Into the Jungle (ARC) Page 2

  Molly’s head knocked into a little cowbell that hung over the door, announcing our entrance more than I would have liked. She giggled as she approached a solemn-faced woman who slouched behind a cash register staring out a narrow lead-paned window. Molly and Britta stood near her to block her view of me. I cased the aisles quickly: the place was dirty, everything looked old and beat. Pawed-over packets of Band-Aids, dusty bottles of American shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant. We honestly could have used all of it, but I had to concentrate on what we came for. Even before they had unfolded the map and began to ask the proprietor in stumbling Spanish the best way to get to La Paz by bus, I had lifted a roll of rubbers, three boxes of tampons, three small bags of rough-cut tobacco, and rolling papers.

  “Hey, Molly,” I called out. This was the signal that I was done, and they could step apart. The woman peered down at me as I picked through some dry goods. “You wanted cornmeal, right, Molls?” The absolute cheapest thing in the store, at twenty-five centavos a half kilo.

  “Sure, yeah.”

  I grabbed a small package and took it to the counter. A glass bowl of wrapped mints sat near the old-fashioned crank register. I took three and laid them next to the cornmeal. “How much?” I asked in Spanish, counting out a few coins.

  “The mints?” she said with a gap-toothed smile. “Those are free.”

  Molly burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. Britta fought to contain herself and was unsuccessful, turning crimson as she folded the map. The woman’s smile soured as she watched us, folding her arms across her sparrow chest. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “Show me what is in your backpack.”

  “Why?”

  Her face grew stone-hard. “My son is outside. He’s a big man. He’ll open it for me.”

  Feigning offense, I counted out twenty-five centavos and stuffed the cornmeal in my bag. “Buenos días, señora.”

  I took a big stride toward the door, but she cut me off and ran past us into the square, shouting, “Diego! Diego! They robbed me, Diego!” We sprinted past her toward the bus that had just fired up its engine, leaping aboard as it lurched into motion. In seconds, the square receded behind us and we were climbing the steep hills back to the city center.

  * * *

  Screaming and laughing, high from our theft, we burst into the Hostel Versailles Cochabamba—a hilariously named fleabag where we all worked for room and board—and raced down to the basement, our roach-infested “staff apartment,” which was just a moldy bunk room the size of a jail cell, complete with cold, always-damp cement walls. I dumped the contents of my backpack onto a broken-down couch squeezed between the cots.

  All the stolen goodies tumbled out, along with a beat-up copy of a book I’d lifted from my last group home in Boston. Reddening, I reached for it, but Molly grabbed the book and turned it over, while Britta nabbed a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers and bolted up the stairs.

  “Charlotte’s Web?” Molly said, examining me. “I remember this book from when I was a kid. Can’t remember reading much since, if you want to know the truth.”

  At the time, I had no explanation for why this little pig’s life saved by the efforts of the spider who really loved him tore my guts out. I only knew that the story had gotten to me, made me cry, but also gave me hope that I could—someday—overcome my wordless sorrow.

  “I keep some old photos in it.”

  As Molly flipped the pages, one fell out, all dog-eared and scratched. “Is this your foster mom?”

  I took the photo from her. “Yeah, that’s Tia.” As I gazed at the picture, I was struck by the resemblance between the proprietor of the store I’d just robbed and Tia, my Bolivian foster mom who had died of cancer when I was twelve. Same age, same tight expression of defensiveness against great odds. Ashamed tears backed up behind my eyes, but I held them off.

  “She has a kind face.”

  “She did the best she could with eight of us running around,” I said, eyes downcast as I stuffed the book back in my bag, embarrassed to be seen reading anything other than the Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski from the ragtag hostel library, not that Molly or Britta would have been impressed by that sort of thing. Of course, I looked nothing like Tia; I don’t look like anyone. Well, I guess I did look like a miniature version of my real mom, who I’d never known. Same curly red hair, blue eyes, but I lacked her glamorous length of bone; she stood six feet in flats, while I’m just five one. Small and small boned. A social worker once told me my mom—who overdosed when I was a baby—had been a poet; in my fantasies she was a brilliant one, too brilliant to live, like Sylvia Plath.

  Molly sorted the condoms from the pile and stashed them in her pants pocket. “Thanks for doing this. Mark’ll be here in a few days. He never has anything.”

  “No problem,” I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “But I’ve got to go.” Thirty-four beds needed a change of sheets.

  “Me too. Britta’s alone at check-in. Bad idea.” We grinned at each other. Britta rarely stopped flirting long enough to write down reservations and keep the beds from being double-booked. A nightmare when dozens of exhausted international travelers flooded in nightly, all of them desperate for food and sleep, none with the cash for a real hotel.

  Halfway up the stairs, I turned back to look at Molly, to find her gazing after me. “A turkey, really?” she said.

  “Yeah. I wore a big coat. Pretended I was pregnant. Worked like a dream.”

  * * *

  None of us ever had enough cash. Evenings off, we made spare change washing dishes alongside laughing toothless grandmothers in local cantinas. On the best days, we nailed the occasional gig teaching English to the sons and daughters of rich families in parts of the city with dreamy names like Cala Cala or El Mirador. We were picked up in big, noiseless town cars to spend an hour or two with their precious babies in vast rooms with balconies featuring jaw-dropping views of the city and mountains beyond, then taken back to the Versailles, to our damp room with floors that glittered with silverfish. Otherwise, we worked constantly at the hostel—booking rooms, cleaning floors, washing linens, and cutting onions and potatoes for enormous pots of stew till our fingers bled.

  All of us were running away from something. I’d been suckered down that January to teach English at a school that didn’t exist. Stole the money—over time at a shit job in an appliance store—for plane fare, got here, no one met my plane or answered my calls. I had maybe five dollars on me, which got me a cab to the Versailles. I begged my way in, then stayed, too broke to go home.

  Molly had dough, even though she swore she didn’t. How could you travel the world to get over a guy, à la Eat Pray Love, sans cash? Still, there was something else wrong that kept her from going home, I could feel it. Britta had been traveling nonstop for a year with no idea what to do next. Anything but Vienna, she’d quip between deep inhales of her hash pipe—anything but that. Something about her father. She didn’t elaborate, but that was fine. I never did either. It didn’t matter.

  I loved these girls with all the passionate intensity and conviction and delusion of my not-yet-twenty-years-old self. The damage in me honored the damage in them, and as far as I was concerned, that was the sum total of truth in the world. Ignoring the fact that we didn’t have much in common, that Britta had a mean side and Molly lied probably more than me—which was saying something—I told myself we’d be friends forever.

  But my gut knew that we were all lost children pretending we were A-OK with our clove cigarettes and our fuck-everything, we’re-never-going-home attitudes. None of us had any idea what we were doing; all of us were devastated inside. There were reasons we’d ended up there, trying to sleep in noisy bunk rooms with doors that didn’t lock, a new boss every other week who leered and leched at each of us. But it was as if we were stuck there, like food caught in a drain. If anyone had asked us, What makes you tick? Where are you going? Why are you here? W
hy can’t you get through the day without crying? What do you want from your life? We would have been stumped for any answers at all.

  As I whipped the thin sheets off rows of narrow cots, grimacing at the occasional period stain or worse, I tried to feel happy for Molly, but the truth was, this new fragile family of lost girls was falling apart, bit by bit. Did it matter who would be the first to leave? For all of us, it was just a matter of time. Soon, I would have to face life after the Versailles, a fate I dreaded—exhaustion, filth, and roaches be damned.

  Nine years later, I wish I could wrap my arms around my younger, stupider self and tell her to hold on tight, because flying to Bolivia on a scam was the least of a series of bad decisions I was about to make.

  TWO

  With Molly leaving soon to travel with Mark, we decided to blow out after our shifts one night. Just to smoke and drink and laugh, feel alive and be together. Arm in arm, we strolled along the Eastern Promenade, a bright string of nightlife packed with markets, where every imaginable fruit seemed blown up to two, three, five times its normal size: huge, creamy Brazil nuts; tart guavas; bittersweet maracujas, or passionfruit. Baby toucans sold as pets squawked in their bamboo cages under shelves groaning with wallets and purses made of anaconda hide. Two-foot-tall, stuffed, baby black caiman—alligators that could grow to over twenty feet long in the slow-moving waters of the Amazon, what I wouldn’t have given to see them in real life!—had been posed on their hind feet dressed in pink tutus and carrying matching parasols. A sign propped under them said in Spanish: PERFECT TO FIT IN YOUR LUGGAGE!

  Under a hand-scrawled poster that read chamánicos, or “shamanic,” a wizened man in a vermillion poncho puffed on a fat cigarette. He sat at a low table; two stuffed and mounted jaguar heads snarling at each elbow. Across from him, a young woman held a baby whose top lip indented toward its little nose, exposing a wedge of pink gum. A thousand lines working in his face, yellowed eyes on her child, the man chanted as he waved his gnarled hands over its swaddled form.

  We meandered through the cloud of tobacco smoke surrounding the woman and her baby, the droning incantations of the shaman low and constant. I stopped to watch, even as Britta nudged me away. “Come on, Lily, what are you doing? Thirty-five centavos to cure a cleft palate? I don’t think so,” she said with a sneer, trying to catch sight of Molly, who’d been whining about getting wasted since early that morning and was probably already at the bar.

  I waved her on, but she put her hands on her hips and squared off with me. “You’re really interested in this hocus-pocus bullshit? Like, abracadabra, your face is all better? Give me a break.”

  “Look, Britta, I’ll catch up, okay?”

  She rolled her eyes and strolled away, shaking her head as she went.

  Of course his sorcery wouldn’t work. I knew that, and maybe the mother did too; still, I couldn’t take my eyes off her—she was rapt, spellbound, lit from within. I felt a stab of sadness, even jealousy; how comforting to believe in a magical world, one where things could actually change for the better. Nothing anchored me anywhere.

  I joined them at a café under a broken neon sign on the Prado. Around us, couples sat nuzzling; at other tables, tight knots of men played cards in tense silence. Encircled by mountains that jutted up into the night, I had the comforting sensation of sitting at the base of a vast, jagged-edged bowl. Far from the city center, ours was the last bar on a dead-end street that dissolved into a copse of trees, their branches interlocking thickly above us. To be in the city yet at the jungle’s door; this element of Cochabamba never ceased to astound me.

  “Lily,” Molly said, getting to her feet. “Nice of you to show up. What’re you drinking?”

  “Tequila.”

  She made the sign for loco before heading for the bar.

  Britta swept up her gorgeous hair in a messy bun, fully conscious of the men’s turning heads. “You crazy American bitch,” she said with a smile. “Did I tell you what I did the last time I drank tequila?”

  “Fucked someone you shouldn’t have? Again?”

  “Have you been reading my diary? Again?”

  We had a good laugh and I loved her anew. She took a swig of her beer and glanced around. A few men at a table not far away laughed with one another as they ogled us, as if daring each other to go first.

  “Ugh, here we go.” Molly slid between us with two tequilas.

  “Easy for you to say, Little Miss I’m-Outta-Here,” I said, checking out the men on the sly.

  “Don’t tell me you like Bolivian guys.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “They’re all macho, drug-dealing assholes.”

  “Maybe she likes macho, drug-dealing assholes,” Britta said. “At least they have cash.”

  Working at the hostel afforded us our pick of single male travelers: the long-limbed Germans and Swedes; the gung-ho Americans; the big, brawling Australians. An international all-you-can-eat buffet walked through the doors of the Versailles every single evening. Still, in my three months at the hostel, only one backpacker had ever really appealed to me, this sweet French guy who read Camus and smoked continually, but after hanging out for a few weeks, he just took off one morning—bed perfectly made—and I never saw him again. In the end, most of the guys seemed sanitized and self-important, or privileged and full of shit, on their way to Machu Picchu in their high-end hiking gear, on the phone with their girlfriends back home in between lame pickup attempts.

  “Tonight,” Molly said, setting her shot glass down with a thud, “I’m celebrating being an expat. We’re the coolest, am I right, ladies?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Fuck McDonald’s. Fuck Burger King.”

  “Fuck all the Burger Kings in Austria,” Britta said with a little beer burp. “You know we have those, right?”

  “Fuck malls,” I said. “In fact, fuck America, that place is so screwed up, pulleeze!! I don’t care if I never go back!” I knocked back my drink with a wince and thought: I am not a child anymore. Friends will have to do. I slammed my glass down. “Fuck everywhere we’ve lived before here, and everyone we ever knew before us. And fuck guys, too, right Britta?”

  She winked and smiled and said, “Anytime.”

  I glanced up at a nearby circle of men gathered around a card game. They stubbed out glowing cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, countless empty beer bottles scattered around their table. One of them seemed utterly disinterested in the game. He sat tilted back in his cheap plastic chair, arms crossed behind his head, a smile playing at his mouth as he stared at me through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I squared my shoulders and looked away, kept talking shit about America and how we were going to be intellectuals and artists and save the world from its asinine self. All the while, hot embarrassment at being watched licked up my neck.

  Something clammy and small groped my forearm: a little boy’s brown hand, fingernails ringed with dirt. I pulled away, but he stood his ground, staring up at me with thickly lashed eyes. With his other hand, he thrust at me a sweaty bunch of heavy-headed purple and crimson flowers. After I accepted them, he turned and hurried back to the man who’d been staring at me, and was slipped a coin or two before sprinting off down shadowy streets.

  Britta’s eyes grew wide. “Fuuuck. Lily, somebody likes you!”

  Molly narrowed her eyes and sucked hard on her fat, hand-rolled cigarette, blowing smoke out both nostrils like a dragon. “Lily, you have to return the flowers, otherwise that means yes!”

  But I was already smelling them; inhaling traces of tuberose, white lily, plus a spice, like clove mixed with grass. “Yes to what?”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “What do you think? These guys are not subtle . . .”

  I felt him before I saw him. This push of air, a cool shadow over us where he blocked the brash overhead lights that ticked and swayed in the breeze. A flame of self-consciousness, of awarene
ss of beautiful male, zipped up my spine. All this, and I hadn’t even looked up from my stranglehold on the bouquet. A long-legged black insect emerged from the throat of one of the fluted flowers, tending one of its delicate limbs into the scented night air. My friends shrank back into their chairs, stared holes into me, breathless for me to say something.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting the flowers in his direction. “I can’t accept these.”

  That’s when I finally looked at him. A gymnast’s build, a bit taller than me, inhabiting his clothes—short-sleeved shirt a size too big and unbuttoned over the universal white wife-beater, baggy American shorts cinched with a colorful woven belt—like he wasn’t aware of them. Thick black hair cut short, missing the usual pomade Bolivian men used to slick it back or spike it up. Under the blocky glasses, carved, high cheekbones shadowed a wide, full mouth. Around his neck hung a black cord strung with the incisors of a peccary, a wild hog deadly in herds; lots of guys wore them, but on him it looked right. Cheap American sandals, the $1.99 type, wide feet, beaten and dusty looking on the sides; they looked unused to being in shoes of any kind.

  His fierce brown eyes, magnified by the lenses, lasered into me like he’d found something he’d been looking for, and who was I to stop him? Like what was wrong with me for not remembering who he was. Of the three of us, Britta was the knockout, hands down, so I couldn’t stop wondering, Why me, dude? And what was with the Clark Kent glasses? Bolivian men, many of them slick and preening, often acted like they were doing you a favor offering to bed you down; this guy, handsome as he was, looked like he got dressed, cut his own hair, and combed it in the dark without a mirror.

  “Where are you from?” he said in Spanish. He made no move to take the flowers.

  “I said, I don’t want them.” I carefully laid out the flowers on the table as if I was showing my losing hand in a card game. I kept my eyes on the heavy velvet petals as my fingers lingered there.