“What I want,” said T., directly as he thought it, “is a guide. I want a guide with a good boat to take me up the river, to the preserve where the jaguars live.”
“Jaguars?” asked Marlo, surprised.
His wife brought them small cups of coffee on an enamel tray. One of the girls in the kitchen burst into tears and the toddler turned in her father’s lap to gaze at her sister.
“I am so sorry,” he said again, awkwardly.
•
As the boat curved around the end of the island and his beach hove into view he saw the tall trees were down. He was looking at their root balls, straggly brown masses along the sand. He could see at least three thick trunks that had fallen across the white walls, caving them in.
The white sand was mixed with brown again.
“It’s totaled,” he said to Paolo the boatman. “I can see from here. I don’t need to go there now. Go ahead, turn the boat. Turn the boat!”
They cut a wide U and headed back to the mainland. He could not force himself to look over his shoulder.
At the hotel he gathered his belongings; he had a couple of sweatshirts and a pair of good boots, but no tent or tarp or sleeping bag. He had very little. He lent his hotel room to the family of the maid who had cried in the taxi. Eight of them would stay in it—an old woman, five children, and the maid and her husband—along with the next-door suite, which he rented for them. They would stay there while the husband and the oldest son rebuilt their own two-room house; they would eat at the hotel restaurant on his tab, because they did not have transportation into town to buy groceries. It would help to assuage his conscience when he left the ruins.
He called his mother from a satellite phone at a medical clinic and got Vera, who went to look for her. There was a delay with the phone that made conversation desultory.
“Who is this?” came his mother’s voice, wavering. “It’s T. Remember me?”
“—I can’t hear them,” he heard her complain to Vera. “It’s staticky. It has an echo on it.”
Vera took the phone again.
“She’s having trouble hearing you,” said Vera.
“We had a hurricane here,” he said, enunciating. “I would have called sooner. There was a storm. It destroyed my new project.”
“. . . me to give it back to her?”
“No, you tell her what I say. OK? There was a big storm.” “. . . big storm?”
“There was a hurricane here. I’m going to be out of touch for a couple of weeks. I’m calling now on a satellite phone.”
“. . . been going on the walks . . . little more fragile . . .” “Tell her I miss her, and I’m thinking about her and
hoping she’s doing well. Tell her I’ll be home soon.” “Who is this?”
It was his mother again.
“It’s me, T. It’s a bad connection. Can you hear me?” “No one there,” said his mother to Vera, fading in waves.
“You know who it is? It’s one of those crank calls. It’s no one.”
In Paolo’s small metal motorboat, slapping the waves as they went south toward the mouth of the river, he felt flat but satisfied, equal to what came. Now that the buildings were gone and the telephone lines were down, he could not fly home anyway, not now. Nothing to do but go up the river toward the mountains. Was that where everyone would go, once the coastlines were gone? Higher ground.
The white lines spread behind the boat, further and further apart, disappearing into the gray of the deeper water as they grew separate.
His mother had loved him a long time ago, he thought. He squinted, trying to discern the precise moment when
the frothy lines of white were subsumed by the background of gray.
A long time past she had known him.
That was over. But it would be all right. Once the work of love had been hers, and she had done it. Now she was unable. It was not a turning, it was a simple erosion—what happened when the self fell away. It floated and sank, joined a deep well of souls, spreading. Where are you, rest of me? Fumble and glimpse but no worry; there was nothing to be done once it left. Child child, there there. And now I let you go.
It did not need to see itself anymore or be conscious of its boundaries. Vigilance fled in old age and man was like the other animals then, who science said could not see themselves. Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender . . . you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned.
And you did not have to know yourself to be fully human. There were always those who did not, and no one said they were beasts.
•
Most of the roads were washed out so they traveled by water. From dock to dock, the open ocean to the wide mud-brown delta: and two days after the hurricane he lay back in a long, low boat moving slowly upriver.
There was a canvas shelter on the boat and the guide was quiet at the wheel. The two of them spoke rarely, so that birds would not startle. The guide, Delonn, was a gruff and modest old man, grizzled and heavyset with dark skin and a
light gray beard. He had worked for the national parks and attended a program for foreign students at Cambridge University; he spoke English with a clipped British accent. He had a vast knowledge of the rainforest, knew the common and the Latin names of plants and animals, the history of foods and medicines and poisons that came from the fruits and the bark and the leaves. He had reference to a long catalog of oddities and hazards.
They drank beers from a cooler. On the overhanging trees large green iguanas crawled lazily; on the bank stood a gray stork, and on a log sticking out of the water small bats were clustered sleeping. The water was torpid. When they came to a bend in the river, where the river’s elbow reached out and flattened into a calm, sunny pool, Delonn encouraged him to jump from the boat and swim.
He shook his head.
“The crocodiles are very small,” said Delonn, smiling.
T. stuck his foot up against the edge of the bench and pulled up his pant leg.
“I see you already know them!” said Delonn, and chuckled. “I thought you were a city boy.”
“I am,” began T., but the guide’s smile fell and he leaned forward slightly, holding his arm.
“What’s wrong?” asked T. “Are you OK?”
“A little heartburn,” he said. T. waited while he breathed slowly for a few seconds and then smiled again. “You realize, Thomas, what the chances are of seeing a jaguar in the jaguar preserve?”
“Low,” said T.
“Seventeen thousand to one. Approximately.”
“It’s OK,” said T. “I just want to be where they live. I want to be in the theater. You know? But I don’t expect them to give me a show.”
There were a number of final animals here—crocodiles, parrots, turtles and anteaters. He knew he might not see any of them. He had mostly wanted to get away.
They jumped out of the boat around midday to walk through a forest thick with stands of bamboo, where T. stooped to inspect what Delonn said was a jaguar print. These were what most people saw of the jaguars, said the guide, and even then only in the rainy season. Black howler monkeys swung in the trees but were also difficult to see, fuzzy shapes in the canopy. At night they slept on the benches of the boat underneath the shelter, and T. listened to the whine of mosquitoes outside the net.
Mornings Delonn radioed back to his contact in the town, checking in; they drank bitter coffee and ate bananas and bread. They would only take the boat as far as the falls, after which they would travel by foot, leaving the beer and the ice behind in the boat and taking only what they needed. They would be carrying heavy packs, T. sixty pounds and Delonn eighty. He claimed to be accustomed.
After that they would wash off by splashing themselves from shallow creeks; they would eat mostly nuts and dried food and filter stream water to drink. This early leg of the trip was a pleasure cruise, said Delonn: T. should drink up.
The river narrowed and moved more quickly as they traveled; a light rain fell and pricked the water. When it let up the guide pointed out birds—a white-collared manakin made a clicking sound like two stones banged together and a bird called an oropendola screeched and rocked back and forth on its branch. There were tanagers and flycatchers and bat falcons; T. saw them fleetingly. It left him disoriented, all of them in the trees, so many.
Then the heat and the humidity. It laid him out.
He drank the last warm beer and fell asleep on his bench, the motion of the boat steady beneath him.
When he woke next Delonn was tying the boat to a strangler fig. Upriver was a series of white cascades, a fringe of thin streams threading their way down a pale gray escarpment. He watched as the guide prepared their backpacks, locked down the food hampers against scavenging animals, folded the shelter and tarped the boat. Then they swung their packs over the side and jumped down. His pack was heavy but this did not bother him; doggedly they tramped up a narrow, muddy trail away from the river, upward through dense foliage.
“Rain coming,” said the guide. “I want to get to the campsite in time to set up beforehand.”
Presently they stopped at a rocky outcrop, still in the shadow of trees. Up through the leaves he could barely see sky. It was late afternoon and the air felt thick. Delonn strung up the tarps overhead, tying complex knots with quick efficiency.
“I was only a Boy Scout for three weeks,” said T. apologetically, watching. “They kicked me out for trying to sell merit badges on the black market. So I didn’t have time to learn knots.”
Just as Delonn tossed the sleeping pads through the open flaps of their one-man tents the rain started. T., watching from a perch a few feet away, brought the hood of his slicker up over his head. The wood in the forest was too wet to serve as fuel, Delonn said, so they would have no campfire. But he cooked for them over a small stove; he stirred soup and set it out in metal bowls. He poured whiskey into metal cups and they drank it under their vinyl roof, listening to the rain.
T. thought how comfortable he was in the company of Delonn, who was easy to be silent with. The guide spread his presence over them both, as much an umbrella as the tarpaulin. Falling asleep in his tent, stomach full of soup and bread and whiskey, he was glad to be where he was—in the midst of a thick field of sound with a thin, taut barrier between himself and the falling water.
He woke and realized the rain had stopped. He knelt and unzipped the door flap and got out; the guide’s door was still zipped. He did not want to wake him so he scrawled a note and set off for a short walk up the trail.
Everywhere there were dripping leaves in a uniform shade of bright green. His shoulders and arms brushed wet branches and soaked his shirt instantly. He walked on, liking the feeling of being wet. He was wet all the time since he came to the tropics; he was never dry. He was steeping. The soil of the trail was so slick that he slipped and fell and soon his knees were pads of drying mud. Toes splayed on a tree was a bright orange frog; he almost stepped on a slug that was as long as his foot. He heard the sharp cries of something overhead and wondered if it was a bird or a monkey.
On his own he was barely equipped. To know that an animal was a last animal he needed other people, foresight and planning, research. He could not know it alone. He relied on data gathered by others; without the guide along he had none. For all he knew the frog was a last frog: but all he knew was nothing. When you knew the name of something that meant it was part of your life already. But here there were things he had never known. It was a new place and frightening, but it made him younger. The lightness was a boon, partly.
One frog—a golden frog was what he remembered, or maybe a golden toad—had lived in a misty cloud forest not too far from here. It had vanished only last year, or maybe the year before.
After an hour he turned back toward the small camp. The guide was still in his tent. T. consulted his watch: nine o’clock. He ate a granola bar and coughed loudly. Finally he walked up to the tent and spoke.
“Delonn? I think you might want to get started in there.” No reply.
“Delonn?”
He knelt and unzipped the flap. Delonn lay on his side, a sheet wrapped around his legs. T. reached out and touched a leg through the sheet; no movement, so finally he grabbed the sheet away. On the kneecap he noticed deep old scars, shining.
“Delonn! Delonn! You there?” But Delonn was inert.
He climbed through the tent opening, up over the guide’s prone body. He put his fingers against his neck, where he thought the pulse should be, but found none. Chest pains, he thought. Delonn had felt chest pains. He checked and rechecked, but still no pulse. He felt wired and nervy with alarm; his unfitness nagged at him. He was unqualified.
“Delonn. Come on. Don’t be . . .”
He was playing a joke, possibly. At the expense of the rookie.
“Really. Not funny.”
He shook Delonn’s leg, then his arm, then rolled him onto his back and squatted beside him, looking down. The eyes were closed; the guide could still be sleeping. It was when the eyes were wide open and dull that you knew they
were dead. His fear for himself warred with disbelief . . . he had never been by himself. Not like this. With Beth at least there had been others there, the steady hand of the institutions.
He was lost. Nothing else had ever happened to him. This was it.
For a time he lay in his tent, staring up at the orange and blue of the roof; several times, in a half-hearted gesture, he called out the guide’s name. The silence confirmed him, but it was still not enough. Then he was suffocating; the tent oppressed. He went out.
He could not carry Delonn on his back, he knew that much for certain. It was at least five miles back down to the riverbank, five miles in slick mud, in dense foliage.
He would have to drag him.
He checked again and then again for signs of breath: could Delonn be in a coma? But the lips were drying. There was a dryness on the lips. He tried to pull Delonn into a sitting position; lamely, he tried CPR, vaguely recalling kneeling over his mother. He tried to press the feel of the dead lips away from him. He should have done this when he first found him. Now it was too late; it was sickening.