We Eat Our Own (10 page)

Ohio, you say without thinking. No, actually, New York. I've been living in New York for—

Siamo in ritardo, Baldo mumbles. Then in tourist-phrasebook English: Sir, will you please put this in the lobby safe?

He is holding out your passport to Hank.

Give me the whole thing, Hank says, snatching the passport
and your entire wallet from Baldo, striding out the door into the lot. This guy's a fellow American. My goddamned countryman! His money's no good here!

You trip after him, stunned and half-buttoned, your eyes glued to your wallet as Hank shoves it into his back pocket. Can't I keep it with me?

Merda, Baldo mumbles from inside your room. Then yells: It will be safer. We need to go.

Well, can we at least stop by the lobby before we head out? My room doesn't have a phone and I haven't really talked to my girlfriend since—

No phones in the Amazon! Hank yells, and you're about to ask what he means, when suddenly Hank wheels around to face you. His whole face is changed, painted over with a Jack Nicholson smile and his eyes jogging toward the tree line, bright with an idea.

Hey, he whispers in a new, low voice. You want to see something wild?

Baldo strides out of the room. We have to leave now.

In the sunlight, there is something about Hank's face that makes you nervous. He's handsome in a wind-chapped way, vaguely ageless. The wrinkle in his forehead should destroy his looks but it doesn't. When you don't answer right away, he chatters his teeth together exactly three times and sniffs.

I think we have to get going, you say.

Baldo yells something over his shoulder to Fabi, who sprints out of the room and goes to start the car.

Come on, it'll take twenty minutes, Hank whines. Tops. You're in South America. You always have twenty minutes in South Fucking America!

Baldo yells: Sir!

Hank yells back: Siesta! No trabajar, hombres!

His accent is so terrible it must be a joke. He turns back to you.

I've got the projector all set up for you up at the house. You can't ask me to take it down now, come on!

Projector?

This is when Baldo strides over, grabs you by the arm, and tugs you toward the car. Fabi yells from the driver's side window: Ci torniamo se possiamo! Più tardi! Avremo una festa, la prometto!

You're fucking with tradition here, guy! Hank yells back. Tradition matters! Every guest of mine has to see this movie! He yells a dozen words, this time in rapid, perfect Spanish, makes rude gestures with his arms and elbows. Don't tell me you don't speak any Spanish, wop!

Baldo shoves you into the passenger's seat and slams the door hard behind you. Fabi turns the key and the engine grinds.

Tomorrow! Hank yells through the glass. Hey, don't forget! Tomorrow!

You will never see the movie Hank wanted to show you. Hank will forget. You'll see him tomorrow, but he won't recognize you. He'll be behind the screen door of the hotel office, feet up on the desk, studying the gaps in his teeth in a hand mirror. When he sees you, he'll give you a paranoid stare, void of any recognition. The fuck are you? he'll say. The fuck do you want?

The silence inside the car, now, is heavy and porous, interrupted by the constant sounds of the road beneath the wheels, the kissy noise of the men drawing cigarettes and bottles to their lips. You watch your own reflection in the side-view mirror, shivering with the hitching of the drive line.

• • •

The canoe is waiting for you when you arrive. A short man someone's hired to row waves hard from the bank. But the Volkswagen sinks into the mud thirty yards before you reach them and it takes what feels like hours to crawl the last distance. I'll get out and push, you say, but the Italians are yelling at one another, pointing wildly, the wheels spinning loud like circular saws. I'll get out, you say, but you don't move.

By the time you make it out of the car, the Volkswagen is sunk a third of the way up the hubcaps. Baldo kicks the mud away from the tires, cursing the mud on his shoes. Fabi jogs out of the car and crouches down to climb into the boat: one foot carefully placed in front of the other, his steps moving straight down the center seam. He keeps his hands clamped to the wobbling gunwales. He keeps laughing like this is all hilarious.

There's no reason for you to be so nauseous. But as you step from mud to metal, as you find your balance over that brown seep of water, your stomach starts palpating. You taste acid and heat. There's a boy climbing in behind you, now, a boy with an oar twice the size of his body, and you realize that it wasn't a short man waving at you: it was him, a child no more than nine years old. His smell assaults you; something like burned tea leaves and the hauling wind over a salt mine. He must be native, you think. This is what the natives smell like. This is how they do things. This is where I am now.

When you look over your shoulder, you register the color of the Volkswagen for the first time: a dim powder-green that sends a shard into an interstice between your gut and heart.

Fabi clucks to the oarsman. Baldo folds himself into the tiny car like an origami trick. He presses the gas pedal, and the engine sound thrashes in the space between your skull and jaw.

The boat pushes off.

• • •

The canoe trip takes half an hour, and the whole way, you can't get your stomach to be still.

You try to comfort yourself. You try to think of your adolescence: Whiskey Island in late summer. Of your road trip with Kay, when you stopped there on the long drive east to crash with your parents for a few nights, show her where you grew up. You took her there, to Lake Erie and the ferry over to the peninsula, and the whole way she was quiet; you'd been fighting for days.

So don't think of that.

Think of an hour later, Kay standing fifteen yards down the beach from you, pulling her shirt over her head. Think of the sand pressed into the skin over the waistband of her skirt, golden, a wash of braille. A half mile off, a smell was rising off the rock pits—pork skin and clean smoke—and you and she still hadn't said a single word to each other in hours.

But then she took off the skirt, a dim powder-green thing that fluttered as she tossed it to the rocks. Even after it had landed, you watched it, gasping like a jellyfish in the wind. The fight was about money—how you'd have none of it when you got to New York and Kay would have a good job waiting at a firm in midtown—but it was hard to think about that when her bathing suit was eggshell-white and beaming at you like a searchlight in the dusk. She walked away from you, mincing toward the edge of the jump-off, gray shells sharp under her feet. She had said she would pay for you, would pay for everything until you found steady work in New York, and the insistence of her love made something calcify in your subconscious, something that had been steeping in you and gone sour over all those days locked together in the car. It made you think selfish
thoughts: that you were an
actor,
and fuck her pity, your work was just as important as hers. It made you snap at her: If I'm too broke for New York, Kay, then maybe I should just stay in Ohio.

Think of how small she looked, how sad and pale, her ribs under the loose elastic band of the bikini.

That was it: your last really good moment together. That was the moment the hard thing in you softened.

Then you were running. Then you were scooping her up under her waist and the pits of her knees, and then she was scream-laughing and you leapt, together, right off the rocks. It happened because of the water, because water, for you, had always been sex and sunlight and hungry smells, a clear-eyed, leaping feeling. It happened because you thought you loved her, still, even if this move had made you feel all messed up, and when you hit the water, it was warm and silver.

• • •

The river, here, is the color of coffee stirred with evaporated milk. Froth curls up from nowhere, floats past you to nowhere. The bushes on the banks sag, exhausted, wet with a sheen of rainwater that gleams like sweat. The trees are colossal: their trunks look like muscle butchered from a mammoth creature, with big dips in between sinews that collect shadows. Their branches are knitted together so tightly over the river that 11 a.m. looks like dusk. The sound and itching feeling of insects are everywhere, but you can see none of them, not until you look at your wrist and find a dozen long-legged things, inches apart and moving.

You swat. You get a dizzy feeling as you look up, as the current draws you forward. The sunlight that seeps through the leaves lands on your face in stray flecks, mottling you. You
look down again and drag your fingertips through the current alongside the boat. It feels suddenly urgent to be certain of something, to know the temperature and texture of the water.

From the bow, Fabi glances over his shoulder. When he sees you, he lunges—eh eh eh eh, porca puttana, no. No.

You haven't got a good look at Fabi, yet, not really. In the car, he'd been thrashing with laughter, his eyes closed or open into bright-black smears, the stinging smell of his alcohol somehow obscuring the image of his face. Now, though, you can see the broad shape of his nose, and that changes everything for you. His hair is curled in minute spirals close to the scalp. His mouth is childish and moist.

He puts a flat palm on top of his head, wrist to crown and fingers pointing up at the sky, and leers with his teeth bared.

It takes you a minute to get what he's trying to tell you.

Sharks? you say. In the river?

He nods. Nuotano dall'Atlantico.

He spits into the water. Sono ovunque. Attenzione.

You look back toward the slow current, and try to pay attention.

You make a count of the dead things in the river: the speckled neon inch of a dart frog, engorged leeches clinging to the furred limb of a half-sunken corpse. A rhesus monkey drifts by, no bigger than a kitten, its skull notched with a wound that drains a subtle pink into the water. Then a snarl of kelp. A cluster of drowned butterflies, their bodies pinched together at the thorax and their wings splayed out like a blossom. Your brain is saying,
seventeen. Seventeen dead things.
Then you see it: a human leg pushes through the surface and bobs.

You startle, your knees knocking the helm. The boat tilts. Fabi eyes you.

The rain starts suddenly, little stings of it on the backs of
your hands. The toes on the leg are filthy with muck. The incision is clean—no, it is perfect,
perpendicular.

Your heart floats to your jaw but you force yourself to study it.

The wound is entirely flat. No. The wound is a bisection. A plastic shell with a hollow core, buoyed by the brown water.

The rain surges for an instant, pushes the leg downstream.

You look away, and up, nauseous. You see the cluster of bodies on the approaching shore.

You think of it again despite yourself: Kay on a Lake Erie shoal, way out in the water. You on the shore, watching the wind sift through every piece of her hair.

It is not like that.

There are natives, or what you think are natives, naked except for straw skirts and handfuls of mud smeared over their bodies. There are tall men in thin linen pants with tensed mouths, barely looking at you. One woman, in a loose white shirt. Men with cameras gripped in loose fists, eyes trained on your approaching boat.

As you're rowed closer, the rain slows, and the crowd parts to let a man through. He is surprisingly short, with bored, matte-green eyes behind thick plastic glasses. No one looks back at him as he pushes through, but he emits an energy that signals the people around him to feint. His thinning hair is mussed in the back and no one has dared to tell him. His arms are crossed in front of a filthy but finely made brown shirt.

The canoe reaches him, carves a deep wedge into the mud.

The short man watches, frowning, his eyes fixed straight at you like you've made a mess. When he offers his hand to you, he doesn't say hello.

Get out. That same venomous accent. We have work to do.

Fabi is suddenly behind you, loud and thrilled, his arms are open wide to receive no one.

Il direttore!

It shouldn't be, but this is what you'll really remember about that first day:

The wave of panic that rises in you as the director scans your body, from your ankles to your neck, squints and bites the edge of his tongue inside his mouth. The weight of the mud in the cuffs of your pant legs as you follow the director over to the makeup tent. The smell of the earth, leafy and dank. The smell of your sweat. The silence of the three men who smear more mud over your arms and your face and into your hair. The slick coolness of it. The hot mist of the air.

The costume crew gives you a green shirt with the sleeves cut off. It looks like it's already been worn by someone who was shoved down hard into wet earth, but you thank them, let them pull it over your head and sit you down in a canvas chair and take your shoes off with their thin, bony hands. They wedge your feet into heavy leather boots and delicately tie the laces. Then they walk away, blotting their fingertips on handkerchiefs that they produce from embroidered shirt pockets, muttering in Italian with elegant disgust.

The director strides over. He smokes as he sizes you up—first with his eyes, then with his hands, lipping the cigarette as he reaches into the back of your shirt to examine the tag. Up close, you learn no new information about his face: it is flat and affectless, a single worry line carved deep into the skin above his eyebrows. He pulls on the bottom hem with two pinching fingers, narrowing his eyes as the wrinkles collapse.

Bene, he says. Are you ready?

Of course you're not. You don't even know what the scene is.

Yes, you say.

But then one of the costumers jogs over, carrying a boxy black 8mm camera. He holds it out to you.

This isn't right. You want to say it out loud—I'm an actor, I'm not a cameraman
.
You must be mistaken. This isn't right.