Piranha - Page 2

Dinner is rice, red beans, and fish just pulled from the water, wrapped in banana leaves, and roasted over hot coals. Mangos for dessert.

“I show you how to eat a mango,” Angel says. He halves the fruit and makes a cross hatch into the flesh with his sharp pocket knife. He inverts it and neat, divided squares pop up like buildings in a city. I bite into the pulp, and he reaches over and licks a drop of carrot-colored juice from my wrist.

At ten o’clock, when Angel has asked me to meet him, I am under gauzy mosquito netting safe from bites in the night.

On Tuesday morning we cruise down the river. I feel the splash of the Amazon cool on my backside as I pee in a hopper mounted over the engine. We dive off the boat and swim with pink dolphins, which in legend make love to women who then give birth to otherworldly creatures that cannot live on land or in water. The guides heave us back into the boat like big white fish.

That afternoon we hike in the jungle. I stumble over roots as I look around. Everything is oversized, the jungle a humid, dense womb. I recognize philodendron, a houseplant, except here it is 50 feet tall and makes me feel lilliputian. Leaves are the size of my body. I want to lie down in one and fold it around me like a blanket. Katydids are as big as my hand. Huge, thousand-year-old trees-kapok, mahogany-rise from buttresses three cars wide, space you can live in.

In the canopy the oropendula, a bird of liquid gold, drips its call onto the jungle floor. Monkeys mock us, glide through the treetops like it is another dimension. I nearly squash a poison arrow frog the size of a marble, orange and deadly. Roldan slashes at a rubber tree with his machete. We touch the milk as it oozes out, viscous, pearly.

After dinner we head to the bar for cold beer. I can feel Angel looking at me. I am dirty, pale, patchy with insect bites. I perspire industriously, my hair wrapped in a wet knot. I drink one beer, then another waiting for something to happen. I return to my hut, but can’t sleep because of the heat. In the distance I hear a drum beat.

It is drizzling at dawn but it feels cool and good as we chug along the shore. Angel and Roldan point to specks flying through the air and flashes in the foliage. Yellow-headed cara cara and blue crowned motmot. Several people in the group become wildly excited.

“Ornithology alert!” one man says, binoculars poised. Angel’s vision is acute from boyhood days of hunting monkey and jaguar. He spots a sloth 50 yards up a tree that I swear is a burl until it inches upward.

We return for breakfast. Scrambled eggs and bread, dense, succulent bananas and pineapples, and thick, yellowish, sweet starfruit juice. Afterward, we hike deep into the jungle. Angel stalks a butterfly, catches it by its wings which are perfectly clear, like windows, and strokes its thorax until it is enervated, hypnotized. We catch sight of an erratically flying butterfly, iridescent, like a piece of shiny taffeta. A blue morpho. We hush as it rhapsodizes into the canopy.

At a small pond we climb into shallow, tipsy dugouts. The guides’ smooth, sinewy biceps stroke water so black you cannot see into it, an onyx mirror, a lake of oil. We glide inches from electric eels, caiman, and piranha. Hoatzins, claw-winged birds as ancient as dinosaurs and big as chickens, perch heavily in boughs above us while bats swoop and dive bomb over our heads. We drift into giant lily pads, chartreuse carpets the size of bathtubs. I want to leap out and lie on one the same way I have the urge to jump out the window of an airplane and float on cottony clouds. Angel lifts the lily pad with his oar. Its pink underside is delicate and fleshy, naked. I want to bite it, to feel it, to rub my body against its texture. I drink in the beauty of the guides, their stone hard thighs, as they carry the dugouts over their heads and lead us back to camp.

When we return, Angel invites me for a swim. He paddles us into a thicket of mangroves, past a man fishing for piranha.

“They taste sweet,” he says.

“How can we swim here with piranha?”

“They just do like this.” He pinches my arm lightly. His fingers rest there.

“They attack if there is a lot of blood,” he says. We get out of the dugout and hang onto a protruding branch. Angel kisses me. I pull away just as the fisherman strokes by. On our way back, Angel steers toward a woman scrubbing clothes in the river.

“You want to wash your hair?”

I stand in the water, mud swallowing my ankles, as Angel circles his fingers on my scalp. We paddle back to camp, past catfish crawling out of the water up the banks to their holes. Fish that walk on land, prehistoric, futuristic, creatures of two worlds.

After dinner, the single women from our group go to the bar. The guides play guitar, bongos, and flute.

“Malague–a,” Roldan sings, his voice like warm gray coals. The air pulses with the sounds of mosquitoes, crickets, frogs. We dance with the guides, slow, smooth, close.

The night moves away and the women slowly, dreamily, go back to their rooms. Angel walks past me, and whispers, “Meet me.” Back under my netting I am waiting for the time to arrive. Fixed time in the jungle seems odd. Everything moves, vibrates, grows so fast that the guides have to machete the trails every other day. I steal down the path toward the far end of the camp where the guides sleep. I hear a whisper from the bushes. Angel leads me to an empty hut. We are silent as we lift the netting and lay together on the mattress.

His lips are sweet. I buff my tongue across them to taste the sweetness, and he presses his body against mine. I am white, ghostly, glowing. He moves his mouth over my body.

“I show you how to eat a mango,” he says.