19

Suz

 

 

Yati Tupi, Paraguay

 

 

Suz had stepped out of the taxi, bewildered. The taxi driver had done some wrangling with the guard who stood at the entrance sign –a long piece of wood with white painted writing. Three brightly colored orange cones stopped cars from entering. She wasn’t sure what that was about. It didn’t seem like a very popular place. Suz didn’t see any other cars around. Finally, the taxi driver gave the guard some cash; the gate keeper, in return, pulled one of the cones aside and let them pass. The cabby drove for about ten minutes and then stopped at the side of the road. Suz stared up the wide dirt road and saw nothing. She looked back over her shoulder and saw nothing. She was alone on the road without witnesses to what would happen next.

The driver exited the cab and went around to pop the trunk.

No matter what happens, Suz thought. I will fight him. I’m not letting him put me into a trunk. When he slammed the hood and walked around with her backpack in his hands, hysteria floated out of her chest in a bubble of craziness, and she found herself laughing until her eyes streamed.

When she was under some semblance of control, she found the driver standing by the car saying something to her. When she finally opened the door and crawled out to stand next to him, he thrust her bag into her hands. He was miming to her. Suz got the impression that this was as far as he could drive, that she needed to walk around the corner. He took his index and middle finger and twiddled them back and forth to look like legs walking, and it was kind of sweet, and kind of unnerving. Suz focused on getting her backpack on in order to keep the next bubble of hysteria packed into her chest. She nodded and gave the man some money. From the look of a windfall on his face, it was too much money, but Suz didn’t know anything about Paraguayan money. It looked like brightly colored Monopoly bills to her.

She moved around the corner and immediately saw the one-story tourist building painted white with a green roof. She approached slowly, waiting for a text. None came. She stood outside the door waiting. None came. Big fat droplets of water began to fall and even under the overhang Suz was getting wet. She decided to go in.

Here, a man approached her and caught her under the elbow. “Man” might have been a stretch. Suz didn’t know what to make of the guy. His teeth were crooked when he smiled at her. A forced kind of smile that twitched at the corners with a wrinkled nose like someone had handed him a bag of dog doo, and he was obliged to carry it. He was very thin, she thought, young. Very young. She wondered if he was still a teenager. At home she would have guessed sixteen or seventeen years old. His eyes looked old though. “No English,” he said. She recognized the lilt of his accent as someone who spoke native Arabic but that was as far as she could guess.

He motioned her to the educational information along the walls, and they both pretended to be interested. They finally made it over to a counter where the refuge’s offerings could be arranged. Bike tours, horse tours, walking tours. A crash of thunder boomed overhead. Suz couldn’t imagine going out in this weather. The desk operator wagged a finger at the pictures then pointed up and as if on cue, the sky boomed again. A text buzzed against Suz’s thigh. She pulled it out: Show this to the woman, it said. What followed were Spanish-looking words. Suz was kicking herself for the years of French that she had studied that were serving her no good at all. Suz handed the phone over, the worker read, and then pointed to a signup sheet for a walking tour. Excursión that sounded like excursion. . . it might mean tour. The woman typed a message into her phone and handed it back to Suz.

You will wait for the rain to stop and then go with the guide.

What if it didn’t stop? Then what?

As if reading her mind, the next text said: Instructions will follow.

Suz swung her head around wondering how this texting-person always knew exactly what was happening. He wasn’t spying on her through the camera. After she realized that she had been carrying the phone in her left hand all the time, she had been careful to put it in her thigh pocket. That hadn’t seemed to have made a difference. Suz moved over to a low couch, pulled off her bag, and sat down. The boy scowled as if she should not have moved without his permission. Suz ignored him. Instead she dug through the outer pockets of the bag. Jack had packed them by hierarchy, he had explained. Each thing in the bag was important, but the things she would need first were in the outside pockets. What she needed was a first aid kit with mole skin. Her new boots had rubbed inch-wide blisters in rings around her ankles. Each step was agony. She pulled off her boots and doctored her skin. She carefully wrapped her pants’ leg over her ankles, folding the extra fabric to cushion her, then put the boots back on. That was the way Jack wore his pants in the pictures of him in the jungle.

After a short time, the rain stopped, and a man dressed in long pants and a long sleeved shirt, despite the oppressive heat, called her name, holding up two fingers to indicate she and her new found friend/guard should come. Two other adults and three children were called, as well, and they all headed out the door behind their guide. They climbed on a tourist bus that drove them about thirty minutes back into the forest, down a road to a path

The path they followed was wide and comprised of rich earth, muddy from the shower. There were some small puddles and a few rivulets, but it was easy hiking. While the path was wide enough that they weren’t brushing against the foliage, the broad leaves on the trees dripped down on them. Suz reached around and found the rain poncho that had been stashed in the right-hand pocket. It was a large military issue poncho that was designed to keep men like Jack dry. For Suz, it was much too long. She ended up holding it up like a ball gown as she moved behind the guide, listening to what he was saying about the history of the area and their conservation in English(ish), and then a repeat in Spanish.

“We have classified thirty-nine species of mammals such as: jaguars, wild boar, capybara – which are the world’s largest rodents, anteater, wolves, and tapir. Paraguay also has a large population of crocodiles in our waterways. As you enjoy your time in Paraguay, please be aware that there are dangers in our waters. The carnivorous piranha, for example, are common.” He lifted his eyebrows for emphasis. “Here at Tatí Yupí we have classified two hundred and forty-seven different kinds of birds and twenty-one reptiles. Perhaps today we will be very lucky and see a boa constrictor. They like to drape their bodies in the tree limbs.

Suz’s eyes widened, and she looked up. What’s that? Boa constrictors hanging in trees like Christmas tinsel?

“Boa constrictors are non- venomous snakes that kill their prey by squeezing and constricting until their dinner is dead.” The guide was walking backwards and using his hands to demonstrate. “Boa constrictors are around three meters in length – so around nine feet.” He looked pointedly at Suz, the only American, as he said that.

She offered him a wan smile.

“And weigh about forty-five kilograms or one hundred pounds.” He turned back around, and they moved farther along the path.

The nature walk was supposed to last three hours and loop around. Around the one-hour mark, the group was taking a break sitting on logs that had been placed on either side of the path. Suz pulled out her bug spray and was dousing herself as the mosquitos came out with the approach of evening and found their little group by their exhalent. Without thinking about it, Suz held out the spray to the man/boy who was with her. The scathing look he gave her made her shrug and pack the spray back in the side pocket. Sure, manly-men didn’t need bug spray. She hoped he had his shots. Then she briefly wondered what kinds of diseases the mosquitos might carry – dengue fever and zika. . . His problem. Not hers.

A text buzzed, and she pulled her phone from under her poncho.

Your friend does not feel well, you will turn around and walk back to the parking area to get him home. Thank your guide for the tour. Tip him with one pink bill. Head back where you came from.

Her “friend” looked just fine. Here she was again, having to make the decision. Did she follow through? Did she ignore the directive? Once again, she realized she was seat-of-the-pantsing this thing, and she’d have to rely on her gut. Her gut said she needed to get to those kids. She felt like they were near.

Suz walked over and spoke with the guide. The guide said that the bus could take them back and would return in time to pick up the other family. The guide grinned, accepting the money and hoping all would be well. And off she moved with the guy.

They walked for about ten-minutes when the guy slowed his pace. His eyes were on the ground, searching. She saw it before he did. At the side of the road three rocks were stacked.

She stopped beside them, reaching under her poncho to lift the back pack straps off her shoulders. They had rubbed her raw through the t-shirt material. Thirty pounds, Jack had said. Minus the weapons. Weapons were metal; they were probably pretty heavy. But last night she had gone through the bag a little and remembered there was a water bladder incorporated in the design. She had filled it with water. Thank goodness she had filled it with water. But water was heavy. Probably heavier than the weapons that had been left behind. She pulled the hose from the clip on the strap and ran it to her mouth and drank down a gulp. It tasted like plastic. She clipped it back in place quickly, so she didn’t feel compelled to share with the guy. Suz felt very protective of her water.

The guy’s eyes swept back across the path and this time he saw the stack. He motioned to her as he moved into the tropical forest, kicking the stack as he went. The guy had a compass out and was following in some direction right through the foliage. After a few paces, he picked up a couple of short sticks. After searching around, he found two more. He handed these off to her. They began walking again and Suz realized the sticks were to use in holding back the dense foliage. Just a few paces in and already Suz was exhausted.

An hour later, she was ready to drop to the ground and sleep with the capybaras. This was by far the most physically grueling thing she had ever done in her life. The rain had started again. The earth began sucking at her boots. As she lagged behind, the guy would turn and hiss at her. Literally, hiss.

There were no animals. No birds. No lizards (thank god). She could hear them, though, in their mad cacophony of trills and squawks. The eyes she had felt on her by whoever was instructing her over the cell phone had nothing on this. This was beyond spooky. As she moved farther and farther into the dense forest, her mind was back on the pictures in the educational building of all the terrifying animals that breathed with her amongst the trees.

The silent one with his disdain for women – or maybe just for her – walked ahead, moving vegetation out of the way for his passage, sometimes letting it snap back at her. She thought she sensed some glee from him when she would yelp in pain. She felt like her pain was his pleasure. If she had done something to rile this boy up and make him want to hurt her, she couldn’t imagine what it was. But she decided to try to keep herself quiet. Sometimes a bully just thrived on getting a desired outcome, when that response wasn’t forthcoming the bullying stopped. That’s the way it worked at her school – it’s not how things were working here in the Paraguayan forest.

When they left the main tourist trail, Suz wondered why this guy didn’t use a machete to hack his way through, then realized they were trying not to leave any trails. At first, she was careful to leave guide posts herself, reaching out and bending branches the way she had read that Indians sometimes did when they were taken from their villages – so their scouts could follow and find them. Suz thought if her marks were frequent enough and visible enough that she could get herself out of here. She was losing hope that they were headed for the boys. She wasn’t sure what lay at the other end of their hike, but she thought if they meant to just kill her, that could have happened an hour ago, and there would be no way that anyone would find her body. If they were even looking.

Would they be looking? Suz started the loop that would take her through her speculations of what could be. The same kind of speculations that filled her with anxiety that then turned to a low burning rage when it came to Jack. And then it hit her like a smack across the face, the irony. Oh the irony. “Irony is the hygiene of the mind,” that was a Bilbescoe quote Suz had used to answer an essay question to get in to Stanford undergrad. Why the heck they were asking high school seniors about irony was beyond her. Back then, the biggest irony in her life was that when she was dead tired she was too tired to sleep. But now. . .now irony was slapping upside the head.

Suz had been angry. Yes, furious. She had to own it. Suz had been angry because Jack kept choosing “other” than her. He chose his missions. He chose the kidnapped victims. He chose the law. He chose his brothers in arms. He kept choosing “other” than her. She was angry because she wanted him to be hers. Living in their little house in the woods, living the life that had always been painted for her since her childhood – a husband who comes home from work and scooped the children up in hugs, pecked his wife on the cheek, and they all lived happily ever after. She wanted her happily ever after – though, wow, to put it in those terms seemed very 1950s Disneyesque. Her little “Leave It to Beaver” world.

But Jack insisted on being in danger and danger meant he could die. She’d never get to see him again, never get to tell him she loved him in person again, never get to make love with him again. That sudden and horrific loss, well she had been through something a little like that with her dad. She didn’t think she could survive it with Jack. So she fought to keep him safe. To keep him nearby.

And now she had decided enough was enough and she needed to let him go. Go and be himself. If she didn’t have the details, eventually she’d stop worrying. He needed to live his life away from her. She needed to open that space he had been living in to welcome some other man in and be hers. Suz felt as she laid it out in those words to be monumentally selfish.

And then here was the irony piece.

She knew back at her house that she was in desperate trouble. She very well could be killed by Jones and the other one. Hence, she decided to go along with their “request” that she go and take care of the children. It was an odd request, very odd, and she wasn’t going to try to work her way out of that maze again. She had gone along. And she continued to go along. She had had a gajillion opportunities and ways that she could have escaped and gotten aid. She had taken none of them because there was a shot that she could find the children and help them. But in that script there was always a “Jack” coming to their rescue. Her Jack was incapacitated, but there were others who were rough and ready, willing to go into dark damp places like this, willing to put their lives on the line for strangers.

She needed one of those people now.

Yes, they were humans and not characters. They got hot, and hurt, and . . .died. How horrible would that be if someone died trying to help her? These rescuers were humans with relationships – mothers and fathers, sister and brothers, maybe even wives and children if not lovers and would-be fiancées. The person she wished would come for her would do so while someone else was feverishly praying that they not come for her. Like she had wished Jack would just stay home and take a policy job with the government or something.

That wasn’t actually irony at all. What it was was hypocrisy. She was a hypocrite.

Jack came after people like her. Saved their lives. Pat them on their backs and off they went to follow their destinies, big or small. Then he came home and painted her bathroom. Built a dog pen for Dick and Jane. Grilled steaks on the grill and told all of his friends what a lucky man he was to have such an amazing woman in his life.

Suz felt the conviction that she felt long ago when she first said no to Jack’s marriage proposal. There were women built on stronger frames than she was. Women who were physically strong, mentally strong, and emotionally strong. Suz shared their intellectual strength but that was such a small slice of the pie. Jack deserved someone better than she.