Darién Gap
I
The car stopped after we crossed into Panama.
“It went farther than I’d hoped.” Marianne shrugged as she pulled the keys from the ignition. “Now what?” The Pan-American highway sat in the distance. Far, but we could walk. You could still see the tops of trucks and hear the buzz of motors over the sound of wind on leaves. “Maybe,” I said, “we should head back to the main road.” Marianne ignored me and took out her phone to record the birds. To me, they sounded the same as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. We hadn’t heard the birds in El Salvador, Honduras, or Nicaragua. In those countries, we’d powered through except for stops every four hours to switch drivers. We travelled through the night, not thinking anything of it until, in Costa Rica, we met the wide-stanced Israeli tourists, their shoulders muscled from years of carrying military-issue automatic weapons. “Two women driving Nicaragua at night,” Aryan-blond Ari said. “You are lucky you haven’t been carjacked and raped.” Ari bounced as he spoke, his English mimicking the ascended South African tone of his parents. We sat together at the hostel bar drinking warm Imperial. I had Marianne and Ari had Dawid: black, Ethiopian, and he didn’t speak English. A scandal, Ari told us, how well he and Dawid got along. He wanted so badly for us to recognize this so I nodded. Dawid said something to Ari in Hebrew. “He says you were lucky, but also too old,” Ari translated. “They want young American girls, not old American women.” “We’re Canadian,” I said, as if that made a difference. When Dawid spoke next, Ari didn’t bother to translate. They drifted further into the bar lit with Christmas lights and mosquito coils while we drank premixed rum-and-cola from a can. “We’re too old for rapists,” Marianne said after they’d gone. I agreed because I always agreed with Marianne when we were young, and now older with arm fat that sagged and the hints of double chins and a whisper of what might be called jowls, I still did it out of habit. When we were young, we’d dreamed of being older. Now we were older and for what? We kept sitting, ignored, in a bar at the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border. Ari and Dawid planned to travel north, us south. When our car stopped, each light blinking off one after the other until the dashboard darkened and turning the key didn’t even make a cough of the engine spilling over, we needed Ari and Dawid’s Israeli army training, alone in the jungle with a dead car. Instead, Marianne and I sat on the trunk to listen to the birds. South—Marianne’s only goal. In Guatemala, we drove down roads that led nowhere and when they petered out, we sat in the car with the windows rolled down and tried not to breathe until the birds sang again. Marianne recorded them on her phone and played the clips at night wherever we’d end up, listening for the differences that would tell us we were on the right track. “Pete said we’ll hear the difference. Right now,” she said on the nights we weren’t rushing through the middle of Central America, “they all sound the same.” To me they all sounded the same. Birds were birds. Cawing, squawking, singing, ugly nature noise.“You need to come with me,” Marianne said. I drove through snow in Ottawa in December to get here. The condo sat in a cold dampness the electric heat couldn’t get out. I heard the whirr as the radiator clicked on and off. “I need you.” For the Spanish. I’d had a nanny from Ecuador growing up. With Frank Jr., we’d hired girls from the Dominican Republic and Cuba. “Who starts to travel at forty-six? I’m too old,” I said. “I’m serious. You have nothing here keeping you.” “Frank Jr.” “Who’s in university. Who hasn’t thought of you once since being dropped off at his dorm. Come on. It’ll be fun.” “I don’t know. There are diseases. Malaria.” “DEET, long sleeves.” “Dengue.” “Still mosquito-based. Same precautions.” “Ebola.” “That’s Central Africa, not Central America.” “I’d rather do Europe on holiday. I’ve never been to Europe. We could be eighteen again with all the other eighteen-year-olds with oversized backpacks, but we’d have the money to get tickets on first class trains and luxury hotels. Tuscany, Greece, Paris at dawn.” “I’ve done Europe. And Pete—” Marianne’s voice dropped down low. “I want to go where Pete went. I want to see.” She blinked quick and turned away so I wouldn’t see her eyes getting wet and dopey. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go with you.” The tears stopped as if she’d turned a switch.
On our abandoned car, Marianne balanced the phone on her palm to play the recordings again and again. The sun sat high. We stuck to our clothing. “Do you hear that?” Marianne’s voice caused the birds’ voices to disappear. We waited until, no longer spooked, they sang again through the green of the trees. The difference lay there: the green, so much of it, all the same until you started to look close, until you put your face right up to the leaves of the trees and the blades of the grass. Every object its own shade of green refracting in the light, almost the same as the green thing sitting on its right, on its left, from the leaves overhead, but not quite. I couldn’t tell one of these countries from the next, but the green burned into my mind. “We’re almost there.” Marianne hopped from the trunk and walked down the road, almost a run. Not toward the highway, but farther into the jungle. “We can’t leave the car,” I called to her shrinking silhouette. Our car had New Mexico plates though we picked it up in California. We’d bought it with gouges on the hood, and the rear where the manufacturer’s logo had been hacked off. A grey sedan, maroon seats, windows unrolling with a crank, odometer stuck on one hundred and twenty nine thousand four hundred and thirty-six miles. “Leave the car. Let them junk it.” “Who? Who will junk it?” Trees overhung the road, dipping down low. “There’s nobody here to junk anything.” “I see a sign.” Marianne pointed to words in yellow paint on brown wood. The road went somewhere. “There’ll be a bus. There’ll be people.” At people I thought of Ari and Dawid. We’d left them to a boat on Lago Nicaragua, but maybe they’d reversed to wait for us south of this new border. Marianne might be marching toward Ari and Dawid, waiting and smiling with cigarettes, ready to go. I’d fucked Dawid or let him fuck me or we’d fucked. The words had changed from when I’d been young and getting a boyfriend was as easy as taking my top off at the bar and watching as the men would queue up for their turn. Now, Dawid knocked on my door and pointed to his crotch with a face as solid as dried clay. I’d nodded and motioned for him to follow me inside. He undressed with locker room efficiency. I pulled off my underwear but kept my top on. The sex was roughly unpleasant. I came by touching myself, thinking of Frankie doing this with the roles reversed, him the aging specimen with the rolls of fat drifting downwards, her the taut, tanned, shaved, arching, screaming, moaning, seething, writhing flesh he buried himself into. Dawid stroked my back until I reached my hands around to bat him away. Misunderstanding, he pulled out and shot semen along my tailbone. I had nothing to clean up with, neither towel nor top sheet. I lay on my stomach while it dried. Dawid sat next to me, tugging on himself, remaining flaccid despite his best attempts. He answered the door with his pants wrapped around his waist like a towel. “Ari,” he said as he held the brown door half-closed with his foot. Dawid pointed to his crotch again then to the door. “Ari?” I shook my head no. Ari must have continued down the hall to the hostel’s other single: Marianne’s room. The next morning, she said nothing about Ari and I kept quiet about the smoothness of Dawid’s skin, the fine razor wire crop of the hair on his head, the way for days afterwards I’d find strands of hair mixed into my clothes, black pubic hair so clearly not my own.
II
Everything standard and basic. Formica framed by silver chrome. Twice the teenager who served drinks walked by with a gas canister to spray on the gutters “Cover your mouth,” Marianne said. “That stuff is poison.” Marianne wanted locals. In Ottawa, she figured that we’d hit backpacker bar after backpacker bar, never imagining how invisible we’d be in the sea of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings pretending to be younger, the rows of dreadlocks and cigarettes and pillows tied or taped to metal-framed bags. Ari and Dawid had been the only kids to talk to us. “So,” Marianne said, picking at the plantain. “So.”We had old money, Frankie too, but Pete grew up in a small town on Cape Breton full of Catholics and fishermen. He said his grandparents spoke Gaelic. Two cousins were priests. He had an accent that came out with the right people and in the right place and at precisely the right time. Marianne brought him as her date to my engagement party. “Isn’t he precious?” she asked as we stood in the ladies’ room adjusting ourselves. “He’s older.” “Thirty-five.” “Your parents will be furious.” I opened my lips to put on mascara. “I don’t care.” She meant it didn’t matter. She’d breached her trust-fund floodgates at twenty-one. Mine were locked until twenty-five. There’d be a leak for the wedding, then another four-year wait. The bathroom shimmered. Everything mirrored back-and-forth, making thousands of me, thousands of Marianne, thousands of the bathroom attendant who knew better than to make eye contact with us. “At least finish your degree,” Marianne said. “Why?” Frankie had a position set up at a firm. Not his father’s, of course. Instead a family friend’s to stall any accusation of nepotism. Soon there’d be babies and parties and fundraisers. I didn’t need a BA attached to the end of all that. “Don’t lose yourself in a man,” Marianne said, but the next day she left, following Pete to Ottawa, transferring her credits to Carleton and switching her major to public policy administration, lost in a man she’d thought more appropriate for her than Frankie was for me. “I miss Pete.” “I know.” Night fell late so high up in the mountains. You could see down across land. A blue strip, maybe the horizon, maybe the sea. Leaves slithered against each other as we sat in the dusk of a Panamanian bar near the border of Costa Rica. “I think he must have been here,” said Marianne. “This place, can’t you feel Pete here?” I couldn’t. Marianne looked through her photographs. The cover said Brag Book. She filled the pages with photographs of Pete in the ’70s and ’80s. Polaroids. Square Instamatics. Black-and-white shots on thick cardboard stock. Pete in jeans on a pickup. Pete on a thin strip of tar-black beach. Pete under a palm tree. Pete drinking with friends. “This could be here.” She pointed to a picture, then to the corrugated metal roof of the bar. “Or there.” I pointed. “Or there. Or really, anywhere. Do we have more to go on? Did Pete work while he was here? That might be a lead.” “I don’t know,” Marianne lied. In the long shadows that preceded the night, I didn’t see it. Later I could pinprick the moment by the slight twitch along the skin of her cheeks, the minute dissonance between the tone of her voice and the hold of her body, the ways the vowels lengthened, the long ones the most. She rapped her knuckles on the table with an upbeat tune not belying the mood. “Drinks?” I suggested, and left to find the teenager running the bar. “I think,” Marianne said when I returned with a promise of more food than the congealing plantains we hadn’t touched, “that Israeli, the black one, he fancied you.” “He said we were so unattractive a rapist wouldn’t want us. I don’t even remember his name.” My body warmed up. The birds sang. I wanted them to be quetzals, the sound of the word, the tz sound in the middle like a sizzle of water dropped onto a stove. Marianne guessed toucans. We ate fried chicken without cutlery, exchanged US bills for Panamanian Balboa at the bar, solicited advice on where to stay. A guesthouse down the road was closest. Pete had stayed in guesthouses in Panama in the early ’80s. Marianne bubbled at the thought of staying in one too. “It won’t be the same one,” I said. “But it might.” We walked through the dark. During the day, the sun smothered us with waves of humidity so solid we could have hacked through them with machetes. But when the sun vanished, the street chilled as if all heat had been no more than a dream. “Easy to forget the sun without street lamps as reminders,” I said. Dark was dark here. Marianne ignored me. The guest house had one room, shared, and no, when I asked the proprietress: they did not allow men. “Not now, before. Have men stayed here before?” Marianne asked. “Jools, translate that.” “I don’t remember how to do past tense.” Marianne glared at me and pulled all the muscles of her body in close. She didn’t speak as we got ready for bed and didn’t accept my offer of bottled water to brush her teeth. I turned off the florescent lamp to her unspeaking back. Then, in the morning, she had gone.
“I don’t feel as old as I am,” Marianne told me late night once on the phone. “No one does.” “I don’t feel forty-five.” “No one does,” I repeated. “No one feels older than thirty. I guess in your thirties you can convince yourself that you’re thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-six, thirty-nine. But when that forty hits, you put your mind to the age when you were perfect. In your head, I mean.” “When were you perfect, Jools?” “Twenty-one,” I replied. A long pause, lengthier than normal, and Marianne came back on the line when she’d managed to stop crying. “It’s Pete,” Marianne told me. “He’s not doing so good.”
I rushed to the street. Marianne had taken her bag, her shoes, the money belt to strap around her waist. The road was filled with more goats than people, more chickens than goats. “Señora,” a man called to me. “You search for something? I take you.” He wore Tommy Hilfiger; I recognized the logo from Frank Jr.’s shirts. We were the same height. He ran toward me. “I’m fine, thank you. No gracias,” I added for good measure. I turned to go inside the guest house. The sun, barely up, had already cooked the cheap tar of the road. The soles of my shoes stuck deep into the muck. I had almost crept inside when the man grabbed hard on my arm. “You can come with me. Is okay.” I pulled my arm back. We both lost our balance and fell away from each other. “Money?” he asked. “I have four children and my wife has illness. I have no way to provide.” “Then get a job. Trabajas.” He switched into Spanish and I lost track of the insults until he cried “¡Puta!” as his tirade began to fade. “¡Hija de puta!” I thought of Dawid. My hand jumped up and I slapped the man, my right hand, his left cheek, chickens and goats and the guest house proprietress as our witnesses. The man started to laugh. He laughed and laughed as I stepped inside the shade of the guesthouse and closed my eyes to the street burning into my retinas. “Por favor.” The proprietress pointed towards where we’d slept, then back outside. She mimicked putting on a backpack over her blue cleaning robe and apron, then walking, exaggerated, steps away. “¿Para limpiar?” I asked. “¿Cuando podemos volver?” She shook her head so I took my things onto the street. The man had gone. Fewer chickens. No Marianne.
“You haven’t been to Israel?” asked Ari. “I haven’t been anywhere.” “I have,” Marianne said. “Ethiopia?” asked Dawid, his lack of English notwithstanding. The th vanished as he said his country’s name, almost a ch instead. “No,” Marianne said. “No, wait. Yes. Something in the capital once.” The lights from the hostel bar hollowed her face to a skeleton. These same lights shone on her hair, picked up the strands of white between the black and made them glow like candles. I’d wrapped my hair, short, easy to manage, in a red bandana now stiff from sweat. We hadn’t bathed since Guatemala. My shirt was a modernist painting from dots and stains of moles and salsas. We should have gone to the room before the bar. “What’s the capital called?” Marianne asked. Ari conferred with Dawid. “Addis,” Dawid said. “No,” said Marianne. “That’s not it.” She clapped. “Food. Jools, try some.” She shoved something sticky into my face. “It’s so good,” she said without trying any herself. Her arm fell around my shoulder so she could pull me close enough to feel her breath on my cheek. “See my friend Jools,” she called out to everyone at the bar. “We’re going to drive south on the Pan-American highway all the way to the end of the world, to Tierra del Fuego if we have to.” “That is impossible,” Ari said. “You can’t.” Marianne turned, wobbling the table as she did, steadying the circle again with her elbows. “The Pan-American highway,” she enunciated. “It goes all the way to the tip of the world.” “It stops,” Ari said, “in Panama. There’s a break in the road.” “There can’t be,” Marianne said. Dawid yawned and pulled on his friend’s arm. He pointed to the inside of the bar. “We’re leaving tomorrow at breakfast.” Ari pointed to the sky. “North.” “You heard Marianne,” I said. “We’re going south.” I pointed stupidly at the ground. He nodded. Then he was gone.
I stood by a square slab of concrete in the ground with a grey metal cylinder sticking straight up from the centre. At the top of the cylinder, a rectangle of a phone box. I picked up to listen to the dial tone humming like phones I remembered from home. The street crowded with more chickens and more goats and now a short and fat pig. No one but me seemed perturbed by the livestock criss-crossing the road.
“Be happy to see animals,” Marianne said. “The places without animals, where the streets have nothing living—those are the places where one should be concerned.” But she gripped the wheel tighter while a bull, lazy, took slow step after slow step to his side of the road. “It is,” I paused to think of how to stay culturally sensitive. “It is an unfortunate way to live,” I decided. “How would you make living here better?” “Hot water at least.” The coil in the bathroom that morning hadn’t switched on, leaving me with an ice-cold shower. “Not like this.” “Pete didn’t mind. Pete said Central America was charming.” “Anything is charming when you have the option to leave.” “Where Pete came from wasn’t much different than this,” Marianne said. “It’s a lot different from where he ended up.” Pete and Marianne in their luxury condominium overlooking the canal. Pete and Marianne in their sixty thousand dollar car. Pete and Marianne serving swordfish to senators and members of Parliament. “Pete ended up where Pete ended up because of me,” Marianne said. “Maybe he should have stayed here. Maybe everything would have been better then.” “The air quality here though. Everyone smokes. All the cars run on diesel. Staying here wouldn’t have helped. His lungs would have been worse.” Marianne didn’t answer. “No hammocks tonight,” I said. My back ached from the previous night. “Some place fancy. Where are we going today?” I asked. “We’ll know when we get there. That’s what Pete would say. He knew when he got there.” Over the engine, I strained to hear her. “We’ll know, too.”
She sat at the bar from the previous day, drinking coffee from a metal mug. “They grow coffee everywhere here but give you Nescafé when you order,” Marianne complained. “You left me alone,” I said. My words shook. My fingers tightened to claws and my teeth ground against each other as I spoke. If I hadn’t slapped someone already that morning, I would have hit Marianne. I would have torn at her face, her smug, coffee-tinted teeth. I would kick hard in the shins, the ribs, the neck. “How could you leave me there without telling me where you went?” “It’s Panama.” Marianne waved her free hand. “You can buy package vacations here. You were perfectly safe.” “A note would have killed you though?” “I couldn’t have gone far.” “The town is bigger than you think.” In the other direction, farther, over the hill, you could see civilization spreading down in a series of grids with the shanties at the edges bleeding into the trees. A tall, stone church in the middle of the square. Smaller, white, stucco ones dotted the green of the mountains, the same white churches we saw from the highway, Evangélico written large on every sign. “We need to do something,” I told her. “The car. Where to go next.” “We should ask people here about Pete.” The buzz of insects overtook our conversation. “We need to see if anyone remembers him.” “Yes, we need to see if anyone remembers someone who may or may not have been here thirty years ago. That’s precisely what we need to do.” The words stung my tongue. “Then we’ll go,” Marianne promised. “You said you’d help. There’s a youth hostel near the centre of town.” Marianne held up a guidebook she’d set on her lap. The pages curled, yellow and black specks like pepper across the words. I smelled the mould standing above her. “The man at the bar said I could have it.” Marianne pointed inside and a man waved back at her. Not the previous day’s teenager. A man in cowboy hat, jeans, red button shirt. He had white sneakers. Nothing white of mine had survived the dust and the rain and the mud of Central America but he wore sneakers so white that they beamed. “That book’s too old,” I said. “The older the better. We need something that’s been here for years.” “When—” I stopped, not wanting to reinforce Marianne’s delusion. “If Pete had come here, they wouldn’t remember at a youth hostel. No one over twenty-five works at a youth hostel. They wouldn’t have been born when Pete was travelling. Why don’t you ask him?” I looked toward the bar. “He looks the same age as Pete.” “He doesn’t speak English.” Marianne stared at me. “Fine.” I took the photo book from the table. She followed me slowly, like walking over loose cobblestones rather than concrete. “Señor,” I said, my accent more French than Spanish, more Québecois than French. “¿Olvida esta hombre?” He smiled, missing an incisor. “What’s funny?” whispered Marianne. I thought. “Olvidar means to forget. I need the word for remember.” “Which is?” I shook my head. “Here, I’ll try this. ¿Usted conoce esta hombre? El está aquí,” but numbers over twenty failed me. “When was Pete here?” I asked Marianne. “Early ’80s. Eighty-four maybe.” I wrote the number on the chalk board advertising specials at the bar. “Los photos son cuando el está aquí.” I handed over the book. He flipped through, not actually looking, then spoke too fast for me to follow. When he finished, he smiled, the missing incisor again. I looked lost. He started explaining again, this time slowly, with hand gestures. “He says many people come through here often. He doesn’t know. Around then there were some,” we watch as he puts his hands together to genuflect, “missionaries?” I guessed. “Was Pete doing missionary work?” I asked Marianne. “No.” “People won’t remember a backpacker from thirty years ago. This is ridiculous.” A ping on the metal roof. Another. A pause of six beats. Then a downpour. The street, livestock and all, scattered. “Chulos,” said Marianne. She mangled the pronunciation by affording each syllable an equal emphasis. “Chew-lows.” “¿Chulos?” I repeated for the man who froze at the word. “No,” he said with vehemence. “No tenemos los narcotraficantes aquí.” “What?” I said as the translation filtered through my brain. “Narco-traffickers? Marianne? Why is he talking about drugs?” “He’s probably confused.” “But drugs?” Marianne laughed. “Don’t be so mother-hen shocked. It was the eighties. Everyone did coke. Well,” she stared at me again, “maybe not everyone. We’re on a drug trafficking route. That’s all.” “Marianne?” “That’s all,” she repeated. “¿Señoras?” the bar man said. “¿Mas preguntas?” “No, gracias.” I thought of the day’s earlier encounter. “Give him some money,” I told Marianne. “Why?” “He helped us out.” “I’m not giving him cash. He didn’t tell us a thing.” I handed him a bill. He looked at it and pointed, misunderstanding, to the bottles on the far side of the bar. “Dos tragos,” he said. “Rum,” I told him, worried an explanation would lead to an insult. “Blanco, por favor.” I knocked them back before wandering into the rain, which had calmed. Drops hit the ground, but didn’t jump up with force to make a mist two inches tall off the street like they did on the highway. The rain hit the pavement and rolled away into puddles that soaked through the sides of my shoes. Marianne grabbed her things from the table to catch up from behind. “Now you’ve abandoned me,” she said. “Now I don’t care.” My foot twisted on trash and I fell. My ankle twinged, my fat stubby ankle, barely differentiated from the rest of my leg. I sat on the road, foolishly wet. If Frankie were here—I stopped the thought. If Frankie were here, he’d run back to his eighteen-year-old girlfriend without a backwards glance. I laughed. Marianne sat on the road next to me and laughed, too. Each breath distanced the possibility of ever stopping. I began to snort and guffaw. Water soaked through my pants. My first bath since we’d left. This made me laugh harder. “Jools, we should go,” Marianne said. “There’s nothing here. We need to go farther south.” “To continue this wild goose chase? You’re never going to find anything. We don’t know where Pete went or what he did.” “He ran drugs,” Marianne said. This made me laugh harder. “You said—” “I lied. You heard the guy at the bar. Narcotics.” “Narcotraficantes,” I said for her. “But Pete?” Pete being Martian would have been more believable. “Maybe,” said Marianne. “A little. I don’t know.” “And now you don’t know again.” “Fine. I do know.” Her lips thinned. “He needed money to keep traveling, that or go home, to welfare or construction work in Toronto. You don’t know what Cape Breton was like then. Places without running water, indoor toilets.” “Here places don’t have running water, indoor toilets.” This did not amuse Marianne. “It’s warm here, with beaches. Pretty girls. Flowers. Pete called Panama the garden of Eden.” I shivered. The humidity slid away into dampness. I fought chattering my teeth. “He moved things around Panama. It was easier for him. He’d play the dumb gringo card and the army would leave him alone.” “So he was a mule then?” Marianne wrapped her arms around herself. A drug trafficker meant romance, aviator sunglasses and white haciendas. A mule was a pedestrian job. Marianne kept herself far removed from pedestrian. Annoyed, but not wanting to show it, she ran to hide underneath some trees for protection from the rain, just as the branches caved under the strength of the rain drops and water the weight of a bucket fell onto her. “Pete never said it would be like this.” Water dripped from the ends of her hair and mixed in with her tears. Her voice hung flat with disappointment. “He said here was like magic. He said he was happy here. He said here was like the start of the world and I came here and everyone yells into their cellphones and drives Mitsubishis and wears designer clothing. Pete sold me this whole story of pristine wilderness and none of what Pete said is true.” “Of course nothing he said was true. You think he told you the truth?” Marianne shook her head. “I don’t want to do this,” I said. If we left, I wouldn’t have to admit being kicked out of the guesthouse. I could go back home, go back to sitting in my house by the ravine, go back to the volunteer committees, go back to the specialty coffee house at the end of the road, go back to writing cheques for people who worked in these places rather than having to see these places myself. “Maybe we can hire someone to drive us to Panama City.” “We’ll take a bus.” “Do we have to?” “A bus won’t kill you. Unless you find an ATM, we can’t afford anything else.” It kept raining. My shoes squeaked on the pavement as we walked down the hill to the centre of town. Marianne pushed me forward to negotiate tickets inside the station and gave me her remaining Balboa to pay. I negotiated time tables with the woman on the far side of the grill. We found a fast bus, Primera Clase, with personal televisions, air conditioning. “We need to buy blankets,” I told Marianne. “The bus will be frío. Cold.” Bits of language mixed together the more Marianne refused to learn even some Spanish basics. “I’ll be fine.” “Suit yourself.” Shops nearby sold coarse wool blankets. Guatemala, Mexico, the vividness of those colours shone five countries away. I’d forgotten the souvenirs I’d bought in the trunk of our car. Once home, they would have been pushed away to the back of closets and forgotten about until charity drives. I’d decluttered early, was all. No real difference. “I’m going to use the facilities,” Marianne said. She returned too fast to have done anything. “I need money for toilet paper,” she said. I gave her a handful of change without sorting the coins. They jangled as they fell into her palm. “I can’t believe they make you pay for toilet paper.” “Pete forgot to mention that?” Marianne stalked off. When the bus drove by the car, unmolested except by the rain streaking away the drive’s worth of dirt, Marianne opened the square glass of her window. The bus’ ambient temperature rose instantly as the cool of the air conditioner swooped out. Marianne took the keys and threw them. They hit the hood, skittered off, and landed in some plants at the side of the road. The sun hit the metal. Anyone going by would see them. “Someone else can have it,” Marianne said. “I’m done.” I smiled. My uninviting grey blanket warmed me. The bus rocked gently, reminding me of our drives home with Frank Jr. after weekends at cottages north of the city. My eyes closed longer and longer with each blink. “We didn’t get there,” Marianne said. “We didn’t go far enough. The song never changed. Pete said you could hear the difference, Mozart versus Stravinsky. This was more like all those stupid pop songs on the radio that all sound the same.” I fell asleep.
III
“I slept with Frankie.” We were on the phone talking about nothing. I’d called to tell her something I’d seen that reminded me of her, something worth sharing over the phone, but had forgotten when she picked up. We laughed at growing older. “I slept with Frankie,” Marianne said. “Again?” “What?” A clicking on the line like teeth distracted me. “You’re talking about the ’80s right after we got married. Or another time?” “You knew about that?” The noise continued. I realized she must have had a pen, a clicky-top, absentmindedly tapping it for comfort. “You told me.” Then I thought. “Maybe Frankie did. No,” I decided. “It must have been you.” We both waited. I shifted around the telephone alcove, our house of the style and age that had telephone alcoves under the stairs. I moved to one position, then another, trying to find a way to rest my body against the wall so my bones wouldn’t ache. The alcove fit snug, snugger than the space had been ten, five, even two years ago. “All I’ve been thinking about,” Marianne spoke first, “for weeks now is this secret I’ve been keeping from you. I’d forgotten about me and Frankie and then it comes bubbling up to keep me awake at night, and you already knew?” “Yes.” “This is anti-climactic. I was so sure you’d be angry and never speak to me again and I’d be all alone.” “You have Pete.” “Not the same at all. You’ll forgive me?” Her voice cut like glass. “We’re still speaking, so I guess you did.” “We didn’t talk the first five years I was married,” I told her. “That was different. I was so busy at work, I didn’t talk to anyone but colleagues and Pete.” Marianne sighed. “How are you, really?” Frankie gone for six weeks. Guilty, he’d signed some papers he’d fight over later, but until then, so many things, so many tangible objects I could hold in my hands, belonged to me. Having stuff made it easy to forget about feelings. “It was meaningless,” I said. “Something about too much to drink, bad drugs.” “Is that what we told you?” “Yes.” “It was only the one time,” said Marianne. “I believe you,” I said, but something in my voice told Marianne the opposite because she kept insisting. Only one time, only once, it never happened again, it wouldn’t have ever happened again, an isolated event, an outlier, a mistake, I’m so sorry. An old flyer sat on the same small table as the phone’s cradle. Months old. I checked the front. Over a year. “I believe you,” I repeated. “If your dalliance had been more than once then ultimately Frankie would have used it in a fight. He probably would have said he liked having sex with you better than me.” “That wouldn’t be true. You had sex enough to get Frank Jr. and all those miscarriages,” she said with the nonchalance of the never-pregnant. “Frankie loved having sex with you.” “And with you and some of the other partners and associates and general office staff and random people he met at conferences and on the street and at bars and, of course, let’s not forget, girls he met from his son’s high school graduating class.” “I can’t believe that one. An eighteen-year-old with Frankie. Her parents must be furious.” “They keep calling here to yell at him even though he moved out.” “Can you imagine how vigorous sex must be? I’d hate to have an eighteen-year-around me gagging for it. I can’t even imagine having sex with someone in their twenties. Thirties, I could handle. I was in my thirties ten years ago. That doesn’t seem so long ago. Yes,” Marianne said as if making a decision. “I’d have sex with someone in their thirties.” “I’m sure Pete will be thrilled.” “I wouldn’t do it.” The nervous clicking started again. I’d read the flyer from cover to cover. “Maybe I should be going.” “Look, Jools,” Marianne said. “That one time thing with me and Frankie, I was an angry person then.” “Fine,” I yawned. “No, listen. I was angry at you and your perfect housewife anti-feminism and I was mad at Pete and my work. I’m not that person anymore.” “I don’t care. Let it go.” She breathed into the phone. “You haven’t been to Ottawa in a while.” “You haven’t been to Toronto, either.” “It’s hard with Pete.” “I should let you get back to him then.” Marianne didn’t reply. “I’ll visit in spring to see the tulips.” “Don’t think I’ll forget. Pete’s had a setback lately, but things might look up by the spring.” She dangled the bait but I didn’t ask about Pete and we both hung up angry. Marianne and Frankie. I hadn’t thought about that in years. The two of them in her dorm room or her apartment or some hotel downtown near the market. Always her and Frankie. Always at the centre. She could have asked me about Pete. She could have breathed a loud breath. “So you know now, me and Frankie. I need to ask, the other way round—no, it’s silly.” “No. Tell me. What’s on your mind.” “Was there ever, has there ever, been anything the other way. You and Pete?” Her voice would break, crack over a word. She might lick her lips, dry from the Ottawa cold. “No,” I could say. “There’s never been anything between me and Pete.” The truth. But Marianne would never even think betrayal of her possible. “Don’t be upset,” Marianne had said. “It didn’t mean a thing. Not for him, not for me. But,” she lowered her voice so I had to lean in close to hear, close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to notice unwaxed hairs on her upper lip, close enough to see that her eyes lacked fear of me rejecting her. “I thought you should hear this from me first.”After the funeral, Marianne told me, “There’s no one left to call Frankie Frankie anymore.” “I still do.” “What does Suzie Tight Tits call him?” Marianne asked. “That’s what Pete calls, called, her.” “You call him Frankie, too. And charming.” “We were always on your side. Such a jerk. He doesn’t try to hide it, Frankie.” “You did it again. Lots of us call him Frankie.” “I must have picked up the habit from Pete,” Marianne said. “You don’t remember in university, Frankie used to complain how undignified Frankie sounded?” “That’s right.” Recognition flicked across Marianne’s face. “Still, why would a teenager want an old-man name like Frankie?” “He made us promise to stop. We went to that bar—” “You got away with calling him Frankie, though. You even got Frank Jr. to stick.” “I guess he never told Pete to stop.” Marianne stared at the ceiling to hold the tears in. “Even if he did, Pete would have done his own thing. He would have called Frankie Mordechai if he felt so inclined. Abdul, Mickey, Vladimir, anything at all.” “Maybe.” Marianne froze hard. “You didn’t know Pete that well.” I surveyed the room. No one but me wore black. “Frankie should have come,” I told Marianne. “I told him I’d rather you did. He e-mailed me—” I interrupted her. “He e-mailed you? Frankie? He doesn’t know how to use a computer.” “He has a gmail account.” Marianne said. “He asked about coming. I told him not to come, even alone.” “But we’re all friends. Always.” Marianne smiled but with disbelief. “We’re not friends with Frankie, Jools. I told you. Pete and I are on your side in this. I mean, were, I mean, he was, I am.” The blinking sped up. “Pete was always on your side.” Then she started to cry.
“Come on, sign it,” Frankie said. “No.” I shoved the pages at him. Marianne had left for the bathroom. We sat in a booth close to the door to get puffs of fresh air when someone walked in. The cheap cigarette haze hurt my eyes. “I think you should respect that I want to be called by my name.” “Frankie is a reasonable diminutive.” I had to try more than once to get the word past my tongue and my rapidly numbing teeth. “It’s the name of a dog.” Frankie sipped at his beer. “It’s the name of a janitor.” “You don’t call me by my name.” “But you don’t mind. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires.” “Except you don’t say jewels.” “Maybe I am.” He smiled like he could still feel his teeth. They lined up as straight, ivory rectangles. “So what are the consequences if I don’t comply? Show me your brilliant legal mind here.” I took the pages off the table. “I give you a dollar whenever I say Frankie. Here.” I fished a grey bill from the inside of my pocket. “Frankie.” “That’s Marianne’s contract.” I flipped further down into the stack of pages. “That’s disgusting, Francis,” I pronounced slow and loud after reading the contract through. “And I want my dollar back.” “For a first offence, I would accept a kiss. On the cheek,” he clarified. “I mean, if you want your dollar back.” “Now you’re paying me a dollar to kiss you?” “It was your money to start with. I’m not paying you anything.” He looked down at the table as his cheeks started to redden. The Frankie we’d come in with, commandeering us a table, ordering drinks, flattering the waitresses, vanished. “Maybe you should find Marianne. She’s been gone a while.” Frankie tapped his fingers on a fogged-up window, five dots poking through to the outside world again and again. “I didn’t realize we’d upset you so much.” “I don’t mind so much when you call me Frankie. Forget about the contract, okay? Can we just pretend this never happened?” “You sure?” Frankie didn’t move while we waited for Marianne to come back, which she did, exclaiming, “Let’s dance!” “I don’t think we can, Marianne,” Frankie said. No band, no speakers, no DJ, not even the radio played. “Fine. Let’s sign,” Marianne scrawled her name on the bottom of her contract. “Then let’s find a place I can dance.” I put some money on the table for drinks. “You too?” I asked Frankie. “I’ve got exams, law school things, papers,” he trailed off. “No, come on.” I leaned across the table and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Come on Frankie. Please.” Marianne ignored or didn’t notice or didn’t care about the kiss or the way Frankie and my fingertips then fingers than palms touched each other as we huddled in the bus shelter under the orange snow-shine of the street lamps. She looked away when Frankie gave me his change for the fare and said nothing about the way Frankie and I ended up in a seat together on the bus when normally Marianne and I sat together. She said nothing, lost in her own world, where the two of us didn’t matter to her at all.
IV
“This isn’t Panama City.” The bus sped through the dusk. I’d watched the sun before speaking, making sure the light slipped down rather than moving up to ensure I’d slept only the day away and not also the night. “We should have gotten to Panama City by now.” “We passed it.” “Then why are we still on the bus?” I asked Marianne. My neck stung from the rough fabric of the seats where I’d rested my face. My ankles swelled from the cold and having to keep my feet held in because of the seats stuck close together. “We didn’t go far enough,” Marianne said. “You said we passed Panama City. That’s where the airport is.” “When we crossed the border,” Marianne slapped her hand on her thigh. “I knew it. So close. This is what Pete was talking about. Can’t you feel Pete here? Like this is where he wanted us to go?” “Maybe Pete could have been a little more specific. Maybe he could have drawn you a map. Maybe if he wanted us to visit Panama, we could have flown down here in the first place rather than drive from the States.” Marianne didn’t notice the harshness in my voice. “Why are we still on the bus?” “I had to find the place where the birdsong changed,” she said, almost in a trance. “At a rest stop, I recorded more birds. Listen.” She played me two pieces from her phone. “They’re not alike at all. It’s the same bird but a different song.” She was right. I shuddered as the song switched into a minor key. “We’re close,” she said over the growling bus engine and the voices of the other passengers. “We have to keep going south, as far as we can go, even if Ari says the road ends.” I’d forgotten about Ari. About Dawid. So quickly. Yesterday I would have remembered them forever and already they were gone, replaced by the man outside the guesthouse and the man behind the bar. Ari and Dawid would be strangers now if I saw them. “What will we do at the end of the road?” “Hire someone. Ari has a friend. He told me what to do, who to talk to.” “When? When did he tell you this?” Around a bend, we all leaned to one side. Some of the televisions flickered. The bus straightened and continued. “After you’d gone to bed,” Marianne said, except Marianne had come upstairs with me after Ari and Dawid abandoned us for the bar, before Dawid knocked on my door. She’d promised me that she said we took this bus to go to Panama City, to the airport, to home. “I still need you,” Marianne said. “The driver said we could pay the rest when we got there.” “Got where?” A blast of chilled air blew down from the vent above my head. I pulled my blanket over top of me for protection. “To the end of the line.” We stopped on a road so narrow that branches scraped both sides of the bus. Trees and a phone box and a hut selling cellphones in bright yellow packages. Some people got off and no one got on. The bus started again. “When we get somewhere with street lamps and taxis and fancy hotels,” I told Marianne, “I’m done. I’m going to take my things and go back to Panama City and fly back to Toronto. This is enough. Enough.” The bus lurched forward. “I haven’t been truthful with you.” “Really?” I crossed my arms. “I’m looking for someone.” “Not a place? Not this magical place where the birdsong changes and everything is the garden of Eden and fountain of youth and faeries and unicorns and Pete risen from the dead? That’s not what you’re looking for anymore?” “There’s a girl, a woman.” “Pete’s Panamanian ex-girfriend?” I rolled my eyes “What’s her name? Her address? Recent photograph?” “Pete said finding her would be easy. He seemed to think everyone in Panama knew everyone else.” “Maybe they did thirty years ago.” The bus television showed Friends with subtitles in Spanish. “The One with the,” I squinted. I couldn’t tell on the tiny screen. “If finding her was so important,” I said, “why didn’t Pete do it himself? Why didn’t he give you directions?” “There aren’t addresses here like at home. He said to go and to look.” “For what?” I asked. My hands shook. Marianne’s nails scrubbed her face, smearing her foundation. The powder ran down her cheeks like peach and ivory camouflage. “When Pete was working here—” “Muling drugs.” “Working here,” she insisted. “They came into a village under the control of a rival gang but only nominally. No soldiers or protection. Pete and the others were supposed to teach the village a lesson so,” she paused, “they raped a girl.” She revealed this with no more emotion than ordering fried chicken. Someone in front, maybe he spoke English, turned to look at us. Marianne stared at him until he turned away. “Pete saw this?” “He participated.” Marianne stopped. “Willingly.” “I—” I began but had nothing to follow. “I’m going to find her and tell her that Pete died. I think she’d be,” Marianne paused. “Happy is the wrong word. Satisfied to learn that. Pete says she’s still here.” “How does he know?” “That’s the sort of thing Pete always knows.” After a pause, she told me, “I’ve known for years, Jools. Years and years. He would talk like this was something to be proud of overcoming. A meaningful experience. He learned from it. He became a gentleman. Attentive. Faithful. Loving.” I grabbed all the things which had spread out around me on the bus, me afloat in a sea of my own objects. I held them tight against my chest and moved to a new seat, an empty seat, freshly vacated and still warm from its previous occupant. Marianne stayed where she sat. We didn’t speak for a long time.The bus station flooded with light, taxis, colectivos, vans, bustling and fighting for attention and passengers. One look and they started shouting at me in English. “A nice hotel,” I yelled. I held out my palm, spreading my fingers wide. “Cinco estrellas.” A man with a sign, my name and Marianne’s, pushed through to the front. “I am Ari’s friend, Maxim,” he said with a broad, untamed accent. “Ari and Dawid. They say you need guide?” “I do.” Marianne stepped off the bus and stood beside me. Tears had streaked her foundation more, leaving more red stains down her cheeks. “We’ll stay in town,” Maxim said. “You need to buy supplies. You have money?” “If I can find a bank,” Marianne replied. “There are banks, like Scotiabank from Canada. You are Canadian.” Maxim said like we didn’t know. He laughed. “Where are we staying?” I asked. “I want hot water and American breakfasts and a place to check my e-mail.” “Of course. It will be the last time you have all these things,” Maxim said. Not me, but Marianne. I would be on the first flight out. He took us to a colectivo, whiter than the others and idling alone near the front of the queue. “Dawid says hello to the blonde one,” Maxim said as we took off. “Just to you.” Marianne stared out the window.
I swam in the pool in the rain, alone and off-season, no other tourists. Maybe there should have been. Maybe Marianne’s credit card handed over at check-in booked the place exclusively for us. I wasn’t asking. The hotel moved like clockwork. I never saw maids, pool boys, waiters, but I never saw mess or disorder either. We ate in the room. Little cards appeared in the morning for today’s lunch and dinner, tomorrow’s breakfast. I checked off the options for both Marianne and for me. I banished beans, chicken, plantain, rice. We ate steak, fish, steamed vegetables, white wine, together in silence at the table in the suite. Marianne left after breakfast for the market with Maxim. A pile of supplies formed in the corner of the common area. On the third day, the mountain vanished, stuffed into a metal-framed camping backpack she’d bought that morning. Marianne struggled under the weight. She wheezed and coughed and bruised herself as she lost her balance and fell against the heavy wooden coffee table. I read a book and ignored her. Lonely Planet Central America. Panama was the last chapter. The Darién Gap the last section before the index. The front desk got me tickets, arranged a ride with the resort farther inland. Their bus came down Saturday at noon from the mountains. They’d let me on to go straight to the airport with the package tourists. My flight connected in Miami. A six hour layover, then straight home. My e-mail sat empty. Dawid who gave out his e-mail like a communicable disease had written nothing. “I wouldn’t have forgiven him. After the first time,” Marianne said. “I didn’t forgive him after the last time. First, last, bookends. It’s almost the same.” Frank Jr. and I went to Ottawa, looking, I hoped, ironically, at Carleton. Marianne stood outside the hotel as we pulled up. A coincidence. The restaurant inside was good. She had reservations, she said. I didn’t believe her but smiled and kissed cheeks and said of course I’d been planning to call her once we settled in. Frank Jr. had excuses, some party for prospective students he’d shown no interest in until the alternative involved an evening with two middle-aged women who couldn’t stand the sight of each other. He would take a taxi afterwards. He would not engage in under-aged drinking. He would be responsible. Marianne invited me to join her while she waited for her colleagues. They would be late, then call to cancel. “More wine?” the waiter asked. I nodded while Marianne shook her head. Then we switched. “I’ll come back once you’ve decided.” He melted away. “All those other times, you forgave him.” “All those other times,” I said, “he felt sorry.” After the first indiscretion, he came home with each move rehearsed, crying, promising, swearing to change. Later, fewer tears, fewer promises, but still the slouch and the body left open asking to be held, still offering to allow me to feel magnanimous in the act of forgiving. “But he’s not sorry this time. Why should he be? She’s eighteen years old. You can’t forgive someone who doesn’t feel bad about what he did.” I wanted more wine and searched for the waiter. “I used to buy condoms for him. I snuck them into his briefcase.” “You did not!” Marianne flushed the same shade of red as the table runner. “It was the ’80s, with all those stories about AIDS. I got paranoid.” “What did Frankie say?” “Nothing. I don’t think he noticed.” We sat. “How’s Pete?” “I don’t want to talk about that,” Marianne said as the waiter returned. We both nodded yes when he asked about more wine.
Maxim stood outside the door. “Is she ready? Marianne?” he asked. “Coming,” she shouted from farther inside. “A few more minutes. Ten maybe.” “So we can talk,” he said to me. “Dawid says you are,” he paused, running through which word to translate. How would Dawid have described me? Compliant? “Reasonable,” Maxim said. “We will talk.” I ushered him in from the hall. “Your friend wants to do something dangerous and with little chance of success.” “Then maybe you shouldn’t have a company that takes unprepared tourists across the Darién Gap.” “That is not the dangerous part. We have good guides and information. The Darién is quiet. All the business has moved north on boats to Mexico.” I stopped to ask him what business, then realized what Maxim meant. “What is dangerous is her quest for this girl. This place is a place for crossing, not for looking about for someone. Your friend is uncertain. She is too jumpy, too skinny. You maybe.” Maxim stared me up and down. “I see muscle. But even you, I would not recommend searching for this girl.” “Then don’t let her go.” “She paid, she goes. I have already bought a man to guide.” “Then I don’t see the problem here.” “Almost done,” Marianne called. “If she backs out, I will refund the money. Come in the car with us to the edge. Convince her not to go. Your friend does not want to do this but she thinks she does. She needs an excuse.” “We drove days to get here. She won’t leave.” Maxim nodded. “She is proud. Come in the car. See what you can do.” Marianne walked in, the camping backpack definitively hoisted onto her shoulders. She hadn’t adjusted the straps right and they dug in deep to her skin. She grunted a little with each step and had left her makeup off. “Let’s go,” she said. “Excellent.” Maxim clapped his hands together. “Your friend will drive out with us. Some companionship for me on the return trip.” “Just like Dawid,” Marianne whispered with a school girl grin. I walked out ahead of her without looking back.
The colectivo was gone. We rode in the rear of a land rover with benches, no seatbelts, no windows. Brown, musty tarp hung down around us. “It won’t be long,” Maxim told us. “The driver is good.” We didn’t reply.
We arrived at noon with the sun. Men in fatigues sat on a guard tower in a clearing that pretended to keep the jungle at bay. Rifles pointed onto us as we fell out of the truck. They held for a breath, then moved away. “Your companions,” Maxim said. Marianne hadn’t the money to pay for a private tour. Two other adventurers, two other Canadians, subsidized her trip. At first, in the sudden light, I saw Frank Jr., the same height and gait and hair flopping down into his eyes. What Frank Jr. must think seeing me here, like this. But I was fooling myself. Three blinks and he became older, stronger, heavier around the face. JP from Trois-Rivières. He locked arms with his wife Micheline. We stood there while Maxim talked to the guide, a man with a face as brown as leather, but smooth, pulled taut across the bone. They stood under the guard tower, occasionally calling something up to the soldiers, waiting for a reply to trickle down. Marianne began to cry. “I don’t think I can do it.” The tears multiplied and fell against the ground. JP and Micheline moved discretely towards the tower and away from us. “You don’t have to,” I told her. “I want to see her.” She used the back of her hands to dry her face but they were soon wet too, moving the tears over her cheeks. “I want her to know.” “It won’t erase what Pete did. You traipsing all the way down here won’t make a difference. She won’t be impressed by your hard work. She won’t forgive you. She’ll look right through you like you don’t exist. You’re nothing to her.” “Pete would know what to do.” Now Marianne used the end of her t-shirt to wipe her tears. She pulled so high to find dry fabric that I saw the underwire of her bra. “Pete didn’t deserve to die.” This made her cry harder. “The girl might disagree.” I’d left my hat in the land rover and the skin on my neck began burning. Cooler air blew over from the shady jungle. Maxim and the guide still conferred with the soldiers. “Good. I want her to disagree,” Marianne said. “I want her to be angry. I want her to hate Pete. I want to meet someone whose whole body relaxes with the comeuppance Pete got, writhing in pain while the morphine does nothing. I want to find her and tell her about Pete and watch how someone is happy that Pete died because if someone is happy about Pete dying then all this will make some sort of sense.” Insects and animals and the leaves of the trees stopped to listen to her. The birds stopped singing. Rifles from the tower pointed toward us again. She took deep and steadying breaths to calm herself. “We aren’t going to see each other again, are we?” she asked. “No,” I replied, but we did, and the next time we did, I walked stronger and taller, and Marianne, who before had always seemed larger than me, cowered at my approach. The guide stood between us. “Vámonos,” he said. Maxim said “Ready?” JP and Micheline started to walk forward, but Marianne stayed in one place. “Let us go, señora,” said the guide. “We have to move now.” “I can’t.” The guide spoke rapidly to Maxim. “I can’t,” Marianne repeated. The weight of her backpack pulled her down. She fell, cross-legged, to a sitting position on the ground. “I can’t do it.” “Good,” said Maxim. “You return to the car with your friend. I have packed Fanta, biscuits.” “I’ll go,” I said. They’d forgotten about me. I took the baseball cap from Marianne’s head and hoisted her pack over my shoulder. It was in the knees, lifting it. “You said it’s all paid for. I’ll go.” “Jools, you don’t have to do this,” Marianne said. “It may be best,” started Maxim. “No,” I said. “I’ll go. She doesn’t want to find out what’s in there.” I pointed to the trees. “I do.” Marianne didn’t move. She sat in the sun, burning as I’d been before I took her hat. “I don’t think you understand,” Maxim said to the back of my head as we walked into the jungle. I was going to be so much more than you ever thought.
