T. Boyle: The Harder They Come

He was staring gloomily out the window, getting more irritated by the minute, when they came to a shallow stream that seemed to be incorporated into the road along with the blistered rocks and scum-filled potholes, except that it was flowing, fanning out in front of them in a broad rippling pan. The tires eased into the water with a soft shush, spray leapt up and fell back again, and all at once he was thinking of the fish that must have lived there in the deep pools, tropical fish, the characins and Jack Dempseys and brick-red platys he’d introduced to his aquarium as a boy. Suddenly he was lost in reverie, picturing the glowing wall of tanks in the pet shop he’d haunted after school each day, remembering the pleasure of selecting the fish and paying for them with his own money, of setting up his first aquarium, arranging the rocks, digging in the gravel to plant the — what was it? — elodea. Yes, elodea . And the Amazon sword plant that looked like a miniature avocado tree. And what else? The little dwarf catfish, the albino ones, and what were they called?

He hadn’t thought about that in years. Or his mother — the way she recoiled in mock horror from the tubifex worms he kept in a Dixie cup in the refrigerator to preserve them. Fish food. The thread-like worms, the smell of them, the smell of the aquarium itself when you lifted the top and the world you’d created breathed back in your face. He began to feel his mood lift. Carolee was right. This was an adventure, something to break the routine, get him outside his comfort zone. The brochure had promised all four types of monkey, as well as agoutis, sloths, peccaries, maybe even an ocelot or jaguar, and here he was getting worked up over taking a leak. He almost felt ashamed of himself, but then he lifted his eyes to where the driver sat block-like at the wheel and felt all the outrage rush back into him. The guy was a clod. An idiot. No more sensible than a stone. He was about to get up again, about to lean over the man and hiss You did say five minutes, right? when the bus emerged on a muddy clearing scored with tire ruts and the driver pulled over to one side and applied the brakes. Everybody looked up.

“Now we have arrived,” the driver said in his textbook English, swiveling in his seat to project his voice down the aisle. “Now you must debark.” The buds were back in his ears. The dark glasses caught the light. Outside was the jungle. “Two hours,” he said, and the door wheezed open.

They were all rising now, fumbling with cameras, purses, daypacks. One of the women — Sheila, sixtyish, traveling alone with what must have been a gallon of perfume and the pink sneakers and turquoise capris she’d worn every day on the cruise, breakfast, lunch, high tea, cocktails and dinner — raised her voice to ask, “Do you meet us back here or what?”

“I am here,” the driver said, bringing two fingers to the wisps of hair at his chin. He stretched, cracked his knuckles. “Two hours,” he repeated.

Sten peered out the window. There was, of course, no restroom, no Porta-Potty, nothing, just half a dozen mud-spattered vehicles nosed in around the trailhead, where a sign read Nature Preserve, in Spanish and English. Across the lot, in the shade of the trees, there was a palapa and in the palapa a single titanic woman in a red head scarf. She would have something to drink — a soda, that was all he needed — and behind the palapa, in the undergrowth, he would find a tree trunk to decorate and all would be well.

They disembarked in a storm of chatter, Phil leading the way — or no, Bill, his name was definitely Bill, because Sten recalled distinctly that there had been two Bills at their table for lunch, and this was the bald-headed one. Not that it mattered. Once the ship docked in Miami he’d never see the guy again — and what he had seen of him so far didn’t go much deeper than How about those Giants? and Pass the salt .

There was a momentary holdup, because Sheila, who was next in line, couldn’t resist leaning in to ask the driver where their best chance to see scarlet macaws was and they all had to wait as the driver removed the buds from his ears and asked her to repeat herself. They watched the man frown over the question, his eyebrows rising like twin smudges above the rim of the sunglasses. “ No sé, ” he said finally, waving at the lot, the jungle, the trail. “I have never—” and he broke off, searching for the word.

Sheila looked at him in astonishment. “You mean you just drop people off and you’ve never even been up there? In your own country? Aren’t you curious?”

The driver shrugged. He was doing a job, that was all. Why muddy his shoes? Why feed the mosquitoes? He’d leave that to the gringos with their cameras and purses and black cloth bags, their fanny packs and preposterous turquoise pants and the dummy wallets with the expired credit cards to throw off the pickpockets while everybody knew their real wallets were tucked down the front of their pants.

“Come on,” Sten heard himself say. “You’re holding up the line.”

Outside, in the lot, the sun hammered down on him all over again. He waited a moment, gathering himself while Carolee tried simultaneously to tighten the cord of her floppy straw hat and loop the strap of the black bag over her head, and then he was striding across the lot toward the palapa and the woman there. “I’m getting a soda,” he called over his shoulder. “You want anything?”

She didn’t. She had her water. And no matter the taste, it had come from the ship.

When the woman in the palapa saw him coming, she pushed herself laboriously up from the stool she was sitting on and rested her arms on the makeshift counter. She must have weighed two-fifty, maybe more. Her skin shone black with sweat. Like the waiter at the café, she was West Indian, one of the Jamaicans who’d settled in Limón — there was a whole section called Jamaica Town, or so the guidebook had it. Very colorful. Plenty of rum. Plenty of reggae. Trinkets galore. “Good afternoon,” she said, treating him to a broad full-lipped smile. “And how may I be helping you?”

There was a plastic cooler set on the ground behind the counter in a spill of green coconuts. Above it, nailed to the crossbeam, was a board displaying various packages of nuts, potato chips and candy. A paperback book— El Amor Furioso —lay facedown on the counter.

“You got any sodas back there?” Sten asked, and he’d almost asked for a cerveza, but thought better of it — he was already dehydrated. And he had to piss. Badly.

“Cola, Cola Lite, agua mineral, pipas, carambola, naranja, limón, ” she recited, holding her smile.

“Cola Lite,” he said, reaching for his wallet, and then he had the can, lukewarm, in his hand, and he was wading through the trash-studded undergrowth in back of the stall, his fly already open.

At first his water wouldn’t come, another trick of old age — your bladder feels like a hot-air balloon and then you stand over the toilet for ten minutes before the first burning dribble releases itself — but he employed the countermeasure of clearing his mind, of thinking of anything but the matter at hand, of the boat and his berth and the way Carolee had looked in the new negligee she’d bought expressly for the trip and what he’d been able to do about it, and then, finally, the relief came. He took his time, christening a tree that was alive with ants, tropical ants, ants of a kind he’d never seen before and would likely never see again. If he was lucky.

A long suspended moment drifted by, the ants piling up and colliding over the cascade of this rank new element in their midst, insects throbbing, birds calling, everything alive all around him. The sun barely penetrated here, and where it did the leaves gave off a dull underwater sheen, the air so dense he half expected to see sharks cruising through the trees. There was a smell of rot, of fragile earth. Something hooted and then another something took it up and hooted back. He might have stood there forever if it weren’t for the mosquitoes — here they came, rising up out of nowhere to remind him of where he was. He shook and zipped up, and only then did he rediscover the can of soda in his left hand, an amazing thing really, an artifact, an object of manufactured beauty transported all the way out here to quench his thirst and pump aspartame into his bloodstream.