Jungle Temptress

The first one was a fisherman named Cesar. He came up the river with his brother's boat and a cooler full of tilapia, and he stopped at my dock because the engine was coughing and he needed fresh water. That's what he told me. I gave him the water. I didn't give him anything else, not that first day, but he came back the next week with a bag of mangoes and a story about how his wife had stopped cooking for him.

They always have a story.

I live four hours up the Rio Sapo, past the last village, past the place where the road gives up and becomes mud and then becomes nothing. The jungle here is thick enough that you can hear your own heartbeat if you stand still long enough. The howler monkeys start before dawn and the cicadas take over by noon and by night the whole place is so loud with living things that silence feels like a rumor. I've been here eleven years. I know the names of every tree within a kilometer. I know which frogs are poisonous and which ones just look like it. I know that men who come up this river are usually running from something, and the ones who stop at my dock are running from something specific.

Cesar's wife was named Marisol. He told me this on his third visit, sitting on the edge of my porch with his feet dangling over the water, drinking the coffee I made because he said it was better than anything in Puerto Pinas. He said Marisol had a temper like a machete. He said she once threw a pot of beans at his head because he came home late from a poker game. He laughed when he said it. I didn't.

"You should go home," I told him.

"I am home," he said, and looked at me with that look they all get, the one that says they've just discovered something they think is new.

I went inside and closed the door.

That's the thing people don't understand about a woman who lives alone in the jungle. They think you're waiting for something. They think you're a question and they're the answer. Cesar brought me fish and mangoes and eventually a gold bracelet he said he found on the riverbank, and I took the fish because I eat fish, and I took the mangoes because they were going to rot in his boat anyway, but I gave the bracelet back.

"I don't wear jewelry," I said.

"You don't wear anything," he said, looking at my dress, which was old and thin and had a tear at the shoulder.

"I wear what I want," I said. "That's different."

He didn't understand. They never do. Their wives wear gold and cook beans and throw pots, and here I am, barefoot in a cotton dress, and they think I'm free in a way their wives aren't. They think I'm simple. They think I'm a vacation from their lives.

The truth is I'm not simple at all.

On Cesar's fifth visit, he brought a gun. Not to threaten me. He brought it to show me, like a gift. A little revolver with a pearl handle that he said belonged to his father. He wanted me to hold it. He wanted to see my fingers wrap around the grip. I don't know why. Men have strange ideas about what will impress a woman.

"Put it away," I said.

"I'm going to leave Marisol," he said. "I'm going to stay here with you."

"No you're not."

"I am. I already told her."

I looked at him then. Really looked. He had a sunburned nose and a bald spot he tried to hide with a comb-over and eyes that were already planning what to tell his brother when this all fell apart. He was forty-three years old and he'd never made a decision in his life that wasn't about escaping something.

"You told her what exactly?" I asked.

"I told her I found someone else. I told her I'm not coming back."

"And your children?"

He waved his hand. A small wave. A wave that said, *those*, like they were a bill he'd already paid.

I walked down to the river and stood in the shallows and let the current pull at my ankles. The water here is brown and fast and cold, even in the dry season. Cesar followed me. He put his hand on my shoulder. His palm was sweaty and hot.

"Don't touch me," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't want me. You want to not be married. That's different."

He got angry then. They always do, eventually. He called me a witch. He said I'd put a spell on him, that I'd made him leave his family, that I'd ruined his life. He threw the revolver into the river and watched it sink and then he got in his boat and left.

I haven't seen him since.

That was eight months ago. Marisol came up the river three weeks later with her brother and a shotgun, but I wasn't home. I was in the forest, collecting mushrooms. When I came back, my door was open and my bed was slashed and someone had written *puta* on the wall in charcoal. I scrubbed it off with sand and vinegar. The slashes in the mattress I sewed shut with fishing line. I don't sleep on that mattress anymore. I sleep on a hammock now, because it's easier to hear someone coming.

The thing is, I understood Marisol. That's what nobody gets. I understood her completely. If I had a husband who went up the river and didn't come back, I'd bring a shotgun too. I'd want to see the woman who took him. I'd want to know what she had that I didn't.

But I didn't take him. I never take them. They come to me and they leave me and in between they tell themselves a story about who I am, and the story is never true.

The rain is coming. I can smell it, that wet-earth smell that rolls in from the east, and I need to close the shutters before it hits. There's a man coming up the river tomorrow. I know because his wife sent word down the line, the way they do, through the women in the villages, a message passed from mouth to mouth like a secret. She said to watch for him. She said his name is Daniel and he's a teacher and he has a blue shirt and a scar on his chin and he's been talking about the witch in the jungle.

I don't know what I'm going to do when he gets here. That's the truth. I never know until they're standing on my dock with their stories and their gifts and their sad, hungry eyes. But I'll tell you one thing.

I'm not going to close my door this time.