The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [64]
More birds cried softly and flapped their wings in passing, but I don’t know what they were because I had shut my eyes, keeping them closed despite some curiosity. I liked more the dreamy feeling of experiencing the forest through its sounds.
I thought I heard a deep human voice calling from a few feet away. I jumped to my feet in a single move, startled. The Drafter stood too, saying, “Don’t be afraid.”
He waved to the caller, who waited at the forest’s edge with two young indigenous men, and a woman with two children, a boy and a girl. The woman and girl wore pants. This struck me as unusual, because here females wear dresses or long skirts.
“You know that man?” I asked.
“The leader, coyote, guide,” he said.
Figure it out, I thought. Figure out what is happening.
“I could not change all these moments, these good moments, by telling you,” he said. “The road is safe. You’ll be all right.”
From his bag he drew out a piece of paper rolled like a tube, tied with a thick blade of grass, handing it to me as he turned to join the others. Understanding flooded my mind as fast and overwhelming as a tidal wave, and I felt helpless against it. For the next weeks this small group would traipse through Mexico and sneak across borders, aiming for destinations in America. The Drafter would walk through my country’s back door, since he had been turned away from the front.
I watched him walk across twenty feet of marshy shore to join the band. I heard him speak to one of the young men in a language I did not understand. He turned and called, “Kekchi!,” smiling, waving, but missing not a step, melting into the forest with the others.
I gazed for a while at where he had been, but saw only trees, huge and brooding. I felt no sense of betrayal, because there had been no promise. I did feel that something of value was disappearing, but whatever it was had never been mine, so I could not say to myself he stole it away.
Inside the car I took the grass tie from the paper tube and unrolled it. I saw myself at a table in a dark room, the head of a great deer on the wall, the figure of a woman looking more sensuous than I had ever believed myself to be. I tossed the paper in the back seat, too brusquely. I drove so fast the tires raised a cloud of dust. I ignored thin figures waving me down, hoping for a ride.
Like a survivor tossed upon shore, I felt whole, but shaken. I was not the same person who—was it only a week before?—had stepped into a dark restaurant on an island floating in a deep blue lake.
That night I returned the car and went back to the cantina in dusty Sayaxche, even though I was not hungry. I did not want to be alone, even though I talked to no one. Black flies studded a sticky yellow strip hanging above the table.
I ordered meat—why not?—picking it slowly from the bone. It tasted dry. There was no sauce.
Journalist Mary Jo McConahay is the author of the travel memoir, Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. She was a war correspondent in Central America, a reporter in Saudi Arabia, and her work appears in more than thirty journals and periodicals. She will eat anything she is served. Once.
MARTIN DILLON
Jimmy the Natural
Ireland is rich in many things, including the unexpected.
WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-TWENTIES I SPENT SUMMERS fly-fishing rivers and lakes for salmon and sea trout in County Donegal in the north east of Ireland. The area had wonderful, wild scenery and a spectacular Atlantic coastline. One summer, I rented a cottage high on a hillside, two miles from Killybegs, a small, busy fishing port. The cottage overlooked barren hillsides, dotted with stone ditches and sheep and the views towards the ocean were heart stopping. At the end of each day, I walked into the village of Killybegs for a pint or two of Guinness and a chat with the locals, many of them men who had spent their lives working on trawlers in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. They