Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [40]
First, I felt a couple of painful pinches around my ankles. Then a few more on my hands, and back, and neck. In the span of perhaps five seconds, I was completely swarmed by a fog of tiny, black biting insects the size of pinheads. I was bitten in places I hadn’t imagined bugs knew existed: they got me inside my ears, on the palms of my hands, in crevices where the sun hadn’t shined since Nixon was president. I swatted at myself like I was on fire, rinsed off what soap and bugs I could under cold water and ran up the hill to my tent, passing Mateo en route. “Poo-moo-blah-blah-blah!” he yelled after me, raising one water bucket in salute. In my tent I started to survey the damage but gave up after counting sixty bites. Each welt was like a little bull’s-eye, with a red circle surrounding a white one and a black dot in the middle.
After several minutes of fruitless scratching, I got dressed and walked to the cook tent. Juvenal was sitting outside the flap with the two boys, quizzing them about something in Quechua. In his yellow Polo button-down shirt, V-neck sweater and striped wool pants, he could’ve been someone’s grandpa who’d just spent twenty minutes finding the perfect parking spot for his Buick, except that the town of Yanama had never seen a motorized vehicle.
He saw me scratching the backs of my hands and motioned for me to come over so he could have a look. “Puma wakachi,” he said, pointing to his tear duct. “The bug that makes the puma cry. Put cold water on them.” Then he turned back to the boys to finish his lesson.
Quechua kids are famously adorable, because they have coal-black eyes and perpetually rosy cheeks, and these two were no exception. The boys didn’t have much to do. Their teacher, who taught all the children in the area, had gone off for the week to a festival up the valley somewhere. Fortuitously, a promising source of entertainment had wandered into their yard—me. After about an hour of stalking me from a distance as I laid out my laundry to dry in the waning sunlight and clawed at my ankles, the older boy screwed up the courage to ask a question.
“Where do you come from?”
“I’m from New York.”
I might as well have said I was from the planet Zebulon.
“Have you heard of New York?” I asked.
“No.”
“Have you heard of the United States?”
“No.” His brother shook his head dubiously in support.
“Have you heard of Machu Picchu?”
“Yes, of course.” Big smiles.
“Well, I live north of Machu Picchu.”
This seemed to satisfy them. Then the younger one thought of another question.
“Is it true that Michael Jackson is dead?”
I tried, and failed, to come up with the Spanish words to say, “The King of Pop will live forever in our hearts.” So I just nodded yes and tried to look sad.
At dinnertime I ducked into the cook tent and showed my bug bites to John.
“Ah, I figured they’d get you sooner or later. I know you won’t let it happen again.”
As we sat down for dinner, the boys squatted about twenty feet from the open tent flap, watching us as they would a particularly engrossing cartoon. I wondered what my sons, whose daily schedules were so regimented, would do if I moved them to a place like this. Probably report me to child services. I asked John what it had been like to grow up in Western Australia in the fifties and sixties.
“Australia was a pretty austere place after the war, up until the mid-sixties. Every Sunday night for a treat we had beans on toast. I was one of the last generation that could live in a big town like Perth, on an acre of land, and walk to school through the bush, with the birds and snakes. I could go and pick fruit, build cubby houses.”
“Sounds like studying might not have been your first priority.”
“I didn’t like school. The educational system was