The Thong Also Rises (20 page)

And then quite suddenly, my driver is gone and I'm alone in the cool dawn.The air is fragrant with the smell of damp stone. The guidebook warnings of muggings, thieves and murder are clamoring for attention in my feverish brain. I am standing in front of a crumbling wall facing the street that looks like every other crumbling wall facing the street. I buzz at various doors, hoping that the quivering jelly feeling in my belly is strictly from fear instead of the bacterial
soup I drank last week. It already feels like forever ago but that's probably because it was on a different planet.

A battered wood door creaks open revealing a grinning woman.The little Spanish I know flies out of my head. All I remember is the not particularly useful phrase, “
Dos margaritas, por favor.
“Apparently, I've been on one too many all-inclusive holidays.

Vilma and Roberto are in their twenties with three children under the age of five. The entire family sleeps in one ten-by-ten room. This frees the two extra rooms for student rentals.The living room has nothing in it but a television and various pictures of a suffering Jesus and a much happier looking Mickey Mouse. The kitchen consists of a sink, one cupboard, stove, fridge, and blender. The table has five chairs. I am to sit with Anna, the other student. Every meal, while Vilma serves us, the family waits in their room either with Roberto or with their older cousin Rosa. We eat as fast as we can as we hear the children being shushed as they wait for their turn.

Vilma stands for hours at the large sink under the corrugated tin roof of her courtyard. She scrubs and rinses and wrings out diapers, shirts, little dresses and pants. In the evening she stands in the kitchen with a makeshift ironing board made of towels piled on the table. Each item emerges with crisp edges.

A couple times a week, I furtively head to the Johns Hopkins unit with my deposit. It's only a little cup in a baggie, although the baggie is festooned with that nuclear symbol, but my pack feels transparent. I can't wait to dump it in their little bar fridge with its magnificent poop magnet collection. I may not be able to conjugate all my
verbos
but I'm learning a new lingo. I tick off the box that says my
stool was fully formed. An
episode
is described as “when the stool takes on the form of the cup.” Sort of Dairy Queen style.

I'm delivering my goods and Johns Hopkins duly delivers theirs. Every day my free lessons help my struggling Spanish. I'm not quite ready for any discussions on existentialism, but I'm able to ask and mostly comprehend directions. So, on the weekends I board the chicken buses and head off to explore this world of light and shadow.

In the hotels I discover the same facilities that exist in my Monday to Friday home.That is, the
agua caliente
dial on the showerhead is more to inspire hope than actual hot water. Every day, proving the adage of hope springing eternal, I force the dial over to the hottest setting, trying not to touch the exposed wires. I then attempt to wash my hair without actually letting the cold trickle touch my head. I slime the wet around on my clammy skin, using the vile little pack towel that I promise to toss before I head home. I pull on my boring beige travel garb onto my damp skin. Khaki never looked so bland until I landed in a country where the women are dressed in direct competition with the parrots.

The last week of school my teacher Maria, who like me is female and in her forties, asks me to write about my typical day in Canada. I write that I like to have a hot bath every night. She stops me after that sentence.

“¿
Agua caliente
? Every night? You can lie down in water up to here?” She brushes back her blue-black glossy hair and holds her hand to her neck, her
café au lait
hand against the rainbow embroidery of her blouse.

“Do you like baths?” I ask, running my broken fingernails through my grubby hair. I am wishing desperately for
Jabon de San Simon.
The soap that promised to wash away my sins.
Unfortunately, it is at the bottom of my pack, useless against my current ignorance.

“I don't know. I've never had one…but it sounds very nice.”

Colleen Friesen lives on the seaside in Sechelt, B.C. with her husband, their hyperactive twelve-year-old nephew, and a continuously shedding and occasionally incontinent Dalmatian named Mary-Margaret. Her work has appeared in
A Woman's Asia, Whose Panties Are These? as well as a variety of magazines, newspapers, and websites.

We entered a clearing that was all
ahhhh
. To our right, long narrow falls hurried over dark volcanic rock then thundered into a pool the shape of a half-moon.To our left, misty wisps floated over the hot springs that filled rocky crevices. Jungle-smothered cliffs gave way to sky blue.

Paradise's only fault? Other tourists. No problem, we'd wait them out. As the last French syllables were fading down the trail, we stripped and plunged into the pool. Billions of tingles shot through us as we dog-paddled towards the falls for a cold pummeling. Icy, we scrambled for the nearest steamy spring. Hot, cold, hot, cold: again and again, until all muscles were the consistency of an éclair's creamy insides.Then we collapsed neck deep each in our own bubbling crevice. Shadows lengthened. We reminded ourselves how fast dark follows sunset. We would agree it was time to go then sink back into our private pools and reveries. Strange noises entered my consciousness, so I rolled my head towards the trail, and…

Oh. My. Word. Dozens of soldiers were charging towards us. Black backs glistening as they ripped off their shirts. Black butts were next as shouting and calling to each other, they unzipped their pants.The man nearest me was buck naked—and laughing.

Guadeloupe's army advanced and not even the trusty “
au secours
” entered my head. My body leapt from torpor to torpedo in
under ten seconds, streaking toward Karen and clothes. Adrenaline pumping, shirttails flying, and sneakers squishing we hurtled halfway down the trail. Then, bent over, hands on knees we gulped first for breath, giggles mounting to guffaws as it penetrated—we be big buffoons.

—Kate Crawford, “Uncovered in Guadeloupe”

They were hanging there the whole time.

“I
CAN
'
T BELIEVE YOU LEFT THEM THERE
,” J
IM MUTTERED
as I squeezed the handle and pulled hard for a third time.

“What do you mean, you can't believe it? You can see them as well as I can. You're not going blind, are you?” The keys were clearly visible in the ignition. People were beginning to stare.

He walked around to my side of the car. “I knew this would happen if I let you drive.”

“It has nothing to do with my driving.” I circled to the passenger side to try that handle again. “My driving was fine. It's not as though you've never locked keys in the car.” I wasn't entirely certain he ever had, but was willing to gamble on it to make my point. I wanted desperately to defend myself, because I suspected my mistake would have serious consequences.

We had rented our Holden wagon in Darwin, 300 miles away. At first, the man at the A1 Car Rental company tried to give us an old beater: no radio, one broken window, lots
of dents, the whole thing covered in powdery red dust. “Yir goin' tuh Katherine? This's yir car, mate!”

The salesman looked at us incredulously when we complained. After some verbal wrangling, my husband, who is large and can be quite persuasive, managed to get us a late model station wagon with intact windows and a weak-but-functioning air conditioner.

Knowing we were in for long expanses of empty highway, we stopped at the edge of town to top off the fuel tank. “What's the speed limit, anyway?” Jim asked the attendant.

“What kin ya do, mate?”

“I said, ‘What's the speed limit on the highway to Katherine?'” Jim repeated himself cheerfully. He meets strangers easily.

“What kin ya do?”

We hadn't anticipated any troubles communicating with the locals on our trip Down Under, but that had been naïve. Their accents were difficult to understand, the rhyming slang was impossible to decipher, and the wry Aussie sense of humor kept me off balance. I had become resigned to the fact that I was clueless much of the time, but Jim liked to maintain a sense of control.

About an hour out of Darwin we stopped to take each other's picture standing next to what the Aussies call “anthills.” These aren't mere bumps of soft dirt, like American anthills. They are towering structures, sometimes as much as twenty feet high, built by termites out of their own saliva and feces.The resulting substance is so hard that the anthills were ground up and used instead of concrete to make airplane runways during World War II. Or so the Aussies said, and I believed them.

The instant we climbed out of the car, flies covered us both. Flies! Making themselves at home on my bare arms,
crawling up my legs, doing their best to creep into my eyes and mouth. I tried desperately to shoo them away, but the flies were not deterred; they crawled over us with impunity. Billions of them live there—maybe trillions. I read that there are more than 650 separate species in Australia.The air was hot—easily 105 degrees Fahrenheit—and the land stretched out flat and dusty, with sparse vegetation and even fewer animals. I couldn't imagine how such a lifeless expanse could possibly support those buzzing hordes. What did they eat, anyway, when there were no tourists around?

We snapped our anthill photos fast and hopped back into the car. Hundreds of flies came with us. After some frantic experimentation, involving swatting, speeding, swerving, and swearing, we discovered that the best way to get rid of flies was to open all the windows and drive slowly. Of course this rendered the air conditioner useless, and we were soon dripping with perspiration, which caused the red Outback dust to cake onto our bodies in a most unattractive way. When I had exterminated all the flies but three, I climbed into the back seat and smashed the last survivors with our A1 rental papers. They left dry, brown smears across the part where we had signed up for extra insurance. Then we rolled up the windows and drove in silence, waiting for the car to cool off. It was too hot to talk.

As it turned out, there was, indeed, no official speed limit on the road to Katherine. Hundreds of miles of open road, dead straight, no Highway Patrol. The speed limit was whatever you could coax your car to do. I say “coax” because only a fool would take a high performance car on this road. When we stopped to get the camera, I discovered that the inside of the trunk was covered with fine red dust. The dust was also sucked into our luggage, and, inside that, into the plastic bag I use to protect the camera from dust. It gets into the engine,
too, and the brakes. That was why the rental company had at first provided us with a beater for the trip. I began to feel guilty that we were ruining this A1 car for anything but Outback travel.

There were “speed limit” signs on the road: white rectangles with a big black zero in the center, and a slanted red bar crossing the zero. (“What kin ya do?”) Jim took full advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and opened it up on the open road. When the speedometer hit 130 kilometers, I looked away. Mostly the trip was O.K., and even seemed fairly safe, because there were no other vehicles on the road. A couple of times we hit potholes and bounced hard. Once there was a really loud noise, and when I looked in the mirror I thought I saw something fall off the bottom of the car. But it was getting late, and we kept driving until we got to Katherine.