Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Published: 2014-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Boto’s Child

Rosalie Loewen

I knew the truth from the beginning although I did not always believe it. It is amazing, the mind’s ability to bend the truth to serve the heart.

It was our honeymoon. Matt was a graduate student, three years into a ten-year Ph.D. Unable to find work in my field, I had abandoned my own undergraduate biology degree and was idling in an interminable office manager position. Our marriage came after a long relationship: an acquiescence on his part, a gambit on mine. I was seeking transformation. Of course, we both knew that his studies came first.

Manaus wasn’t much of a honeymoon, despite the exotic locale. Matt had a grant to study the piraiba fish of the Amazon: giant catfish, ancient monsters, longer than a man and wider than you could put your arms around. There weren’t many of the piraiba left then, and for all I know they are gone now. Ashes to ashes, mud to mud, same as the rest of us.

Matt’s contact at the Manaus university arranged our hotel and found us a three-day riverboat excursion for the locals’ price on the Rio Negro, the Black River.

The Black River. A spidery line on the map belies its voluptuous curves and doglegs forming a loose plait that refuses to answer to the cartographer. Born thin and icy in the Andes, it streams down from Colombia along the lip of Venezuela, gathering water and richness as it wallows into the colossal bowl of the Amazon basin. There it reaches full strength, covering even the tallest kapok trees at a whim, leaving them suspended underwater, their leaves still moving gently in remembrance of breezes. Finally, turbulent and treacherous with rips, its broad back furrowed and peaked white, it slams into the Amazon River. Even there, it holds its own, a solid black line cutting out and into the milky chocolate of the Amazon for miles before finally roiling under and into that great river and allowing itself to be carried to the sea.

Our excursion boat was peeling white with green trim, damp-soft with rot in the corners, a clumsy oval of two wedding cake tiers covered by a peaked wooden awning. Under the awning, there was room either for two hammocks or a table and two chairs. This top deck was for us, the tourists, while the lower deck had hammocks for the crew, a glass-windowed steering house, a corner of a kitchen, and trapdoor access to the big diesel motor, the heart that beat beneath the deck.

We boarded the boat at 10:00 a.m., in deference to our photocopied itineraries, and then sat under the awning in the smog-choked harbor watching other tourist boats, nearly identical to our own, take on their passengers. Each boat had a similar version of our crew: the bellied, beetle-browed captain and the thick-armed female cook, missing a random assortment of teeth between them; and the guide who, in a sea of ubiquitous flip-flops, sported immaculate sneakers as his badge of prestige.

On that

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