Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel

Author:Benjamin Kunkel [Kunkel, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812973754
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2006-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

We hoisted and donned our backpacks and set out toward the station. Glare rose off the dusty streets like dirt from a beaten rug, and there among the mountain-humbled buildings I seemed to feel purposefulness and good cheer bubbling up in me. Brigid however was still seeming a little sullen, possibly because she was still disappointed that I wasn’t Natasha, or possibly even because she thought I was disappointed that she wasn’t.

I was on the verge of trying to clear the issue up when a small powerfully-built teak-colored man wearing glasses, tiny running shorts, and one tall rubber boot, ran out of one of the dim shops along the main drag yelling “Brígida, Brígida!” like it was Eureka! Eureka!

Alarm changed to surprise on her face, and then delight, with maybe a taint of pity too, as Brigid shook off her pack and braced herself for the impact of this scrambling bowlegged man. They joined in a sort of two person huddle, demonstrating the strange custom of presumably some culture or other as they clasped shoulders and leaned their foreheads together. They talked for a minute excitedly in Spanish, then Brigid shoved the guy in my direction. He wore his black hair in a bowl cut that made you think of boys sent off to school, and had something shy and undefended in his broad-nosed face. Still he walked up to me with his hand struck out and introduced himself—that much I could tell—as Edwin.

“Estoy Dwight Wilmerding,” I ventured. “Me han robado.”

Perhaps the phrase book had betrayed me? Because Edwin looked confused. But Brigid was looking more perplexed by Edwin than by me. “His name is not Edwin.”

“Sí,” the man said to me in apparent agreement. “Me llamo Edwin.”

I nodded my head at both Brigid/Brígida and Edwin/not-Edwin and left them to work it out. Brigid emerged from a short parley with the following somewhat frowning report: “All right, now he is Edwin.” Apparently he’d been Dica back when she’d begun living with and studying his tiny forest-dwelling clan on and off in the Oriente.

“Huh? Which clan? In the where?”

“Oriente means east, the jungle, the Amazon.” And apparentlyit was Edwin’s clan that she’d spent the last four months with—whereas Edwin hadn’t seen them at all in the year and a half since they’d moved further downriver and he’d left to make his living as a jungle guide. “And I have not seen Dica—or rather, I suppose, Edwin—”

“And why the switch?”

“He says he wanted a cannibal name.”

I nodded at Edwin as if to confirm the reasonableness of this desire.

“Cannibal is what they call everyone who is not a Haponi.”

“They’re all vegetarians? The . . . Haponi people? Of the Oriente?”

She laughed. “No, they eat quite a lot of monkeys, capybaras, peccaries, tapirs, all these things.”

At least I knew what monkeys were. “They eat monkeys and call us cannibals? Monkeys basically are humans. Look how hairy I am.”

“I have noticed,” Brigid said with heartbreaking neutrality.

“We’re not cannibals. Exactly. All we want is to look nice and have cheap sources of energy.

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