Paco tugged at my hand. “I’m a very good boy. I work hard. I can show you things.”

“Thank you, Paco. That’s very sweet.”

Not far from us, a little girl parted another little girl’s hair, picked out something black and squirming, and bit it in half with her gleaming front teeth. I bent down to Paco and uncurled his fingers from mine, turned away to grab my backpack from the plane. Holding it over my head, I jumped down into the river. The current was stronger than it looked from the sandbar, much colder near the silty bottom that sucked at my sneakers as I pushed my way toward the bank.

Back muscles corded and straining, Omar dragged the rope knotted with the rubberized sacks, seizing my hand with his free one as we waded to the shore. Afternoon sun blazed murderously onto my back as we stood dripping on the crescent of dark sand.

Unlike my reception with the children, the adults continued staring without expression. It never occurred to me then that they might have simply felt shy. Defiantly, perhaps stupidly, I mirrored their sullenness. Even the babies had stopped crying and turned a solemn eye toward us, their mothers’ glistening nipples abandoned for the moment. Three thirty-foot canoes carved out of immense logs knocked gently against one another at a small floating dock, just slabs of wood lashed over empty barrels. Two enormous fish—six, seven feet long—lay side by side on the shore, the lips of their gutted bellies red and swollen, mouths gaping open, eyes beady black coins. In the air: the stench of gas, fish, sweat, a heavy green rot.

From this relative silence, a huge pig, bleeding heavily from behind its massive head, came screaming from behind the longhouse on the hill. Its belly dragged on the dirt, short legs and hooves scraping for purchase against the grade of the slope, a braided liana leash dragging along behind. A few pink piglets tumbled squealing behind her, snouts twitching, little asses waggling. A small man wearing a pair of sagging shorts ran out after the sow, cursing, snatching at the leash as she dragged him down the hill. A few of the men ran to help wrangle the wounded animal back up the bank and out of sight.

Still, no one moved. Omar practically crushed my hand in his; I felt the bones of my fingers bending together.

A man and a woman solemnly descended the stairs of the longhouse and made their way down the bank; a little girl clutching her mother’s skirt. Grief informed their gaits with a broken, hurt quality; they looked old beyond their years. The man looked to be in his midtwenties, the woman a teenager, maybe younger than me. The crowd let them through with a quiet respect; some even bowed their heads, stroking the shoulders and bodies of their own children, pulling them close.

The couple and the little girl came and stood before us, the man a taller version of Omar, but thinner and with a heavy brow, cheeks cratered with acne scars, the woman quite pregnant, her smooth black hair pulled back from her wide, open face. Her eyes were pinched with sadness, but somehow I could picture a smile lighting up her features; she carried herself like the town beauty she was. She nodded at me. Omar held his hand out to his brother, but Franz pulled him into a tight embrace, his face over Omar’s shoulder, stricken. They held each other a long time, as if each second contained a year of missed history, before parting, both of their heads tilted at the dark mud.