I looked around at the other huts. Ours was the only one built with bamboo that was not split, as far as I could tell. The others were thatched palm, tin, or split bamboo; there were even a few rough brick constructions, and a weird one that looked made out of recycled swimming pool tile.

“So, are you going to tell me that the spiders came because I’m afraid of them?”

He fought back a smile and shrugged as he stirred the remaining food in the pot over the fire.

“Fuck this,” I said, sounding like the teenager I was. The children coaxed one of the spiders into a long bamboo tube, then turned it upside down. The spider dropped out, hit the dirt, reared back in defense, and scrambled away, vanishing under a mat of leaf litter.

“This kind of tarantula only eats insects,” Omar said. “They have no interest in us. There’s a kind with yellow on his back you can’t play with like this, it’ll jump up and bite you, it’s very poisonous, but this one”—he gestured at the kids—“these are kind of sweet, right? I had one as a pet when I was a boy.”

I started to cry around then. Resting the hot pan on a rock, he put his arms around me. This time I let him. A couple of women walked by loaded down with woven baskets on their backs, leather straps across their foreheads, their faces stoic with the strain. I felt like a total wuss.

“We’ll have to sleep in the longhouse for a while,” he said. “I’ll build us our own hut. You have to be patient with me.”

I wish I’d read him better then, his shame about having to sleep in the spider-filled hut since we had no other, but I was too wrapped up in myself to see it. What little cash he had he’d spent getting us there and paying off the pilot.

I wiped away my tears, pissed at myself that I’d indulged in them at all, and slipped on my backpack, a move that always comforted me. I was in a place where legions of fist-sized tarantulas falling from the ceiling was nothing to get worked up about. Maybe it was time to remember that there were man-eating jaguars out there, bamboo rats as big as dogs in the cane. Long story short: Maybe, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore, and it might be time to suck it up and learn the jungle ropes.

TEN

I followed Omar as he wove among the huts, the brutal heat of the day like an immense hand pushing me back. A rhythmic whoop sounded near the river, a wild, deranged sound.

“You could have left your bag back by our oven,” Omar said.

I huffed it up higher on my back, clicked the buckle at my waist. “I always have this with me,” I said, in no mood to give an explanation. This backpack was in fact an upgrade; there were years I bounced from group home to group home with my belongings in a garbage bag, but one day, on a fortuitous trip to Goodwill, I’d picked up a ratty but serviceable one for a couple of bucks. I loved that bag, slept with it bundled in my arms. Each time I moved in with a new foster family, I never, ever unpacked what little I owned. It was something nobody could make me do, and besides, I never knew when I was going to have to make a run for it. I learned later that my nickname those early days in Ayachero was Mochila, Spanish for backpack.