Omar and I settled near the tail.

A small, rotund woman dressed in a tube top and a sparkly short skirt filled glasses, pouring steadily to satisfy the milling crowd.

“You’re Omar’s wife?” she said with flat affect as she set out plates of tiny speckled-brown eggs—each could have fit in a teaspoon—hard-boiled quail eggs.

I nodded.

“I’m Carmelita. I’m from San Solidad,” she said, as if San Solidad were the center of the universe and she was just slumming here in Ayachero. She touched her hair, which had been swept into an updo, something I hadn’t seen on any of the other women, not to mention the sparkly skirt, tube top, or white plastic platform sandals.

Under the bar, three caged quails squawked in a bamboo cage, lifting their dinosaur feet and clawing at the sides, their heads crowned with a Mohawk of rainbow spikes. On the bar, a little green gecko eyed the eggs, motionless in the way only lizards can be. Carmelita brushed it away; it went flying off into the humming trees.

Omar took a few eggs, peeled them and handed some to me after he rolled them in a clay saucer of dirty-looking large-grained salt. They were delicious, still warm and dense with yolk.

“You’re from the boat?” Omar gestured at what looked like a pile of junk docked at the beach. A dredge—half garbage truck, half barge—sulked under flickering torchlight. A tangle of hoses and vicious-looking metal parts hung off one side, torn canvas tented the other. A few rough-looking men in tattered shirts and shorts leaned on the metal railing, perhaps hoping for a breeze off the river.

“We just arrived,” she said to Omar, leaning into him, breasts almost completely liberated from her top. “You know, we are very sorry for your loss.”

Was she flirting with him?

With a smirk, she turned away from us, back to filling glasses and setting out plates laden with strips of meat. Nearby, skewered mouth to anus by a metal pipe, the pig hung over a fire dripping fat from its roasting flesh.

“Who’s she?”

“A hooker. Some men must be coming through.”

Franz and Anna approached us and accepted their glasses of sugarcane brandy. Bolivian pop tunes jangled from a boom box behind the bar, tuned to a low volume perhaps out of respect.

“We heard about the spiders in your hut,” Anna said. “We need to burn that one down. Please, stay in ours until we can build you another one.”

“Thank you,” I said, but Omar cut me off.

“We’re fine in the longhouse for now, but that’s very kind of you.”

In the end I was relieved we’d passed on this; their hut may have been tarantula-free, but it was tiny: just one room for them and Claudia. We would have been on top of one another. There was no privacy in the main room of the longhouse, but at least there was space.

The crowd parted as two white men blundered through. They wore ragtag camouflage gear from head to toe; heavy knives hung from leather straps at their sides, guns gleamed under belts.