A huge man, bald under his sisal hat, led the way. He was heavy in the jowls, with thick eyebrows and a mustache as bushy as a squirrel’s tail. He wore the skin of a jaguar like a cape over his back, its massive head hung down over one shoulder. Flies walked stickily over its still-open eyes. The other man, gangly and gristly, wore his oily blond hair in a ponytail, exposing a badly drawn tattoo on the back of his neck of a naked woman riding a motorcycle. Whistling, he dragged a wooden cart stacked with three yellow-footed tortoises the size of garbage can lids, all bound by balsa-bark restraints. Still alive, they moved with dispirited swipes of their powerful arms. In a shadowy box jerry-rigged on top, a live infant macaw hopped and squealed, red and blue fluff flying off its body as it bounced itself off the walls of woven sugarcane. Lashed to this was a tightly wound roll of brilliant blue, red, and yellow feathers.

It unnerved me that the only other white people around—besides the Frannies—seemed to be thugs. Until that moment, I could envision a growing—perhaps painfully slow—camaraderie with the villagers. All that suddenly became a bit hazy. I shrank into myself, drank my brandy too fast, kept my head down.

The fat man waved his ham-hock hands as he knuckled his way through the crowd. Testily, the village men let him pass. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, thirsty men here, coming through, coming through.” The women gathered at the far reaches of the torchlight as he swung a big thigh over a stool at the end of the bar.

Bristling, Franz pulled Anna behind him as he drew closer to the big man. “When did you kill this jaguar?”

The poacher held out his hand and smiled. “Wait, wait, wait! A man hasn’t even met these new people or had his first drink and that’s your first question? Introduce us, Franz!”

Franz’s face turned dark, taut with contained fury. “Omar, Lily, this is Fat Carlos—”

“Omar!” he said, accepting with a wink a glass of aguardiente rocketed down the bar by Carmelita. He knocked back the contents, sucking the sugar off his lips. “I remember you. The long-lost brother, the one who got away. Who went to the big city and—what—it didn’t go so well? Tell me everything.”

Omar got up and stood at his brother’s side. “I’m here for my nephew’s funeral.”

“Funeral?” He glanced around. The crowd had afforded the men a wide berth; many were helping themselves to pig or roasted yucca. A few seemed to be actually enjoying themselves, voices rising, even laughing occasionally. The mood much different than down at the beach. “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed it,” he said, glancing around. “But we’re surely sorry to hear that. Aren’t we, Dutchie?”

The scrawny-necked man grinned and sputtered as if he’d been told a joke, his blond mustache greased with pig fat. “It’s a shame when someone dies, it sure is. Who died, then, Carlos, do we know?”