“But we couldn’t both be Frances. Lord knows these Indians are confused enough.”

Seated high on a tall stool that looked too spidery for her weight, FrannyB tapped off a thick length of cigar ash before drawing and holding in another lungful. A few more cigars, courtesy of For God’s Sake, poked out of her shirt pocket. Her pale green eyes squinted, assessing me.

“But really, I ask you, what are the chances? Two missionaries named Frances, one from Massachusetts, one from Georgia—that would be me, as if you couldn’t tell—” She poured on an extra syrupy drawl here. “Both decide to spread the Lord’s word in the middle of this godforsaken devil’s workshop—this end-of-the-world snake pit . . .” She gestured at their tiny homestead, the spare church, the vines I could almost watch growing around Christ’s scrawny hips.

“Think on it: two puny one-engine Cessnas flying low over the jungle, going on twelve years ago now, on the very same week, both of us spreading the word of God over a loudspeaker from our planes, as if they could understand us! Both of us dropping gifts from the sky—mirrors, silverware, and so on—on the heads of these heathen Tatinga . . .” She shook her head and spat out a piece of tobacco, grinning at some being just beyond my head, as if to meet my eye would have admitted some small defeat. “I have to laugh sometimes at the mysterious ways He works. And to think we—she mostly—refused to meet at first, both of us being so dang bullheaded. Like there weren’t enough godless ones to spread the word of God to. Like there wasn’t enough of God’s work for a hundred of us—for thousands! We had to crash into each other, isn’t that right, A?”

FrannyA ignored her, sweating over her task, fingers shaking with effort at the detailed work. I noticed a faint trail of scars on the back of her neck near the trace bumps of her spine, and wondered. FrannyB let out a belly laugh. “Did I ever tell you about that crash, For God’s Sake?”

He laughed in a mirthless way. “A few times, over,” he said, busying himself with the task of unstrapping the heavy bags from Perla’s back; she shuddered with relief and flicked her rough tail as the weight fell off her. He and Omar lugged the supplies to the door of a small brick house, a perfect replica of a two-story New England home, except the windows were just empty squares, the roof toggled together with baked clay tile, and the shutters—for effect only—cut from stained balsa wood. At only about seven feet tall, it wasn’t big enough for two floors. It gave off the feel of a creepy dollhouse, where giant dolls lived. The Frannies’ simple camp was a brief, oblong area of cleared jungle a couple of hundred feet above sea level, the highest land for miles.

FrannyB continued, “Her pilot was high on ayahuasca. He slammed into us at a thousand feet. Clipped a wingtip clean off. We both lived, as you can see, only my pilot didn’t. Didn’t get out of the plane in time . . .” She shook her head, remembering. “But hers? Walked out of the wreck just fine. Wandered around talking about some dragon lifting us into the serpent’s mouth to the star of the beginning, some hooey like that. A, you remember that, right?”