“Do you know, we’re not even the first to try to spread the word of God here? There was a man before us. Pastor from Nashville. Came by himself. He showed them a photo of a peccary. They’d never seen a photo in their lives. Turned it over, no peccary. So they called him a devil, can you imagine? Eight spears through his heart. He’s buried behind the chapel here. For them it’s all about their shamans and their dark work. And you know, wherever you put your energy, to the dark or to the light, that’s what grows. I’m telling you, the things I’ve seen . . .” She shook her head, reminiscing with an awestruck horror not devoid of rapture. “They would scare you to death.”

“What have you seen?” I flashed to the Tatinga men emerging from the forest at Benicio’s funeral, the snake heads hanging down from beneath Beya’s hut, the poison frog battling in its tiny cage—all frightening things on the surface, but each so much more than what they seemed. I wondered what FrannyB really wanted from me.

She got up and rummaged around in one of the bags, poured some rice into a pot full of water and placed it on an iron grate over smoking coals. “Their animism, their devil worshipping—”

Omar broke in, to my relief. “I wanted to make you an offer on your sewing machine.”

FrannyB busied herself with the rice. “What are you talking about, young man?”

“Lily’s a seamstress. She can sew anything. She can be a real help in the village. She’ll sew anything you need, for either of you. Right, Lily?”

A sewing machine! Something to do besides wash clothes and feed chickens and grate yucca. “Of course. Whatever you need.”

FrannyB wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Problem is, Omar, you’ve got nothing to give me for it, am I right?”

“What do you want?”

“That you could give me?” She shook her head.

“I can bring you guns.”

“We’ve got guns.”

“What about game? Smoked fish?”

FrannyB reached into a little sack of salt, tossed some in the boiling water. “You really like this girl, don’t you?”

Omar’s face hardened. “Franz and Panchito and me cleared this land. We built this camp, this house, to remind FrannyA of hers in America. Isn’t that worth something?”

“Then you left us. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You started the whole thing, leaving Ayachero. Gave people ideas. All the sudden everybody needed Nike shoes, TVs, computers. Poachers got bolder. Tatinga retreated. You know the rest.”

FrannyA looked up from her mat and turned, as bantam and sinewy as FrannyB was towering and blocky. “It’s half mine, you know, B.”

“So sell him your half,” FrannyB snapped as she stirred the rice with a tin spoon. “You’re the one who uses it, A. I’m just looking out for you.”

“She can have it, as far as I’m concerned.”

FrannyB shook out her shoulders and fed thick fingers through her hair. “Well, all right, then. But we could really use some more game up here, Omar, some dried fish. Some tapir if you can get it, paca, even, whatever you can manage. But on a regular basis. Fat Carlos, Dutchie, they’re looting all our traps, or the game has moved on. That’s possible, that’s what everyone’s saying. Anyway. Sick to death of living on fruit and starch.”