and without thought. By instinct he unties the rope from around the branch and climbs down the tree. Balam stands next to the grave. Locking his stare on Balam, the angry man pulls his knife from the trunk of the tree, slices the loop of the noose, and lets the rope drop from his neck and the knife drop in the grave.
I’m ready, Balam, he says.
Balam will give him a death more honorable than the tree, and he is grateful for this new plan. He steps toward Balam, can hear the mighty cat’s breath. He closes his eyes and contracts his muscles, tightens his body for the attack. He is waiting and adrenaline, he is fear and sorrow, he is silence and fury, he wants to live and he wants to die.
Howler monkeys and frogs bellow. Balam, the jaguar king, stands at one side of the grave, the angry man stands at the other. His son had imitated a frog, his son had smiled; he loved his wife once; he wanted a life he could live. He opens his eyes, and Balam and every jaguar are gone.
FACT. Male jaguars are solitary, living and hunting in territories they aggressively defend.
The angry man revs, his blood like oil slicking an engine, revs so high his muscles collapse. He falls into Balam’s tracks, his hands where Balam’s paws had been, his feet in the grave. His cheek presses the soil floor.
He can’t start over. He can’t reclimb the tree or retie the rope. He can’t call Balam. Balam betrayed him—like everyone he’s known. Ants crawl over his arms, bite him with their scissor jaws, scorching pain. He wants a joint. He wants a woman. He wants to tear Balam’s head from the wild cat’s neck. He pushes himself up to get away from the ants. Standing in the grave, he has to choose his next move. He stands for a long time, until the wind shifts and the sky goes gray, then he pulls on his T-shirt, ties the bandana over his long hair, and tucks the empty red woven pouch into the waistband of his jeans. How is he going to get money? He can’t go on like this. He uses his knife to shovel dirt over the bottles in the pit.
When he’s finished the angry man slumps against the tree. He stares at the rope coiled like a snake that’s too tired and sick of itself to move. He wants his energy back. He wants someone to kiss this fear and anger away.
The canopy and clouds work together to block all light. Rainy season, the sky crashes and clangs, rain falls violently and soaks him with his own failure. He is cold and moves through extremes. He needs relief. Beer gives him backbone and spit, but he needs fire. He needs the heat of a woman, the only thing that ever warms him up.
He wants a sweet lick on his neck, a private moment to entice these demons, these million-pound ghosts off his back. Tomorrow he’ll deal with tomorrow. Tonight he needs hands, hair, thighs, and flesh.
After the heat of the day, after the sky clears and the afternoon sun is no longer scorching, I close my book, the one about the boy stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger. I read most of the afternoon, longer than I intended. I felt compelled to continue reading, even though I kept telling myself to put the book down. I only brought one novel and wanted to savor it, little bits each day, but I read as if I were hungry for what it could feed me, until finally the boy in the lifeboat had a change of heart about the tiger. Then I breathed deeply and felt I could stop.
My body is stiff from sitting, I think a walk will feel good, so I tuck the book into the suitcase in my cabana, put a T-shirt and shorts over my bikini, and position my straw cowboy hat over my hair in a barrette, cooler that way in the heat. I toss some things in a backpack, I like to be prepared: camera, sunscreen, a twenty-dollar bill, twelve Belizean dollars, and a fifty-dollar traveler’s cheque, just in case. I set off down the beach. When the beach gets swept up in waves, I move to the road. A few cars pass but not many. This is a sleepy village, people don’t go places just to go, why expend unnecessary energy?
MYTH. The angry man gets high on the beach under a coconut palm. He draws circles inside circles inside circles with a stick.
I walk and walk. It’s farther than I remember. I’m going to the dive shop where the diver works even though he told me not to walk that far. I did it before, on my first trip to Belize, and he brought me back to town in a boat through the lagoon, naming vegetation and birds along the way. Red mangrove, black mangrove, buttonwood, heron, hummingbird, pelican, swallow, osprey.
As I walk I think about the marathon I recently ran, 26.2 miles, and how distance feels good to my body. But I’m in flip-flops, the wrong shoes for this road, and need more cushion against the small stones. The sandal thong rubs between my right toes and hurts. When I arrive at the dive shop, I plan to ask for a Band-Aid.
Along the road are brightly painted beach cabanas amid tropical overgrowth, and I think about the house I’m renovating. I call it a small bungalow because it sounds charming, but really it’s a dump in need of total repair. It’s toward the top of an uphill dead-end alley, which is misleadingly named a terrace.
The renovations have been harder than I imagined they’d be, and less fun. I watched my dad renovate an enormous house by himself. My brother renovated his home. My sister renovated hers; she even helped build a restaurant. The difference is they have skills and power tools and like this sort of thing. I don’t. I hired people to take care of the big jobs: new foundation, plumbing, electrical, and roof. But on my teacher’s salary I don’t have a budget to hire professionals for all the cosmetic needs inside the house, so these are my projects, and I have to do them on the cheap.
The biggest problem is the wood floors, which are uneven and in horrible shape. I started with the easiest room, the bedroom, which needed a few nails removed, sanding, and a new stain. Then I moved to the living room and kitchen floors, which were burdened by a layer of carpet and underneath that a layer of linoleum that was glued to the wood. I pulled up the worn-out carpet and dragged it to the driveway. The driveway is being supported by hard dirt packed around an overturned porcelain claw foot tub; the house inspector had never seen anything like it, but laughingly told me it was the least of my problems. On the floor, I used a little metal tool to scrape up the linoleum and moved around the room on my hands and knees testing for weak patches that would come up easily. Soon the floor resembled a map of gluey continents, shifting plate tectonics, and then not only were the floors structurally uneven, they were sharp and sticky to walk on, too. It was so much worse than when I started.
Employees at the late-night mega-hardware store in Hollywood sold me tools and various liquids and goo in large containers. I tried their suggestions, took photos of the disastrous results, and returned to the store where invariably different people would be working so I’d whip out the series of photos and explain the project from the beginning, asking, What do I do now?
When I finally admitted defeat with the floors in these rooms, I called in an expert who assessed the mess and shook his head. The wood floors were never worth saving to begin with, he said, they’re soft wood, not hard, and no way was I going to get up those tiles, better to start over. I forked over the money for him to lay plywood over the current floors in the living room and kitchen as a base for new hardwood floors. It’s a great idea, but hardwood is expensive and will have to wait. What do I do now? Paint, trick the eye with color! After days of indecision, I settled on dark orange for the floor. Yes, orange. I was inspired by a book of dream homes in Mexico, and I decided those colors are my palette. I painted the plywood dark orange and finished it with a sealer. The baseboards were gone, oh well, one more thing for the list. I painted a faux finish on the walls in yellow and orange. Then I went all out and laid huge purple tiles on the plywood in the kitchen. I quickly discovered I’m not a good measurer. I’m an approximator, which isn’t the best quality to have for home renovation. The tiles approximately meet with the edges of the room. It will be covered once the baseboards are up, but what do I do now? Hide some of the gaps with floor plants! If I don’t look too closely at the unevenness—and the fact that the floor is plywood and that there are no baseboards—and just take in the gorgeous plants against the wild color scheme, the house is starting to look festive, if not beautiful.
As