Read Online Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Christopher S. Stewart
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nodding; he clasped and unclasped his thick hands over the keyboard as if he was going to crack his knuckles but decided against it.
He told me he was from Queens and seemed suddenly relieved to be talking to someone else from New York City. “I came to meet some girls,” he eventually confessed, pointing at the screen, where “hotstuffie92” awaited him.
I joked that I’d thought single men went to Russia for that. No, he said, it’s cheaper to fly here—especially during a coup!—and he thought the women were nicer. He had family from Nicaragua. He’d been to Costa Rica a few times, but it was more expensive to travel there, he said, and “it’s like Florida with all those old people retiring there.”
He’d been talking to hotstuffie92, a girl from a nearby village, for about a year now. She’d planned to meet him at the Paris, but the military kept blocking the roads, forcing her to turn around. He showed me a creased picture—it had obviously spent too much time in his back pocket—of a dark-skinned woman, slightly overweight, with a gap between her front teeth. She looked twenty-one years old at most.
“Beautiful,” I said. He nodded appreciatively. He said that when she finally got there, he would take her out for a nice dinner. “Maybe Pizza Hut,” he said.
He asked what I was doing, and I told him about the White City. Most people I would talk to down here knew about the legend. Locals would invariably refer to the hundreds of square miles in which the ruins were thought to be located as “way out there” or “far, far away,” as if the place were located on another planet altogether. The man hadn’t heard of the city. He giggled and told me he didn’t want to get anywhere near the jungle. He compared it to a kettle of boiling chicken. The closest he’d get to the jungle or any lost city was the pool out back, with the drooping potted flowers and palms.
“I guess we both came here looking for treasure,” he joked.
WHEN I FINALLY got on the computer, I opened my e-mail to see a note from Amy. She wondered if I had made it. “We miss you,” she wrote. As I sat there, I imagined them just finishing breakfast, bowls of cereal, and then heading off for the day—Sky to her summer camp at the school down the street and Amy to an art show.
I replied that the coup wasn’t so bad as the papers were making it out to be and that the heat was killing me. I didn’t mention anything about the military or the gunshots the night before, but I began to feel sentimental and said that I’d kept thinking about them on the curb as I pulled away in the cab. I told her to tell Sky that an orange parrot lived in the hotel courtyard and that I would call her on her birthday, in about three weeks. “Don’t worry about me!” I wrote. As I hit “Send,” I realized that this would be the last time I’d have Internet access and thus it would be the last message home.
“Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”
T HE TRUJILLO THAT Morde and Brown found was no longer the center of the colonial Spanish Empire. A recent plague had wiped out the city’s surrounding banana crops and scattered local laborers to look for work elsewhere, making the place feel barren and remote. As the explorers stumbled off the boat, they walked the same beach that Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés had likely walked centuries before. They passed the crumbling Spanish fort, with its defunct cannon. The streets were overgrown with grass, and an eerie quiet suffused the summer air—a “ghost town,” Morde called it.
At the top of a sharp hill, the men wandered past a graveyard, where they discovered the decaying tomb of an American bandit named William Walker who had been shot by a firing squad in 1860 for trying to take over the country. The site only made the men more eager to move on.
The visit to Trujillo is really notable for only one reason: Morde’s mysterious encounter with a person who claimed to have
He told me he was from Queens and seemed suddenly relieved to be talking to someone else from New York City. “I came to meet some girls,” he eventually confessed, pointing at the screen, where “hotstuffie92” awaited him.
I joked that I’d thought single men went to Russia for that. No, he said, it’s cheaper to fly here—especially during a coup!—and he thought the women were nicer. He had family from Nicaragua. He’d been to Costa Rica a few times, but it was more expensive to travel there, he said, and “it’s like Florida with all those old people retiring there.”
He’d been talking to hotstuffie92, a girl from a nearby village, for about a year now. She’d planned to meet him at the Paris, but the military kept blocking the roads, forcing her to turn around. He showed me a creased picture—it had obviously spent too much time in his back pocket—of a dark-skinned woman, slightly overweight, with a gap between her front teeth. She looked twenty-one years old at most.
“Beautiful,” I said. He nodded appreciatively. He said that when she finally got there, he would take her out for a nice dinner. “Maybe Pizza Hut,” he said.
He asked what I was doing, and I told him about the White City. Most people I would talk to down here knew about the legend. Locals would invariably refer to the hundreds of square miles in which the ruins were thought to be located as “way out there” or “far, far away,” as if the place were located on another planet altogether. The man hadn’t heard of the city. He giggled and told me he didn’t want to get anywhere near the jungle. He compared it to a kettle of boiling chicken. The closest he’d get to the jungle or any lost city was the pool out back, with the drooping potted flowers and palms.
“I guess we both came here looking for treasure,” he joked.
WHEN I FINALLY got on the computer, I opened my e-mail to see a note from Amy. She wondered if I had made it. “We miss you,” she wrote. As I sat there, I imagined them just finishing breakfast, bowls of cereal, and then heading off for the day—Sky to her summer camp at the school down the street and Amy to an art show.
I replied that the coup wasn’t so bad as the papers were making it out to be and that the heat was killing me. I didn’t mention anything about the military or the gunshots the night before, but I began to feel sentimental and said that I’d kept thinking about them on the curb as I pulled away in the cab. I told her to tell Sky that an orange parrot lived in the hotel courtyard and that I would call her on her birthday, in about three weeks. “Don’t worry about me!” I wrote. As I hit “Send,” I realized that this would be the last time I’d have Internet access and thus it would be the last message home.
“Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”
T HE TRUJILLO THAT Morde and Brown found was no longer the center of the colonial Spanish Empire. A recent plague had wiped out the city’s surrounding banana crops and scattered local laborers to look for work elsewhere, making the place feel barren and remote. As the explorers stumbled off the boat, they walked the same beach that Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés had likely walked centuries before. They passed the crumbling Spanish fort, with its defunct cannon. The streets were overgrown with grass, and an eerie quiet suffused the summer air—a “ghost town,” Morde called it.
At the top of a sharp hill, the men wandered past a graveyard, where they discovered the decaying tomb of an American bandit named William Walker who had been shot by a firing squad in 1860 for trying to take over the country. The site only made the men more eager to move on.
The visit to Trujillo is really notable for only one reason: Morde’s mysterious encounter with a person who claimed to have
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