Ouch. It’s an effort to keep my face neutral at that insult. I take another bite of fruit to hide my scowl.
“What was the Factory thinking, sending me down here without someone who spoke the indigenous languages?” She’s talking at me more than to me, verbally ventilating her frustration, just as I hoped she would. I’m not sure what the Factory is, but I heard the capital letter on it in her tone sure enough. “The charity is crooked, the mosquitos are the size of hawks, oh, and there’s human traffickers out to kill me.”
I cough and choke on my fruit at her last declaration. She believes I’m just eating too fast and shakes her head in disgust.
“I need a damn hero. An Indiana Jones or Keanu Reeves, and what do I get? Naked muscle man too dumb to eat food.”
I recover somewhat and scrutinize her closely. She just tossed out the words ‘human trafficking,’ and it completely jibes with my own suspicions. My contacts in the native tribes report their societies are on high alert. Children have disappeared, without a sound, in the middle of the night.
I turn and walk away from her, still not speaking. Like a lost puppy, she splashes along in my wake.
“Hey, where are you going? I need to get out of here.”
We tramp up to my shack and adjacent hangar, and she makes a strangled, frustrated sound.
“No, you idiot, you can’t get in there,” she says. “I’ve already tried it, it’s locked. Locked, do you understand?”
She slips into Portuguese and Spanish, but I continue to ignore her. I reach up into the boughs of the rubber tree growing over my shack and extract the key hidden in a bole.
“Wait, are those keys?”
I unlock the door and swing it open wide.
“This is your place?”
She follows me into the shack, which has more to offer than its humble exterior would indicate. I have a laptop, a decent bunk, and a small cooking range, as well as a generator to power it all. There’s no indoor plumbing, but I have a toilet built to let out right over the water.
In short, it’s not the savage cave dwelling she’d been expecting.
And when she sees the poster of Fast and the Furious hanging on my wall, she stiffens in anger.
“You…” her voice is black as midnight. “You speak English, don’t you?”
“Bad English, mostly,” I say, struggling into a pair of cargo shorts.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was just being cautious. Some strange woman comes up and starts blabbing about Factories and human trafficking, and I start getting nervous. Natural reaction.”
“You sound American,” she says, eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“Expat,” I say proudly. “The Green is my home now.”
“You live here, and you like it?” She cocks her head to the side.
“Yeah, it’s great.”
“For God’s sake, why would you say that?” She’s obviously incredulous.
I shrug. “No bills, no taxes, no fences. I do as I please from morning to night. The forest provides all I need to survive, and I take the occasional load of cargo for little luxuries like my Inspiron there.”
Her pretty, dirt-streaked face grows thoughtful. “Cargo…do you have a boat?”
“Yeah, but that’s not how I haul my cargo. I have a plane.”
“A plane?” Hope floods her blue eyes like the Amazon during the rainy season. “Listen, can you take me to Macapá? It’s very urgent.”
“Does this have something to do with the human trafficking? How did you even find out?”
