Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale Read Free Book Online Page B

was motioning us to come in. Where was Dr. Fernando with his slow speech and clear enunciation? (Peter would soon devise a helpful phrase in Portuguese: “When you talk to me, imagine you’re talking to a six-year-old.”)
    Dr. Fernando was nowhere to be seen, but we’d just met Eduardo, the club president. He marched us onto a glassed-in porch, sat us down at the end of a long table, and ordered up some Coke and beer.Around the table were a dozen other mostly graying men, who at 10:00 AM were drinking beer and shots of honey-colored cachaça , sugarcane rum. Eduardo picked up a guitar. A large songbook was open in the middle of the table. One man leafed through it.
    â€œ Aqui o. ” Here.
    They began crooning a bossa nova—all except the young man at the far end, with the ebony hair; a long, chiseled jaw; dark, intense eyes; and a smile that revealed a slight gap between his front teeth. Zeca. He was the first of three twenty-six-year-olds I would come to think of as our “guides.”
    When I’m traveling in a strange place where I don’t speak the language, I observe much more than at home, where I’ve come to take things for granted. But I know so little and understand even less. I find myself making up stories about the places and people I meet. It’s easy to start confusing the stories with reality.
    I also find myself relying on sources I might not under normal circumstances, either because they present themselves or because they’re the only ones I can communicate with. I trust people I might not if I knew more, because I have no choice. Often these are young men. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad characters; they’re just not the experts one might seek out given more choice, though in fact they are often experts in their own ways.
    In our travels before we had kids, Peter and I were continually picked up by teenage boys. I suppose they had time and curiosity. We’d hire them to be our guides. On a story assignment of Peter’s in northern Greenland, we camped on the tundra outside the village of Qaanaaq and were found by Akiak, a seventeen-year-old. He became our translator. When Peter commissioned an Inuit hunter to take us by dog sled out onto the frozen sea ice, it was Akiak who translated when we got stranded, the ice unexpectedly breaking up; or when I needed somewhere in all that white to change a tampon; or when we camped for two days on an ice floe, waiting for the huffing snort of surfacing narwhal.
    In Ghana, it was again teenage boys, two this time, who offered to take us hunting for “bush meat” in the jungle outside a town inthe province of Brong Ahafo. We looked for hollow fallen logs and stood back when they shot randomly into their dark holes, pulverizing whatever was inside. I guess this was amusement, not dinner. They generously shared their lunch, stewed we-didn’t-ask-what (because it looked an awful lot like rat), transported in a gym bag.
    In Indonesia, it was Ari who took us to his village to stay with his mom, where we were housed in one of the many cubby rooms kept for visiting males, invited in solely for a one-night stand, in that matrilineal Minangkabau society.
    Once we had kids, this stopped. The teenage boys dropped us.
    But the twenty-somethings picked us up. At the tennis club, Zeca ambled over, in his long, loose shorts, soft T-shirt, and lazy flip-flops, and sat down.
    â€œI don’ really like this music,” he confided in English that came out like a dotted line. “You know . . . Alison Chase? I like . . . Alison Chase. Thaz . . . good music!” He dropped his chin emphatically as he said it. It would be months before I realized he’d said “Alice in Chains.”
    Over the guitar music Zeca told us he was the son of a lawyer and had become a lawyer himself, a labor lawyer defending the “little guy,” the laborer.
    â€œLabor law is good . . .” he paused,