-Part 2-
I scouted the village to burn daylight. The place was too bare. I had nothing to do other than walking and appreciating how thick the trees and the oxygen were. I used to hike a lot as a Forestry student. Even though I was not a fan of the fauna, insects to be exact, the flora calmed me. The air was clean and clear. The timber here didn't smell of varnish. The only smoke in this village came from the burning firewood. The witch doctor's hut didn't smell like my father's office and disinfectant. Again, I was away from the city, away from him.
I sighed, trying to exhale the thought together with my breath.
A shirtless tribesman cycled lakeward. As a group of naked children ran past my left side, Professor Smit shouted Ethan's name somewhere on my right. Ethan came running from the tent with something in his hand—I was too far from them to see what it was—and they were gesturing to each other before they entered the chief's house.
Professor Smit was an amusing guy if I overlooked his arrogance. He was so good at socializing when he wanted to. Somehow, despite his negative traits, he was amicable. He had said that he hated talking with humans, but he did talk a lot. Perhaps it was the lecturer in him? Perhaps it was his inherent talent? His gift of the gab?
He had an affinity for the other egghead, Dr. Chen. Birds of a feather flock together, I guess. Just this morning at breakfast, they were deep in conversation about the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Both were not fans of the Germans, from their openly xenophobic comments about them.
I heard that Dutch people are proud of their directness and their tell-it-as-they-see-it mentality. The rumor is real. Professor Smit did well at representing his birth country.
Five half-naked tribeswomen walked past me with a basket in hands.
"Hey. Deixe-me ir com você...?" [Let me come with you?] I pointed to the basket and to the cassava farm.
I knew they were heading to the farm. They did the same thing yesterday. The villagers wouldn't understand official Portuguese, but they would get my gesture.
The women giggled and nodded, so I followed them through a path that led to a football-field-sized cassava farm and orchard at the edge of the village. It took us fifteen minutes to reach this place. Red branches of the waist-high shrubs stretched out a few yards to the horizon, adding vibrancy to the surrounding greenery. My mind was filled with nostalgia.
When I was a teenager, my mother taught me Japanese cuisines. She was a brilliant cook. I have all of her recipes embedded in my head. We had a cassava shrub in our backyard too. My mother would unbury the tuber and steam it, and we would eat the flesh with sugar.
It took us an hour to harvest enough cassava to make bread for almost six hundred people. Tapioca bread, or as they called it beiju, was their staple. Every nuclear family usually prepared the food independently. They only made it into group work because we were here as guests.
We headed back to the village and started preparing lunch. Several tribesmen brought fish, and the women grilled them. Alicia and Zack joined us half an hour later.
"I assume we'll eat this parched bread every day?" Zack flipped the bread on the big pan, sighing. His eyebrows made him look like he had a permanent scowl. A thin, vertical scar on his right eyebrow gave him a harsher expression.
"Oh, come on, Zack. That's low key rude. You eat what they give or not at all. Besides, this parched bread gives you enough carbs to function the whole day," Alicia said.
"They have snacks here too if you ever get bored... I can see you already are." Ethan slapped his shoulder and sat on the ground between Zack and Alicia.
"Snack? Really? As in?" Zack's protruded eyes thinned in suspicion.
"I saw the kids grilled grasshoppers like s'mores yesterday," Alicia said.
"And big ants," Ethan added as he focused the viewfinder of the camera toward the heating pan. "They seemed to enjoy 'em."
"You could build your food pyramid scheme with those," I said and the other two laughed, but they didn't know how much I cringed inside from the imagery of grilled grasshoppers.
"Never mind. I'm already appreciative of this flimsy bread now." Zack shoved a fistful of hot bread into his mouth and writhed in agony.
I threw him my water bottle as I laughed, and he chugged the water down his throat.
"Are you an idiot?" Alicia clutched her stomach as she laughed hysterically. "Oh, damn. Your face is precious. Did you get his pictures, Ethan? We can make a meme out of them."
He snapped photos of the weary Zack who was leaning against the shack's pillar, and counted each time he clicked on the shutter button.
"Da Graça." Professor Smit approached us. "I've been searching for you high and low, and here you are, playing house. Jesus. I was on the cusp of losing my patience." He threw his notebook and a voice recorder on the ground and sat on a tree stump stool next to Ethan.
"Where's your walkie-talkie, Professor Smit?" Zack asked. "You could've hollered him."
"Why, thank you for the patent insight." He tsked. "This device you gave me is sans battery." He tossed his walkie talkie to Zack, who caught it with both hands.
"Ah, sorry. I'll get you one after lunch."
Professor Smit dismissed him with a flail of his hand and scanned me up and down.
What's his problem?
"Por que você está procurando por mim?" [Why are you looking for me?] I asked.
The edge of his lips curved in almost an evil way. "Mudança de plan," [Change of plan,] Professor Smit said.
"Tenho a certeza que não planeei nada contigo." [I'm sure I didn't plan anything with you.]
"I have made one for you, naturally." He untied his hair, gathered the wayward strands, and retied it.
So they really made decisions about me behind my back.
His sleeve lifted up and I saw a humanoid bite scar on his left arm. He was more muscular than I thought. Lean like an athlete, broad-shouldered. Then I remembered he told me something about his Jiu-Jitsu trainer. But he didn't look like a martial arts practitioner. Maybe I was being judgemental, but nothing about his posh look suggested that he could be a fighter of some sort.
"There's something I wanted to run past you. So... I found out that Chaves withheld you from the track surveying. And to be honest, that is convenient for me." He kneaded his earlobe. "I require extra hands... well, ears and mouth actually. I need to shepherd as many under-twelve kids as I can and have them orally answer some picture questionnaire. The issue here is," he glanced at the banana trees behind the shack, and whispered, "monkeys are impeding my work. I couldn't punch above my weight when it comes to primates." He shivered as if 'primates' was an atrocious expletive. "You're supposed to be good with them, aren't you?"
"So what was your original plan?" I ignored his egocentric plan. I spread the tapioca dough onto the big pan. The dancing steam tickled the tip of my fingers.
"To have you aid me once you come back from the trekking."
I glanced at him. I couldn't help laughing at his absurdity when he said it with a straight face. "I'm feeling a little backed into a corner here, Professor."
"Well, that's great! Ethan, you're coming too. Zack or Alicia can substitute for photography. William has gone with the chief and Essien to the neighboring village. I'm sure they're not coming back anytime soon."
"William is your RA. He should be the one who helps you. Why me?" I said.
"Didn't you listen to me about him canoeing to the other village at the moment? Tsk." He glanced at Ethan who was taking pictures of the tribeswomen stacking pieces of bread on a wooden tray. Professor Smit then leaned toward me, harrumphed, and whispered: "Besides, I like you more than Norman's... well, my garrulous RA. You should ditch Chaves's ass and become my RA instead so I don't have to deal with him much." His voice seemed like it vibrated deep in his chest.
Something sweet and floral and bitter wafted into my nose. Something expensive. Bergamot. I always hated bergamot, but it smelled heavenly on him. I must have gone nuts because shivers ran up my chest and blood rushed to my face. I like you? What kind of answer is that?
I glanced toward the cloudy sky when my face cooled down. The sun was right above our heads. "Você quer minha ajuda agora? É hora do almoço." [You want me to help you now? It's lunchtime.]
He clicked his tongue. "Não agora. Talvez em duas horas?" [Not now. Maybe in two hours?]
I felt like pulling out his tongue and stomping on it. "Eu não saberia o tempo. Eu não tenho um relógio." [I wouldn't know the time. I don't have a watch.] I gave him a stupid answer just to annoy him the way he annoyed me.
"Your vacuous pretense is on purpose, huh?" He shook his head and said something in Dutch. He was cursing, I was sure. He cursed a lot. He unfastened his blue-strapped watch and pulled my hand. "It's ludicrous how a man doesn't own a timepiece. I swear, next thing I know, you're gonna compute a horologic ephemeris from stick shadows." He clipped his watch around my wrist and stood up.
Perplexed, both from not understanding his jargon and from his action, I stared at the watch. Breitling Exospace. My hand jerked toward him as I gasped. "Wait! Take it back. This costs... at least five thousand dollars. Don't joke around with something this pricey." I tried to get it off, but he flailed his hand in front of me.
"It's not five K. It's eight point six K. It's cheap. Keep it. I have another watch with me. You've been ruffling my feathers since last week... asking Chaves the time every damned day. Give it back to me after we finish this expedition, then go buy one already." He peeked behind me. "So, what's for lunch? The insipid bread again?"
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