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  In an hour, when we could go no farther by road, we walked the rest of the short distance toward the lake under double canopy forest, dark and cool. Somewhere the border ran nearby, but in this wild land there were no markers or fences, no sign of other visitors. As we followed a curve, a dashing movement rustled low foliage just off the trail. We stopped. Probably it was not a jaguar—although that would have been thrilling—because the big cats are nocturnal. Perhaps a peccary, or a brocket deer.

  At the lake we lay on our backs, unspeaking, but communicating, it seemed to me, our ease with the moment and place. We didn’t point or cry out to each other when we saw the pair of scarlet macaws fly overhead, electric red and blue with fine yellow collars, their long tails like fiery rays in the pale sky. But I heard the Drafter take the same deep breath as I.

  More birds cried softly and flapped their wings in passing, but I don’t know what they were because I had shut my eyes, keeping them closed despite some curiosity. I liked more the dreamy feeling of experiencing the forest through its sounds.

  I thought I heard a deep human voice calling from a few feet away. I jumped to my feet in a single move, startled. The Drafter stood too, saying, “Don’t be afraid.”

  He waved to the caller, who waited at the forest’s edge with two young indigenous men, and a woman with two children, a boy and a girl. The woman and girl wore pants. This struck me as unusual, because here females wear dresses or long skirts.

  “You know that man?” I asked.

  “The leader, coyote, guide,” he said.

  Figure it out, I thought. Figure out what is happening.

  “I could not change all these moments, these good moments, by telling you,” he said. “The road is safe. You’ll be all right.”

  From his bag he drew out a piece of paper rolled like a tube, tied with a thick blade of grass, handing it to me as he turned to join the others. Understanding flooded my mind as fast and overwhelming as a tidal wave, and I felt helpless against it. For the next weeks this small group would traipse through Mexico and sneak across borders, aiming for destinations in America. The Drafter would walk through my country’s back door, since he had been turned away from the front.

  I watched him walk across twenty feet of marshy shore to join the band. I heard him speak to one of the young men in a language I did not understand. He turned and called, “Kekchi!,” smiling, waving, but missing not a step, melting into the forest with the others.

  I gazed for a while at where he had been, but saw only trees, huge and brooding. I felt no sense of betrayal, because there had been no promise. I did feel that something of value was disappearing, but whatever it was had never been mine, so I could not say to myself he stole it away.

  Inside the car I took the grass tie from the paper tube and unrolled it. I saw myself at a table in a dark room, the head of a great deer on the wall, the figure of a woman looking more sensuous than I had ever believed myself to be. I tossed the paper in the back seat, too brusquely. I drove so fast the tires raised a cloud of dust. I ignored thin figures waving me down, hoping for a ride.

  Like a survivor tossed upon shore, I felt whole, but shaken. I was not the same person who—was it only a week before?—had stepped into a dark restaurant on an island floating in a deep blue lake.

  That night I returned the car and went back to the cantina in dusty Sayaxche, even though I was not hungry. I did not want to be alone, even though I talked to no one. Black flies studded a sticky yellow strip hanging above the table.

  I ordered meat—why not?—picking it slowly from the bone. It tasted dry. There was no sauce.

  Journalist Mary Jo McConahay is the author of the travel memoir, Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. She was a war correspondent in Central America, a reporter in Saudi Arabia, and her work appears in more than thirty journals and periodicals. She will eat anything she is served. Once.

  MARTIN DILLON

  Jimmy the Natural

  Ireland is rich in many things, including the unexpected.

  WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-TWENTIES I SPENT SUMMERS fly-fishing rivers and lakes for salmon and sea trout in County Donegal in the north east of Ireland. The area had wonderful, wild scenery and a spectacular Atlantic coastline. One summer, I rented a cottage high on a hillside, two miles from Killybegs, a small, busy fishing port. The cottage overlooked barren hillsides, dotted with stone ditches and sheep and the views towards the ocean were heart stopping. At the end of each day, I walked into the village of Killybegs for a pint or two of Guinness and a chat with the locals, many of them men who had spent their lives working on trawlers in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. They told fascinating stories of heroism and tragedy but some stories got taller in the telling. Of all the people I met, two brothers, Declan and John, intrigued me the most. They shared a house on the outskirts of Killybegs and worked a small plot of land on which they had some goats and sheep. In the evenings they frequented local bars and had a pact never to be in the same bar together. According to Declan, they spent so much time “within a hand’s breadth of each other during the day,” it was unthinkable they should have to suffer one another’s company at night when “the demon drink took hold,” and besides, they were destined to “spend enough time together in eternity.” In the meantime, a recipe for harmony was to patronize different bars and if possible go home alone. As a rule, after a long, drunken walk home each was too tired to argue.

  Declan was the most instantly recognizable. He wore a heavily soiled, cream-colored cap, claiming it was a gift from a famous American whose name he had long forgotten. I learned a lot about Killybegs from him, but only after I bought him pints of “the black stuff.” He claimed his love affair with Guinness began when he realized the color of the “head” on a pint resembled the color and texture of female breasts.

  One evening, he asked if I had ever seen or met “a strange one” on my late night walks back to the cottage. I told him the only creature I had ever seen on the winding, two-mile journey was a badger that once crossed my path. Anyway, there were no street lights and it was impossible to see much beyond the beam of the torchlight I carried. It helped me walk a straight line to avoid falling into ditches on either side of the narrow lane to my cottage.

  “So you’ve never seen The Natural?” he whispered.

  Before I could ask him who The Natural was, he went off to retrieve a pint someone else had bought him. I walked outside into a cool night and strolled to the harbor to admire the fishing trawlers and enjoy the heavily scented sea air and smells of freshly gutted fish. Five minutes later, I was at the outskirts of Killybegs, walking into the dark countryside with hundreds of insects dancing in the beam of my torch. I had walked about a mile when the torch batteries died. Had it been a familiar west of Ireland night when the sky and its myriad stars were visible, I would have felt comfortable walking the rest of the way without artificial light. But this was an overcast night and I was suddenly plunged into darkness. I continued my journey at a much slower pace, hoping to stay in the center of the lane. I was confident if I did that for twenty minutes I would eventually reach the part of the lane where tarmac gave way to a stone path. At that point, I would know to veer right onto a grassy, elevated path. From there it was 150 yards to my cottage but I now kicked myself for not having the foresight to leave lights on in the cottage. My real concern was if I missed the cut I would find myself heading for cliffs overlooking the ocean.

  Suddenly the eerie silence was broken by the faint sound of someone approaching from the direction of the cottage. I called out but no one answered. I began walking again and after several minutes I heard footsteps, this time coming from behind me. I swung round and the footsteps ceased. Bracing myself for an assault, I got into a fighting stance and remained like that for several minutes. Convinced the thereat had passed, I walked on a step at a time, my fists still clenched. Suddenly, I was frozen still by the sound of a person or animal rushing through undergrowth. Then some
thing brushed me gently in what seemed like a split second. I was beginning to think I was going out of my mind when all of a sudden a face appeared several feet from me. It was a grinning face lit by a torch illuminating only the nose and eyes. The face seemed to belong to a grown man but the eyes had the wondrous expression of a child. The person staring at me was slim and about 5 feet 8 inches tall. The weird apparition lasted only seconds because the torch was switched off and I heard the person running ahead of me. I waited until the sound of his footsteps was replaced by the buzz of insects and sat on the tarmac, trying to make up my mind whether it was better to retrace my steps or continue walking to the cottage. I chose the cottage because it was closer than Killybegs. I could lock the doors, close the windows and wait for the dawn. There was no phone but I was confident I could hold off an intruder until I was sober enough to drive to the local police station. I got to my feet and began walking as fast as I could only to discover I had overestimated my navigational skills. I veered slightly to my left and fell off the side of the road into a water-filled ditch. When I climbed out of it I felt like a drowned rat. The remainder of the walk to the cottage was slow and painful. When I got inside, I lost no time locking up. I then sat on a worn couch with an axe by my side and a fishing knife in my lap. Whether it was alcohol, stress, or a combination of both, I fell into a deep sleep. I was awakened at dawn by a rhythmic tapping on the kitchen window. I jumped up and the sound ceased. Ever so cautiously I crept to the window and gazed out at the nearby hillsides. To my great relief, all I could see were grazing sheep and goats but two donkeys were munching dried grass next to the cottage door so I quickly surmised the sound I had heard was probably one of them disturbing a patch of gravel.

  Daylight made me feel confident so I unbolted the front door and gingerly stepped outside. It was a beautiful morning and there was no sign of anyone as far as the eye could see. I was about to walk back into the cottage when my eye was drawn to an object on the kitchen window ledge. On closer inspection, I found it was a wet, rolled up newspaper. I knocked it to the ground and three fresh mackerel rolled out of it. It was only then I noticed a small, open cardboard box on the gravel. Inside it, nestled on a bed of straw were four small, speckled chicken eggs. I spun around, expecting to see someone watching me from behind a hedge or stone ditch but there was no sign of a human presence. Nor was there a note from the donor of these gifts.

  I took the food indoors and was pondering my next move when Patrick Dempsey, the farmer who had rented me the cottage, drove up in his car with a large bag of turf for my fire. I offered him a cup of tea and he readily accepted. He was a big, red-faced man with hands the size of dinner plates and thick, wavy gray hair. I liked him but always felt he was a wily character, innately suspicious of city dwellers. Any time I questioned him about the locals he shrugged his shoulders, yet he thought nothing of asking me endless questions about city life. He also had a habit of inquiring if I truly liked Donegal and who I had talked to in Killybegs on my pub trips.

  As he loaded the turf into two large wicker baskets beside the fireplace, I wondered if it would be wise to mention the apparition on the road. I feared he would think I was a crazy drunk and stupid for not carrying extra batteries for my torch. He was definitely not the type of man to find himself without replacement batteries or for that matter to be walking the lane in the early hours. He locked up his house and outbuildings every evening at ten o’clock and did not venture out again until dawn to milk his cows and let the chickens out of their coop. He was a hard working, conservative farmer prepared for every eventuality.

  His wife was a brusque woman at the best of times. Like her husband, she was big-boned and strong as an ox. She wore a headscarf which was often pulled down to the tops of her eyebrows and she tied her hair back with a black ribbon. Her daily ensemble was a woolen cardigan, a long skirt partly covered with an apron and rubber knee-length boots spattered with hardened mud. Her callused hands matched the deep lines in her face and testified to decades spent working outdoors with her husband. She was a fine cook and her specialty was a chicken and leek soup. The first time I visited them, the smell of her soup reached me when I came within sight of their house. After she poured me a bowl of it, I remarked how I met Declan and his brother the previous day and they were colorful characters. She fixed me with a stern look before she spoke.

  “Those two fellas aren’t the full deal.” She tapped her temple with her left index finger. “If I was to be kind to them, I’d say they’ve haven’t been right since their parents died and that was over twenty years ago. If that Declan fella and his crazy brother had gone to a match maker as I suggested to them years ago, two good women would’ve sorted them out and they wouldn’t be having drunken fisticuffs in bars and be staggering out the road from Killybegs plastered in the dead of night. I don’t know how many times they’ve missed being run over, not to mention the numbers of times they’ve both fallen off that wee bridge over the river near their place. There’s hardly a trout in that river that doesn’t know what they look like.”

  I refrained from laughing, because neither she nor her husband thought what she said funny. I was nevertheless intrigued by her reference to match making. I had once listened to a radio program about the role of match makers in remote parts of Ireland. Traditionally, children worked on the family farm until their parents died, by which time they were in their fifties or sixties and had a house and land and no one to share it with. It was an acute social problem and, in many instances, middle-aged men and women lacked the social skills to form relationships. Often, they turned for help to men known as match makers. The late Irish playwright, John B. Keane, a renowned matchmaker in the West of Ireland, claimed he had made hundreds of matches. If a woman in her sixties sought his help finding a partner, he asked her three basic questions. If she answered all three positively, his task of finding her a mate was made easier. First, he would ask if she was happy to marry a man “with a baldy head.” Then, he would inquire if she would be content with a man with no “bars in his grate”—teeth. Last, and what he deemed the critical question, was whether she could marry a man who would not consummate their marriage. Many men were not interested in sex and just wanted companionship and a woman to cook and clean like their mothers and sisters had done.

  “If a woman answers yes to my third question I have no problem finding her a match,” John B. Keane would say.

  The apparition on the road more than matchmaking was on my mind as I poured Patrick Dempsey a second cup of tea and thanked him for the turf. I was still reluctant to tell him about the apparition so I asked him if he knew who left the fish and eggs outside the cottage. He glanced out the window and smiled.

  “Those were probably from Jimmy the Natural. I should’ve told you about him,” he said, staring at me over the rim of his cup. “Sure it slipped my mind, didn’t it? But you’ve no need to worry. The Natural means you no harm. If anything, I’d say he’s taken a liking to you. He can be a wee bit like a child, you see, and he doesn’t look at the world the way others do.”

  He removed a pipe and a worn leather tobacco pouch from his trouser pocket. While I waited anxiously, he methodically filled the pipe with tobacco and, using his right thumb firmly pushed the tobacco down into it until it was flattened beneath the rim. Then he held a lit match over it until it nearly burned down to his fingers. With a smile of satisfaction, he gripped the pipe between uneven teeth stained by years of stale tobacco smoke and inhaled until the tobacco glowed like a tiny volcano. Slowly removing the pipe from his mouth, he exhaled with a contented sigh.

  “You mustn’t worry yourself about the Natural,” he added, casually placing the pipe in his mouth and pressing his teeth against its stem like it was a well-used prop. For the next ten minutes, he talked non-stop about The Natural, pausing at times to re-light the pipe until he tired of it and put it aside.

  He explained that Jimmy the Natural was in his forties and lived with his elderly sister in a small stone hous
e off the lane leading to the cliffs. Jimmy and his sister were born there and had worked all their lives helping their parents who died in 1956. Now in her sixties Jimmy’s sister was like a mother to him. They had four goats, a dozen sheep and some chickens and their water supply was from a cool, crystal stream fed from the surrounding hillsides.

  From an early age, Jimmy was never allowed to stray far from the cottage because everyone knew he was not like other children. Patrick pointed to the small fields and hedgerows overlooking the cottage.

  “Sometimes, I would be working up there and I would hear a little yelp like a goat and realize it was little Jimmy but I would never see him. He had no words and communicated with gestures. Believe me, he’s smart and knows more about the land than any of us. He’s a great help to his sister and looks after their livestock. I never tell tourists about him because they wouldn’t be likely to see him. On the other hand, they’d be on the lookout for him and might take pictures of him if they spotted him. Their kids might even make fun of him as kids do when they come across somebody strange. He leaves his house only at night or before dawn. In the early mornings, he likes to sit on the cliffs and lower a hand-line into the surf with feathered hooks attached to it and a big weight at the end. He lets it sink into deep water under the cliffs and jerks it up and down in a jigging motion. That way he catches lots of mackerel and Pollack and sometimes big conger eels. During the day, his sister keeps him close to home. At night, he knows never to stray from the lane. That’s his boundary as it were.”