Jungle Men

Jacob was homesick, but I was far from it. Eighteen years of my life had been spent hopping around from one home to the next and Brazil was just one more to add to the list. Out here in the jungles, building up little huts for the poor, I could really breathe even if the air was water and stunk of monkeys. Here, I was not a boy—I was a man.

So when I saw Jacob sniffling—like he did every night— by a fenced, tilled yard and a dilapidated hut, I lost my patience. With one swift swoop of my arms, I pushed him through the fence, squashing several vegetables that became permanent green and yellow stains on his pants. His jaw dropped to the ground and his glasses went askew, looking like some of the nerds I used to harass at high school.

“We’re not boys anymore,” I shouted. “We’re men. Eighteen-year-old men don’t get homesick! They don’t cry either! Men look it straight in the eye and they say, ‘What?’”

“What?”

“What! That’s what they say. When my granddaddy learned he was going to be fighting the Germans, what did he say—‘What?’ When he marched right up to the front line with nothing but seven bullets, what did he say—‘What?’ Then when he looked down the nose of that shiny, German rifle just before he got shot, what were his final words? ‘What?’That’s what being a man is, Jacob. We stand up, look our homesickness in the face and say--?”

“What!”

As I helped him up, we beamed at one another—men, brothers, united and steadfast once again in our purpose to build a school for poor Brazilian children. My father had always recited that speech when I was afraid of the bunny monsters under my bed, but never knew it would come in handy.

Our excitement ceased when the squeaky door of the hut flew open and banged against the side, almost leveling the entire abode. Standing in the doorway was the wildest jungle woman I had ever seen. Black and white markings tattooed her face, making her look like some disfigured zebra. Wild bushy black hair contained leaves, twigs, and even whole branches, making it stand on end. In her hand was a long jagged stick with three coconuts attached.  Her sunken, red and yellow eyes stared at us in a glare that meant death. Jacob’s sniffling returned and he cowered, but could not take his eyes off the witch woman.

“Sam,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “Do something.”

There was only one thing to do. This woman was fear, itself. So I stepped forward right into the vegetables we had accidentally trampled and I said, “What?” 

I didn’t expect her to lash out at me like a rabid tiger from a cage, shrieking some devil language at the top of her lungs, madly waving the stick above her head and dribbling foam from her mouth. Jacob and I were the manliest men anyone ever saw because we ran out of her vegetable patch so fast someone would have thought we were superheroes from those comic books. We managed to outrun the witch woman, but her screams and curses still pursued us into our very beds.

In fact, they still haunt us today. I believe it was a curse she put on me—half of it was her revenge for ruining her plants and half of it was my granddaddy’s for running like a coward. Several years later, I ended up bald and the father of five daughters.