Lesson Three Writing Assignment

The Peruvian rainy season had started early this year, and rain had been falling nearly non-stop for more than a week. This part of the upper Amazon basin was starting to flood, and the Rio Napo had already risen some three feet. For the residents of Santo Diablo, perched on the river’s banks, some four hundred miles up-river from Iquitos, months of solitude were ending. An unregistered collection of twenty plus slapped together dwellings, the camp provided a base for mineral prospecting and was isolated most of the dry season.

A sign, sprayed freehand, in red paint, on one of the camps makeshift building’s declared “ Myra’s Bar ” to interested souls. Inside, rain drumming relentlessly on the leaky corrugated metal roof threatened to overwhelm a boom-box blaring salsa music. Alone at one end of the bar, Will studied his empty beer bottle. I’m getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of life, he thought. Maybe I’ll make this my last venture into wildcat engineering. Maybe I should find a place for myself and stay put. Maybe I should get a good woman. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Life was a lot of maybes lately, it occurred to him.

Will would never see sixty again, and a hard life was beginning to take its toll. More and more often, these last few years, he pondered settling down. Right now, the thought of a comfortable woman, regular meals and decent rum seemed mighty appealing.

Sighing, he let his gaze move to the woman washing glasses in a pail of dirty soap water at the other end of the forty-foot long plywood bar. From beneath graying brows, his blue green eyes took in the soiled spandex that mercifully covered much, but not enough, of her short thick body. They should pass a law against fat women wearing Spandex, he mused.

A mosquito settled on Will’s tanned forearm and immediately set about drawing blood. He had been introduced to jungles at age nineteen when he was drafted into the U.S.Marine Corps to serve in the Viet Nam war. Since then he had been in and out of jungles all over the world surviving Malaria and several bouts of Dengue. Mosquitos came with the territory, like leaches and jungle rot, and he watched, in a detached sort of way as the tiny insect swelled, then popped it like a small cherry.

A trickle of sweat rolled down his back and was absorbed by an already damp t-shirt. Sliding his hard, compact body off the rickety bar stool he headed toward what passed for a men’s room. Myra’s, as Santo Diablo’s only bar, had a cornered market. Management knew it, and amenities were few. Then again, clients here weren’t overly demanding. Avoiding puddles on the dirt floor he crossed to the one room structure's far corner, stepped behind a four-foot high piece of corrugated metal nailed vertically to two rotten planks driven into the ground. Holding his breath against the stench, and paying attention to where he placed his sandaled feet, he unzipped his faded jeans and relieved himself into a rusted ten-inch diameter pipe protruding at an angle from the corner.

Returning to his bar stool, he noted two men enter through the bar's squeaky swinging doors. He had seen both before. They were part of a six-man crew who's digs were somewhere up river toward the Yasuni National Park. After a few words with the fat lady, Sal, the older of the two, headed in Will's direction, his rain poncho dripping water.

At the other end of the bar, the fat lady pulled two label-less brown glass bottles from a large ice filled trashcan. Then she too headed in Will’s direction.

The fat woman and Sal arrived at about the same time. Without a word she set both bottles on the rough plywood in front of Will and waited. Will dug damp bills from his pocket and paid her. Only then did she extract a bottle opener from between her ample bosoms where it hung on a cord. After opening the bottles, she silently turned and waddled back down the bar to pour the younger of the two newcomers a shot of cheap Peruvian Pisco.

“Got boat two days,” Sal stated flatly in broken English grabbing one of the beers.

“Down?” Will asked hopefully.

Sal nodded. “Hundred fifty U.S., bring own food.”

Without hesitation Will extended his hand and the two men shook. Business concluded, Sal took his beer and walked back down the bar.

Might manage to get back down-river to Iquitos in a few days if the rains held, and Iquitos was a significant improvement over Santo Diablo. But then almost anything was better than here, reflected Will.

Might even wrangle a job on a ship and get as far as Manus by the end of the month, he smiled to himself. Manus was in Brasil and almost a thousand miles down the Amazon from Iquitos.

In his other life Will was a merchant seaman and licensed as Chief Mate Unlimited by Panama, the United States and Liberia. Finding work shouldn't be too difficult, he thought as he nursed his beer.