Disappearance of armour
I lost my good-luck travel necklace while loading the floatplane for a hunt. I took it down from a hook over my desk, with plans to fasten it around my neck as I walked the length of the dock to get to the truck and retrieve a box of 30-aught shells. When I got back to the boat, no necklace.
Kyle, who rents a room the tugboat, could only hold one passenger in his Super Cub. Xander loaded in there, giddy with excitement – all of us juiced on the thrill of the hunt. Kyle untied and off they went – engine banging as the plane lifted over O’Connell Bridge with our packs and rifles. He would come back and fetch me.
Meanwhile I retraced my steps, searched the truck, the boat, and finally put a notice on the board at the work ramp.
“Leather braided necklace with bone amulet. If found please call –.”
I found the necklace in Guatemala, fifteen years earlier. A woman sat crosslegged in Antigua’s central square, her jewelry arranged on a colorful blanket before her. In the same way you pick out a duck when firing into a flock, I fastened on that necklace. Thin leather braided into stiff square stock, a flecked bone in the shape of a cement truck drum hanging in its center. It looked more like cord than string.
I reached for it, but the woman hissed, shook her head and wagged her finger. Older, pretty, with wispy graying hair, she flashed her fingers for the number of quetzals she required. I handed her the money. She counted it and nodded. Then she lifted the necklace, came around the blanket, held my cheeks and back of my neck with her hands, and kissed me deeply.
“To make you safe for viaje,” she said. And she put it around me. The bone amulet fit perfectly the notch the sternum meets the bottom of my neck – filling it, shielding it, protecting it.
From that day onward, whenever I traveled, I wore the necklace. I wouldn’t fly without it. My girlfriend gave me a hard time. At the age of 31, it seemed corny.
But its weight calmed me. Pulling the knot through the woven loop, letting its weight fall around the base of the neck, the bone slipping into that notch – I became deeply superstitious. And so I was as I stood there, racking my brain for any other place I might have put the damn thing. Not wanting to step into that floatplane, to embark on a deer hunt, without it.
I had plans to give the necklace to my firstborn. On her first substantial trip – to Africa, Kentucky, New York – who knows. And for a good long while, holding onto the gunwales, watching for Kyle’s yellow plane to appear out of the north, I was sad, sad, sad.
And there he was, dropping out of the sky, green and red light marking starboard and port, a mosquito against the overcast sky. I knew Xander, labrador that he is, would be panting, eager to get into the country. He probably was up there glassing the alpine.
Kyle taxied up to the boat. Taking a breath Iclimbed down, balanced on a pontoon, and hoisted myself into the small backseat. I fastened on the phones, adjusted the mic, and clicked in the shoulder belts.
Waves slapped the bottom of the pontoons as we accelerated, surface tension lessening as Kyle stick upped, then we were weightless, our two bodies seated over a flying engine. I watched the cords move to either side of me as he made adjustments. “Throttle” written in black marker beneath a blue wooden lever to my left. It seemed to primitive.
Out we flew, slicing between the saddle connecting Harbor Mountain and Gavan Hill, Kyle slowing down, anticipating the updraft. Past Starrigavan, seemingly through a portal, to Cold Storage Lake – so-called because the town used to gather ice there.
I filmed our approach. As we passed over a waterfall, Kyle pointed out a white mound in the muskeg below us.
“Floatplane crash.”
And so it was. I could see the frames of the windows, the walls caved in by time. I thought of Philadelphia, where I had come from, and, briefly, considered the danger of travel, and the meaning of home.
As our pontoons touched down, the mountain rising in front of us, keystoning of the alpine we would hike in search of blacktail deer, I caught sight of the necklace again – attached to my mirror as I drove, in Africa at the back of the bus, bouncing against my collarbone hitchhiking in Honduras, waiting for a Greyhound in Billings Montana. And then we got out of the plane and went hunting.
