Click here to read the previous post.
In San Jose my friend Nando is waiting at the gate. When I ask him how he got past security, he winks at me and touches his nose. He knows San Jose and takes us to a nice local place near the airport while we wait for Nature Air’s puddle-jumper to take us all to Puerto Jimenez. In the back of the taxi, he treats us Peruvian flake, which he says comes through Panama.
While we’re drinking cerveza and waiting for some food, Emma takes off and returns five minutes later with a pair of scissors. How she’d do that? She doesn’t even speak Spanish. Excusing herself, Emma glides off to the ladies room and and every man in the place is watching her. She soon returns with the bleached-out, fried ends of her hair cut off. A bad beauty salon experience in New Mexico had left her hair like cotton candy, which is why we called her Emma Frost. But now light honey, straight hair fans out around her face. She twirls around in her light white shift and dirty white little sandals.
And she looks delectable. Her eyes gleam, taking in the sun and road, the trees, and pastel painted little square buildings. The restaurant’s like an upscale, big-windowed, round, low pancake house. I pull out her chair, thinking, yeah, good enough to eat or maybe better hold by the wings and keep in a jar. Right, I know: evil thought. No keeping Emma in a jar. No keeping her until she’s anxious and stifled and I start to hate her. Not this time.
A local kid run in and says Nature Air is leaving in ten minutes. Emma must be pretty baked because she asks how many people fit in the bus.
“Depends how much you weigh, Emma,” says Nando. “It holds a maximum of six. That’s six Americans or eight Costa Ricans. But you and Scott are both skinny. So I don’t know. But we better run before we miss it. The bus, that is.” He winks at me.
The propellers have started already and I wonder if Emma notices. But we enter through the back and the plane is so small and boxy, I guess it could be a bus. A flying bus. Emma says she hopes she doesn’t get carsick.
She can’t get her seatbelt to fasten and come to think of it, the plane does look like a worn out van: three long seats, a few missing belts. When we pick up speed and it lifts off the runway, she startles, rising from her seat. “Oh! Wait! What?”
Nando and I are cracking up. Nando, in front, turns around and asks Emma, “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of death?”
The girl is too cool. Sweet, little Emma crosses her perfect, young legs, raises her chin, and shakes her head. “Afraid of death? Not unduly.”
(Click here to read the next episode.)
