Trekking with a Magician

I stepped off the porch of the eco-lodge and my boot went straight into mud up to the ankle. Five llamas turned their heads at the same time, all of them staring at me like I was the entertainment.

"Don't laugh," I said, because I could hear Vic laughing behind me.

"I'm not laughing."

"You are absolutely laughing. I can feel it in the floorboards."

"I'm laughing at the mud, not at you," he said, coming around me with his long legs and stepping between the puddles like he'd rehearsed it. "The mud is funny. You are graceful."

I was twenty-eight years old, a Black flight attendant from Chicago, and I had married this man, a white magician with a laugh like a screen door, two years ago after watching him pull a dove out of a napkin in a Vegas hotel bar. I had flown emergency landings without spilling coffee. I could handle a llama pen in Bolivia.

"Which one is ours?" I asked, pointing at the whole line of them like I knew what I was doing.

"That one. The tan one with the bad attitude. His name is Rupert."

"You named a llama Rupert?"

"George named him. I just go along with it."

Vic looked good out here, I'll admit that. He was thirty, tall, wearing that stupid canvas hat he bought at the airport in Miami, and he had his sleeves rolled up as if he worked with his hands instead of typing code for a living and doing card tricks on the side. His side. Vic never could pick one passion. Magic at night, software during the day, and now the two things were getting stapled together in some merger I still only half understood.

I got my boot out of the mud and followed him toward the fence, and Rupert the llama let me get close and then spat at the ground near my feet.

"Okay, wow. Rude."

"He does that to everyone. It's a compliment."

"It is not a compliment."

"It's a llama compliment," Vic said, and he grinned at me over his shoulder, and there it was, that grin, the one that got me in the Vegas bar in the first place. I felt something warm in my chest and I pushed it down, because we were here for business. His business. I was going to be good at this week if it killed me.

* * *

The office at the lodge was one room with a desk, two laptops, a map of the salt flats pinned to the wall, and a kettle that looked older than both of us. Julie was there when we came in, sitting cross-legged on the desk chair with papers spread everywhere. She was twenty-seven, the owner's daughter, sharp-eyed and friendly, and she'd worked for the family trekking company since she was twenty-one, so she knew where every staple was.

"Okay, so this page is the valuation and this page is the part my dad cares about," she said, sliding a folder toward Vic. "George, did you print the schedule thing?"

George was at the far desk, thirty-four, operations manager, been with the company since he was twenty-two. He had the look of a man who did three things at once and worried about a fourth. "I printed it twice because the printer here eats pages," he said. "Also the wifi dropped again."

"It always drops," Julie said.

"Which is why it's funny that we're merging with a software company," George said, and he rubbed his eyes and laughed a little, nerves coming off him like heat off a road.

Vic sat down and read the folder, actually read it, and I stood by the window feeling useful the way a potted plant feels useful. I knew the deal in broad strokes. His startup did the booking and routing software, this company had the llamas and the guides and fifteen years of reputation, and together they were going to sell trekking trips to rich people who wanted a story to tell back home. Fine. Good. But listening to the four of them talk about integration and platform roadmaps made me want to go outside and be spat at by Rupert again.

I noticed a toolbox on the shelf by the door while they talked. Old, scarred up, the wood dark at the corners, and carved into the lid were two letters. VK.

"That's yours?" I asked Vic, pointing.

He looked up from the folder and his whole face changed. "Yeah. Yeah, that's my dad's. Was my dad's."

"How did it get to Bolivia?"

"I brought it. It travels with me." He got up and lifted it off the shelf like it weighed nothing and everything. "He gave it to me when I started doing magic, I was twenty-two. He carved the initials himself, which is funny, because his name was Victor too, so technically he carved his own initials on my toolbox."

"That's very sweet," Julie said, and she meant it.

"He did tricks at my birthday parties when I was little," Vic said, running his thumb over the letters. "Not good tricks. They were terrible. But he loved it, and then when he got sick I sort of picked it up to keep it going, and then I got good at it, and then I got obsessed." He set the box down on the desk next to the merger papers. "Anyway. It seemed right to bring it here."

Nobody said anything for a second, and then George cleared his throat and said, "Page six has an error," and we all went back to being business people. But I watched Vic tuck the toolbox under his arm when we left, and I thought about his dad, who I never met, who died the year before I came along. Two years married and there were still whole rooms in this man I hadn't walked into yet.

* * *

Late afternoon, the light went gold over the hills and Julie and George went off to argue about page six, and Vic and I walked out to the pen with a deck of cards in his pocket, because of course there was a deck of cards in his pocket.

"Watch this," he said. "This is for professionals only."

"Rupert is not a professional."

"He has natural ability."

Vic held the deck out to the llama, which sniffed it, which was already more of an audience reaction than some shows I've heard about. Then he fanned the cards and said, "Rupert, pick a card, any card," and Rupert, and I swear on my mother I am not making this up, Rupert leaned in and pulled one out with his lips.

Okay. That was a little impressive.

"Look at that," Vic said. "Is that your card?"

"He put it in his mouth, Vic. It's wet."

"Don't look at the card, look at the magician."

"He ate your force card. That's the worst review you've ever gotten."

Rupert snorted, this big wet dismissive sound, and turned his head away, and Vic clutched his chest like he'd been shot.

"Critic," he said to the llama. "Tough room. This is why I do corporate events."

And I laughed, really laughed, and something in me tipped over. It was the grin, and the stupid hat, and the toolbox with his dad's initials sitting back at the lodge, and four days of travel and no sleep, all of it at once. I stepped over a puddle on purpose this time and got up close to him.

"Do the one where the card ends up in my pocket," I said. "Do it right now and I'll pretend I don't know how it's done."

"You do know how it's done."

"I don't, actually. I've never once figured it out and it drives me crazy."

"That," Vic said, shuffling the deck, "is the nicest thing you've said to me all week."

He did the trick. He did it slow, with commentary, making fun of his own hands, and the card ended up in my jacket pocket anyway, and I grabbed his arm and said a word I'm not allowed to say on an airplane.

"How. Vic. How."

"Trade secret."

"I married you. I'm entitled to the trade secrets."

"You married me for the secrets?" He plucked the card out of my pocket and showed it to Rupert, who was not interested. "Then you married the wrong magician, babe. The secrets are the least valuable thing I own."

"Well, they're up there," I said, and he kissed me, quick, right there in the llama pen, and Rupert turned his whole body around like he was embarrassed for us.

* * *

Next morning there was a briefing in the lodge office, which meant six people and a map of the salt flats and the old kettle going the whole time. Julie stood at the map with a pointer stick, and I have to say, she ran that room like she'd been born in it. Which, at twenty-seven, running her family's company since she was twenty-one, maybe she was.

"Okay, so, tomorrow we go out. It's the demo trek, the one we're going to photograph and put in all the merger materials, so everyone smile like you're having the time of your life." She tapped the map. "We leave here at six, we go up this ridge, which is easy, then down into this valley, which is also easy, then we lunch at the spring. After lunch it gets real. This switchback section here, everybody stays single file, nobody wanders, and George goes first with the lead llama."

"Nobody wanders," George said, from the corner with his coffee. "Last year a client wandered. We found him two hours later. He was fine. He had adopted a goat."

"That's not funny, George."

"It's a little funny."

Julie ignored him. "Four llamas, four handlers. Vic, you're with me, we carry the gear with the cameras. Kyla, you can ride in the middle with a guide or you can walk, whatever you like."

And here is where my mouth did a thing my brain had not approved. Because I had spent four days feeling like the potted plant, and I was tired of it, and my husband was about to become half of a company, and some stubborn wire in me said, not today.

"I'll take a llama," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"Lead one. Handle one. Whatever the word is."

"Are you sure?" Julie said, careful, the way you talk to someone who just said they can swim right before a lake crossing. "They can be, uh. Opinionated."

"Rupert," said George.

"Absolutely not Rupert," said Julie.

"No, I want Rupert," I said, and God knows why. Pride. Pure stupid pride. "I've met Rupert. We have history. He spat on me and I forgave him, that's a bond."

"Kyla," Vic said, low, next to my ear. "You've never handled a llama."

"And you'd never run a startup and now you have two. People learn." I turned to Julie. "Brief me. Treat me like staff."

Julie looked at her father's empty chair, like she wanted backup, and then decided she was the backup. "Okay. Okay. Rope goes here in your left hand, never wrap it around anything attached to you, he pulls, you let rope slide, you do not win a pulling contest with two hundred pounds of llama. He stops, you stop. He does this thing with his ears back, that's not a mood, that's just his face. And you talk to him. They like a voice."

"She'll have a voice," Vic said. "She's from Chicago. She has several."

"I'm giving her the good rope," George said, getting up, and I understood that was the nicest thing this man knew how to say.

That night Vic lay next to me in the narrow lodge bed and said, "You don't have to prove anything, you know. To them or to me."

"I know."

"You're already, and I want to be careful how I put this, the most interesting person in every airport you walk through."

"That's the job, Vic. I literally work there."

"Fine. Second most interesting."

"Better."

"But tomorrow," he said, and I could hear him grinning in the dark, "if Rupert eats your braid, I get to say I told you so at the wedding anniversary."

"Go to sleep, magician."

* * *

Six a.m. came ugly and cold, and the llamas came uglier. There were four of them plus Rupert, and George did some kind of inspection ritual over each one like a man tucking in children, and then Julie handed me Rupert's rope and said, "Left hand. Talk to him. Good luck," in the tone of a woman handing over a live grenade.

The first hour was actually fine. The ridge was easy like she promised, the light came up over the hills in this slow pink way that made even me stop being bitter about the hour, and Rupert walked along in front of me like a gentleman. I talked to him the whole time, told him about Chicago, about the time I deadheaded a flight to Santiago with a broken coffee pot, about my sister's dog. He did not care. He also did not object. I counted it a friendship.

Then we came down into the valley and Rupert found his calling, which was stopping.

He'd just plant. Mid-stride, full stop, neck out, done. I'd give the rope a little pull like Julie showed me and he'd lean into it, this great patient ton of stubbornness, and I'd say, "Rupert. Rupert, please. People are watching."