Whirlwind

by David Klass

  My mouth opens and the river rushes in. I pop up, choking. That’s two. The next one will finish me.

  Is a voice in the distance shouting my name? I manage one last kick and then I sink down a third and final time.

  Blackness edges in on the fringes of my consciousness, like a curtain slowly being drawn across a lighted stage.

  I’m just barely aware of a shape diving toward me. Is it the freshwater killer whale, coming back for a bite?

  Hands grab me. Strong legs kick us to the surface.

  Eko tows me to the bank. She opens my mouth, turns my head to the side, and tries to breathe life into me.

  I flash in and out as she pinches my nose closed and gives me mouth-to-mouth. It’s no use. I can’t breathe the oxygen she’s trying to give me.

  Suddenly I go into spasm, kicking and gagging.

  Eko turns me on my side as water streams out my mouth. Finally it’s all gone, and I can gasp in air again.

  She looks down at me, hands on her hips. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “P.J.,” I gasp.

  “Even if she survived the falls, how could you ever hope to find her? You could never make it back that far upriver in your condition. You barely made it fifty feet.”

  I nod and gasp out, “Had to try. Would have gone farther. Hit a whale. Do better next time.”

  Eko’s eyes remain furious, but something else kindles in them. Grudging admiration. “It was a pirarucu,” she says softly. “The largest freshwater fish in the world. They breathe air, but they’re not whales. They’re almost extinct, but you managed to find a pretty good specimen.”

  I look right back into those angry black eyes. “P.J.,” I whisper. “The truth.”

  Eko nods slowly. “Okay. I believe your girlfriend is still alive. But you can’t go back and try to save her. The more you search for her, Jack, the more you will make her death a certainty. In fact, the only way you can possibly help her is to come with me.”

  63

  In Eko’s canoe, drifting downriver, listening to explanations I don’t want to believe.

  “The only reason the Dark Lord let you go is because he was hoping you’d lead him to Kidah,” she tells me. “When you turned toward the city, and he saw that you were heading out of the forest, he immediately ordered your death. His men are scouring the rain forest now, searching for you. It was their mistake that you survived the ambush. The colonel is not tolerant of mistakes.”

  “If they don’t find me, he’ll kill them?”

  “Without a doubt,” Eko agrees. “That’s why the search for you has become so intense.” She has a talent for matter-of-factly breaking bad news. “They’re scanning the forest with low-flying drones, and they’re paying thousands of natives to fan out in canoes. Of course, they’re also searching for the other members of your party who survived the ambush, and they’re always on the lookout for Kidah, but the primary focus now is you.”

  “So if I go back and search for P.J., I’ll be sailing right into their hands?”

  “And if you should find her, or even come close, you’ll just be drawing more danger upon her.”

  Eko’s fingers touch my wrist. She looks into my eyes. “You asked for the truth, Jack—see if you can handle it. The more you seek her out, the more danger you bring to her. Your love for her and your desire to be with her can only bring her pain, suffering, and ultimately death. That is the sad irony of your relationship with Peggy Jane Peters.”

  “P.J.,” I correct her sharply.

  “This is not her struggle. If you really love her, let her go. She is not of your world.”

  I yank my wrist free. “She and I grew up together. You’re the one who’s not of my world. And I think maybe you didn’t save P.J. because you’re jealous of her.”

  Eko looks surprised. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “We’re speaking the truth,” I remind her. “Can’t you handle it, Eko?”

  “I’m not some lovesick teenager. I’m on a mission to save the earth.”

  “You’re also a woman, and a prophecy said we were going to be married.”

  Eko shrugs. “What will be, will be. The point is that the colonel will hunt for you till he finds you, and he’s also looking for P.J. You can’t run away or even hide from him for very long, and neither can your girlfriend.”

  “She’s with a Korubo chief who knows the forest.”

  “And I’m sure he’s done the smart thing and abandoned the canoes,” Eko tells me. “It’s much easier for the colonel’s men to spot people who are out on rivers, where they can be seen from the air. If the chief leads P.J. and the others deep into the forest, and they take refuge with a tribe, they can hide out for a little while.”

  “Then why didn’t we abandon our canoe?” I ask.

  Eko hesitates a moment, and when she answers, her voice rings with a zeal that comes from absolute faith. I remind myself that she is a priestess, and has dedicated her life to a cause. “This canoe is the only possible chance of getting where we need to go,” she whispers.

  “And where is that?”

  “We must find the Mysterious Kidah,” she declares.

  I recall what Gisco told me about him in the balloon. The greatest genius of the future, who apparently decided to play hide-and-seek just when all the cosmic chips were put out on the table. “What good will that do? If he’s really so powerful, and he’s cut and run, that’s his choice. We’ll never flush him out. End of story.”

  “We can’t let the story end that way. We need to find out why he disappeared, and help him, and get him to lead us. He alone can kill the colonel. If he does, he’ll save my future world. And at the same time, you and”—she hesitates—“P.J. will no longer have anything to fear. So we have a common cause: find Kidah. Help him defeat the Colonel. It’s the last, best chance for all of us.”

  I mull it over. She may well be right, but I don’t want to leave P.J. again and go off on some wild-goose chase, or rather wild-wizard chase. “When the colonel released me, he warned me that if I ever helped the Dannites or searched for Kidah, he’d track me down and make me pay.”

  “He’ll do that anyway,” Eko assures me. “He already tried to kill you at the falls.”

  “I hate to provide him with any more incentives.”

  “His warnings to you about Kidah should be all the proof you need that this is his only weak point, and therefore the only chance we have.”

  I sort of know what she means. I remember how desperate the colonel was to learn of Kidah’s whereabouts. When he demanded information about the missing sorcerer from me, fear rang in his voice. I felt it then, above the candirú pit, and I know it now: this fiend from the future, who is not shy about wiping out rain forests and changing the destiny of entire worlds, is scared of a little lost wizard.

  “Okay,” I say finally. “I accept that it’s our only chance. I won’t try to escape again.” I hesitate and then promise, reluctantly, “I’ll go with you, and do what I can to help.”

  Eko gives me a tiny smile and we resume paddling.

  After a time, I add, “And by the way, Eko, for what it’s worth, thanks for saving my life.”

  “Twice,” she reminds me. “You’re welcome.”

  64

  Deeper, ever deeper into the most unmapped, unexplored section of the Amazon.

  No drones with DNA scanners fly overhead, and even if they did, they would never spot us here. We are paddling through a flooded forest. The winding labyrinth of watery channels is shielded from the air by an impenetrable curtain of interlaced branches. Sunlight itself can’t pierce the leaf cover—what filters down to us is a faint greenish luminescence that imbues every animal, plant, and rock with a cartoonish emerald glow.

  No dugout canoes with paid native spies pass near us—we haven’t seen any evidence of other humans in days. No footprints. No native huts. No smoke from distant fires.

  It feels like we’ve entered a prehistoric forest, and are not only pad
dling farther and farther from civilization but also backward in time, to an untouched wilderness in a bygone era before man started to muck the planet up. There are no Cessnas droning low overhead searching for mahogany, or logging trucks rumbling down freshly hacked forest trails. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see a pterodactyl plane down from the trees, or a stegosaurus rumble out of the underbrush with its spiked tail swinging.

  A few lines of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” come to me as I paddle:

  This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight …

  But of course I’m not seeing pines and hemlocks. I’m seeing spiny-trunked pupunhas and towering maparajubas. They are bearded with moss like the pines and hemlocks in Longfellow’s poem, but they’re also mustached with lichen and sideburned with fungus. Stringy vines hang down from them like unruly hair, and woody lianas dangle like thick, sloppily tied hippie braids.

  The trees’ green garments are indistinct not only in the twilight, but all day long in this world of low light. They include ferns with enormous fronds that cloak the trees’ massive root systems, and all manner of clinging epiphytes that gird the trunks like armor or tart them up like flowery lingerie.

  Eko has mastered the habits of every giant tree and gnomish shrub in this forest primeval. She uses her knowledge to nurse me, feed me, and protect me while I slowly recover. It feels strange to have to rely for the basic necessities of life on a woman so soon after another young woman completely depended on me.

  There Eko is, in the soft dawn light, spearing a fish for me to eat even though she’s a strict vegetarian. And there, at noon, a knife in her mouth, as she scales a palm to cut fruit for our lunch. And at night, lighting a fire to keep us warm and then lying next to me. “Try to sleep, Jack. Those screams are far away.”

  “But they sound so close, Eko … and so human.”

  “A snake is eating a monkey. The monkey’s friends are protesting from the high branches, but there’s nothing they can do. Now it’s over. They’ve swung away to mourn him. Close your eyes. We’re safe here. I’ll sing to you.”

  I feel guilty being with her after all the promises I made to P.J. by the fireside. But it’s obvious I wouldn’t last long in this predator-filled hothouse without Eko’s knowledge and vigilance.

  As I get stronger, and start to be able to paddle without pain, and swim, and even climb trees, she uses her forest savvy to protect me from my own self-destruction.

  “Careful, Jack,” she warns as I prepare to dive off our canoe headfirst.

  “Don’t worry, I see that big black rock.”

  “That’s not a rock,” she informs me. “It’s a giant freshwater electric eel.”

  “You’re kidding. I don’t see any eyes.”

  “They’re almost blind. They sense movement by sending out low-level electric fields. When they locate prey, they increase the voltage. They have enough juice to kill caimans.”

  A few hours later, I find a shallow pond that seems perfect for learning to spearfish. As I stalk a fish with visions of cooking it on a spit, Eko shouts that I should get out of the water.

  I reluctantly let my lunch swim away and clamber up the bank. “Now what? Was it poisonous?”

  “No,” Eko tells me, “it would have made a delicious lunch. And then you would have, too. See those flashes of red?”

  I follow the direction of her finger and peer down at a far corner of the pond. “What are they?”

  “A school of red-bellied piranhas. The most dangerous members of the piranha family. And it’s not known for being a warm and cuddly family.”

  I spot dozens of them, small and barely moving. It looks like nap time at the piranha kindergarten. “I read that piranhas rarely attack humans,” I tell her.

  “True for most of the year,” Eko agrees. “They’ve got easier things to eat. But when the forest floods and then starts to dry out, they get trapped in ponds like this. As the food thins, they get hungrier and hungrier. If you’d caught that fish and spilled its blood, they’d have been onto you in a heartbeat. Their teeth are like razors—a school that size can strip a bone clean in seconds.”

  Eko’s lessons pay off. Pretty soon I am spearfishing in the right pools, and diving off the canoe at safe moments. I still feel the urgency of our mission, and I worry constantly about P.J., but I also start to notice a subtle change in the way I think about the rain forest.

  It stops being an alien and terrifying place, filled with living land mines. Instead, I begin to savor its unique beauty. And with that change, almost despite myself, I start enjoying my time with Eko.

  65

  Is she flirting with me, or is our closeness just a byproduct of sharing a dangerous mission through breathtaking terrain? Is it part of Eko’s agenda to design moments when we feel intimate, or is the attraction mutual, and am I as much to blame as she is? It’s hard to tell, but I can’t deny that it’s happening.

  It happens when I see her emerging from her morning swim, without a shred of clothing or self-consciousness. She smiles at me and I wave back, and try not to stare at her.

  It happens at noon when we walk through thick brush and she thinks I might have picked up tiny ticks. She has to check me for them, which involves running her fingers over my scalp, and then sifting them through my body hair.

  At night, by the fire, we sleep near each other. We started doing this when I was helpless, and she had to protect me. As I got stronger, we never stopped. Maybe it makes tactical sense for us to be so close—we can guard each other and share information about snake hisses and growls from the underbrush. Or maybe we like exchanging whispers and feeling the warmth from each other’s bodies. There’s probably truth in both explanations.

  Whatever’s happening, I struggle valiantly against it, but I can’t completely prevent it.

  They’re such very different women. It made me feel manly to come to P.J.’s rescue, to find her and win her back and start leading her out of the rain forest. And to be fair to her, P.J.’s hardly a shrinking violet.

  But Eko is superior to me in surmounting just about every challenge we meet. She’s braver than I am, stronger, too, and a far better swimmer. She radiates a mature, athletic sexiness and an unspoken confidence that I will come to my senses and we will end up together.

  As we spend long hours in each other’s company, the temptations become greater and my defenses start to weaken.

  One late afternoon, as we prepare to make camp, Eko suddenly stops moving on a rocky bluff above a freshwater lagoon. She turns her head and stands motionless, all her senses on high alert. I watch her face and try to figure out what dangerous predator’s scent she’s just picked up. Is a herd of peccaries about to burst from the bush, tusks gleaming as they charge?

  Then Eko does something she almost never does—she smiles. It’s not a small, guarded smile either. She flashes a big, delighted grin that lights up her usually serious face. “Come,” she says, “time for a swim.”

  “But we have to build a sleeping platform and finish getting the wood for the fire before it gets dark …”

  Eko grabs the branches I was collecting and tosses them into the water. “We can do that later,” she says. “Now I want to introduce you to some friends.”

  I start to ask what she’s talking about, and the next thing I know she’s pushed me off the cliff and dived in after me. I surface just as she hits the water. “What the heck was that about, and who are your friends … ?”

  My question dies on my lips as Eko takes off in flight. She soars two, three, four feet in the air, rising above the dark lagoon. Even Eko can’t jump that high, especially from shoulder-deep water. Then I see that she’s getting a lift, on the back of a bright pink dolphin!

  The dolphin must weigh several hundred pounds, but it swims with grace and rubberlike flexibility. I see that it has a hump on its back instead of a dorsal fin. Its head pivots all the way around
to look down at me, and it smiles. Eko grins, too, sharing a joke at my expense.

  I feel something moving under me. Another pink dolphin! It gets me in the position it wants, and then rises with me on its back. I feel myself being launched out of the lagoon, and suddenly I’m flying next to Eko! We both laugh out loud at the wonderment of the moment.

  We spend half an hour swimming with the two pink dolphins in the purple twilight of the Amazon evening. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re on a kind of enchanted double date. The dolphins have long beaks, friendly faces, and silky-smooth skin. They’re clearly devoted to each other, and they also love Eko, who can communicate with them telepathically.

  I can’t find their wavelength, but it doesn’t take telepathy to figure out that they’re every bit as smart as we are, not to mention fun-loving and mischievous.

  As the sun starts to sink, one of them tugs my shorts off and swims away with them. I cover up and move into deeper water as my shorts are deposited by dolphin beak on a branch of a distant floating tree. “Eko, did you tell him to do that?”

  “They’re naked and I’m naked, so it seems only fair.”

  “Fair to who?”

  “Stop asking so many questions!” She laughs and then springs forward and dunks me.

  It’s hard to win a dunk fight with a martial arts expert, but I feint right, go left, and dunk her right back. In a second we’re laughing and wrestling with each other, all knotted up in a jujitsu hold that could lead to strangulation or impregnation if it’s pushed much farther.

  I didn’t plan it, but innocent fun changes into something much more serious. In a heartbeat we’re locked together, looking into each other’s eyes. Our heads incline. Our lips brush …

  With a tremendous effort I break away and swim off underwater. Eko doesn’t chase me.

  I stay away for a few long minutes, retrieve my shorts, and get my body back under control. When I swim back we resume the fun and games with our pink humpbacked friends, and try to pretend that nothing happened.