“I’m not either,” I heard myself say in a low, warning voice. “But I’ll do you worse than that arm if you get near her.”
He held the gun to his chest. Black, with a long nose and a sleek handle, it looked surreal to me; I had never seen an unholstered gun up close before. His finger was to the side of the trigger. He was shuddering. “Been tracking you for days. But I just want to talk to her.”
I reached up to catch hold of the weapon, but Estrada bolted away and headed toward Yolanda. She turned and dragged her feet through the mud in a stumbling race to the center of the clearing, with Estrada close behind. Manuel staggered after them until he reached a hard bank shelving down to the bare patch where Estrada and Yolanda stood, unsteadily.
“I’m going to hurt you,” she promised Estrada. She was grappling at her back again, to get hold of her machete. “I swear to God I won’t let you walk away from here.” She got the blade loose and held it in her hands.
“Why did your father have to set off that bomb?” Estrada asked. “That’s what I want you to tell me.”
“Because you’re a murderer!”
“Not before he got hold of me.”
They stood about ten feet away from each other in the center of the glade, surrounded by fog and streaked by the eerie light. I stared at them, moving my mouth but not making any noise. They both started violently. As if mirror images of each other, they threw their arms up and looked down at their feet.
“Yolanda!” Manuel yelled. “Don’t move!”
From where Erik and I stood in the bog, about fifty feet away from Yolanda, Estrada, and my father, we couldn’t see what was the matter at first. The sedge glittered all around us as if it were scattered with gold flecks. Some of it, disturbed by footsteps, stuck up in peaks like the whipped whites of eggs. It was only when we continued to stare at Yolanda and Estrada and saw the mud crawling up their legs at an alarming rate that we realized that they had blundered into quicksand.
Both of them began struggling to reach the opposite sides of the pit, but the sand had already reached the middle of their thighs. Then their hips.
“I’m going to sink,” Yolanda said. She was weighed down by her rucksack, and still held her blade in the air. “Lola, I’m going to drown.”
“No, you’re not!”
Erik and I were still on the edge on the swamp.
“We have to help them,” I said.
He nodded.”Let’s go.”
“Don’t come over here!” she screamed, and threw her machete onto the bank.
“She’s right,” Manuel said. “Stay put! This place is full of pits.”
Erik and I took one look at each other and began to crawl over to where they were.
“Move, move, move,” I shouted. “She might only have a few minutes!”
Ahead of us, Estrada was batting off the muck with his free injured hand; he did not let go of his gun.
“Take off your pack!” my father yelled, from his place on the bank.
Yolanda shrugged off her pack and placed it on the mud next to her, while Estrada struggled in the sand, sinking rapidly. The gun fell from his hand as he tried to swim and claw his way out of the bog; it landed on the top of the sand and glinted there, half submerging into the thick matter.
Estrada and Yolanda, both belly-deep, stared at each other across the bag; then they looked down at the weapon between them.
“That would make things easy, wouldn’t it?” Estrada asked in a rasping voice.
“Oh, I’ll make it easy,” she answered. “I know what you’ve done!”
“Yolanda, just get out of there!” I yelled.
Manuel was sweating terribly, his face pale. He leaned down on the bank, threw off his backpack, and snatched his hammock out of it.
Yolanda and Estrada both began to lunge forward toward the gun, whose handle was sticking out of the sludge. Their movements were impossibly slow. Every fierce push through the sand only moved them forward a few millimeters—and deeper toward the center of the pit. Their arms shot forward in frantic gestures, but they remained nearly immobile except for their constant push downward into the quicksand. The backpack next to Yolanda sank into the bog and disappeared.
“Yolanda, stay put!” Erik yelled. “You’re sinking faster!”
But she continued to push as hard as she could; their hands slapped at the muck that surrounded the gun handle. And then Yolanda’s hand closed in on the weapon, and she pulled it up; it was dripping with the grainy stuff. She pointed it at Estrada’s head, and he looked at her and winced. He closed his eyes.
She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Its chambers were clogged with muck.
“Aaahhhhhh,” Estrada cried. He opened his eyes, and his scar was as white as paper. “Get out if you can. I’ll die here, anyway.”
The quicksand was nearly up to the soldier’s chest. Yolanda was stomach deep and gasping.
“Were you going to kill me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. His eyes were red, but dry now.
“Yolanda, stop talking and stay still,” Manuel said. Erik and I were dragging ourselves through the mud and had nearly reached the bank where my father crouched. From my vantage, I could see that Manuel was shaking very badly, so that he had difficulty controlling his head and his arms. His hands and his thighs spasmed, and he stretched his face into a painful smile. His knees bent, and he sank into the mud, throwing his pack to the side. Squatting down, he began to curse at himself for his cowardice in a voice I could barely hear, but what I could make out contained language I had never known him to use. Yolanda didn’t say anything. Neither did Erik and I as we scratched our way over the swamp. And then, still on the ground, Manuel mastered himself with a great effort, crying and swearing as he began to unfold the entire hammock. He sounded strange and terrible, and his face distorted. But he put his hands on the ground and pushed himself up. He stood on his feet. Then he flung the hammock over to where Yolanda half reclined in the quicksand, baring her teeth in a grimace.
“Grab it!”Manuel yelled.
As Erik and I reached Manuel, he threw the hammock a second time, and missed. He was not shaking anymore. He threw it again. Her arms lay on top of the fen, grasping with slipping fingers at the macramé loops while the quicksand slithered up and clutched at her back. Her lips stretched wide, and her jaw moved silently.
“Work harder!” Erik yelled.
She linked her finger around one of the loops of the hammock, which had begun itself to sink into the bog. She hooked her index finger into its circle, and got hold of it in her hand.
The three of us pulled and tugged. Hammocks stretch, and aren’t as efficient as rope, but we kept on grabbing it and yanking it back, and then she did begin to move through the stuff, slowly, skimming through it while she hung onto the net. Estrada gazed up at us, his face fading into ash. We wrenched at the hammock until she slid closer to the bank. And just when she neared it, she stretched one arm back, toward Estrada. She didn’t say anything to him as they looked at each other.
“Get yourself out of there!” I yelled at her.
She kept her eye fixed on her enemy. Estrada was sinking deeper, though his face had stopped twisting.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
She flinched.”Estrada.”
He didn’t say anything; he kept staring at her with huge eyes.
“Estrada! Grab hold.”
And then the lieutenant heaved himself up. We had no idea what he was doing at first. We watched in shock as he plunged head first into the quicksand pit. For a moment, his back was still visible in the bog. Then it disappeared.
A deadly silence threw itself over the swamp; we could see the indentation in the quicksand quiver, move, and then begin to smooth itself out.
“Keep on pulling!” Manuel yelled.
We snapped our attention back, and Erik, Manuel, and I pulled until we dragged Yolanda’s limp body out of danger. Erik wound his arms around her w
aist and helped her crawl up, away from the sand. She heaved herself between us.
We were all panting, and covered with thick sludge and dredged weeds. Manuel looked exhausted and ill. Yolanda hunched, dripping, in the middle of a circle we’d made, and eventually began to try to rub the grime off of herself, and off me. But the dark masses of it clung onto her clothes and embedded itself in her jeans. Her eyes were opened very wide.
“What did he mean when he said I didn’t understand?” she asked.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said.
“What did he mean?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“It meant that he was insane,” Erik said. “It meant that he was a killer.”
“I’m not sure,” Yolanda said.
Erik squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God, I wished I’d never seen that.”
I had my arms around Yolanda. “What were you trying to do?”
Manuel ran his hand over his head. “Why did you move toward him? We almost lost you again.”
She looked at me through the dark hair that streaked across her face.
“I was trying to save him, Lola,” she said. “I was trying to save that man’s life.”
She put her cheek against my chest and began crying.
CHAPTER 55
It took a good span of time before we could think clearly again, and only then did we haul ourselves out of the bog and push back through the corridor of juniper. Each of us had turned inward and quiet from the horrible thing we’d just seen. It took very little conversation to confirm that each of us now believed that east was not the right way to go, after all.
“I was wrong,” Yolanda said to me, as we trudged side by side through the bush. “If my father were alive, I’d have to tell him he was right about not going that way.”
“Yolanda,”I said.
“It doesn’t matter. What does is that we find your mother. And we know it won’t be in that direction. That seems clear enough now.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head and paused as we continued trudging through the wood, back toward the river Sacluc. “I’m not all right. I don’t know why I tried to help him—Estrada.” She cleared her throat. “But I wish that I had.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to end badly, though. It could still be all right.”
I touched her wrist.
“It could still turn out okay,” I forced myself to say.
She nodded, and the four of us continued to hike until we returned to the area by the river. On account of the heat, the chicleros had gone. We washed ourselves and the hammock in the Sacluc and tried to lie out in the sun to dry, but the humidity was too great, and the mosquitoes continued to harass us. Manuel sat down and closed his eyes. He said that he’d had enough shock for six lifetimes and would just like a minute to collect himself, please. Erik sat by the bank of the river while Yolanda and I combed and washed the mud out of our hair. He pulled the papers and the journals out of my sack and began to look through them.
At a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, he did find that passage of Von Humboldt’s he’d been trying to remember.
“I’ve got it.” He walked over to us, with the wet and half-pulverized edition of the Narrative in his hand.
We looked up at him.
“You’ve got what?” I asked.
“This is the paragraph that’s been in my head. It’s from Von Humboldt’s record of trekking through the jungle when he was looking for—what he thought was a magnet. It’s the part where he writes about his guide. The slave, Gomez.”
“You can barely read it,” I said.
“I can still make it out,” he said.
“What does it say?” Yolanda asked.
Now even Manuel opened his eyes.
The German’s passage that Erik had recalled came right after the point where Gomez had teased Von Humboldt and Bonpland by suggesting they were lost in the jungle, and sang them a few lines of the old song.
“I told you!” Aimé Bonpland whispered, holding on to my hand.
“Do not worry, we are not lost, as I am making a joke,” Gomez said. “According to my calculations, we must only follow the Dwarf.”
“What?” I asked him.
“The Dwarf. …”
“It has to be the same thing,” he said. “It’s the direction they took to get to the blue city, remember. Gomez showed them the way.”
“The way of the Dwarf,” I said.
“It makes sense enough now, if any of this does,” Yolanda said. She took the book from Erik and held it in both hands, fingering its broken spine. “I’ve been west, we’ve been south, now we’ve very certainly tried east. We might as well go north.”
“You don’t sound very hopeful,” I said.
She gave me a small smile but said nothing.
“Should we stay the night here?” I asked. “Maybe we’re too tired to do anything more today.” My hip was throbbing with pain.
She passed her hand across her mouth. “I lost all the food I carried into that quicksand—”
“So we can’t dally,” Manuel finished the sentence for her.
Yolanda nodded. “And besides, I don’t want to drag this out anymore. I want us to find your mom and go home.”
“Yes, me too,” I said.
“I agree,” Erik said.
“I am getting so worried about Juana,” Manuel said. “I’m more frightened of this place now than I ever was.”
“But you’ve stopped shaking,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, looking at his hands. “That’s so.”
The odd thing was, none of us moved, as some terrible depression seemed to hit the group. We sat down in another half circle, not talking much, and listening to the conversations of the animals and the murmurs of the breeze. We should have been off hiking by then. Even before we did that, we needed to dress and pack once more. From that same spot off the Sacluc, we had to set out again for the Jade in the last direction remaining to us.
But for a long while we sat there, coldcocked, too worn out to move.
CHAPTER 56
Few words were spoken between us during this hour, but I believe we were all beginning to doubt that we’d ever find Mom in that jungle.
As we lingered in the forest, that hopeful feeling I’d had when I lay with Erik in the hammock grew thinner. I couldn’t feel my mother like I had then. And I thought that even if she had come to this forest and we could find her, there was a good chance she had died here, like that woman in Flores. Or like that terrible soldier who had drowned in the bog. It was November 7, and we had not heard from her in twelve days.
I felt a hard pang of very cold, very sickening reality as this occurred to me. The idea of our journey’s futility propelled me to my feet. I didn’t care if my logic was meaningless. It could happen. She was alive and here, and we had to keep on.
I stood and slipped on my pack.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s go get her. Now.”
We headed north. This was thick territory, and woolly as any we’d seen before. Yolanda made hard use of her machete as she sliced through the bushes and the blood-colored flowers. Past the stands of chicle trees we found a ruination of tumbled mahoganies and marshes alive with butterflies and yellow-beaked birds. The trees reached down toward us, with their fringes of palms and their branches that were like the elegant arms of dancers.
We marched, my hip hurting so much that I worried that some serious and permanent damage might have been done to it. Yolanda’s black hat flitted ahead of us; I stared at the back of Manuel’s small poky head. Erik marched behind me. Together we passed ferns like immense green cathedrals. Our boots sucked into the rich mire. To the sides of our path scattered the severed limbs of the plants hacked through by Yolanda, and before us spread the ever-deepening jungle, with its broad glossy leaves as large as children. Occasionally there would be a clearing where the hurrica
ne appeared to have simply peeled the whole skin of the forest floor from its rocky bottom, and heaped up the remains in scattered piles.
We walked through this terrain for miles. Another hour passed, and the sunlight dripping through the trees started to fade. At around six o’clock, Manuel stopped walking.
“Hold on,” he said. And then he just sat down on the ground.
“We can’t go on for much longer,” Erik said. “At least not today.”
“I don’t see anything,” Yolanda said. “I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“We’ll go for a while longer,” I said. “We’ll go until we find my mother.”
No one said anything to that. A minute passed, then two; Erik and Yolanda looked at each other and then up into the trees.
“I just need to rest for a minute,” Manuel said. He was bending over his knees and holding his face.
I sat down too. My hip was killing me.
For twenty minutes we stayed there, not talking. Erik dressed my hip again.
“Maybe we should stop,” he said.
I shook my head. “No. There’s still light.”
“Manuel’s not doing very well.”
“Manuel’s doing fine, and does not like to be talked about in the third person,” Manuel said. “Lola’s right. Let’s get up and go a little farther until the light dies.”
Yolanda smiled down at him. “You’re getting tough in your old age.”
“Yes, I am, aren’t I?”
He looked better than he had a few hours before. She grasped his hand and helped him up, and they started to go off together, hacking through more juniper and ferns.
But I had trouble moving now. Erik had to practically haul me to my feet. He lifted me up by the ribs, and I willed my body to work. I took one step with my good leg, another with the bad. I pitched myself forward through the wood, traveling as fast as I could, afraid that if I slowed down, I’d stop.
CHAPTER 57
A thick dusk settled over the forest. The maze of the jungle flew out beneath our feet in circles and crisscrosses and dead ends of brush that we cut through with our flashlights and our blades. Bromeliads opened up in the mists, orange-red, lime-yellow, with spiky black-green hearts and leaves so sharp they’d slice flesh. We passed another run of trees, which ended in a shattered clump of wood where three other mahoganies had toppled in the winds. Farther on, another section had been ripped open, and all the tufts of furry grass and bush and the layers of mud had been stripped off, but in this neater space there stood a hump of earth, and what appeared to be some rocks.
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