“How long will we be here?” asked Ben. He glanced at his wrist instinctively and felt a brief moment of panic before he remembered giving it to Auggie for safekeeping.
“Mmm, ten minutes. We want to get to the research center soon, is still far.”
Auggie followed along behind Cooper and Janie, with Ben and Brooke coming after him, and Ernesto in the rear. Felix was not among them; he was apparently staying behind with the canoe. As Auggie walked, taking little sips from his water bottle, he wondered if that great explorer, Percy Fawcett, had ever come upon such a place during his adventures in the Amazon; a primitive civilization, one of the outliers on the edge of this new and forbidding frontier.
Janie and Cooper were side by side as they approached the stairway, but then Janie said something to him, something the others could not hear, and Cooper took off running, taking two steps at a time. Once at the top, Cooper let out a whoop and his voice carried out across the water and through the trees.
Raising his fists above his head, Cooper shouted gleefully. “I’m king of the world!” With that, he turned and vanished from sight.
The others gathered at the crest of the hill. From this high vantage point, they could see the true power of the Amazon, which had carved a deep groove through the rainforest. The river moved slowly through the jungle, rubbing up against the banks like a snake trying to shed its skin. Down below, Felix was leaning against the bow of the peki-peki as he smoked a cigarette.
Ernesto, leading them away from the viewpoint, explained that the park rangers rarely ever stayed at this post due to its remote location. Apparently, even the locals did not care for this degree of isolation. They crossed a small yard of sorts, overgrown by coarse grass and littered with rusted barrels, wooden carts, and various pieces of defunct farm equipment. Similar to its neighbors, the main hut crouched on stilts, and its wooden steps were sturdy in spite of their weathered appearance.
Ernesto led them up the lopsided steps, through the screen door, and into the dim interior, where the shade offered a welcome respite from the sun. A small desk contained a jar full of pencils and a ledger in the form of a spiral-bound notebook. The ledger was folded open, its place held with a small stone, so that the names, dates, and countries of origin written inside were plainly visible, many more than one might expect in this distant corner of the world. Ben read a few of the entries aloud: Germany, Spain, England, Canada, France, and so on. With a sense of humble pride, Ben signed his name amongst the others, those he now viewed as the chosen ones—fellow explorers from the far-flung reaches of the globe. When he was done, he jotted down Cooper’s name because his friend was still nowhere to be found.
Eventually, though, they did find Cooper. While they were busy signing the guest register, he was exploring an adjacent hut, which had been transformed into a makeshift museum housing rows of shelves upon which there rested dozens of glass jars of varying shapes and sizes. The jars were full of formaldehyde or some other kind of liquid preservative, and each one contained a specimen that had been collected from the jungle. Cooper moved from shelf to shelf, inspecting the contents of each jar, sometimes muttering softly to himself.
A humungous snake head glared ferociously through a hazy yellow liquid, eyes dim with malice, its mouth forever open to reveal the backward curving fangs that seemed ready to strike. Attached to the jar was a faded label that simply read “Bushmaster – viper.” Cooper had never before heard of a bushmaster, and he was somewhat excited to add this to the long list of other dangerous species that lurked in the rainforest.
All along the shelf were dozens of other curiosities, each with its own jar and descriptive label: a huge eel, coiled upon itself like a spring was identified as “Baby electric eel”; a tiny reptile, barely the size of Cooper’s hand, was dubbed “White Caiman”; various kinds of frogs; something that looked like a pig fetus. The top shelf on the opposite wall was wider than the rest, for it housed a specimen unlike any other: resting atop the horizontal plank was an enormous skull, wide at the crown and growing more and more narrow toward the snout. Rows of large white teeth dotted its lengthy jaws.
In the dusty light, Cooper read the small index card tacked to the shelf below the skull: Negris Camis: Black Caiman. Beneath this was a bit of additional information, written by a different hand: Black Caimans can reach lengths of up to 4.5 meters and reside in Oxbow lakes.
“Holy shit,” murmured Cooper. Suddenly, he sensed a presence and, looking up, saw that the others were gathered around behind him. He’d been so absorbed in studying the details of each creature that he had not even noticed them until now. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Did you see the size of this thing?”
Ben raised his eyebrows. “Four and a half meters. What does that come out to, Professor?”
“A little under fifteen feet,” Auggie answered without hesitation.
“Fifteen feet?” Cooper yelped. “That’s one big boy. Remind me not to go swimming around here.”
Behind them, the screen door opened silently and a shadow appeared in the doorway—a thin black smudge etched in a rectangle of light. Stepping into the museum, Ernesto said, “Hey, guys? It’s time we should go. Uh-huh. Time to the research center is still little while.”
Cooper turned to the others. “You guys ready?”
They began to file out into the bright daylight.
Auggie was standing before the great caiman’s skull, staring into the empty holes where the creature’s eyes once gleamed with a cold, reptilian intelligence. Beads of sweat glistened on the boy’s high forehead, tracing silvery lines from his hairline down to the narrow tip of his chin. Ben watched him for a few seconds but Auggie did not stir.
“Hey,” Ben said, “we’re leaving.”
Auggie continued to stare into the empty eyes as though gazing upon all the secrets of the ages. The vacant eyes held him, and even as he felt a strange shudder in the pit of his stomach, he could not look away.
“Auggie-dog?”
Auggie stirred suddenly. He took a step back and raised his camera so that he could fit the skull and the placard into the frame. In the bright flashes that followed, the room was transformed into something that reminded Ben of some cheap carnival sideshow. Satisfied, Auggie raised his head from the viewfinder and his eyes looked like caverns in the gloom. “Alright, man. I’m ready.”
Out of the darkness and into the light, they began down the well-worn path, moving at a steady clip to catch up to the others, leaving the tiny village to the solitude of the afternoon shadows.
Eleven
Littered with stray branches and fallen leaves, the path to the research center was a narrow affair, barely visible in places, and flanked by thin gray trunks. The trees seemed closer, the shadows darker, making that other path, the one at the Amazonia Lodge, seem like a major highway by comparison.
Janie and Cooper took the lead. Janie knew where she was going and only lagged a little because she found it enjoyable to witness a newcomer’s reaction to the place she had, for the course of the past month, called home. Cooper found excitement in the smallest of things; every leaf, every twig, every sound held a mystery to him.
Auggie watched them from behind. They were talking animatedly about something or other and probably ruining their chances of seeing any wildlife that might have been ahead. Treading carefully over the mat of leaves, Auggie kept his eyes on the ground, looking for, but hoping not to see, signs of movement there. His mind flashed back to the museum—the bushmaster with its hooked fangs and malicious gaze; the kind of creature that would bite you just because, just for fun. Suddenly, he was glad of Cooper’s excitable nature. Perhaps scaring away all the animals was not such a bad thing at the moment, especially if that included snakes.
Behind Auggie, Ernesto watched the jungle with passive interest, perhaps looking for something in particular. Not far behind, Brooke and Ben brought up the rear. In the eternal gloom beneath the canopy, Brooke’s green eyes seemed to glow with a secret light. A
s they walked, she turned her head sideways and said, “You’re going to love it here.” Ben grinned at her. As the shadows flickered across their faces, they looked at one another affectionately, silenced by a sudden shyness.
Soon they glimpsed what now seemed a familiar sight ahead: an opening in the canopy filled with daylight, an artificial clearing at the center of which rested a stilted lodge of bamboo and basic timber, a manmade stronghold against the encroaching jungle. With its open floor plan, small dining area, and arched entryway, the Wildlife Research Center was a miniature version of the Amazonia Lodge, but with the stamp of functionality over convenience. Ben stopped to admire his new surroundings. By all appearances, this was a true outpost, some relic of a bygone era built on the fringe of a new frontier.
Brooke was watching him intently. “What do you think?”
Ben was staring straight ahead. Now he turned to her, grinning. “This is more like it.”
“Hey, guys?” Ernesto said. “I can show you to the room.”
“Well,” Brooke said. “Janie and I have to take care of a few things for school. Do you want to meet up later on?”
“Definitely,” Ben said. “Where will we find you?”
“Right over there, in the dining area.”
“Okay.”
“Well, have fun, guys!”
“Thanks.”
“See you later.”
“Bye.”
Ernesto guided the boys down the hallway, past double rows of curtained doorways. At last he stopped at a doorway and tapped his finger on the curtain. Hanging just outside the doorway was a square wooden placard with the number 8 carved into it. Otherwise, the room was indistinguishable from all the others.
“This is the room,” Ernesto said. “If you like, we can meet in a little while to go for a walk in the jungle.”
Auggie was looking at the watch on his wrist, squinting to see the numbers. “How long till we meet?”
“Mmm, thirty minutes?”
Ben looked at Auggie and Cooper and did not see dissent among them. “Perfect,” Ben said. “Thanks, Ernesto.”
Cooper pulled aside the curtain with a flourish and the three boys entered their new quarters.
Bathed in honey-colored sunlight, the room was a tiny rectangle, barely large enough to accommodate the three single beds flanking the walls. Similar to the Amazonia Lodge, the extremity of the space was open to the jungle, and beyond the wooden railing, a cluster of fan-shaped fronds rippled peacefully in the breeze. Beside each bed was a simple nightstand, each one topped with a kerosene lamp; three flimsy shelves along the far wall, upon which they could store their toiletries and other essentials; aside from that, little else.
Auggie had set his backpack down and was readying his clothes for the hike. He held a shirt up to his nose and winced at the smell. “Do you think they have a washing machine?”
Ben chuckled. “Probably not. But they should have a sink or a hose so we can scrub them down with these.” He held up a little package of laundry wafers, each one roughly the size of a postage stamp. The wafers, Ben explained, dissolved in water to create suds for washing.
“Always the Boy Scout,” snorted Cooper.
Ben only shrugged, grinning.
“I gotta tell you,” Auggie said to no one in particular, “I was a bit skeptical about leaving the first lodge behind to come here.”
“Yeah? And now?”
A sheepish smile spread across the narrow face. “This place is the real deal.”
“Seems like we’re the only ones here.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we’ll see too many tourists this far out—”
“—or kids with laptops—”
“Now we’re way off the grid—”
“—or lines at the dinner buffet—”
“—most remote lodge in this part of the jungle!”
They grinned at one another in their excitement.
“How much time do we have?” Ben asked suddenly.
Auggie glanced at the watch on his wrist. It was an automatic gesture, one that he’d grown accustomed to over the course of the day. “We’ve got about ten more minutes before we’re supposed to meet Ernesto.”
Ben sprang up from his bed, energized by his new surroundings. “Let’s take a quick walk around this place and check it out. What do you think?”
Cooper was already up and heading for the door. “Shit, yeah,” he said, waving his arms excitedly. “What’re you waiting for? Let’s go exploring.”
Twelve
The man with the pinched brown face and missing front teeth collected his cards from the wooden table and began to arrange them in his callused hands. Sunlight slanted in through the open doorway of the two-storey bungalow, illuminating the flies that spun dizzying circles in its amber beams. The men were playing Golpeado, a local version of rummy. Stumpy fingers shifted the cards back and forth and two bushy eyebrows knitted with the effort of trying to read the cards in the ruddy light. At last, the man’s black eyes sparkled as the meld began to reveal itself, and he knew that he was “going rummy.” He was fifty-three years old and his mop of hair was thick and black, with not a hint of silver. This was Felix, the oldest of the river boat guides.
Grinning at last, he laid the rummy meld down on the table for the others to see. With a collective groan, the other two men tossed their cards down in disgust. Like Ernesto, Felix was a born member of the Ese Eja tribe and had grown up on the banks of the Amazon. Though the other guides sometimes teased him about his advanced age, they also respected him, and his word was gospel among the young men who sought a better life through the tourist trade. Felix’s fellow players, Felipe and Oscar, were brothers. The man with the toffee-colored complexion, Felipe, was the elder at twenty-five and already had a wife and two children. At just over six feet tall and rippling with lean muscle, he seemed, at first, an imposing figure, though those close to him knew him as an affable person with a penchant for playing practical jokes. Three years his junior, Oscar shared neither his brother’s physique nor his good looks. He was a squat, apelike man with a lazy eye and a large mole on his right cheek, from which sprouted several wiry hairs. Neighborhood bullies had flattened his nose when he was just a boy, and in the onset of adulthood, it gave him the appearance of a brawler. Oscar seldom spoke, and everyone, including his own brother, suspected that he had been born a bit slow.
Felix laughed and collected his winnings: a pack of cigarettes and a little more than twelve Peruvian nuevos soles. Looking across the table, Felix opened the new pack of cigarettes, making a point to sniff the fresh tobacco just to rub it in. The younger men watched with sad, brown eyes; grumpy with indignation. Felipe muttered something obscene, and Felix laughed. He pulled a few cigarettes from the pack, holding them up as a kind of peace offering, and then pushed them across the table. Felipe and Oscar’s faces broke into sudden joyful smiles. “Gracias, gracias!”
Felix nodded, getting up from the table. “I’m going for a walk,” he told them. “I will see if I can be equally lucky with a fishing pole. Would anyone like to come?” The two boys looked at him through a cloud of smoke and shook their heads in unison. Felix shrugged. He left the soles on the table; they were good boys, and he trusted that the money would still be there upon his return. Grabbing a beer from a cooler and stuffing it into his pocket, he walked outside into the sunset and headed down the rutted path to the water.
By the river was a small dock with two canoes and a peki-peki. Off to one side was a small storage shed. Felix lifted the latch and removed his favorite fishing pole, a simple affair he’d fashioned himself, which consisted of little more than a bamboo rod, a rusted reel, and some string. Next, he lifted out a plastic tackle box. After many years beneath the glare of the equatorial sun, the once-vibrant aquamarine had long since dulled to gray. He supposed, in a strange way, the tackle box reminded him of himself: old and worn, yet fully able to serve its function.
Felix opened the tackle box and hunched over to in
spect its contents, eyes straining in the twilight. Inside were all the various tools of his favorite pastime: a variety of homemade weights, hooks, flies, and lures made of rubber, wood, and metal. Though the once-gleaming barbs of the hooks had since dulled with oxidation, a few of the lures retained the glamour of their former glory; bright splashes of red, green, and blue. Felix picked up a medium-sized lure—similar in size and shape to the bowl of a serving spoon. The lure, which was painted a loud, unnatural green, was adorned with a few small, brightly-colored feathers that helped to give the little fish the appearance of having a tail and also acted as a stabilizer in the water.
Turning the lure in the light, he examined it for defects. This was his favorite and most reliable lure, and it conjured up his crowning achievement as a fisherman: the memory of the time he once landed a massive pirarucu. Better known to the foreigners as arapaima, the fish was more than six feet long from nose to tail and had weighed well over two hundred pounds. Felix had been a younger man back then, and still packed with the hard muscles of youth, yet it had taken well over an hour before he was able to land his mighty prize. In the end, it was worth it though; he had triumphantly returned to the village with his trophy, and those who were present still spoke about it from time to time. The story usually began with Did you ever hear the story about the giant pirarucu that Felix caught? It was the largest one I ever saw, bigger than any man in the village. Big enough to swallow a child…
Felix’s fishing glory had taken place long before the waterways became polluted, before the river was wrought with sport fishermen who were too unskilled to use handmade lures and rods on the more elusive fish. In those days, the giant fish were still seen with some level of frequency, and it was always a wonder to cast one’s line or net into the river and await what luck or fate might bring you. That was part of any fisherman’s attraction to the sport—that sense of mystery, that climactic moment just before some unknown thing from down there was wrestled to the surface for human eyes to behold. Of course, for the local people, nourishment was always a priority. Nowadays, one was lucky to catch something that was even big enough to eat, maybe a bass or a catfish, let alone one of the giants. Were there still monster fish out there? Felix thought so, though their population was steadily depleting. Much like the jaguar and the puma, the river giants had pushed farther into the jungle to seek safety from the humans who hunted them. Felix doubted he’d catch such a fish this evening, but one could always hope.
Pray for Darkness: Terror in the Green Inferno Page 8