In that moment he felt that the jungle rejected all civilization with a conscious and purposeful effort: an active hostility. He saw the jungle as a reservoir of unrestrained savagery that alerted every civilized hackle.
And the waiting Indians were like the embodiment of all he feared: a focus of cruel intelligence that did the jungle’s bidding.
I will not submit! he thought.
“They’re out there in the jungle … looking at us right now,” said Gettler.
“I don’t like floating in the dark,” said Jeb. “We could come on a snag, get caught in rapids—anything!”
“There’re no rapids right away,” said Gettler. “Forty miles or more. Not until we start down off this plateau.”
“We’ll watch for an island,” said Jeb. “It’s not very likely that they’ll be waiting for us on an island.”
“Good idea,” said Gettler. He settled back into his seat, thought: So my second chance won’t be easy! All right, I’m used to fighting. I’ll make it even if it kills these soft fools!
The river tugged gently at their anchor, and all of them sensed their alliance with this current dragging itself endlessly down to the sea like a black chord of emptiness.
But now … no longer empty.
The hoots and cries of howler monkeys greeted the dawn. Their intrusion aroused the birds to mysterious morning talk in the sheltered blackness of the forest: staccato peepings, churrings up and down the scale, intermittent screeches.
A pearl luster crept across the sky, became a milky silver light that gave definition to the river. To the west climbed foothills—one foothill after another—piled waves of hills pounding against the Andean escarpment.
The plane sat nose-in to the trees on the right side of a narrow island. It floated quietly like a great water bug. Dancing flames of forest flowers wavered in the tree overhead. A sluggish current twisted into random whorls against the floats. Vagrant curls of morning mist hung on the water like puffs of torn gauze.
Inside the cabin Jeb Logan stirred to wakefulness, stared downstream. The river was like a cathedral aisle between tall trees. His gaze dropped to Monti beside him. She was still asleep, curled into a fetal crouch against her door. She had the look of a small child about her: the red hair disarrayed, an unlined expression of innocence on her face.
Thoughts and feelings of protectiveness passed through Jeb. He resisted an urge to reach out and pat her shoulder, turned his head to look at Gettler.
The Aussie hat was off, revealing a graying wheat stubble of hair. Gettler’s head was thrown back. He breathed with a low, burred rasp. There was an appearance of fallen greatness about the man. Heavy pores indented his skin to a harsh, leathery brown. A day’s growth of beard roughened his chin and cheeks. Frown creases laced the corners of his eyes and mouth.
Jeb’s attention shifted to David. The boy’s pale blue eyes stared straight ahead into the dense, somber green of jungle growth on the island. David flicked a glance at Jeb, resumed his watchful staring. There was a washed-out look to the boy’s face that made his freckles stand out. A section of sunburned skin on his forehead was beginning to peel away in flakes of grey-white.
Gettler turned the watch over to the kid, thought Jeb. Well, why not? Young senses are alert.
He turned back to Gettler, noted the handle of the revolver curving up from the man’s belt. Jeb considered reaching out and taking the gun, then he became aware of a change in Gettler’s breathing, looked up to two eyes like drops of hot tar staring at him through slitted lids.
“What time is it?” rumbled Gettler.
Monti stirred restlessly.
“Just dawn,” said Jeb.
Gettler turned to David. “All quiet, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jeb straightened, looked downstream. The mist had risen slightly. It veiled the near reaches of the river. “Time to shove off,” he said.
“Let’s keep our eyes open for another dugout,” said Gettler. “Then we could make time.”
Jeb’s jaw muscles hardened. “I’m sticking with the plane!”
“You’re a fool,” said Gettler.
“Okay! But I’m riding it out in the—”
“Listen to me!” snapped Gettler. “I know the jungle. You move fast here or you don’t survive.”
“You can go by yourself anytime,” said Jeb.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” murmured Gettler.
Jeb looked around at the interior of his plane, at the smooth tan fabric of the ceiling, the chrome efficiency of the instrument panel. He put his hands on the wheel, moved it. Angrily, he jerked his hands away, shifted his weight, felt a tingling cramp in his legs.
A feeling that something or someone had betrayed him filled his senses.
“Are you going to shove us off, or shall I?” asked Gettler.
“I’ll do it,” said Jeb. He opened his door, slipped down to the float, untied the vine he had used to fasten the plane in the night. A broken cane pole bobbed in the driftwood caught against the upstream float. Jeb recovered it, pushed the plane into the current, glanced downstream.
There was not a breath of wind. The makeshift sea anchor rested on the float, grapnel hooks trailing wisps of reedy grass. He decided to leave it there, clambered back into the cabin.
Without anchor and wind to hold the plane steady, it twisted at the push of every random current. There was a certain majesty about the movement: slow, sweeping turns to the river’s rhythm.
Jeb sniffed. The smell of gasoline was almost gone, and he detected the odor of mildew mingled with the musk of human sweat. Mildew. Already the jungle had a beachhead within the plane.
Monti stirred, rubbed her eyes. She turned toward Jeb, smiled. Then, slowly there came an unfolding as she awoke: a look of confusion replaced the smile. She shook her head, turned, stared hopelessly out her window.
“We’d better think about shooting some game today,” said Jeb. “Those K-rations won’t last forever.”
“The first thing is to take stock of what we have,” said Gettler. “What’s in that kit behind this seat?”
Jeb turned. “There should be seven K-rations left. Water purifying tablets. I told you about them. Some antibiotics. Fishing gear. A pellet stove. Tea. Snares. Another flashlight and spare batteries. We’ve a machete. And there’re twenty-five rounds of extra ammo for that revolver in the seat pocket here.”
“Is that all?” asked Gettler.
“A light poncho,” said Jeb. And he thought: Okay, so I’m not telling about the .22 revolver!
It was as though David had read his mind. “Didn’t you say there was a .22 revolver?” the boy asked.
Jeb swallowed. “Didn’t I mention that?”
“No, you didn’t,” said Gettler. “What else do we have?”
“I’ve got a scout knife,” said David. “And matches in a little waterproof box my Dad …” He grimaced. “My Dad sent me last Christmas.”
“There are more paraffin matches in the kit,” said Jeb.
“I have my camera and the attachments here in this bag,” said David. “And ten more rolls of film.” His voice lowered. “That’s not much good to us, though.”
Monti held up her pearl-inlaid cigarette lighter. “Here’s a cigarette lighter.” She fished a cigarette from her shirt pocket. “Anybody for a smoke?”
Gettler shook his head.
“I kicked the habit,” said Jeb.
Monti lighted her cigarette, spoke around the first exhalation of smoke. “How noble of you.”
“I couldn’t afford the U.S. imports when I first came down,” said Jeb. “And I couldn’t stand the native product.”
“What’s in your luggage back here?” asked Gettler.
“Mostly clothes,” she said. “A shaving kit I was going to give …” She shrugged.“To Roger. Some toilet things, perfume, make-up. A carton of cigarettes. A can of lighter fluid. Nothing that’ll do us much good.”
“We may need the lighter fluid,”
said Gettler. “This is going to be no joy ride.”
Monti sniffed. “Why don’t we stop the melodrama. There’ll be search planes out right away.”
“Why?” asked Gettler.
“They won’t be able to make radio contact with that army post. They’ll come to investigate.”
“And they may decide it’s a simple mechanical failure,” said Gettler.
“They’ll be out within a week, anyway,” she said. “When they find out I’m missing. The papers will have a field day. My agent’ll roll on the floor in purest ecstasy, and we’ll pack them in at Las Vegas.”
“We’re on the edge of the rainy season,” said Gettler.
“When the rains start there’ll be no aerial search,” said Jeb. “They may send a boat up the river, but even then we’ll have to cover maybe six hundred miles on our own.”
“Why look at the worst side?” demanded Monti.
“Because that’s what we have to be prepared for,” said Gettler.
“You haven’t told us what you have,” said Jeb. He looked at the bulges of Gettler’s jacket pockets. “What’s in your pockets?”
“Extra clips for the rifle,” said Gettler. “A hunting knife and some matches.”
Jeb turned around, looked downstream. They had drifted around a bend. Ahead, the emerald green of the hills turned to a misted blue in the distance. Already, the sun was becoming an instrument of torture. And the humidity! Sweat rolled off his skin without evaporating. He saw in his mind’s eye the long curving and re-curving slant of river, a vaguely wandering trench through the wilderness.
A striated claw of hills loomed closer ahead. Jeb wondered which claw carried the river channel.
“We’d better eat,” said Gettler. He turned around. “Scrunch forward, son.”
David leaned over his mother. She reached up, patted his cheek.
Gettler groped behind the rear seat, came up with K-rations, sat back. “Is there any water?”
“There should be a one-quart canteen full in the bottom of the kit,” said Jeb. “And there’re two canvas bags.”
“That’s something else you didn’t mention,” said Gettler. Again he squirmed around, felt in the luggage compartment.
Hunger suddenly awoke in Jeb’s stomach. His hands trembled. His mouth burned with thirst. “Let’s have the canteen up here.”
Gettler passed it forward. Jeb took it, offered it to Monti. She shook her head. He drank greedily, put down a sudden nausea.
David said: “What’s that?”
“A water bag,” said Gettler. “You take it now, and get down on that float out there, dip it full of water and drop in one of these pills.”
“Careful you don’t fall in,” said Monti. She opened her door, leaned forward.
“This river’s full of piranha,” said Gettler. “I’ve never seen them so thick.”
David scrambled down to the float, dipped the bag full of water, returned to his seat. Monti slammed the door.
They ate in silence, hunting out the last morsels.
Presently, Jeb leaned back, took a deep breath. The sun was high enough now to burn the mist off the river. The heat was mounting. The tropic warmth seemed to have a definite moment of beginning, he thought. One instant it wasn’t there, then it overwhelmed the sense threshold to wash the body in perspiration.
“I have to go to the toilet,” said David.
Monti looked out, studied the patchwork shadows along the shore.
“I’ve been looking for a place to land,” said Jeb.
“Another island,” said Gettler. “One we can see clear across.”
“What I had in mind,” said Jeb.
Monti shook her head, took a shivering breath, turned to stare straight ahead at the quicksilver track of the river. The plane seemed suspended in a vaulted cavern of motionless air that was slowly inflating with heat until she was sure it must explode.
Jeb looked at her. “Are you all right, Monti?”
She nodded, unable to speak, thought: There’s a laugh for you! Am I all right? Hell, I’ve never been all right! Except a few times with the guy who’s back there dead.
“I have to go to the toilet bad,” said David. “I can’t wait.”
Monti whirled. “You have to wait!”
“You better get out and hang onto a strut, son,” said Gettler. “We’ll look the other way if it bothers you.”
“All right.” David opened the door, clambered out.
Monti said: “Could one of those blowguns—the ones with the poison darts—reach out here from the bank?”
“Just about,” said Gettler. “Adds a certain spice to the elimination problem.” He smiled. “We could hang our jackets over the windows if you want to use the float.”
She turned a look of pure venom on him, whirled back to stare straight ahead.
“Let’s face the fact that we’re real people,” said Gettler. “We’re not like characters in the women’s magazines, people who never sit on a toilet.”
She ignored him.
David returned to his seat.
“Feel better, son?” asked Gettler.
David blushed, shrugged.
“Gettler, give us the poncho from the kit,” said Jeb.
“Why?”
“Just hand it here.”
Gettler turned around, grunted as he pulled the poncho from the luggage compartment. Jeb took it, fixed it over the windows beside Monti.
She glanced at him, smiled faintly, took a deep breath. “I never did read those magazines,” she said. She slipped under the poncho, opened her door, stepped down to the float. The door closed.
A minute passed in silence.
“Wasn’t there any way you could’ve saved my Dad?” asked David. He looked up at Gettler. “Any way at all …”
Gettler’s hands turned white as he gripped them into fists.
David said: “I mean … you got away and—”
“Shut up! Will you?” Gettler was shivering, face contorted.
Monti’s door opened. She climbed into the seat, took down the poncho as she entered, wadded it under her feet.
“I’m sorry,” said David. “I just wish …” He swallowed, fell silent. A confusion of angry, fearful thoughts warred within him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Monti.
“David just wishes it’d been me who got killed instead of Roger,” said Gettler. His voice lowered: “Can’t blame him.”
“Oh, no …” said David. “I …”
“Be quiet, David,” said Monti.
And she thought: Yes. Why wasn’t it that big oaf?
Silence settled over the cabin.
They drifted along a widening stretch of river where the current slowed. The root-laced banks crept past in a time-clogged, dragging suspense.
Jeb stared hypnotically at the shore, and the thought came to him that the moment of immediate past was never quite discarded—and the future never quite had a starting point. All fused in one gliding, stretched-out smoothness: a positive momentum down an endless incline.
He turned his head, studied the feathered softness of hills on the right, and suddenly beyond the hills glimpsed the snow cone of Tusachilla with its black tonsure of volcanic ash.
Now, the river was lined with mango trees in dense foliage broken by the lighter sage of tropical mistletoe and an occasional fur-coated chonta palm.
Above the near reaches of the river hovered two black and white urubu vultures. They hung seemingly fixed in the burned-out steel blue sky as though they had been painted there on a false backdrop. A flock of tanagers—deep glistening turquoise—swept overhead, dived into the jungle wall, were swallowed by it as though they had never been.
Monti had watched the birds. It’s the same with us, she thought. Nothing marks our passage here: no broken branches, not a leaf disturbed. We might never have been for all the sign we leave.
Then she thought about Roger.
“Those birds,” she said. “I don’t know why �
� but they remind me of something Roger said once. I think he read it out of a book.”
“Oh?” said Jeb.
“Something about all life being holy,” she said.
A deep rumble that could have been a chuckle came from Gettler. “That’s from Blake. Christ! I can hear Roger saying it. He was full of philosophy!”
“That he was,” said Monti.
“Arrrrrgh,” said Gettler. “I’ve studied philosophy in six languages. Did any of it tell me the world is just like that jungle out there?”
“You couldn’t argue with him,” said Monti. “He’d smile and quote somebody on peace and understanding.”
“The jungle’s the finest school of philosophy in the world,” said Gettler. “Completely pragmatic. Ask about good and evil! The jungle has one answer: ‘That which succeeds is good!’ And it kills to maintain its status quo!”
Monti turned, looked at him. “Were you really a professor once?”
Gettler drew back, lowered his head. A look of confusion, of retreating, passed over his face. A tic moved his left cheek. Every feature revealed a deep inner struggle as though something were rising to the surface.
Why should that question bother me? he asked himself. Certainly I was a professor! His mind swept through a violent pulsing of memory, like a deck of cards riffling before his eyes. There was the university at Bonn. And the class in comparative logic. And there was one of his students he hadn’t thought of in ten years: Karl … Karl … The last name evaded him as new memories attacked his reeling mind.
What’s happening to me?
His hands came up, claw-like, pressed against his forehead as though to dig out the offending memories.
Abruptly, they were gone, leaving him feeling wrung out, weak. Now, he was angry with this woman because she had exposed him to something he had believed dead and buried—with the burial place carefully hidden. He opened his eyes, saw her staring at him.
“Is something wrong?” asked Monti.
“Yes!” He hurled the word at her. “This world’s full of stumbling fools!”
Monti drew back.
“Was I a professor? Arrrrrgh! You’ve a head full of cotton! What difference does it—”
“You were a professor,” she said. “Why don’t you like to …”
Four Unpublished Novels Page 24