“Force is natural,” said Gettler.
“Drop it, Gettler!” said Jeb.
“I could kill you right now,” said Gettler, and the softness of his voice carried a more intense menace than if he had shouted.
Monti shuddered, pressed closer to Jeb.
“Every woman thinks she wants a gentleman until she’s tasted a little decadence,” said Gettler. “Logan, you will wait outside.”
“Wait!” cried Monti.
She felt terror overwhelming her, and yet beneath it there was a fascination, a feeling that Gettler could be right: that the touch of him might overpower her senses with an ecstasy that she could never again resist. She felt herself on the brink of an addiction … like a person about to take a lethean drug.
“We’ve waited long enough,” said Gettler.
It’s come to this, thought Jeb. I’m going to get myself killed over a woman. He pushed Monti away, tensed himself for the moment of struggle.
And David acted out of instinct.
“Don’t you like me anymore, Mr. Gettler?” asked David.
Gettler sensed himself dissolving in a frenzy of warring fragments. Why can’t the boy shut up?
“I thought you liked talking with me,” said David.
“Sure I do, son,” said Gettler. “It’s just that …”
“Then why can’t I stay back here with you?”
Something waited at the edge of Gettler’s consciousness. He weighed David’s question as though it were a crisis point for the entire world. The spinning pinwheels behind Gettler’s eyes almost blinded him.
Should the boy stay with me? Why shouldn’t he stay?
The answer came through the pinwheels whirling in his mind, spiraling up out of a far darkness, and Gettler spoke in a kind of trance-like voice: “You can’t stay because you aren’t real. They tortured you and killed you to make your mother obey them.” A sob caught in Gettler’s throat. “Poor little Peter. One day the world was so good … and the next day it was a horror—full of screams and …”
There rose up before Gettler’s eyes a picture of a child’s body, naked and spread-eagled on a table—the skin laced by the dark weals from a smoking poker. He glared at the memory image as though it had actual substance. And his mind reacted as to the reality—in the same pattern of the original event: it rebelled in revulsion, horror and denial. He put his hands up, pushed against the night.
“No!” The sound was torn out of him, filling his silent audience with a surge of panic.
“You killed him!” screamed Gettler. “What did he do? He was just a child! What could a child do? He was just a child … he was just a child … he was just a child … HE WAS JUST A CHILD!”
And Jeb suddenly felt that he was watching a soul unravel before him. Monti was almost overcome by an urge to whirl, and grab Gettler … to comfort him.
“Nobody’s killed me,” said David. “I’m right here.”
Something shattered the contact with the present, plunged backward in time to the moment of utter denial. He whirled, crushed David against him. A bit of the present filtered back followed by a moment of utter clarity. He spoke tenderly across David’s head, spoke down the pinwheel corridor of time to the distant dead: “I’m sorry, Peter. I should’ve taken you away. I knew they were monsters.” He lapsed into German: “I knew. I knew. I should’ve taken you and your mother to safety.”
Tears scalded Monti’s eyes. She shook her head. The picture of Gettler was becoming plainer in her mind. She spoke past a throat that ached with repressed sobs: “Who killed your son?”
But to Gettler her voice was Gerda’s voice, and it drove him back into hysteria. He raged in German: “It was my fault! We should’ve run away! But I didn’t know they’d suspect me so soon! Gerda! I didn’t know! GERDA! Please forgive me!”
And he repeated himself in English: “Please forgive me, Gerda.”
And again in Spanish, as though he were forced to explore every pattern of communication in his mind for a magic formula that lay the ghost of the past: “Por Dios, Gerda! Tu perdón!”
“Was Gerda your wife?” asked Monti.
Gettler’s hysteria melted. He realized that he had been raving. A painful clarity came over him. He pushed himself away from David, retreated into his corner.
“Did they kill your wife, too?” asked Monti.
And Jeb sensed a feeling like embarrassment within himself. He wanted to shout at Monti: “Christ! Leave him alone!”
Gettler spoke in a low, tired voice: “They … made her … watch. She got the knife from one of them … fell on it.”
Monti shuddered uncontrollably.
“The Third Reich ate them,” said Gettler. “One gulp. Just like they’d never been.”
“You called me Peter,” said David.
“I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” whispered Gettler.
“Was Peter … was that your boy’s name?”
“Yes.”
“Were you really a professor?” asked Monti.
“Huh!” It was almost a coughing sound from Gettler. “What I was … I was a set of muscles in a labor battalion.”
“But why?” demanded Monti.
“I was an enemy … an enemy of the state.”
“But what did you do?” she asked.
“Monti, leave him alone,” said Jeb.
“No. I like to find out what makes people tick.”
A growl rumbled from Gettler. “You lie!”
“What?”
“You are a torturer,” said Gettler. “You create pain. You hope my pain will force me to betray the secret of life. All you want from me is an answer that will stop your fears. This is why there are sadists.”
“All I wanted to find out is why they killed your wife and child,” said Monti.
“Let the dead bury their dead,” said Gettler.
“Didn’t you even try to get revenge?” she asked.
“Ha-ha!” Gettler roared. “You use a pretty word there.”
“All I mean is …”
“You don’t know what you mean!”
And Jeb thought: She’s set him off again!
“Let’s change the subject,” said Jeb.
“No!” barked Gettler. “She asks about revenge. To her it’s a slap on the wrist. Not even that! His voice lowered. “Me, I understand this word. It goes down into my guts. Revenge! You hang your enemy by his toes. You skin him with hot pliers … with exquisite slowness, you …”
“In heaven’s name!” cried Monti. “What did they do to you?”
“Ahhhhhh … they taught me to appreciate the jungle. This lesson I learned: the philosophy of the jungle. You cannot take that from me!”
“How old was … Peter?” asked David.
How old? Gettler pushed his memory down the path that repelled it. Thirteen? Yes. Thirteen.
“He was thirteen.”
Gettler nodded to himself. Yes. It was Peter’s birthday. I had his present under my arm—the telescope. Yes. I had it under my arm when I came home to … to …
His mind recoiled in panic, bringing back only the image of a face: a man’s face, grinning, heavy-jowled and square beneath the black uniform cap. And the glittering eyes: the sadistically delighted eyes, the little pig eyes with their gleam of power and joy at his horror.
“They rubbed the blood on my hands,” whispered Gettler. “And when I screamed … they laughed.”
“God in heaven!” whispered Monti.
“There’s no God!” muttered Gettler. “In heaven or hell! I’ve seen the proof. There’s no room for our God in a jungle.”
A tortured silence invaded the tiny cabin.
Monti crept close to Jeb, pressed against him for comfort.
“All that kept me alive,” whispered Gettler, “all that kept me alive was the planning in my mind. What I would do to Oberst Karl Freuchoff when … It is very funny what happened. All the lovely tortures I imagined. For nothing. He was killed in the war. At Stalingrad. Oh, I aske
d. I looked. And his family … the bombs. All gone. It was very funny …”
David breathed softly, silently: fearful that he would be heard.
Monti shuddered, pressed her face against Jeb’s arm.
“So I went away,” murmured Gettler. “Yes. That is what I did.”
Again, silence closed in upon them … with only the rain and wind outside—the bump-bump-bump of the canoe against the float like a frightened heartbeat.
There was a gradual descent to calmness. Monti drew away, and without thinking, began to hum: low, plaintive. Then she sang—so subdued that the sound almost lost itself in the gusts of wind and rain.
“None but the lonely heart can know my sadness …”
Presently, Gettler took it up, singing in German while hot tears scalded his cheeks.
“Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss, was ich leide! Allein und abgetrennt von aller Freude!”
Jeb’s eyes smarted. He rubbed them, thought: My God! No wonder the poor sonofabitch is crazy!
In the first platinum light of dawn they cast off on a rain-shrouded river. It was a rain of monotonous violence that created a liquid world all around them. Rain lashed the river. The windshield ran torrents.
Jeb dropped down to the float, tossed the sea anchor into the current.
Wind-hurled lines of rain slanted beneath the wings. Each gust tightened the line to the floating drag. The plane dipped and swayed with an uneasy shuddering motion.
The four humans sat in dampened, submissive torpor while the muddy current pulled them between vaporous grey lines of hills.
There was a new emotional atmosphere in the plane: a subdued tolerance, a softening that fitted their growing physical weakness.
Gettler appeared withdrawn after his outburst in the night. He rubbed at his beard, sighed and shook his head repeatedly.
“This is the seventh day,” said David. “A week.”
Jeb returned to the pontoon.
“Where’s the fish line?” he asked.
“Here’s what’s left of it,” said David. He passed it out the door.
“There’s enough,” said Jeb. He rubbed a shred of rag in the snake blood on the cabin floor, tied the cloth to the hook, tossed it into the water. Within seconds a piranha gobbled the hook. Jeb flipped it onto the pontoon, held it beneath his foot while he killed it with the machete. He tossed the fish into the cabin, caught another … and another.
“I’ll clean them,” said David. “I know how.”
He leaned over the seat, reached for one of the fish.
“Careful!” shouted Jeb.
But David’s hand had already touched a fish’s nose. The jaws snapped convulsively. The boy jerked his hand back, and the end of his little finger dangled from a bloody stump just below the second joint.
“But it was dead,” said David. He spoke in a tone of shocked disbelief.
“David!” screamed Monti. She reached for the boy as he sat back in the rear, holding up the welling red end of his finger.
“It was dead,” repeated David.
Gettler already was bringing the first aid kit from behind the seat. He opened the kit in his lap, brought a clasp knife from his pocket, cut off the dangling fingertip, painted the end with disinfectant, bandaged it.
David kept repeating: “But it was dead.”
“You never put your hand anywhere near the teeth of one of those things until the head’s cut off,” said Jeb. “We warned you.”
“Even when the head’s off, you’re careful,” said Gettler. He tied off the bandage.
“The whole end of his finger,” whispered Monti.
“Be thankful it wasn’t his entire hand,” said Gettler. “How’s it feel, son?”
“It throbs.”
“Keep that bandage out of the river,” said Gettler. He stared at the white wrapping, and a dull moroseness crept over his features. Slowly, he sank back in the seat, turned to gaze at the passing shore.
Monti closed the first aid kit, put it on the floor.
“Does it hurt badly, dear?”
“It’s a little worse than it was.” He bit at his lower lip.
“There’re a few codeine tablets in the kit,” said Jeb. “Give him one if the pain becomes too rough, but it’d be better to save them for tonight.”
One bite! thought Gettler. That’s how the jungle kills. The flies and the ants come for what’s left. The worms. And there’s not even a ripple, nothing to say you were here. Or the piranha take you—and your bones dissolve in the ooze. He shivered at the passionate encounter with his own fear. The whirling pinwheels returned behind his eyes. He could see them even with his eyes open.
Grey-green banks rose higher around the plane. The current picked up speed, and the channel narrowed.
Jeb wrestled with the cane pole.
“Hey!” he called. “Give me a hand!”
Gettler snapped around, startled.
The plane had surged to the left around a narrow island. Vines snagged on the wings in the constricted channel. The plane whirled and lurched, pulled in lunges and starts by the floating drag anchor. The canoe bumped and scraped against the pontoon.
Gettler scrambled down to the right hand float, took up his pole, once he bent to check the lashings on the dugout.
“We’re in another side channel!” shouted Jeb.
The plane broke through another writhing growth of vines.
“If it gets any narrower we’ll have to abandon the plane,” said Gettler. “We’d never get back up against this current.”
Jeb’s lips thinned into a grim line.
The plane’s wings bowled headlong into flooded cane stands that lined both banks. Whiplashing fronds cut at the two men. Cane bent, crackling and scraping as the current tore the plane through.
“Christ! I hope that patched float holds!” prayed Jeb.
They broke into the clear, swirling across an eddy at the juncture of another channel. The plane rounded a bend, and the river widened between overhanging walls of dark jungle that dropped to thin reaches of drowned saw grass. Rain hissed in the water, pounded against the metal of the plane. The falling drops were so thick they seemed suspended in the air, performing crazy jigs.
Another river bend dropped away behind them … and another. The damp heat mounted, and as it increased the rain slowly eased off to a heavy mist that hung from the sky like a grey gauze curtain. Abruptly, the rain stopped. The river reflected the clouds as on a polished surface. Then vapor curls began forming above the current.
The plane parted the mist, rounded another river bend.
A dark line appeared downstream surging toward them. The wind returned, bringing new sheets of rain that raked across them with fierce, biting slashes.
Jeb peered at the left shore dimly visible in the downpour. He turned to Monti.
“Know where we are?”
She roused herself from a sagging torpor.
“Where?”
“This is where we came down to refuel on our way in.”
She stared past him at the mottled grey shore.
“The beach’s under water,” said Jeb. He pointed. “It was right along there. See that candelo tree?”
“Yes.” She nodded numbly.
And Jeb thought: It only took us an hour and a half to fly upstream from here. We’ve been more than a week coming back. He turned, looked into the rain-veiled reaches downstream, thought about the twisting, turning river ahead.
The current took them around another bend to the left. An eddy swung the plane out toward the darkening right shore.
Abruptly, David pointed to the right. “What’s that?”
Jeb glanced around, snapped: “Tapir! Gettler, shoot that before—” He broke off in the act of lifting the cane pole to push them toward the animal.
The tapir stood on a completely flooded island, brown water lapping at its stomach. The animal’s actions arrested Jeb’s voice.
A lurch backward, and the tapir stared myopically upstream
. It snuffled, wriggled.
Water erupted in savage violence around the animal. Flashing silver forms of piranha leaped completely clear of the river to slash at the tapir’s sides.
The animal squealed once, sank into a rolling turbulence of red water.
Jeb felt a sudden premonition as deeply ominous as the one he’d experienced on the morning that started this flight. A heavy certainty sank into him that death was sure to strike them. He glanced from David to Monti to Gettler to Monti, stared down at his own hands on the cane pole.
Which one of us? Maybe all of us.
His stomach felt leaden.
A slowly curving river bend hid the jungle tragedy.
Gettler suddenly slammed his hand against the strut, raged: “It stinks! Everything stinks!”
“Take it easy,” murmured Monti.
“Arrrrrgh!” snarled Gettler.
“Were those piranha?” whispered David.
“Yes,” said Jeb.
David swallowed.
Monti looked down at the three fish on the cabin floor.
Jeb followed the direction of her eyes. “I’ll clean them if you feel like cooking them.”
“I’m…” She shuddered.
“Eat or be eaten!” snarled Gettler.
“I’m hungry,” said David.
“There’s the spirit,” said Gettler, and lower: “Eat or be eaten.”
Another river bend passed beneath them.
Jeb gestured downstream where the current split around a grey-green mound, fuzzy-edged in the hissing rain.
“Island.”
The two men labored with their cane poles, guiding the plane into a grassy stretch at the upper end of the island. An inevitable cloud of insects poured out of the disturbed grass, swarmed around exposed flesh.
Jeb ignored them, stared down the island.
The full length of it was open: no more than twenty-five yards long. It was covered with low scrub that bent before the driving rain.
“Something moved in that scrub,” said Gettler.
“That’s what I thought,” said Jeb.
“Looked like a little monkey,” said Gettler. He took the rifle from the cabin floor, moved forward along the float, leaped into the grass, sloshed through it to the higher ground.
Jeb took out the three fish, cleaned them. He looked in at David.
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