“Sure,” said Jeb. “Now stop trying to talk. Take some more water.”
Again he forced salt water between Gettler’s lips. And again Gettler turned away.
“Gotta ’splain,” he whispered. “Something’s holding us on the river. ’S time! River’s time. Words holding us!”
“Can’t you make him stop raving?” asked Monti.
“Circle,” whispered Gettler. “All creation. Mustn’t stop circle. “Sdeath! Motion’s holy.” His voice dropped. “Creation … fire … circle.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Monti.
“He’s delirious,” said Jeb.
“It’s my fault,” said David. “If I hadn’t tried to be smart … but I was so hungry, and I saw those tracks. Then the storm came, and I was afraid …” He began to cry “The Indians …”
“Did you see Indians?” demanded Monti.
“Not until the river.”
“Storm saved him,” said Jeb. “Indians take cover in a storm.”
Again he dribbled water between Gettler’s lips.
“He seems to be breathing easier,” said Monti.
“I think so,” said Jeb.
He turned to bandaging Gettler’s arm, thought: Why didn’t I let him die? Sonofabitch!
“How’s your hand, David?” asked Monti.
“Oh, it’s all right.”
“That bandage looks muddy.”
“I fell.”
“Let me change the bandage, David,” said Jeb.
David put the bandaged hand behind him. “It’s all right.”
“Let’s see it!” snapped Jeb.
Slowly, David brought his hand around.
Jeb took it, gently cut away the dressing.
David looked away.
“Christ!” said Jeb.
“What is it?” whispered Monti.
“It’s infected.”
“Badly?”
“Any infection’s bad out here!”
Jeb dug in the medical kit, brought out the terramycin. “Take these. I’ll pack it with this sulfa ointment.”
Monti watched Jeb work—short, angry movements.
And Jeb thought: I didn’t let Gettler die because he saved David … and probably saved me … and … No. I did what I had to do for him.
It came to Jeb abruptly that this simple idea explained Gettler: He did what he had to do.
Jeb tied off David’s bandage.
“There’s what I saw,” said David. He looked out the right hand window.
Jeb and Monti turned.
The rain mist had thinned. Through it they saw a great black face of lava rock about a mile away. It towered above the jungle growth like the side of a monster ship. To the left it appeared split, and the air showed a thicker hazing of mist there.
“It looks farther away,” said David.
“River’s curving all over the landscape through here,” said Jeb. “Monti, open your door.”
She obeyed.
A faint roaring came to their ears.
“More rapids?” asked Monti.
“Could be the wind,” said Jeb.
A gust of wind pushed a black line up the river toward them, pulled a rain veil across the lava cliff. The downpour whipped around the plane, thudded against the cabin top. As quickly as it had come, the wind passed and the smooth current slipped them onward through a somnolent hiss of falling rain.
Gettler stirred, groaned, opened his eyes.
Monti looked across him at Jeb, who was sitting half out of the cabin to make room for Gettler.
“How do you feel, Gettler?” asked Jeb.
“Thankful,” whispered Gettler.
“Thankful?”
“For your jungle kit. German in your ancestry. Has to be. Too thorough.”
“Do you feel up to crawling into the back?” asked Jeb.
Gettler nodded.
They helped him over the seat. He slumped back beside David, glanced at David’s bandage.
“Invalids in the rear, eh, son?”
“I’m sorry I caused so much trouble,” said David.
“Not you,” said Gettler. “The jungle.” He looked out his window. “Indians live in the jungle, and the jungle lives in them—passed through them. Nothing resists. Take a white man, though: it’s like our skin wouldn’t let the jungle in. One of us has to break. Drain that swamp! Kill those bugs! Clear away that forest!”
“Give it back to the Indians,” said Monti. “Every man to his own jungle.”
She tipped her head against the seat back. “It’s so hot … so damp. If it wasn’t so goddamn damp! I smell mildew all over me.”
Jeb slipped down to the float, kicked away a floating island of sedge that had lodged there, ignored the cloud of insects that arose at the disturbance. He saw that the rain was slackening. It shimmered away to a glistening mist, and even that faded.
The river took on a flat and oily look: a stretch of shimmering glass dotted with tufts of sedge like a tabletop display laid out on a mirror with a label: “South American jungle river—Amazon headwaters.” It became an enchanted river: slow, hypnotic. The plane was a toy plane shrunken by jungle sorcery—lost in a magic immensity of flooding current.
“White men weren’t meant to live in this country,” muttered Jeb.
He felt that they drifted in a moist pocket of air that had been drained of all vitality. The smell of the jungle pressed in upon him: a dank piling up of life and death on the forest floor, rotting and festering. The odor hung across their track—a physical substance of smell that they encountered in waves.
A soft breeze puffed across the plane from the right hand shore, brought a new odor. Jeb sniffed at it.
Gettler stirred upright in the rear seat, hissed: “Cassava root! I smell fresh cassava root!”
“What is it?” asked Monti.
Jeb stared across the plane’s cowling.
“Village,” he said.
“Where?”
“Back in the jungle across there.”
“I don’t see anything,” said Monti.
A stagnant silence settled over the plane.
Presently, Monti said: “The air’s so hot. I feel like it was pulling all the oxygen out of my lungs.”
Jeb looked downstream at a line of shock-headed palms along the far shore. As he looked, a flock of golden-beaked toucans lifted out of the trees in a frenzied cloud, filled the air with their dog-pack yelping.
“Something disturbed them!” hissed Gettler.
“What?” asked Monti.
“Maybe an animal,” said Jeb. He glanced in at Monti. Her cheeks were indrawn, pale hollows. He rubbed at his beard, felt the sharp line of cheekbone beneath.
“Possession isn’t nine points of the law here,” said Gettler. “It’s all the law there is.”
Jeb closed his eyes, felt the weariness draining him, sleep like a narcotic mist waiting at the edge of awareness. He experienced a nightmare sense of dreaming through their entire journey to this point. His eyes snapped open. He put a hand against the warm metal of the cowling, wiped at a smudge of oil smoke stain.
“It’s so hot,” said Monti. She pulled the back of her hand across her forehead.
The river downstream suddenly glistened with uncounted sparklings.
Jeb looked up: great cracks of blue were spreading through the clouds. The sun came out. It hit the plane with a sense of physical pressure, reflected off the water into every corner beneath the wings. Jeb turned away, saw the silver wheel of a spider web stretched between fuselage and float. It brought to his mind the vivid remembrance of the spider on the ceiling of his bedroom in Milagro (How long ago? he asked himself) and this recalled his nightmare premonition.
Death and a river … a river and death.
A feeling of helplessness came over him, a giving up to the belief that he was caught like a fly in a web, held by a force too strong to resist.
And he recalled with a dull uncaring that he had neglected to take the twenty-two
revolver from Gettler’s pocket.
It doesn’t matter, he thought. Nothing matters.
“Mr. Logan,” said David.
Jeb shook his head slowly.
“Mr. Logan!”
It took a conscious act of determination for Jeb to turn his head toward David in the cabin. The boy was leaning forward, unbandaged hand pressed against Monti’s forehead. Monti was curled in her corner, eyes closed, head thrown back against the seat.
“She feels awfully warm,” said David. “She’s been moaning.”
The idea refused to register in Jeb’s mind, but he nodded as though he understood. Realization swam upward through his consciousness like a fish rising from the depths.
“Fever?”
“I think so, sir.”
“See if she’ll take … one of the pills we gave you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Downstream, a curving ripple of current swept away from the left shore. Jeb saw it, looked beyond it, became aware that the river curved, too. It swept to the right in a wide arc.
The plane glided into the ripple track, bobbed and danced, turned. Dull sloshing sounds came from the floats. A faint roaring came to Jeb’s ears—like the echo in a seashell.
Jeb started to turn in the direction of the sound, but David suddenly leaned out the door, pointed upstream.
“Mr. Logan! Look!”
Jeb looked.
A line of canoes stretched across the upstream reaches of the river, coppery bodies giving off an oil sheen in the hot sunlight.
“They’re chasing us!” said David.
The roaring sound grew louder.
Both Jeb and David turned, looked downstream.
“That’s what I saw!” cried David.
About a mile downstream, sheer black walls of lava rock squeezed the river into a rumbling agony of white water. Waves cresting over unseen rocks sent up a crazy splendor of violence that climbed in a milk-and-amber mist above the chasm.
And Jeb thought quite calmly: Yes. That’s probably what he saw. The river track curved away from it, then back.
He became aware of movement along both shores between the plane and the raging water. The movement aroused a feeling of curiosity.
More canoes, by God!
“They’ve got something stretched across the river!” shouted David.
Gettler sat upright beside the boy. “Whh …”
And Jeb saw what David had seen.
“It’s a rope or a net,” he said.
He felt a detached admiration for the Indians. “They’re persistent devils,” he said.
“Do something!” cried David.
A screaming shout arose from the canoes downstream, was answered by the Indians following.
The dreamlike detachment suddenly snapped off of Jeb like a sheet whipped from a statue.
“What am I doing?” he asked.
He whirled around, shot a glance upstream.
The pursuing canoes had closed the gap between them and the plane.
“It’s a trap!” screamed Gettler.
Jeb leaped into the cabin, primed the motor.
Beside him, Monti opened her eyes, shook her head.
“Strangest dream,” she whispered.
A booming roar came from the right bank. Something slammed into the tail of the plane.
Jeb pulled the starter.
A slow grinding sound arose from the motor.
“Battery’s dead!” shouted Jeb. He whirled. “David, see this knob? Pull it the minute the motor catches. I’m going out to crank it.”
Jeb clambered across Monti, who stared blankly around. He dropped down to the float, saw the dugout tied beneath the fuselage, grabbed the machete off the cabin floor, cut the fish line fastenings. The machete clattered against metal as he tossed it back into the cabin.
A many-throated scream filled the air behind them. He ignored it, worked his way forward, leaned out, grasped the propeller, jerked it down.
No response.
Again.
The motor roared to life, and Jeb almost fell off the float getting out of the way of the propeller. A pall of black smoke floated upstream as the plane gathered way. A screeching sound of friction had been added to the other rackets from the motor.
Jeb scrambled back into the cabin, kicked the right rudder. They swept around toward the canoes upstream. The canoes parted, and he saw that they too carried a net across the river. He allowed the plane to sweep around toward the savage torrent in the canyon.
A raging defiance filled Jeb.
The dugout that he had cut loose loomed ahead. He swerved to dodge it, roared toward the downstream trap rope and the chasm.
This is the only direction to go! he thought.
The battered plane skidded across a cross-eddy, skimmed toward the rope. Now, the river spread out in a glossy black pool. And beyond the rope, the water creased into steeper and steeper furrows before flashing outward and down into the gorge.
Slowly, the rope ahead lifted from the river like a dripping snake to reveal the dark pattern of net squares below. Eager hands on each shore pulled the net higher.
And the plane swept into the net, rocked forward. A thunderous grinding and whipping sound lifted above the plane as the propeller slashed through the net ropes.
The motor stopped short.
But the net had been cut.
A savage scream arose from the Indians, rising above the devil drums of roaring water. The current swept the plane to the right, crunched it against the first obsidian buttress above the torrent. A scraping and wrenching of metal competed with the mounting roar of the chasm.
Gettler shouted something that was lost in the avalanche sound of the water. The plane bounced outward, whirled, pounded across two infolding steps of explosive current. A vast pulsing roar like the crashing of ocean waves onto rocks deafened them. The spiral cone of a whirlpool sucked at them, shot them into a new, more savage turbulence.
They heard the rasping, crunching, grating of rocks grinding in the maelstrom. A glistening ledge of black rock, its face scarred by the current, loomed directly ahead. The plane smashed against it, recoiled.
The people in the plane were shaken about like pebbles in a box. Wham! The left door slammed open and wedged against the strut. The right wing crumpled against the chasm wall, and the plane whipped around to the left.
Jeb watched the motion jolt the rifle off the cabin floor into the river. He was powerless to prevent the loss. A heavy rumbling sound from the shattered right wing added to the din. The plane’s nose lifted on a boiling, spume-hurling upsurge of water, and they slammed down into a black maelstrom beyond.
Monti held fast to the safety straps on both sides, caught in a fascination of terror by the view over the cowling. She felt herself plummeting with the plane: down! down! down! whipped around, and back through undiluted violence that crashed around her like a crazy carnival ride.
A frothing spiral of current shot them around broadside to the channel, then back until they faced downstream. Again they lifted over a millrace chute, slammed down into another roaring cavity of water.
David hugged both arms around the seat back directly ahead of him, head turned sideways. He could see out the side window: a cresting of amber spray, the flopping right wing, a pocket of damp green shade along the water-scarred cliff. Solid white water washed over the window, and the wing was gone.
Gettler lay wedged on the floor between front and back seats, his head just below the level of the left side window. From this viewless position, sound dominated his world: a deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild; magnification beyond human endurance of the highest savagery in noise. He felt the sound as a physical thing that grated through him in an unchecked rhythm like a giant’s fingernails scraping across a cosmic blackboard.
A washboard of white water dropped off beneath the plane, shot it through a staccato of jarring slap-slap-slaps that sent solid spray geysering over the cowl.
Jeb tried to see thr
ough the spray, glimpsed only a rippling blur of motion. He had seen the right wing go, felt it like something torn from his own body. His hands were numb from clutching the control wheel, and his shoulder ached. The wheel moved freely forward and back, but he could not remove his fingers from their grip on it to gain a hold on something more solid.
Can she take more of this? he asked himself.
He expected momentarily that the plane would disintegrate, dumping them into the chasm: motes in an immensity of violence.
A great brown turtle back of smooth current rolled over directly in front of them, and the spray washed down the windows to give Jeb and Monti a clear view of the prospect.
Monti closed her eyes.
The plane surged up onto the smoothness with a sliding and gentle deceptiveness. There, it hesitated, then dove down the lower side. The nose with its twisted propeller smashed squarely into a black wall of water. There came a wrenching, screeching of metal. Then the tail slammed down, lifting up a torn and gaping hole where the motor had been.
A whirlpool caught them, twisted them around until they faced upstream. The river hurled them tail foremost over another boiling mound of water. A wrenching and grating came from the tail as it ripped against the rocks. The plane whipped around with the tail as a pivot.
And Jeb watched the dark torpedo shape of an overturned canoe shoot past them … and another.
The Indians tried to follow us into here! Or they chased us too close to the chasm and were trapped!
The left wing raked the black lava wall, and the plane twisted momentarily sideways, shot with blinding abruptness into the glare of sunlight. They floated across the false calm of a broad pool that absorbed the turbulence of the rapids, and revealed this turbulence only in bubbles, thin and swift runnel lines converging and spreading.
The plane emitted a metallic gurgling, tipped to the right. The damaged left wing flopped upward.
Jeb looked out to the left, saw the pontoon floating almost a foot beneath the river. Water began to creep across the cabin floor as the plane tipped farther to the right. He swept one frantic glance around: four overturned canoes floated in the pool, but all were too far away.
“We’re tipping over!” cried Monti.
“Everybody to the left,” said Jeb.
Four Unpublished Novels Page 43