by Lou Cameron
Another Jivaro woman came over and squatted near Susan Reynolds with a puzzled smile. She said something in Jivaro and Diablilla translated, saying, “She says she is glad the señorita has recovered from her madness. She says she was very worried about her.” Captain Gringo told Susan in English.
Susan turned, her face aside and said, “Tell her I hate her. She’s one of the girls who kept me in that hut with all the shrunken heads.”
Captain Gringo nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yeah, I’d forgotten you were supposed to be a Christian missionary. I guess the Prince of Peace would have hated her, too, huh?”
Susan looked stricken and then she sighed and said, “That was a cruel thrust, Dick. But I guess I had it coming. I’m trying to remember why my friends and I came down here, but it isn’t easy. What should I do?”
“I’m not sure. Instincts are usually safe to follow, if you’re a reasonably nice kid. I think she’d settle for a smile.”
Susan looked timidly on her erstwhile captor. Then she suddenly leaned forward, took the surprised Indian girl by the shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek. The delighted little Jivaro girl laughed and wrapped her arms around Susan, saying something in her own language. Diablilla translated, “She says it makes her heart soar to have a new friend. She says the cheap blonde made a lousy pet.”
Captain Gringo chuckled and translated a cleaned-up version as the Indian girl leaped to her feet and scampered off to get something. Then he added, “You’re doing fine, Susan. That didn’t hurt, did it?”
The blonde laughed and said, “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t felt so good in weeks! Now that I understand, I can see they weren’t as nasty as I thought. But there’s still a lot of work for missionaries here, Dick. They have absolutely no morals. You can see how shameless they are about their bodies, and at night, oh, Lord, the way they carry on in the huts, right in front of everyone!”
“Everybody has morals, honey. They just don’t agree on what morals are. I don’t know Jivaro rules, but I once had an Apache point out how sinful we whites were. He tortured prisoners and had two wives, but as I was taking him back to the reservation he asked me if it was true that we had little children working in cotton mills back East. Clothes don’t make much sense in a jungle when you study on it. I feel just fine without my shirt and I’d probably feel better without pants if I wasn’t a product of our own culture.”
“Oh, even if one accepts the nudity, Dick, they still seem pretty nasty. I’ve seen grown men mistreating little girls and—”
“Now just back up and try that again, Susan,” he cut in, adding, “You saw a Jivaro making love to a girl. Period.”
“No, ravaging a child, damnit! Give me credit for having eyesight. I tell you I’ve seen them doing terrible things to girls as young as six or eight!”
“Well, leaving aside the fact that they look pretty young at any age, you’re forgetting something. You say none of them abused you sexually, right?”
She nodded and he continued, “Okay, if they’re not in the habit of raping helpless captives, what are the odds on them taking a Jivaro girl against her will with her parents within earshot?”
“It’s still dirty and disgusting. Don’t tell me you approve of child-molesting, too?”
“It’s not for me to approve or disapprove, Susan. I’m not a Jivaro. If they like to start younger than we do, that’s their business, not ours. Who knows, maybe the kids like sex. Most people do.”
Diablilla had been trying to follow the conversation without much luck. She nudged Captain Gringo from the other side and asked, “Are you two flirting?”
He laughed and said, “No, she was telling me she doesn’t approve of being vile.”
“Why talk about it at all in that case? I’ll bet she would like to be vile with you, but I shall be most cross with her if she tries to take you away from me. You must tell her you are my soldado, Dick.”
He patted Diablilla’s shoulder and said not to worry. The awkward three-way conversation was abruptly ended by the old chief coming over with a worried look. He tweeted and grunted at Diablilla and she told Captain Gringo, “He says his scouts have spotted flagelados, many flagelados, headed this way. He thinks they may have cut our trail.”
Captain Gringo nodded and was still thinking when the girl Susan had kissed came back with a big bowl of something sloppy for them. That helped him make his mind up in a hurry. He called to Gaston and said, “Round up the guys with guns and let’s take a hike. I’ll carry the machine gun. Everyone else should be safe here if we do it right the first time.”
Chapter Seventeen
It was still light but would soon be dark as the long line of slave-raiding flagelados moved abreast through the selva. Their leader, a big mulatto with an ugly scar down one cheek, smiled thinly as he spotted another scuff mark in the forest duff. He didn’t know who they were trailing. It didn’t matter. El Cicatrizo’s forty men were hard-eyed jungle runners armed with twelve-gauge pump guns in addition to their pistols and machetes. El Cicatrizo made it twenty to thirty people they were trailing and at least a couple of them seemed to be women. That was nice. He and his men hadn’t had any women since they’d raided that last village a week ago, and while rank had its privileges, a man gets tired of buggering a youthful follower. A couple of the people the slavers were trailing wore shoes. So they weren’t Indians. That was good, too. El Patron didn’t like them to bring back wild Indios, although an Indio would do if they couldn’t catch anyone else. The bunch ahead were doubtless Colombian peons. The best kind of slaves. If a man spoke Spanish it was a simple matter to put him to work, no?
El Cicatrizo stepped around a huge mahogany bole and stopped thoughtfully. A wall of second growth lay in sight up ahead. He hoped the damned peons fleeing from him hadn’t run into that brush. It was a bother digging people out of bushes with machetes. It could be mildly dangerous, too.
A lieutenant moved over to him and said, “It’s getting late, Chief. The-boys are a little worried about meeting a Jivaro in the dark.”
El Cicatrizo spat and answered, “I spit in the mother’s milk of any fucking Indian. We outnumber any band we might meet, even without our shotguns. Besides, no Indian left all those footprints we’ve been following. They are peons, I tell you.”
“Si, I, too, can read sign. But why are they running? One can see they moved through here in a great hurry. We have not raided this deep into Colombian territory before. Could somebody else be after them?”
El Cicatrizo shrugged and said, “Who cares? We will make them tap rubber for El Patron, too. These ahead of us could be smugglers running from the Colombian border guards. On the other hand, they may have heard we are recruiting in the neighborhood. That missionary camp we hit a few weeks back is not far from here. Word may have gotten around. I have told you boys to be quiet and watch your smoke, but does anybody ever listen? Let’s move in on those bushes. I want to get them before dark, whoever they are.”
So the skirmish line edged closer, guns trained on the wall of greenery. A shallow gully running at right angles to their advance made a natural fire line. El Cicatrizo held up his hand and called out, “Form on my flank, muchachos. Take cover here and let us see about that thicket before we move in closer. Gomez, Silva, you two scout forward, and be careful, eh?”
As two men moved cautiously forward, the burly El Cicatrizo hunkered down in the gully, shotgun across his knees. The men beyond did the same. It was what Captain Gringo had been expecting them to do when he’d spotted the gully earlier. He, of course, was off to their flank, behind a fallen log with the Maxim. Gaston and the eight riflemen with them lay flat behind other cover flanking the slavers.
As the flagelados lined up so considerately, he whispered to Gaston, “See if you can pick off the scouts. Are you all set?”
Gaston said, “Mais oui,” and might have said more if it hadn’t gotten so noisy all of a sudden as the husky American rose from behind his log, machine gun braced on his hip, a
nd opened fire!
The cathedral-like selva echoed with the insane woodpecker rattle of his spitting Maxim and the screams of dying men as he hosed hot lead the length of the gully. A shotgun blossomed orange at him, but he ignored it. He’d chosen his position with care, and knew that he was out of shotgun range. The same could not be said for his returning fire. A machine gun shot as far as a rifle, albeit not as accurately. Accuracy was not much of a problem when you threw enough rounds into a target, so he gave them a full belt of .30-30 before the Maxim fell silent and left him standing with his ears ringing in a cloud of drifting blue smoke. He saw no movement among the bodies lined up in the gully. Off to his left he heard the flat crack of a rifle and the duller roar of Gaston’s pistol. Whatever they were up to was their problem. He lowered the hot Maxim to the log and inserted the end of a fresh belt before he stepped over the log, dragging the belt behind him as he advanced with the machine gun muzzle leading the way.
He rolled El Cicatrizo over with his foot. The big mulatto still looked surprised. Captain Gringo didn’t see what all the mystery was about. Anybody with six rounds in him was supposed to be dead.
As he moved down the line he saw some of the others were in better or worse shape. None of them were ever going to bother anybody again. He’d put at least three rounds in every one of them and one guy had taken maybe eight. It was hard to judge, with half his head blown away like so.
Gaston came in at an angle to join him, calling out, “We got both the scouts. One is still breathing, with considerable effort. I told Pancho you might wish to discuss his unseemly past before we finished him. So Pancho is watching him.”
Captain Gringo saw Quico and some of the others coming over to the gully. He called out. “Hey, Quico. Take over here and gather up all the weapons, ammo, and anything else we can use. I think the Blue Brigade is back in business. We’ve even got guns for the girls, now.”
Then he asked Gaston to lead him to the wounded prisoner.
They found Pancho seated on a log, discussing the joys of Hell with the groaning flagelado who lay at his feet with a bullet in his guts.
Pancho looked up and said, “His name is Silva. He’s a Brazilian motherfucker and he says he does not wish for to die. Is that not amusing?”
Captain Gringo told Pancho to shove over and took a seat on the log to quietly study the dying flagelado. Silva was a Creole with a gold ring in one ear and a shaven head that belonged on a baboon. He had a gold tooth he kept baring in pain as he complained to his mother, God, and a couple of saints about the way he’d been treated. Captain Gringo had a hard time following until he got used to the accent. Silva spoke the mixture of bad Spanish and bad Portuguese that made up the lingua franca of Amazonia.
Portuguese spelling was a lot different from Spanish but the spoken words were not that different. Speakers fluent in one could understand the other about as well as an English-speaking Texan could savvy a broad Scottish brogue. Portuguese had a sort of French accent and he missed some words, but it wasn’t hard to see that Senhor meant Señor or that San and Sao both meant Saint.
Captain Gringo nudged the wounded flagelado with his booted toe and said, “Enough of this bullshit. Where did you guys get those neat American shotguns?”
Silva sobbed and said, “That hurt, damn your eyes! Have you no pity, senhor?”
“For a wounded man-eating tiger, maybe. For an animal that preys on its own kind? You have to be joshing us. You were going to tell us about those Browning pumpers, remember?”
Silva said something dumb about needing medical attention. Captain Gringo kicked him harder and snapped, “I’ll give you something for your pain, you prick. I’ll give you another bullet in your knee cap. And if that doesn’t put you in a conversational mood I might get unpleasant.”
Silva whimpered, “Sao Cristavo! I think I am dying!”
“Think, hell. Of course you’re dying. We’re all dying, sooner or later. What we’re talking about is how comfortable it’s going to be. You didn’t get all those repeating shotguns from those missionaries. You had too many of them. Who outfitted you? Who are you working for?”
“Please, senhor, I have a woman at the plantation. Dom Luis will kill her if he learns I talked.”
“Listen, it will be our little secret, see? Who’s this Dom Luis, a rubber baron?”
“A rubber emperor, senhor. Don’t tell me you have never heard of Dom Luis Do Putumayo?”
“No, but you were just about to tell us all about him, right?”
“You promise not to tell on me? You promise to do something for this pain, senhor?”
Captain Gringo did, so Silva spilled his guts. Rather literally, toward the end. His story was disjointed and rambling. Captain Gringo had to make him repeat a lot of words he didn’t understand. He had to keep kicking the semiconscious slaver to keep his mind from wandering, and the results were sort of messy. But, with Gaston helping with some of the more French-sounding words, they got as much as Silva knew out of him, and Captain Gringo was already condensing it to the shorter version he’d tell the others as they compared notes and planned their strategy. Then, when Silva started repeating himself and reminding Captain Gringo that he’d promised to do something for the pain, the tall American nodded and rose from his seat. He placed the instep of his boot on Silva’s throat and tromped hard, crushing the windpipe like a cockroach, with a sickening crunch. Then he said, “Let’s go. Pancho, send one of the guys back to the Indian camp for a salvage detail. It’ll be dark soon and I don’t want to leave a single round of ammo behind out here. We’re going to need every round if that guy was serious about the army this Dom Luis has.”
Pancho shuddered as he looked down at the dead man and said, “I am sure he spoke most sincerely, señor. Do you always finish them off like that? I was expecting you to shoot him in the head.”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said. “Old Infantry trick. I just told you we need all the ammunition, didn’t I?”
Chapter Eighteen
The war council in the Jivaro camp that night was sort of weird as well as awfully complicated. Captain Gringo met with the tribal elders, Gaston, Diablilla, the natural leaders of his band, and the blonde Susan Reynolds in the chief’s hut. The pleasant old gent had a line of little black shrunken heads hanging from his smoke-stained ridge-pole just above them, and while Captain Gringo was too polite to ask, some of the heads looked like they’d once been attached to white men. The beards and mustaches gave a grotesque touch to the tiny serene faces with the lips and eyelids neatly sewn shut as they dangled just above his own eye level, facing the others around the little smudge fire. It was funny how large living heads looked in the flickering light.
As he repeated what the dying slaver had told him in Spanish, Diablilla twitted at the Jivaro, and Susan, of course, looked blank, trying to follow. It was surprising that her church had sent her into a solidly Catholic part of the world not speaking a word of any language she was likely to hear. But the idea of Mormon headhunters was sort of dumb in the first place, when you thought about it. The Catholics had spent centuries trying to make Christians out of everyone in these parts. So anybody who was still holding out had to be a hard sell.
The old padres had been allowed pretty rough methods of conversion by the Inquisition. Any tribes who’d held out against the fire and sword of the conquest were going to be rough to convert via brotherly love in English. But that was Susan’s problem. Or, rather, it had been, before her party had gone out of business.
He waited until he’d told it all to his Spanish-speaking followers before he turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, honey. But your friends are all dead. Those guys we chopped up out there were the raiders who hit your camp. They work for a big rubber guy called Dom Luis. He calls himself Dom Luis Do Putumayo, like he owns the headwaters of the Putumayo. I guess he thinks he does.”
Susan gasped. “I can’t believe that! We knew Dom Luis! He struck me as a perfect gentleman of the old school.”
“At his plantation, down the river. The steamboat from Manaus dropped us off there. He has a regular little town at his landing on the Putumayo. He was ever so gracious. He entertained us for a few days, told us all about the tribes we might meet and so forth, and tried to talk our leaders out of going farther upstream. He warned us the country was dangerous.”
“Yeah, he probably didn’t want you to see too much of it. What happened then?”
“Oh, Dom Luis loaned us some canoes and ordered some of his men to paddle and guide us up this way. I don’t see how they could have intended any treachery, Dick. I know at least two of our native porters were killed in the raid on our camp. I watched them die. They worked for Dom Luis!”
“Yeah, so did the flagelados who massacred your party. There might have been a mix-up. More than likely, the porters he sent with you were just innocent peons. Everybody living under the Tsar is not a Cossack, and it’s not like Dom Luis is short of help. He’s got his slavers combing the country for new recruits.”
“I can’t believe that of Dom Luis, Dick. He seemed like such a nice man. There must be some mistake. Maybe he doesn’t know what his roughnecks are doing when he isn’t watching them.”
“He knows, doll. Dom Luis is a Brazilian. He’s added a big chunk of Colombian territory to his rubber empire in the last few months. And let’s not say something dumb about him being confused about the borderline. He started with a land grant from Brazil, so his plantation has to be on the map, and the map says it’s just inside the Brazilian border. A guy who invades other countries on his own must feel pretty smug and powerful. He knows they just had a revolution in Colombia. The Colombian military is weak and divided. Patrolling the jungle down here is the least of their worries. So he’s just started grabbing. He’s issued spanking new modern weapons to his own private army and he has enough men to make hash out of any little patrols Colombia will be in shape to send for a while.”