by Aaron Elkins
“Maybe… maybe they just… wanted to… scare us off,” Theo managed, following it with an “Uff!” as he tumbled headlong over a fallen trunk.
Sure, Arden thought grimly, and maybe they forgot to dip their darts in poison. And maybe your poor gray face and your uncoordinated movements — this was the third time Theo’d fallen — are just in my imagination.
“Jesus, Theo,” Frank said. “You have to watch… where you’re going.” He said it with a kind of teeth-clenched jauntiness, trying to convince himself — to convince all of them — that there was nothing the matter with his brother aside from simple, frightened clumsiness.
Theo knew better; Arden could see it in his eyes as he and Frank pulled him to his feet.
“Well, let’s go,” Theo said, but he just stood there. His speech had slowed perceptibly now and was more mumble than words. He could no longer put his lips together. His system was shutting down. “Oh, hell, I need to… I need… lie down.” He sagged against Frank.
“Theo,” Frank said urgently. “You can’t lie down. Come on, we have to keep going.”
“B… bud… I can’t… I can…” His eyelids were drooping; saliva ran down his chin.
Frank wiped it away with his fingers, his eyes filming over with sudden tears. “Theo, you can make it, we’ll get you there, bro.”
“Don’t worry, Theo, we can do it,” Arden said. “Come on, buddy.”
Quickly, they each hooked one of Theo’s flaccid arms over their shoulders and got going at as close to a trot as they could manage. Theo was as inert, and as frightfully heavy, as a corpse.
“Artificial respiration,” Arden panted, as they struggled on. “Get him… to boat… artificial respiration.”
This was mainly for Theo’s benefit, if he could still hear them. As they all knew, if artificial respiration could be applied until the effects of the toxin receded, the victim could recover, and Arden wanted him to know they hadn’t forgotten.
“Right,” Frank said brightly. “We’ll take… turns. All… have dinner in Iquitos… tonight.” But his eyes were rolling back in his head and he had begun to stagger with Theo’s weight. He was more delicately built than Arden, and he was clearly in agony, at the very end of his rope.
As was the stronger Arden. His lower back shrieked with pain, and every breath drove shards of glass into his lungs. His legs were beyond pain; he was no longer running, only driving each leg one excruciating, slogging step at a time. How many more could he force them to take? And were they really getting any closer to the boat, or were they going deeper into Chayacuro country?
Again, seemingly from a few hundred feet behind them, came a casual, softly spoken syllable or two of the Chayacuro language.
Frank slowed, struggling for air. “Can’t… carry… anymore!” he groaned. “Got to… put him down.”
Arden wouldn’t have been able to haul Theo much farther either, and it was with mixed guilt and relief that he slipped out from under Theo’s arm and helped Frank lay him gently on the mossy ground.
Frank crouched beside the supine, inert body and looked up at Arden. “We have to hide him. We can’t let them…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. “You take his legs. I’ll take—”
“Are you out of your mind?” Arden cried in a hoarse whisper. “They’re right behind us. Do you want us all to die?” He was tugging at Frank as he spoke. “Come on!”
Frank resisted, slapping angrily at Arden’s hand. “He’s still alive. He can hear us.”
Theo’s eyes were open, though unmoving. He could see them too. But there was nothing they could do. Hauling him farther was out of the question. “The hell with you then,” Arden said, straightening and turning away. “I’m going.”
“Wait! I’m coming, I’m coming!” Frank bent quickly to kiss Theo’s forehead. “Don’t worry, little brother, we’ll be back for you,” he said, choking on the words. Tears dripped from the end of his nose, but he let Arden drag him to his feet.
They had hurried on for only another minute or so before they stopped dead at the sound of Chayacuro voices carried on the still, heavy air; not the laconic syllables they’d been hearing till now, but an excited jabbering.
Frank squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God, they found him. Oh, please, no.”
“Not necessarily. They—” Arden’s voice died in his throat at the unmistakable chunk of a machete chopping into something that didn’t quite sound like wood. “I’m sorry, Frank.”
Frank turned stricken eyes toward the sound and actually began to stumble blindly in that direction.
Arden grabbed him by the collar. “What the hell are you doing? There’s nothing we can do for him now. Come on, snap out of it. We have to keep going.”
Frank let himself be turned around by Arden and goaded into moving forward again, but he was like a man in a trance now, going wherever Arden pushed or pulled him. They had thrown off their heavy backpacks — the precious bag of seeds now hung from Arden’s belt — and they were crossing a less thickly overgrown area where the going was easier and quieter, and they were less likely to be overheard.
But the same was true for the Chayacuro.
“Oh!” Frank exclaimed as a dart struck him in the soft, V-shaped space just below the left ear and behind the jawline. “Oh, no.”
Like his brother before him, he plucked it out and threw it away. As with his brother, it made little difference. Half paralyzed already, perhaps with grief or despair, he stumbled after Arden into a heavier, more concealing thicket, but made it only fifty yards before collapsing in a heap across Arden’s legs, sending them both sprawling. Arden got quickly to his feet, but Frank lay where he was. One trembling hand reached up to Arden.
Arden recoiled from it as if it were a snake. The skin on the back of his neck tightened instinctively against the prick that must surely come at any moment. “Frank—”
Instead of a dart, a slender, naked Indian burst out of the brush only five yards from them and froze, staring shocked and open-mouthed at them. He carried an immensely long blowgun, longer than he was, but he was only a youth, thin and unmuscled, Arden saw, no more than twelve or thirteen.
“Hahhhh!” He shook the blowgun at them.
Arden, in a sort of dull shock of his own, raised the Beretta and shot him in the chest, then shot him again as he crumpled with a sigh.
Whether Frank was even aware of what had happened was unclear. His gaze was loose and unfocused. “Arden, don’t leave me here,” he said thickly. “I can make it. Just help… just… uhh…”
Arden turned and fled, but quickly came to a stop. Hesitating for only a moment, he ran back to where Frank and the boy lay. The boy’s eyes were open, staring at the sky. A pool of blood was spreading out from under his shoulders, but the two black holes in his chest were almost bloodless.
“Arden… ,” Frank said, his eyes shining. “Thank… thank you. God bless you… I knew… I knew you wouldn’t…”
Arden tried not to look at him. He snatched up the bag of seeds that had come untied from his belt when the two of them had fallen and dashed back into the jungle, toward the river.
August 12, 1976
Mr. A. K. Chua
Executive Vice President, Research and Development
Gunung Jerai Industries Sdn. Bhd.
Level 3, Amoda Building, No. 22 Jalan Imbi
Kuala Lumpur
Dear Mr. Chua:
It was a pleasure meeting with you in Miami earlier this week. I hope that you (and the Hevea seeds) had a safe flight back to Kuala Lumpur.
As you requested, I am putting into writing the tragic events that attended the securing of these seeds.
On August 4 of this year, having acquired the thousand blight-resistant Hevea brasiliensis seeds which we had contracted for (plus another two hundred as backup in case of spoilage), my companions, Theodore and Franklin Molina, and I were attacked without provocation by Chayacuro Indians as we returned to the boat that we had left on the Amazon for the
return journey to Iquitos. The first sign of them was when Theo was struck in the neck by a poisoned blowgun dart. A second dart hit my backpack.
We immediately fled toward the boat, which we believed to be some two miles farther on. For several hundred yards we hacked our way through the jungle with the Indians in pursuit some distance behind. When Theo was no longer able to run, or even walk, Frank and I carried him between us for a few hundred feet more, until it became inescapably apparent that he was dead. With our own strength failing and the Indians closing in, we had no choice but to leave him and continue our own escape.
A few minutes later, Frank was also hit by a dart, and at once showed signs of hysteria. I was unable to stop him from running wildly off through the jungle in what I was sure was the wrong direction. Nevertheless, I ran after him, catching up to him only when he stumbled and fell. At this point, one of the Indians suddenly appeared, brandishing his blowgun. I managed to shoot him just as he was about to release another dart.
By this time, Frank was completely paralyzed, able only to move his eyes. Apparently his frantic activity had hastened the circulation of the poison. He died in my arms.
Using the failing strength I had left, I again made for the boat, where I started up the engine and arrived in Iquitos that evening.
Once there, I made a full report to the police and waited for five days at our base hotel in the faint hope that I might have been wrong about my companions having perished, that I might have mistaken paralysis for death, and that either or both of them had somehow survived and would show up. Needless to say, neither of them did.
If you require further information, I would be glad to provide it.
In closing, I would like to thank you for your prompt initial payment. I wish you the best of luck with the seeds, and I look forward to accepting your kind invitation to visit the Gunung Jerai plantations to see the new plantings for myself.
Sincerely yours,
Arden Scofield
ONE
Iowa City, Iowa,
Thirty Years Later: November 2006
WHAT with pitchers of beer at not much more than half price and hot buffalo wings at ten for a buck, Brothers on a Wednesday night was not the best place in the world, or even in Iowa City, for quiet, sober reflection. The place was jammed with students — the university campus was a scant block away — and the noise level was enough to rattle the windows up and down Dubuque Street.
Nevertheless, quiet, sober reflection was exactly what Tim Loeffler, a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s prestigious Ethnobotanical Institute, was shooting for. Unfortunately, the “quiet” part had been out of the question from the start, and the “sober” part was beginning to get away from him, inasmuch as he and his four buddies were working on their third pitcher of Bud. But with his friends now taking their turns at the nearby foosball table, he was able to more or less collect his thoughts and sort through what was bothering him.
He’d gotten cold feet; that was it in a nutshell. When he’d first heard about the upcoming Amazon cruise and learned that none of his fellow grad students had signed up, he’d jumped at the chance. Almost a full week in the wilds under the direction of his major professor, Arden Scofield, with no other students competing for Scofield’s attention; it would be a heaven-sent chance to get on his good side, and — at long last — to get his Ph.D. dissertation topic approved, maybe right then and there. The other two members of his committee — Maggie Gray and Dr. Gus Slivovitz — had signed off on it six months ago. Only Scofield had held back his approval, merrily sending him back to the drawing board each time Tim had submitted it to him, always with one niggling, incredibly time-consuming “suggestion” or other. And the ironic thing was, Tim had taken on the miserable topic specifically to please Scofield, who went in for such subjects: “Agrobiodiversity conservation relating to consumer-driven strategies as they pertain to chick pea cultivation in the central Midwestern United States.” Just looking at the title practically put him to sleep, and here he’d been laboring on the wretched thing for almost three years, with no end in sight as long as Scofield kept waffling.
But this was it; he’d had it. Three years of classes and three more years slaving over the damn dissertation were enough. It was now or never. He’d been offered a fantastic postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Botanical Museum — Harvard, for God’s sake, the grand-daddy of ethnobotany! — scheduled to begin the next academic year, the catch being, of course, that he had to be a bona fide postdoc himself to accept it. His coursework, comprehensive exams, and language requirements had been gotten out of the way long ago. All that remained now was Scofield’s squiggle of a signature on the title page, and he was determined to get it from him before the trip was over. There would never be a better opportunity.
So why the cold feet? Because it had finally dawned on him that a big part of his problem with Scofield — or more accurately, Scofield’s problem with him — was that the man simply didn’t like him, had never liked him. Who knew why? Maybe Scofield, who loved center stage and thought he was the greatest lecturer on God’s green earth, didn’t like him because Tim had once or twice inadvertently stepped on his punch lines. (It was hard not to when you were hearing them for the tenth time.) Or maybe Scofield, underneath the hail-fellow-jolly-well-met act, disapproved of Tim’s interest in ethnopharmacology. Tim’s original choice for a dissertation topic had been an examination of the preparation and use of hallucinogenic plant extracts among the Indians of Southern Ecuador — now that was something he really could have gotten his head into. But at the idea, Scofield’s caterpillar eyebrows had come together, he had stuck his pipe in his mouth, and he’d made one of his friendly, phony, well-now-let’s-you-and-I-think-this-through-together faces that meant anything but. Cravenly, Tim had caved in and accepted the agrobiodiversity topic the moment Scofield suggested it. He had even more cravenly thanked him for it, though his heart had been plummeting.
For the ten-thousandth time he mentally kicked himself for not choosing Maggie Gray as his major prof. Maggie, despite that hard-shelled, sarcastic bitchiness of hers, was not only a hell of a lot easier to get along with (“Call me Maggie,” she’d told him the first time he’d met her. “Call me Arden” was something he was still waiting to hear and probably never would), but Maggie, unlike Scofield, had a strong interest in ethnopharmacology herself and would have welcomed his Ecuadorian project as a thesis subject. But no, he’d leaped at the chance to get the famous Scofield as his major professor, imagining all the good it would do him in his career.
What a laugh. And the really irritating part of it was, everybody knew that the supposedly straight-arrow Scofield himself was a damned druggie, or near enough to it to make no difference. His everyday tea of choice after dinner was known to be something called Mate Celillo, which he claimed was an ordinary Bolivian mate — a popular tea, often recommended for altitude sickness and stomach problems, and made from coca leaves from which the addictive alkaloids had been removed. He drank it, so he claimed, because of its digestive properties and because it was a soothing way to end the day and thus helped him sleep. But Tim, who had his suspicions, had once swiped a couple of his tea bags and tried it, and he’d been a lot more than soothed. For an hour or so there had been a wonderfully relaxing, extremely pleasant sense of floating and well-being, and then, without seeing it coming, he’d suddenly plummeted into a deep, nine-hour sleep — in his chair, while watching television. Despite a little morning-after letdown — nothing new there — it had been a great trip, and Tim had made several efforts to locate some of the stuff on his own, but so far, no luck.
Getting back to Scofield, maybe the problem was that the guy just didn’t like his face, or his nose, or the shape of his ears — just a matter of chemistry, at bottom unexplainable and irreversible. Well, if so, it went both ways by now; he could hardly look at Scofield without feeling his stomach turn over. But whatever it was, it was there, all right, and earlier tonight, when he and his
pals had been talking about it, one of them had raised a pertinent point: “If he just plain doesn’t like you after three years of knowing you, what makes you think that being around him twenty-four hours a day is going to make him like you any more?”
It was a reasonable question, and Tim was worried. He couldn’t imagine coming out of this detesting Scofield any less than before, so why should it work the other way around? The thing was, he was never at his best around the guy — clumsy and stupid, saying the wrong thing, usually overly obsequious, but sometimes (the wrong times, inevitably) overly assertive, even blundering. His meetings with Scofield invariably left him feeling hollow and sick to his stomach. What if he picked the wrong time to present him with the latest incarnation of the dissertation? What if Scofield turned it down yet again?
Well, if that happened, that was the end of it. Enough of his life had been wasted. He would throw in the towel. With his master’s degree he could certainly teach botany at a junior college, or maybe get some kind of job with a company that made herbal products or natural nutrients or something. But goodbye, “Dr.” Loeffler; farewell, Harvard; so long, big-time research.
He gave his head a shake and poured another glass from the pitcher. What the hell, the die was cast, he couldn’t get out of it now, and maybe that was a good thing, all things considered. One way or another, he was headed for a life-altering experience on the Amazon. By the time it was over he would know exactly where he stood, and that was a feeling he hadn’t had for a long time.