by Aaron Elkins
“Yes, yes, I do see,” Duayne said, nodding.
“And then the skin itself. There are tool marks on it, see? Burn marks too, right under—”
“Okay, enough already, Doc,” John said. “Now the next time we’re in the market for a shrunken head, we’ll know if we’re getting ripped off. But what’s it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of curse or something?”
“A warning?” Tim suggested. “Are they threatening us?” His eyes slid sideways to the slowly passing shore, now a safe three miles away.
Gideon put the head down and straightened up. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m reasonably sure it’s not meant as a gesture of welcome, but I’ve never run into this custom before: tying a head to a spear. On the other hand, I’m not exactly up on South American ethnography.”
They all stood staring down at the head as if expecting it to open its sewn-together lips and provide answers on its own.
“Chato says he knows what it is,” Vargas announced into the silence. Chato, the Indian crewman who had mutely conducted Gideon, John, and Phil to their cabins earlier, had appeared a few minutes before to begin mopping up broken glass and spilled liquor. But now he was standing on tiptoe, whispering excitedly into Vargas’s ear.
“Qué quieres decir, Chato?” Vargas asked impatiently.
The Indian began to whisper again.
“Speak up so everyone can hear,” Vargas ordered.
Chato, looking uneasy at the attention, raised his voice to just barely above a whisper. Not only was he almost inaudible, but he spoke in a Spanish-English-Indian patois with which even Phil had a hard time.
“Translate, will you, Captain?” Phil said.
Vargas accommodated him, translating after every couple of phrases. “He has heard of it before, this custom… . In olden days, one of the native groups used it as a — a what, Chato?… ah, a death-warning, a revenge warning, to an enemy tribe… . They would use… no, they would take… no, they would shrink the head of a killer, someone who had killed one of their own people, and they would attach it to a spear… and they would, they would throw the spear into the hut, into the wall of the hut, of the family of this killer… to tell them that one of them would soon die too… for the purpose of…” He searched for the English word.
“In retaliation?” Gideon suggested.
“Yes, professor, that’s correct, in retaliation.” He thought Chato was done and began to say something else, but Chato hadn’t finished. Vargas listened some more.
“Ah. You see, the fact that the victims received the shrunken head of their own kinsman back, that was to show the contempt that the attackers had for them… that the head wasn’t even worth keeping. And sometimes it would not be the head of the actual killer, but the head of another member of the enemy tribe. Sometimes two heads would be—”
“So… what’s this got to do with us?” Tim asked. “Why would they… I mean, what reason would they… ?”
“Ask him what tribe,” Scofield said hoarsely. He had emerged from the dining room while Vargas was translating.
Vargas put the question to Chato.
“Los Chayacuros,” Chato said.
“The Chayacuro,” Scofield said in a dead voice and then, as he sagged back against the dining room wall, laughter started gurgling out of him, limp, helpless laughter that built until it convulsed his whole body, so that he slid slowly down the wall into a sitting position on the deck.
The others stared at him, appalled. Vargas hurried toward him with his arms out, but Scofield, still shaking with deep but silent laughter, waved him off. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said when he finally stopped and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Oo, ow, that hurt.”
But he wasn’t all right. There were oily tears running down his cheeks and he was still giggling. “They want to kill me… they remember, don’t you see? They’ve waited for me all these years… can you believe it? All these years… They want to finish the job, they—”
Mel Pulaski stepped forward and reached down to grasp his hand. “Come on, Arden, get up,” he said disgustedly. “This isn’t doing anybody any good. Okay, you’ve had a hell of a scare, but it missed you. You’re okay, you’re fine. A couple of little nicks.”
“A hell of a scare,” Scofield echoed woodenly. “Yes, yes, it was certainly that.” Another little hiccup of laughter.
The big ex-linebacker pulled him unresisting to his feet. “Come on, let’s get you to your cabin.”
“I’ll do it,” Tim said, running up. “Come on, Professor, you want to lie down for a while. Easy does it now… .” He took Scofield’s elbow and began to shuffle him tenderly forward the way a nurse would shuffle an aged patient down a hospital corridor to get a blood test.
That brought Scofield to sudden life. With a violent twist of his arm he shook the young man off. “Dammit, Loeffler, don’t treat me like a child! I’m a little shaky, yes — who wouldn’t be? — but I can damn well get to my cabin without your help!”
Tim’s face turned redder than Scofield’s. “But I wasn’t — I was only—”
“Oh, forget it, never mind,” Scofield muttered and strode off, steadily enough after the first tottery step or two, to the flight of stairs that led up to the cabins.
When he was gone, most of the others sank into the plastic chairs at the various tables, sighing, or shaking their heads, or otherwise expressing shock and discomfort. Tim was flushed and sullen. Gideon and John remained standing, leaning against the deck railing.
“My Lord, I wonder what that was all about,” Duayne said. “Why should he think these people, these… Chayacuro, would be trying to kill him?”
“Oh, I know what it was about,” Maggie said. “Most of us do, actually. Or at least the ones that know Arden.”
“So how about enlightening the rest of us?” John suggested.
Maggie shrugged. “Why not? Well, you see, it goes back quite a way. When Arden—” She stopped and turned to Mel. “Mel, why don’t you tell it? You’re the man who just wrote his life story.”
Mel made a face. “I didn’t write his life story. I wrote what he told me his life story was, which is a different thing. That old story about the Chayacuro that he’s been dining out on for thirty years? Who knows if it really happened? There’s nobody around to check it out with.”
“Well, obviously, something happened,” Gideon said. “He was pretty shaken up there.”
“Yes,” Maggie agreed. “I’ve known Arden a long time, and I’ve never seen him like that. Not even close. Arden is usually — always, really — one of the most in-control people you’ll ever…” Shaking her head, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Just go ahead and tell it, Mel.”
“Okay, why not? Here’s the story.” Mel lounged back in his chair, his massive brown legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his hands in the pockets of his shorts.
Thirty years earlier, he told them, Scofield, as a twentysomething-year-old graduate student, had been on a rubber seed–hunting expedition in the Amazon with his two best friends, fellow students at Harvard.
“They were on assignment for a big Malaysian rubber plantation,” Maggie put in. “They made a lot of money from it. Arden did, at any rate. The other two never made it out.”
“You want to tell the story, be my guest,” Mel said grumpily. No less than Scofield, he didn’t care for having his narrative flow disrupted or his punch lines telegraphed. But with this Gideon could easily sympathize.
Maggie threw up her hands. “Well, please excuse me. I was just trying to fill in a few details. You go ahead, you’re the professional storyteller, after all.”
“Okay, then,” Mel said uncertainly, not sure whether or not he’d just been insulted. “So while they were coming back through the jungle to their boat, they were attacked by this band of Chayacuro Indians. First one of his pals gets it — a poison dart through the neck. So Arden and his other buddy drag him along, trying to stay ahead of the Indians, but in a few minutes th
ey could see he was dead, and they have to leave him there. Then the second guy gets hit—”
“Wait, before that happened,” Tim said, “they actually heard the sound of them chopping off the first guy’s head, chonk! And the first guy was the second guy’s brother!”
“His brother!” Vargas exclaimed with a shudder. “Ay, qué asco!”
Mel sighed, seeing how it was going to be, but he took it in good stride and continued: “When the second brother was hit by a dart he went sort of crazy—”
“Arden went crazy?” This time it was Phil. “Or the brother?”
“No the brother, for Christ’s sake. He ran off in a panic, into the jungle, and Arden chased after him, trying to get him back to the path.”
“Which was pretty brave, when you think about it,” Gideon said. “He could easily just have taken off, trying to save himself.”
“Yeah,” said Mel, “assuming that the way he tells it is the way it happened.”
It was the second time Mel had expressed doubt. “And you don’t think it is?” Gideon asked.
Mel thought before answering. “No, I didn’t say that. Look, I’m a careful writer. I’m serious about fact-checking, that’s all, and I get uncomfortable when there’s no way to check something out, especially when it happened a long time ago, and it’s a story that makes somebody out to be a hero — or a coward, for that matter. People forget, they embellish, they like to look good, you know? I’m not talking about lying, just about maybe remembering something the way they want to remember it. But no, I don’t have any real reason to doubt him, just…”
“Come, come, tell us what happened,” an engrossed Vargas urged. “The other brother, he died also?”
“Yes, but not before one of the Chayacuro, a big guy for an Indian, catches up with them. As Arden tells it, the guy has his blowgun to his lips, aiming it right at his throat from only fifteen feet away, and Arden shoots him just in time.
“Whoa,” said Phil, shaking his head. “That’s hairy.”
“Yeah. Anyhow, then the second brother dies too, right in his arms. Arden leaves him for the headhunters too — in all fairness, what else could he do? — and runs for the boat they’d stashed at the river, and he gets away. And that’s it, that’s the story.”
But he couldn’t resist a final aside. “As Arden tells it.”
A thoughtful silence now settled down over the group, moderated only by the soft, steady swish of water against the hull and the clinking of broken glass as Chato quietly finished sweeping the last of the shards into a dustpan.
After a time, Duayne spoke. “I guess I don’t understand. Does he think these Chayacuro are still after him? Why would they be?”
“Presumably because he killed one of them,” Mel said.
Duayne shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. It was kill or be killed. He had no choice. They were chasing him; he was defending himself. It was completely justified. What else could he do?”
“No, you don’t get it; that’s not the way their minds work.” The speaker was Cisco, making his first appearance since the introductions that morning. He had returned to take a chair against the dining room wall, a little away from the others, where he sat. Looking not quite so much on his last legs as he had earlier, he had changed to shorts and flip-flops that revealed knobby, hairy knees and bony, callused, misshapen feet that looked like illustrations from a podiatric pathology textbook.
“See,” he said, “to them, there’s no such thing as ‘self-defense’ or ‘completely justified.’ They just don’t think that way. A dead guy is a dead guy.” He paused to take a shaky pull on the cigarette he’d brought with him, an action made more difficult by the stiff, uncomfortable way he held his head. “If it’s caused by somebody else, it has to be avenged. Period. Hell, even if it’s not caused by somebody else, they find somebody to take it out on; in their world, nobody except the old folks dies because he just plain got sick and croaked; it’s always a murder, a curse, you name it. Booga-booga. Somebody did it to him. Witchcraft, poisoning, whatever. These people, they got a very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality.”
Gideon nodded. It was a common enough world view among nonliterate peoples, especially fierce groups like the Chayacuro. Cisco seemed to be a bit more on the ball than he’d given him credit for. He was considerably sharper than he’d been earlier. Apparently he’d had more education than his manner suggested too. “A very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality” — that was hardly the language of your typical dope-addled drifter or dropout or whatever he was, especially considering that English wasn’t his first language. Gideon was even beginning to have an easier time understanding his mush-mouthed speech. Still, there was always a sense of something being “off” about him. When you spoke to him, it was as if your words were going by about two feet to the left of his head, and his were missing yours by about the same distance.
“But it was so long ago,” Tim said. “How could they remember? Would anybody still care?”
“They don’t see time like you do,” Cisco said. “They see connected events: killing, revenge. The first, like, requires the other, you know? The time in between doesn’t have anything to do with it. It doesn’t compute, you know?”
“And what do you think about it, Cisco?” Maggie asked. “Was it really them? Were they really trying to kill him?”
Cisco shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” Thin ribbons of smoke trailed from his nostrils as he spoke. “All I’m saying is, look around, look where we are.” He waved, without turning, at the darkening jungle behind him. “This ain’t Kansas, Toto. It’s a different world, it’s got different laws you and me can never understand in a million years.”
“Wow,” murmured a thrilled Tim. “Damn.” Others murmured similarly.
“Hold on a minute, folks, this doesn’t hold water,” said Gideon, for whom things were veering too close to the occult to be comfortable. “What Cisco says is true enough, generally speaking, but it doesn’t apply in this case. How could they recognize Arden after so many years? How would they know he’d be aboard the Adelita?”
Phil backed him up. “And how could they know that he’d be standing there in plain sight right at that moment? They couldn’t, it’s impossible.”
John chimed in too. “Yeah, and how would they know exactly where the boat would be passing at that exact time? How would they know to station somebody right there with a spear?”
“Yes,” said Duayne, throwing in his sensible two cents’ worth as well. “How could they possibly know we’d be close enough to shore for a spear to reach the boat? For most of the time, we would have been way out of range.”
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The only reason we were that close is that I asked Captain Vargas to move us in so that we could see some wildlife.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Vargas concurred.
“So whatever the hell it was about,” John said, “it wasn’t because anybody was laying in wait, specifically trying to get Scofield.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cisco said, unimpressed, and coming within a millimeter of burning himself as he scratched one bare leg with the hand that held the cigarette. “I’m not saying they did or they didn’t, but I tell you this: I been here a long time now, and I spent a lot of time in the jungle, and I seen a lot weirder stuff than this. These people — I don’t just mean the Chayacuro, I mean, you know, a lot of the indigenous jungle people — well, our laws of physics, and motion, and even the material world, they don’t apply. We think there’s no way they could know he’d be coming back, but they have ways of knowing things that science doesn’t even begin to understand. Let me ask you… um… ?” With his chin he gestured questioningly at Gideon.
“Gideon,” Gideon told him.
“Okay, let me ask you, Gideon. You want to know, how could they know you would ask Vargas to bring the boat close at that exact point, right?”
Gideon nodded. “I sure do.”
“B
ut I see the question a different way. Why did you ask him to bring the boat close at that exact point? Where did the idea come from? Ideas don’t come from nowhere. What was it that made you do it right then and not some other time? What made the other guy, Scofield, stand right there, out in the open, in full view, at that exact second? Isn’t it possible that forces beyond anything we—”
“Nothing made me do it,” Gideon retorted with heat. “Look, Cisco, I have a pretty well-integrated belief system regarding causality myself, and in this case you can take it from me that no jungle witch doctor” — he winced at his own highly unanthropological choice of words, but phrases like “ways of knowing things that science doesn’t begin to understand” tended to buzz irritatingly in his ear, like a cloud of little mosquitoes, and made him cranky and argumentative — “put the idea in my head. I assure you, I’m quite capable of coming up with it all by myself.”
Before the words had left his mouth he was ashamed of himself. Snapping so pompously at a human wreck like Cisco was contemptible. “On the other hand,” he said in a lame attempt at making amends, “of course you’re right: nobody really can say where his ideas come from.”
Cisco’s reaction only made him feel worse. He’d hurt the poor guy’s feelings. The gaunt, gray-bearded man dropped his eyes and held up his hands in submission. “I’m just saying,” he mumbled around the half-inch, burning butt still in his mouth. “No offense, buddy.”
At that point, one of Vargas’s Indian crew — the cook, obviously, inasmuch as he was carrying a wooden ladle and wearing a gravy-stained apron tied at the waist, an equally grubby white undershirt, and a villainous black bandanna tied around his head — came out of the kitchen with fire in his eyes.