“Kevin figured the Tabna were goona be his Ishi,” Derek, the only Scotsman of the crew, was saying. “Goona make him fooking famous. Goona get him a cushy lecture job at some fooking university.”
“Might do at that.” Jake ran his hands over his head, wiping salty sweat over hair already stiff with it. He’d been lured by the promise of a grand adventure too, of traveling where few white men had gone. Lured by the challenge of negotiating with a tribe that didn’t conduct trade.
But most of all, he’d been lured by what he’d be negotiating for, the benesha, and the promise of an end to severe hunger.
A woman ambled out of a hut and joined the sack menders. A little girl toddled behind. Still no men.
Jake looked around the camp. “Have you seen Mawgis this morning?”
Kevin shrugged and pulled himself to his feet. He wasn’t a tall man, but he towered over Jake. “Don’t know. They were gone when we got up this morning. We ate breakfast with the ladies.”
“Where’s Joaquin?” Jake asked.
“Gone off to some emergency upriver. Left right after dawn. Took his translator and the only working satellite phone with him, too. How’re we supposed to talk to the Tabna without a translator? Whole day likely gone to rot.” Kevin spat. “Bureaucrats.”
Jake reached into his pocket and pulled out his translator. He’d brought two—one for himself, one for Joaquin. Mawgis already had one the Salesians had left. When negotiations were finished, Jake would return them all to World United.
He walked toward the young woman he’d admired yesterday, the tiny machine visible in his flattened palm. She shook her head and turned her back to him. With a beseeching look in his eyes, he approached the women mending the sacks. One of them shook her head, but another stood up and came over, smiling nervously. Jake gently fitted the translator in her ear—a simple thing to do, since she was his height. He found himself smiling back at her, an easy, comfortable smile, enjoying the pleasure of being among people his own size, even as he worried and asked her where Mawgis and the other men were.
She spoke. He tapped his own ear and then touched hers, in sign that he needed the translator back. She giggled slightly, then removed the machine and handed it over.
“Gone hunting,” the translator voiced, turning her words into English.
He took the machine from his ear and held it out for her. She gingerly set it in place again.
“For how long?” he asked, and immediately regretted the unanswerable question.
The woman gave him a blank look, handed back the translator, and turned away. She resettled herself and went back to her sack mending. The other women and girls looked at her with curiosity, but she only bent her head and concentrated on her task.
Jake blew out a breath. Mawgis might indeed be hunting, but it wasn’t only meat for the pot he was after. His absence was about power, about making him wait. Jake knew it, and he was sure Mawgis knew that he knew.
Two
“Jake. Jake. Jake. Jake.”
He woke exhausted and confused, his brain foggy from too little sleep in a restless night mostly spent worrying about the success of the mission. Mawgis held the tent door aside with one shoulder, leaning in, grinning at him. The pale yellow light of early dawn framed the Tabna chief like an aura. The opened door let in the wet heat already ratcheting up for the day. Mawgis motioned with a softly fisted hand for Jake to follow him. Jake didn’t move.
He knew more about the Tabna now, about Mawgis. The women had told him some useful things while he’d busied himself translating for the film crew—the little machine whispering in his ear hour after hour while he kept half an eye on the trees around the camp, watching for Mawgis’s return. He’d learned about the Tabna tradition of one-upmanship—a game devised by the first ancestors when they’d arrived in the forest, to trick knowledge from ignorant natives. These days the Tabna played the game among themselves, and with youngsters stolen from other tribes—to find the cleverest among them, as potential mates. Jake had wondered what happened to the less clever. Were they sent back? Abandoned when the nomadic tribe moved on, or left to fend for themselves? He hadn’t asked, since it would have meant trading the translator again. The Tabna liked to talk, but moving the translator back and forth seemed to weary them. They lost interest if he asked them to switch too often.
The Tabna believed that playing the game with anyone who wasn’t of their tribe was a gift—a way to teach an “other” about life, and to make the other a better person. Sauleen, the woman most willing to wear the translator and talk, had said the depth of the game Mawgis played with Jake was an honor. He could have done without the favor.
And now here was Mawgis, motioning again with his fist that Jake should come with him. Jake lay on the sleeping bag, his eyes locked on those of the older man.
Mawgis opened his curled fingers like a hammy actor, displaying the translator in his palm. He made a great show of installing it, first holding up the tiny piece of hardware between his thumb and forefinger, then twisting his wrist and setting the translator in his ear with a flourish.
Jake watched but didn’t move. Mawgis grinned and started talking, the words coming fast, rolling into almost a single long sound. His hands gyrated in sweeping arcs. Jake closed his eyes and rolled over, as if to go back to sleep.
Mawgis laughed—graciously conceding defeat, Jake thought. Mawgis ambled over, chattering in Tabna as he walked. He knelt down, and clasped Jake’s shoulder as though Jake were his good friend whom he had missed terribly while he’d been away. Jake rolled back over and slowly opened his eyes. He sighed deeply and reached into the pocket of the cutoff jeans he’d slept in, pulled out the translator, and set it in his ear.
“Come with me,” Mawgis said. “We will talk about the things your chiefs want to know.”
Two fat, black-and-white-speckled worms fell out of Jake’s boots when he upended and shook the leather shoes. Yesterday it had been a large frightened cricket. The day before that, a Brazilian wandering spider, making Jake jump. The wandering spider was one of the few in the forest with venom that could kill a man. He’d smashed it with the heel of his boot.
He pulled on a dusty T-shirt, tugged on socks and the boots, and checked that he had his watch. Mawgis kept his eyes on the procedure, grinning. Jake followed him out.
A low campfire burned, bathing the ground in a soft glow. They walked across the hard-tramped soil toward Mawgis’s hut, the two of them the only people in the usually busy common area. The rest were still asleep, Jake assumed—Kevin and Joaquin in their shared tent, the remainder of the film crew in another, the Tabna in their huts. An early-rising woodpecker hammered loudly on a nearby tree. Jake winced at the irritating rat-a-tat. A dull ache had settled into the left side of his head, behind the temple. He would have given a lot for a cup of strong coffee.
Or better, a big mug of wicked, caffeine-exploding yerba maté, sweetened with four teaspoons of sugar. Something to kick his brain into high gear. Instead he sucked in deep gulps of air, oxygenating his blood. By the time they reached Mawgis’s hut, he felt fully awake, the ache in his head gone. Capable.
The hut had been empty of everything but sitting mats and a pile of gravel the last time Jake had been there. Now, along with the two mats, it contained an incongruous tall silver teapot resting on a metal frame, a small candle burning beneath it. On the ground next to the teapot sat a box of long kitchen matches, two clay cups with heavy blue and red glazes, and another small, neat hill of tiny stones.
“Maté?” Mawgis asked, offering the drink Jake had lusted for on the walk over.
Jake shrugged away the sudden unease that tensed his muscles. Yerba maté was a common drink in Brazil. It wasn’t at all odd that it should be offered, and only a coincidence that he had just been thinking of it.
“Yes. Thank you.”
Mawgis poured maté for Jake and a cup for himself. The fresh, loamy scent of the tea filled Jake’s nostrils. The brew was warm and strong, an
d already heavily sugared exactly the way he liked it. He told himself again that the coincidence was just that.
From the corner of his eye, he watched Mawgis sip his drink. The cups weren’t large, but both men needed two hands to hold theirs—Mawgis the distorted mirror image of himself.
This was how he must look to normal-sized people, struggling with things they took for granted—two hands to hold the small mug, the trembling in the arms, like a child. Overwhelmed by knives and forks too big for his hands. Climbing on a step stool to brush his teeth and rinse his mouth. Using that damn grabber to get a glass from the cupboard, as if he were already an old man, infirm.
Jake focused on the ground, to push the images away. He had work to do.
They sat quietly and sipped their drinks, both men pretending it was companionable. Bits of dried palm frond came loose from the roof and floated down. Flies buzzed past their ears. Jake’s mind whirled ahead, planning, considering, choosing words. He was sure Mawgis was doing the same.
“Do you enjoy your work?” Mawgis asked, breaking the silence.
“I do,” Jake said. “I like helping two sides find an agreement that benefits them both. I believe my work brings good to everyone involved.”
Mawgis set down his cup. “We’ll now talk about benesha.”
Jake started to rise. “I’ll get Joaquin.” He wanted the FUNAI representative there to witness the terms he and Mawgis agreed on. To ensure that the Tabna got what was promised to them. He’d seen too many promises broken, too many people cheated out of what was theirs.
“We will talk,” Mawgis said, the sudden scowl on his face enough to stop Jake from pressing further.
“World United,” Jake said, sitting back down and keeping his voice casual, “is prepared to trade well with your people for benesha.”
Mawgis spread his hands, palms up. “What do you have to offer that might interest me? What could you offer for benesha that is worth its value? What can you pay equal to a full belly for a hungry child?”
Aspirin. Antiseptics. Steel trowels and shovels. Machetes. Fishhooks. Jake felt foolish. The air was hot and muggy. His shirt clung to his armpits. He worked at looking cool and comfortable, in control.
“You have only one thing,” Mawgis said. “Yourself.”
Jake tapped at the translator. This was a bad time for the machine to spit out the wrong word.
Mawgis leaned slightly forward. “Tell me a tale from your life and I will judge its value. If it’s good enough, you will have your benesha.”
“What kind of story?” He’d done enough deals with different sorts of people to be only mildly surprised at anything anyone said or asked for. In Kazakhstan, a farmer had insisted Jake arrange a marriage for his homely son before he’d agree to placement of a cell phone tower on his land. Telling a story would be easy.
“A true one. Why are you small? You were not born stunted, I think.”
“No.” Jake fiddled with his watch. Usually when some fool asked about his size, he answered, “Hormones” and let it go at that. He’d never told anyone the real story. He considered several answers he could give now—and decided on the truth.
“It happened when I was five, just a few months shy of my sixth birthday, about the same time from the womb as Marl is now,” Jake said, naming a young boy in the camp. “A nervous age, when a child is leaving babyhood behind, looking forward with excitement and fear to finding his place in the grown-up world. I was bright—I’d taught myself to read when I was four. I loved watching baseball and ice hockey and playing violent video games. I thought the sun rose and set on my mother’s smile.”
Mawgis nodded, his eyes closed as if seeing Jake then, a skinny kid who, except for softer facial features and a slighter frame, looked the same as Jake did now, doing things Mawgis could not conceive of—reading, video games. Was the machine in his ear crackling with static at the untranslatable words? Jake wiped his sweaty hands against his shorts.
“It happened in what we call April, the time in my country when the land begins to warm again after the cold season. When I woke that morning, my mother was already up. From my bed, I heard the light rustle of turning pages as she read the newspaper in the living room. My father was away on business. My older brother was still asleep in our room. Half-asleep myself, I stumbled out of bed and down the hall and crawled into my mother’s arms. She kissed the top of my head and said, ‘Such a big boy you’re getting to be, Jake-Jake, but you still fit in my lap.’
“My heart began to pound. I thought, ‘If I get too big to fit in my mother’s lap, she won’t love me anymore.’ A crazy fear. A child’s fear—real-seeming, narrow in its vision, and all-consuming, the way only a child’s fear can be. With all my being, I wished never to grow any bigger, and I didn’t.”
Jake hadn’t thought about that moment for a long time—the instant when a five-year-old boy did the impossible and changed his life forever. It was like those stories about terminally ill but determined people whose cancers disappear. On some cellular level people had more control over their bodies than they consciously understood. His parents had hauled him to every specialist on three continents. No one could explain what had happened. No amount of human growth hormone could make him taller.
Mawgis opened his eyes. “Did you look back later with sorrow?”
“Many times. And many times I struggled to undo what I’d done that morning. Especially in high school and college, when I became aware of women. Not many wanted to be seen with a man my size, much less consider courtship with someone who looked more like a child than a potential mate. Everything else about my body moved right on schedule. My voice changed at twelve. I started shaving at seventeen. I had all the usual urges.”
Mawgis regarded Jake and seemed to make up his mind about something. “You are no longer sad.”
“Reconciled,” Jake said, and shrugged.
But not without forlorn hope. Not without the dream that one morning he would awake and find himself grown. Not without bitterness and anger and bewilderment at what he’d done—and a vain pride that he’d achieved as much as he had in life, despite his size.
“A good story,” Mawgis said, resting his hands on his thighs and leaning forward. “Worth something.”
“Worth letting the hungry have benesha?”
A smile crept across the Tabna’s mouth. “Worth sharing a secret with you.” He stood up. The hut felt suddenly unbearably hot and stuffy. For no reason Jake could explain, he wanted to flee. He started to stand, but Mawgis motioned with his chin for Jake to stay.
The older man left the hut and almost immediately returned carrying a wooden bowl about the size of a cereal dish, half-filled with greenish mud.
“Benesha,” he announced.
“Mixed with what?” The benesha Jake had seen in New York looked like finely ground jade.
“Only water.”
“Our scientists fed it dry to the test animals. Should they have mixed it?”
“Benesha like this is only for Tabna,” Mawgis said. “And now for you, too.” He slipped the translator from his ear.
“Would you enjoy some travel?” he asked. “Benesha can take us many places.”
Father Canas, the Salesian who had helped prep Jake for this job, had said the Tabna used trance-inducing drugs.
“The Salesians,” Mawgis said, as if hearing his thoughts. “Very nice people, but narrow in their minds.”
Jake shifted his position where he sat, thinking, once was an incident; twice was coincidence; three times was something he’d have to think about. Later. He focused on what Mawgis had said about benesha.
The mice that had eaten the mineral hadn’t gotten stoned, Jake consoled himself. If the Tabna believed benesha induced trance, their belief could make the mineral perform for them—if not for him.
Jake tapped his translator as a sign Mawgis should put his in again so they could talk. Mawgis shrugged. Evidently their conversations were going to be one-way for a while.
Mawgis’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Like an animal? No.” He pushed Jake’s head back and spread a thin coat of watered benesha on his forehead. Then he pulled up Jake’s shirt and smeared the paste over his chest and abdomen.
Except for the polite-society handshake, Jake didn’t like being touched by strangers—not that it happened much, a man his size. He made people uncomfortable. He blew out a short breath and let Mawgis rub the mixture on him. Mawgis covered his own skin the same way, then sat back down on the thick, woven-leaf mat across from him. The flame beneath the tall silver teapot had gone out.
Jake waited for the first effects to start—nausea, a woozy feeling. He didn’t know what to expect. Minutes passed and nothing happened. He sneaked a look at his watch.
The benesha started to dry, making Jake’s skin feel tight and dirtier than it already was. With his mud-smeared face and torso, he felt like an aborigine—or a patron at an expensive spa. The contrasting images made him laugh aloud. Mawgis’s mouth spread into a grin, responding to Jake’s laughter. Or maybe at the sight Jake presented. Or maybe, Jake thought suddenly, at the knowledge that the Tabna was pulling his leg.
The older man picked up a handful of the pea-sized stones from the small mound near the teapot and began rattling them in his palms. A soothing sound. He chanted so low, Jake could barely hear him. The translator hissed static. He pulled it from his ear. His mind wandered.
Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Page 2