Her brow furrowed and he heard a sudden commotion behind him: shouting, scuffling, and a woman’s scream. No! He thought and turned, but Natalie stepped in front of him and over her shoulder he saw a flash of the plastic gun that had evaded the sensors, in the hands of a short, suited man running up the steps to the podium. Moises just had time to register a face, but only remembered the eyes afterwards, black and hollow like the gun barrel before it exploded. Then he heard the shots – one … two … three – the third from the security guard bringing the assassin down.
Natalie’s body spun and hit him, knocking him to the ground. Her face fell into the crook of his neck, her hair over his eyes. Moises felt a hot wetness creep steadily through the fabric of his shirt and his neck slowly cooled as her breathing faded.
He began to scream.
* * *
… “Okay, Quispé, we’re done for now.”
The Texan lifted his arm and made a circling shape in the air above his head. He looked shaken. Moises stared at him, dumb with shock. The engines throttled up and Moises nearly fell from his chair as the boat increased speed.
When the butterfly was taken inside, Dollie gave Moises another coffee. He held it tightly. The heat seemed to soothe his damaged hand.
“What is it?” Moises asked, staring out into the darkness, his tears drying quickly in the wind.
Dollie thought for a moment. “I don’t know, but I am about to go to war with it, I think.”
“I will not go to New York. I–”
“Of course you won’t. According to that thing I’m a dead man. No, I’m glad you read that one, so we can stop that pretty little scenario before it occurs,” he blustered, but his voice sounded hollow to Moises.
Wendell sat beside Dollie, his face bright with excitement. “It’s quite scary when you think about it,” he said.
Dollie turned to him.
“The story just after I met him had my name and other influences from me in it. I’m sure if you looked at the other stories there would be other correlations.”
“But that shit about Hawthorne happened last year and he had no knowledge–”
Wendell rose to his feet. “No, and some of it is far in the future. There is more going on here than we can understand, but some of this is the boy’s doing.”
Moises shook his head. “These things won’t happen.”
“I think they already have in some sense.”
“Jeesus! What kinda mumbo jumbo bullshit is that?” asked Dollie.
Wendell sat back down, becoming a vague shape just outside the small pool of light from the table lantern. “I know, I know, we’ll find a way around it. I just need to think. Are you going to tell him?”
“About what?” asked Dollie.
“Alice Cavendish.”
“That wasn’t top of my list of things to do tonight, no.”
“It might help. He might have an insight somehow.”
Dollie sat up, his body tense. “Go on then, you sonofabitch, tell him. I’m short on time in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“This creature,” Wendell began, “shows up every eighty to a hundred years … has done for as long as records have been kept. In 1926, on the outskirts of Iquitos, not far from where Señor Dollie now lives, a girl, Alice Cavendish, found a big, black butterfly in her garden. The insect was killed by a servant, but the girl’s father, an English rubber baron of some note and a keen lepidopterist, kept the remains. Later, he was looking at it under a microscope with his daughter when she swore she could see writing on the wings. After some persuasion, Cavendish copied what she read down onto paper. The family were to leave the following day for Malaysia, but the girl was missing from her bed when the nanny went for her next morning. Later, they found the butterfly gone, too. Neither were ever seen again.”
“The Yagua took her,” Moises said.
“I believe you are right,” Wendell said. “There are some uncertified reports that the girl lived with the Yagua to an old age.”
“We will never understand these things.”
“Did you know, Moises, that the Japanese have the myth of the white whale who sings the secrets of the world as she glides through the ocean depths? And in Indonesia, they say there’s a village deep in the jungle where a giant, ancient tortoise lives. Once every thirty years, the tortoise talks for a full day without stopping. There are signs and wonders everywhere, if you care to look for them.”
Moises sighed. “You cannot control the black butterfly, señor. It answers for no human.”
He could not stop thinking of the things he had seen. He felt responsible. A sickening weight rolled in his stomach.
Dollie suddenly sprang to his feet and Moises couldn’t help but flinch. The Texan rubbed his hands together briskly and his breath steamed in the cold night air. “We will, because we have to. I think these stories are signposts … warnings, too. I aim to make good use of them. Why did you find it, Quispé? What would be the point? To bring it to my attention, that’s why. I have the power to use the knowledge in those wings.” Dollie jabbed his hand in the direction of the table. His eyes glowed with fervour in the rushing darkness. He turned away and placed his hands on the prow of the boat, like a zealot in the pulpit, preaching to an empty church long after service. “It stands to reason we got to move off this planet sometime soon. It’s just a matter of finding how. Something on those wings will show us, I know it. We have to keep reading.”
Moises finished his coffee and watched the steam curling from the empty cup. He didn’t fully understand what Dollie was talking about, but as he listened, Moises realised he should have destroyed the butterfly the moment he caught it. He glanced at Wendell sitting casually to his left, the two soldiers beyond him. They were looking out at the water, seemingly uninterested in the conversation. Watching these four men, and their utter indifference to him and his world, caused a sudden surge of rage to swell up in his chest. His mother and father, his brother Mayta, and all the others who had been killed by the actions of these people, seemed to be forgotten by everyone but himself.
“Hawthorne … he says you are director of the oil company Hevron?” Moises said, shaking with emotion.
Dollie turned and put his back to the water, his hands gripping the gunwale behind him. Dawn was coming and the sky above him was stained a filthy orange. “I do have a controlling interest in that particular company, but it ain’t common knowledge. Doesn’t tally with the work of Emerald Earth.”
“You killed my family.”
Dollie’s smile was sardonic, slightly tired. “So you keep saying, but I had nothing to do with it. You people don’t own this jungle. Your new president, Mr Garcia, knows that and he’s a friend of mine. You better read me something I can use come morning … do you understand?”
Moises nodded and the Texan dismissed him. But as he turned to give instruction to Wendell, Moises jumped to his feet, lowered his head and ran at him. Before anyone could react, he hit Dollie full in the chest. For a moment it seemed that his charge would have no effect on the big man. Dollie grunted as if in disgust at the pitiful assault, but as he pulled his hands from the gunwale to push the boy away, he leaned back from Moises’s flailing hands and the momentum of the boy tipped him to the point of no return. With a shriek, Dollie got a hand on the boy’s shirt and they both went under the bow of the speeding boat. Moises was buffeted through the roiling water, and the cold sheared through his senses, stopping all thought. The terrifying weight of the boat smacked into his shoulder and he felt the propeller churn past his head with a monstrous roar, spinning him away from it violently. He surfaced coughing in its fizzing wake. As his eyes cleared, he saw the boats, already quite a way upriver, sweeping around in two graceful arcs to return for him and Dollie. Moises looked around in panic for the other man as the vicious current tugged at him incessantly. He could not
see or hear any sign of the Texan. Resigned to his fate, Moises attempted to swim to the bank, filled with a certainty that if Dollie’s men did not shoot him in the water, the current would take him down to the riverbed soon enough. A spotlight found him almost immediately. Bathed in blinding light, and feebly treading water, he raised his arms and waited for a bullet. It did not come. A metal hook smacked him on the shoulder and he grabbed at it gratefully as numerous voices shouted instructions. He was dragged to the hull of the boat and hoisted up, flung unceremoniously onto the deck.
Surprisingly, he was then left alone. He snorted the muddy river from his nostrils and tried to make himself comfortable, but his right shoulder protested whenever he put weight upon it. Moises sensed something was wrong with Dollie. He had heard the man crying out when the boat picked him up. There still seemed to be a lot of panic and angry shouting from members of the crew and much bustling about. The men who ran past him looked very scared.
Moises managed to crawl into the curve of the boat’s hull. He drew his knees up and hugged them to him, hoping he would be forgotten forever. And remembering his most precious possession, went to the pocket in his shorts. The water-softened matchbox was still there. He took out the tasteless lump of gum and popped it into his mouth. The sky continued to lighten and with the buzz of the motors, the bark of the howler monkeys now came across the water as Moises drifted into exhausted sleep, still chewing his brother’s gum.
His nose woke him: the sweet reek of human waste punctuated by the smoke of the moto-cars that were already rasping through the city streets. Moises sneaked a peek over the gunwale and saw Belen, the floating port of Iquitos, which was almost dry at this time of year. The raft homes that in two months’ time would be floating 20 feet higher lay surrounded by sun-dried timber and rubbish. Above them, thatched-roofed houses leaned drunkenly in all directions on their toothpick stilts, as if gazing down on the ground in pity or longing. The doors of some had been slid open and blank-faced children sat outside with their legs dangling over the detritus. The roofs were lined with gallinazos, who shuffled restlessly, flapping their dusty black wings in anticipation. They were waiting, as always, for their silent partners, dysentery and cholera, to do their work on the young and the infirm.
Sometime later, Dollie approached from the rear of the boat. His face was pale and hollow. There was a sling on his left arm and the bandages were soaked a deep red. Moises saw a drop of blood fall from it to join the others streaked down the thigh of the man’s trousers. The Texan stopped in front of him and grimaced. “You’ve got some pepper, I’ll give you that much.”
Moises stood up shakily. “Maybe I am not like glass.”
“You’ll break well enough,” Dollie assured him.
The soldier behind Moises brought the butt of a carbine down on the back of his head and the boy crumpled to the deck.
Bagua
April 28th 1997
When The People left their tents and gathered there that morning, the boy spent an hour on his father’s back, looking through the long, wooden spears that clanged against the tarmac in agitation every time an army vehicle appeared. At the head of the crowd was a loose pile of trees and shrubbery blocking the highway that his father had called la curva del diablo: the devil’s curve. Beyond, lay 200 yards of empty road that the soldiers occasionally ventured down, calling through horns for the crowd to disperse.
The boy felt very proud up there on his father’s shoulders, with the man’s strong, calloused hands holding his ankles. The stiff palm leaves on the man’s headdress scratched against his empty belly as the songs of the Yagua and the Wampis filled the sky. Most of The People there were young and male, dressed in cut-off jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps. But his brother and his father wore the traditional grass skirts of their tribe and had marked their faces with the scarlet juice of the achiote berry.
Just before he came down from his father’s shoulders, the boy saw a long line of squat vehicles appear over the hill ahead. Beside them, double rows of soldiers marched like leaf-cutter ants down the highway. His father left him then, moving forward through the crowd, responding to calls from the front. For a while, the boy played with his older brother as the crowd murmured and swayed with a growing anticipation. This involved nothing more than the two of them pushing and pinching each other, and his brother taking him in a headlock and squeezing his nose until the boy thought it would burst. When they got bored of this, the two of them went back to shouting insults at the soldiers they could not see.
Their mother spent most of the time on her tiptoes, trying to see what was happening up ahead. But sometimes, she looked down at her youngest son, smiled and ruffled his hair. He squeezed her hand very tightly in these moments and kissed it repeatedly. Often, her face would change as she was looking at him; it would become stretched and ugly and she would go back to shouting, straining to see over the chanting crowd.
The heat had grown between the swaying jam of arms and legs and was wringing sweat from them. The People had become a restless mass of dark, wet flesh. The boy stood in the shadows, clutching his mother’s red skirt tightly. He stretched his neck back and watched the sky, trying to take his mind off the heat, his grumbling stomach and the angry shouts around him. The sun was above them now, hidden behind the great heaps of dark cloud that had been building since early morning. Occasionally, a patch would simmer and burst into a blinding lance of sunlight before darkening again. These moments always took the boy by surprise and left rings, dancing in the corners of his eyes.
The crowd surges were becoming more frequent and more violent. There was nothing the boy could do but hold onto his mother’s skirt, go with it, try to stay on his feet and anticipate the response: a sudden surge back again. There was a thick, prickly atmosphere growing in the crowd and the voices were becoming more hateful. When he took a breath, the air seemed to die in his mouth. It felt like he was trapped in a dense part of la selva and he wanted to climb one of the trunks, clamber across the canopy and away to safety.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his brother manoeuvre his arm to take out a matchbox he had tucked into his skirt. The boy knew it contained a soft sweet that could be chewed many times and never disappear. A tourist had given this magic to his brother when he had visited their village.
“For me,” the boy shouted, snatching at the matchbox as his brother slid it open. The older boy grabbed him by the throat and shook his head slowly.
The young boy wriggled, calling his brother the name he had heard most of the crowd shouting at the soldiers.
“Nimbyii! Nimbyii!”
His brother slapped him across the face once. The boy dropped his arms and hung his head. His brother smiled and took the gum from the little matchbox. He tore it in two and handed half over.
“Here!”
The boy popped it in his mouth. It was hard and tasteless.
“Thank you, Mayta,” he said.
His brother’s face was swallowed up as the crowd surged forward again. The boy felt a violent shove in his back and nearly fell. As the weight of the crowd swung around him, he lost his grip on his mother’s skirt. Everyone was looking upwards. There were grunts and yelps of panic aimed at the sky. He caught a glimpse of what was causing the crowd’s agitation: a metal truck floating in the sky to the left of the road. The truck came lower and the boy saw a man leaning from the side, cradling a large gun. There was a thump and then another; the crowd opened and something clattered onto the road. The boy watched it spin, billowing blue smoke out in every direction. His breath caught in his throat. Somebody hit him as they ran past and he fell to his knees, tears streaming from his eyes. Shapes spun and screamed in the smoke around him. The gum fell from his mouth on a string of drool and he reached for it.
Somebody lifted him up, pushed him under an arm and ran for the trees. For a second, the smoke parted and he saw the tree-line bouncing tow
ards him through clear daylight. There was a buzz past his ear, close enough to send a shiver through him. The screams grew louder. The arm holding him suddenly loosened and he rolled in the dust at the roadside, yelping as the skin came away from his chest and elbows. He tumbled down the embankment and hit a cushion of tall grass, which bent around him like a protective fist. He did not want to get up from there. In the grass, tiny insects comforted him with their chatter. Above, there were popping noises, strange cries and the growl of motors, and he wondered if they were part of a dream he was remembering for the first time. Dark wings began beating in his mind, urging him to be as still as the dead. He watched them until he fell asleep.
Silence woke the boy. He sat up, feeling as if he had done something wrong and would be in trouble for hiding down in the grass. He brushed down his face and arms. His chest was covered in dark patches of clotted blood and dust. They burned unbearably as he got to his feet and he shook his hands and whistled at the pain. Above him there was a grey haze where the crowd had been standing. It was quiet, except for a subdued crying which fluctuated, coming in whispers and mutterings from different directions.
He saw his mother immediately. The red of her skirt took his eye at the side of the road. She was sprawled over the side of the embankment on her back, arms flung out towards him. The black hair he loved to bury his head in was spun across her face. He stared at her, feeling uneasy, willing her to move before he did. Then she did move and as her body began to shake, the hair fell from her face and he saw her mouth was ragged and enlarged, saw that somehow it had swallowed her nose. She slid backwards up onto the road and out of sight.
The boy climbed the embankment and saw a soldier pick his mother up and throw her over his shoulder. The road was a tangle of bodies, flags and broken spears. Soldiers were moving amongst the mess, nudging The People with their boots. The boy followed the man who was carrying his mother. As he reached for her, another soldier caught him from behind. The boy struggled and screamed, but the soldier put his arms around him, held him tight against the man’s tough breastplate and waited for the boy to tire.
The Dreams of the Black Butterfly Page 19