Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  PART

  THREE

  CXLIV

  THE RIVER WAS sated, as the rain was well aware. It pressed forward, robust and certain, eager and acquisitive, free of the memory of want. The river was sated, but the rain poured into it until it was filled to the point of disgust and disgorged itself into the forest. Thus all rivers flow from hunger to complacency to foulness; from decay to certainty to stone. When the waters finally receded from Pahquel, the three towns were like three turtles washed up on the shore, dazed and stranded, unsure of their direction. People began to move their arms and legs again, to visit each other on their kaawas in the afternoon, and to cure the meat and fish out in the open, so that the smoke no longer saturated the beams of the lean-tos, but stretched up in taut white columns to the sky. Breathing was freer and deeper, and the sun was sharper and more bold, and yet there was a tension in the air, an unfamiliar, high-pitched hum, a spider-thin reverberation of unease.

  Dabimi was almost never in the village then, so that disputes went unsettled, and babies waited longer to be named, and once, when he was away without explanation for three days, a person was burned without the guidance of a leader, leaving his family to fear that he wouldn’t find his home. Agitation and uncertainty crept into the greetings between persons; husbands and wives argued openly in their houses without so much as an attempt to dissemble, and even the parrots on the kaawas seemed testy and quick to outrage.

  A hand of days after the burning from which Dabimi had been absent, Larry appeared on Panar’s kaawa, shaking and wheezing, to tell Panar that Dabimi’s absences were not to prepare for future hunts, or for obtaining extra guidance; rather, they were to prepare for the end of the world.

  “You’ll see!” He has things from another world! Somebody’s giving him gifts he can’t repay!”

  Panar looked at him soberly. “We don’t know that,” he said.

  “I can show you! Will you come?”

  They stared at each other in pulsing, humming silence. Larry knew that to enter, unbidden, the house of their chief, the one chosen by the ancestors to lead, the one whose powers were granted by the force of a hands-and-feet of chajans, and take his things, and see what they were, and what they had to say, meant another sort of end of the world. Panar came forward, the old man steadying the younger one, and Larry shivered with fear as he saw the fear in Panar’s eyes. Even more terrifying was the fact that Panar turned to follow him, that Panar placed his trust in him when Larry knew that trust could cost him his life.

  Dabimi’s hut was empty when they approached. Larry and Panar gathered the baskets they found hanging from its rafters and ran towards Larry’s hut holding them close at their sides, so as not to alarm the abducted objects inside them. On the path, they ran into Pitar Ak coming towards them, and motioned for him to follow. Aran appeared at the chajan as they came up, shocked to see them, clearly betraying her concern at Larry for appearing three days earlier than planned.

  “Did the gathering go badly?” she said as she saw the stricken look on his face. She looked at the baskets, which were not the sort used for gathering, and then from one to the other of the men as they drew the things out and placed them at Larry’s feet: A knife in a leather sheath; a pair of rhinestone cufflinks in a box; a pair of scissors; a small iron frying pan; a ball of gold-colored string; and a small vial of fishhooks with its cork stopper in place.

  “He’s taken these from someone and that someone’s going to hurt us. I’m sure of it. They’re coming for me or for us. They’re going to hurt us!” Larry said in a mix of English and Pahqua, hysterically.

  “Which of these things do you know?” said Panar in a voice of forced calm, holding them up one at a time before Larry’s eyes. “You’re sure they were taken?” He had used his flashlight every evening for the entire first year, and he had worn his clothes until they were nothing but ribbons and holes, and he had left his penknife open on the kaawa while he went for water, and he had used it for cutting leather and fish, but no one had ever asked him about any of the objects he had drawn from and returned to his pack. To steal from a person, as Dabimi had done, as they were doing now, was an assault on the ancestors, on time itself, the consequences of which they were already living beneath.

  “They aren’t mine,” said Larry, “and they weren’t Jarara’s. But I know what they are and what they do and what world they came from.”

  At that moment, a comet shot across the evening sky, burning into the black udder of the heavens a scar so deep it did not heal, but oozed a yellow liquid into the moonless air. The light illuminated Dabimi’s silhouette as he stood in the doorway, watching them.

  “Yours?” said Panar looking up, stretching out a hand of sinew and bone, from which a striped basket swung.

  “Um,” said Dabimi, shaking his head sharply. “The ancestors have only contempt for those who steal.”

  “Um,” said Panar, looking him in the eye. “And yet you stole these things,” he said firmly, rising and taking a step forward.

  “Those things were given,” said Dabimi. “And they were given by someone you know. By him and by his friends!” He pointed at Larry and the others turned to look at him in horrified amazement, as though he had been suddenly unmasked. Without taking his eyes from Dabimi, Larry moved his hand around in the air, searching for Aran’s arm, but couldn’t find it.

  “You need to tell me who it is. Who do I know? Who do I know? How do I know you aren’t just leading me into a trap?” Larry shot back, thinking unwittingly of Jorge, and then reminding himself again that Jorge would never have betrayed him.

  “You know a man with sky-colored eyes and thing,” he said, gesturing toward what would have been a shirt. “He said that he knows you, and that you are his friend.”

  “I don’t know anyone like that!” Larry shouted. “Is that who you’re going to take us to? Some stranger?” he stammered, using the English word, as there was no such word in Pahqua.

  “At sunrise,” said Dabimi, triumphant, wild-eyed, as he added, “He’ll be glad to see you. He’s been asking for you.” He took the basket from Panar’s hand, and the two from the floor, and riffled through them. Then he slowly slid the laces up his arm like a taunt before disappearing into the darkness beyond Larry’s hut.

  When he had gone, the four stood paralyzed and silent, unable to free their eyes from the empty chajan. They barely noticed when the boys came in, beckoned by Aran to the back of the hut, and unrolled their sleeping mats on the floor.

  At last, Panar turned around to face the rest. “So we’ll get ready for the morning,” he said, grasping Larry briefly by the arm as he went out.

  When he had gone, Larry backed into the farthest corner of the hut and pulled the smaller of his two shoulder bags out onto the kaawa. He fanned the fire carelessly and in a single graceless gesture poured out the contents of the bag. There were batteries corroded almost beyond recognition, and a mess of fishing twine, and an empty bottle of penicillin, and a few small spiral notebooks, their pages bloated and fused by the damp. There was his own broken wristwatch, its face eaten away like a leprotic man’s, and two others, preserved like mummies in decorated wooden sarcophagi, and some pairs of moldy socks, in which colonies of maggots resided. One of the batteries rolled off the pile toward the fire and he barely noticed how the flames singed the hair on his arm as he snatched it back. At last, he found what he was looking for—a few scraps of paper and an envelope sealed in a discolored plastic bag. As he opened the bag, he paused for a minute with his eyes closed, as though praying, or trying to read the papers by feel, and then drew them out slowly in the palm of his hand, leaves so fragile they were shaken by the very exhale of the fire. “These are my ancestors,” he said to the air.

  It was shocking to see how puny they were; because he hadn’t allowed himself to look at them before, he had imagined them as squares of heavy bond paper, cardstock even, covered with strong dark letters like those from a fountain pen. Such fantasies are manifestations of
the irony of time, variations on a universal theme: The son returns, contrite, to his father’s house, begging for protection at last, when the old man is too frail to give it. The papers weren’t merely flimsy but—although brittle to the touch—transparent, saturated by a dry grease that blurred the pen strokes into a network of blue veins beneath pale skin. The marks formed words, names and phone numbers, the legible passages as absurdly meaningless as the faded ones. There was the paper from Silvio, containing contacts at the consulates in Rio and Sao Paulo, and bearing the names of the leaders of the tribes that dotted the banks of the Xingu, the closest of which was two hundred kilometers away, along with a crudely drawn map that had taken on a topographic aspect due to the blurring of the ink. There was a chart from Joaquim containing Jorge’s routine runs, roughly by season and coordinates, along with a list of which of his fellow agents could be trusted and which were more likely to inform on him. At the bottom of the pile was the letter from James, in a labored handwriting so intimately familiar that he nearly gagged when he saw it, the script uncannily faded and ghostly, as one would expect of a letter from the dead. In it, there was a phrase with which to reintroduce himself to Asator and a message to give to a woman from the far village of Pahquel, for whose daughter James had acted as jitana, but who had long since died, and an odd diagram of circles and triangles containing numbers connected by lines and equal signs, at the bottom of which was the formula 1:4.3, and an apparent warning that said “Thus they are more vulnerable to extinction if disrupted but also more threatening to surrounding populations.”

  Larry spread the notes on his palm and let his eye fall on the words that were illuminated by the fire. Light flickered over half a phone number, a first or last name, a word or two of a sentence. He stared at the changing pattern of light and dark as though it in itself had something to tell him, and was startled by a noise behind him. He jumped so that the papers were scattered in the dirt. He had forgotten about Aran, who had been watching him with a disturbed expression and about his boys, who were peering at him from just behind the chajan.

  “Remember these names,” he said to Aran, picking up the papers, reading off the lists three times in repetition in a whisper. “Now we can put these things back,” he said, but Aran stood off to the side, unwilling to touch what wasn’t hers, while he closed the plastic bag and threw the crusted batteries on top of it. He tossed the putrid socks onto the fire where they hissed and smoldered.

  He didn’t even try to sleep or to lie down on the ledge. Instead, he sat with Aran on the kaawa, awaiting the first stirring of the light. They were all fragile, each one a mesh of blue threads as pale as faded ink beneath a tissue of skin, the two sons inside, and the stooped, white-haired old wife, and the husband, tall and wiry, light-haired, his face still unwrinkled but scarred from shaving with dull blades. It was an unspeakable privilege to sit together, leg against leg and arm against arm, resting their backs against the side of their house, surrounded by the harmonies of the night birds and the insects. Before them, a sudden, unlikely perfection unrolled, the moment in which life emerged from the oceans and transformed itself, the moment in which all that was blurred, slurred, random and unformed drew itself together into a kind of sense, a single word resounding on the precipice of chaos. Perhaps every person bears witness to such a culmination, as a hand moves the lens of a life from one pole to the other through a fleeting point of focus. Nothing is revealed at such a moment, no object or person or idea, but merely the fact that the world is improbably sharp and real. Despite himself, Larry had taken his place in such a world and had been received. He was like a man who longs with such intensity to gain a woman’s love that he cannot bear to be around her and wins her precisely as a result of his willingness to lose her. Only much later, years after the goal has been achieved does the recognition of it arrive, most often at the point at which its loss is imminent.

  “Don’t wake them,” Aran whispered as the horizon lightened, barely waiting for a reply before disappearing inside and emerging again with a basket of food and water gourds.

  “We should bring them with us,” said Larry, standing.

  “No!” hissed Aran, moving to block him. Larry turned to go around her, and she moved in front of him again. “What are you going to do?”

  “Ok, I’m not going to wake them,” said Larry, “but there are some things I need to bring along.” He disappeared into the hut and emerged almost instantly, holding something behind his back, his hunting knife, which he buried at the bottom of the basket. Then he took her arm and they hurried out, following the path that ran behind the outermost huts of the village, which was rough with stubble owing to disuse. From time to time, a branch would reach out a hand to stop them, and once, they came to a sudden halt as the shadow of a man passed across the opening in front of them. They hung back until they saw that it was Piri, returning from his sister’s house in the far village. He had with him a basket of dried fruit, which he had set on the ground while he relieved himself. When they saw him, they ran to him and motioned him into a stand of Sapucaia. “I’ll be away for a day or two and Aran will be gathering with me,” Larry said, aware that neither of them carried the yoke of gourds and baskets.

  “Are Iri and Oji still asleep?” asked Piri, sounding confused. “Will they feed themselves? Is Kararar with Oji?”

  “Their baskets are full,” said Aran, “but they’ll have to carry their own water in the morning.”

  “Tell them not to worry,” said Larry, taking Piri by the arm, overcome by the sudden desire to embrace him. “I’ll tell you about it when I get back, my friend,” he whispered, forcing himself to let go.

  Dabimi and the others were already gathered together behind his hut, stomping their feet in the chill, when they arrived. Without speaking, they turned and Dabimi led them out through the forest’s towering chajan of trees, into its broad, cavernous rooms, in which the night still lingered. They passed the first circle of Pahquel, marked by a log resting on its stump, before the sun had cleared the treetops, and they reached the finger of water known as the kiro akasa long before the sun had reached its height. They stopped several times to drink, but they ate as they walked, swinging their baskets to their chests whenever they were hungry. Each one privately suspected that Dabimi had deliberately set a pace that would make obvious his superior endurance despite his age, and the realization made them even more determined. Pitar followed on Dabimi’s heels, and Larry on his, surprised by the ease with which he kept up. As the sun touched the trees behind them however, he was aware, with a shock, that the other two were struggling. He could hear Panar breathing heavily at his back, and noticed that Aran’s gait had become more and more uneven, until she almost dragged her left foot over the pack of dirt and leaves. He felt his throat tighten as he remembered her as she was when she had found him, agile and invincible, able, he had had no doubt, to carry the weight of two. He began to consider what would be lost in asking Dabimi to slow down, or whether he should try to pull Aran’s arm over his shoulder, when Dabimi stopped abruptly in front of a thatched lean-to built into the side of a tree in a place where there had been a slight parting of the canopy overhead. The lean-to was empty but for a ledge that stretched across its back wall, upon which were placed a cigarette lighter and a ball of twine, a rolled-up fishing net, and what looked like a tarnished silver hip flask.

  “So these things are not taken, but given,” said Dabimi with a broad, gloating smile as he put down his basket and placed the things into it one by one, with the exception of the flask, the contents of which he swallowed in three loud, gasping gulps before replacing it on the ledge. “Given by my friend. Given by your friend,” he said emphatically, looking Larry in the eye. “We’ll sit and today or tomorrow he’ll be here. And then, I’ll take you to another of these places. They are all around us now. You just wait and see.”

  Dabimi dug among the things he had piled into his basket until he found a large dried Murcuri fruit and bit into it with an air o
f forced nonchalance. The others sat in a circle around him, watching him eat. All turned their heads at once as he tossed the pit over Aran’s head into the scrub. Without the fruit to occupy him, Dabimi seemed suddenly aware of their scrutiny, and started picking at a nail with an expression of fierce concentration. Aran lay her head against Larry’s shoulder, but didn’t sleep. Panar did sleep, resting his forehead on his knees, while Pitar squatted in the posture of a runner at the block, leaning forward, his eyes fixed on Dabimi’s face. As they sat, the light inched away so slowly that its retreat went unnoticed, leaving them unaware that they were only going through the motions of seeing. At last, they heard the crunching of boots on dry ground and started up, erect as prey.