The six Americans hid out in a dark corner of the hotel bar, tossing back double shots of Alka-Seltzer. The Old Man ordered another round for everyone and after that there was only the sound of the Alka-Seltzer going plop-plop, fizz-fizz and occasionally a groan or a muffled burp. They were too tired to run anymore or even to shuffle along slowly. Their eyes were red and puffy with large dark bags under them and in some cases satchels and valises. The Americans had been in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for eighty-four days without taking any sleep and they now believed that the man known only as Carlos was trying to kill them.
“But why us?” Mac Beatty said. “All we want to do is catch a few fish.” Mac was the owner and president of Trav-elwise, a travel agency in Portland, Oregon. He had fished all over the known world and a good deal of the unknown world but he had never come up against anything like Rio, where the only fish he had seen were on plates in restaurants, which is not the same as catching your own. “This is supposed to be a fishing trip, is it not?”
The Old Man laughed sardonically, which was not easy while gulping Alka-Seltzer. He explained the probable scenario that had set in motion the threat to their lives.
Carlos’s boss in the Brazilian Tourism Authority, Em-bratur, had ordered the six Americans to be “taken care of” while they were in Rio.
Carlos nodded. “How do you want it done?”
“The usual Brazilian way,” his boss said. “Party them to death.”
The Americans knew if Carlos took them to one more party they were finished and all the Alka-Seltzer in the world would not save them. Their only hope was to get out of Rio fast and start the fishing before someone asked for whom the bell tolls and nobody could come up with a good answer except to look at the Americans and smile sadly.
The two quarterbacks looked as if they were done for anyway, and the Old Man wondered aloud if he shouldn’t give them the last of his Rolaids and leave them behind while he and the travel agents escaped to the fishing camp.
“No way,” said Cliff Stoudt, who was the great quarterback of the Birmingham Stallions. “You’re not leaving Brian and me behind, although I wouldn’t mind having the last of your Rolaids in any case.”
“Yeah, we can make it,” said Brian Sipe, who was the great quarterback of the New Jersey Generals. “You’re not done for until you’re done for.”
After that the Old Man could see that Sipe was even worse than he had first thought and decided to finish off both quarterbacks quickly by doing his impersonation of Howard Cosell. They both cringed when he squeezed his nostrils together but said later they didn’t realize he was getting ready to do his Cosell. His Cosell usually resulted in a clean kill but not always and sometimes he had to track the wounded into the bush and they would charge him, coming very fast and mean, and he would have to drop them with his Johnny Carson at close range.
But then Carlos came into the bar and saw the Americans slugging down double Alka-Seltzers. He complimented them for having eaten and drunk well and endlessly and for still showing some faint signs of life. “Tomorrow you can go fishing,” he said. “Usually Americans do not survive nine Brazilian parties in a row, but you have. You have beaten me fairly and honorably and tomorrow you can go fishing.”
“Good,” the Old Man said. “I have been in Brazil eighty-four days now without catching either a wink or a fish.”
“You have been in Brazil only three days,” Carlos corrected him. “But tomorrow you will catch many fish in the Pantanal.”
At the mention of Pantanal, the Old Man’s spirits rose. He had read much literature about the Pantanal and knew that it was a paradise for zoologists and botanists and ecologists and, of course, fishermen. A great unspoiled wild place the size of Montana, the Pantanal teemed with strange and beautiful animals and with so many plants and flowers some of them had never even been named. Although the Old Man liked to think of it as a lovely, endless marsh, experts in such matters said the Pantanal was actually a lowland plain whose many broad, placid rivers gently flooded it during the rainy seasons. In other words, a marsh, thought the Old Man, who never really liked experts anyway.
“What time do we leave?” Ron Hart asked Carlos. Ron was an old South America hand, and president of Sportsman’s Safaris out of Reno, Nevada. He and his partner Ted Kaphan were in Brazil setting up fishing and nature safaris on the Pantanal rivers for next summer, when they joined up with Mac, Cliff, Brian, and the Old Man.
“You leave for the fishing camp at dawn tomorrow,” Carlos said. “Right after tonight’s send-off party.”
The Old Man was pronounced dead twice during the send-off party but revived both times asking, “Do we fish now?”
The next morning the Americans were flown a thousand miles inland to Cuiabá, the capital of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. From there, they were to be taken by bus into the Pantanal but were first rushed off to a welcoming party, where they were mistaken for zombies. After the party, they were allowed to sleep for three hours and then rousted out for a breakfast feast.
“Maybe they will let us rest for a day before going to the fishing camp,” Brian said.
A tall young man appeared in the doorway. He wore the attire of a guide, including a large, wide-brimmed hat. The Americans stared sullenly at him.
“Excuse me,” the guide said. “Let’s go.”
His name was Paulo and henceforth he would oversee the Americans’ every waking moment during their expedition into the Pantanal. Eventually they would come to look upon him as a friend and one of the great guides of the world and a wonderful human being, but not until after making several unsuccessful attempts on his life.
On the long, dusty ride into the Pantanal, the Old Man was amazed at the lavish spectacle of nature stretching out as far as the sleep-sodden eye could see on both sides of the narrow, dike-like road. Ron Hart identified many of the birds for Brian and Cliff: garcas (herons), emas (small ostriches), siriema (large nonflying birds), jabiru (large storks), toucans, macaws, and so on. Where Ron left off, the Old Man took over.
“There’s a duck,” he said. “Some kind of weird duck.” He hoped he wasn’t being too technical.
Every few miles, Paulo would stop the bus. “Excuse me, let’s go.” Then the Americans would get off the bus and take pictures of alligators. They took 4,784 pictures of alligators.
Once, the Old Man made a serious mistake. He said to Paulo by way of idle conversation, “I wish I could get a good tight close-up of one of those ’gators.”
“You want close-up of alligator?” Paulo cried. “Wait here!” Charging into the murky water, he began herding the alligators toward the Americans, and then there was much yelling and rushing about, although mostly by the Old Man, who was allergic to alligator breath.
A few miles down the road the bus stopped again. “Excuse me, let’s go. Take pictures of dead alligator.”
The alligator was very dead and had been that way a long time and was dried up and cracked and coming apart at the seams. Nobody wanted to take pictures of the dead alligator, since it already had enough problems.
“Yuck,” Ted Kaphan said. “That’s really awful.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Cliff Stoudt, the quarterback, said. “Tape him up and send him in for the second half.”
The bus was hot and humid and the Old Man began to feel like the Gremlin that got cooked in the microwave. He stared out the window. Thousands of egrets blanketed the landscape like restless snow. Off in the distance, near the treeline, a small red deer with huge antlers browsed among wandering families of capybara, the world’s largest rodent. The knobby eyes of alligators stared back at the Old Man from every pond of water. “The Pantanal is a very birdy and alligatory place,” he thought. He wondered if it was also a very snakey place.
“Excuse me, let’s go. Take pictures of anaconda.”
The huge snake, disturbed from its nap in the middle of the road, did not want to have its picture taken. Before everyone had grabbed a camera and leaped off the bus, t
he anaconda had slithered off the road and down into a thick, boggy patch of brush. The Old Man thought his one chance to photograph an anaconda had vanished forever, but he did not yet know Paulo well.
The guide held up his hands to silence the cries of the disappointed. “Wait here. I be right back.” Then he charged down into the brush after the anaconda.
Horrible sounds came from the brush: grunts, crashes, snarls, snaps, thumps, and thuds. The men on the road listened for sounds of severe squeezing. “Well,” the Old Man thought, “no more ‘Excuse me, let’s go.’” And then Paulo lunged out of the brush, dragging the anaconda over his shoulder like a hawser. He threw the snake down in the middle of the astonished photographers, who leaped into the air and made ineffectual running motions. The snake, however, lay placidly on the road, too tired to squeeze anybody. It knew when it had met its match.
Late in the afternoon, the bus stopped abruptly at the Cuiaba River, which was a good thing because the road ended there and the river was full of piranha. At the fishing camp the men were given cabins with live frogs on the walls of the bathrooms. Later, Mac Beatty would step on a frog with his bare foot on the way to the bathroom in the dark and would wake the whole camp.
The men dropped their gear on the floor and fell into their beds and made deep rattling sounds with their throats. Finally, they would get some sleep.
“Excuse me, let’s go.” Paulo herded the Americans out to an all-night welcoming party thrown by the manager of the fishing camp, where they were once again mistaken for zombies. Brazilians love a good party.
The next morning the Americans finally got to go fishing. They got into two long, narrow, very tippy boats, and Indian guides took them far upriver very fast. The Old Man thought that maybe the reason the boats seemed so tippy was that the river was full of piranha. He remembered once seeing a film in which a cow waded into one side of a piranha river and came out the other side as a loose assortment of naked bones. The Old Man worried a great deal about the boat tipping over and wondered if he could swim to the near bank and survive to the extent that he could at least be identified by his dental X-rays.
The Cuiabá River was broad and languid and about the color of chocolate milk. The steep banks on both sides were backed by jungle. There were jaguars in the jungle but they were seldom seen because they come out only at night, and only a fool would want to be in the jungle at night. The Old Man was no fool.
Mac Beatty was in the bow of the Old Man’s boat. It was good to have Mac in the bow of the boat, because otherwise the Old Man might have been there and the alligator might have got him. The Indian guide did not see the alligator on the bank and started to drive the boat in right beneath the ten-foot reptile. Mac did not see the alligator either, because he was busy fitting together his fly rod. Since the guide spoke only Portuguese, the Old Man yelled at him, “Naranja sopa, por favor! Naranja sopa!” Later he learned this meant, “Orange soup, please!” which may have explained why the guide looked puzzled and continued to drive the boat toward the alligator.
The alligator charged out over the top of Mac and bel-lyflopped into the water beside the boat. Mac instantly filled the air with karate chops but the alligator got away unharmed. Afterwards, Mac kept looking up to see what was about to jump on him, and that night he stepped on the frog with his bare foot.
Mac was a great fly fisherman and enjoyed the fight the big piranha put up against his light tackle. The guide thought Mac was crazy. He then demonstrated to Mac, Ted Kaphan, and the Old Man the proper way to catch fish. He baited a 10/0 hook with half a piranha and hurled the eighty-pound line and chunk of lead out into the river. Presently he jerked on the line and brought it in hand-over-hand very fast, clubbed the big fish, and dragged it into the boat. He had landed the fish in thirty seconds. He could not understand why the Americans liked to play with their fish.
The Americans caught many fish that morning, including piranha, dourado, pintado, piraracu, and others they could not identify. Ron Hart had told them the Pantanal rivers also held cachurro, peacock bass, filhote, and fish even Ron didn’t know. The Old Man followed his practice of catching the fewest and smallest fish, so as not to embarrass his companions, but even his fish were big and strong and fought well, and after four hours the Old Man’s arms ached from catching fish. Ron had said that the Cuiabá was by no means the best of the Pantanal’s fishing rivers, and that there were many others much better, but the Old Man was satisfied with the Cuiaba and even elated. It beat the heck out of ol’ Delroy Heap’s beaver ponds.
At noon the guides took the Americans back to the fishing camp, where they ate piranha soup, which was very good and had just a tiny bite to it.
Then the Americans fell into their beds and slept for two hours straight, until Paulo awoke them and said it was time for the farewell party.
“What farewell?” Stoudt croaked. “We just got here!”
“Yeah,” Kaphan said. “We’re supposed to fish for three more days!”
“I’m just getting the hang of catching all these weird fish,” Sipe said. “We can’t leave now.”
But Paulo said there had been a change of plans. The Americans had to be rushed back to Cuiabá for a round of parties. There appeared to be no end to Brazilian hospitality, and the Old Man thought he had never met a friendlier and warmer people. Still, he wanted to fish. By the time he returned home, he would have traveled a total of fourteen thousand miles to fish a total of four hours, which was not nearly enough. Hemingway would not have left after only four hours of fishing.
After the farewell party the next morning, the Old Man tried to detect sensation in his extremities but could find none. The other Americans, Sipe, Stoudt, Beatty, Hart, and Kaphan, stared forlornly at the river and remembered the great four hours of fishing they’d had there.
“Maybe there’s been some mixup and they got it all straightened out and we’ll get to fish for another three days,” the Old Man said. “Look, here comes Paulo. He’s smiling! I bet he’s going to tell us we get to stay here and fish! What do you say, Paulo?”
“Excuse me, let’s go.”
Strange Encounters of the Bird Kind
Many people go through life without having weird confrontations with birds, but I am not one of them. When I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense thriller The Birds, I thought it was a documentary. Several times during the movie, my wife screamed.
“Oh, that’s so ghastly!” Bun said of one scene.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It happened to me last week. See that big ugly bird pecking the guy’s head? I think I recognize it.”
Bun claims my attitude toward birds is neurotic. She likes birds. Once she hung up a hummingbird feeder outside our kitchen window and filled it with sugar water. For a week or so, even I enjoyed watching the birds slurp away at the feeder while I ate breakfast. It wasn’t long, however, until word spread among the hummingbird population that there was a free handout to be had at the McManus house. Soon dozens of hummingbirds were flying holding patterns over our backyard, awaiting their turn at the sugar water.
I will admit that in the beginning the hummingbirds were orderly and well behaved, as anyone would be who had a sugar daddy like me on the string. After all, I was the one earning the bread to buy the sugar for their sugar water. It wasn’t long until matters took a turn for the worse. One day the feeder ran dry and I forgot to pick up sugar at the store on my way home.
“Maybe you should go back to town and get the sugar,” Bun said nervously. “The feeder has been empty all day.”
I was indignant. “Listen, I’m not—I repeat, not—climbing into my car and driving six miles to buy sugar for a bunch of freeloading hummingbirds. They can wait until tomorrow.”
“But,” Bun said, glancing out the kitchen window, “they’re becoming, well, sort of unruly.”
Sure enough, they were. A dozen or more hummingbirds were hovering just outside the window, glaring in at us, their beady eyes aglitter with accusation.
&
nbsp; “I don’t like the looks of this,” I said. “They’re turning into a mob. There’s no telling what they might do if they get out of hand. I’ve seen birds run amuck before. Maybe I will drive back to town for some sugar. Lock the doors and don’t let anyone in, particularly if they’re only an inch tall and wearing feathers.”
It was a close call. Afterwards, I made sure we always had plenty of sugar on hand. When the hummingbirds went to the Caribbean for the winter, Bun and I heaved a sigh of relief and gave the feeder to the Johnsons, who live a couple of miles down the road. I never cared much for the Johnsons anyway.
The first birds I had trouble with were the family chickens when I was a young boy. They filled me with a sense of guilt that I never got over.
Every Saturday my grandmother and I would go out to the backyard, capture one of the chickens, and kill it for Sunday dinner. Gram, a stout, tough little old pioneer lady, did the actual killing. My job was to capture the luckless chicken.
“Git that one over there,” she would order. As soon as the chicken saw her pointing at it, it would take off and try to make it to the county line. I would eventually run it down and start carrying it back to Gram, who waited at the chopping block, double-bitted ax in hand.
“Wait! Hold it!” the chicken would say to me. “You’re making a terrible mistake! I didn’t do anything! I’m innocent! Fred did it. You’re mad about what happened last Tuesday, right? Well, that was Fred’s fault. I saw him do it. I really did. Wait! Stop! Don’t hand me over to that old lady! She’s crazy!”
The part I played in these executions gave rise to such profound and enduring feelings of guilt that even as an adult I will often deliberately miss an easy shot at a game bird. Just as I am about to squeeze the trigger, a little voice inside me will plead, “Wait! Hold it!” and I will pull slightly off to the right or left of the target. My hunting companions, an uncouth and insensitive lot, respond to this explanation with raucous ridicule.
The Grasshopper Trap Page 16