Ruthless River

by Holly Fitzgerald

  No one paddled or motored out to make a sale. This happened twice more with the same result: friendly waves, children and dogs running along the bank, but no one boated out with bread and fruit.

  Uneasiness settled into my gut. We had passed only two slim dugout canoes all afternoon, about a mile from us, hugging the shoreline. Their motors putted as they made their way up the swollen river. Perhaps there was a reason there was such little traffic? Maybe even indigenous people couldn’t break easily into the current and found it difficult to boat at this time of the year. I began to wonder about Juan’s advice. Had he even been on this part of the river, especially during the rainy season? He’d said he was going back upriver by pecky-pecky, but had he ever gone downriver this far?

  We assumed the border post at Puerto Pardo should be coming up in the next couple of hours, but it could be earlier or later, for we weren’t sure of the raft’s speed. We began watching intently, having no idea what the fort might look like. It might be hidden in trees as Sepa had been. There were no landmarks to guide us—nothing but trees and entangled vines. The fading sun cast shadows on the rain forest, making it appear dark and dense.

  Pink dusk splashed across the sky and over the river, a splendid view before nightfall. I heard the far-off cry of some beast, then a loud sound like whistling from across the water, clear and sad, following us. It made me shiver.

  “Fitz, is that a bird or a person?”

  “Sounds like a man!” Fitz stood at the bow, his eyes searching.

  “It’s amazing that a whistle can carry so far.”

  “Why would he be whistling so loudly in the jungle?”

  “It’s spooky. Maybe it’s a signal.” I remembered a story I’d heard a few months earlier about five missionaries who had been killed by Indians. But that was in another part of the Amazon basin, a couple hundred miles away. Still, my head began to throb, thinking of people who might not want us around, who might be watching us from behind the trees.

  “Juan said there weren’t any unfriendly people along here,” Fitz said firmly, but he stared toward the darkening jungle, his arm above his eyes to cut the dropping sun’s glare.

  I stared, too. Then dogs began to bark. It reminded me of Zelda, our Keeshond, and of my parents’ and sister’s dogs. Was a man walking his dogs in this wilderness?

  Fitz called out, “¡Hola!”

  The whistle and barks immediately stopped. After a minute, as our raft continued down the river, the whistle and barks resumed. Fitz and I both called out. Each time we did, the sounds ceased. Goose bumps rose on my neck. “Why do they go silent when we call?”

  Perhaps the sounds weren’t from men or dogs at all, but from mimicking birds that had once heard men pass this way. We could be passing virgin landscape that no human had ever crossed. I wasn’t sure which was worse: hostile people or no people.

  The sun was dropping with no sign of Puerto Pardo, Peru.

  “It’s going to be dark soon,” I noted. “We won’t be able to see the fort.”

  “We’d better put in.”

  “But is it safe to land?” I listened for the weird whistles.

  “If Juan is right, it should be safe.” Fitz sighed. “This whole venture is based on trusting what he told us. So we might as well trust him now.”

  I guessed Fitz was right. We had nothing else to go on. In a while the whistles and the barking began to disappear.

  “We’ll see the border better in daylight,” Fitz continued.

  “Okay. When the current moves toward the bank, let’s try to pull in.”

  Now that we’d been on the river for half a day, we hoped that we were more adept at handling the raft than when we’d started. When the Pink Palace surged toward the shore Fitz steered and I paddled hard. As we got within inches of the bank we grabbed for the bowed branches, but the powerful current wouldn’t cooperate, wrenching us back to the middle of the river.

  We neared the shore repeatedly, touching the trees, then pulling at them to bring ourselves in. Each time the current yanked the raft, and the boughs were ripped from our hands. The Madre teased us again and again.

  “We’re coming close!” Fitz called from the helm.

  I stroked and stroked, and as we neared shore I reached out and grasped a limb. “I think I’ve got this one!”

  “Hold on, hold on, Hol!”

  The limb skidded through my fingers.

  The Rio Madre de Dios, her cunning strength serenely masked, flicked a finger and twisted the cumbersome Pink Palace back into deeper water. “This rudder is for the birds! It’s too small.” Fitz threw the tiller aside, grabbed the paddle, and stroked hard toward the shore.

  I pushed with the pole as it touched the bottom close to the bank. I grabbed a tree limb and so did Fitz. We wrestled to hold them. Sweat crept across my brow. I fought and lost. Fitz did, too. Tears filled my eyes and my throat burned. “Let’s try again,” I implored. I clutched another branch. “I’ve got it this time!”

  But the branch slipped my hold like an unruly child, throwing me off balance—almost into the menacing river.

  Fitz threw his arms up. “This is impossible! We can’t get to land! We have no control! No goddamn control at all!”

  The Pink Palace was too big to follow anyone’s lead but the Madre’s. I stared at Fitz and at the receding trees. At that moment, it dawned on me that we were totally at the mercy of a dangerous river. She was stronger than we’d realized. We couldn’t paddle the Pink Palace to shore alone. We would have to call out at the border and hope the border guards could dock her.

  There were no roads out of here. If the guards didn’t see us and we drifted past the border, the river would only get wider as it wound inexorably toward Riberalta, five hundred miles away.

  We’d been warned to avoid the crashing rapids just beyond Riberalta. Fitz and I had been assured we could easily pull in at the town, but now I saw that we would be helpless, were helpless now. I raised my swollen hands to my cheeks and gasped for air as the river took us back toward her center. Looking at Fitz I expected to see determination. What I saw was fear.

  “It’s getting dark,” I said, wanting my voice to be calm but feeling it rise. “If we pass the border without knowing it, we won’t be legal!”

  “What else can we do? We can’t stop the goddamn raft.” He swiped his hair with his hand. “We’ll just have to keep going through the night then call out for help when we spot the border—if we spot it.”

  “How will we see it in the dark? There’s no electricity out here.”

  “We’ll just have to get lucky,” Fitz said, his voice now resolute. “It’s probably on the top of a hill.”

  We stood on opposite sides of the raft to view both banks of the Madre. I tried to stare without blinking, for fear of missing a border post that was perhaps no bigger than a single hut and that had no lights.

  Chapter 10

  The Border

  I was comforted by the emergence of a nearly full moon rising into an endless panorama of stars. Our raft glided silently through the light reflected on the water. In the shadowed jungle there was not a single man-made flicker from farm or hut, but we occasionally saw tiny glints of light moving through the trees. We both suspected them to be the wary eyes of creatures following us closely. All was quiet around us, except for intermittent shrieks that made the back of my neck cold.

  “That’s the same noise we heard at Sepa.”

  “Yes,” Fitz replied, carefully navigating the curved logs to reach me in the moonlight. He pressed his arm around me. Was he trembling?

  The commanding screeches reverberated across the water. I was almost glad we weren’t on land.

  “Do you think we missed the border?” I asked, leaning into him. “Wouldn’t they have a light to show boaters where to pull in?”

  “What boaters?”

  My eyelids were drooping from the strain of staring into the shadows. Fitz must have seen this because he suggested I go lie down in the tent.<
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  “I’ll watch for the border,” he said. “I’m sure there’ll be a clearing and some kind of outline of a building.”

  “No. I’ll stay up with you.”

  He stepped to the bow and looked toward shore. “There’s no point in both of us waiting up.” His cigarette glow illuminated his determined face.

  “Don’t you want company, babe?”

  “No, Hol. I’ll keep watch better on my own. I need to stay focused.” His posture was taut. Maybe he’d developed jungle eyes while watching for the enemy in Vietnam.

  When my head hit the sleeping bag I crashed like a baby. I trusted my husband, the comandante, with my life.

  —

  I woke to Fitz shouting for help: “¡Socorro!”

  “Fitz?” I yelled through the plastic tent walls, scrambling to get up.

  “We’re here! A guy just lit a cigarette. I could see his face in the flare of the match.”

  “Where?” I stumbled through the tent flap.

  “Up there!” Fitz was pointing to the right bank of the river, clicking our flashlight toward the tiny glow in the dark. He called out, “¡Socorro!” over and over. I followed suit.

  We heard abrupt, muffled voices, then men shouting. We continued to yell, “¡Socorro!” amid banging doors, running and yelling now coming from the riverbank. A rifle exploded with fire.

  “Get down!” Fitz screamed.

  Several more shots rang out.

  Backing into the tent, I flattened myself to the floor. Help us, please! I prayed as bullets whizzed over our heads.

  “The fucking idiots think we’re smugglers running the border!” Fitz hissed.

  A bullet tore through the tent just above me as we continued to drift down the river in the dark. The men were now at the water’s edge, the shooting replaced by revving pecky-pecky motors. A beam of light splashed through the tent as small boats banged alongside the Palace. The motors were idled, puttering while harsh voices boomed over each other. The men poked at the tent. “Come out!” they insisted in Spanish.

  The tent siding was going to rip so I pulled back the flap and saw men in two motorboats, their rifles aimed directly at us. Some were in uniform; others were wearing only jockey shorts that shone white in the moonlight and looked ludicrously out of place. Fitz was prostrate on the balsa logs, his hands on the back of his head. The men commanded us to get into the boat nearest us as more boats surrounded the raft.

  Although it was a calm evening, the current was so strong it took several boats to push the raft to shore. The men muttered impatiently, shaking their flashlights at each other to signal where to land, evidently farther downriver than they wanted to be. They told us to take our backpacks and get out of the boat. Some of them leapt onto our raft and rummaged through our things.

  With rifles still on us, we were led along the bank and finally up a steep, winding path. Fitz was in front of me, moving as quickly as he could, but the trees blocked the moonlight so we tripped on roots and rocks underfoot.

  After a few minutes, we entered a dark hut, the only illumination coming from a flashlight throwing long shadows onto the guards’ faces and the walls. Several soldiers surrounded us. We were ordered to sit on the floor. They opened our bags and dumped everything at their feet.

  “¿Qué es?” One soldier held a skirt up as he stared at me. His right incisor was missing. Shadows crossed his face, making him appear devilish.

  “A skirt,” I answered, disturbed by the way he was looking at me.

  “¿Qué es?” another man demanded. Spit flew through the gaps in his teeth and sprayed me in the face.

  “That’s a shirt,” Fitz said, directing the man to look at him.

  The guard would not remove his eyes from me. He laughed when he saw me wipe my cheek, then muttered something to the guard next to him. They both laughed.

  A guard wearing only his underpants stood to the far left of us. He picked up a bra and dangled it by the strap in our faces. “¿Qué es?”

  I turned to Fitz. He stayed calm as he stared at the man.

  The guard laughed as he caught the eyes of his friends. He wiggled his hips and twirled the bra in the air. The others guffawed. A man with a long face and hollow cheeks reached down and grabbed a pair of my nylon underpants. I felt my cheeks burn.

  The smirking man looked at the others for validation. They all grinned. He rubbed the underwear in his hands then held them up in front of his face.

  “Put that down,” Fitz said coolly, his eyes snapping. Silence.

  A round-bellied man whose chest hairs burst from his rumpled shirt reached for my box of Tampax. “¡Ay!” He glared at Fitz as he shook the box and tipped the white cylinders to the floor.

  The other men snatched them up then tossed them to each other. We didn’t say a word.

  The men leered, poked at more of my underwear, and dangled it for the new guards, who were now coming in to see what all the laughter was about.

  These men might not have seen a woman in ages, I thought, panic creeping into my chest.

  I sank my fingernails into my palms to distract myself from fear. Nobody seemed to be in charge.

  At last, an officially dressed aduana opened the door. He was lean and neat in his pressed uniform with his rank on his sleeve. The guards stood to attention. The aduana barked orders and commanded everyone to go to bed. He told us to set our sleeping bag on the dusty floor of the hut, then left us alone among a few stored boxes.

  We lay down with nothing over us, trying to draw solace in each other’s arms. “Are you okay, Hol?”

  “I’m fine, but those men were scary.”

  “They were jerks. The bastards could come back anytime. Don’t worry, Hol, I’m not sleeping tonight.” He hugged me to him.

  I doubted I could sleep either, especially with the animal sounds that felt ominously closer on land. But I hoped I would. I nestled into Fitz’s chest and squeezed my eyes shut.

  FEBRUARY 16

  We heard the guards approach the hut at dawn. I sucked in my breath as the door opened, bringing with it the smell of freshly made coffee. One guard handed us each a cup. Another gave Fitz our passports. We couldn’t believe it when they explained that they were going to escort us across the border to Puerto Heath. No one apologized for last night’s behavior, but we weren’t going to stick around any longer than required.

  Two men motored us the short distance to the Bolivian border post, which was tiny, with just a few pecky-peckies pulled up to shore. The Pink Palace was tied to a thick tree trunk farther downriver.

  The Peruvian guards took off again as the Bolivian aduana strode toward us along a path leading from his log house. He introduced himself as Sergeant. Still shaken from our Peruvian reception, I felt immediately reassured by his kind eyes, and the sight of young children scampering after a ball up the hill behind him.

  Sergeant explained that he lived at the post with his wife, three children, and a few other men. He said he’d heard the gunfire in the night and was relieved to see that we were all right. He went on to apologize for the attack of the border guards. “We get smugglers back here sometimes. The Peruvian guards can get crazy.”

  “We were calling out for help, not trying to hide,” I said.

  “Sí, señora, it doesn’t make sense. We don’t shoot like that on our side, I can assure you. We are civilized here.”

  He led us up the path, where trees shaded the house. There were no flowers, gardens, or feminine touches, but it felt like a home. The contrast to Puerto Pardo was remarkable.

  Sergeant welcomed us into a sparse dining room that was filled with sunlight. Motioning to the table and chairs, he beckoned us to sit down. He explained that he’d not had visitors for a long time, then asked us what we were doing at the border. We told him our story and why we were on the raft. “Ah!” he exclaimed, looking into our faces more intently now.

  Sergeant introduced us to his wife, a trim woman, perhaps in her thirties, with dark shoulder-length hair
and an inquisitive smile. She offered us a shower from the rain barrel on their roof, and a hot midday meal of fish and rice. We could not resist either.

  Over lunch, they pressed us for news of the outside world and stories of our travels. We shared a languid afternoon with them, but beneath our gaiety we were wary about getting back on the raft. We admitted to Sergeant that we couldn’t control the Pink Palace and that we couldn’t bring her in.

  “All rafts can be difficult,” he agreed, “but you should have no problem if you just carry on down the Madre and call out again in a few days’ time. Someone will help to bring you in at Riberalta.”

  Fitz and I looked at each other.

  “But what if they don’t?” Fitz asked.

  “And what about the rapids?” I added. “We can’t go over those.”

  “Really, there’s no problem,” Sergeant replied in his easy South American way. “You barely see the rapids in the flood season. The port authority will notice you before you reach them.” He grinned. “Without guns this time, I guarantee.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Fitz scowled.

  “You won’t be near a border so there will be no armed guards.”

  I wanted to be absolutely certain we wouldn’t run into more trouble. “So we should be okay to ride the river day and night?”

  “That is all you can do with this raft. You will be fine.”

  —

  “What do you think?” Fitz asked me, when we were alone after lunch.

  “What other option do we have? I’m scared, but it seems a normal thing to do here.”

  “They might not have enough food to feed us. They probably want us to get out of here.”

  I liked the aduana and didn’t believe he’d steer us wrong.

  At 3:00 p.m. we clambered back onto the raft. Sergeant ordered two guards in pecky-peckies to pull the Pink Palace out to the main current. We waved and called “¡Gracias!” over their motors as we continued down the vast Madre. We felt like children leaving their parents. It didn’t occur to us that Sergeant and his family might be the last people we ever saw.