Insects 2: The Hunted

by John Koloen

  What he wished was that one of his friends would tell him exactly what to do, but none of them did. It all came back to what he would say to Duncan. He felt that turning him down would hit him like a brick, especially now that he had so few people he could depend on.

  “Et tu, Cody?” he mused. “Et tu?”

  38

  THE BELL 206 Long Ranger carrying five passengers descended slowly after leveling off near the village’s dirt runway. Huge clouds of red dust blossomed in the rotor wash, forcing a group of curious and excited children to shield their eyes and back away as the noisy chopper came to a rest, near a large, open-air building with a thatched roof. As the passengers emerged, the children closed in to admire the large, shiny machine.

  The children were accustomed to seeing an ancient DC-7 carrying supplies and the occasional passenger who could afford it, which many of them never tired of viewing, but a helicopter in their midst was a rarity and worth a close and lengthy inspection. They ignored the khaki-clad men as they made their way to the building where the men were met by the old man who was in charge of the airfield. The men were there because the village’s children could not keep a secret.

  Adults in the village had heard about the baratas antropófagas over the radiotelephone but were not impressed. They made fun of them. They sounded small and insignificant compared to a mapinguari, the rainforest’s Bigfoot. But their children knew better.

  Every male child grew up in the forest, learned how to hunt and fish, learned how to climb trees, learned how to stalk and learned how to keep things hidden from the adults. One of the things they kept hidden was a body they had found, reduced to bones with a skull that looked like it was screaming. As many as a dozen of the older children had made the pilgrimage to see the skeleton that lay against a trunk on a small grassy hill. With so many having seen it, it was not surprising that the secret got out.

  The airfield manager had worked out arrangements with his cousins, who owned ATVs, to rent them to the Americans. The cousins agreed but only if they would be paid to drive. They followed a well-worn trail heading in a northerly direction from the village. The trail was filled with twists and turns, large stones protruding from the surface like pointed stumps, holes large enough to swallow tires. One of the Americans, speaking Portuguese slowly, complained about the bumpiness and the drivers slowed down.

  “I hope we don’t have much farther to go,” one of the men said to the others.

  The ATVs were on the trail for about a half hour when the drivers pulled into a small open area surrounded by dense forest. A footpath led into the woods. The path was well-worn and damp. It was covered with footprints.

  “Quanto mais?” the American who spoke Portuguese asked.

  “Just around the next bend,” one of the drivers replied.

  “What did he say, Cody?”

  “Not far, Dr. Thomas,” Cody Boyd said.

  39

  MAGGIE CROSS’S ATTORNEY arranged for a lawyer in Manaus to handle Antonio Suarez’s case. This had been done before she boarded the plane for Houston. She did it for Howard Duncan who, she hoped, would return the favor by spending a pleasant weekend in her suite at the Lancaster Hotel. She felt differently about Duncan than most men she had known. Several weeks after the catastrophe in the forest, she still saw him as a shining light—strong, intelligent, not showing fear, taking the lead. She had stayed close to him, helped him fight the swarming insects, and when it was over, followed him to safety. They’d had a couple nights of romance before and during the expedition and she hoped there would be more, despite the fact he wasn’t particularly handsome. Or rich, which didn’t bother her in the least since she had never met a wealthy man whom she liked. When it came to getting their way, they were as single-minded as she was.

  On the other hand, Duncan was intimidated in the presence of wealth. His role had always been as a beneficiary. A wealthy foundation supported his work and, though he was grateful, he was uncomfortable rubbing elbows with its contributors. He hated the annual conference the funders sponsored at which he and others who received funding, mostly scientists, were required to give presentations and updates about their work and then engage in small talk. Now that his funding had been suspended, he wouldn’t have to go through that ordeal, but he still needed money if he was going to return to the rainforest to continue his work.

  The drive to Cross’s hotel took less time than finding a parking space. Dressed in beige knee-length shorts and a dark blue short-sleeved shirt, he shivered after leaving the humid closeness of the street for the air-conditioned discomfort of the hotel. He noticed immediately that hotel staff wore long sleeves and vests or jackets, a tacit recognition that the hotel was too cold to be comfortable. Riding the elevator, he still wasn’t certain what he would say to her. Was she primarily a funding mechanism or a romantic outlet?

  Goddamn, that’s cynical, he thought. At the same time, he wondered whether he could ever let someone into his life to the extent that she became as important to him as his work. Were that to happen, would it mean that his work had diminished in importance or that his feelings for someone else had simply become more important? The past several weeks had been nothing short of an ordeal, opening up all kinds of questions that previously had remained hidden. He hated self-doubt. It wasn’t in his nature and he put it out of his mind as he knocked on the door to Cross’s suite.

  40

  THE DRIVERS LED the Americans to the human remains and then stood back as they hovered around them like well-behaved children. Cody Boyd didn’t need a magnifying glass to tell what had happened.

  “See these cut marks,” Boyd said, holding up a tibia. “These were made by Reptilus blaberus.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Definitely.”

  The men passed the bone around and one of them gently set it on top of the pile. Nolan Thomas, the oldest of the men and the leader, studied the landscape, which was dense with underbrush. Water droplets from the canopy bounced off their hats but nobody paid attention. In the windless air thick with humidity, their khakis had turned brown from sweat. The screeching of monkeys in the trees made conversation difficult.

  “This doesn’t seem right,” Boyd said.

  “What doesn’t?” Thomas asked.

  “When we found the first body, human body, we’d already found dozens of dead animals. In fact, they were all over the place. But I’m not seeing that here.”

  “Why don’t you ask them if there are other bodies?”

  Boyd grimaced. He knew enough phrases in Portuguese to order fast food, to find a bathroom, the basic tourist questions but beyond that he resorted to an app on his phone that translated English into other languages.

  “Existem outras instâncias?” he said awkwardly.

  The drivers looked at each other and shrugged.

  “The kids found it,” one of the drivers said in Portuguese.

  “So, what do you think?” Thomas asked. “You think there’s more?”

  “There has to be. If the bugs got this guy you gotta figure they got everything else. Maybe we should spread out and look.”

  The two men who accompanied Thomas looked at each other quizzically.

  “You think they’re still around?” One of them asked tentatively.

  “I don’t know,” Boyd said. “Could be.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’ve read articles about what happened to you. Y’all kinda walked into it, didn’t you?”

  “We got caught in a flood,” Boyd responded defensively. “If it hadn’t been for that…”

  “Maybe we should ask the children,” Thomas said.

  41

  HAVING RETURNED TO the village, Boyd managed to string enough words together in Portuguese to make the ATV drivers understand that he wanted to talk to the children who had seen the body. They called out to a group of boys who were inspecting the helicopter. Two came running.

  One of the men asked whether they’d found other bones or
skeletons. The boys looked at each other. One whispered something to the other. They weren’t certain whether they were about to get into trouble.

  “Havia outros ossos?” one of the drivers said sternly.

  “Yes, we found more,” one of the boys admitted in Portuguese, looking at the ground.

  “What are they saying?” Thomas asked, as he took Boyd aside.

  “There are other bones,” Boyd said. “That just makes sense.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we get one of them to take us there. The men don’t seem to know anything except what the kids told them.”

  Boyd asked the boy if he would show them the bones. He eagerly agreed.

  Conferring with Thomas, it was decided that they would use one ATV and follow the boy’s directions. This time the driver insisted that in addition to paying him, the boy should be paid as a guide, which brought a smile to the youngster’s face.

  42

  THE DRIVER WASTED no time returning to where they’d found the body. However, once on foot they were surprised to see their young guide take a different path that wound around the hill where the body was found, behind and beyond it to a field of tall grass. He pointed to what, from a distance, looked like a pile of rocks. Leaving the boy and the driver behind, Thomas and Boyd moved quickly toward what turned out to be a pile of bones. While Boyd photographed it with his cellphone, Thomas pulled a skeleton out of the pile. It was a squirrel monkey.

  “This has the same marks as the others,” Thomas said, examining the skeleton.

  “What do you suppose happened here?” Boyd said, scanning the area.

  “I’ll bet the kid knows,” Thomas said.

  Boyd struggled to translate. As best he could determine, the boy said that he and his friends were hunting when they started finding dead animals on the forest floor. Somebody got the idea that the hides could be worth money and they removed the bones and put them in a pile to see how large it would be. Later, they found the dead man.

  Thomas outlined his plan on the ride back to the village. Flesh was still attached to some of the bones but, for the most part, they’d been stripped. On the chopper, despite the constant roar of the engines, they talked, the leader and the reality TV consultant.

  43

  DUNCAN HAD HOPED that spending the weekend with Maggie Cross would help him make a clean break with the past and it did, but not as he had wished. Everything between them was good, from sex to conversation, and for most of the weekend he felt relaxed in a carefree way that a week earlier would have been impossible. He was surprised at how willing he was to open up to Cross, not censoring his comments, just letting thoughts tumble out. And tumble out they did—the anger, the humiliation, the anxiety, and mostly the misgivings he had about the decisions he’d made in the rainforest and how much they may have contributed to the death of Carlos Johnson and Fernando Azevedo.

  Cross, on the other hand, wasn’t focused on the past. Sympathetic at first, she coaxed Duncan to talk about his feelings but thought it would only last a short time and then they could get on with their weekend. She had survived and returned to her normal life, and though Duncan’s experience was more complicated, she expected him to do the same. That’s what middle-aged people did, she believed. Instead, she’d succeeded in opening a wound from which poured a mixture of self-pity and despondency that surprised her and made her wonder whether she had misjudged him all along. Maybe he wasn’t as strong and steadfast as she had believed him to be. At least he didn’t cry. That would have been too much.

  Duncan could never have spoken so frankly about himself to anyone, not with lawyers waiting to file suits and calls for investigations and the rumors swirling like dust devils around him. To whom else could he confess his fears and inadequacies? He had colleagues but no friends. He was afraid that anyone else he talked to could be recording the conversation and would use it against him, but he trusted Cross and the terrible experience they had shared. Although they were of the same generation, they weren’t old friends and this became apparent when he asked her what she would have done had she been the leader.

  “This is pointless,” she said impatiently, which took Duncan by surprise. “What’s done is done. You did the best you could. It’s not like there were good and bad choices. I’m sorry that you’re having such a hard time with it but, you know, it’s not like you caused the flood.”

  “But would it have been better to try to walk away instead of taking the truck?”

  “How could we know? It was regrettable that people died, but as far as you or I know, more would have died had we done something else. Besides, no one had any better ideas.”

  “Hamel thought he did.”

  “Yeah, well, he thinks very highly of himself and if that’s who you’re comparing yourself to, then I feel sorry for you. You’re better than that. You can blame yourself all you want. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone. But we did. No one was coerced.”

  Duncan was chagrined and embarrassed. She’s right, he thought. But it was hard for him to let go.

  “The students might have felt coerced,” he said.

  “Damn it! That’s their problem if they were. Will you just get over it? It’s been weeks. You’re not going to go on like this forever, are you? It’s really not pleasant to watch. I hate to say this, but you really need to grow a pair.”

  Duncan’s face reddened.

  “You’re right,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing,” she insisted. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “To what?”

  “Lunch, if nothing else.”

  44

  BOYD LET THE phone ring. It was the third unanswered call from Duncan. He felt guilty about not telling him he had a new job as a consultant, though it was temporary. He knew his former boss would be disappointed because they’d talked about coming back to Brazil to find specimens. He’d been noncommittal at the time because he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it again, and then the job offer came. He saw it as an opportunity to make good money while combining his skills as an entomologist and amateur filmmaker. The producer put him to work immediately, scouting locations with Nolan Thomas and his research group. The friends he’d confided in all agreed that he should take the job, that it would look good on his résumé and that he’d make good money.

  But he hadn’t fully thought out how he would break it to Duncan. The longer he delayed taking the call, the worse he felt. The guilt piled up. He knew he couldn’t avoid him forever. If his mentor had his best interests in mind, then he’d understand and congratulate him rather than making him feel bad. He’d answer the next time Duncan called. He told himself he wouldn’t apologize. He had done nothing wrong.

  45

  “I’M SORRY, BOSS,” Boyd said over the phone.

  “I called you like a half-dozen times. Are you screening my calls?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that,” Boyd lied uncomfortably. “Anyway, this is just the fourth call from you.”

  “Well, there you go, you’ve been screening…”

  “No, I haven’t,” Boyd insisted. “I’ve been out of cell range.”

  “Where are you?”

  Boyd stared at his laptop screen, which was open on a small desk in a hotel where the film crew was staying. He was glad he was in the room when Duncan called. He needed the privacy. He didn’t want the producer or anyone else to know about the call.

  “I’m in Manaus.”

  “Really!? Already. That’s amazing. I thought you hadn’t decided to go.”

  Damn it, this is hard, Boyd thought. Toying with a ballpoint pen on the desktop, he thought about what he should say.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. It’s just that I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Say what? Just spit it out.”

  Duncan made the call from Cross’s suite. He and Maggie had just returned from lunch and both were in much better moods. They’d decided
to move forward, which was more of a relief to Duncan than he’d expected. Cross was happy to listen as Duncan described his plans to return to Brazil, as long as he didn’t get into too much detail. On the walk back from the restaurant they stopped at a liquor store and, while Duncan made his call, she made mojitos. Sitting next to her on the leather couch, he put his phone on speaker and set it on the coffee table.

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “I know that. I’m paying you.”

  “No, I got a new job. I’m a consultant with a reality film crew. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

  Anger quickly overwhelmed Duncan. He felt an urge to throw the phone against a wall. He reached toward it, but Cross put her hand over his, smiled, and shook her head slightly.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last week. It was outta the blue. It was too good to be true.”

  “And the past, what has it been, two years. I guess that wasn’t too good to be true?”

  Boyd rolled his eyes. He didn’t want to argue. He wanted to remain on Duncan’s good side.

  “They’re paying me a lot of money, you know. I’m gonna make enough to pay off some of my student loans. Besides, it’s only a three-month contract.”