Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  “You identified Paul as Patchen’s father?” I asked.

  “I thought it was best to tell the truth.”

  “Ah geez, Thomas.” I had to hook up with the one American diplomat on earth who thought it best to tell the truth. What Thomas and I both knew about Aguaruna culture was this: A murdered man’s father seeks revenge. The people would assume Paul was there to find and kill the people who had shot Patchen. Which put us in danger of a preemptive strike. On the other hand, anyone who knew anything about the area said that the consejo could guarantee our safety.

  “Evaristo says we’re welcome to come,” Holladay said. “He’ll help us in any way he can.”

  Paul Dix flew back to the U.S. for Patchen’s memorial service, a celebration of his life, held in the woods of Vermont. There were six hundred people in attendance. What struck Paul about the ceremony was the sheer diversity of Patchen’s friends. There were rough-hewn backwoods loggers, young musicians, hippies, yuppies, Dartmouth professors, rich people, poor people, and hundreds of children. Patchen and his mother ran a summer program teaching children about the woods, a kind of mini-ecology camp. The children loved Patchen, and came back year after year.

  Patchen’s mother, Sandra Miller, put together a brochure that included excerpts from “Growing Up in the Woods,” an autobiography Patchen wrote in the fifth grade. “Our bird feeder has the most action around, with chickadees that eat from our hands, flying squirrels that eat from my hands, chipmunks that eat from my hands.… They all like to come through the window into our house. The voles and mice wash their faces after eating peanut butter.”

  The last bit of the autobiography was titled “Chapter IX: The Future.” It read: “I would like to be active outdoors, explore, go places, have experiences, live with and study people from other backgrounds. Anthropology sounds good.”

  In Peru, the war dragged on. Paul and I, working together in Montana, combined our notes on the Aguaruna. The missionaries, we agreed, had enjoyed a large measure of success. Today, each village is likely to identify itself as either Protestant or Catholic, but the new religions are sometimes understood in a manner singular to the Aguaruna. The most hallucinatory book in the Bible, Revelations, is the most significant to the Jivaro.

  This fact has led to strange interpretations of outside culture. Canned goods, for instance, which can be purchased in stores that serve the army checkpoints along the Marañón, are carefully examined by the Aguaruna and Huambiza. It is thought that bar codes have dangerous significance and must be carefully counted. If they add up to the number 666—the mark of the Beast in Revelations, the sign of the devil—the food is demonic and not to be eaten.

  The Aguaruna and Huambiza people, especially those in remote river villages, have ample reason to fear outsiders and their customs. The new oil pipeline road has brought in many mestizo farmers, who use an indiscriminate form of slash-and-burn agriculture. The Indians, by contrast, slash but don’t burn, and have much smaller fields. The Aguaruna believe, quite rightly, that their ancestral lands are being destroyed, despoiled.

  It is true that Peru has taken steps to guarantee the Indians these lands, but the model for land titling was taken from high mountain villages, where people live together in towns, not separated from one another by half a mile or more. On the Marañón, land is titled to Aguaruna “villages” that hardly exist, and settlers are moving into the spaces between. In addition, the Aguaruna Huambiza population has doubled since 1976, but these people are now being forced to live on less land.

  People are angry, and the Aguaruna sometimes resort to a form of self-defense that trades on their fierce reputation. When a settler builds a house on what is considered Indian land, Aguaruna men have been known to dress in their traditional costumes and surround the place at night. They scream and brandish weapons. No one is ever injured, but the settlers generally find it prudent to move, usually the next day.

  Still, despite such efforts, the influence of the outside world has reached deep into the guts of Aguaruna society. The army needs Aguaruna soldiers, familiar with the jungle trails near the border. Getting them to enlist isn’t much of a problem. Young Aguaruna men of seventeen, who might be in Imacita or Santa María de Nieva for a festival, are simply rounded up by soldiers. The “enlistment” is a two- or three-year proposition.

  And when these young men come back to their villages, they are filled with strange ideas; they are sometimes contemptuous of their own culture, angry, and often dissatisfied. Villagers speak of “bad influences.”

  People in the most remote villages most fear outsiders. That fear is embodied in a ghoulish night creature called the pishtaco. Not every white man is a pishtaco, but it is only white men who kill in the night and then plunder the corpses for their life force, which is focused in the “grease,” or body fat. This grease is used to lubricate the white man’s machines, and explains the efficacy of such technology.

  Michael F. Brown sees the “pishtaco fears … as a powerful metaphor for the experience of … people whose lives have been twisted and foreshortened by what they see as mysterious power emanating from the gringo world.” Every missionary, botanist, doctor, or anthropologist I talked to knew the pishtaco myth. It wasn’t a quaint bit of folklore. The Aguaruna believed in pishtacos who stalk the night.

  The dread of pishtacos is invariably mentioned as a possible motive whenever any white person is killed in Indian country. On October 8, 1989, on the Marañón, three French citizens and a Peruvian were shot and killed by Indians, near the place where the Cenepa flows into the Marañón. They were floating on a raft and shooting videotape. According to Charles Pittaluga, the French consul in Lima, the killers were never found and a motive was never established. Some settlers who lived in the area blamed the harsh rhetoric of the consejo for creating a climate in which unwitting trespassers could be murdered. There is also a persistent rumor that the killers believed the video camera was a pishtaco device that could extract a man’s grease from a distance.

  In collecting information on the Aguaruna, I too was looking for a motive—a reason why Patchen Miller died—and that fact may have colored the tenor of my questions. Edmond Hammond, a twenty-six-year-old Indian-rights activist, asked me, please, not to “mythologize the Aguaruna. They’re different,” he said, “but not inhuman or unhuman. They have a right to live as they choose. They’re people.” The Aguaruna Hammond knew were proud, honest, clever, generous, and fond of jokes.

  Michael F. Brown said that in two years living among the Aguaruna, “I never had as much as a pin stolen. Theft was nonexistent.” He thought the Aguaruna “were incredibly admirable. When you depend on people for your survival—unless you’re a complete blockhead—you develop a very real admiration for them. They’ve never been conquered, they’re proud, they’re resourceful: they’re not beaten down Indians. The Aguaruna are like the Lakota Sioux of the Amazon: very forceful and straightforward. Other Indian groups might find them too forceful, but Aguaruna culture didn’t collapse when it came into contact with the outside world, as many others did.”

  What Edmond Hammond said was that if the Aguaruna were “demonized,” it would play directly into the hands of certain Peruvians, who want to open up the land for more colonization. They want to do this because of the tensions with Ecuador, and they want to do it for financial gain. Colonists will bring in mercury-based gold mining, and will poison the rivers. The forest will be slashed and burned for cattle farming. The present small-scale timbering will give way to large international schemes. “If the Aguaruna are slammed as a people because of the actions of one or two men who should go to jail,” Hammond said, “it will be an ecological and civil rights disaster.”

  Which, I thought, would not at all be a fitting tribute to Patchen Miller, considering the way he lived and the things he believed.

  Vision Quest

  By late April the war had wound down, and on April 30, Paul Dix and I, along with Thomas Holladay and a Peruvian photographer, Victo
r Chacon, of Caretas magazine, boarded a commercial flight in Lima on the first leg of our trip to the Marañón ambush site. The Russian twin prop banged and crashed its way over the Andes, and as we dropped into the vast green expanse of the Amazon, Paul said, “People talk about closure, that I’m coming here for closure.” He shook his head slowly. “There’s no closure. You don’t just cry for a few days and then it’s over.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Every once in a while a wave of grief just washes over me and I know it’s never going to stop happening.” Birds ate from Patchen’s hand. That was a thought that could trigger him. “It’ll get better,” Paul said, “but it’s never going to be over.”

  Paul is a photographer and tends to see his emotions visually, as a picture. When he thought of Patchen, he saw a globe, with a dark spot—an invincibly evil area—centered in the jungles of Peru. He disliked the image, thought it was twisted with hatred, and he couldn’t get it out of his head.

  There was little chance we’d ever find out who killed Patchen. Paul just needed to understand, to talk with the Aguaruna. Shake the dark image, if that was possible.

  Of course, if there was a group of robbers along the Marañón who killed for profit, they should be punished. But Paul hoped the Aguaruna would do that themselves, in their own way. That’s what Patchen’s mother, Sandra, wanted. Just leave it. Sandra had raised Patchen. She was suffering terribly, and as Paul saw it, she had all the rights in this matter. But there was that dark spot on the globe, and Paul needed to sink into its depth. Something beyond grief, or even justice, was pushing him. He couldn’t explain it.

  We landed at Bagua, on a military gravel airstrip. It wasn’t a scheduled stop, but Thomas Holladay had pulled a few strings, and the four of us stepped out of the plane into a blinding light. There were a couple of hundred uniformed soldiers sitting under a tin-roofed palapa, waiting for their flight home from the war.

  A group of Peruvian National Police, who had been notified of our arrival, met us on the runway and asked how they could help. Take us to Imacita, we said.

  Presently we were thumping and sliding down the gravel oil-pipeline road in a white police Nissan pickup truck. The rain was falling in sheets when we pulled into Imacita about dusk. It was a small town, with muddy gravel streets set around a tiny public square constructed entirely of cement: cement walkways; cement benches; a cement sculpture of what appeared to be a soccer ball on a pedestal. Men and women—mestizos, whites, and Indians—sloshed through the streets in high-top rubber boots. The shops were all open to the street, and consumer goods were piled in racks: soap and canned food and aspirin and rope and pails and towels and toys, all covered over with blue tarp awnings. It was a town of shiny blue tarps in the rain.

  A distinguished-looking man stepped out of one of the cafés and hailed us. He wore gold-framed aviator glasses, a light green dress shirt, beige slacks, and dark leather shoes. I had seen pictures of Evaristo Nugkuag taken around the time of the Fitzcarraldo incident. Then he wore colorful handmade ponchos, and his hair was cut in the traditional Aguaruna fashion, short in front, long in back. Now, he had a typical Peruvian businessman’s haircut; he was in Imacita on consejo business.

  Evaristo welcomed us. He and Thomas exchanged diplomatic pleasantries in Spanish. The rain let up, and we stood in the muddy street under a light drizzle. Two little boys ran by, screaming with laughter, chased by an angry young girl in a pink frilly dress that looked as if it had been in a mud-ball fight. Evaristo shook Paul’s hand and held it in his own as he expressed his sympathy. He said that the killers were probably “outsiders.”

  Very gently, Paul said he didn’t think that was so. The incident happened in the middle of Aguaruna country, the killers were Indians, and they spoke Aguaruna. Evaristo dropped Paul’s hand, pivoted about in a circle, as if agitated, and said, “Oh, this is bad. This is very bad for the Aguaruna people.” He said that the murder could only be the work of “individuals.” There were many “bad influences” now.

  Paul said he understood a little about the problems the Aguaruna faced. Evaristo nodded. That was good, he said, and he wanted Paul to know that what happened was not “political” and wasn’t meant to be a message of any sort. “We work,” Evaristo said, “with many Americans. We work with people of all nationalities.”

  That night Paul and I spoke for a while, in private. “When Thomas introduced me to Evaristo,” he recalled, “he said that I wasn’t looking for the killers or coming for vengeance, and that’s right. But then … he said I came to forgive.”

  “And you didn’t?” I asked.

  “I’m not Mother Teresa,” Paul said.

  We sat in silence for a moment. “What do you think Evaristo meant,” I asked finally, “when he said ‘this will never happen again’?”

  We speculated for a bit. Evaristo was a politician. He had traveled widely in Europe, raising money for the consejo, and had visited the U.S., where he was received in the White House. The man owed his power and position to the fact that he was able to mobilize international opinion on the part of his people. I truly believed Evaristo when he said that the January 18 incident was “bad for the Aguaruna.” The killing diminished his effectiveness in the international marketplace of ideas. It was entirely possible that Evaristo knew who pulled the trigger that night, and that steps had already been taken, punishments meted out. Not that he would ever tell us.

  Paul and I agreed that the presence of Thomas Holladay on this trip was crucial, and demonstrated that Patchen’s death was being taken seriously at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

  “I suppose Thomas has a file on me,” Paul said. Dix has been highly critical of U.S. involvement in Central America, very vocal about it, and he tends to see the government as a monolith—diplomats in league with the CIA in support of death squads. That sort of thing.

  “This is a tough trip,” I said. “It’s dangerous. Thomas didn’t have to come.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “The man’s been nothing but a source of support.” He thought for a moment, then allowed that maybe, in spite of his position, Thomas Holladay was one of the good guys.

  “Probably just fell through the cracks,” I said.

  That night at dinner, Paul took a stand: He did not want to visit the Aguaruna with an armed police guard. No police at all. We asked Thomas what he thought. A thin, venomous-looking spider, about half the length of a big man’s hand, was crawling across the front of Holladay’s shirt, and he brushed it to the floor with the unconscious reflex of a man who’s used to hard living in hot climates. In fact, Thomas Holladay had spent two years in the Peace Corps in Yap and served one year in Vietnam. “No police,” he said, and shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  Victor Chacon, for his part, liked the idea. Victor was an Amazon Indian by birth, but he was really a member of the tribe of Tim Page and Sean Flynn, which is to say he was a combat photographer. Once, on assignment, the Sendero Luminoso kidnapped him: a man put a gun to his head, then pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. It was a warning. Victor thought, The dumbshits didn’t even confiscate my film.

  By ten the next morning, we were at the island where Patchen and Josh had been shot. Evaristo had said that people all up and down the river knew we were coming and that we were free to visit any of the villages. He didn’t believe the police would allow us to do that in their absence, and helped us put together a complex connivance in which we would book passage to Santa María de Nieva in a commercial passenger craft, then call an unscheduled stop at a place where a member of the consejo, Yuan Unupsaan, would be waiting for us in a small speedboat.

  The water was lower, but the island was just as Josh Silver had described it: the eddy, the ceiba tree, the wall of foliage. Thomas Holladay and I crashed through the underbrush, looking for a trail. I was sweating and sunburned, and when I rubbed my hand across the back of my neck, there were dozens of nasty little stinging ants balled up in my palm. Yuan Unupsaan, with the perverse pr
ide of people who live in challenging environments, began describing the infinite varieties of ants in the Amazon: the little red ones that crawl up your pants legs and sting like fury, and the big black ones that leave welts the size of a man’s fist, and the …

  “There might be a trail here,” Holladay called.

  It wasn’t much, but we followed it twenty or thirty feet to a hole in the ground, where it ended.

  “Iruich,” Yuan said in Aguaruna. Armadillo.

  “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, does it,” Thomas Holladay said.

  There was no trail through the foliage. The assailant hadn’t just been strolling through the forest. It had to have been the two drunken men in the dugout. And since they had arrived in a hand-paddled dugout, they couldn’t have come very far. The river had been almost twenty feet higher in January. No one could paddle upstream against that current, and the big pongo above us, the one Patchen and Josh had battled for almost fifteen minutes, was very ugly. So the killers came from the village across the river to the south, Huaracayo, or the smaller one to the north, Ajachim.

  Paul had already figured it out. He was sitting on the sand beach above which Patchen’s raft had been floating four months earlier, when the water was that much higher. The sky was perfectly blue, there were a few white puffy clouds, and the river was clear and fast and clean. Sunlight dazzled off its surface. Paul was miles away, fighting against one of the waves that rolled over him from time to time.

  I sat some distance away, with Thomas and Victor and Yuan, who was telling us about the rabid vampire bats up the Rio Santiago.

  “Can you take us over to Huaracayo?” Thomas Holladay asked.

  In that place, there was a sort of village green, with a soccer field, a medical clinic, and a schoolhouse. The buildings had thatched roofs, or tin roofs, and were built of split cane, tied together with vines. There were gaps between each bit of cane so that the buildings were cooled by breezes. This was an administrative center, and the people lived in similar houses some distance away. The only man present told us that everyone else was out working in the fields. We gave him a gift of several dozen spiral notebooks for the children, and he told us we could meet with the people of Huaracayo the next day.