Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  And so we made our way downriver, checking in at two army posts, and arrived at Santa María de Nieva early that afternoon. It was a larger version of Imacita, and entirely unlike the immaculate village of Huaracayo, there was a faint odor of rotting produce and human waste. We were met there, with great fanfare, by the local police. The commanding officer was a bundle of energy and looked a bit like the late actor Sal Mineo. He said he’d just been assigned the post, that there wasn’t a lot of mysterious crime in Santa María de Nieva—whenever anything happened, it was generally pretty clear who did it—and that he was very keen to find Patchen’s killers.

  It has been Paul’s experience that cops in rural Third World posts are often corrupt, and use their positions to bully the poor and powerless. So it was with something less than complete enthusiasm that he sat with the officer for three hours, going over an inventory that Josh had made of all the gear on the raft: a Leatherman tool, an MSR cookstove, an orange Therm-a-Rest air mattress, two blue Lowe backpacks, a green Patagonia canvas shirt, a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, a pair of Eddie Bauer suede hiking boots. Paul drew out the logos of the various brands, and the officer copied everything down in a growing state of excitement. Oh yes, this was a big break, he said. Sooner or later someone would show up wearing something on the list. He’d hear of someone showing off a cookstove or knife. The killers had probably taken the covers off the oil drums on the raft and sunk it in some pongo. But … they may not have considered the fact that Josh could produce such a complete and identifiable inventory.

  It was clear to me that this officer of the Peruvian Investigative Police, assigned to a jungle backwater, desperately wanted to solve a crime with international implications. It was a career maker. There was just this one thing holding him back. A detail. The police in Santa María de Nieva—it pained him to say it—did not have a boat. He’d never actually been to the ambush site, which was several hours upriver. And if we were going there tomorrow—if we’d already hired a boat—was there any chance he could come along? As an observer. He wouldn’t be in the way at all.

  Paul didn’t like it. We discussed the matter over a dinner of stewed chicken and rice. I asked Paul why he had spent three hours with the cop if he didn’t want the killers caught and punished.

  “There’s part of me that wants that,” Paul said. And it was decided that the officer could come along, provided he came out of uniform, unarmed, and left the meeting while we talked with the people.

  We slept in a hotel that had eight-foot-high cubicles for rooms. The roof was tin, supported on heavy wooden beams twenty feet overhead. About one-thirty that night, there was a godawful racket, the thumping, thundering sound of that tin roof dancing a fandango on top of the beams. The earthquake, I learned later, measured 6.2 on the Richter scale. It was over a few minutes after it began. Paul and I shined our lights on the beams to see if there was any structural damage. I saw something—a bit of brown fur—moving across the wood. A rat? Maybe a spider monkey.

  I went back to bed thinking, for some reason, of a spider monkey I’d seen at one of the army checkpoints. It was a pet, pampered and overfed. I’d made some witless joke about “negocios de monos,” monkey business, and a soldier said, “That’s what we call the Ecuadorians. Monos.” Monkeys. I thought, Easier to kill a monkey than a human being.

  And that thought stayed with me all the way back up the river the next day. At Huaracayo, we were met by the mayor, called the Apu, whose name was Victor Yagkuag. The people were gathered in the schoolhouse. There were about fifty of them, sitting three abreast on benches built for schoolchildren. The women sat to the left, and several of them were breast-feeding babies they carried in slings. The men wore clean T-shirts with shorts or dark slacks. Most of them didn’t wear shoes.

  Yuan Unupsaan, of the consejo, seated Paul and me in the front of the room, on tiny children’s tea-party chairs. He introduced Thomas Holladay, who in turn introduced the police officer, Victor, Paul, and me. He said that Paul had not come to seek vengeance. He had come to understand the context of his son’s death. He had come for emotional reasons. He had come for spiritual reasons.

  The Aguaruna, perhaps, thought it unlikely that Paul wasn’t seeking vengeance, but they seemed to nod with a kind of forlorn wisdom when Thomas talked about death and spirituality. It was the formulation Paul had been looking for as well. Spiritual reasons. You could grasp some tragedy with your mind, but until your soul understood, you would forever be in pain.

  Thomas Holladay excused himself from the meeting. He said that he, as an official of the United States, and the police officer, as an official of the Peruvian government, would go back down to the boat so that people could speak freely.

  And when they were gone, Paul and I got caught in a quick blast of Aguaruna political discourse. “Here,” the Apu said, and he showed us a neatly handwritten document festooned with signatures. The police had come to the village directly after the murder, and everyone said then that they didn’t know who did it. See, it’s all written down.

  This demonstration was conducted at high volume, with many emphatic gestures. No one had heard the shotgun blasts that night. The river was too high, too loud for the sound to carry. And what motive would someone from the village have?

  Paul stood and waved his arms. He wanted to speak. Victor was in the back of the room, shooting pictures.

  A woman stood and said, “We too ask our God why this happened.”

  “We didn’t know your son,” a man shouted. “Why would we kill him for vengeance?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Paul said, in his fluent Spanish. “Esperan.”

  Yuan translated Paul’s words into Aguaruna, though it was clear to me that all but the oldest men and a few of the women understood Spanish.

  The people settled down, and Paul thanked the consejo for helping make this trip possible. He thanked the people of Huaracayo for taking time off from their work to speak to him, and he told them that they lived in one of the most beautiful forests he had ever seen, alongside one of the most beautiful rivers on earth. He emphasized, again, that he hadn’t come for vengeance. He was not looking for los culpables, the guilty ones. He had come only to understand, and to resolve the situation for himself spiritually. He had suffered much pain since his son was killed, he said, but he wanted the people to think about Patchen’s mother and the pain she felt. For the mother, he said, it was very bad. Very bad.

  The people now sat in complete silence. Paul spoke slowly and sincerely, using simple words and short declarative sentences for an audience that spoke Spanish as a second language. The care he took gave his sentences the force of poetry.

  He said that he was beginning to understand the customs of the Aguaruna people and that he had great respect for them. He understood their fear of people coming in from the outside—people who wanted to take their land, their hunting grounds. He knew they loved their children and feared bad influences.

  Perhaps there were Aguaruna people who had fallen under the spell of these bad influences, he said. Perhaps there were people who killed not for vengeance but for profit. This was very bad for the Aguaruna people. To rob and kill—this had never been the Aguaruna way. It was a sin against the soul of the people.

  Paul paused. There was a stirring on the women’s side of the room. The Santa María de Nieva policeman was standing outside, listening. We could see him through the split cane. Paul walked outside, and the people heard him tell the officer to “go back to the boat. Do it now, please.”

  There was a certain rumbling of satisfaction when Paul came back into the room. He sat back down next to me on his tiny chair.

  “I am not a citizen of Peru,” Paul told the people, “and there is nothing I can do about my son’s death. Perhaps the police will do something. I would prefer—and the mother would prefer—that you do something about it in your own way, according to your own customs. Perhaps that has already been done.”

  I could not read the people’s faces.
/>
  “You did not know my son,” Paul said. “His name was Patchen. Patchen Miller.” And he told them that Patchen had loved rivers and mountains, that he had loved the forest and all the animals in it. He told them how Patchen had lived and what he had believed. “If you should find out who the guilty ones are,” Paul said, “I want you to tell them that they killed a brother.”

  There was utter silence in the room, and now I could read the people’s faces very clearly.

  “Patchen Miller was your brother,” Paul said.

  What I saw in some of those Aguaruna faces was a sudden shock of sorrow, and I believe that, for a moment, they grieved for their brother.

  I thought about that as we ate the chicken and yucca and plantains the people of Hauracayo brought us for lunch. The advice Patchen and Josh were given—don’t talk to people on the river—was wrongheaded, and maybe fatal.

  It’s a simple thing to sit around a campfire, drinking, and discuss what to do about a couple of men you don’t know; men who you haven’t spoken to, and who won’t speak to you. The killers may have thought, These two men could be pishtacos, and they are on our land, and they are like the others who come and steal from us, and they have things we want, and we can steal from them, and this is only fair. We don’t know these men. They are not our kin, and they are not our brothers. They are like monos, monkeys, not even human, and we can kill them.

  After lunch, the Apu broke out some manioc beer, that tuberous mess the women spit into buckets to ferment. It was quite white, lumpy like buttermilk, sweet and cool.

  Thomas Holladay passed the wooden bowl to me. “Did you see the two young guys in the T-shirts?” he asked in English.

  “One red, one green?”

  “Yeah. Hair short in front, long in back.”

  “Both of them with the Dick Tracy nose.”

  “I told Victor to shoot some close-ups of those guys,” Thomas said. “Portrait shots. I thought Josh might like to see them.”

  A woman filled the bowl after I drank, and I took it over to Paul, who was talking with the Apu.

  “This stuff is really good,” I said.

  “Especially if you don’t know how it’s made,” Paul said, in English.

  He was feeling better—good enough to joke around, anyway—and when we said good-bye to the people of Huaracayo, Paul thanked them for speaking with him. He said they’d helped him deal with his pain and that he felt tranquillo, peaceful, calm.

  Later that day, we flew out of the Marañón River basin in a small single-engine plane chartered from a missionary group. We rose above a series of rain squalls, then passed over the island across from the Aguaruna village of Huaracayo. The sky was clearing to the west, but it was still raining in the east. There were half a dozen rainbows arced out over the place where our brother, Patchen Miller, died.

  Uncharitable Thoughts at the End of My Rope

  I am hanging from a rope affixed to a diaper, which I am wearing in the place where diapers are most often worn. The diaper is, in fact, a ten-foot-long runner made of nylon webbing and is wrapped about my legs and crotch in a manner most familiar to mothers and climbers. The ends of the runner are hooked into a pair of carabiners, which in turn hook into a small piece of metal containing two holes called a figure eight.

  With my diapers and carabiners in place, I can run a doubled over climbing rope through the figure eight, step backward off the lip of a cliff, and slide safely down the rope. This is the fastest nonfatal way to get down off a mountain. Since most cliff faces are higher than the average climbing rope is long, numerous slides are required to reach flatland. Ropes are expensive, however, and in order to retrieve them after each slide, they are usually wrapped around an anchor—a tree, a horn of rock, a sling affixed to a chock—and dropped double down the face of rock below. The ends of the rope should dangle over a stand-up ledge at the very least. There the climber can pull on one end and bring the rope down after him. The process is called rappel, from a French word meaning “recall.”

  I am out recalling over the side of a cliff this spring day because the summer is shaping up heavy on rope work. I have been invited to help some people place a pair of peregrine falcons on a rocky ledge rising high over the Pacific Ocean. I have promised to join a caving expedition where we will be expected to slide down a rope in absolute darkness some four hundred feet. “You can rappel, can’t you?” I was asked in both cases.

  “Does a chicken have lips?” I lied. “Is a bear Catholic?”

  The last time I slid down a rope was six years ago. As I remember, it seemed a painless procedure after the first-time terror of trying to scale a 5.7 climb called the Grack in Yosemite. Slide down a rope? No problem. Rappel off a cliff holding a delicate peregrine falcon in a sweatsock? Piece of cake. Drop off into the darkness of the earth’s abysmal depths? I could handle it.

  As time ground slowly onward, it occurred to me that—what the hell, a little practice with the rope wouldn’t actually hurt. God helps those who help themselves. Be prepared. Better to be humiliated in front of friends than go plunging into the darkness with bats like falcons swooping all around.

  My friend, photographer Paul Dix, has been climbing for almost thirty years and owns all the requisite ropes and hardware. As it happened, Paul didn’t mind taking an afternoon off for some rope work. I would be perfect, he said, for “some rappelling photos.” Paul says things like that with a straight face. He would use the shots to build up his stock file. Dix said he would be happy to supervise my practice sessions if he could shoot photos.

  Which is how I came to be hanging over the lip of a cliff in Yankee Jim Canyon, just above the rapids of the Yellowstone River. Other men have hung from the neck until dead; I was hanging from my diapers and dying of boredom. This is the curse of going anywhere with an outdoor photographer.

  “Just hold right there,” Paul said, diddling with his Nikon. “Okay, now drop down about two feet. Good. Now turn your face out of the shadow. Lift your right foot about four inches. Perfect. Hold it there. Look natural.”

  This was my first drop in six years, and a natural look would have been one of intense apprehension, but after hanging in various positions one ordinarily sees only in East Indian sex manuals, a certain ennui takes hold of the soul.

  “Can I go now?” I called. The diapers were beginning to chafe.

  “Uh, wait just a minute please. I’m changing film.”

  Using Paul’s gear and relying, as I was, on his expertise, I was in no position to argue. I was in no position at all. I was hanging by my diapers, thinking uncharitable thoughts about photographers.

  “Oh my God,” Paul called. “You think you can hold there another few minutes? Five more minutes.” Dix was in a lather of anticipation. “There’s a couple of kayakers upriver.” The photographer was scrambling up the side of the cliff, dragging thirty pounds of camera gear in a frenzied quest to find the perfect angle. “If I can just get you and the kayakers in the same shot …”

  Paul was muttering to himself, hard at work. Someday he’ll be sitting at home, in his office, and his agent or some magazine art director will call and ask, “You wouldn’t have a photo of a scared-looking guy rappelling down a cliff with a couple of kayakers paddling by below, would you?”

  And Paul Dix will say, “Of course,” in a way that suggests all good photographers have that shot.

  There was a nice little rapids upstream, and the kayakers had no idea that I was hanging in the wind, waiting for them to pass so that Paul could be nonchalant with art directors about his rappelling photographs. The kayakers were probably nice guys. I bet I’d like them if I met them in a bar somewhere. What I didn’t like about them this particular day is the way they kept … diddling around. Drop into a big hole and paddle furiously in order not to move. Anybody who would work that hard to go nowhere, I thought, twisting slowly in the wind, was an imbecile of heroic proportions.

  “Can you drop below the overhang so you hang free?” Paul asked. So I
hung there, working hard to go nowhere and feeling vapid as a kayaker in a rapid. The diaper was cutting into my thighs and there was a sense of paralysis in my legs from the hips down. I mean, it had begun to hurt, hanging there for half an hour at a crack, and I began to think of Paul as a Kodachrome sadist.

  Okay, I admit that photographers, as a rule, are probably wonderful people, as likable as the idiot kayakers probably were, but while at work, the average outdoor photographer could piss off the pope. Once, in South America, I stood under a heavy waterfall wearing rain gear made of a “new-generation” fabric while photographer Nick Nichols took shots for a catalogue designed to show that this stuff was impervious to water. It was a cold day on the high plateau known as El Mundo Perdido, the Lost World, and the fourth time I walked through the falls, I called up to Nick that I was soaking wet and cold.

  “This stuff doesn’t work,” I screamed. “Not even a little bit.”

  “Gimme one more walk-through,” he shouted back. “I haven’t got the shot.”

  “But the stuff doesn’t work.” A bit of logic and fine good sense howled into the empty space between a working photographer’s ears. “It leaks like a sieve.”

  “I don’t know that,” Nick shouted. “Gimme one more walkthrough.”

  “This stuff is the fabric of betrayal …”

  “Looks great,” Nick yelled. “Real good. One more walkthrough.”

  Nick has actually asked people to give it one more walk through a bed of coals. That was in Surinam, where he was working on a story about the people who live deep in that country’s tangled jungle. Their ancestors, brought over as slaves, had immediately escaped into the bush, where they lived as they had in West Africa. Anthropologists study the bush people of Surinam in an effort to understand eighteenth-century West African culture. Nick spent three weeks in one jungle village—long enough to count the people he met there as friends.