Bordeaux

by Matthew Thayer

  “My ear peas, did you see them?”

  “You really are a dummy. Couldn’t hear the kayak, because you were listening to music. Serves you right. How many times did the Master Sergeant warn you?”

  “Please! Did you see them?”

  “No, Sal, I was too busy saving your sorry-ass life to worry about your damn ear peas.”

  “My computer?”

  “Yes, it was floating. I grabbed it on my way to you.”

  Every man has his limit, his breaking point. I had survived tsunamis, a lion attack, life with the natives on the trail, and a thousand other hardships. The prospect of spending the rest of my days without proper music melted my psyche into a puddle of tears.

  “You can listen with the speakers in your helmet,” Andre consoled.

  “Itttttt’sssss nnnnnott, ttthhheeee sssssame,” I whimpered.

  Embarrassed by my unmanly display, Andre removed himself to the end of the beach. He took a seat on a gray driftwood log and stayed there until I’d finished leaking. It had been so long since I bathed myself in a sea of self pity, a thrice-weekly occurrence back in the old days, I wallowed like a pig in the familiar refrains of “Why me?” and “How unfair!” Jumping up to vent, I hurled stones in the river and childishly splintered driftwood limbs against the beach rocks ’til my hands ached. I can be so mature.

  My antics seemed to put a smile on Andre’s face. He strolled up the beach and pointed his paddle at my chest.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You could ask Lorenzo if you can use his peas, but I doubt he’ll share. Me? I’ll give you mine.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure. If your porters win the race, we trade. My ear peas for your boon.”

  “You think the porters can win?”

  “Salvatore, my father had a saying, ‘Never bet against the house.’ I spent two years watching you fleece guys out of money, booze and food. I figure, you set this bet up, you’ve got the angles covered.”

  “What makes you think that all of a sudden?” Andre has no misgivings about complaining. If he suspected cheating, he would have spoken up earlier.

  “The way you looked at the waterfall, it was obvious, you expected to find it. The man who does back flips over a pretty butterfly discovers a natural wonder and starts talking about his days as a volunteer firefighter in Zurich? Right. You are usually a much better liar.”

  Was I losing my touch? I elected to jump right back on the horse and see.

  “I haven’t the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about. Why do you pester a man who is not yet recovered from such a close brush with death?”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “What makes you think they will come? Can they really find us?”

  “Look at the fire Lorenzo has built.”

  Angst had blinded me to the mushroom cloud of roiling, gray smoke billowing into the morning sky not far to our north. Even I had to smile.

  “Ah, Lorenzo, you rarely do things halfway,” I said. “Let us see what he has done.”

  I climbed on the bow of Andre’s boat and laid there, Wallunda-like, as he navigated through the limestone canyon. There were no signs of my kayak or paddle, but when we arrived at the scene of Lorenzo’s impressive fire, we found he had not been too busy with the pyrotechnics to yank my malfunctioning boat from the river as it floated by. It lay on the western shore. Lorenzo and Wallunda leaned against its hull, reclined in the gravel, watching the show.

  Snapping and crackling like small arms fire, the fire roared with the intensity of a blast furnace. Its creators were so intent on their handiwork, they barely looked our way as we dragged Andre’s boat to shore and plopped down to join them. The idiots must have spent the entire morning consolidating driftwood on top of a tangle of long-dead pines. The trees, hundreds of them, had been swept downstream during a flood and wedged high up the beach at the base of the limestone cliff.

  Sitting across the river from the fire, nearly 100 meters away, enough heat was deflected off the cliff face to warm our faces. I peeled off my sodden leather clothing and footwear and hung them to dry on the limbs of a driftwood tree half-buried in the gravel. The fire felt good against the cool breeze which funneled through the canyon.

  TRANSMISSION:

  Martinelli: “I’m hungry. Where’s the trout?”

  Bolzano: “We lost them.”

  Martinelli: “Can’t you two do anything right? My job was to build the fire, and as you can surely see, I have built a beauty.”

  Bolzano: “Lorenzo, look at this bump on my forehead! I was nearly killed. My kayak malfunctioned. It began spinning uncontrollably and knocked me unconscious after casting me into the river. Andre saved my life, not that you care. I forgot about the trout, and to tell the truth, I don’t give a flying fuck about the trout.”

  Martinelli: “Your boat floated by upside down. Wallunda saw it coming. I had to jump in to save it.”

  Bolzano: “Didn’t you think to come upstream? See if we needed help?”

  Martinelli: “I knew you were all right. I told you, we have God’s protection. He promised. We are to be blessed with long lives.”

  Bolzano: “Did you see my paddle? My ear peas?”

  Martinelli: “What did you do to cause your boat to break?”

  Bolzano: “I did nothing. You heard the noise. The problem had been coming on for days.”

  Martinelli: “Stupid porters probably dropped it.”

  Bolzano: “Of course they dropped it. The boats survived a pair of God-damned tsunamis. Whatever bumps my porters may have perpetrated pales in comparison. Did you see my belongings?”

  Martinelli: “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain! Wallunda might have seen your paddle as it went by. I think that’s what she said. We were busy talking about Hell. It may have washed up on the beach downstream, our side, about a hundred meters down.”

  Bolzano: “The ear peas?”

  Martinelli: “In this river? You gotta be kidding me.”

  From the log of Cpl. Salvatore Bolzano

  Firefighter II

  (English translation)

  What allows fire to so easily mesmerize the eye and spirit? It will captivate modern man’s attention no less than it does early human’s. Our friends are content to sit for hours watching the flames of their campfires flicker.

  This blaze of Lorenzo’s was impossible to ignore. There was not one thing calming or peaceful about it.

  Fueled by the increasing wind, the immense pile of tinder-dry pines was soon fully engulfed. Flames shot 50 meters up the cliff face and beyond, roaring with such intensity the limestone walls began to fracture and cleave off in sheets of glowing rock. With a sound akin to breaking glass, the strata peeled off the wall to collapse into the inferno, crashing down amid geysers of sparks and billowing smoke.

  The heat chased us up the beach. We pulled the kayaks up with us lest they melt. My leather jerkins and moccasins hanging in the limbs were beginning to smolder, and I was deciding whether I should go rescue them before they burst into flames when Tomon and the first of the porters arrived. They didn’t yell or celebrate, but rather, ambled quietly down a diagonal goat trail to take seats with us amid the driftwood and gravel at the top of the beach.

  “Tomon!” I exclaimed, clapping him on the back. “You made it.”

  “Good fire. Big fire.” He replied with hand signs. By this time, the field on the far side of the river was ablaze, pine trees going up like match heads 100 meters tall.

  I’m never quite sure what the natives think of us. Who we are, what we are. There was no doubt, Tomon and the gang were impressed by Lorenzo’s fire. Over the next 15 minutes the rest of my little band wandered in. Nine men, six women, three children and four dogs.

  The wheezy old fire starter was the only casualty of their cross-country journey. Tomon said he was walking with the man two days ago when he died. They had reached the top of a small hill and were starting down the other side, through an area of thick
nut trees, when the fire starter clutched at his chest and fell over dead. They buried him by a stream and spent a night by his grave out of respect.

  “He would have enjoyed this,” Tomon signed, gesturing toward spreading wildfire.

  If not for his untimely death, they may well have arrived before we did. Four days to cover 175 kilometers as the crow flies. They obviously traveled much farther than that. I begin to appreciate how much ground these people can cover when they set their minds to it.

  Tomon said they passed through plentiful game and saw many Neanderthal, he calls them “Flat Heads,” and a few native bands. They avoided contact with one and all, fearing one of the itinerant clans might be spoiling for a fight. I think that is the gist of what the poor exhausted man was attempting to convey.

  Andre speaks the Green Turtle dialect far better than I do. He asked a few questions about the hunting and terrain before turning with a smile to Lorenzo.

  “It appears Salvatore has won the race,” Amacapane said. “I never thought it could happen. I guess we each must pay him a boon. Anything you want, is that correct, Sal?”

  “I agreed to no such thing!” Lorenzo said, grabbing Wallunda by the hand and leading her down the beach.

  “The lousy son of a bitch. He can’t do that.”

  “Lorenzo makes his own rules.”

  “We have an understanding, right? Even if he queers the bet, you and I are together on this. Correct?”

  “Yes, indeed. Look how the trees on the hill flare. The wind will carry this a long way.”

  “Yes, directly toward my Green Turtles. He is one evil son of a bitch. And you know what? He’ll say God told him to do it.”

  Although raised within the Catholic Church, my faith has eroded through the years. I have seen too much abuse and excess in the name of the Lord. The Bible reads like fiction with its ancient stories of miracles and supernatural events. The symbolism and magnitude of what happened next could convince nearly any doubter that the Hand of God reached down to tweak Lorenzo and say, “Play fair.”

  A dust devil caught my eye. I followed it as it traveled along the far rim of the canyon, a wispy little tornado of dirt and loose stems of grass, spiraling lazily toward Lorenzo’s fire. Growing as it approached, feeding off the copious amounts of energy being released, it stalled over the super-heated air to spin into a monster.

  In a blink of my eye, the faint wisp was transformed into a rotating column of flame vacuuming up blazing pine tree skeletons, red-hot embers and ash with the roar of a bullet train. Spitting fire and smoke, the tornado spiraled to a height of more than 300 meters in seconds. Tomon and the porters were duly impressed, hooting and pointing as the orange funnel cloud swayed like a cobra. They grew quiet when the winds from the east suddenly reversed to topple the tornado across the river in a graceful arch.

  Knocked off its furnace, robbed of the fire’s tremendous energy, it collapsed straight toward Lorenzo and Wallunda. The pair stood dumbstruck for a moment, heads tipped back, mouths open. Wallunda burst for safety like a scared deer. Lorenzo followed her up the beach, dodging falling limbs and red-hot coals until it became obvious they would never outrun the deadly cascade. Turning to his shouts, she followed him to the river. They dove into the water just as a cloud of smoke and ash descended to obscure our view.

  In less than five minutes, the hillside above us became a raging inferno. Our uneasy hopes the canyon would offer safety were dashed when the winds abruptly shifted back to westerly to fill the void with smoke and flying sparks.

  “To the river!” I shouted, first in Italian and then Green Turtle. I snatched up my dry clothes and Lorenzo’s paddle as Tomon and the porters helped Andre push the three kayaks into the water. Women carried crying children. Dogs were dragged by the scruffs of their necks. It was all a blur. Coughing, clinging to the edges of the boats with just our heads exposed to the broiling air, we kicked toward the middle of the river and let the current carry us away.

  We passed through the tornado’s smoke and ash to emerge into a patch of relatively clear air. I thought we may escape unscathed, but we exited the canyon to find ourselves headed straight for a crackling wall of flame. Forest on both sides of the river raged, pine trees exploding into torches hundreds of meters tall.

  “Go under,” was all I could say before collecting a deep breath of scorching air and plunging my body under the kayak. It felt as if my lungs must burst, but my training kicked in. I forced my body to calm itself, make the most of every bit of oxygen. Streaks of orange and yellow flashed across the surface as I floated directly under the boat. One by one, my companions surfaced. Andre and I were the only ones left. At once, the surface turned blue.

  We rose to a scene of absolute horror. Floating along with the kayaks were the bodies of two children, two of the porter’s women and all four dogs. The boy who first befriended me by tugging on my hair so long ago had hung steadfastly on the bow of the kayak. The poor child was roasted black as charcoal. His lips and eyelids had melted away to lock his face in a ghoulish grimace.

  The tops of the kayaks were too hot to touch. Andre and I flipped them over and motioned for the survivors to hang on as we swam the boats toward the upwind shore. Having managed to cling to Lorenzo’s paddle, but not my clothes, I was nude as I scurried about the beach tending to the wounded.

  Nearly every survivor had first or second-degree burns on their hands and faces, necks and shoulders. The intensity of the fire on the western side of the boats was much greater. The people who surfaced on that side were either dead or had third-degree burns which exposed flesh and bone through blackened skin. I had held Tomon under by his tunic until he fought free, and he in turn had held his woman. Both were relatively unscathed, and it was they who took charge of our triage center.

  We made a row of moaning victims in the pea gravel, did our best to relieve their great pain, all the while casting worried looks over our shoulders lest the mighty fire sweep down to toast us once again. Now, hours later, I can report that two porters have passed from their injuries, as has another of their women. I suspect we may lose one or two more to infection before we are done. They suffer so.

  There has been no time to mourn the dogs, though I am sure the people will take their loss hard. The fire roasted every part of the animals which remained above the waterline. Heads and paws singed of all hair, skin charred black. They presented such a sorry sight, I pushed the poor beasts into the river before those who hadn’t seen them did.

  Andre helped for a while, and then paddled downstream to look for Lorenzo. He returned with the man himself, and his skinny woman, not a half-hour later. They had shot through the fire zone before things had truly heated up. They beached by the confluence of a small stream. Andre arrived in time to catch them having intercourse on the beach. He interrupted them with the call of a loon.

  “They’re loony,” Andre said. “Why not use the appropriate call?”

  Wallunda takes great interest in the Green Turtles’ pain. She inspects their wounds, tsk-tsking to herself. Hearing groans a while ago, I caught her poking a stick into the flesh of one of the most severe cases. The man has since died, and I doubt her ministrations were the cause, but I reacted by instinct. My forehand slap sent her sprawling. She gave me a look of pure venom as she gingerly dabbed her lip to check if it was bleeding. I expected her to run to Lorenzo, but she kept her eyes locked on mine.

  “If you hurt my people again I will kill you.” I signed the words slowly, so there was no mistaking my meaning. She responded with, “Not if I kill you first.” What an evil bitch.

  I stood guard over the poor souls while Tomon and his woman hurried inland to search for medicinal herbs. They returned in short order carrying four uprooted aloe vera plants. Using his flint knife, Tomon split the plump leaves down their spines to coax out a gelatinous, green goop, which we spread liberally over the wounds. The process could not help but remind me of my mother. As I was growing up, the woman insisted on using the same pla
nt to treat my occasional scrapes and sunburns.

  As I nursed the wounded, my attention gravitated down the beach where an argument was heating up between my Italian shipmates. Wiping my bloody hands clean on my bare ass, I walked up to join the fray.

  As I mentioned, my faith has waned through the years. Today’s tornado of fire could easily be seen as the work of God. I preferred to view it in terms of physics and the vagaries of nature. Stuff happens. That wouldn’t stop me from using it to manipulate Lorenzo.

  “God was after you, Lorenzo,” I said, interrupting Andre’s harangue about keeping promises and the importance of sharing pistols. As Lorenzo’s relations with the Almighty are one of his primary concerns, I was quick to point out good Christians do not lie or cheat. In other words, I dropped the Old Testament on his head. He rebuffed my efforts. Though I believe I set the hook in such a way he may not wriggle out of his responsibilities just yet.

  TRANSMISSION:

  Bolzano: “It was the hand of God, slapping you down for not keeping your word.”

  Martinelli: “What is it now?”

  Bolzano: “We agreed upon a wager and you lost. You refused to honor your bet and walked down the beach. Not 10 minutes later, The Lord sent you a not-so-friendly reminder to fly straight.”

  Amacapane: “He’s right, you liar.”

  Martinelli: “God doesn’t care about your childish games. He doesn’t have time for races and vole-hunting contests. That was Him saying, ‘Do not doubt me! I have given you a job, do it!’”

  Bolzano: “Andre, give us a moment alone, will you, please? Thank you. Lorenzo, I thought you and Jesus were close associates, taking walks together and sharing your life stories. Why is He trying to kill you?”

  Martinelli: “I deserved to be punished. I was sitting there on the beach doubting Him. Wallunda and I had prayed so hard for the Tattoos to win. And then your stinking porters show up, not even tired. I’m glad they were burned. Cheaters! I know you, Sal. You rigged the bet.”