The propeller whirred innocently.
Just freakin’ typical.
Kinkaid reached out, killed the engine. The prop wound down and stopped. Its three blades cast a shadow of the peace sign onto a copse of rubber trees inches away.
“Are you okay?” Kinkaid asked me over his shoulder.
I sat up. The ribs hurt, but didn’t move when I pressed them with my palm. I also took comfort from the fact I could stand and hadn’t thrown up yet. “Yeah. Nice landing.”
He unwedged himself from the pilot’s chair. “You all right?” he asked the floor, where Carlos was starting to unfold himself.
“Yes.”
Carlos and I looked at each other for a long moment.
“You’re fired,” I said.
I could hear shouts in the distance, growing closer. Time to start worrying about staying alive. I grabbed Kinkaid’s arm as he staggered to the tail section to check his gear.
“We’re scientists,” I said. “We’re just going to the research station. We are not journalists.”
“What?” He picked up his camera case.
“That stays here,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t—”
“If they think you’re a journalist, they’ll kill you.” When he stared at me, I added, “Don’t provoke anything. We’re going to the research station. That’s it. Nothing else.”
“Why would they kill us?”
“Because the mine is illegal,” Carlos answered from the cockpit. “This is Yanomamo land, and the miners have dug without government permission.”
“They’re paranoid about being stopped,” I said to Kinkaid. “Or robbed.” The voices outside grew louder. The distinctive, heavy, shung-clunk of a shotgun being racked made me lower my voice. “Don’t be stupid and we might get out of this alive.”
He nodded.
“That means keep your mouth shut,” I clarified.
He nodded again, shoving his glasses back onto his nose.
I shrugged into my day pack, ignoring my tender ribs. Showing weakness to a dog pack just feeds the frenzy. I needed to get out of this with Harrison’s ashtray, my forged CITES certificate, one cardboard tube for storing a Death Orchid, and my life.
Everything else was negotiable.
A strong brown hand gripped the door and a short man stuck his head through the cargo door. “Saia do avião!” Behind him, the shotgun’s nose beckoned us.
We climbed out and lined up beside the plane. Four men with rifles slung over their shoulders clambered in. In a moment, I heard my duffel unzipping and my stuff being pulled out. The short guy who’d spoken to us appeared to be in charge, probably the head donos, the mine foreman. Security would be part of his job. A much younger man held the shotgun on us, his face pasted with a “just doing my job” expression.
The donos smiled, revealing an archetypical gold front tooth. “You have come visit us,” Goldtooth said in English.
I felt Carlos tense beside me. “Bad fuel,” he replied. “We were lucky.”
Not quite as lucky as we might have been, I thought. The donos studied Carlos for a moment.
“We took bets whether you crash.” He slapped one broad hand into the other and grinned. “I lost!”
A tinkling bang inside the plane heralded the end of Kinkaid’s camera. In my peripheral vision, I saw Kinkaid’s jaw tense, but he kept his mouth shut. The donos shrugged. “Accident,” he said. “Too bad.”
When Goldtooth turned his attention to me, I dropped my gaze to his feet. I’m proud, but I’m not stupid. I’d save the I Am Woman tirade for when I was the one holding the shotgun.
“What you doing here?” Goldtooth asked. “What a woman need here?”
“I’m a scientist,” I replied. “Científico.” No, dammit, that was Spanish. “Cientista.”
I let my eyes wander from his muddy boots up worn work pants to his stout white cotton shirt. A few wiry hairs sprouted from the shirt’s open neck. “Studying plantas.” I chanced a glance at his face.
His black eyes had narrowed. I was starting to feel pretty good about those eyes not looking like a snake’s when I realized his nonviper gaze had settled below my neckline. Never mind my bulky, buttoned-up canvas-shirt look. This guy was interested in what lay beneath, which was a white cotton muscle tee, a white cotton sports bra—a not-too-shabby C—and a lot of sweat. Bugs buzzed my ear, but the deet kept them at bay. Too bad they didn’t make lech-repellant.
His fingers twitched. Abruptly he grinned. “Come to office!” he said. “You need Coca-Cola!”
The sullen young guy with the shotgun waved us down the airstrip toward the collection of hovels that served as mine headquarters. As we trudged along the airstrip’s rutted surface, the clatter of generators rose over the sheet-metal buildings. Now, at around ten in the morning, the sun was ready to bake us into crispy bits. I shrugged off the stray notion that we were descending into hell. I hadn’t been searched, I’d been allowed to keep my day pack, and the worst they’d done to my person was ogle.
All things considered, things were looking up.
The shotgun-toting guy stopped at an outlying building beside the airstrip. Beside the building, three Yanomamo women wearing brightly colored T-shirts and bowl-cut hairdos loitered in the shade, one holding an infant in her arms. A Yanomamo boy who looked about twelve chased a toad, aiming boy-sized arrows at it from his boy-sized bow.
The Shotgun Kid swung open the door and waved us inside the building. I’m glad I wasn’t expecting a blast of cool air because I didn’t get one. If anything, the heat was worse. Goldtooth motioned for us to move on through a small anteroom to the large office and sit down on the floor, then he disappeared.
A large metal utility desk sat square in the middle of the room with a wide wooden chair squatting behind it. A neat stack of papers held down one edge of the desk. A two-drawer metal filing cabinet hunched in the corner. Overhead, a ceiling fan vigorously flung stale air onto our heads.
I took the corner where I could see the door and the Shotgun Kid filling it. A third Brazilian lingered just outside the door. Kinkaid settled cross-legged next to me. For the first time I noticed he’d brought his own day pack with him. Good Boy Scout. Too bad his camera hadn’t made it. A thin trickle of sweat slid down his temple but he seemed calm. I wasn’t surprised. Landing the little plane the way he had took more nerve than I had.
Carlos hunkered down next to Kinkaid like he was sitting around a campfire. He looked a little too at ease for my peace of mind. Of course, he wasn’t one of two Americans in the room. Or a woman. My guess was that before this was over, he’d end up cutting a deal with the miners to make some of their supply runs into Boa Vista.
Goldtooth returned with three open glass-bottled Cokes. Refrigeration was too much to hope for, but a wet drink was a wet drink. He handed them out, let his thick, rough fingers scrape mine when I took the bottle from him. His grin, stretching through a fleshy face, made me think twice about taking a sip. I set the bottle’s warm butt on my knee.
“Now!” he announced, perching on the edge of the desk. “What you doing here?”
I didn’t volunteer anything and neither did Kinkaid. The question had clearly been addressed to the man the donos would assume was the pilot.
“Engine trouble,” Carlos said after a moment. “Bad fuel. We were forced to land here.”
“Yes,” the donos agreed patiently. “What you doing here?”
Sweat broke out on Carlos’s upper lip. Not good. If you act guilty, you are guilty.
“We hired him to bring us to the jungle,” I said.
The donos turned his black eyes on me. Maybe I’d spoken out of turn and it would get me in trouble, but it was better than watching Carlos get us all killed by taking too long to think about his answer.
“You had a video camera.”
“It was mine,” Kinkaid said.
“You a journalist?”
“No.” Kinkaid looked at the donos a moment before switc
hing to textbook Portuguese and adding, “I study insects and how they work in your rain forests. The camera was for photographing them at night.”
Goldtooth nodded thoughtfully. Had the camera survived, Kinkaid might have been able to play back the film he’d already taken to help make his case.
“Plantas,” Goldtooth said abruptly, still in Portuguese. “Which?”
I took a deep breath. “Bromeliads, lichen, moss,” I said in English. At his puzzled frown, I said, “Weeds.”
That he understood. Bromeliads to a guy like him would be weeds. If he had to clear it to make room for an airstrip or a mine, it was a weed. He nodded and looked down to shuffle through the desk’s papers, ignoring us. I got it: he was a busy and important man. I set my untouched Coke bottle on the hard wooden floor next to Kinkaid’s, also untouched.
The donos sniffed and traded a glance with the Shotgun Kid. “Out,” he said to Carlos.
Carlos slowly stood. “Out?”
The Shotgun Kid pointed the muzzle at Carlos’s shins and then gestured to the door. Carlos took a few steps, but hesitated when he passed the Kid. I didn’t blame him. I knew the skin of his back was crawling, waiting to be pumped full of shot.
“Take your plane,” the donos said.
“It won’t fly on bad fuel,” Carlos objected.
Goldtooth nodded at the Brazilian lurking outside the door. “Get him fuel.” The Brazilian left. “We will talk, eh?” he said to Carlos. “Maybe we do business. Now go.”
Carlos spared me a rueful glance, a shrug of apology, then turned and walked out, taking my hope for getting out of here with him.
That seemed about par. Guy screws you and leaves without looking back. My luck, which had been on the upside briefly today, was headed straight down the toilet again. It was just me and Kinkaid and no transportation. Brilliant. My heart started pounding my chest wall, wanting out. I couldn’t blame it. Things couldn’t get much worse.
The Shotgun Kid suddenly backed into the room, a hint of fear on his impassive face. Then a stout, uniform-clad man wearing jet-black sunglasses stalked in, his cane thumping the floorboards. The colonel—at least that was what his uniform’s shoulder boards said—looked ridiculously like an elderly Manuel Noriega, his thick curly hair sticking out from beneath a gold-braided cap. Goldtooth shot off the desk like a rocket and stood at attention.
The big cheese had arrived.
Kinkaid leaned forward as though to stand, but I clutched his arm. Prisoners did what they were told. Standing might be construed as an affront to the colonel’s authority. Better to take a chance on playing dumb Americano. Just when I thought I couldn’t get any more scared, I did.
The colonel’s full lips pursed as he studied the frozen donos. I got the impression Dad had gone off for the weekend and unexpectedly returned in the middle of his son’s unauthorized house party. This wasn’t Goldtooth’s office after all. I hoped Kinkaid and I wouldn’t end up paying the price for the head foreman’s cheekiness.
The colonel spat something in rapid-fire Portuguese I didn’t understand. Goldtooth hurriedly ordered, “Stand!” so we did. He patted us down, enjoying my chest and thighs a little too long despite Dad’s hovering presence. I concentrated on worrying about the colonel. Worrying about the inevitable rape came later.
“Journalists,” the colonel muttered in disgust, waving us to sit on the floor again. He snapped his cap from his head to the desktop, revealing more shaggy, curly hair going a dirty white. “Why do you come here?” he demanded, leaning on the desk and shaking his cane in our general direction. “To tell us how to treat our land? To tell us we cannot dig here, we must dig there?” He erupted into a coughing fit that sounded like it’d bring up a lung.
I squeezed Kinkaid’s hard forearm to remind him to keep quiet.
Recovering a few moments later, the colonel put his cane on top of the desk. He grabbed his sidearm from its holster and waved it. “We bring food and work to the Indian,” he continued, stamping a little groove back and forth in front of us. His hands quivered. “They do not work. They do not help. We take less than what we give. We make roads into the jungle.” He jabbed the gun at Kinkaid. “We tame it and make it useful to men and commerce. We bring medicines.” He jabbed the gun at me. “We clear timber for farms. We do all of this with best of intention.” He stopped jabbing and pacing to stand in front of us, eyes sparked with fury. “And still, you Americanos try to tell me what I can do, where I can do it.”
I held my breath. Probably no Americano had ever told this sociopath anything, with the possible exception of the CIA operative who had trained the colonel’s paramilitary organization, whatever it was. His beef was probably with the environmentalists, specifically those conscientious internationals in Boa Vista, and I definitely didn’t help fill those ranks.
But Kinkaid might. He looked the type. The colonel glared at us. A quick twist of fear stabbed my gut. I gripped Kinkaid’s arm tighter.
Maybe it was the colonel’s nonviper gaze that made me brave. A snake would take me out. Not this guy. Maligning the natives seemed to be what he wanted to hear, and the safest thing to say to make him think we were on his side. “With respect,” I said in my best bad Portuguese during his pause, “I see you bring food and money to the Indians here. If they wanted to work, they would work.”
“Yes!” the colonel agreed loudly, shakily waving the gun. “Yes! We give them clothing. We give them food. We give them better life. Still, they do not work.” His next coughing fit doubled him over.
Goldtooth made as if to pat his back, but retreated, a sneer gracing his face, as the older man waved him away. The colonel straightened, cleared his throat. Then he stared at the wall next to me as though gathering his thoughts. He nodded. He sniffed. He looked at the donos, then at the Shotgun Kid. When he glanced over at me and Kinkaid, he frowned.
The old man, I decided, was losing it. Alzheimer’s? Hardening of the arteries?
“Americanos,” he muttered. “Stupid Americanos.”
The colonel holstered his weapon and crossed his arms over his barrel chest to survey his subjects: two nervous Brazilians and two nervous Americanos. He abruptly uncrossed his arms, apparently remembering what he was doing.
He said something I didn’t understand to Goldtooth. The Shotgun Kid motioned for us to stand. I got up, careful to hold my day pack by the strap without making any sudden moves. Kinkaid echoed my actions.
“I will take those.” The colonel gestured to our packs.
Well, hell. I handed mine out, and the Shotgun Kid took it. Kinkaid did the same. Then Goldtooth nodded for us to follow him, leaving the colonel and the Shotgun Kid behind.
So we’d survived the crash, the preliminary interview and the colonel’s whim. I wondered what was next on our to-do list.
“Come, I show you we bring money to jungle!” Goldtooth said as we blinded ourselves by stepping outside.
Down the far end of the airstrip, a huddle of men stood around the Cessna, Carlos among them, smoking. I ignored the spilt milk. Time to forget being scared and start thinking about getting outta here.
Following Goldtooth through the camp’s maze, I counted seven large huts—administrative buildings, various living quarters, what passed for a cafeteria where fish was being grilled on an outdoor spit. All the while, the thick smell of water permeated the air, like steam lifting from a hot summer day’s asphalt. The generators, wherever they were, rattled and rumbled. Smoke rose over the trees we were walking toward. A loud, rushing hiss abruptly started up ahead, became a roar. Goldtooth led us down a narrow path cut into the forest and stopped at a gigantic hole in the ground I hoped was not our grave.
Standing on the hole’s crumbling edge, I looked down. Some twelve feet below, a drenched man carrying a fireman’s hose aimed the nozzle at a chunk of earth that held out for a good five seconds before it fell apart. Mud-covered men immediately pounced on the earth. They broke it apart to pluck out large chunks of rock that they passed down
a line of more mud-covered men. At the end of this human conveyor belt, the rocks got put on a real, mechanical mud-covered conveyor belt and carted up out of the hole into an open-air processing area opposite where we stood. These were the garimpeiros, literally “gold robbers,” who had moved from poverty in the south to take whatever jobs they could find.
The generators’ deafening rattle made Goldtooth shout. “We give jobs to men who work! Do you see any Yanomamo there?” he yelled. “They stupid and lazy. We offer jobs.”
I nodded knowingly. Right. Men slopping around for twelve hours in mud for ten cents a day: smart. Men lying in hammocks in the jungle after hunting two days out of the week: stupid.
“What’s that?” Kinkaid pointed to the murky brown wash flooding from the processing area. A little waterfall spilled down the eroded hillside and pooled at the bottom, then flowed out of sight.
“There we take gold from earth.” Goldtooth pointed like a proud papa showing off his firstborn son.
Smoke belched from the open-air processing area, where I could see bandana-masked men leaning over large flat pans set over fires. Chunks of gold-mercury amalgam were being heated up in those pans. Occasionally a workman tipped a pan to pour the quicksilver off into the channel. Some of the mercury would be reclaimed and used again. Most of it would be washed into the little waterfall and travel downstream where it would be consumed by unknowing Indians and Brazilians. Birth defects and mysterious cancers were sure to follow.
Kinkaid opened his mouth but closed it when I shot him a glance. I knew where he was headed and he didn’t need to go there unless he was heavily armed.
“Come! I show you quarters!” Goldtooth yelled over the racket.
We walked back to the compound. I was glad just to get a little distance from the noise. When we reached the hovel apparently reserved for drop-in guests, I stopped.
“We have associates, other cientistas, waiting for us,” I said. “When will we be allowed to leave?”
“Leave?” The donos’s gold tooth mocked me. His eyes drifted south, to my chest, and I stifled a shudder. “You leave when I say you leave.”
The Orchid Hunter Page 7