Lost in the Jungle

by Bill Nye

  The girl’s head jerked back slightly.

  A woman with wide hips and swinging elbows nearly knocked over Pepedro. A group of men marched past, chanting and singing. More and more people were pressing closer to the field. Music was blaring. A bottle of beer shattered on the pavement behind the kids. Still, the girl tried to close the door again.

  Then the woman who’d hip-checked Pepedro spun around. She held her hands to her face and pointed at the boy with the million dollar foot. An older man beside her then recognized the young soccer star and shuffled toward him with a Sharpie and a half-crumpled piece of paper. The woman grabbed the marker, untucked her T-shirt, and held it out for Pepedro to sign. The madness spread like lice. Suddenly everyone was shoving their way to the limo, holding out smartphones, begging for selfies.

  Alicia pulled the door open wider and pretty much threw her brother into the limo as our driver reversed out of the crowd. He was leaning back and looking through the rear window. Honestly, the guy might have been better at driving backward.

  The boy with the million dollar foot exhaled as he and his sister settled into the cracked leather seats. Matt switched sides and sat between Ava and me, and the girl spoke to the driver in Portuguese.

  “You’re telling him to get out of here?” Ava asked.

  “Won’t his team be disappointed?” I added.

  The girl sighed as she stared through the window at the growing crowds. “This is just pickup. My brother is not letting down his teammates. Maybe the crowd, but it’s okay, because this is not safe for my brother. This is like São Paulo. Maybe worse.”

  On the plane I’d read a little about São Paulo, a sprawling city of twenty million people. “What happened in São Paulo?” I asked.

  “It was madness,” Pepedro said. “The crowds grew so fast that they began to press in on the pitch.”

  “The field,” Matt said. “In America we call it the field.”

  “You’re not in America,” Alicia reminded him. “You are in Brazil.”

  I laughed. Pepedro did, too. Then his smile vanished as he recalled the event. “We had to crawl out, like animals through the brush. Like peccaries. Pigs.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  Alicia shrugged. “Yes, but we survived. I’m Alicia. This is Pepedro. But you know that. You are Hank’s family?” she asked.

  I waited for Matt to answer. Or Ava. But neither of them said anything. “Well,” I began, “I mean . . . I guess you could say . . .”

  “Sort of?” Matt offered.

  Ava inched forward to the edge of the seat. “Did Hank say we were his family?”

  “Maybe I misunderstood,” Alicia said. “He showed us some pictures of you.” She pointed to me. “Where is the funny little tie?”

  “My bow tie? I—”

  “Why are you here?” Alicia asked. “Did you come to watch my brother play?”

  “No,” Ava said.

  Someday, I hope to teach my sister that brutal honesty isn’t always the best strategy. “Well, yes, we did,” I said. “Ava’s just joking. We love soccer. Really. And we’ve heard such amazing things about your left foot, Pepedro. But we do have a few other questions for you.”

  Alicia crossed one leg over the other and raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”

  Ava didn’t hesitate. “Did Hank hire you as guides?”

  “Yes,” Pepedro replied.

  “Where did he want you to take him?”

  “The rainforest.”

  “No,” Ava said.

  “Where in the rainforest? And why?”

  Matt leaned forward. “What was he looking for?”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  “We haven’t heard from him for three weeks,” I explained. “We’re worried he might be in danger.”

  “Yes,” Alicia replied. “He might be.”

  Ava leaned forward. “We need to know everything.”

  The limo was finally clear of the crowd, and our driver was talking quietly on his phone. Alicia spoke to him over her shoulder as her brother removed his shin guards and unlaced his cleats, switching them for a pair of scuffed canvas sneakers. The driver snapped his phone into a dashboard mount and steered onto a quieter street.

  Alicia gazed out the window at the passing buildings. “Do you know what I do? My brother, he kicks a ball. He kicks so well that people have already offered to pay us millions of dollars if he will kick the ball for their team when he is older.”

  “But you’re only like twelve years old,” Ava said.

  “Thirteen,” Pepedro said. “But this doesn’t matter. If you can kick, they will pay you now, so you don’t play for someone else later.”

  Alicia removed her backpack, pulled out a green bandage, reached down, and waved to him to lift up his foot. He turned and swung his leg onto the seat between them, and she started wrapping his left foot in the bandage, right over his sneaker. “Me,” Alicia began, “I think this is silly. Millions of dollars, all for o jogo bonito, the beautiful game? Ridiculous. Pepedro, he thinks it is silly, too.”

  The blank expression on his face suggested he didn’t completely agree.

  “Totally ridiculous,” Ava said.

  “Absurd,” Matt added. “Talented young scientists can barely pay their rent.”

  “Well,” I said, “I think it’s awesome that people want to pay you millions of dollars to kick a ball.”

  Now Pepedro smiled. Alicia nodded. “Yes, maybe. And we should let them. Absolutely! But . . .” She held up her index finger like a scolding teacher. It seemed really long. Was it? Or was it an illusion? If I could have frozen time, I would’ve stopped to measure it. “But,” she repeated, “we must be certain that he is not taken advantage of by these teams and businesses. This is my role. I review the deals, and we have not yet found a deal that is good for my brother.”

  “Alicia is my agent,” Pepedro said.

  She finished wrapping his foot, then patted it gently and leaned back in her seat. “This is why we protect him and his foot. This foot is worth millions of American dollars. Maybe more. These teams who want him . . . they will pay us money now, but then we will be tied to them forever. Pepedro will not be able to make his own choices. We don’t just want money. We want freedom. So we wait.”

  The limo was accelerating. Our driver was glancing in the rearview mirror. Alicia opened the miniature fridge and removed several ice-cold cans of soda. Why hadn’t I thought to look in there? The cans were red and green and yellow. She called up to the driver, then passed one to each of us after he responded. “Guarana,” she explained. “Brazilian soda. Very delicious.”

  Matt popped the top and sipped. “It’s like ginger ale,” he said.

  “No,” Alicia said. “It’s like Guarana.”

  My sister was holding her cold, unopened can in both hands. “You were talking about money and freedom,” she said. “What does that have to do with Hank?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “No, maybe not everything. Sometimes, this choice to not accept a contract is a little painful. Sometimes, we need money. So when your friend Hank asked if he could hire us to take him into the jungle, we accepted.”

  “Aren’t there other guides?” Ava asked.

  “There are many other guides,” Pepedro replied. “But they don’t know what we know.”

  “And what do you two know that’s so special?”

  “We know how to find the giant eels.”

  6

  ODORASED

  The limo rolled through quiet, tree-lined streets as Alicia and her brother told us their story. Their parents were expert rainforest guides, and several years earlier they had made an important discovery, a species that was much larger and more powerful than any of the known electric eels. Naturally, my brother knew the Latin name, Electrophorus electricus magnus. And he knew the name of the scientist credited with its discovery, too.

  “Our parents led this scientist into the
rainforest to study the eels,” Pepedro explained.

  “He barely mentioned them in his research paper,” Alicia added.

  “That’s not fair,” Ava said.

  “Yes, well, our parents didn’t care,” Alicia said. “Some years passed, and then your friend Hank read the scientist’s paper on the eels. He wanted to come to Brazil to study the creatures himself, so the scientist sent him to our parents. There was just one problem.”

  “They were dead?”

  “Jack!”

  “Sorry, Dona Maria told us—”

  “No, it’s okay. You’re right. They were dead. Our mother was killed by a poisonous frog and my father was eaten by piranhas.”

  The three of us fell silent. My mouth might have hung open. A few seconds passed. Alicia had this weird, strained look on her face, like she was holding back gas. “Wait, are you serious?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No! Car accident.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pepedro said. “My sister thinks she is funny.”

  “I am funny,” she insisted. She appealed to Ava. “That was funny, right?”

  My sister winced.

  “A little dark,” Matt said.

  “But frogs always make a story funnier,” I added. “Frogs and goats.”

  Now it was the Brazilians who were silent. Sometimes I wished there was a guard between my brain and my mouth. A little guy who listened to my ideas and decided whether my mouth should voice them. He’d be pretty busy, constantly grabbing thoughts and tossing them back down into my mind’s garbage bin. He’d probably have a long beard, too. Maybe he’d wear overalls. And when he wasn’t working, he’d play the harmonica.

  “Okay,” Matt resumed, “so Hank finds you instead, and he asks you to help him find these eels?”

  “He wrote an e-mail to our parents,” Alicia explained. “We still have the address for their guide business. So we told him to meet us at a restaurant here in Manaus—”

  “Saudade,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s right. How did you know that?”

  I wanted to tell them about the matchbook and how the geniuses didn’t know why Hank kept it in the bathroom. Instead, I pointed to Ava. “She figured it out. Anyway, you met him, and then what?”

  “He was surprised to meet young people,” Alicia said. “But he mentioned something about knowing a few talented children himself.” My brother blushed. “He agreed to pay us to help him find the eels. We departed a few days later and journeyed down the river. We found some beautiful eels. Very big. Huge electric fields. Your friend Hank was using all kinds of instruments to study them. Everything was going very well.”

  “Until?”

  “Until we learned that we were not alone,” Alicia added.

  “A small group of scouts for a logging company was hiking through the same section of the jungle, marking trees that they wanted to cut down.”

  “That’s illegal, right?” Matt asked. “You can’t just cut down trees in the rainforest.”

  “Yes,” Pepedro said. “Unfortunately, it is also a very easy law to break. The loggers can destroy entire sections of the jungle before anyone notices.”

  The driver swung the limo off the quiet side street and onto a crowded avenue. Alicia leaned toward the window to study the street signs. She squinted, then sat up. “Your friend Hank was furious. He was yelling at them about carbon sinks. And they had guns!”

  Leave it to Hank to lecture a group of armed men about climate change. “Yep, that’s Hank,” I said.

  “By the way, what are these carbon sinks?” Pepedro asked.

  Quickly, Ava explained: “Too much carbon in the atmosphere traps heat, which causes the planet to warm.”

  “Climate change,” Pepedro said.

  “Exactly,” Ava answered. “The trees in the Amazon rainforest basically suck carbon out of the air and trap it. So they help fight warming.”

  “And since the rainforest stores all that carbon,” Matt added, “that means if you cut down the trees, bacteria and other microscopic forms of life attack the wood and release the carbon dioxide into the air.”

  “Back to the loggers,” I said. “Did they kidnap him?”

  Alicia sipped her soda before responding. “Kidnap? No, no, no. They let us go and warned that they would shoot us if we ever returned.”

  “He went back, though, didn’t he?” Matt asked.

  “Yes,” Alicia answered. “He had some kind of plan to use satellites to save the rainforest.”

  Instantly I imagined a fleet of tiny satellites drifting overhead, tracking the illegal loggers, then blasting their chainsaws with space lasers. The beams would be blue. Or maybe green. Because they’d belong to the good guys. But would that even work? Did satellites have lasers? Luckily, the little harmonica player stopped me from suggesting the possibility.

  “How many times did he go back?” Ava asked.

  “This last time was the fourth,” Alicia replied. “We didn’t go back with him, though. He didn’t want to put us in danger, so he insisted on going himself. Each time he came down to Brazil, he’d treat us to a nice dinner. That man loved steak.”

  “Loves,” Ava corrected her. “Plus he’s a vegetarian.”

  “Not anymore,” Pepedro said.

  My sister frowned. They were acting like they knew him better than we did. She didn’t like that. And neither did I.

  For a minute, we were all silent. The pieces of this puzzle just weren’t fitting together. I finished my drink, then tilted my head back and tipped the can upside down, hoping for a few more drops. When I was finished, I caught Pepedro smiling at me. These Brazilians were really proud of their soda.

  Outside, the traffic was only getting worse. A light mist was falling, making it difficult to see. Alicia kept rolling down her window quickly, trying to spot the street signs. She spoke with the driver in Portuguese before explaining that she didn’t know the route he’d chosen.

  Matt breathed in deep. “You have to take us.”

  “Where?” Alicia asked.

  “To the jungle! We need to find Hank.”

  Alicia sat back and smiled. “This is good.”

  “So you’ll take us?” Ava asked.

  “Maybe. First, we must negotiate. I need some practice before we decide to choose a team for my brother in a few years. So,” she said, crossing her arms as she leaned back in her seat, “how much can you pay?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Ava answered.

  “Well, not exactly,” Matt said.

  “Alicia,” Pepedro started, “I don’t think this is the time to practice—”

  “How much?” Ava asked.

  Quietly, Alicia quoted a number. “That’s reais, the Brazilian currency,” she said.

  Ava closed her eyes, converting the figure into dollars. She muttered the number under her breath. “That’s a lot, but we can do it,” she said.

  Alicia frowned. “I should’ve started higher.”

  “No, that’s plenty high,” Matt said. “That’s way too much.”

  “Matt, this is Hank we’re talking about.”

  Ava was right. What was his problem? “The flights were one thing, Matt,” I added. “The hotel, too. But we shouldn’t be worrying about money now. This is too important.”

  “Our price stays,” Alicia insisted.

  My brother was staring at the floor. “We can’t hire them,” he mumbled.

  Why was he being so stubborn? “We have to,” I replied.

  “We can’t hire them, okay? We don’t have any money.”

  “There’s probably an ATM somewhere—”

  “No,” Matt said. “You don’t get it . . .”

  “This really isn’t the right time to be cheap,” Ava said.

  Matt laughed uncomfortably. “I agree! Totally. But here’s the thing . . . see, we’re kind of . . .” As his voice faded, he started wringing his hands together in front of his chest.

  “We’re kind of what?” I asked. “What are you talking ab
out?”

  Finally my brother blurted out the truth. “We’re kind of out of money.” He exhaled. He smiled. Then he stuck out his tongue and breathed out again. “Phew. Wow! That feels good. Amazing, really. You have no idea how long I’ve been holding that in.”

  Turning to face him, Ava asked, “Matt, what are you talking about?”

  My brother shrugged. “We have twenty bucks in the bank. At most. Maybe less, if Jack forgot to cancel his subscription to the Swank Club.”

  “The what?” Alicia asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  And it really was nothing, considering that my monthly membership to the Swank Club meant I got either a new bow tie or a new pair of colorful socks in the mail each month. Even if I had canceled my membership, twenty bucks wasn’t going to get us a guide. That wouldn’t be enough money to hire someone to walk us down the street, let alone through the jungle.

  The limo accelerated, then stopped as the cars ahead of us braked. I pushed out with my feet to prevent myself from landing in Pepedro’s lap. That would’ve been awkward. And I kind of wished our driver was going backward again.

  “Credit cards?” Ava asked.

  “Maxed out. We can’t put another dollar on them.”

  “Wait,” Ava said. “Reboot. How did this happen?”

  Matt explained everything. Basically, we make all our money from the sales of our book of poems, The Lonely Orphans. I talked Hank into giving us a small allowance for helping out around the lab—you’re welcome, siblings—and a few dollars dribbled in now and then from the ads that ran with my YouTube video. But most of our cash came from book sales, and according to Matt, those sales had been plummeting. Not only that, but our expenses kept rising. The rent for our apartment had increased. Ava always needed new equipment for her projects. Matt had bought himself a new telescope and a high-powered laptop that quickly became his favorite thing in the world. And one of us had a taste for rare and expensive basketball sneakers. Was five hundred dollars too much to pay for a pair of high-tops worn in an actual NBA game? No. Of course not.

  Anyway, Matt detailed how money was flooding out of our bank account but only trickling in. He’d been trying to make it all work. He even wrote a sequel to The Lonely Orphans, but the new book was rejected by thirty different publishers. Apparently people were tired of orphan verses. The latest thing, Matt said, was cat poetry.