by Joe Kane
“How far does it go?” I asked.
“To Manaus,” the man said. “It is new. This is the only copy. The river changes course so much that any chart more than a month old is out of date. Every few weeks the navy sends out a boat with a chart-making team. A friend of mine works on the boat. During the last trip he traced this from the original. Do you want it?”
If the chart was even half as accurate as it appeared to be, it was, at least to us, invaluable.
“How much?” I asked.
“Twenty dollars.”
I opened my wallet and began counting out soles.
“Dollars,” he said. “American.”
I fished out my emergency stash, a U.S. twenty hidden in my shoe, and gave it to him.
“Good,” he said. “Be careful. The navy considers this chart classified information. If they find you with it, there will be trouble.”
I tucked the chart under my shirt. It bulged.
“One more thing,” the man said. “If you know anyone who needs my assistance, please send them to me. But do not tell them about the chart.” He gave me his card, which I tucked in my shirt pocket unread, and opened the door. I left.
In the dark street every popping motorbike engine sounded like a gunshot, and the half-hour walk back to our hostel seemed interminable.
Durrant and Bzdak had arrived in Iquitos five days before us, their voyage on the Jhuliana punctuated by a twenty-four-hour poker game and loud disco music. They had a bundle of mail for me, my first communication from the States in two and a half months, since Cuzco. I sat in a soda fountain with them and drank milk shakes. While they watched television (Tarzan, of course, though this time a color, late-fifties version I didn’t recognize), I read my mail. An uncle had died, a favorite aunt had cancer, my girlfriend loved me but was getting lonely, my dog no longer responded to the mention of my name.
When we returned to our hostel Durrant filled my medical kit with malaria tablets, sterile wipes and dressings, packets of rehydration powder, mosquito repellent, antivenin, syringes, and splints. In addition, she had found in Iquitos sangre de grado, literally “blood of the dragon.” It is a kind of resin that when applied to wounds forms an elastic skin. She also outfitted us with a cedar oil said to be excellent for massaging sore joints and muscles (and was to prove particularly effective in combination with a half liter or so of pisco). She and Bzdak had sewn up sheets for us to use as bedding in the tropical nights.
I was alone in the hostel courtyard the next morning, packing these supplies into my kayak, when a man approached me. He looked Peruvian (short and dark), but he also looked like something of a pimp—he wore reflecting aviator sunglasses and an expensive watch with a band that was too thick for his thin wrists. As most people did, he inquired about my kayak. After I had explained the rudder and the storage system, he asked, “Are you having trouble with your visa?”
“No,” I said, but it was a lie. All four of our Brazilian visas had long since expired, and we were having difficulty renewing them. In addition, the Brazilian consul, whose diplomatic passport had apparently been rejected once in Miami, was getting his revenge at my expense. I had visited his office three times and been told each time to return the next day. But I considered this no one’s business but ours.
“Is Piotr Chmielinski here?” the man asked. I was surprised to hear him pronounce the tricky Polish name flawlessly.
“No,” I said again. This time it was the truth. In fact, Chmielinski was at that moment running between Peruvian and Brazilian offices trying to negotiate our visas.
The man left, but he returned later that afternoon, while Chmielinski and I were making the last repairs on our boats. The two men spoke in Polish, Chmielinski wearing what I now recognized as his don’t-get-in-my-face face.
The man walked over to me and examined the gear laid out around my kayak.
“American tent,” he said in Spanish. “No good. A toy. I have a strong Polish tent.” He looked at Chmielinski as if for approval, but received only a hard stare.
“Strong like these kayaks,” the man continued. “Good Polish craftsmanship.”
Chmielinski said, “The kayaks are American.”
“That cannot be true,” the man said.
“It is true,” Chmielinski said. “The best you can get.”
The man started to reply, thought better of it, and turned on his heel to leave. At the courtyard gate he said, “I am in the next building if you need me.”
Chmielinski said nothing after the man left. We worked in silence until I finished gluing new foam rubber to the seat of my boat. Then I coaxed an explanation from him. He said the man was based in Peru as part of an unofficial wing of the Polish consulate. When Chmielinski’s Polish expedition had first come to Peru, the man had shepherded them through the country. “Then we learned that he is spying on us everywhere. Asking questions, scaring our Peruvian friends. We break with him. And then after Solidarity we had the big demonstration in Lima. Now he is always watching.”
He would not tell me more.
We left Iquitos four days before Christmas, having arranged to meet Bzdak and Durrant at the Brazilian border. It is Polish custom to keep a Christmas tree through the end of February, and to that end Chmielinski had glued a couple of three-inch, wire-trunk trees to the noses of our boats. “Joe, maybe one day you will find a present under that!”
We dragged the kayaks to the promenade and down the wooden steps, waded knee-deep into the marsh, and shoved off for Brazil, three hundred and thirty miles east.
A strong current sucked us along the waterfront, through a fleet of peeling-paint riverboats, waterlogged peque-peques, and rusting ghost freighters. Then we were beyond the city’s northern edge, past swamps and rice fields where sad-faced men standing knee-deep in the river watched us as if they had nothing better to do. The city ended abruptly, jamming up against the bush, which rose in giant broccolilike spears. Over the next ten miles the odd cattle ranch sprawled amid the spears like a neon-green carpet, but otherwise the wide, flat Marañón felt deserted. The bush thickened to a band of black satin, and once, the dim honk and boom of trumpet and drum jumped from it and someone shouted, but we could not see him. After the crowded streets of Iquitos the river seemed a lonely place.
Late the next day we passed, to our left, the mouth of the Napo River. A Spaniard, Francisco de Orellana, sailed down the Napo from Ecuador in 1542 on what would become the first recorded navigation of the Amazon from the Andes to the Atlantic. His looting and killing set the tone for the subsequent conquest of the basin, and his scrivener, Friar Carvajal, inadvertently named the great river through his fanciful account of a conflict with women warriors who sounded suspiciously like the Amazons of Greek myth. They were “very white and tall, and have hair very long and braided and wound about the head, and they are very robust and go about naked, but with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men.”
We made camp near the Napo, at the caserío, or river hamlet, of Señor Fausto Ramirez, his wife, and their thirteen children. In our honor the Ramirez family hung a transistor radio directly above our tents. Like most Peruvian radios this one had three volume levels—loud, louder, and amigos norteamericanos.
Before we retired, we were also treated to a dog fight. As the family gathered around, a black dog and white dog converged in a bloody dynamo in front of the caserío, a spectacle that ended with the black sinking its fangs into the white’s throat. The white went down with a spooky death rattle.
No one had said a word during the fight, and when it was over they left in silence, all but Fausto’s shy wife, who until then had answered our many questions—What is your name? What will the weather be tomorrow? How many children do you have?—with either “Si, señor” or “No, señor.”
Now she murmured that the white dog had been hers.
“What did you call it?” Chmielinski asked.
She mumbled somet
hing in a small voice. We moved closer, and she repeated it: “Gringo.”
By the evening of our third day out of Iquitos we were still a hundred and seventy miles short of the border and in trouble. Chmielinski’s Peruvian visa, which he had been unable to extend, would expire at midnight the next night. If we did not reach the border by then, he risked jail.
Knowing this, we had paddled long, hard hours, and I was grumpy and exhausted from the work of it. I was not at all happy at dusk that third day, when, as the three-quarter moon rose to a chorus of frogs, Chmielinski announced that we would paddle through the night. We found a beach and stopped to rest and eat. Silent and petulant, I let Chmielinski do all the cooking.
An hour later we returned to the river. Night had fallen and the moon lit the jungle canopy, but down at water level bush and river had melted into one black, silent belt.
After paddling in near silence for two hours we took a floating break. I fell asleep. I awoke to Chmielinski whistling “Silent Night” and towing my kayak.
“I can paddle myself,” I said, and did just that, but at a slow, sulking pace. I wanted to find a beach, bathe, stretch out in my tent, study the moon. I wanted peace and rest. Chmielinski’s relentless good cheer only soured me further.
I let him travel a few yards ahead of me and ran through some games devised long ago for this sort of situation. I tried to remember all the lyrics to a favorite record album, but when I got stuck on “Grabbed my coat, put on my hat, made the bus in seconds flat” I decided instead to rebuild my apartment board by board—These French doors will certainly look nice—thought about cars (I detest cars), calculated the monthly payments on a new Porsche. Then I contented myself with listening to the slap … slap … slap of paddle on water.
When I woke up Chmielinski was no longer in front of me.
I saw a light to my left and one to my right. I paddled toward the left and yelled. No answer. I paddled right, but that light suddenly disappeared.
I panicked.
I tried to recall what the chart, which Chmielinski carried on his boat, had looked like when we had consulted it back at the beach. There was supposed to be an island coming up, with the main current bearing to the right of it. I aimed for what I guessed was the river’s right bank and paddled hard until I heard music and yelling and suddenly realized how alone and vulnerable I was. I retreated to what I guessed was the middle of the river.
“Goddamnit, Piotr!” I shouted, and caught myself.
Something flapped past my head.
In the moonlight I made out the silhouette of what appeared to be an island. I sighed with relief. Surely Chmielinski would be waiting there. But the harder I paddled, the farther away the island seemed to be, as if it were running from me. Then a cloud blotted out the moon and the island disappeared.
In the blackness I couldn’t tell whether I was paddling upstream or down, and that paralyzed me. I was afraid to turn my head for fear of losing what little sense of direction I still had. I stopped paddling and drifted. I do not belong here, I thought. I belong at home, in a bar, walking my dog and teaching her my name. I belong somewhere with some LIGHT. Instead I was stuck in the blackest part of the night in the blackest part of that black hemisphere, only a thin skin of cold plastic separating me from …
My kayak bumped something and stopped.
I reached with my paddle and prodded whatever it was.
Sand.
I stepped from my boat and sank to my shins, but two steps farther on it held me. When I looked into the night, however, the night looked back at me, a black plane dissolving into heartless silence. I couldn’t tell where the sand began or ended.
I dug in my boat and found my flashlight. The batteries were dead.
Gingerly, I paced off an area large enough to hold my tent and boat. I groped in my boat and found my tent and the candle that was stored in it and set up camp. I had been on the Marañón at least fifteen hours that day and should have collapsed in sleep, but I lay awake worrying that the river would flood, or a storm would hit, or that someone had followed me. I got up and tied my tent to my boat. I opened my pocket knife and lashed it to my wrist.
Then I went out hard.
I woke up with the sun broiling me to a sizzle. My head ached, my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t move my right arm, and my hands were asleep and swollen into half-moons the circumference of my paddle shaft.
I slithered out of the sweatbox tent and tried to get my bearings. I had camped on a finger of sand about ten yards by five, dead in the middle of the river, the banks more than a mile to either side. The sky held no clouds. It would be a long, hot, brutal day.
A vulture circled, swooped low, appraised me, and landed at the tip of my island. I grabbed my paddle and chased after it, screaming, “No way, asshole!” It jumped in the air and circled slowly a few feet overhead.
Panic boiled in my stomach. This is the way a crazy man acts, I thought, and then, Order. I need order.
I unpacked my boat, concentrating hard on every movement, as if that might block out my fear. My hands shook. I set everything out to dry, sponged out the boat, scrubbed the cockpit, checked the water bucket. Nearly full. I forced down a liter.
I dove into the river, washed, dried naked in the sun. I inventoried my resources. The lunch bucket held two cans of cooked rice, three chocolate bars, and a can of sardines. Three comidas plásticas were crammed into the kayak’s nose. I opened a bag of sweet-and-sour pork, mashed it cold with a bag of rice, and made myself eat it.
We had traveled forty miles that first day out of Iquitos, sixty miles each of the next two days, and, I estimated, thirty miles the night before. That left a hundred and forty miles to the border. With luck, two days.
I packed my boat and set off, but I found myself paddling tentatively, as if not fully committed to the task. The circulation had returned to my hands, but I couldn’t raise my arms above my chest, and my wrists crackled. The sky, a hot, depressing blue, offered no hint of relief. I longed for the happy gray of clouds and rain.
My intuition said Chmielinski was all right, but I felt like a complete fool. I had set off to chronicle an expedition, and now I was alone on the river. Though I had imagined the journey playing out in dozens of different scenarios, this had never been one of them.
I stopped paddling, drifted, dozed. I woke up when the boat rocked and almost tipped over. Four-foot waves were rolling to my bow and the sky had blackened to something close to night. Here was the storm I had longed for. It scared the bejesus out of me.
I scrambled into my rain suit and secured the spray skirt around my waist and cockpit. Reeds fluttering on the horizon signaled a shallows, with luck a beach. I plowed toward them, punching head-on through the rollers, and hit sand as the sky let loose. I dragged my boat up on the beach, sat in it, and let the storm pound me.
After it had passed I heard voices behind me and turned in my seat to find a leather-faced peasant and a small boy studying me as if I were choice driftwood.
“Where are his legs?” the boy asked the man.
The man said, “He doesn’t have any.”
“Hello,” I said. I stayed in the boat and showed them the compass affixed to my deck.
“Always north,” the man said. “A miracle.”
“How far to Brazil?” I asked.
“Two hours,” the boy said.
“Two days,” the man said, “but you must be very careful. Stay to the Peruvian side. The Colombians are all drug runners and hoodlums. They will shoot you.”
Before I had come to Peru, of course, that was exactly what I had been told about Peruvians.
But after I thanked them and put back into the river, I could not deny that I was entering strange new country. The river itself had straightened out below Iquitos—there were few of the Ucayali’s maddening curves—but it was chocked with islands so long it often took hours to paddle their length. I would forget that the land I saw was an island, until suddenly it fell
away, and the true bank appeared a mile or two in the distance. In those moments, my known world abruptly redefined, I felt deceived.
In late afternoon the river narrowed into a long chute perhaps a mile wide, the current increased from one knot to about three, the islands disappeared, and I sped through a no-man’s land. On my right, to the south, lay Peru, its bush thick and solid save for an occasional thatch hut and dugout canoe. On the north bank, however, most of the bush had disappeared. Colombia. A procession of sleek powerboats plied the bank, and I saw one sprawling ranch after another, their stately white houses and fat cattle a wealthy contrast to Peru’s pitiful huts and ribby beasts. In front of each hacienda stood a large dock. If I were writing a novel and needed a setting for a drug baron’s headquarters, I would think: This.
So I was surprised when the bullets flew from the Peruvian side.
At first I heard only the gun’s report, to my right. On the bank, a few hundred yards from my boat, a half dozen figures were jumping up and down and waving their arms. So long, bozos. I was in no mood to perform for a bunch of trigger-happy Peruvians. I paddled south as hard and fast as I could.
This, of course, was not fast at all.
A bullet hissed across my bow. They were not aiming for my cute little Christmas tree. Past them but still in range, I turned upstream and raised my arms.
“Don’t shoot!” I yelled.
They shot again.
They stopped shooting when I put my hands down and began to paddle toward them. When I landed I saw that they were sailors. Boys. The sergeant, who held the only rifle, could not have been nineteen years old.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
He led me to a watchtower. Inside sat a desk and a man, and on the man’s shoulder a parrot that had shit down the back of his shirt. As I entered, the man swung around to face me. He wore officer’s insignia, mirror sunglasses, a pencil mustache, and greased black hair combed straight back.
“Your friend left this for you,” he said.