by Tim Weed
“What happened at the end there?”
Sánchez shook his head, sighing. “They denied us permission. They say it’s for our own good.”
“Well, at least we asked.”
“You’re right. Back in Puerto we can inquire about other locations.”
Meech nodded distractedly for a moment and then looked up suddenly. “You’re not saying we have to go back now, are you?”
Sánchez lifted the aviator sunglasses off his eyes and perched them on his forehead. “Well, yes. I’m afraid we do.”
Meech was incredulous. “But this is a scientific inquiry,” he said. “It’s not as if we’re drilling for oil, or mining gold. We have no intention of disturbing sacred ground. So how can they—”
Sánchez was shaking his head, and Meech knew him well enough to see that he’d made up his mind. “Look,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “You’re an academic, too, so you know how pressurized the environment can get. I don’t have time to scout another location.”
The Venezuelan looked at him with compassion. “I’m sorry, Meech,” he said softly. “But without permission we can’t proceed upriver. It’s a bad idea.”
The dugout reached the main river and Sánchez aimed it downstream. With the extra impetus of the current, they’d be back in four or five hours. The wind on Meech’s face felt moist and intrusive, like hot breath. A reservoir inside him broke, and desperation flooded his veins, filling him with tight-chested resolve.
“Look. Turn the boat around and go back to the village. You can wait for me there. Tell the elders the gringo needs a specimen and is willing to pay the Asociación if he finds one.”
Sánchez’s coffee-colored cheeks darkened a shade. The engine sputtered out and they were drifting downstream on the slow current. “You’re making a mistake, Meech. Just because you’re a scientist doesn’t mean you don’t have to respect the rules. The Ye’kwana belong to the forest, which means that their rules are nature’s rules. Take my word for it, you don’t want to mess with this stuff. It’s bad medicine.”
Meech smiled grimly, his heart pounding. “Do you really believe that? Because you’re a scientist, too, Juan—or did that slip your mind?”
Sánchez shook his head and spat in the water. He shrugged and restarted the engine, turning the boat back upstream toward the village. At the Asociación he climbed up onto the dock while Meech held the bowline; he watched with an expression of deep foreboding as the North American oversteered the dugout through the shanties and throttled toward the open river.
Meech motored along slowly, jaw clenched and shoulders drawn up in acute concentration, keeping the dugout close to the riotous greenery along the river’s right bank. This was it, he knew. His last chance, or at least his best one, to escape the straitjacket of mediocrity that was drawing ever tighter around him. His solitary routine was a suffocating bore, and the frightening thing was that it was becoming comfortable: the frozen dinners in a small apartment overlooking the Charles; the daily bicycle route to his office and the lab; the increasingly rote lectures he delivered, in the same order, every semester. No. There had to be more.
A flash of scarlet in a leafy weave of lianas overhanging the river caught his attention, and in his excitement he stood and nearly fell out of the dugout. He circled back a few times, but it was no good; he couldn’t relocate whatever it was he’d seen. So he continued upstream, shivering a little though the air was thick and warm around him.
It was nearly dusk by the time he gave up the search. As he turned the boat downstream, it dawned on him that there was no way he could make it back to Esmeralda before dark. Indeed, night was falling already in its abrupt, tropical way, with velvety black shadows concealing the broken stumps and driftwood jams and other hazards of the waterway. Gingerly, he edged the dugout up to the bank and grabbed a handful of vegetation, looping the bowline around the branches supporting it into what he hoped was a secure knot. The dugout swung downstream until the line held steady. Hunched in the prow, he tried to sleep. He was more discouraged than fearful, though in his wakefulness the occasional unrecognizable grunt from the forest or gurgle from the black river shallows caused him to stiffen, heart pounding, before he could ease back into a semblance of the relaxed mindlessness that was a prerequisite for sleep.
Eventually, he did fall into a dreamless slumber, and when he awoke it was already light. There was a burlap bag full of mangoes in the bottom of the dugout. He ate one, slicing the pulp off the big seed in wedges with his pocketknife, and nervously dipped his hands in the river water to wash off the stickiness. A crashing noise very close by on the bank gave him a start, but he couldn’t see anything through the dense vegetation. He motored slowly up the bank, hoping to spot a frog on an overhanging branch. If it were raining his chances would be better, he reflected.
The sun rose high enough that its glare turned the river into a wide, eddying mirror. He decided to head back to Esmeralda, where he assumed his Venezuelan colleague was still waiting. If he saw the need to apologize, he would. He wasn’t ruling it out, anyway.
Back in the village, the pockmarked Ye’kwana at the Asociación gave him a cool, appraising look before telling him that Sánchez had caught a ride downriver with a dugout of artisans bound for the Puerto Ayacucho craft market. It was logical that the Venezuelan hadn’t waited overnight. On previous trips, he’d been a proud and gracious host, even a little over-protective as he shepherded Meech through the backwaters of his home bioregion. But Meech understood that he’d crossed a line this time. That his angry insistence on pressing forward, in addition to proving futile, had been an affront to his friend’s innate generosity.
Not that Meech needed a guide. There was an extra tank of gasoline in the stern and he’d be traveling with the current all the way back to Puerto Ayacucho. But the fact that Sánchez hadn’t waited confirmed his suspicion that his impulsiveness had been ill-advised. He hoped their friendship would survive it.
The children watched him from the porches of their stilt houses as he steered the dugout awkwardly back to the river. Their faces were grave and unyielding, and he became uncomfortably self-conscious; it was as if they were sitting in judgment, or knew something about himself that he did not. He was glad when he’d traveled downstream far enough to put a wall of vegetation between himself and the village.
He awoke sweating and disoriented in his Puerto Ayacucho hotel room. The ceiling fan hung immobile above his head in the half-dark, and the air in the room was as torpid as a sauna. He’d left the dugout tied among the barges at the town docks. It had been too late to buy a water bottle for his bedside, and his mouth and throat were so dry that he could barely swallow. He got up and slid open the slatted screen covering the narrow window. It was just before dawn. The logging trucks with their precious cargoes of rainforest hardwoods were already beginning to clank and rumble through town to the northern highway. The close tropical night was only half-diffused, a black diesel haze squatting like the underbelly of some enormous stinking beast over the corrugated roofs of the town.
He knew that he had to do something about dehydration, but it was still too early to go out and buy bottled water, so reluctantly he decided to drink from the tap. It was a risk, but he figured that since he was leaving later that day he could take care of any ill effects with antibiotics back in the States. In the bathroom he turned on the tap and let it run for a few minutes, wondering if he could still count Sánchez as a friend. He leaned over the sink to sip, and then reflexively guzzled the lukewarm water. It had a slightly metallic taste from the pipes, but other than that it didn’t seem too bad. Nothing obvious, anyway.
His plane left at noon, so he had more than five hours to kill. He took a shower in the same tepid water and then unpacked and reorganized his equipment case. He sat on the bed for a while, replaying the last conversation he’d had with Sánchez before he’d dropped him off at the Asociación. Was it too late to make amends? It was only a little after eight by his wat
ch. Still plenty of time.
Outside the hotel, he flagged a rusting Plymouth Valiant with a taxi sign affixed to its roof and gave the driver Sánchez’s address, scrawled in the Venezuelan’s block-letter handwriting on the back of a tattered Universidad de Caracas business card Meech had kept in his wallet since his first field expedition seven years before. They’d taken a dugout three days up the Rio Negro. There had been an extraordinary range of wildlife: pink river dolphins, claw-winged hoatzins, harpy eagles, even a school of piranhas boiling the surface all around the carcass of a sloth that had been killed by a jaguar. Meech hadn’t accomplished much in terms of herpetological research, but they’d had a wonderful time—sleeping in hammocks strung up between tree branches over the water, passing the long hours of river travel teaching each other jokes in Spanish and English. Since then, he’d grown accustomed to thinking of Sánchez as one of his closest friends, but it was odd: he knew little about the Venezuelan’s personal life, and had never visited his home. The driver agreed to wait a few minutes while Meech went to the door.
The earthen yard was decorated with a smattering of recently planted date palms and Meech had to walk around a puddle of rust-colored water to get to the front of the house, a low bungalow built of whitewashed cinderblock with a polished ocher floor continuing out onto the porch. He knocked, and after a moment, a little girl opened the door and peered out at him from the gloom. She was shirtless and dark-skinned, probably five or six, with shiny, black, shoulder-length hair. Something about her head seemed slightly out of proportion, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. She folded her arms across her chest and he realized he was staring.
“Profesor Sánchez está en casa? Tu padre?”
The little girl was solemn-faced. She turned her head to call to someone inside and Meech saw what was wrong with her hair: there was a big shank of it missing, a shiny patch of scar tissue the size of a sand dollar on her scalp. Meech remembered the story of a Harvard entomologist who’d been bitten by a botfly in Panama. He’d returned home knowing full well that he was incubating a larval worm under the skin of his scalp, and a few months later he’d captured the emerging fly in his baseball cap at a Red Sox game. The anecdote troubled him more now than it had when he’d first heard it.
Sánchez, shirtless, his long hair loose and sleep-tousled, came to the door. He folded his arms over his chest and Meech noticed the family resemblance to the little girl. “I’m glad to see you made it back, amigo,” he said, making a special effort to project warmth in his smile. “I left the dugout tied at the town dock. Stowed the engine, covered everything with the tarp, and so on.”
Sánchez nodded distractedly, but did not invite him in. His eyes searched Meech’s face. “Did you get your specimen?”
“No, unfortunately.” Meech felt dizzy.
Sánchez stared at him for a moment more and then shook his head. “You don’t look well, my friend.”
“I’m just a little tired. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I’m grateful for all your help over the years, and I apologize if I . . . if I caused you any . . .” He trailed off, overcome by a momentary spell of lightheadedness. He reached out to support himself on the doorframe. “I just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings before I leave the country.”
Sánchez gazed sharply into his eyes. “No hard feelings, Meech. I only wish you’d have listened to me back in Esmeralda. I’m afraid—”
“No,” Meech interrupted, shaking his head. “You were just standing up for what you believe. But I had to go on.” He was struggling to hold a linear train of thought. Sánchez shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder, and Meech walked across the yard feeling dizzy and confused. Halfway to the taxi he turned and called out, “By the way, what happened to your daughter’s scalp?”
“Nothing serious. She’s fine. Get some rest, Meech.”
As he climbed into the taxi, he experienced a wave of nausea that he thought might be owing to an empty stomach. It was nearly two hours before he had to be at the airport, so he told the driver to drop him at the market for coffee and arepas. That was a mistake. The crowd was too dense, the air too rank, and the sensation of all the hot moist flesh pressing in on him drove him into the putrid shadows behind a fruit stall where he retched until his gut was dry. Walking back to the hotel he began to notice things, maladies, misfortunes: a man with a baseball-sized lump on his neck; a small child with smooth blank skin where an eye should have been. He thought anxiously of Boston, where it was already getting cold, where people would be doing their Christmas shopping. Where once a year winter swept in like a frigid housemaid to make sure the air was sterile and clean.
The plane to Caracas was a light Cessna, only seven passengers. As they taxied down the runway Meech felt a rush of excitement, a familiar sense of unburdening and narrow escape. Although he was returning empty-handed again, he was newly confident that he could make something happen with his career. After all, who else in the department could claim his expertise on Amazonia? Somehow he would get another grant, and next time—well, there was always a chance.
The takeoff was rough. They were flying into a northern headwind and the small plane got tossed around a bit. There was some uncomfortable sideways slipping as they climbed, then an air pocket caused a sudden plunge in altitude. The other passengers gasped in unison, and Meech noticed that his palms were cramped from gripping the hand rests. He did not feel well.
Soon the plane rose above the turbulence and stopped bucking. Meech exhaled and looked out the window at the shadow of the Cessna, crossing the Orinoco as it meandered out of the steaming rainforest and onto the dull green expanse of the savanna. An intense wave of foreboding blurred his vision, and he blinked to bring things back into focus, heart pounding in his chest. Something about the way Sánchez had looked at him back at the house had been most disturbing. It was the kind of look you would give a condemned man: fearful, resigned, pitying.
Beneath the plane, the river continued north, looping in lazy curves like a fat worm over the floodplains to the coast, where it disgorged in a vast delta of brackish mud. The delta was no longer much guarded by the ancient mangrove swamps, most of which had been taken out for shrimp farms, salt mines, oil refineries. He couldn’t shake this feeling of dread. Borders were being blurred, filters removed, forces unleashed. He was part of it—a cause, a catalyst. The mouth of the tropics was open to the world.
A WINTER BREAK IN ROME
I WAS dealing out a deck of cards when the compartment door flew open, letting in a blast of frigid December air and a girl so classically beautiful—lively hazel eyes, cheeks glowing, a cascade of loose blond curls—that she might have walked straight out of a Botticelli painting. She was American, college-aged, wearing faded Levi’s and an expensively cut Italian-leather jacket. She leaned down to kiss Silvio on both cheeks and then sat beside him on the upholstered seat facing me. Outside the window the Umbrian countryside flew by, a blur of fields and hillsides in desolate shades of brown.
“You’re Justin, right? Kate Higgins. Art History 101. Don’t you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you,” I lied. I didn’t, which was surprising, but it didn’t matter, because from that moment on I was under her spell.
The three of us chatted all the way to Rome. An Italian major, Kate had spent the previous semester in Florence. Every so often her gaze would come to rest on mine in a way that made me feel singled out, understood, appreciated. As we pulled into the Roma Termini station she scribbled the address of her pensione and handed it to Silvio. She pressed the button to open the compartment door and smiled at me as the clatter and whine of the braking train flooded in behind her. “Justin. I know you don’t remember me.”
“Of course I do.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. But I do remember you. You said some intelligent things in that class.”
“I did?” I was annoyed to find myself blushing.
>
The door slid shut behind her, and Silvio punched me on the shoulder. “There you go, dude. I told you Rome was gonna be fun.”
Silvio was an actual baron, with a title-laden name that took more than a minute to recite, which he sometimes did as a party trick. He’d grown up mostly in Scarsdale, so he was fluent in the idioms of the American upper-middle class, and he was quite charming; people generally thought highly of him until they saw him drunk. Like me, surprisingly, he was a financial aid student. His parents had divorced when he was young, and they’d burned through their respective inheritances. In the end his father had been forced to work as a taxi driver in New York City, which was not something that Silvio was eager to talk about.
And although he really was a baron, his Roman cousins one-upped him: they were dukes. Filippo was a ruggedly handsome university student around our age; Tomasso, an army officer in his mid-twenties. They lived in an old palace with their widowed mother, the duchessa, who never smiled and rarely spoke. There were marble statues in shadowy niches, time-blackened portraits on every wall, and a set of antique halberds on hooks above the hearth in the great room. The mantelpiece was a marble bas relief of Hercules and the Nemean lion. The palace was more like a neglected museum than a home, and I was fascinated by it, though it was dim and chilly and I couldn’t stop shivering the whole time I was there. At certain moments I felt homesick, a little guilt-stricken for neglecting my family over the Christmas break. On a side table in my guest suite I discovered a stand-up frame containing a black-and-white photograph of Benito Mussolini; I recognized the military uniform and the ugly little smile from a twentieth-century history course. Picking it up to get a closer look, I experienced a moment of vertigo.
On our first morning in Rome, Silvio and I borrowed Filippo’s battered Fiat, which rattled and stuttered as Silvio drove it up out of the dukes’ underground garage. On the way to Kate’s pensione, I mentioned the Mussolini portrait.