Hour of the Assassins (39 page)

He scarcely felt the insects or the heat. There wasn't anything to feel. C.J., the money, the Starfish, how impossibly remote it all seemed. There was only the dark, slimy shade of the trees and his own plodding steps. He no longer watched where he put his feet to avoid the snakes, scorpions, and quicksand. What difference did it make, he thought dully. His machete slashes grew weaker and he was wondering what it was that still drove him on when he stumbled to the edge of the clearing. His eyes opened wide in astonishment. He had never seen anything like it.

The clearing was huge, bigger than a football field, and it was filled with millions and billions and trillions of butterflies. There were giant bright blue and iridescent violet morphos butterflies with wing-spreads of over half a foot, scarlet butterflies, golden pierid butterflies, butterflies of every possible shade, in the brightest, richest blues and reds and whites and yellows he had ever seen. They filled the clearing from the ground to the sky, as though the air had turned into brilliant, swirling, ever-changing patterns of color. There were colors that he had never seen before, that he hadn't even known existed. The sun burned behind a dazzling cloud edge and poured shafts of pure white light down into the clearing, the rays shining through the jeweled wings, like light through stained glass.

Caine stood there, transfixed. The clearing was a living rainbow of riotous color that changed its pattern moment by moment. He wondered if he had ever seen color before, in all its heartbreaking purity. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen—and it was his alone.

He was certain that he was the first white man ever to see this incredible place, perhaps the first human being ever. It was like a gift from God, a reward for having come so far, for having endured so much. He wished C.J. were here so that he could share this with her. He had been so wrong; there was redemption. It was there before him.

It was with the greatest reluctance that he finally left the clearing, looking longingly back over his shoulder at those endlessly swarming, living jewels. He wanted to stay longer, but the desire to live, to go on, surged up in him as never before. He wanted to see C.J., to blow the Starfish wide open, to do everything. He wanted to live forever.

Gradually the ground grew firmer and he had to use the machete less. Orchids of every kind and color flourished on rotting, fallen trees, which he stepped over with great care. They usually harbored snakes and scorpions and—even more troublesome—savage wasps and bees. Nets of lianas and thorny creepers hung from the trees in profuse tangles. He came face to face with a monkey, who peered curiously at him as though he recognized his distant kinship with the man, and then scampered easily up the vines. Caine regretted the loss of the carbine. He was getting very hungry.

Several hours after he had left the clearing he came upon what was unmistakably a trail. The narrow footworn path had beaten a tunnel through the dense foliage and Caine gratefully hung the machete at his belt. He was on the trail for barely an hour and had begun to look around for a place to camp, when he saw a fetish tied to a branch that hung over the trail about shoulder height.

It was a monkey skull, decorated with bright red macaw feathers and the teeth of some large animal dangling on a vine necklace from the hollow eye sockets. Caine sighed and shook his head with a wry smile. He didn't understand the symbolism of the fetish, but he could recognize a No Trespassing sign when he saw one. He carefully examined the trail around the object for traps, or any other sign of human hands, but there was nothing. The black shadows of the dead monkey's eye sockets seemed to stare at him, and he couldn't repress a shudder as he stooped over to pass under the branch.

CHAPTER 16

He was a short, ugly man, naked except for a loincloth and a braided crown of red and yellow toucan feathers. His face was tattooed red and black with horizontal strings of inverted triangles and he wore carved bamboo plugs in his ears. He was holding a bow, the long reed arrow aimed at Caine, as they faced each other on the trail. The barb was black-tipped with curare. The Indian was looking at Caine's head as if he were visualizing how it would look shrunken to size and added to his collection.

For a long moment they regarded each other silently, neither of them daring to move. Then the Indian was joined by two more Achuals, who materialized like wraiths out of the shadows of the trees. One of them carried a blowgun and the other, garbed in a tattered shirt and trousers, carried a rusty twelve-gauge shotgun. The rush of blood pounded at Caine's temples and in his mind he could hear the distant echo of Hudson's warning: “In the jungle the penalty for a mistake is death.”

With slow deliberation he raised his palms to them to show them that he was unarmed. Stony-faced, the Indians watched him and did nothing. He had to do something to win them over, and fast, he realized. But what? He was all out of tricks. Of course! Tricks! As a kid, he had practiced the patter and the thumb-palm from a magic book he had got for six cereal box-tops for weeks. It was worth a shot, he thought.

He carefully reached into his pocket and plucked out a ten-sol coin, which glittered in the waning sunlight as he flourished it before them. The Indians watched the coin intently, their eyes wide in fascination. Caine held the coin in his right hand, tried the thumb-palm as he closed both hands with a flourish, blew on his hands, and opened them empty. He pointed his left index finger into his left ear and pulled the coin from his right ear. Then he smiled broadly, the one universal human gesture.

The wide-eyed Achuals clicked their tongues appreciatively and one of them ventured an astonished, “hoo-hoo,” which he later learned was their version of applause. The Indian with the shotgun cracked open the barrel, pulled out the cartridge, and stuck it through the hole in his earlobe. Reversing the gun, he placed the muzzle to his mouth and blew an ear-shattering trumpet blast through the bore. The other Indians smiled and clicked their tongues, “hoo-hooing” appreciatively.

They led Caine in triumph to their village, the Indian with the shotgun tooting every few paces to announce their arrival. Huey, the Indian with the gun, spoke a few words of broken Spanish and he appeared to be the only one who had ever had contact with white men. Huey wasn't his real name, of course. But when Caine had asked them their names, their eyes had turned sullen and suspicious. Evidently, there was some sort of taboo against revealing their names, so he simply pointed to them in turn, and said, “Huey, Dewey, and Louie.” They appeared delighted with their new names and every so often, one of them would say his new name aloud and then burst into laughter.

The Achuals moved swiftly and confidently down the trail, sidestepping around and bending under unseen obstacles. At first Caine simply followed them, thinking that this was their normal way of movement. Then he began to notice that they were sidestepping cleverly concealed traps and snares. Dewey stopped him and gestured for him to bend over. It was only as he did so that he caught a glimpse of a slender, almost invisible neck-high strand of thorny vine strung across the trail. It came to him with a rush that these were not animal snares, but mantraps. That stupid coin trick had saved his life. He remembered what Father José had said about the savagery of the Amazona Indian. Despite their apparent friendliness, his life was hanging by a thread.

As they marched, the Indians kept glancing at him curiously. He wondered if they were trying to figure out how long it would take them to shrink his head. Each of them in turn came up to Caine and touched him as unselfconsciously as a child, as if to assure themselves of his reality. When they felt his groin, there was a lot of hoo-hooing and tongue-clicking. All in all, Caine thought they made a merry group as they approached the village in the evanescent orange light of dusk.

The village consisted of four huts in a clearing, surrounded by a fence of palm fronds and thorny vines. The huts were simply raised wooden platforms covered with palm thatched roofs and open to the air. Summoned by the trumpeting of Huey's shotgun, the entire village had gathered in front of the largest hut. There were about thirty of them, mostly women and children, their bare bodies glowing with a bronze sheen in the twilight. Most of the women wore only short, intricately patterned cotton skirts and dozens of strands of beads around their necks. Their faces were tattooed in bright lines with
urucú
dye. Their generally flabby breasts were naked, the nipples large and copper colored. Most of them carried sullen, black-haired infants. The children were completely naked.

One little girl about eight years old cradled a gray-and-white
paca
in her arms. The furry rodent must have been at least two feet long. Yellowish mongrel dogs roamed the clearing, barking incessantly. With a muffled grunt a taller Achual brave, who wore Western trousers and a torn straw hat incongruously perched on his head, kicked a yapping dog in the side. The animal let out a wild squeal and the Indians all laughed as he scrambled away.

The Achuals looked expectantly at Caine and this time he knew what to do. He repeated the coin trick, the coin glowing like a ruby in the last rays of the sun. This time he finished the trick by fishing the coin out of the tall brave's ear and presented the coin to him. Their mouths hung wide in astonishment and then there was lots of tongue-clicking and hoo-hooing.

The chief, for that's who Caine took the tall Achual to be, stared for several long minutes into Caine's eyes, as though examining his soul. Caine returned the stare with his own unblinking gaze. His life was on the line and he knew it. At last the unsmiling chief placed his hand around the back of Caine's neck and touched his forehead to Caine's and Caine was immediately swamped by noisy, giggling Indians anxious to touch him.

They seemed particularly fascinated by his week-long growth of beard and the hair on his chest. Caine winced as one after another of them tugged at his hair. The thick stench of their unwashed bodies almost suffocated him. Several of the women slyly touched his groin and there was more tongue-clicking. One of the men shouted something at the women and suddenly everything was still.

Trouble over the women was the last thing he could afford, Caine realized. To distract them, he handed all his coins over to the chief. They gathered in a dense crowd around the chief, who examined the coins carefully before taking two of the largest for himself and then distributing the rest to the others. There weren't enough coins to go around and a noisy quarrel broke out between Dewey and Louie over a ten-centavo piece.

The two men shouted angrily at each other, slapping their chests and shoving as they grappled for the coin. Surprisingly, no one, not even the chief, paid the slightest attention to them. After a brief scuffle, Dewey grabbed the coin and swallowed it, leaving Louie blinking stupidly. The quarrel ended as quickly as it had begun, and as the darkness fell, the Indians began to disperse to their fires.

Caine followed the chief into the main hut. Ducking to avoid the main beams, he almost bumped into a half-dozen round objects hanging from a beam near the fire. Then he recoiled in horror and swallowed hard. They were human heads, the lips and eyelids sewn shut, shrunken to the size and shape of ducks' eggs, hanging by long black strands of hair. The skin had the color and patina of beaten copper and each head's features were distinct and clearly recognizable.

At a gesture from the chief, Caine sat beside him by the glowing fire. The fire was built of three logs, touching at the center and radiating outward. As the logs burned down, one or another of the chief's wives would push the remaining stumps toward the center. The chief passed Caine a gourd of
masato
. Caine drank deeply of the clear, fiery liquor and passed the gourd back to the chief, who took a long swallow. The warmth of the liquor flooded Caine's body and he was almost immediately light-headed. He hadn't eaten since a brief lunch of sticky, boiled bracken stalks on the trail, before he had hit the quicksand. You had to be careful when eating bracken, to be sure that they were true ferns and not hemlock or some other poisonous plant. The only sure way to identify edible ferns was by the lines of brownish dots, which were really spores, on the undersides of the leaves.

Two handsome brown women with long inky black hair, whom he took to be the chief's wives, served them a meal of fried plantains, gritty
mandioca
gruel, and stewed monkey. Caine knew that the meat was monkey because clumps of fur were still attached to the chunks. He thought of the monkey he had encountered on the trail and he began to feel queasy. It was like being a cannibal. He forced himself to swallow the bile that rose to the back of his throat and accepted another piece of meat from the chief's fingers. He wolfed it down. In spite of his nausea he was ravenously hungry and in truth, it didn't taste that bad.

The chief passed him the gourd again and Caine took another swig of
masato
. Then he began to sputter and laugh at his own finicky food taboos. The Achuals weren't that different from anybody else, he realized. We are all apes in clothing and no matter how we dress it up, we all eat plants and dead animals, just like any other ape. The image of hairy apes dressed in suits and dresses and making a ceremony out of eating animal corpses at some fancy restaurant struck him as wildly funny and soon the chief and the women were laughing at his hilarity. He was drunk he realized, and then the dysentery grabbed at his intestines, like a powerful hand.

Caine bolted from the hut and ran to the deep shadows near the fence, where he vomited and painfully relieved himself at the same time. After what seemed like hours, he weakly pulled up his pants and returned to the hut on unsteady legs. He was sweating profusely and he held out his hands to the chief in what he hoped was a gesture of apology. Then his legs gave way and he collapsed on the wooden floor of the hut.

The chief gently placed his hand on Caine's brow. It felt cool to Caine and his feverish eyes watched helplessly as the chief and his women pulled off his filthy clothes and examined him. Caine glanced down in fear and loathing. He scarcely recognized his own body. His sunburned skin was mottled and swollen with countless insect bites and he winced at the lightest touch. His ribs were clearly visible. He must have lost at least twenty pounds after barely a week in the jungle. Lying naked on the hut floor, surrounded by savage Achuals, he realized that he had lost the last traces of civilization. He had nothing more to lose. Father José had been right: to enter the darkness of the Amazona was to enter the midnight of the soul.