After a time, Duayne spoke. “I guess I don’t understand. Does he think these Chayacuro are still after him? Why would they be?”
“Presumably because he killed one of them,” Mel said.
Duayne shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. It was kill or be killed. He had no choice. They were chasing him; he was defending himself. It was completely justified. What else could he do?”
“No, you don’t get it; that’s not the way their minds work.” The speaker was Cisco, making his first appearance since the introductions that morning. He had returned to take a chair against the dining room wall, a little away from the others, where he sat. Looking not quite so much on his last legs as he had earlier, he had changed to shorts and flip-flops that revealed knobby, hairy knees and bony, callused, misshapen feet that looked like illustrations from a podiatric pathology textbook.
“See,” he said, “to them, there’s no such thing as ‘self-defense’ or ‘completely justified.’ They just don’t think that way. A dead guy is a dead guy.” He paused to take a shaky pull on the cigarette he’d brought with him, an action made more difficult by the stiff, uncomfortable way he held his head. “If it’s caused by somebody else, it has to be avenged. Period. Hell, even if it’s not caused by somebody else, they find somebody to take it out on; in their world, nobody except the old folks dies because he just plain got sick and croaked; it’s always a murder, a curse, you name it. Booga-booga. Somebody did it to him. Witchcraft, poisoning, whatever. These people, they got a very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality.”
Gideon nodded. It was a common enough world view among nonliterate peoples, especially fierce groups like the Chayacuro. Cisco seemed to be a bit more on the ball than he’d given him credit for. He was considerably sharper than he’d been earlier. Apparently he’d had more education than his manner suggested too. “A very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality” – that was hardly the language of your typical dope-addled drifter or dropout or whatever he was, especially considering that English wasn’t his first language. Gideon was even beginning to have an easier time understanding his mush-mouthed speech. Still, there was always a sense of something being “off” about him. When you spoke to him, it was as if your words were going by about two feet to the left of his head, and his were missing yours by about the same distance.
“But it was so long ago,” Tim said. “How could they remember? Would anybody still care?”
“They don’t see time like you do,” Cisco said. “They see connected events: killing, revenge. The first, like, requires the other, you know? The time in between doesn’t have anything to do with it. It doesn’t compute, you know?”
“And what do you think about it, Cisco?” Maggie asked. “Was it really them? Were they really trying to kill him?”
Cisco shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” Thin ribbons of smoke trailed from his nostrils as he spoke. “All I’m saying is, look around, look where we are.” He waved, without turning, at the darkening jungle behind him. “This ain’t Kansas, Toto. It’s a different world, it’s got different laws you and me can never understand in a million years.”
“Wow,” murmured a thrilled Tim. “Damn.” Others murmured similarly.
“Hold on a minute, folks, this doesn’t hold water,” said Gideon, for whom things were veering too close to the occult to be comfortable. “What Cisco says is true enough, generally speaking, but it doesn’t apply in this case. How could they recognize Arden after so many years? How would they know he’d be aboard the Adelita?”
Phil backed him up. “And how could they know that he’d be standing there in plain sight right at that moment? They couldn’t, it’s impossible.”
John chimed in too. “Yeah, and how would they know exactly where the boat would be passing at that exact time? How would they know to station somebody right there with a spear?”
“Yes,” said Duayne, throwing in his sensible two cents’ worth as well. “How could they possibly know we’d be close enough to shore for a spear to reach the boat? For most of the time, we would have been way out of range.”
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The only reason we were that close is that I asked Captain Vargas to move us in so that we could see some wildlife.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Vargas concurred.
“So whatever the hell it was about,” John said, “it wasn’t because anybody was laying in wait, specifically trying to get Scofield.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cisco said, unimpressed, and coming within a millimeter of burning himself as he scratched one bare leg with the hand that held the cigarette. “I’m not saying they did or they didn’t, but I tell you this: I been here a long time now, and I spent a lot of time in the jungle, and I seen a lot weirder stuff than this. These people – I don’t just mean the Chayacuro, I mean, you know, a lot of the indigenous jungle people – well, our laws of physics, and motion, and even the material world, they don’t apply. We think there’s no way they could know he’d be coming back, but they have ways of knowing things that science doesn’t even begin to understand. Let me ask you… um…?” With his chin he gestured questioningly at Gideon.
“Gideon,” Gideon told him.
“Okay, let me ask you, Gideon. You want to know, how could they know you would ask Vargas to bring the boat close at that exact point, right?”
Gideon nodded. “I sure do.”
“But I see the question a different way. Why did you ask him to bring the boat close at that exact point? Where did the idea come from? Ideas don’t come from nowhere. What was it that made you do it right then and not some other time? What made the other guy, Scofield, stand right there, out in the open, in full view, at that exact second? Isn’t it possible that forces beyond anything we-”
“Nothing made me do it,” Gideon retorted with heat. “Look, Cisco, I have a pretty well-integrated belief system regarding causality myself, and in this case you can take it from me that no jungle witch doctor” – he winced at his own highly unanthropological choice of words, but phrases like “ways of knowing things that science doesn’t begin to understand” tended to buzz irritatingly in his ear, like a cloud of little mosquitoes, and made him cranky and argumentative – “put the idea in my head. I assure you, I’m quite capable of coming up with it all by myself.”
Before the words had left his mouth he was ashamed of himself. Snapping so pompously at a human wreck like Cisco was contemptible. “On the other hand,” he said in a lame attempt at making amends, “of course you’re right: nobody really can say where his ideas come from.”
Cisco’s reaction only made him feel worse. He’d hurt the poor guy’s feelings. The gaunt, gray-bearded man dropped his eyes and held up his hands in submission. “I’m just saying,” he mumbled around the half-inch, burning butt still in his mouth. “No offense, buddy.”
At that point, one of Vargas’s Indian crew – the cook, obviously, inasmuch as he was carrying a wooden ladle and wearing a gravy-stained apron tied at the waist, an equally grubby white undershirt, and a villainous black bandanna tied around his head – came out of the kitchen with fire in his eyes.
“ Se va enfriar la cena,” he told Vargas sourly.
Dinner was getting cold.
TEN
Another unexpectedly tasty meal was waiting for them on the buffet table: warm potato and carrot salad, white rice, stewed bananas, chicken and vegetables over spaghetti, and beans, with caramelized bread pudding for dessert. As with lunch, there was no wine served, only water. Everyone seemed hungry, going at the food with gusto. And with rice, potatoes, and spaghetti all in the same meal, the carbohydrate-deprived John looked like a man who’d died and gone to heaven.