He leaned forward to study them, propping his hands on the plywood. Sweat dripped onto the board from the tip of his nose. Minutes passed. The crew members lost interest and wandered a few yards upstream to sit on a nest of fallen trunks, light more cigarillos, and chat among themselves. Phil lost interest and went to join them, but John sat down on a log and remained to watch. He had seen Gideon pull too many surprising and instructive rabbits out of the hat to go wandering off.
“Ah, there is something interesting,” Gideon said after a while, then quickly lapsed back into silence, picking up the vertebrae one by one, peering at them, poking at them, turning them round and round. John, well accustomed to this, waited patiently, twiddling – literally twiddling – his thumbs.
What had caught Gideon’s attention were the two lowest vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. Both had suffered some pretty serious injury to their vertebral bodies – the thick cylinders of bone that stacked one upon the other (separated only by the soft, pulpy, and so often troublesome intervertebral discs) to form and give strength to the vertebral column. Both bodies had a collapsed, caved-in look, especially at the front. He showed them to John, comparing them to the healthy, solid look of the others.
“Whoa,” John said, getting down on his knees in the mud beside Gideon to have a closer look and to handle them. “They look… it’s like someone just grabbed them with a pair of pliers and squeezed the hell out of them.”
“That’s not a bad metaphor, actually, but what did the squeezing were the vertebrae above and below them. These are compression fractures, John. They’re not broken in the usual sense of a fracture – that is, they’re not broken, as in ‘broken into pieces’ – they’re squashed. The pressure on them has compressed the cancellous bone inside.”
John was holding the C-7, running his fingers over the surface. “So what would do something like this?”
“Well, a lot of the time they’re associated with osteoporosis, where the bone is already thin and weak, and maybe the person falls and lands square on his rear end, and that jams the vertebrae up against each other. Sometimes the person doesn’t even know there’s been a fracture.”
“You mean it doesn’t hurt?”
“Oh yeah, it hurts all right. But it’s not like when you actually break a leg, or an arm, or a rib – snap – when that happens you know it the minute it happens. But something like this – he might just think he’s got a chronic headache or a pain in the neck from a strain, or a sprain, or something like that. People will go months before they finally see a doctor.”
John fingered the crushed part and grimaced. “Man, I think I’d know it.”
“But what’s interesting about these particular bones is that this guy wasn’t osteoporotic. Except for these two vertebrae, everything else that’s left is fine. That’s one thing that’s odd about it. The other thing is… mmm…”
“The other thing is…?” John prompted patiently.
“That you don’t see this kind of thing in the neck. It usually occurs down in the lower thoracic or lumbar vertebrae, right in that S-curve in our backs, because that’s where the pressure on your spine is concentrated – one of the unfortunate outcomes of our walking around on two legs instead of a more sensible, balanced four. When you see it in the cervical segment, it’s usually something like a motorcycle accident, or an automobile crash where the person’s head is driven up against the frame of the windshield, say. But in something like that, you’d expect some associated trauma, whereas in this case the other bones don’t show any. The skull’s fine – other than that hole, of course – the mandible’s okay, and none of the other five vertebrae are damaged. In fact, the only times I can remember coming across cases like this one were… I’ll be damned. Is it possible…? I bet…” He trailed off in mid-sentence and wandered abstractedly upstream to where Phil and the crew members were yakking away like lifelong buddies.
“Were what?” John yelled after him. “Is what possible? Damn it, I wish you wouldn’t-” With a sigh and a shake of his head, he followed after him.
Gideon spoke in Spanish. “Chato, the other day, the first day of the cruise, when we were all meeting each other, you were there, standing on the side.”
“Yes,” Chato said warily.
“And when Cisco got introduced as the White Shaman, you laughed and called him something else.”
“I mean nothing bad, senor, I only joke with my friends, I very-”
“No, I realize that. I just need to know what you called him.”
Chato licked his lips and looked to his pals for help, but they gaped blankly back at him.
“You’re not in any trouble, my friend; there’s nothing to worry about. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I called him… everybody calls him… the White Milkman.”
“Ah, that’s what I thought,” Gideon said with satisfaction. “And why was he called the White Milkman?”
“What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?” Gideon heard Phil ask John.
Chato’s explanation, a torrent of overexcited pidgin Spanish-English, was too much for Gideon, and he had to ask Phil to translate. Phil listened, nodding, then explained:
Cisco had been labeled the White Milkman by many of the locals in Iquitos in sarcastic reaction to his self-aggrandizing references to himself as the White Shaman. Cisco’s knowledge of authentic shamanism, it seemed, was held in low repute by those who “Fine, fine, but why do they call him a milkman, specifically?”
“Because that’s what he is. Well, not the kind who delivers milk – there’s no such animal in Iquitos, because apparently nobody drinks it – but there’s this little dairy farm nearby that makes cheese, the one and only Amazonian dairy farm they ever heard of, and sometimes he worked there, taking care of the cows, milking them, feeding them-”
“What do they mean, ‘little’? How big is ‘little’? How many cows?”
“Gideon, what the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Just ask them, Phil.”
Phil shrugged and asked. “Maybe a dozen, they say. Maybe less. Little.” Another shrug. “Which proves?”
“Which suggests that it wasn’t big enough to make milking machines worthwhile. The cows would have been milked by hand, the old-fashioned way.”
“Which proves?” This time it was John.
“Plenty. In fact, that about settles it.” He went back to where the bones lay, picked up the skull, and gazed with extreme attentiveness into the face that was no longer there.
“‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,’” Phil intoned as the crewmen, increasingly uneasy, quietly went back to the ship.
With a half smile, Gideon slowly looked up. “I did know him, Phil. So did you two.”
Phil and John stared mutely at him.
“It’s Cisco,” he said quietly.
NINETEEN
The crushed cervical vertebrae, he explained, were part of a syndrome known to forensic anthropologists as “milker’s neck.”
When a cow was milked by hand, the milker sat on a low stool beside it and leaned his head at a somewhat awkward angle against the animal’s flank while he reached underneath to do the milking. So far, no problem. But a cow does not stand perfectly still while being milked. It shuffles its feet. It shifts its weight. And when it shifts its considerable mass sideways against the milker, he is more or less pinned between the cow and the stool… with his neck sharply bent – that is, flexed. When this happens, the vertebral column can “give” at its most stressed point, the junction of neck and torso, where the flexion occurs. In other words, the already flexed neck is hyperflexed, and pressure is focused on the lowest two cervical vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. The result – by no means always, but often enough – is a crushing of their cervical bodies.
“Like these,” he finished, holding the two vertebrae up again for their inspection. “Remember Cisco’s headaches? And the way he held his head, kind of on the side? Well, you’re looking at the reason.”