We passed a semicircle of huts. Francis Lungley called it a village.
"I see signs of corruption," Father said. "I see a tin can!" At another group of riverbank huts, he said, "It's all gum wrappers!"
There was only one more village, and it was hardly a village — a few open-sided huts and a stand of banana trees. This made Father hopeful. Two men sat at the river's edge clumping submerged stones with boulders. Francis Lungley said the men were fishing — stunning the creatures under the stones. They turned the stones over after they clumped them, and pulled out squashed eels and tadpoles and frogs.
"We must be getting close," Father said.
Francis slapped himself on the head. "I forgit! Them mahoganies!" He smiled at the trees as if he expected them to smile back. "It near here."
Father looked satisfied. "They didn't cut them down. Nothing to cut them down with. Primitive tools. Nothing to use the trees for. Just sit back and watch them grow. Now that's a very good sign."
Here, grass spikes grew out of the water, and the trunks of short cut-off trees stood in pools. Clumps of spinach bobbed in the river, and the lianas were black and dangling, like high-voltage wires blown down by a storm. It was all green wreckage and might have been the mess left by a subsided flood. In what was supposed to be river, there were shoots of fountainy leaves, and the land steamed with crater holes of scummy water. Mud and mosquitoes — and it was hard to tell where the river ended and the land began. There was no definite riverbank, and if it had not been for the tall trees behind it all, I think we would have turned around and gone back — we certainly could not have gone any further. Many of the smaller trees were dead, and on the deadest ones were brown pods, quiverine under the branches. "Bats" Mr. Haddy said. "Thev's bats." He repeated his bloodsucking story to Clover, but she said, "You can't scare me."
Staring at some bushes, I saw human faces. The faces were entirely still and round and staring back at me with white eyes that did not blink. I was not scared until I remembered that they must have been there the whole time, watching us thrash our boat through the spinach and the weeds.
Father saw them. He said, "I've got a little surprise for you."
At his voice, and while we were still looking at them, the faces vanished. They did not move, they just disappeared — goggling at us one minute, gone the next. They had turned into leaves, but not even the leaves moved.
"Out to lunch," Father said. "Get the duckboards. We're going after them. You first, Charlie."
"Why me?" But I knew I should not have asked.
Father said, "Because you're the bravest one here, sonny."
This was not true. But the risks that Father made me take were his way of showing me there were no risks. On the rock in Baltimore, up the kingpost of the Unicom, climbing through Fat Boy — it had all been a kind of training for times like this. Father wanted me to be strong. He had known all along that he was preparing me for worse, for this tiptoeing through the spinachy swamp on duckboards, and teetering past the scummy pools and the vine tubes.
"Stamp your feet, Charlie."
I did so and a snake, hanging in six bracelets from a low branch, gathered itself and dropped into the water and swam away.
After that, I stamped my feet every chance I got, and further on a short fat viper, surprised by the clomp of my shoe, wormed into a stump hole until only its gray tail tip showed.
Father was saying, "Never can tell about these people. They might be Munchies — haw!"
We got through thirty yards of this by passing the last duckboard ahead and repeating this process to make a walkway through the mush. It was hard to believe there had been people right here, standing in the swamp. How had they disappeared without making a splash?
We came to bushes like hedges, and past them the trees were taller and had trunks like thick skirts hanging in folds. Parroty birds, and birds so small they might have been insects, screamed around our heads. Above the tops of the mahogany trees there were bigger birds, perched or making shadowy flights, like flying turkeys. Their wings made slow broomlike brushings against the treetops. They might have been curassows — I heard bull-fiddle twangs — but Father said they were vultures and that he wanted to wring their scrawny scavenging necks.
"Seville," Francis said, and pointed to an opening some yards ahead — more jungle, except that it was dark here and sunny there. Gnats and flies spiraled in the light and speckled it.
Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like this place so soon."
"What kind of houses are those, Dad?" Clover asked.
"That kind of dwelling, of course—"
He never admitted not knowing something, but these huts were not easy to explain. They were small tufty humps made from the same spiky grass we had walked through on the duckboards. A framework of skinny branches balanced the hanks of dead grass bunched on top. Not huts — more like beehives that needed haircuts.
"— that's probably where they keep their animals. Muffin," Father said.
"Got no animals here," Francis said. "I ain't see one."
"All the better," Father said. "If they actually live in those things, then we came to the right place."
Mr. Haddy chuckled and said to me, "The right places for Fadder is always the wrong places for me."
Father looked gladly on the miserable village.
Yet only the huts were miserable. This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderly. Each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size, the big-leafed ones at the jungle floor, the towering trees with tiny leaves rising to great heights, and the ferns in between. I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching stems — a wicked salad that stank in your face and flung its stalks around you.
This was more like a church, with pillars and fans and hanging flowers and only the slightest patches of white sky above the curved roof of branches. There was nothing smothering about it, and although it was noisy with birds, it was motionless — no wind, not even a breeze in the moisture and green shadows and blue-brown trunks. And no tangles — only a forest of verticals, hugely patient and protective. It was like being indoors, with a pretty roof overhead. And the order and size of it made the little huts beneath look especially dumpy.
The village — if it was a village — was deserted. Without people there, it was like the crust of a camp, where some travelers, too lazy or sick to make proper lean-tos, had hacked some bushes apart, shoveled a fire next to a rock, and spent one uncomfortable night before setting off again to die somewhere. The only sign of life was a sick puppy that yapped at us from behind a pile of trash — fruit peels and chewed cane stalks — and didn't bother getting up. I gave the hungry thing the sandwich I had stuffed into my pocket at lunchtime. He tried to bite me, then he ate the sandwich. In the center of the five huts, all made of grass tufts, was a smoky firepit, and some broken calabashes. There was not a human here to be seen.
But we had seen faces back at the duckboards.
Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't blame them for fetching out of this place. Lungley, what you say is for true. This is dirt." He was glancing around and wetting his teeth as he spoke. "We could go home, Fadder. We could slap we own mosquitoes."
Father was fanning himself with his baseball cap. He said, "They can't be far away. Probably down at the drive-in hamburger stand." He looked up and saw Mr. Haddy walking away, in the direction of the duckboards.