The river looked calm and black and I saw a pink fin glide on the surface. River dolphins turned into men at night, the story went, seduced women, and lured them back to the deep. Folktales were facts here. Spirits flew among shadowed trees. Karitiana shamans saw ghosts in the mist. I was a fool to believe that Eddie had been taken.
“That man is staring at you,” said Rooster.
That’s when I saw the crewman, frozen, on the stairway leading to the upper deck and pilot house; a big, curly haired man, mouth open in surprise, and he turned and scurried off, glancing back as if to confirm that I was there. There was no point going after him. A confrontation would create a scene, and there was no way off this boat.
Someone could have shown him my picture. If the union people or police are really looking for me, they could have easily spoken to the crew before we left. I think it would be a good idea if Rooster and I take turns going to sleep tonight. We need to switch off standing guard.
I watched a roach the size of a mouse run beneath my hammock. The ferry panted to reach a speed that could not have exceeded four miles an hour. Every once in a while a smaller, fast-moving flying boat came up from behind, as if to catch us, and my heart seized up, but the boats passed, heading for New Extrema. Bored, people in neighboring hammocks struck up conversations, and in this casual way I learned some history about the outpost ahead.
“It started as a collection point for rubber during the boom in the 1800s,” an old man — a retired priest — told us, sharing Rooster’s coffee. “Back then the only place the world got rubber from was Brazil. But rubber trees cannot grow commercially, on plantations. They fall victim to a fungus, so attempts to make rubber farms failed. In nature rubber trees grow with great separation, as natural protection. So the negocianos, the businessmen, needed people to harvest rubber for tires and rain ponchos and boots. They tricked poor city people into the jungle, lied to thousands from São Paulo. They said that rubber grows in great balls that could be plucked from trees. That the Amazon was a paradise and that they would grow rich picking rubber. They lent these people money, and the uneducated slum dwellers flooded the forest. They bought tools on credit and trekked into the jungle. They built shacks to live. By the time they knew they had been tricked it was too late. They could not go back.”
“They were stuck here,” I said, appalled.
“The only way to pay their debt was to harvest rubber.”
“What happened to them?”
“Thousands died of malaria, starvation, and snake bites. The few who lived could not read or add, so the merchants cheated them, paid just enough to keep them alive, but stole the rubber. In Manaus lived rubber millionaires. They built an opera house and sent their laundry to Portugal, filthy rich people; until British sailors stole some rubber trees from our jungles and planted them in Asia. There’s no fungus there. Trees can grow on plantations. Their rubber was cheaper and the Brazilian market collapsed. The millionaires went broke. The opera house rotted. But the tappers are still there, eking out a living, walking the forest, sticking little tubes in the trees, harvesting rubber in drip cups like photographs I saw of maple farmers in the United States.”
The man nodded sadly. “These days, in New Extrema, all that remains are some poor tappers, or smugglers who bring gold across to Bolivia, and drugs back in.”
Rooster handed the man a tin plate containing a mass of sticky rice and cooked vegetables and bits of grayish meat.
“You sleep first,” Rooster said, patting the pink mosquito net hung over his own hammock. “Seven hours left.”
The engine coughed, broken. We drifted to shore.
“Give us an hour to fix it,” a crewman said.
At 2 A.M. we started off again, just as I saw another fast-moving light coming up on us, on the river.
“Police,” Rooster gasped.
But it turned out to be another flying boat, two figures on board as it crossed our searchlight. One man steered. The other was slumped over. The man at the tiller waved but the other man did nothing. He might have been sleeping. Or ill. Or dead.
That boat gave me an idea. I will hire a small boat and visit the island. I will tell the doctor there that I’m a visiting physician from the U.S. A courtesy call would be normal. If they let me on, I’ll figure out what to do.
A whole day had wasted away and another dusk was coming. The sky was gray with misty rain. At 5 P.M. the mosquitoes swarmed. I saw them crawling on my mosquito net, masses of black against pink. I saw one enter the net through a dime-sized rip. I crushed it, saw from the blood on my thumb that it had already bitten someone else.
In Wilderness Medicine, I teach my students, be patient in remote areas. Don’t expect things to work as they do back home. Go with the flow unless there is an emergency. Understand that concepts of time are different.
It was impossible to follow my own advice.
Rooster was shaking me. I must have slept, and the sun was high and we were moving again.
Rooster whispered urgently, “She is here, Joe.”
“Who?”
“The woman from your hotel, and the restaurant. She is on the upper deck with her companion. I think she saw me, too.”
The boat chugged around the nine millionth bend, which looked the same as the first one. The trip was taking forever. Rooster’s anxious look turned to puzzlement as he watched my expression. “Joe, you are pleased?”
“Well, if she’s here, maybe we’re in the right place.”
But between the crewman who’d recognized me, and the woman, all my ghosts were coalescing in the same place.
I started for the stairway to the upper deck, to confront her. The boat would be perfect for this. She’s not police, or she would have approached by now. She’s not union or she wouldn’t have stayed at my hotel.
The Brazilian-made Taurus beneath my shirt had a blue finish, and a .40 caliber, fifteen-round capacity. Pulling it out on this boat would guarantee a radio call to the Federal Police by the Captain. It was useless here.
“Maybe she is here by coincidence,” Rooster suggested.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know we’re here.”
I laughed.
The upper deck came into view, and with it, another crowd like the one below, hammocks strung, noise, crates, dogs, music. I saw the woman and her male companion. They reclined on their hammocks, drinking from liter bottles of water, by a pile of stacked crates. The man spotted me first and rose almost lazily and said something and her head swiveled sharply in my direction. He was the one blocking direct access. He was large and muscular and wore soiled khakis and moved with light-footed grace for a big man. His eyes, as I closed, looked sleepy beneath rectangular eyeglasses. He’s protection, she’s the boss.
The woman leaned back and pulled something from a knapsack and I tensed but saw it was a camera, which she aimed at me. I saw no weapons. Then again, they couldn’t see mine. Rooster waddled so close behind me that I could hear his quick, hard intakes of breath, and smell garlic. He was too close for me to back away fast if something happened.
Snapsnapsnap… she was taking photos.
Close-up; she was slim and dark, and looked to be in her early thirties; fit, not pretty but arresting, sexy in some violent way. The skin was naturally dusty, café au lait. The body looked hard as a rock climber’s or gymnast’s. She had eyes the dirty green of the North Sea, two fathoms down. The cheekbones were sharp, nose thin but not knifelike, mouth a generous surprise and hair thick, curly and shoulder length, wild, colored somewhere between copper and cherry. Terrific posture. Castizo, I thought. A mix of mestizo and European. I saw a white, arced, penny-sized scar below the right eye. It should have marred the attraction. In her, somehow, it added challenge.