A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (3 page)

I
sat next to an investment counselor on a recent flight from Miami to a jungle island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. I told him about the picture—the white woman in panty hose, the three impassive Indians—and what it meant to me. We worked our way around that meaning, just as I am doing here, by swapping jungle tales. The man told me this story:

“I have a friend who is a very successful contractor, and his wife is what you might call an adventurer. She’s a pilot and has been all over the world. Well, she heard about some gold mines up one of the rivers of Brazil and wanted me to see if I could find investors. It looked a little too iffy for me, so she went ahead and raised the money on her own. She got all the permits and certifications that you need and hired two Vietnam vets to help her work the site.

“One day, a government plane set down on their landing strip and they were arrested. The charge was murder—multiple counts. It seems there was another operation in progress in the area. The guy who headed the thing was hiring criminals, escaped convicts and various other unsavory types who might feel comfortable in the jungle, away from any legal agencies. These fellows would work a site, and each of them, I suppose, had a percentage of the take. The fellow who was running the operation would fly to the site with a couple of thugs and shoot the miners, take the gold, and save the percentage.

“This must have gone on for quite some time. Few of the dead men had family or friends who would worry about them or even know where they were. Anyway, the Brazilian government finally caught on to the operation. My friend was charged in connection with seventy-eight murders.

“She and the two vets were tossed into jail in Manaus along with seven other men. One man, who wore a two-pound gold medallion around his neck, got bail the next day. It turned out that he was running the mining-and-murder
operation. My friend was left in the cell with six thugs. She slept against the wall. One of the vets slept beside her while the other kept watch. The other six never made a move.

“Well, you can imagine the field day the Brazilian press had with the case. They found out that my friend had a small canister of Mace in an oversized belt buckle. One headline went something like:
AMERICAN AVIATRIX, ALLEGED MASS MURDERESS, IN POSSESSION OF DEADLY NERVE GAS
.

“After three weeks, it became apparent that she could not have committed those murders, and she was released.”

“Did they ever catch the guy with the medallion?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But my friend still has all the permits, and she’s going back.”

“She’s going back?”

“Gold’s up over six hundred dollars an ounce again.”

S
ome poor guy was sobbing in the next room, and I was just coming off another case of dysentery, swigging paregoric and thinking about that damned picture again. The picture and the jungle. The hotel was located just outside Flores, a town in the northern Guatemalan state of El Peten. It was a civilized sort of place, with clean beds, running water, and flush toilets. But it was in the jungle, after all, and the elements had conspired to sabotage the hotel’s pretensions. Several months before, the hotel had been situated on the shore of Lake Peten Itza. Now it was
in
Lake Peten Itza.

The lake had been mysteriously rising for more than a year, and the steady, unseasonable rains of the past few weeks had been disastrous. The swimming pool, in what had been the courtyard, was underwater, and a foot or more of Lake Peten Itza lapped up against the building. Flocks of tropical water birds floated by the windows, glanced inside, and blurted out horrid little croaks.

The ceiling of my room was wire mesh. Ten feet above
that was sloping, thatched roof. Air circulated nicely, but you could hear people in other rooms as if they were standing next to you, and a man in the adjacent room seemed to be lifting weights. There was the sound of heavy exertion—
mmm-phuph, mmm-phuph
—followed by several quick breaths—
whee-who, whee-who
.

A young American woman was speaking to the man. “So they’re ruined. A pair of jogging shoes. Big deal, thirty bucks. Jeeze. Please, Larry, don’t do this to yourself. We can get the camera reconditioned. Jeeze. We have eight more days, and it just can’t keep raining like this. Really.”

Clearly, Larry was not lifting weights. He was suffering a common sort of allergic reaction to jungle travel. “Larry,” the woman said, “now you just stop it. I think the Mayan ruins are beautiful, even in the rain. So it got a little muddy, and there were a few mosquitos, and we had some bad luck. So what? Larry, you’re thirty-two years old. Will you please stop crying?”

I had just spent a couple of weeks at the more remote ruins, stumbling around in the same rain and mud. All archaeological evidence suggests that the Mayans, in what we now think of as their classic period, were the most advanced people of pre-Columbian America. They developed accurate calendars and hieroglyphic writing; they built massive stone cities and ceremonial pyramids. About 900
A.D.
, the race fell into an inexplicable decline. There are any number of theories about what happened: famine, flood, disease, revolt, invasion. My own idea is patently incorrect and stubbornly wrongheaded, but I cling to it because it terrifies me. I like to think that the jungle simply swallowed up the culture.

El Peten has not always been heavily forested. Analysis of windblown pollen that was recovered from a long core drilled into the bottom of a centrally located lake shows that, in about 2000
B.C.
, El Peten was a land of broad savannas. The dominance of jungle over grassland began early in the classic period. Archaeologists believe that in the post-classic period, a poorer sort of folk moved into the temples and lived there until the jungle engulfed the buildings. Perhaps,
as the jungle advanced, they prayed to the carved stone images of their ancestors.

“It was clearing up when we came in,” the woman in the next room said.

“We waded in,” Larry moaned.

“And there’s probably a beautiful sunset going on right now.” I heard the sound of drapes being opened, and I looked out my own window. Rain was falling in sheets. It was the same leaden color as the lake. A huge waterfowl drifted by, and, directly under my neighbors’ window, it said “
Gawaahhqk
.” There was silence in the room, then Larry began lifting his weights again, much faster this time.

J
oseph Conrad, in his brilliant evocations of the jungles of Africa and the Far East, used and perhaps overused the word
impenetrable
. In truth, those jungles, and the lowland jungles of Central and South America, only seem impenetrable from a road or river or trail or clearing. In those places where sunlight is allowed to reach the ground, a tangled wall erupts out of the earth, a dense green wall that protects the jungle from civilization and can easily be seen as a warning.

In the forest proper, under the endless, broad-leaved canopy, direct rays of the sun seldom reach the earth. What light there is seems tired, heavy, turgid—a flaccid twilight. The floor between the tree trunks is largely bare. But the jungle supports an abundance of life. The majority of invertebrate organisms in the Amazon basin have yet to be named, and generations’ worth of botanical research has yet to be done. Above, arboreal frogs with adhesive pads on their feet creep over the dripping leaves. Hordes of bats pollinate the colorful flowers sprouting on tree trunks rather than attempt the tangle of greenery. Aquatic flatworms live in the perpetual moistness of the forest floor. There are tapirs and jaguars, spider and howler monkeys, amphibians, ants and anteaters. There are spiders that drop
from the canopy above and eat birds, and there are more birds in the jungle than anywhere else on earth.

In the jungle rivers, one-hundred-pound rodents graze on reeds, and anacondas, those twenty- to thirty-foot-long green-and-white snakes, lie in wait for pigs and small deer that they will kill by constriction and eat whole. The jungle generates persistent reports of forty-foot anacondas, and one miner swears he’s seen such a reptile, sunning itself on a riverbank, with the antlers of a deer protruding from its open mouth. “The snake was going to have to wait for the head to decompose before it could spit out those horns,” the miner told me.

Despite the telling and retelling of such tales, despite the abundance of animal life—the shrieks and barks and howls one hears—it is the forest itself that captures the mind and sometimes ensnares the soul. “Contact with pure, unmitigated savagery,” Conrad wrote, “with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.” For Conrad, civilization was not a matter of flush toilets and paved roads. In his jungle tales, good men, left in the isolation of the forest, became slave traders, murderers, less than men. The jungle provides “a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.” I have felt these sensations, and have translated them as fear. Especially when lost in that troubling darkness, I have felt the sheer weight of indifferent animosity, of some vast, humid hatred.

In the jungle, a lost man feels driven by a desire to plunge ahead, while the hanging vines slap at his face and roots rise up to tangle his feet. Better to stop; sit, think. And that is when the green hostility begins to smother the soul. The mind’s eye sees the forest as if it were a time-lapse film. Trees twist into grotesque shapes, the better to steal the sun. Parasites erupt out of healthy organisms. Creepers lash out to strangle lesser plants. Lianas—long, woody vines—drop from branches like thick ropes and root at the base of
the host tree, choking off its life so that they themselves stand as a new tree with the dead one inside.

The jungle is moist and warm, and living things may grow and reproduce all year long. Competition comes not from the elements but from the volume of life. A lost man, sitting, thinking, perceives that every living thing longs for the death of every other living thing. He understands “the ever-ready suspicion of evil” Conrad wrote about, “the placid and impenetrable mass of an unjustifiable violence.”

These thoughts took on a special clarity when, in the company of other reporters, I visited the necropolis of Jonestown, where the stench of decomposing bodies sent bile rising into my throat. I had already spent days talking with survivors, and I knew that Jim Jones had been deluded, probably addicted to drugs, and clinically paranoid even before he moved to the jungle. But the jungle tore at his mind and fed his paranoia: when the rains came early and the crops failed, it was because the CIA had seeded the clouds. In the jungle compound, from the wooden chair he called his throne, Jones passed on his paranoia to the people of Jonestown, for paranoia is a contagious disease. They saw soldiers in the bush beyond the clearing, and they could hear the growling of vehicles as these shadow forces massed for attack. It was a debilitating siege, and in the end, like the heroes of Masada, who killed themselves nearly two millenniums ago rather than surrender to the Romans, most of them committed suicide rather than submit to the shadow forces that lay in wait, out there in the jungle.

I’m not suggesting that the tragedy happened because Jonestown lay in the jungle. Still, it is impossible to conceive of a similar occurrence in Indianapolis or San Francisco. The madness, the
danse macabre
of suicide and murder, could have happened no place else but in the dark vastness of the jungle.

I
have sat around fires with people others might describe as primitive, even savage. We have shared food. And I have been places where there is no evidence that man exists. I find an inexplicable delight in that, in the sure knowledge that, throughout all of time, no other human being has stood on the same spot. It is, finally, a fragile emotion, something not easily recollected in more temperate climes, where man has stripped the earth of darkness. Still, I find a flicker of that lustrous delight, of lunacy and darkness, in the idea of a white woman in panty hose posing before three unimpressed Indians.

Stare at the picture long enough, knowing that it is a story that will never be told, and you realize that the jungle is an ecology of secrets, that in the jungle, more than any other place on earth, there is the conservation of mystery.

The white woman sits in her panty hose, and the welts on her back tell us the jungle is eating her alive. Long after she is gone—after she has screamed her last curse at the photographer and the whole idiotic project, whatever it may have been—one feels the Indians will still be there, sturdy and placid. And that is the final meaning of the picture: as civilization schemes to violate the jungle, the jungle conspires to brutalize civilization.

C
all it science, I know gossip when I hear gossip. Dr. Kelly Stewart was standing up on the stage in the auditorium at the Academy of Science on Wednesday night; she was standing right there in front of a paying audience talking boldly about who was sleeping with whom and about which females had left which males; she was talking about everyone’s favorite, that old rapscallion Nunkie, the opportunistic bachelor who started off alone and ended up with a harem of six females and a family of at least nine healthy infants. Dr. Stewart even had a chart showing Nunkie’s rather incredible success in acquiring females and siring infants in the decade before his death.