Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller

Shadowline Drift

Alexes

Razevich

Heat and d
irt. Air like molasses. Eighty degrees, but it was early still. One hundred and fifty feet from his tent to the hut, though it seemed further in the hot, wet air. Jake was good at that sort of thing—figuring out temperatures, people’s height and age, the desires of their secret hearts.

From habit, he checked his watch
—half past seven—and rubbed the titanium-cased face for luck. The watch had been a gift from his parents on his thirtieth birthday. It was much too nice and certainly too expensive, and a bit too big for his size, but then, wasn’t everything? He’d been embarrassed by their generosity, but pleased with the gift. In the three years since, it’d been a lot of places with him, some of them dicey, and he’d grown superstitious—as long as he wore the watch, he’d come home safe and successful. Safety mattered in the backwaters of the Amazon, but success this trip was critical. He drew a breath and
stepped into the palm-sided hut occupied by the man he’d come a long way to see.

The hut felt dark inside after the bright sun. Dust motes hung in the still air, caught in the thin shaft of light streaming through a small slit in the wall opposite the door. The man, Mawgis, sat cross-legged on a thick, woven-leaf mat.
An identical mat lay across from him. Beneath the mat, the packed-dirt floor was a brown so deep it was nearly black. A pile of small stones lay near Mawgis, and nothing else, so it wasn’t living quarters. A place for gatherings? It struck him as odd. Why would the Tabna, a small tribe of twenty-seven people, need a building just for that? Unless a bedroll was stashed out back. That was possible. He’d been well briefed for this meeting, but the briefings had focused on what someone else thought he should know, not the small things he might wonder about.

Mawgis squinted up at him, appraising.
“Not very tall, are you?”

The man’s voice was rich and deep, a bow drawn slowly across cello strings, Hebrew or Gaelic sounding. The raisin-sized translator nestled in Jake’s ear droned, sorting language from the background noise of calling birds and nattering monkeys.

“
Three and a half feet,” Jake said, knowing the measurement had no meaning for the Tabna man. “About the same height as you.”

The
older man was thin and wiry, and though Mawgis calmly sat, Jake felt an electric energy in
him. His face was interesting: golden-brown skin barely wrinkled with age, and loam-colored eyes. High cheekbones. Broad nose and thin-lipped mouth. Three precise rows of vertical scars on each cheek—the scars rubbed with yellow dye. The man’s features went together so well, he seemed more drawn by an artist’s hand than something natural-born.

Jake felt Mawgis inventory him in return, the man’s eyes flickering over him. Blue shirt, khaki shorts, leather hiking boots. Dusty-brown hair—longish. Blue-gray eyes. Sunburned skin, glazed with perspiration. Jake certainly didn’t look like the Salesian missionaries who’d discovered the previously unknown tribe, each priest tall and dark of skin, hair, and eyes. He wondered what Mawgis made of him, of all of them—the five pale men and one brown man who’d come to see him now, each for his own reasons.

Mawgis r
an a knuckle across one of the scars on his right cheek and adjusted the blue and red parrot feather circlet at his neck. Other than the feathers, he wore only a leaf folded around his penis. The Amazonian humidity had plastered Jake’s shorts and shirt to his body like an ill-fitting skin. He resisted the urge to pull the fabric away.

Mawgis glanced at
the empty mat across from where he sat, indicating that Jake should sit. He cleared his throat. “How was your journey?”

“
Difficult,” Jake said, settling onto the mat and crossing his legs into a loose pretzel form that
mirrored his host’s. “We traveled the Amazon and the Japurá Rivers, then branched off to a tributary with terrible rapids. One boat turned over. No one was hurt, but we lost supplies and equipment. We hiked six days through the forest with our gear on our backs to reach you.”

The
older man gazed at him. “You’ve been other places?” he asked, making no comment on the ordeal.

“
Many,” Jake said.

Banshees screamed in the trees—howler monkeys. It was hardly the first time Jake had heard them, but the sound still made his shoulders tense.

Mawgis tapped his chest. “I, too, am greatly traveled.”

Jake nodded and kept his face blank. Well
traveled was a matter of perspective.

The
other man swept up a pile of pea-sized stones from near his feet. “When were you born?” The stones in his hands rattled softly—a sound like dry grass hissing in the wind.

“
I’m thirty-three.” He knew it was a meaningless answer. The Tabna had no concept of the 365-day cycle of the earth around the sun. They reckoned time by events—when the ants left their nests to forage, when the rains stopped, when the jaguar ate the old chief. That’s what he’d been told by Father Canas, the missionary who had spent eighteen months living with the Tabna, compiling a Tabna-English dictionary. Last month he’d helped Jake prepare for this job.

Mawgis touched the translator in his left ear.
“You misunderstand,” he said. A small yellow ant crawled up his leg and he squashed it between his thumb and forefinger. “I ask—when did you leave the womb?”

Jake tried to figure a way to answer, but came up with nothing.

The older man peeked at the stones in his hands. A quick smile lit his face—bright white teeth, the middle two a little long. “You were born when your chief first walked in his new house, though it wasn’t his then.”

Jake silently cursed Father Canas, who
’d assured him the English translations were at least ninety-seven percent accurate. They were going to have a hard time doing business if their words continued to be scrambled.

“
Delacort,” Mawgis said, the stones clicking in his hands. “Present Delacort.”

He seemed so sure of himself; Jake tried to make sense of it.

Jesus.
President
Delacort. Jake had indeed been born the year Jonathan Delacort, as a newly elected senator, first arrived in Washington. Now in his late sixties, Delacort was president.

Jake
bent his mouth in the smallest of smiles. Better to let Mawgis think him amused, not surprised. “Yes. How did you know?”

The Indian
’s eyes slid away from Jake.

The morning mist turned into
a sudden shower—fat raindrops falling like dotted lines
outside the hut’s open doorway, thudding against the palm-thatched roof. Something—Jake saw only a flash of rat-like tail—skittered above the hut’s simple tree-branch framing, through the palm fronds overhead. He waited.

Mawgis opened his hands and held out the stones.
“Choose two.”

A doz
en or so pebbles of various colors, some speckled and some solid brown, white, or black, rested in his cupped hands. Jake chose one white and one gray-speckled. Mawgis closed his fingers over the remaining stones, chanted a few words that came through the translator as static, and threw the pebbles on the ground between them.

On a job in Haiti,
Jake had watched a thin, bumpy-spined woman read chicken entrails, bent over so far that her nose practically touched the offal, her eyes being not as sharp as they’d once been. Mawgis wore the same concentrating yet confident look as he studied the pebbles, though his spine was straight, his shoulders down and relaxed.

“
What do the stones tell you?” Not that Jake believed a handful of gravel had told Mawgis the year he had been born or had given the man a context in which to express the time. Not that he thought any significance lay in which two stones he’d chosen. What Jake wanted to know was this: what did Mawgis want to tell him?

“
The stones?” Mawgis said, and blinked slowly, like a turtle. The blink didn’t go with the feeling of pent-up energy Jake sensed in him. “That
you are a plain man. More clever than you like people to know, and resolute. You will fight to the end for what you believe is right.”

A moment passed, the ever-present noise of the forest leaping into the silence. Mawgis shook his head as if trying to clear his thoughts. “Follow,” he said, stood, and headed out the door.

Jake walked o
ut behind him, thinking that the description Mawgis had given for him could fit any number of people. Thinking, too, that he had no more idea now what Mawgis wanted him to know than when he’d awoken that morning in the yellow canvas tent he’d hurriedly pitched the night before. He’d finally made it to his destination only to discover that the man he’d come to see was out in the forest somewhere.

The rain stopped as quickly as it had begun,
leaving the air so thick with moisture Jake felt he almost could have rolled it between his hands and formed a solid ball. He peered through the wet haze at the Tabna camp. His mind had been on his meeting with Mawgis when he’d come through the camp that morning. He hadn’t paid much attention to his surroundings. But these things mattered—appreciating where and how people lived, being friendly to and getting to know the people around the decision maker. A perk of the job, in Jake’s opinion.

Spaced around the
camp’s perimeter were eleven palm-sided huts the same size and shape as the one Mawgis and Jake had left. The thatched
roofs were A-shaped, with wide eaves to let the rain slide off. Vine-woven hammocks hung between poles set in front of the huts. Some were in use, their occupants swinging contentedly. The people must have all been inside while the rain fell. None of them were wet.

Three canvas tents were set up near the camp
’s perimeter, Jake’s and the two used by the men who’d accompanied him on this trip—four Brits making a documentary about the Tabna, and Joaquin Machado from FUNAI, the Brazilian government office charged with protecting the rights of indigenous people. The film crew’s four-man tents were about the same size as the Tabna huts. Jake’s tent, big enough for two normal-sized adults, was smaller than the huts but spacious for him.

A young Tabna woman
—Jake guessed her to be fifteen, sixteen at most—swayed lazily in a hammock, one slim brown leg hanging over the edge. Small white dots covered her shoulders and upper arms like a shawl. Her thick, straight black hair was cut short, like Mawgis’s. Her breasts were small and firm. She eyed Jake and smiled. He smiled back.

Birds called in the jungle now that the rain had stopped, every throat proclaiming its own loud and raucous song. Gnats as small as grains of salt whirled near Jake
’s head. He batted them away and tried to come up even with Mawgis, but no matter
how fast he walked, the older man stayed half a step ahead.

In the large central area where the communal socializing, cooking, and eating took place, two Tabna men were showing a group of boys how to make spears. Ian, one of the British film crew, had his camera trained on a child struggling to attach a spear tip to the shaft. The boy looked up at the camera and grinned. Jake wondered what the Tabna thought about all the sudden attention they were receiving.

Mawgis led him toward the smoke and then past the big iron cauldron that served as the community cooking pot. A dozen men and women worked at preparing the evening meal, which was, Jake saw, going to be termites, squirrel monkey, and kinkajou. Over the years he’d downed fish-eyeball soup, mountain oysters, and raw prairie dog. He could manage roasted monkey and a few bugs, but would pass on the beer two women were making by softening tough cassava stalks with their own saliva and spitting the juice into a bowl to ferment. Derek, the Brit filming the women, looked a little green. Jake bet himself a dollar Derek wouldn’t join them for dinner that night.

Mawgis tapped Jake
’s shoulder. The tiny translator felt loose in Jake’s ear. He pushed it back into place.

“
Shall we walk among the trees?”

The forest loomed like a presence, something felt as well as seen, lurking just beyond the
clearing’s edge. Jake inhaled a deep, wet breath. Two steps, four, half a dozen. The spacious camp surrendered to a dense landscape, pulsing with too much color, writhing with too much life. Leaves in a thousand shades of green blocked the sun’s light, leaving the forest floor as dim as evening. Orchids in vibrant purples, yellows, and glowing whites clung to trunks and branches of trees so tall Jake couldn’t see their tops.

“
Walk carefully,” Mawgis said.

The ground beneath
Jake’s boots was spongy. Moisture seeped out of the dark mulch, oozing around his heels with each step. Rainwater fell from the leaves like a second cloudburst, soaking his clothes and making his skin prickle in spite of the heat. He sluiced off the water with his hands as best he could.