Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller (11 page)

The trader looked him up and down. Jake was used to being stared at, though not this overtly. When he had been small, people usually had felt sorry for him and mostly tried to hide their stares. He felt suddenly
self-conscious in his new body, taller than the other man, but dressed like a beggar in Knonee’s cast-off jeans and faded T-shirt, his wild hair and scraggly beard in need of a cut.

“So,” Toshi said, picking up the fish food again and sprinkling some into a tank. “You’re what—an eco-tourist? How’d you get separated from your group?”

Jake shook his head. “I work for World United. I’ve been negotiating with one of the local tribes.”

“Yeah? The government know about you being here?” The trader’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t just slide on in to take advantage? Maybe a land grab for some cattle ranchers? Gonna fuck up the forest and ruin my business while you’re at it?”

“Nothing like that. A fair negotiation with one of the smaller groups here. Joaquin Machado with FUNAI brought me in.”

Toshi’s jaw set like he’d caught Jake in a lie. “I know Joaquin. He wouldn’t let you loose in the park with just a native paddler.”

Jake shrugged. “I’m on a deadline with these negotiations. You know how it goes—people back home think working in the Amazon is the same as doing business in Kansas.”

The fish trader pursed his lips and muttered, “Idiots.” Jake figured that Toshi had worked with his share of unreasonable wholesalers in the States and elsewhere.

“I need to go to Manaus as quickly as possible,” he said. “Can you get me there?”

The trader thought it over, another weighty decision. “One thousand dollars American and I’ll have you there before lunch tomorrow.”

Jake smiled thinly. “Must be a pretty fast boat.”

“Plane. We can leave first thing in the morning. I gotta room you can have tonight.”

Even for a plane, a thousand dollars was too much. Jake would have talked him down, but the price hardly mattered. He had no money. He didn’t even have a passport.

“Fifteen hundred,” Jake said, “but you’re going to have to trust me for it.”

Toshi leaned against the counter and regarded him. “Trust is expensive. Two thousand.”

“Fifteen.”

“Not gonna happen,” Toshi said. “No cash, no plane—not for less than two grand.”

Jake fiddled with the stem of his watch, then nodded.

“And good-faith collateral,” the trader said.

Jake turned his empty palms up.

Toshi looked at Jake’s wrist and smiled. “That’ll do.”

The light went out in one of the aquariums and the background hum of motors dimmed. Toshi swore, strode over to a corner of the room, and fiddled with a nest of cables on the floor. The light came back on and the hum grew louder.

The trader walked back to Jake. “You wanna go or not?”

Jake stared at the man a moment, then undid the band and handed over his watch.

The trader took it, pulled open a drawer, and dropped it inside. He slammed the drawer shut.

Jake slept in the spare room at the back of the trading post, on a hard slat bed with a thin, dirty pillow he covered with a towel he’d found in the washroom. Dreaming, he found Pilar next to him, and gathered her into his arms. Her hair smelled of lemon. The heat of her body, the slight pressure of her against him, made him sigh.

He woke to the screams of howler monkeys. Pilar leaned on one elbow, smiling down at him. Jake closed his eyes, content to stay in the dream.

“It would be lovely to sleep,” she said, and he heard her voice as though it were something tiny and far away, “but it’s time to get up.”

Pilar’s voice. At the fish trader’s. That was wrong. Jake snapped his eyes open. Sunlight poured through the little window into the familiar room at the compound. He was awake—clearly awake—and not dreaming. He lurched up, bumping against Pilar.

“What happened?” he said.

She shrugged and sighed. “Knonee.”

“Left me off.” His gaze darted around the room. “How’d I get back here?”

“Get back?”

Confusion knotted his tongue. He had to think hard to get the words out. “Knonee took me to the trading post. The trader, Toshi—we’re supposed to fly to Manaus today.” He grabbed his left wrist. His watch was gone.

Pilar lightly touched his leg. “We talked about Knonee taking you, but he didn’t come last night like he’d said he would. I don’t know why. He’s Fant’s nephew and she’s mystified. Naheyo—”

He cut her off. “I was there. Knonee was here. We went down the river. I met the fish trader, Toshi. He took my watch as collateral for payment.”

She gave him a tiny smile. “Sounds like a wish dream. You’ve been cooped up here so long, it makes sense that you’d dream about getting out. You’ll get to a phone, Jake, just not today.”

“I can describe them. The fish trader is shorter and older than me, Asian. His hair is white and runs over his collar. Knonee is young, maybe twenty, maybe younger. He’s shorter than I am, but we’re built the same. He gave me this.” Jake pulled at
his T-shirt, wanting to show her the words “Brazil: World Cup 2002.” Nothing was written on the plain white shirt covering his chest.

He looked down. His watch lay on the dirt floor.

Pilar leaned over and picked up his watch, fastening the device on his wrist—the same way she had all those weeks back, the day he’d first woken in this room. Having it on was small comfort now, not like then, when just the feel of it on his wrist made him think everything would be fine.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered, half-surprised he could still speak, his mind spun so crazily. His head pounded and the blood banged in his ears. He leaned forward, his arms between his knees.

He wasn’t sure
what was real—the trip with Knonee or being in the compound. Maybe he was at the fish trader’s, dreaming of being with Pilar. He’d wake soon. Toshi would fly him to Manaus.

“It’s Naheyo, isn’t it?” he asked, looking sideways at Pilar sitting beside him, her hands clasped in her lap. “She’s keeping me here. You have to make her understand. People are going to die. Real people. Not ‘
demons.’”

“Naheyo isn’t keeping you,” Pilar said. “She wants you gone. She’s worried your demon will possess you again and you’ll ‘
kick over the anthill.’ Her words, ‘kick over the anthill.’ I don’t know what that means. I asked, but if Naheyo doesn’t feel like answering, she doesn’t. She’s furious that
Knonee didn’t come. She said that he’d better be hurt or sick—there’s no other excuse for him disobeying her order.”

Pilar cut off abruptly, and he could see she was thinking, her lips pressed tight, considering, but he couldn’t guess at what. Did she know something she didn’t want to say? Watching her, waiting, his muscles clenched—each moment a vise squeezing the molecules of his body tighter, contracted by the weight of confinement. She had to be right—he’d been dreaming. Or was dreaming still. Pilar unlaced her fingers and stood.

“I’ll take you to Catalous. We’ll have to walk and it’ll take a few days. It’s the best I can offer.”

“Now?” He was halfway to his feet before the word left his mouth.

She shook her head. “Soon. I’ll get some supplies together. An hour or so.”

A sudden rain began—a hard rain that beat against the mosquito netting taped over the window,
making netting bow at the bottom. Water trickled down the wall behind the cot. He glanced at the window and wall and then at Pilar. Hiking through the forest would be misery in the rain, but he didn’t want her to change her mind and say they’d go tomorrow. Her eyes didn’t say that, though. Her look said they’d be leaving as quickly as possible, the same as her words. A bit of the pressure in his chest let up.

Pilar slipped from the room. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. It helped the pounding in his head some.

The rain stopped as quickly as it had started. The wall behind the cot was already drying, the color fading back to a dull dun, by the time Pilar returned. She handed him a pair of worn hiking boots and two thick gray socks.

“Mike—Dr. Samuelson—I came to the Amazon with him the first time, when we stayed in the main Lalunta village. He left the boots behind.”

He listened to her inflection and watched how she stood—still leaning slightly forward, her arms at her sides, not loose, but not clenched either. There was never anything between her and the man who had owned the shoes, no odd feeling about handing them over to him—he heard and saw that. Still, there was something, some hesitancy in her.

The boots fit well enough, a little tight, but the length
seemed good. He would have made the walk barefoot, but shod was better. He double-knotted the bow in the laces and stood up, anxious to start. Pilar seemed anxious too, though maybe he was reading her wrong, thinking she held something close when she was just primed to go, or resigned to a long trek she wanted to get over. They had at least a two-day or longer walk ahead of them. If she wanted to tell him something, she would. Two days’ walk, and he’d be at a phone.

She bent down to the pile of goods she’d brought along with the boots and handed him a roll of canvas, a light blanket, and a canteen. She hefted a canvas pack onto her back.

“I’ll take that,” he said, but she smiled as though vaguely insulted, then bent at the knees to pick up the last item she’d brought, a machete. He wondered if it was the one Naheyo had carried that first day.

“Ready?” she asked, turning before he answered and heading down the short hallway out into the courtyard. She gave him a glance and nod when he caught up and matched his pace to hers. He was glad she didn’t talk. His mind rumbled, full of thoughts, and words were distracting. They crossed the cane field where he’d first seen Naheyo and then Pilar, and plunged into the forest.

Beyond the Lalunta camp, everything was leaves and bark, mud and standing water, sharp smells, fly buzz, and monkey chatter. Behind them, the compound was lost in a frenzied maze of trees, shrubs, and undergrowth. He’d grown used to the compound—its walls, floors, ceilings. Now, in the wild world that had come so near to killing him, he gripped the head of the cane like a talisman. They’d get to a phone. Nothing else mattered.

A raucous chirping of birds filled the air. He looked up but couldn’t see them in the dense greenery—bananas and small palms, and toothache
trees with leaves that reminded him of ficus. Creepers twisted up tree trunks and dangled back down from branches hung with resting bats. He found himself breathing hard, falling behind Pilar. It irritated him that he wasn’t as strong and fast as she was. Fatigue weighed down his body like a water-soaked coat.

“Am I going too fast?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder.

He shook his head and pushed harder against the cane, using it to get spring and speed. A dung beetle rolled its prize across the ground in front of him. Jake stepped over it and pressed on.

They were only three or four hours out, walking without talking, moving in that mind-whirling silence of people approaching a destination that is not an end. He licked his lips and tasted the salt of his sweat.

Pilar stopped beside a tree with a trunk so wide Jake doubted that together they could get their arms around it. Thick, knobby roots snaked across the ground. The tree looked like Medusa, Jake thought, standing on her head. It was the only tall tree. The others nearby were lower, their branches floating like ballerina skirts over the sandy ground of the clearing.

“Let’s take a rest,” she said, and slipped the pack off her back and let it fall to the ground.

High in the Medusa tree, seventy, maybe eighty feet up, a colony of monkeys swung in the branches and chattered down at them. On a low branch, a black monster of a spider slid down its silken ladder. Jake ran his hands over his hair.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He shook his head, first feeling like he didn’t want to talk yet—not
till he’d reasoned out to his own satisfaction what had happened—and then realizing he had to.

“I don’t think it was a dream last night,” he said.

She pressed her lips together, the way she did when she was considering something. “You fell off your cot,” she said. “Do you remember? I’d say three or four in the morning. The crash woke me. I came to your room to see if you were okay. You’d already gotten yourself back up and were asleep again.”

He didn’t remember falling or getting himself back onto the cot. Would she lie to him? He didn’t believe she would, any more than he believed the trip
downriver with Knonee had been a dream. There was a term for what he was feeling—the holding of two contradictory ideas at the same time, believing equally in both. He couldn’t remember the term, or whether it meant he was losing his mind.

“I stayed with you the rest of the night,” she said. “I was afraid you might fall off again, hurt yourself. I hope you don’t mind.”

Maybe he hadn’t fallen off the cot. Maybe the crash was him landing back from the fish trader’s. Beamed back by a less-than-perfect transporter. He shook his head. That he’d had that thought scared him. Maybe he was coming unhinged.

“No. I don’t mind,” he said.

Pilar pulled off the once-white bandana that covered her hair and soaked the cloth with a bit of water from the canteen. She rubbed the fabric over her face and neck, cleaning away the light layer of dust on her skin.

“It was kind of Naheyo to let you guide me,” Jake said.

She nodded once, slowly—the way people do when the nod doesn’t mean agreement, but something completely different.

“What?” he said, and it came to him as the word left his mouth. Naheyo hadn’t let her come. That was why she’d seemed hesitant just before they’d left.

Pilar sat on a fallen tree trunk, using her feet to brace herself on the round log. “Naheyo wanted you out of the compound, but she didn’t want anyone to go with you. She wanted to drive you out, alone. You made it through the forest once, but I couldn’t let—” She glanced at the ground.

“Thanks,” he said. It was such a small word to say all that he meant.

Pilar laughed under her breath. “Two people have defied her in as many days—first Knonee,
then me. She’s likely furious.” She held out the canteen.

He took it and tilted it back, drinking as little as he could and still slake his thirst, thinking anything could happen out here—he hadn’t forgotten being lost in the forest. Best to be as ready as possible. He wondered if Naheyo really would have forced him out of the compound alone, or would have just flapped her arms and chattered on incessantly, but let him stay. Naheyo didn’t strike him as the sort of person to easily forgive defiance.

“What will happen when you go back?”

She half shrugged. “I’ll tell her I was beguiled by the pale foreigner and couldn’t help myself. She’ll storm a few days, but the truth is, she likes having me around. She likes the attention I pay her. Everything will be fine.”

“And if it’s not?”

“Most likely she’d turn a cold shoulder and my research would come to a quick end. I’d go home with incomplete data.”

“To an incomplete career?” He handed the canteen back to her.

“Naheyo won’t send me off,” she said, as if her words could make it true. “I’m the best audience she’s ever had. She’ll cry when my time here is done.”

He hoped she was right. Kevin had led his film crew into the Amazon, hoping the Tabna would make him famous. Jake didn’t know what Pilar hoped her work with Naheyo would bring her, but
he didn’t want to be the cause of a rift between them.

“Are you beguiled?” he asked, and his heart went up into his throat.

She screwed the cap back on the canteen and smiled.

A cloud of termites whirled through the clearing, tiny white wings glinting like splinters of mirror in the sunlight. They ducked their heads, batting the insects away from their faces, and Pilar laughed—a single chuckle that broke something in him, and then they were both laughing, silly as school kids. Tears welled in his eyes and he wiped them away with the back of his arm. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed liked that—deep, from the gut, over nothing—probably not so long ago, but it seemed forever. He wanted it to go on and on.

The termites whirled across the clearing and into the forest. Their laughter dropped away, the last chuckles floating on the same breeze the insects rode, drifting among the trees.

“Well,” Pilar said, and walked over to where she’d dropped her pack. “Are you hungry?”

He was famished and hadn’t realized it. She handed him the pack. Inside were small loaves of fresh-baked bread, a cake of dried fish, shucked Brazil nuts in a large plastic jam jar, and a small Swiss Army knife. A second jam jar was packed with some sort of fresh leaves. Jake took out the bread and fish, cut off hunks of each, and offered
them to her. They ate and drank, then moved on, Jake thinking as they walked that for a moment, when they were laughing, he’d almost forgotten where they were—and why.

The forest thickened, the brush and trees growing close together—so lush and green it hurt his eyes. Walking in a straight line was impossible. They detoured right and left, Pilar wielding the machete like a warrior, hacking away any limbs in their way. He trusted that she knew how to get where they were going.

“This will open up soon,” she promised.

A butterfly, neon orange and blue, flittered across his view, suddenly rose, and disappeared into the canopy overhead. Jake watched its flight upward and saw the one-eyed parrot looking down on him from a low branch.

He nudged Pilar and kept his eyes on the bird.

“One-eyed and alone,” she said, following his gaze into the branches. “Unusual. Parrots are flocking birds. If one flies off, the mate, at least, goes too. Usually the whole flock goes. The bird seems to be doing fine, though. Feathers aren’t ragged and he’s plump enough.”