State of Wonder (40 page)

Easter stayed with her though he had never followed her out to the Martins before. The sun was high and hot though it was not yet nine in the morning. She carried a very large basket that she had found in the storage room, something the Lakashi had woven out of heavy grass. She had never come so late. In the two hours since she had last taken this trail the jungle had installed an entirely different set of birds screeching out an entirely different hue and cry. The mid-morning shift of insects replaced their early-morning brethren and clicked and vibrated a new and distinct set of messages. Marina kept her mind on the snakes that wrapped around trees and tangled themselves into vines and she placed her feet down carefully. She could not afford to make a mistake now. She stopped for a minute at the edge of the Martins, leaning forward to wipe the sweat off her face with the hem of her dress. The way the bright sunlight came into the field now turned the bark a softer yellow and she stood there, making a point to notice everything. She picked a Rapp and held it up to Easter, then she put it in the basket. She picked another and another and he followed her, going to other trees, taking just a few from every individual community of mushrooms, thinning them out while the basket rounded into a pile of pale blue jewels. No matter how many they picked the plants did not appear to be diminished. Maybe that was part of their secret. She had never realized how many of them there were. Protecting the Rapps meant protecting the Lakashi, and the Martins, and the fertility drug, and the malaria vaccine. No one could ever know where the Rapps had come from. But who had thought to protect Anders? If this is what was available to her then this is what she would use. When she picked up the basket it was scarcely heavier than it had been empty, and she covered the whole thing up with the nightgown and made her way back.

The mushrooms she knew were her best chance but she had Easter carry the peanut butter and the oranges just in case. She loaded all of it onto the boat. Thomas met her on the dock, Benoit was beside him. “I cannot believe what Dr. Swenson has told me,” Thomas said, the panic rising in his voice, “What must Anders have thought, that in all this time we never came to look for him?”

Marina shook her head. “We didn’t know.”

Thomas took her hand. “I am going with you to find him.” The Lakashi were there now, waiting to leap aboard.

It was all a set-up. Dr. Swenson would have called out for Thomas as soon as she was gone, telling him everything, telling him he had to go with Marina, and Thomas, guilt stricken in his ignorance, played right along. But it was not his destiny to see this thing through. “Anders was my friend,” Marina said, and squeezed his thin fingers. “He’s the reason I came here. I think I should be the one to go.”

“I understand that,” Thomas said. “But he was my friend as well and so it is equally my right. And you have no language with which to ask for him back.”

“You don’t speak Hummocca,” Marina said.

“What Benoit and I have between us will be closer to Hummocca than your English. I will not wait on this dock and wonder what’s become of you. I will not wait to see if Anders is alive.” His face shone with such bright earnestness it was nearly unbearable. “I have already made a promise to Dr. Swenson. We are going along.” Benoit nodded his head without understanding exactly what was being promised. Marina thought it was a nod of considerably less conviction.

“If you wait much longer to decide, Alan Saturn will hear about this,” Thomas said. “He will insist on going. He has always been interested in the Hummocca. And Nancy would never let him go without her, you know this, so factor her in as well. I do not imagine Dr. Budi would agree to stay behind to watch Dr. Swenson but I could be wrong. If she insists on coming as well then we will need to put Dr. Swenson on the boat. We could make her a pallet on the deck out of some blankets.”

If Anders were in fact alive in a tribe down river he had been there for more than three months. Marina would not have him there another night. “Alright,” she said, finally. It only mattered that she left right away. It mattered less who was with her. “Alright.”

Thomas nodded gratefully, glad that this part of the negotiations was complete. When he told her their next step was to find a gift she told him about the oranges and the peanut butter but didn’t mention the mushrooms.

“I wish we had more,” he said, looking at the ten lonely oranges with discouragement. “But we will make a good presentation. We will say to them, ‘We have brought gifts’ and ‘Let us have the white man.’ ” Thomas said the two phrases to Benoit in Portuguese and Benoit gave back the closest approximation in Lakashi. Standing on the dock, the three of them repeated the words over and over again. Marina prayed the linguist was correct, that this was an uninteresting language that came off the same predictable root as the languages of all surrounding tribes, though it seemed doubtful the linguist had ever found the Hummocca. The Lakashi interrupted them as they practiced their lines. Benoit tried to explain that the gifts and the white man did not concern them. Marina’s mind clamped down on every syllable, embedded them in her brain—
I have brought gifts. Let us have the white man.

“We should go now,” Thomas said. “Before the others arrive. We can practice when we’re on our way.”

“I need to get some water,” she said, looking around the boat, “and a hat.”

Thomas stepped onto the dock. “I will go,” he said, and then he nodded towards the Lakashi. “You keep them off the boat.” He turned back and raised his hand to her and at that moment Marina realized how easily she could lose Thomas on this trip. Suddenly she pictured him dead, an arrow in his chest, his body slipping over the side of the boat. She shuddered, blinked. How could she risk the life of Mrs. Nkomo’s husband while going off to find Mrs. Eckman’s husband? She tapped Easter hard on the shoulder, motioning for him to start the ignition while she untied the line. As they pulled back, Benoit yelled at her, pointing to the place where Thomas Nkomo had so recently stood, and with that she pushed Benoit backwards into the water. Easter seemed to think this was hysterical, Marina pushing his friend into the river, and he gunned the engine so the two of them could get away.

F
or hours they saw no one, no men on floating logs, no children in canoes. Occasionally a tree full of monkeys would scream at them or a silvered pack of sparrows would sweep past the bow, but other than that they were alone. Marina opened up one of the oranges and gave half of it to Easter. They had peanut butter and a bushel basket of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Marina kept her eyes trained to the right-hand side of the boat, trying to remember which slight parting of branches marked the turn they were supposed to take. “You see that river there?” Alan Saturn had said to her. “You follow that river to the Hummocca tribe.” When finally she saw it, or saw her vaguest memory of it, she tapped Easter on the shoulder and pointed out the turn.

The river that went from the Lakashi tribe to the Jintas was itself a tributary of the Rio Negro. It was a modest river, half the width of the Negro and a fraction of the Amazon, but the tributary they had turned on was lesser still, a wide creek really, narrow and nameless. Marina had felt certain about leaving Thomas and Benoit behind until they made that turn and now she was wishing for all of them—the Saturns and Budi and even Dr. Swenson on the deck in a pile of blankets. She wished she had filled every available dugout with Lakashi and had them paddling along behind her. If there was safety in numbers she and Easter were perilously unsafe. The jungle closed over the entrance and after a few minutes she could no longer see the way out. In some places the trees touched leaves from either side and knit together a canopy, cutting the light into leaf-shaped shadows that covered over the water. Marina imagined Barbara Bovender and Mr. Fox standing silently in the back of the boat behind Milton, all three of them wondering if the turn they had taken could possibly have been the right one.

Easter took down the speed and the boat glided quietly ahead, the trail of purple smoke vanishing ten feet behind them. Marina couldn’t understand how this part of the jungle could be so much worse: those were the same trees; this was the same water. They went along for an hour before the river widened, and then another hour before it narrowed again. Marina stayed close to Easter now. She kept a hand on his back. “I’d like to be out of here before dark,” she said to him, because the sound of a voice, even her own voice, was a comfort, and that was when the arrows came raining down on either side of them, half of them making sharp clicks as they hit the deck while the others parted the water like knife blades and slipped inside. Easter leapt to push the boat ahead but Marina caught his hand. She pulled the throttle down to stop the engine and put her arms around the boy. This, she thought, was the outcome of the letter Mr. Fox had brought into the lab that she and Anders had shared: this moment, these arrows, this heat and jungle. Together she and Easter stared into the matted leaves. There were no more arrows. She opened her mouth and cried out in Lakashi, the series of pitches she sincerely hoped she had remembered correctly. She had a gift. She said it again as loud as she could. “We have brought gifts.” It was ridiculous. They were not words, they were sounds. They were the only sounds she knew.

The wall of trees sat before her silently. She eased the throttle forward to counteract the current of the river that pulled them back. The arrows had fallen at least three feet away from them and Marina was willing to take this as a good sign. It wouldn’t have been so difficult to hit the target had they meant to. She kept her hands on Easter’s back and counted the seconds by the regular beat of his heart. Minutes passed. She called out to the jungle again, a sentence without meaning, and it echoed through the trees until the birds called back to her. She saw a movement in the leaves and then, slipping out from between the branches, a single man came forth, and then another. They were created wholly from the foliage, one and then one more stepping forward to watch her until a group of thirty or more were assembled on the bank of the river, loincloths and arrows, their foreheads as yellow as canaries. The women came behind the men, holding children, their faces unpainted. Marina thought of her father extolling the virtues of the pontoon boat but while it was steady in the water it was nothing more than a floating stage. She and Easter stood on an open hand offered to the Hummocca, and though she waited for her own fear it did not come. She was finally here. This was the place she had been trying to get to from the very beginning and here she would wait for the rest of her life. She tapped at the throttle to hold her place. They watched her and she watched them. Marina pushed Easter behind her and picked up the basket of Rapps. She tried to throw a few mushrooms as far as the shore but they fluttered into the water like a handful of blue feathers. She put down the basket and very slowly took an orange out of the box, holding it up first as an exhibit and then pretending to throw it and then throwing it so that it landed close to the middle of the group of them. They took a step back from it, making a wide half circle, and watched the orange where it lay in the mud until a man stepped forward from the back of the group and reached over for it. His hair was long and the color of sunlight, his beard ginger and gray. He looked to be thinner by half and yet he was there, still himself. Anders Eckman, just as his wife had speculated in the insanity of her grief, had only been missing. When Marina called his name he flinched as if someone had fired a gun.

“Who is it?” he called out.

“Marina,” she said.

He stood there for a long time, the globe of the orange caught between his hands, his shirt filthy and torn, his pants torn. “Marina?”

“I’ve brought a gift,” she said in English and then said it again in Lakashi.

There was a low murmuring on the shore and Anders seemed to be listening to it. “What is it?” Anders said.

“Rapps. I’ve got some peanut butter and some oranges and a very large basket of Rapps.”

One of the men raised an arrow towards the boat and Anders walked over and stood in front of him until he lowered it again. He was saying something now, and then he pressed his thumbs into the orange and pulled it in half, taking out a piece for himself and holding it up to them before putting it in his mouth. Then he divided up the fruit into sections and handed it out to the men who were standing around him. “Do not under any circumstances give them the Rapps,” he said calmly.

“It’s what I’ve got,” she said.

“You’ve got peanut butter. If these people find out about the Rapps they’ll gut every last Lakashi by sundown and clean them out. How did you find me?” he called to her. One by one they cautiously laid the slices on their tongues and as they bit down they turned to Anders in their startled pleasure.

“I’ll tell you some other time,” she said. It was all she could do not to jump over the side of the boat, to swim to him.

Anders pointed back at the boat, and after further conference he called to Marina. “The orange is good. They want to know what you want in return.”

She wondered if he was serious, if he really didn’t know. “You,” she said and then added to that the second sentence she knew,
Let us have the white man.
She wondered if a syllable of it made sense to them. She could feel Easter’s breath through the fabric of her dress. His mouth was pressed against her back. She was an idiot to have brought him. She knew enough to leave Thomas and Benoit behind and then took Easter with her without a thought, like he was nothing more than her talisman, her good luck. No mother would have brought her child into this even if he was the one who understood the river and the boat.