The Codex (15 page)

Sally nodded.

“You tend the fire,” said Tom. “I’ll pole, and then we’ll switch off. We won’t stop until we reach Pito Solo.”

“Right.”

Tom pushed the boat back into the river and poled close to the flooded forest, listening for the motorboat. Soon they came to a small side channel winding away from the main one, and took it.

Tom said, “Somehow I don’t think Lieutenant Vespán had any intention of bringing us back to San Pedro Sula. I think he planned to have us fall out of his helicopter. If it weren’t for that missing part, we’d be dead.”

19

Fenton looked up into the vast canopy that arched above his head and noted that night was falling in the Meambar Swamp. With it came the whine of insects and a steamy miasma of rot that rose up from the shivery acres of muck that surrounded them, drifting like poison gas among the giant tree trunks. Somewhere in the depths of the swamp he could hear the distant shriek of an animal, followed by the roar of a jaguar.

It was the second night in a row that they could find no dry land to camp. Instead, they had tethered the dugout under a group of giant bromeliads in the hope that their leaves would help keep out a steady rain. They did no such thing, instead channeling the rain into streams that could not be avoided.

The Teacher lay in the bottom of the dugout, in the rain, huddled against the heap of supplies, wrapped in a wet blanket and shivering despite the suffocating heat. The cloud of mosquitoes that enveloped them in a mewling fog was especially thick about his face. Vernon could actually see them crawling about his mouth and eyes. Vernon reached out and spread some more deet on his face, but it was a hopeless task. If the rain didn’t wash it off, the sweat did.

He glanced up. The two guides were in the front of the boat, playing cards by flashlight and drinking. They had hardly been sober since the beginning of the trip, and Vernon was horrified to discover that one of the ten-gallon plastic jugs that he thought contained water was actually full of homemade aguardiente.

Vernon hunched over, swaying and hugging himself. It wasn’t quite dark; night seemed to be coming very slowly. There was no sunset in the swamp: The light went from green to blue to purple and then black. At dawn it was reversed. Even on sunny days there was no sun, just a deep green gloom. He felt desperate for a bit of light, a breath of fresh air.

After four days of wandering in the swamp, their guides had finally admitted that they were lost, that they had to turn around. And they had turned the boats around. But they only seemed to go deeper into the swamp. This certainly wasn’t the way they had come. The guides were impossible to talk to; although Vernon spoke Spanish fairly well and the guides knew some English, they were often too drunk to speak any language. For the past few days, the more lost they seemed to become, the more loudly the guides denied it and the more they drank. And then the Teacher had gotten sick.

Vernon heard a curse from up front. One of the guides threw down his cards and staggered to his feet, rifle in hand. The boat rocked.

“Cabrón!” The other one had swayed to his feet, gripping a machete.

“Stop,” Vernon yelled, but as usual they ignored him. They cursed and came together in a drunken scuffle; the rifle went off harmlessly, there was more grunting and scuffling, and then the two guides, none the worse for their altercation, settled back down in the boat, gathered up their spilled cards, and redealt as if nothing had happened.

“What was that shot?” the Teacher asked belatedly, opening his eyes.

“Nothing,” said Vernon. “They’re drinking again.”

The Teacher shivered, drawing the blanket tighter. “You should take away that gun.”

Vernon said nothing. It would be stupid to try to take away their gun, even when they were drunk. Especially when they were drunk.

“The mosquitoes,” the Teacher whispered, his voice quavering.

Vernon squirted some more deet into his hands and gently smoothed it over the Teacher’s face and around his neck. The Teacher sighed with relief, gave a quick shiver, and closed his eyes.

Vernon pulled his wet shirt about himself, feeling the heavy rain on his back, listening to the sounds of the forest, the alien cries of mating and violence. He thought about death. It seemed that the question he had been seeking an answer to all his life was about to be answered for him, in an unexpected and quite horrifying way.

20

For two days, a deep and protective cloak of mist lay on the river. Tom and Sally poled upstream, following winding side channels and keeping a strict policy of silence. They traveled day and night, taking turns sleeping. They had little to eat except Sally’s two candy bars, which they rationed, bit by bit, and some fruit Sally collected on the way. They saw no sign of the soldiers pursuing them. Tom began to hope that they had given up and gone back to Brus, or had gotten hung up somewhere. The river was riddled with sandbars, mudbanks, and sunken logs to hang up a boat. Waono had been right.

The morning of the third day the mists began to lift, exposing two dripping walls of jungle lining the blackwater river. Shortly thereafter, they spied a house on stilts built over the water, with wattle walls and a thatched roof. Beyond that a riverbank appeared, with granite boulders and a steep embankment—the first dry land they had seen in days. A dock appeared at the water’s edge like the one at Brus—a rickety platform of bamboo poles lashed to slender tree trunks sunk in the muck.

“What do you think?” Tom asked. “Should we stop?”

Sally stood up. A boy was fishing from a platform with a small bow and arrow.

“Pito Solo?”

But the boy had seen them and was already running away, abandoning his rod.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Tom. “If we don’t get something to eat, we’re finished.” He poled into the dock.

Sally and Tom jumped out, and the platform creaked and swayed alarmingly. Beyond, a rickety gangplank led to a steep dirt bank, which rose out of the flooded jungle. There was nobody to be seen. They scrambled up the slippery embankment, slipping and sliding in the mud. Everything was soaking wet. At the top was a small open hut and a fire, with an old man sitting in a hammock. An animal was roasting on a spit of wood. Tom eyed it, smelling the delicious aroma of roasting meat. His appetite was tempered only slightly when he realized it was a monkey.

“Hola,” said Sally.

“Hola,” said the man.

Sally spoke in Spanish. “Is this Pito Solo?”

There was a long silence while the man looked at her blankly.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” said Tom.

“Which way is the town? Donde? Where?”

The man pointed into the mist. There was the sharp Cry of an animal, and Tom jumped.

“There’s a trail here,” Sally said.

They started up the trail and soon came to the town. It sat on a rise above the flooded rainforest, a motley collection of wattle-and-daub huts with roofs of tin or thatch. Chickens strutted away from them, and skinny dogs slunk along the walls of the houses, eyeing them sideways. They wandered through the village, which seemed deserted. It ended as quickly as it began in a wall of solid jungle.

Sally looked at him. “What now?”

“We knock.” Tom picked a door at random, knocked.

Silence.

Tom heard a rustle and looked around. At first he saw nothing, and then he realized that a hundred dark eyes were peering at him from the jungle foliage. They were all children.

“I wish I had my candy,” Sally said.

“Take out a dollar.”

Sally removed a dollar. “Hello? Who wants an American dollar?”

A shout went up, and a hundred children burst from the foliage, shouting and jostling, their hands extended.

“Who speaks Spanish?” asked Sally, holding up the dollar.

Everyone shouted at once in Spanish. Out of the hubbub an older girl stepped forward. “Can I help you?” she said, with great poise and dignity. She looked about thirteen and was pretty, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and two gold earrings. Thick brown braids went down her back.

Sally gave her the dollar. A great ahhh of disappointment went up from the group, but they seemed to take it with good humor. The ice, at least, was broken.

“What is your name?”

“Marisol.”

“That’s a nice name.”

The girl smiled.

“We are looking for Don Orlando Ocotal. Can you take us to him?”

“He went away with the yanquis more than a week ago.”

“Which yanquis!”

“The tall angry gringo with the bites all over his face and the smiling one with the gold rings on his fingers.”

Tom swore and looked at Sally. “Sounds like Philip got our guide first.” He turned back to the girl. “Did they say where they were going?”

“No.”

“Are there any grown-ups in town? We’re going upriver and we need a guide.”

The girl said, “I will take you to my grandfather, Don Alfonso Boswas, who is the head of the village. He knows everything.”

They followed her. She had about her an air of self-possession and competence, reinforced by her straight posture. As they passed among the crooked huts, there was a smell of cooking that made Tom almost faint with hunger. The girl led them to what looked like the worst hut in the village, a leaning pile of sticks with almost no mud remaining in the cracks. It was built next to a muddy expanse that served as the town plaza. In the middle of the plaza stood a bedraggled cluster of lemon and banana trees.

The girl stood aside at the door, and they stepped inside. An old man sat in the center of the hut, on a stool too low for him, his bony knees sticking out of the great holes in his pants, a few wisps of white hair coming off his balding skull in random directions. He was smoking a corncob pipe, which had filled the hut with a tarry smell. A machete lay on the ground next to him. He was small and wore glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him a wide-eyed look of surprise. It was impossible to imagine he was the chief of the village; he looked, instead, like the village’s poorest man.

“Don Alfonso Boswas?” Tom asked.

“Who?” The old man cried, picking up the machete and waving it about. “Boswas? That scoundrel? He’s gone. They ran him out of town long ago. That good-for-nothing was living too long, and he just sat and smoked his pipe all day and looked at the girls passing his hut.”

Tom stared at the man in surprise, then turned to look for the girl. She stood in the doorway, suppressing a giggle.

The old man laid down the machete and laughed. “Come in, come in. I am Don Alfonso Boswas. Sit down. I’m just an old man who likes to tell a joke. I have twenty grandchildren and sixty great-grandchildren, and they never come to visit me, so I must tell jokes to strangers.” He spoke a curiously formal, old-fashioned Spanish, using the usted form.

Tom and Sally took two rickety stools. “I’m Tom Broadbent,” he said, “and this is Sally Colorado.”

The old man stood, bowed formally, and reseated himself.

“We’re looking for a guide to go upriver.”

“Humph,” he said. “All of a sudden these yanquis are all crazy to go upriver and get lost in the Meambar Swamp to be eaten by anacondas. Why?”

Tom hesitated, nonplussed by the unexpected question.

“We’re trying to find his father,” said Sally. “Maxwell Broadbent. He came through here about a month ago with a group of Indians in dugout canoes. They probably had a lot of boxes with them.”

The old man looked at Tom, squinting. “Come here, boy.” He reached out with a leathery hand and grasped Tom’s arm in a viselike grip, drawing him closer. He peered at him, his eyes magnified grotesquely by the glasses.

Tom felt as if the old man were peering right into his soul.

After a moment’s scrutiny, he released him. “I see that you and your wife are hungry. Marisol!” He spoke to her in an Indian language. The girl left. He turned back to Tom. “So that was your father who came through here, eh? You don’t look crazy to me. A boy with a crazy father is usually crazy, too.”

“My mother was normal,” said Tom.

Don Alfonso laughed uproariously and slapped his knee. “That is good. You are a joker, too. Yes, they stopped here to buy food. The white man was like a bear, and his voice carried half a mile. I told him he was crazy to go on into the Meambar Swamp, but he did not listen. He must be a great chief from America. We had a good evening together with many laughs, and he gave me this”

He reached over to where some burlap sacks were folded up, fumbled about with his hands, and held something toward them in the palm of his hand. The sun struck it, and it glinted the color of pigeons blood, with a perfect star shining in it. He placed it in Tom’s hand.

“A star ruby,” breathed Tom. It was one of the gems in his father’s collection, worth a small, perhaps even a large, fortune. He felt a sudden rush of emotion: It was so like his father to make an extravagant gift to someone he liked. He had once given a panhandler five thousand dollars because the man amused him with a witty remark.