Whirlwind

by David Klass

  I am a point of light now, above an abyss. I spread my arms and dive forward, and somehow grab P.J. as she screams and starts to plummet. My momentum carries us back over the edge of the pit to the stone floor.

  50

  I lie there in darkness, holding P.J. tight. This girl. This girl from Hadley-by-Hudson who I love and have come so far to find. Only her. She clutches me back and whimpers, and I am crying, too.

  I know we’re still in grave danger. There’s nothing I can do. The ordeal of crossing the bridge was too much for me. The panic that I suppressed for so long now seizes control. I’m exhausted. My legs cramp into Gordian knots. My right foot starts to throb. I shake uncontrollably.

  I sense the colonel standing above us, watching. There’s no way I can get up and fight him. We’re at his mercy. But he doesn’t push us into the pool. He doesn’t strangle us.

  I’m vaguely aware of time passing. Other men creep hesitantly into the room, summoned by their commander.

  They stay back as he bends close to me, and his voice is soft and musical again. “Well done, Jack. I like survivors. I reward the brave. You told me what you know. It’s of little use to me, but I will keep my side of the bargain and let you both go. Here are my terms. Leave the rain forest. Never return. Never help the People of Dann again, or I will find you.”

  I lie there on the stone floor, clutching P.J. and trying not to shiver. He’s clearly waiting for some sort of response. Somehow I manage to look up at him and nod. Then I gasp, “My dog.”

  “You can take that mindless cur if you want.”

  “And the boy.”

  “Fine. I have no use for a tongueless twit.”

  I know I should stop. I can feel P.J.’s heart beating fearfully. I should quit while I’m ahead, and get her out of here. If he really is willing to let us go, we should make a beeline for the nearest exit and not look back till we’re in North America. Still, I can’t stop myself from gasping out, “Ernesto … and the kids in the cell …”

  The colonel laughs. “Such nerve! Who are you? Moses? You want to lead your people out of bondage? The truth is, I have no use for them. Weak as they are, and diseased and addle-brained, they’ll slow you down. But if you want them, you can have them. It will give me a chance to empty the stinking refuse from my prison. Take your chosen people and head out into the wilderness.”

  He nods to his henchmen. “Get them out of here.”

  Strong arms haul us up. P.J. and I won’t release each other, so the guards half carry, half drag us to a door behind where the colonel was standing.

  As we pass him, he reaches out and puts a restraining hand on my shoulder. It’s a soft hand, but it tightens till it feels like he might snap my collarbone. His voice sounds in my ear: “Goodbye, Jack. I’ve told you the truth and I’m giving you a chance at a happy life, which is more than your own father ever did. Remember one thing—if you ever make contact with Kidah, or try to help the Dannites in any way, I’ll find you and make you wish you had fallen into that pool with the candirú.”

  51

  It’s an armada of the pathetic. In twos and threes they are let out of their dark cells and stumble down to the river under the watchful eyes of armed guards.

  P.J. and I stand near a dozen dugout canoes, holding hands silently, and we watch the sad parade approach. They limp and sway and lean on each other for support—men, boys, and even a few women and little kids. Some of them have tremors, others have been in prison for so long that they look terrified at the prospect of freedom. The colonel’s phrase comes to mind—the weak, the diseased, and the addle-brained. He has indeed opened his prison’s gates to cast out the wretched refuse of his teeming cells.

  All the men and boys from my old cell are there. Mudinho, our young companion from the Andes, now looks to be inseparable from Gisco. He waves at me and smiles, glad that I’m okay and pleased to be out in the sunlight. Then he hops into a canoe and snaps his fingers, and Gisco bounds in after him and settles down by his feet. I watch him pat the dog’s snout and give Gisco’s ears a good scratch. The old Gisco would have bitten his fingers off, or at least made a bitingly sarcastic comment. But the new Gisco just drools and wags his mop of a tail.

  I help P.J. into a canoe. We haven’t spoken much since we were let out of the colonel’s fish-tank torture chamber. I think she’s experiencing post-traumatic shock—if that’s possible, since our trauma is not over yet. She watches me at all times, as if afraid that if she so much as blinks too hard I may vanish into the steamy air.

  I sit in front of her and grab a paddle. These canoes are not the sleek machine-tooled and outboard-powered craft that the colonel’s soldiers used to rescue us from the caimans. The dugout P.J. and I clamber into is thirty feet long, and appears to have been chewed by fire from a single log. Its worn hull has an impressive assortment of nicks and knife slashes, not to mention dried chicken feathers glued on with blood.

  My guess is that the colonel’s men intercept fishermen and traders on the river and take whatever they want, including the old dugouts themselves. Our canoe must have belonged to a poultry vendor, who butchered his birds right on the bow. The other canoes in our group look equally decrepit. Something tells me we are being sent off into the wilds of the Amazon with the oldest, flimsiest, and leakiest vessels in the colonel’s fleet.

  I have no idea how I will steer this rudderless log downriver with only a flattened pole to paddle with, but Ernesto comes to my rescue. The self-declared governor general of the free and wild Amazon quietly takes control of the situation. He assigns the weakest of the prisoners to ride with the strongest, and the most experienced native paddlers to help the clueless settlers and city dwellers. P.J. and I fall into that last category, so Ernesto directs the Korubo chief himself to our canoe.

  The chief has undergone a transformation. His eyes are alive now, his very skin seems to be waking up. He jumps into our dugout and pushes off strongly from the mud bank, and soon we are in the lead position, gliding swiftly downriver. Eko taught me to paddle a kayak on the Outer Banks, so even with the flattened pole I’m able to generate some power as he steers expertly from the back.

  The colonel’s compound extends for more than a mile and we pass impressive military fortifications and docks with gunboats. Then the river narrows, and a metal gate runs from bank to bank. At the bottleneck, two soldiers stand outside a concrete guard station. One cradles an enormous rocket launcher in his arms as lovingly as if it were a newborn. I get the feeling he’d like nothing better than to pick off our canoes for target practice.

  We slow down as we approach the gate, till we’re barely moving. The second soldier raises a cell phone and whispers a few words. Then he disappears into the guard station. A minute later we hear the whirring of electronic controls and the metal gate lifts like a drawbridge.

  We paddle under it, and the current stiffens and sweeps us downriver. Soon the metal gate is just a pinprick of gleaming light against the lush background. When it vanishes behind a leafy curve in the bank, and the roof of the guard station sinks out of sight, I hear whooping and clapping and one Indian man breaks into song.

  I understand their joy. “We made it,” I whisper to P.J., turning to take her hand. “Now we’re free.”

  She looks at me. I still have great trouble believing we’re actually here together, in the Amazon. But it’s undeniably P.J. in the flesh, barely two feet from me, in a fast-moving canoe, her long auburn hair trailing in the breeze.

  The same soft lips I used to kiss when we necked in our favorite lookout over the Hudson, when I had nothing more to worry about than an algebra test, now part slightly. The bright eyes that used to dance when they saw me approaching her hall locker in the morning are clouded with shock and worry, but they focus on me.

  P.J. hasn’t said much since we escaped from the candirú pit, so I don’t expect a reply. But she whispers back, “That place is living death, Jack. And that man …” She breaks off for a second, and then finishes bravely
, “But I dreamed of you, and that gave me hope.”

  “I dreamed of you, too,” I reply quickly. “Real vivid dreams, like I could see you and hear you and almost touch you. I knew you were in danger and it drove me crazy that I couldn’t do anything. P.J., it’s my fault that this happened. I’m so very sorry …”

  I stop talking, explaining, and apologizing. She’s gone again—disappeared into some safer place deep inside herself. There will be time for conversation later. Now we need to get away.

  I resume paddling and try to concentrate on the dangers in the river ahead. From jaguars to candirú, I know how deadly this place can be, but I still feel oddly optimistic.

  P.J. said it well—the colonel’s prison was living death. Whatever exotic animal, vegetable, and mineral horrors the Amazon holds seem far less threatening than the human monster we’ve just left behind.

  52

  The Korubo chief paddles in a steady rhythm. The other canoes are strung out in a long chain behind us. Some of them have three or four passengers, others as many as ten. The chief’s concentration is unceasing—his eyes sweep from bank to bank. He keeps us on a fairly straight course, but every now and then he veers to one side. He never offers an explanation for these changes of direction, but his reasoning often becomes alarmingly evident.

  We barely avoid a column of black flies so tiny they’re invisible from thirty yards away. I hear them before I see them—they swarm in a funnel cloud, in such a frenzy that they make the air hum. One of them lands on my arm and takes a bite before I flick it away. There must be billions of them in the tornado-shaped cloud that seems to reach from river to sky. As we pass close, the melodic hum sharpens to a shrill, voracious whine.

  Later, just as we’re about to pass under an enormous tree, the chief steers us into deeper water. The tree has long branches that overhang the river, with dark vines trailing down. As we paddle past, I notice that the thickest of the vines is yellow with black spots. It seems to sense our approach, and moves a few feet away!

  P.J. spots it moving, and she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Jack! It’s a giant snake!”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a big, dumb anaconda,” I try to reassure her. But “big” doesn’t begin to do justice to this colossal serpent. Its tail is wrapped around a high branch, its thirty-foot body dangles down, and its head is submerged. I follow the curve of its yellow neck beneath the surface and spot its trowel-shaped head riding the current. Only its nostrils poke above the water as it waits for something tasty to swim past.

  The anaconda’s slitted eyes rise slowly above the surface to study us. “It knows we’re here!” P.J.’s hand trembles on my back.

  “Canoes probably aren’t high on the list of favorite anaconda foods,” I tell her. “Anyway, I’m bringing you back to Hadley in one piece. I intend to personally walk you up the front steps and deliver you to your father.”

  I hesitate for a second, remembering my reception in our hometown, and decide not to mention that her parents called the police to arrest me, and that her dad took a swing at me. Instead I glance back at her and say, “They’re okay, by the way. Your parents, I mean. I saw them a few weeks ago. They’re very worried about you, but they’re keeping faith.”

  P.J. doesn’t say anything, but a tear rolls slowly down her cheek. I wipe it away, and whisper, “Sorry, but I thought you’d want to know that.” She nods very slightly, leans over, and kisses me on the neck.

  I can tell she’s getting stronger with every hour we put between ourselves and the colonel’s dungeon. Soon we’ll be able to have a real conversation. I look forward to that moment, but I also fear it. Will she believe what’s happened? Can she ever find a way to forgive me?

  Islands start popping up in the river like green buoys. Some of them are just tangles of swampy grass, others feature towering trees. They split the river in half and then in thirds, till we’re completely lost in a shifting wonderland of green islets, bays, and inlets.

  I have no idea where we’re heading, and I don’t really care. When we stop for the night there will be plenty of time to discuss routes and strategy. Right now I’m focused on taking care of P.J., and avoiding biting flies, half-submerged anacondas, and whatever other exotic dangers the dark waters conceal.

  53

  We stop for the night on an island in the center of the river. It’s just exposed grass and mud, with a grove of what look like mangrove trees. A danger light starts flashing in my mind—the island is inhabited! Several canoes lie side by side on the mud beach, just above the waterline. As we draw closer, I see that they’re not canoes but giant black caimans, watching our slow approach with hungry, reddish yellow eyes.

  I don’t really want to hop out of our canoe with the caimans so close, but when the chief jumps into the chest-deep water I reluctantly follow his lead. Soon we’re pulling our dugouts up the slippery bank, barely fifty feet from the latter-day dinosaurs.

  “Won’t they mind us intruding on their turf?” I ask Ernesto as we walk back to help with the other canoes. “How can we get a good night’s sleep knowing they may decide to use us for a midnight snack?”

  “Don’t worry. Caimans are smart,” our leader assures me. “They never take risks. They’ll hear our voices, see our fire, and leave us alone. But since they’re on the island, nothing else will come too close.”

  Using caimans as our personal security system seems like a dangerous plan, but this is not my world.

  The sun touches the treetops, and the Amazon night starts to put its dark arms around us. The river glows a deep shade of purple-black. With every passing minute the animal-and-insect chorus rises in volume and intensity. Night feeders prepare to hunt. Are those frogs, calling to one another? Could that hungry roar be a jaguar? The one we met before screeched.

  The fading light lends urgency to our need to make camp. Ernesto and the chief divide us up and assign tasks. P.J. and I are sent with a group of mostly women and kids to the grove of trees. I soon learn one reason we stopped here. The branches are heavy with a star-shaped fruit that has a slightly bitter taste but is quite edible.

  We gather dozens of them. I put on a little juggling act for P.J., and one of the four fruits I have circling from hand to hand falls out of the loop and plunks me on the nose. The impact makes me lose my balance and tumble off a low branch onto the grass. I land gracelessly, on my butt. When I look up, several of the kids are laughing.

  I glance over at P.J. and she’s smiling, too. It’s the most natural smile I’ve seen from her thus far.

  When we get back with our fruit, I see that the other work crews have been busy. There’s a roaring fire going. I can’t begin to describe how comforting a big fire is with the darkness of the Amazon all around us. Enormous leaves have been interlaced to form a sleeping platform. Someone’s even managed to spear a few fish, and they’re sizzling away on spits.

  I must eat a dozen or so of the fruits, not to mention my share of fish. I see Mudinho chowing down also, and flipping bits of fish to Gisco, who gobbles them up before they hit the ground. At least my old traveling companion still enjoys a good meal.

  When we finish eating I realize that night has fallen. Darkness doesn’t really “fall” in cities, or even suburbs, but in the Amazon it comes down like the shadow of death itself. There’s a depth and density to the rain forest night—the billions of eerie sounds as creatures devour weaker creatures, the swampy smells that ooze off the river, the shifting shadows that joust at the edges of the firelight—beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

  I try to be brave for P.J.’s sake, but the truth is the sounds make me jumpy, the smells seem to stick to my skin, and the shadows conjure up nightmares. I’ll be very glad when the sun comes up.

  Guards are posted, and the other members of our group find places to lie down on the sleeping platform. Gisco and Mudinho curl up near the fire, and both of them appear to fall asleep within seconds. They seem to have blind faith that the people sleeping on either side of the
m will somehow protect them. I hope the old saying about there being safety in numbers is rooted in truth.

  “Should we catch some sleep?” I ask P.J. “We have a big day ahead of us. I think there’s some space over there …”

  But she takes my hand and draws me away from the sleeping platform, to the opposite side of the fire. “No,” she whispers. “I think it’s time for us to talk.”

  54

  On a rock by a fire in the heart of the Amazon I sit down next to my high school sweetheart and prepare to explain to her the details of exactly how I came to destroy her life.

  We’re facing away from the fire, looking out at the shadowy bank and the wide, star-specked river. Every few seconds a fish breaks the surface to gobble an insect, and the ripples make the reflected Milky Way tremble and reshape itself. We’re sitting so close that our shoulders brush. I put my arm around P.J., but she gently undrapes it and enfolds my fingers in her own, holding my hand on her lap, keeping me captive.

  She’s waiting for my story, and she has every right to hear it. I suck in a big breath, but I can’t figure out what to say or where to begin. So I exhale silently.

  P.J. has always understood me better than anyone. She comes to my rescue, speaking first, bringing us back to the unlikely place where it all started. “Do you remember the first time we kissed?” she asks softly.

  “Of course. In the old gym,” I reply, unsure where she’s going but very content to follow. “Under the bleachers. On a Tuesday. I’ll never forget it.”

  “After we broke apart we looked into each other’s eyes, and then we kissed again,” she reminds me softly. “The first kiss was just fun and recklessness and curiosity. But the second one was much more serious. It sealed it. Do you know why I kissed you that second time, Jack?”

  It’s a simple question, but I can’t seem to come up with the right answer. “We’d been friends for so long. Since third grade,” I mumble. “You must have known I was crazy about you. I used to dream about you. And we always respected each other so much. You laughed at my jokes. And—”