by Sean Rowe
“The second day, more of the same thing. After about three hours we spotted smoke maybe fifty miles from the first camp. We flew right over, and you could see them running for cover. Our plan was to put down, get within a half mile of the place, and pound the shit out of ’em with a few mortar rounds and move in on foot. Nice idea. Like I said, you couldn’t even see the ground, just treetops. There was absolutely no way to land the chopper. So we decide we’re going to use the penetration anchor and slide ourselves down the fast rope. The pilot would take two guys and go back to the first camp we found, the abandoned one, and wait until we radioed for a pickup.
“OK. So we saddle up and go down the rope. Laos all over again, right? The chopper takes off, and the first thing we realize is there’s no way we’re using the mortar. We had a good fix on the village, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the trees again. Once you got down in there, you couldn’t even see the sky. The trees were like a roof over your head, about eighty feet up. The only thing to do was to walk in.
“It was about an hour of bushwhacking until we picked up a trail. I’m figuring there’s no way anyone’s going to be left in that camp by the time we get there because of the racket we’re making. I was wrong.”
“THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN were all there. We waited a long time before we went in, even though we knew they could see us hiding in the trees. They just stood there in front of their chickees, some of the women nursing babies. One of them would walk over and put a little piece of wood on the cook fire and then walk back.
“Now we’re standing around. They’re looking at us, and we’re looking at them. What’s the plan?
“Someone wanted to torch the place and call it a day, and someone else said that was no good, the Indians would just build a new camp, maybe right in the same place. The question got down to: where were the men? None of us spoke any Portuguese, and it didn’t matter because these people had their own language. An old woman came out of one of the chickees and started yelling at us in it. Perez, he was half Mexican, he tries yelling back at her in Spanish, but neither one understands what the other’s saying. The chickees were raised platforms with thatch roofs over the top but no walls, and when the old woman got done yelling, she climbed back up on her platform and lay down in a hammock.
“The only thing that made any sense was to wait there a while for the men to come back to camp, see if they were dumb enough to do that. We should have paid more attention when we flew over, because no one could really remember if we’d seen any men or not when everyone scattered. Which meant we didn’t know if we had just happened to show up when they were off on business, or maybe they split when they heard the chopper. They could be sitting out there watching us right now.
“Lester and this guy James King, at this point they’re both checking out one of the girls, getting ideas about some hammock action for themselves. The women weren’t wearing anything but these little skirts, which was no big thrill because most of ’em were butt-ugly, real short and dumpy with bad teeth. This girl and maybe one other were all right. The next thing, Lester has her by one arm and James has the other, and they’re walking off to the edge of the clearing. And what was weird is that no one seemed to care. The girl wasn’t putting up a fight. The other women look bored, most of them already back under the thatch following Grandma’s example.
“A little while later, Lester and James come back with the girl and big grins on their faces and say they got it figured out: the womenfolk are having their periods. The men go off hunting, like a ritual. What, they’re all on the rag? Sure, says Lester, they get in sync. Happens all the time in sorority houses in Austin.
“I’m pretty wired at this point. This was back when I was eating a lot of crystal. What I’m starting to think is that one problem with our merry band is that no one’s exactly in charge. We decide it would be a good idea to get on the radio and inform our chopper buddies what we’re up to. Which we do, and they say fine, just keep in mind we need a couple hours of daylight to do a pickup and get back home. Otherwise we’re stuck for the night, which nobody was counting on.
“A couple of the other guys want to take the girl out in the trees, but what we do instead is what we should have done from the get-go. The five of us spread out to the edge of the clearing, a few yards into the jungle, and wait, no talking, no smoking.
“Nothing happened. We sat there for seven hours. At four o’clock we gave up and threw all our gear in a pile in the middle of the camp. I got on the radio and started calling for the chopper, but there’s no answer. Nothing. I popped in some fresh batteries: zip. We tried again every few minutes for an hour.
“At that point the only thing to decide is who’s taking first watch. But the next morning we had some decisions to make. What we decided to do was torch the chickees and head east to the abandoned camp and the Huey.
“It took us two days to get there. It would have taken us a week if there hadn’t been a clear trail the whole way. The first day we kept calling on the radio. The second day we just walked. You ever see that movie where those people get shrunk and they’re in this little submarine going through the human body? That’s what this was like. It was like moving through something that’s alive. I mean, there were sounds coming from everywhere, especially at night. Things crashing through the trees way high up, other weird sounds all over the place, screams, grunts, you name it. Krystal gave me a book about the Amazon last year for Christmas. It says there’s hundreds and hundreds of insect species that scientists haven’t even named, and I believe it, on account of I met each one personally that first night, at least the ones that could fly and bite.
“We were not in a good mood when we got to the abandoned camp, but there was the chopper. At first I was happy to see it, but then it started to bother me. I had worked it out in my mind that Lagrange and the others had taken the bird back to the base camp for some reason that would make sense once I knew what it was. What didn’t make sense was for them to be sitting here for two days with no food or water. If the receiver or the transmitter on their radio was screwed up, they would have figured it out pretty quick and come looking for us. They had plenty of fuel. I climbed inside the chopper to check the radio, and it looked OK. It was there, anyway.
“What wasn’t there was the crew. We had about three hours of light left. The first hour we just sat with our backs up against the chopper struts and relaxed. Lester spritzed a few rounds into the trees, and we waited some more, talking about what we were going to eat when we got somewhere with a restaurant. We would have lobbed some mortar rounds, but of course we had ditched the mortar along with the other heavy stuff the first day on the trail.
“There was still no sign of the chopper crew. Maybe they had gone off to find a stream and were on their way back right now after hearing the shooting. We were getting impatient, though, so when Perez found a game trail heading into the jungle on the other side of the camp, we figured that’s the only way they could have gone. One or two of the guys wanted to sit tight with the chopper, but I knew this was no time for splitting up. Finally we all get up and head out, me walking point down the trail.
“About half a mile down, I stopped. I was really tired, more tired than I had realized, and I was coming off the crystal in a major way. I was turning around to say, ‘This is ridiculous, fuck it,’ when James King’s gun goes off right behind me, full auto. What I see as I’m turning is this black guy backed up to a tree getting cut in half by rifle fire, the slugs hitting the tree trunk, thap-thap-thap. At the same time another black guy steps right out of nowhere onto the trail and shoves a spear through James King’s back. The guy with the spear is wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and a diaper. Lester’s shooting it out with someone farther down the trail. I heard a sound behind me, and I’m spinning, clicking off my safety, and KAPOW! Something hits me hard and righteous. Everything goes to white pinwheels. That’s it, lights out.”
“WHEN I CAME TO, it was dusk, and I was sitting up against one of the
chopper struts with the granddaddy of all headaches. I looked over and there was that same guy wearing the Mickey Mouse T-shirt and the diaper, a blue one. He was chewing the meat off a bone and looking at me. I looked back at him, and pretty soon it was like when you’re a kid and you get in a staring contest with some other kid. Then he turned his head and said something to one of the others, and I realized he wasn’t into the stare down at all. He was just looking at me, taking his time, wiping his fingers on Mickey Mouse. And right then I notice that what he’s chewing on is a foot. Lester’s foot, because Lester was the only guy with feet that big.
“Later on when I’m paying attention again, there’s another one holding the end of a stick between his feet and twisting the stick around and around until it broke in two. I knew it wasn’t a stick as soon as I saw it because it’s got Semper Fi on the upper part, with a dagger and roses, but it still looked like a stick. It’s like if you’re ever in the woods at twilight thinking about bears, every other stump is going to look like one. Things look like what your mind wants them to look like, especially in certain kinds of light.
“Now this guy’s looking at me. He raises up the smaller part of the arm and points it at me. There’s some white bone sticking out the front. He’s offering it. I shook my head, which doesn’t mean anything to them, but I guess he got the point. I passed out again after that.
“I felt rain on my face and woke up, and it was dawn: red in the east over the clearing. Mickey Mouse is looking down at me, and he turns and says something to the others that I’m guessing means ‘Breakfast is served.’ I’m looking around for a gun, but there aren’t any extras. I count six guys holding rifles, three more with just spears. I’m thinking, can I get inside the Huey and lock the doors and last long enough to get out of there, except I haven’t flown a helicopter in years, and I can still only see out of one eye, and I’m pretty sure my collarbone is broken.
“What happened next: they’re trying to get me on my feet, pissed off because I’m curled up in a ball, not wanting what’s coming. They give up, and Mickey comes over and kicks me in the side. He starts screaming and pointing toward the western edge of the clearing, the trail, pointing and screaming. They got up and started walking, and so did I, one guy walking behind me to kick me in the ass from time to time if I didn’t keep pace. He would yell up to the front of the line every once in a while, and some of the others would yell back.
“I thought I would pass out, but I didn’t, and the next night we walked into camp. The women were all there, and I could see they had started rethatching the chickees. Grandma comes out to the center of the clearing and kicks me in the leg, hard. I go down on the ground, and I figure, OK, that’s it: I know these guys are hungry after walking nonstop for a day and a half. But I was wrong again. Nobody ate a thing. Everyone lay down and went to sleep. I was surprised I slept, but I did.
“The next day what woke me up was gunshots and screaming. I figured someone had shot someone else with one of the Kalashnikovs, but it was just Mickey, scared shitless but pleased with himself for figuring out how to click off the safety.
“That’s when I saw my chance. I went over and started showing him how to hold the gun, how to snug it up to his shoulder, how to sight down the barrel. I showed him how to load and unload. By the end of the day I had those guys doing basic infantry drills, maneuvers for close combat, mock firefights—what a trip! After a couple more days, some of them left camp and went to gather up all the ammo clips we had dumped our first time down the trail.
“One night I woke up, and there was a face. It was the girl, the one Lester and James King had taken out in the trees. She was squatting down, watching me. What woke me up was her hand touching my hair. After a while she put her hand on my hair again, and then she got up and went away.
“It might have been three months that went by. My eye and the rest of me healed up, and I learned some of their words, but not many. I could say hi to Grandma, but she wouldn’t say anything back. It had something to do with the girl. The girl didn’t have any kids, and it seemed like a problem for her. Several times at night I would wake up and she would be there, squatting down, watching and waiting. Finally I just said to hell with it and fucked her, and after that she left me alone. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I did.
“Needless to say, my homies ran out of ammunition. The huts were all done now. Things would have been boring, except that every so often the men would go off on these walks, and I was expected to go along with them.
“These guys could walk, man. I mean, some days we must have walked thirty miles, and that’s through serious terrain. I would be stumbling and crawling and running sometimes trying to keep up, and I knew if I didn’t stay with them it was all over. Sometimes they got lost, like for days. You couldn’t tell at first, because it didn’t seem like they cared one way or another whether they knew where they were going. The worst thing was, they didn’t eat when they were on these hikes, and we’re talking a week or ten days at a time, easy. Once when I was pretty sure they were lost, we came to a river and they sat down and waited for a day and a night until some guys in canoes came along. I was thinking: what now, they’re gonna jump these mothers? But they didn’t. They got directions from them. They also got a shitload of food, little jungle pigs stretched on sticks that were all piled up in the canoes. I couldn’t believe it, because it didn’t seem like the guys in the canoes got anything in return. They were practically cleaned out. Then everyone starts eating, and it goes on for like three hours. They almost ate everything. I swear to God, they must have eaten twenty pounds of meat apiece. By then it was night, and everyone passed out like they’d been boozing. It was fucking incredible.
“But it wasn’t as incredible as the next trip, because on that one, we’re walking through the jungle again, and the next thing I know there isn’t any more jungle. We walked out into a clearing about three miles wide, and it almost blinded me. There was a road, and we got on it and kept walking and after a while along came a bus. I’m like, what the fuck? These cannibals are going to town? And that’s exactly what happened. We all got on the bus. One of them gave his walking stick to the driver. To me it looked like a stick, but the driver acted like it was a case of Dom Perignon. The closer we got to the city the more the bus filled up, people trying to stay cool with these cannibals on board.
“We drove downtown, and they all got up at the same time and made the bus driver stop at a certain street. The street was mud, but there was a concrete sidewalk. Mickey gets out, he bends down and knocks on the sidewalk with his knuckles and stands up and starts laughing like it was the funniest thing on earth. They all head for the doorway of this store, and just when the last one gets through it, I started running down the street big-time. I didn’t stop running till I came to a harbor. I found the captain of a river ferry who could speak English, and he explained to me how to get out of there.
“Anyway, you asked, so I told. I slipped into the bathroom at the airport to take some money off this guy who looked like a professor. I glanced over at the mirror and freaked out. My hair was totally white.”
There was a long pause. Then it was Manny talking.
“So from all of this you learned that retirement would be best?”
“You’re a dipshit, Manny. You missed the whole point of the story. What I learned? What I learned is I am what I am and a tree is what a tree is. The point is to keep on being it as long as you can. Those guys were cannibals, so they ate my pards. They were doing what a cannibal’s supposed to do.”
“They didn’t eat you.”
“Right,” Kip said. “That’s the part I never quite figured out.”
There was nothing, and then there was the sound of bedsprings creaking.
“Manny,” said Kip’s voice, much softer, “I flat-out love it when you do that.”
11
I WAITED, BUT there was no more story, just a low hum on the tape recording. Something went blink way out at one o’clock, and I figured: masthead
light on a sailboat or a shrimper coming home from the Dry Tortugas. I kept the Walkman on my head and let the hum keep going while I climbed down from the spotting tower and dug in the ice chest. In the tower you had to hang on tight or get pitched against the grab rails. Down here there was less rock and roll but more spray and more engine noise. I stepped up on the side deck to check the view and caught a face full of saltwater off the top of a swell. No more blinks up ahead, though.
No light at all, except the red and green running lights on the bow and the glow coming through a narrow strip of window halfway between me and the bow pulpit. I knelt before I had a chance to fall down, and then I started crawling forward with the beer in my hand. The closer I got to the bow, the more the hull pounded against the swells, and the harder it was to hold on. A stiff breeze was blowing out of the southeast, with plenty of spray coming over the side. Soon I was soaked, but I didn’t care. I had a good buzz going off the beer, and even with the wind, the water felt warm. Veins of warm water streamed across the window strip, and the light coming through the watery glass was warm too, a golden glow.
I lay flat while the boat bucked and got my face down close to the glass. Fontana was on his side a few feet below me with his knees pulled up and his arms folded. I could see plastic tubing coming from somewhere else in the cabin and leading to a square of gauze on his chest. He folded his arms tighter, shaking, and then I guessed he had said something. Julia’s hand and arm appeared and next the back of her head. She threw her hair over one shoulder and got hold of a little rubber port that branched off the IV tubing. Her other hand came into view, holding a syringe with a needle. She sank the needle into the rubber port and began pushing the plunger on the syringe. She was taking her time with it, and before she got done and pulled the needle out, Fontana had stopped shaking. He reached up and took her hand in his and put it against his cheek.
