Two to Tango (Nick Madrid)

by Peter Guttridge

  "And no traffic cop would dare to pull them over." I turned my head and saw the log-like object some fifteen yards away. "Okay well I think we should climb up the nearest tree here. Don't let him know you're scared. Animals can sense it"

  "I don't think these things can be called animals. Theyre primeval aren't they-Nick, it's moving."

  Our speed in getting up the tree from a standing start must have beaten all records, especially as I was still clutching Bridget's vanity case. We stopped some fifteen feet up. The caiman waddled very deliberately over and stopped beneath the tree.

  I looked down on it with mounting fear. It was some nine feet long. Bridget was looking down, too.

  "They can't climb can they?" Bridget said, hysteria at the edges of her voice.

  "Not a chance," I said, trying to sound confident. "Though there is a Caribbean one that can-"

  With remarkable suddenness the caiman reared up on its hind legs, held still for a moment, then hurled itself up towards us. It's massive head was suddenly right in front of my face.

  "-Jump!" I yelled, rearing back and thrusting the only thing I had-Bridget's vanity case-into its open jaws.

  The caiman clamped its jaws shut in some kind of reflex and dropped back to the ground with a juddering thud.

  "We are in the Amazon aren't we?" I said, my voice shaking. But when I looked round Bridget had clambered another twelve feet up the tree. I climbed after her.

  "Where's my vanity case?" she said accusingly.

  I pointed down.

  "Oh fuck," Bridget said. "He's got my bloody fags. And my tampons."

  "Tampons?" I said. "Is it-are they, er, needed?"

  "Will be in a couple of days," she said, halting a few feet higher and wrapping an arm round the trunk of the tree.

  "That explains it."

  "What?" she said sharply. "Explains what?"

  "Nothing," I said quickly. "Absolutely nothing"

  I groaned. Bugger the caiman, the chances of surviving the night with Bridget sans fags immediately pre-period were pretty remote.

  The caiman jumped again. I'd read the Caribbean caiman could jump six feet into the air to catch its prey He was short a few feet.

  "You're sure they can't climb," Bridget asked shakily.

  "Of course they can't, don't be silly"

  "Silly? I've just seen one jump six feet in the air, don't tell me I'm being silly."

  "Yeah, but would it be jumping if it could climb?"

  As I said this the caiman sidled off and slipped quietly into the water.

  I wondered what it had heard. I couldn't see the river for the branches of the tree we were in.

  "What the fuck is a Caribbean crocodile doing here?" I said.

  "Tourist? Extended family? Visiting relatives?"

  I looked nervously up into the tree.

  "What are you looking for?"

  "Nothing," I said.

  She glared at me.

  "Anaconda-you knowpythonorboa constrictor-renieniber we were told the difference when we were in Edinburgh."

  I'd had a close encounter with a large python in a flat I was renting the previous year doing the festival. I'd avoided harm. The flat's cat hadn't fared quite so well.

  "I mean what are the odds on being menaced by a giant snake twice in a lifetime?" I said.

  "What, in theAmazon?"she said sourly, producing an umbrella from the pocket of her jacket. I looked at it in bemusement.

  "What you're going to prod it to death? Come on the chances of us climbing up the exact same tree a python is sleeping in-trust me I know about these things"

  "As I recall from Edinburgh your knowledge of wildlife is gleaned almost entirely from movies. I'm not sure we can rely on your childhood memories of The Jungle Book for an awareness of jungle craft."

  I looked back up at my question mark.

  "Here," Bridget said, handing me the net curtains. "Otherwise the mosquitoes will bite us to death."

  The branch was broad. It was a hardwood tree but quite comfortable. Any other time the noises of the night would have bewitched us-toads, cicadas, the moth that rattled its wings.

  In the distance lightning quietly illuminated a heavy bank of clouds. We huddled together against the trunk, the netting wrapped round us.

  "You didn't see a marzipan house did you?" Bridget muttered before she fell asleep against my chest.

  When I awoke the good news was we hadn't been bitten by too many mosquitoes.The bad news was we were covered in heron shit. I looked up as the last of them flew away, its farewell gift plummeting past me onto the branch below.

  It was raining, although under the canopy of the tree we were fairly dry. Well, aside from the humidity.

  "So-now what do we do?" I said to Bridget as the sun burst through the trees around us. We looked around. We were as near to the river as it was possible to get. More to the point we were all of 300 yards from the encampment.

  "Well, we can't move-they'll find us. We have to stay here until later in the day when help arrives-and if it doesn't then we try to take a boat. With luck they'll think we're miles away."

  Half an hour later the young boy ran down the muddy steps to the river bare-chested, machine gun in his hand. He looked across to where the boat Joel had taken should have been at anchor then rushed back up the steps.

  Nothing happened after that and the day unrolled into the longest one of my life. At first it was quite interesting. We saw a school of freshwater dolphin break the surface and leap into the air at regular intervals during the morning.

  I was a bit blase about them-there's a place I go to in Crete to do yoga where the dolphin come right into the bay I confess to carnal relations with a woman who actually did that most New Age of things and actually swam with dolphins. That's how desperate I can get.

  Bridget wasn't blase, she was totally indifferent. As she was to the birds of all descriptions-fisher hawks swooping down to steal fish from just below the water's surface, herons, pairs of macaws, parrots, oropendula vultures.

  We had some water and a couple of melons I'd brought from Leticia. But the tree got increasingly uncomfortable. We spoke little. Even less when a fisherman and his family settled below in a dugout canoe. We couldn't say anything in case they were in cahoots with the guerrillas-though I've never been terribly sure what a cahoot is.

  The Amazon teemed with fish, the commonest of which were the dogfish, catfish, and of course the jolly old piranha. Their fishing rods were twigs, their bait bits of fish, from which I deduced they were fishing for piranha.

  The fisherman was kneeling in the front, paddling, his wife and two children were behind him.The boat nudged the base of our tree with a hollow thwack.

  After an hour of them sitting there Bridget whispered to me.

  "I need to go to the loo."

  I'd been thinking the same thing. It was hard to see how we could without alerting the fisherfolk to our presence in a rather immediate way. However, I had another reason for not doing. I'd read about a parasitic fish called the candiru.You don't want it to catch you pissing in the Amazon. It travels up your flow of urine then lodges in your urethra. there. It has barbs that make getting it back out virtually impossible-short of amputation that is.

  The fisherman and his family moved off around three in the afternoon. They'd caught nothing. We glugged the last of the water. Bridget looked tearful.

  "You okay?"

  "It's just connections-I finally got my Harvey Nicks card back after the bank manager cut up all my credit cards. It was in my purse in the vanity case."

  "Are you saying you don't altogether like it here?"

  She didn't answer, just looked around at what I had fondly come to think of as our tree.

  "Bottom line-what does your book say about other things we can catch in the ju-what is that?"

  As she spoke she grabbed me.An enormous blue moth with the wingspan of a small aeroplane wafted by.

  "It's a giant blue moth," I said.

  "Is t
hat so-called," she said, grabbing me again,"to distinguish from this one which might be characterized as a smaller-but not much smaller-red moth?"

  "You got it."

  "Okay-you were saying."

  "Well, aside from the mosquitoes carrying who knows how many kinds of malaria, the ants that have already bitten us to death, the vampire bats that can give us rabies, there are chiggers which attack our ankles, some thing that burrows into your skin between your toes and works its way up your bone marrow-yech-then there's"

  "Okay-thanks for the resume. I think we'll leave it there. Well, we have two choices. We can either stay up this tree and starve to death-not to mention suffer poisoning from splinters up my buns-or we can go back to the guerrillas."

  "I think they must have gone by now, otherwise we would have seen them searching for us. And, if they haven't, they'll be pissed at us"

  "Yes, but they need us alive and well. But whatever we do, I need to get down from this tree pretty damned fast for an urgent call of nature. I don't know what that diet of piranha, cassava, and fried bananas has done to you but my stomach is churning something terrible."

  "Snakes," I said quietly.

  "Huh?"

  "I'd forgotten snakes, lurking under every bush."

  "Waiting for some genteel Englishwoman to lower her bum on them no doubt."

  "I can't imagine that would be their idea of a good time. Genteel?"

  Bridget ignored me as she shinned-with remarkable dexterity actually-back down the tree. She walked into the low undergrowth, turned, squatted, looked at me.

  "Well, come on, you're going to have to keep a lookout for snakes."

  "What am I supposed to do if I see one?"

  "Hit it with the torch. Step on it. Wrangle it. Anything so long as it doesn't bite me."

  Greater love hath no man for a friend than that he shall stand beside her on the lookout for snakes as she squats in the middle of the Amazonas with what shortly turns out to be dysentery.

  When she'd finished we moved down to the river's edge and looked across at the dug-out canoe bobbing in the water against the opposite bank.

  "You should swim across," she said. "Joel said it's quite safe if it's not feeding time."

  "When's feeding time?"

  She shrugged.

  "Didn't say but the odds must be in your favor"

  A dolphin suddenly came out of the water, arced its back, and slid back beneath the surface. It came back out and did a kind of triple jump, with twists.

  "I can't imagine dolphin, caiman, and piranha would share the same bit of water can you?" I said.

  "If you say so," she said.

  "Oh fuck," I said, stepping into the brown water, my foot almost immediately sinking into mud. Taking a deep breath I pushed myself into the water and started to swim.

  I didn't make much progress at first, but then doing backstroke with one hand whilst attempting to protect your manliness with your other probably isn't the most effective stroke. After ten yards or so I rolled over-I was so frightened there was scarcely any manliness to protect. I made a mental note to muse on some other occasion on the remarkable mutability of the male genitalia.

  Even doing the breaststroke I made fast if splashy progress. I was about halfway across, my body attuned to the slightest ripple of water or stray piece of vegetation when something nudged my side.

  I almost drowned there and then. I jerked away from what I imagined to be a caiman's slavering jaws, bicycling my legs as my head went under. When I broke the surface again it was to come eyeball to eyeball with a dolphin.

  Just what I needed-a playful dolphin. It nudged me with its long beak again, then slipped under the water, rubbing past my body, and emerging on the other side.

  I was trying to figure out if I could hitch a lift on it to the other bank when I heard pops of gunfire coming from the hotel up on the hill. Okay, so the guerrillas hadn't left.The next moment the dolphin ducked under the water again as a motor launch came from nowhere and headed straight for me.

  I was about to follow the dolphin's example when a figure in combat fatigues, face daubed in camouflage paint, appeared at the prow of the boat, machine gun in hand, and called out in a familiar voice:

  "Got yourselves in a bit of bower, aintcha?"

  Back on shore Bridget was surrounded by half a dozen other men in the same outfits and camouflage gloop. The Cockney who'd rescued me in the toilet back in Leticia and had just now fished me out of the water was talking into a radio handset as the boat headed for the shore. He'd introduced himself as Harry.

  Two of the men on shore lifted Bridget into the boat and then followed her in.The leader spoke into a radio microphone and five minutes later a powerful motor launch pulled in beneath our tree.

  "So-you guys okay?" Harry said. "Sensible of you to hole up until we found you. All kinds of nasty things in the jungle."

  "Like?" Bridget said.

  "Pick up hookworm round here really easy, just by walking barefoot on infested earth," one of the other men said. "Down on the shoreline here, lots of sandflies. Some of them carry cntaneous icishmanias-gives you a sore that won't heal."

  "Then, of course," Harry resumed, "if you're unlucky enough to be bitten by a venomous snake, spider, scorpion, or even river creature you got problems."

  "I thought they had serums for all that stuff?" Bridget said.

  "Sure they do but they need to know what kind of venom it is. Ideally you got to catch the animal and take it with you for identification."

  "Naturally"

  "Brave of you to go in the water," Harry said to me. "You didn't piss in it did you? Only there's this fish-"

  "I know," I said.

  "Swims up the urine-"

  "I know-" I said more firmly.

  "So did you? Did you piss in the water?"

  I looked from him to Bridget and back again.

  "Not intentionally," I mumbled. A couple of the other men guffawed. They looked the kind who would. "How did I know the dolphin wasn't a caiman until it came out of the water?"

  "Caiman are easy," a brawny, broad-shouldered guy said. "Punch it between the eyes to kill it.Tail meat is very tasty."

  "I'll remember that for next time," I said.

  Harry laughed, slapped me on the shoulder.

  "It's okay mate, the candiru fish wouldn't be able to get through your trousers."

  I smiled foolishly.

  He offered his hand to Bridget.

  "What about my luggage?" she said.

  "Was it up at the hotel?" Harry shook his head. "Nothing there now."

  Bridget gave me her basilisk stare.

  "Fucking great," she said, clambering into the boat. I was, I knew, dead meat.

  "All you've got to worry about now is the water you swallowed when you went under.What Puerto Nineira drinks today, seventy-odd communities up the river pissed last week."

  I rubbed my stomach and subsided back in my seat. He handed me a flask of water.

  "Seem to be forever thanking you," I said.

  "You always so danger prone or is it just your lucky week?" he said.

  I took a swig of water but said nothing.

  "Big bloke like you," he continued, "look like you should be able to look after yourself."

  "He does yoga," Bridget said.

  "Ali," Harry said, as if that explained everything. I was sure I heard one of the other men mutter, "Powder puff."

  "What are you guys-SAS?"

  "That would be telling wouldn't it?" Harry said.

  "Secret mission, huh?" I knew the SAS were flown in to rescue British hostages all the time over here.They were advisers on the siege in Lima when the Tupac Amaru held all the guests at some shindig at the Japanese embassy hostage. I also knew they'd been used to help fight the drug cartels. "You're chasing the drug barons or the guerrillas?"

  "We're not here," Harry said levelly. "You never saw us. And I wouldn't advise you to go round saying the SAS were operating here."

 
It was kind of a threat and whilst I'm not quite the pacifist Bridget was suggesting by saying I did yoga, as if there were an automatic link-actually, the yoga I do is quite vigorous, thank you very much-I wasn't into macho stuff.

  Besides, I'd seen aTV documentary once where an SAS man was explaining how he got out of trouble if he was in bother in a pub-"I'd bite the guys nose off. That usually does the trick" I imagine it would.

  "Did Joel come and get you?"

  The leader nodded slowly.

  "In a manner of speaking."

  His radio crackled into life and he moved to the front of the boat, speaking quietly into it.

  We pulled in at Puerto Nineira. I'd been wondering what Harry had meant by his "In a manner of speaking" about Joel. When I saw his boat docked at the bar with a tarpaulin over something lying in the prow I realized what he meant.

  Harry nodded when I gave him a questioning look.

  "Boat drifted down here. The soldiers found it"

  Bridget and I made to cross over into Joel's boat. Harry motioned us back.

  "You don't want to see. He had his throat cut. Almost took his head off."

  I swallowed.

  "Where are the soldiers now?" Bridget said.

  "Back at base. British hostages not something they want to get mixed up in," Harry said. "They tipped us the word. Nice life they've got. No real danger from either guerrillas or drug barons. But there is some drug activity here-somewhere in the middle of the jungle are all the drug refining factories."

  "And that's why you're here?" I persisted.

  "Leave it out, will ya?" he said. "I told you-we ain't ere-okay?"

  "What happened to the guerrillas?"

  "Not the kind of question to ask in polite society, Nick," Harry said.

  "There was a young couple," I said.

  "I should leave it, son," he said, fixing me with a cold blue stare.

  "No, we want to know," Bridget said.

  "Usual rules of engagement darling. They fired on us, we returned fire."

  "They're all dead?"

  "Couple.The rest melted away into the jungle, as you might say." He held our look. "Don't be too grateful we got you out now willya?"

  It was a four-hour trip down to Leticia. The humidity was intense but I didn't realize it until we slowed and the breeze lessened and I immediately started to leak water.