The Orchid Hunter

by Sandra K. Moore

  That’s when I knew Daley had hired Indians, as well. Good ol’ Daley. He really was starting to brighten up.

  I hightailed it further up the hillside. Here, about three miles from the village, I’d discovered a great hiding place where I could while away the rest of the night until they gave up and quit looking. With the change of plans—I needed to get finished up here and go find Rick—I could still use the hiding place to lose the Indians before doubling back toward the village.

  The climbing rope I’d strung earlier led to a non-stinging liana hammock anchored relatively low, about ten feet off the ground. It’s conceivable for over one hundred and fifty different species of beetle to live in a single tree, and knowing my luck, they’d all be on vacation in my hammock. But I could handle being crept upon for a little while until the Indians tired of looking for me.

  As long as the hammock didn’t house a pit viper, I’d be okay.

  A volley of shots echoed around the ridge as I hooked up my harness and started climbing. What the hell was going on down there? Had Daley lost his mind?

  I reached the hammock and pulled the rope up after me. The sling on the branch above the hammock would have to come down because those sharp-eyed Indians would spot it. Hell, they could shoot a capuchin monkey in the canopy with a bow and arrow at dusk, so they’d easily see my sling, even in the dark, probably because it just wouldn’t look right.

  I toed the hammock gingerly, testing for creeping things and poisonous snakes. Just a few innocuous ants and the requisite handful of beetles amid the rich-smelling muck of decaying leaves and fallen branches.

  It was, of course, damp.

  Before unhooking the sling, I took the precaution of tucking my pant legs into my boots and lacing them up tight to prevent a lower-body attack by the creeping things. My shirt got buttoned up all the way and I tied around my neck the oversize handkerchief I always carried. Then I gathered all my gear inside the hammock with me, quickly lying down to spread my weight across as much space as possible, evening out the pressure on the vines. Just in time, too, because I heard Daley’s voice below.

  “Bloody hell,” he said gruffly. Then in Portuguese, “Tell the Indians to fan out. She’s here somewhere.”

  The last Brazilian said, “What about Quando and Gilberto? What about Silvo?”

  “Don’t worry about them, my friend. They know the rendezvous points.”

  The Brazilian spoke a few words I didn’t understand, and a soft male voice answered. An Indian. It sounded like Daley and the Brazilian moved on. The Indians, of course, were totally silent.

  Then my luck ran out.

  The liana hammock creaked. All along my body the biomass shifted subtly.

  Damn.

  The hammock hitched, jerked and gave in to gravity, vines screaming as they tore along their fibers. The tree branches anchoring them snapped and the hammock slid sideways, tipping me over the edge.

  I hit the ground hard, full out, facedown, knocking the breath out of me just before three hundred pounds of biomass hit. Buried under decomposing plant matter and heavy branches, I burrowed one hand to my right, thinking it might be the shortest way out. My fingers found hard sticks or bones, but no air. I tried the other side. The same. A shallow breath sucked silty bark into my mouth.

  Now’s not the time to panic, I thought. I spat dirt and drew one arm as close to my body as I could. My hand found my shirt. I bowed my back to give myself a little space and managed to get my mouth inside my handkerchief for some clean breaths. Thank God.

  Up was clearly the road to take, but to go there I’d have to forfeit the act of breathing for the time it’d take to swim my way out. If I could wiggle forward and up against the dead weight. Even if I managed to get my shirt over my face so I could breath clean, the biomass would plaster the cloth to my nose and suffocate me in place.

  I was still struggling with my plan of action when I heard voices. The biomass felt lighter as seconds passed, and then hands broke through the muck to latch on to my arms and jerk me out.

  It was like surfacing from a muddy pool, smelly mud and leaves and dead things spraying in all directions as I shook off my rescuers.

  Daley, damn him, was laughing. I wiped the goop from my face, coughed hard a few times, and glared at him and his Brazilian in the dim light of false dawn.

  “Oh, luv,” he said when he could talk without gasping, “you are a sight.”

  The Indians, who were melting out of the shadows, stared at me with something like awe and kept their distance. I guessed liana hammocks weren’t where they were used to hanging out. Half-hoping I’d inadvertently tapped into a myth, I took a single step toward one of them.

  The Indian didn’t move, but Daley held a nasty-looking pistol at my rib cage, his laughter abruptly silenced.

  “Don’t try anything, luv,” he said soothingly, his voice like milk chocolate. He held out his other hand. “I believe you know very well what I want from you.”

  “I can’t give them up,” I said, shaking my head. “Not both of them.”

  “Give me the pack.”

  He pressed the gun’s muzzle against the ribs still sore from the bad plane landing seven days before. Seven days? It felt like a month.

  “Come on, Daley,” I said, trying not to sound like I was desperate, which I was. “I need you to cut me some slack, just this once.”

  His smile would have been beautiful except for the ugly look in his eyes.

  “I see no good reason for honoring that request.”

  “One orchid,” I said. “All I need is one.”

  “As many times as you’ve screwed me over?” he asked softly, that beautiful smile sliding steadily into sadistic menace. “As often as I endured your insults? Your humiliations?”

  “I know I’ve been tough on you but it was only because I knew you were man enough to take it,” I lied. “Leave me one orchid. It’s personal. It has nothing to do with von Brutten or Thurston-Fitzhugh. Believe me.”

  I bit down on a wince when the pistol’s muzzle dug harder.

  “I don’t believe a word that’s coming out of your pretty little mouth,” Daley whispered. “Give me the pack.”

  The desperation abruptly welled up and drowned my pride. “Please, Lawrence,” I said, hating the way my voice shook. “Just this once—”

  “Now.”

  A shrug, and the pack slipped from my shoulders into my hands. He yanked it from my grip and tossed it to the Brazilian, then stepped back.

  Daley barked an order the Brazilian translated. The Indians disappeared into the forest in all directions, making sure I’d have a hard time following them. I didn’t care about the Indians but there was no way I’d let Daley or my orchids out of my sight.

  A rifle cracked nearby, sending us both to the ground for cover. In the confusion, I scrambled over and tried to get a grip on Daley’s gun but my muddy fingers slipped. He swung hard at me. My head thudded when the pistol’s butt clipped my temple. By the time I quit seeing stars, he’d stood and put several steps between us.

  “Trouble in paradise,” he remarked, motioning toward the Yanomamo village below us. “I shall be leaving now, and wish you a very good trip back to your employer. Perhaps we shall see each other again soon. But not too soon, I hope.”

  It was a clear invitation to go after him. I sat up and my eyes had to catch up with me before they could focus on Daley’s back disappearing into the forest. Damn him. The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Rick had been my straight line up until now. I could probably catch Daley on the other side of this range and then—

  Another rifle crack. Shouts. The acrid smell of burning wood. I scrambled to my feet, looked down into the valley just rising into the light of dawn. Gray smoke rose over the village and amid the trees I could see faint tongues of flame. A woman screamed until a pistol shot echoed against the hillside, cutting her off. What the hell had happened? Had the Yanomamo been attacked? By whom? And where was Rick?

>   Daley’s undisguised footsteps thumping over the forest floor faded. My orchids. As of dawn, I had six days to get the orchids and get back. Scooter came first. He always came first.

  I took a single step after Daley and stopped, feet frozen.

  Forgive me, Scooter.

  I started running for the village.

  True dawn was breaking as I reached the village outskirts. Flames shot out of the shapono, its framework a liquid orange skeleton as it burned. Two pistoleiros writhed on the ground in front of it, arrows sticking out of their stomachs. A little pile of Yanomamo dead lay crumpled at the clearing’s edge. I ran to my hut. It still stood, far enough away from the main village to be overlooked. No sign of Rick. Faint screams sounded deeper in the forest. I grabbed the rifle from my duffel and slung it over my shoulder.

  A volley of gunshots led me toward Father João’s hut. I circled wide, trying to figure out from the sounds where the shooters were. The whiff and thunk of an arrow striking flesh, a man’s cry, then a pistoleiro dropped like cut timber three feet in front of me.

  I hoped the Yanomamo would recognize me when they saw me.

  A pistoleiro broke cover and ran toward me, rifle raised. Without thinking I squeezed the trigger at point-blank range. He looked more surprised than hurt, clutching his stomach. I grabbed his rifle as he fell. Five Yanomamo men sprinted past me, bows ready, and flushed a handful of pistoleiros from behind Father João’s hut. The Brazilians ran, then sprouted arrow feathers from their shoulder blades.

  I followed the Yanomamo warriors back toward the flame-lit communal area. Where’s Rick? my gut shouted, but I didn’t have any words I could say to the men to get an answer. The women’s screams became wails when we stepped into the clearing. On the far side of the burning hut, the shaman tended the wounded and Father João directed a child to bandage a woman’s bloody arm. Porfilio, the Shotgun Kid from the gold mine, held a cloth to a man’s chest.

  I scanned the triage area as I walked closer. Where the hell was Rick? A finger of rage stroked my breastbone. If Daley had done anything to him—

  Father João moved. Behind him, a man sat on a downed log with his head in his arms, blood sheening the side of his face and head, running down his forearm. Shot in the neck or face probably. The blood masked his features, made him unrecognizable. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes. Light glinted from the eyeglasses he held.

  Oh God.

  Rick.

  I nearly had my shirt off by the time I skidded to a stop in front of him. “Don’t move.” I dropped to my knees, then ripped a strip off my shirttail to make a bandage. His eyes were shiny white in all the shiny red. “Where were you shot?”

  The right side of his face was thick with blood, his hair clotted with it. My throat tightened up so much it hurt to breathe.

  “Jessie.”

  “Hold still.”

  I gingerly ran my fingers over his temples and into his hair, feeling for the wound and praying he’d just been scraped. So much blood. And I was so damned filthy. What if the wound got infected because my hands were covered with dirt? I wiped my eyes on my muscle-tee’s strap.

  “Jessie.” Our fingers slid greasily across each other as he caught hold of my hands and drew them down in front of him. “I’m not shot. It’s not my blood.”

  That took a minute to register because most of my synapses had short-circuited over the thought of him dying. When his words finally hit home, I clamped my arms around his neck and tried to see how close I could get.

  “I’m okay.” His arms wrapped so far around me that his hands gripped my sides. “I’m okay,” he whispered against my ear.

  In my entire life, a full body hug had never felt so good. The blood’s metallic smell, my earthy, mucky grime, Rick’s slimy cheek, his glasses frames poking my head—I didn’t care about any of it as long as he didn’t let go for about a year.

  Behind us, the wailing subsided slowly. After a moment there was only the crackling of the fire and the occasional crash when a burned hut support collapsed. Men muttered. I heard Father João’s voice. Then the high-pitched, plaintive cry of a child.

  I pulled back to look at Rick. “Where’s Marcello?”

  His forehead tensed, making three long cracks in the rime of drying blood. He bent his head, then raised it and met my gaze. His eyes gleamed with pain. My heart died.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Jessie. There wasn’t—”

  “Where is he?”

  “Father João and I took him into the jungle. It was better that way.”

  “I want to see him.” Tears streamed over my cheeks. “Take me to see him.”

  When I tried to stand, Rick caught me hard against his body and made me look at him. “There’s not enough left of him to see,” he said quietly.

  I stared, not believing. Finally, “This is his blood, isn’t it?”

  Rick nodded.

  My forehead pressed his blood-smeared neck. “What happened?” I asked his top button.

  “Marcello brought Porfilio last night so we could start talks this morning. The colonel must have suspected something, because his strongmen followed them here. Porfilio and I tried to talk to them, tell them not to attack, but they didn’t listen.” Rick’s hands stroked my back. “When they started fighting, Marcello got in the way. That’s all. He just got in the way.” I felt him swallow. “I tried to save him, Jess.” He gave up a sob. “I couldn’t.”

  The damned analytical part of my brain took over and I raised my head. “If he was shot, why was it so bad? Why was there so much—”

  “He wasn’t shot.”

  “You said—”

  “I said he got in the way. Please, Jessie,” he said, his dark eyes pleading.

  He shook his head, refusing to say aloud what I suddenly knew had happened. My chest went leaden with rage. It was a technique played out around the world in every third-world jungle and savannah I’d ever been in. Save the bullets for the adults.

  “Goddamn it!” I shouted, wrenching from Rick’s arms.

  “Jessie.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  I stalked back out to the communal area where the two pistoleiros lay dead. The pile of Yanomamo were, I saw now, children.

  One of the dead men held a blood-covered machete in his hand.

  There are times when the rage doesn’t run out, when it turns in on itself and cools to hardened steel.

  Calm descended on me. I loaded the rifle and fired into the dead man. Then I reloaded for his dead buddy. Then I did it again, and again, until I ran out of shells. When that was done, I hoisted the assault rifle I’d taken from the Brazilian I’d shot and emptied its magazine into them. Finally I took the machete from the dead man’s hand and leaned it up against a rock. I lifted the assault rifle, aimed and punched the stock hard onto the blade. The machete snapped in half.

  I stood for a moment over the dead men and massacred children. Somewhere in the jungle, Marcello lay, broken and bloodied. Probably still wearing that Day-Glo climbing harness. Oh, God. I fell to my knees, holding on to the empty rifle, tears flooding over my soiled hands.

  Why Marcello? Why these kids? They weren’t a threat to anyone. The sheer uselessness of it pummeled my brain and heart, over and over like a relentless tide throwing itself on rock. Useless, the waves said, like Scooter’s illness. Useless like my parents’ deaths.

  It took a while to pull myself together, but when I had, I went back to the triage area. Villagers lay or sat around the flat rock that was Father João’s makeshift worktable. The shaman sat on the table, his face expressionless. The padre heated a knife over a flame. Rick limped as he walked from a villager he’d just bandaged to the operating table.

  “What’s this?” I asked Rick, pointing at his foot.

  “Nothing serious,” he said dismissively. “Twisted ankle, but nothing broken or torn.”

  I shot a glance at Father João, who nodded. “Getting the children into the jungle,” the older
man added, his eyes huge behind his thick lenses. He saw me looking at the sling cushioning his left arm and shrugged. “Broken. It does not matter.” He turned to the shaman.

  The shaman’s shoulder had bled profusely at one point but had stopped. Rick peeled back one of the padre’s precious bandages to reveal a gunshot wound. Father João said something to the shaman, who neither moved nor spoke. The padre muttered briefly under his breath, then pressed the knife tip into the wound. A few minutes later, he’d dug out the bullet. The shaman waited, impassive, apparently not feeling a thing.

  Maybe he could teach me how to do that.

  “We both need a bath,” Rick said to me gently as the shaman moved off. “And you need some rest.”

  “I’m not sure I can sleep.”

  “I’ll bring you something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I muttered automatically.

  “You’re hungry, angry, and tired. I can help two of those. Come on.”

  He made me go back to the hut and eat a hunk of cassava bread. Then he dug out some clean clothes for me. We went to the bathing pool, walking slowly to accommodate his limp.

  “Did you get the orchids?” he asked as we stripped.

  I waited until I was naked to answer. “I lost them. Daley caught me.”

  I freed my ponytail and a quarter pound of dried mud fell out. I took the bar of biodegradable soap Rick offered and dropped into the pool, heading for the ledge where I didn’t have to tread water.

  “All of them?” he asked from the bank.

  I nodded.

  I couldn’t say anything else. It was just too much right then. Standing chin-deep on the rock ledge, I dunked my hair and tried to run my fingers through the wet strands, but no dice. Too many tangles. Too much gunk. I tried starting at the ends, but they caught on my fingers, too. Two nails had split into the quick during my little jaunt and ached beneath their stinging. A dead beetle clung to a knot.

  Dammit, I thought, feeling everything inside me and outside of me going out of control. The orchids, gone. Marcello, slaughtered. Rick, hurt. Scooter, dying. See what happens when you get close? Better I stay away from people. I clenched my teeth and tugged viciously at my hair. Dammit, dammit, dammit.