“Not much better, I’m afraid,” he said in defeat. It was not a discussion he wanted.
After a long silence, Nate eased down to the toilet. When he finished his work there, he pulled the chain above it and left the small room. Light brown river water ran into the toilet bowl and flushed the waste through a tube and sent it directly into the river.
TWENTY-THREE
_____________
I
t was still dark when the engine stopped and woke Nate. He touched his left wrist and remembered he wasn’t wearing a watch. He listened as Welly and Jevy moved below him. They were at the rear of the boat, talking quietly.
He was proud of himself for another sober morning, another clean day for the books. Six months earlier, every wake-up had been a blur of swollen eyes, cobwebbed thoughts, seared mouth, arid tongue, bitter breath, and the great daily question of “Why did I do it?” He often vomited in the shower, sometimes inducing it himself to get it over with. After the shower, there was always the dilemma of what to have for breakfast. Something warm and oily to settle the stomach, or perhaps a bloody mary to settle the nerves? Then he was off to work, always at his desk by eight to begin another brutal day as a litigator.
Every morning. No exceptions. In the final days of his last crash he had gone weeks without a clear morning. Out of desperation
he’d seen a counselor, and when asked if he could recall the last day he’d stayed sober, he admitted he could not.
He missed the drinking, but not the hangovers.
Welly pulled the johnboat to the port side of the
Santa Loura
, and tied it closely. They were loading it when Nate crept down the steps. The adventure was moving into a new phase. Nate was ready for a change of scenery.
It was overcast and threatening more rain. The sun finally broke through at about six. Nate knew because he’d rearmed himself with a watch.
A rooster crowed. They were docked near a small farmhouse, their bow tied to a timber that once held a pier. Westward, to their left, a much smaller river met the Paraguay.
The challenge was to pack the boat without overloading it. The smaller tributaries they were about to encounter were flooded; banks would not always be visible. If the boat sat too low in the water, they might run aground, or worse, damage the prop of the outboard. There was only one motor on the johnboat, no backup, just a couple of paddles that Nate studied from the deck as he drank his coffee. The paddles would work, he decided, especially if wild Indians or hungry animals were in pursuit.
Three five-gallon gas tanks were arranged neatly in the center of the boat. “These should give us fifteen hours,” Jevy explained.
“That’s a long time.”
“I’d rather be safe.”
“How far away is the settlement?”
“I’m not sure.” He pointed to the house. “The farmer there said four hours.”
“Does he know the Indians?”
“No. He doesn’t like Indians. Says he never sees them on the river.”
Jevy packed a small tent, two blankets, two mosquito nets, a
rain fly for the tent, two buckets to dip out rainfall, and his poncho. Welly added a box of food and a case of bottled water.
Seated on his bunk in the cabin, Nate took the copy of the will, the acknowledgment, and the waiver from his briefcase, folded them together, and placed them in a letter-sized envelope. An official Stafford Law Firm envelope. Since there were no Ziploc bags or garbage liners on board, he wrapped the envelope in a twelve-inch square section he cut from the hem of his poncho. He taped the seams with duct tape, and after examining his handiwork declared his package to be waterproof. Then he taped it to his tee shirt, across his chest, and covered it with a light denim pullover.
There were copies of the papers in his briefcase, which he would leave behind. And since the
Santa Loura
seemed much more secure than the johnboat, he decided to leave the SatFone too. He double-checked the papers and the phone, then locked the briefcase and left it on his bunk. Today could be the day, he thought to himself. There was a nervous excitement in finally meeting Rachel Lane.
Breakfast was a quick roll with butter on the deck, standing above the johnboat and watching the clouds. Four hours meant six or eight in Brazil, and Nate was anxious to cast off. The last item Jevy loaded into the boat was a clean shiny machete with a long handle. “This is for the anacondas,” he said, laughing. Nate tried to ignore it. He waved good-bye to Welly, then huddled over his last cup of coffee as they floated with the river until Jevy started the outboard.
Mist settled just above the water, and it was cool. Since leaving Corumbá Nate had observed the river from the safety of the top deck; now he was practically sitting on it. He glanced around and saw no life jackets. The river slapped the hull. Nate kept a wary eye on the mist, watching for debris; a nice fat tree trunk with a jagged end and the johnboat was history.
They went crosscurrent until they entered the mouth of the
tributary that would take them to the Indians. The water there was much calmer. The outboard whined and left a boiling wake. The Paraguay disappeared quickly.
On Jevy’s river map the tributary was officially labeled as the Cabixa. Jevy had never navigated it before, because there had been no need. It coiled like string out of Brazil and into Bolivia, and apparently went nowhere. At its mouth it was eighty feet wide at most, and narrowed to about fifty as they followed it. It had flooded in some places; in others the brush along the banks was thicker than the Paraguay.
Fifteen minutes in, Nate checked his watch. He would time everything. Jevy slowed the boat as they approached the first fork, the first of a thousand. A river of the same size branched to the left, and the captain was faced with the decision of which route would keep them on the Cabixa. They kept to the right, but somewhat slower, and soon entered a lake. Jevy stopped the motor. “Hold on,” he said, and stood on the gas tanks, gazing at the floodwaters that encircled them. The boat was perfectly still. A ragged row of scrub trees caught his attention. He pointed and said something to himself.
Exactly how much guesswork was involved Nate couldn’t tell. Jevy had studied his maps and had lived on these rivers. They all led back to the Paraguay. If they took a wrong turn and got lost, surely the currents would eventually lead them back to Welly.
They followed the scrub trees and flooded thickets that, in the dry season, made up the riverbank, and soon they were in the middle of a shallow stream with limbs overhead. It didn’t look like the Cabixa, but a quick glance at the captain’s face revealed nothing but confidence.
An hour into the journey they approached the first dwelling—a mud-splattered little hut with a red-tiled roof. Three feet of water covered the bottom of it, and there was no sign of humans or animals. Jevy slowed so they could talk.
“In the flood season, many people in the Pantanal move to
higher ground. They load up their cows and kids and leave for three months.”
“I haven’t seen higher ground.”
“There’s not much of it. But every
pantaneiro
has a place to go this time of the year.”
“What about the Indians?”
“They move around too.”
“Wonderful. We don’t know where they are, and they like to move around.”
Jevy chuckled and said, “We’ll find them.”
They floated by the hut. It had no doors or windows. Not much to come home to.
Ninety minutes, and Nate had completely forgotten about being eaten, when they rounded a bend and came close to a pack of alligators sleeping in a pile in six inches of water. The boat startled them and upset their nap. Tails slapped and water splashed. Nate glanced at the machete, just in case, then laughed at his own foolishness.
The reptiles did not attack. They watched the boat ease past.
No animals for the next twenty minutes. The river narrowed again. The banks squeezed together so close that trees from both sides touched each other above the water. It was suddenly dark. They were floating through a tunnel. Nate checked his watch. The
Santa Loura
was two hours away.
As they zigzagged through the marshes, they caught glimpses of the horizon. The mountains of Bolivia were looming, getting closer, it seemed. The water widened, the trees cleared, and they entered a large lake with more than a dozen little rivers twisting into it. They circled slowly the first time, then even slower the second. All the tributaries looked the same. The Cabixa was one of a dozen, and the captain had not a clue.
Jevy stood on the gas tanks and surveyed the flood while Nate sat motionless. A fisherman was in the weeds on the other side of the lake. Finding him would be their only luck of the day.
He was sitting patiently in a small, handmade canoe, one carved from a tree a very long time ago. He wore a ragged straw hat that hid most of his face. When they were only a few feet away, close enough to inspect him, Nate noticed that he was fishing without the benefit of a pole or a rod. No stick of any sort. The line was wrapped around his hand.
Jevy said all the right things in Portuguese, and handed him a bottle of water. Nate just smiled and listened to the soft slurring sounds of the strange language. It was slower than Spanish, almost as nasal as French.
If the fisherman was happy to see another human in the middle of nowhere, he certainly didn’t show it. Where could the poor man live?
Then they started pointing, in the general direction of the mountains, though by the time they finished the little man had encompassed the entire lake with his bearings. They chatted some more, and Nate got the impression Jevy was extracting every scrap of information. It could be hours before they saw another face. With the swamps and rivers swollen, navigation was proving difficult. Two and a half hours in, and they were already lost.
A cloud of small black mosquitoes swept over them, and Nate scrambled for the repellent. The fisherman watched him with curiosity.
They said good-bye and paddled away, drifting with the slight wind. “His mother was an Indian,” Jevy said.
“That’s nice,” Nate replied, hammering mosquitoes.
“There’s a settlement a few hours from here.”
“A few hours?”
“Three maybe.”
They had fifteen hours of fuel, and Nate planned to count every minute of it. The Cabixa began again near an inlet where another, very identical river also left the lake. It widened, and they were off, at full throttle.
Nate moved lower in the boat, and found a spot on the bottom between the box of food and the buckets, with his back to the bench. From there the mist couldn’t spray his head. He was contemplating a nap when the motor sputtered. The boat lurched and slowed. He kept his eyes on the river, afraid to turn around and look at Jevy.
Engine trouble was not something he had spent time worrying about, yet. Their journey had enough little perils already. It would take days of backbreaking labor to paddle back to Welly. They would be forced to sleep in the boat, eat what they’d brought until the food ran out, dip water from it during the rains, and hope like hell they could find their little fishing buddy to point them to safety.
Suddenly Nate was terrified.
Then they were off again, the motor howling as if nothing had happened. It became a routine; every twenty minutes or so, just as Nate was about to doze off, the steady strain of the motor would break. The bow would dip. Nate would quickly look at the edges of the river to inspect the wildlife. Jevy would curse in Portuguese, fiddle with the choke and the throttle, and then things would be fine for another twenty minutes or so.
They had lunch—cheese, saltines, and cookies—under a tree in a small fork as rain fell around them.
“That little fisherman back there,” Nate said. “Does he know the Indians?”
“Yes. About once a month they go to the Paraguay to trade with a boat. He sees them.”
“Did you ask him if he’d ever seen a female missionary?”
“I did. He has not. You are the first American he’s ever seen.”
“Lucky guy.”
________
THE FIRST sign of the settlement came at almost seven hours. Nate saw a thin line of blue smoke rising above the trees, near the
foot of a hill. Jevy was certain they were in Bolivia. The ground was higher and they were close to the mountains. The flooded areas were behind them.
They came to a gap in the trees and in a clearing were two canoes. Jevy guided the johnboat to the clearing. Nate quickly jumped ashore, anxious to stretch his legs and feel the earth.
“Stay close,” Jevy warned as he switched gas tanks in the boat. Nate looked at him. Their eyes met, and Jevy nodded to the trees.
An Indian was watching them. A male, brown-skinned, bare-chested, with a straw skirt of some sort hanging from his waist, no visible weapon. The fact that he was unarmed helped immensely because Nate was at first terrified of him. The Indian had long black hair and red stripes on his forehead, and if he’d been holding a spear Nate would’ve surrendered without a word.
“Is he friendly?” he asked without taking his eyes off the man.
“I think so.”
“Does he speak Portuguese?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you go find out?”
“Relax.”
Jevy stepped from the boat. “He looks like a cannibal,” he whispered. The attempt at humor didn’t work.
They took a few steps toward the Indian, and he took a few steps toward them. All three stopped with a nice gap in the center. Nate was tempted to raise the palm of his hand and say, “Howdy.”
“
Fala português?
” Jevy said with a nice smile.
The Indian pondered the question for a long time, and it became painfully obvious that he did not speak Portuguese. He looked young, probably not yet twenty, and just happened to be near the river when he heard their outboard.
They examined each other from twenty feet as Jevy considered his options. There was a movement in the brush behind the
Indian. Along the tree line, three of his tribesmen emerged, all mercifully weaponless. Outnumbered and trespassing, Nate was ready to bolt. They weren’t particularly large, but they had the home-field advantage. And they weren’t friendly folks, no smiles or hellos.