“These fish,” Vargas said, “in all the world are found only in the Amazon. On our future trips, there will be a, what do you call him, a naturist, a naturalist, aboard to-”
He was shocked into silence by a reverberating thunk that could be felt in the floorboards, and then a microsecond later a tremendous crashing and tinkling of glass. The racket had come from behind them, from the bar, which was basically a slightly modified eight-by-six-foot prefab storage shed, the back of which had been bolted to the outside of the dining room wall, beside the entrance. Glass shelves filled with bottles and glasses around three sides left just enough room for a bartender to fix drinks and serve them through the opening of the Dutch door. The walls on either side had been fitted with large, fixed glass panes so that the attractive array of bottles within could be seen from the outside.
At the moment, however, it was anything but attractive. The glass pane on the port side had been shattered – shards lay everywhere underfoot – and two of the glass shelves had come down in fragments, their bottles – those that hadn’t been broken – rolling around on the floor. The air reeked of whiskey and beer. In front of this enclosure stood Scofield, openmouthed and frozen in place, his towel clutched to his chest with both hands. His eyes popping, he was staring at the shaft of a heavy, still-vibrating six-foot-long spear that had buried its point in a half-empty vodka carton inside the little room, nailing the carton to the floor. Given where the chalk-white Scofield was standing, it couldn’t have missed him by more than a foot.
The three others ran up to him. “Arden, are you all right?” Gideon asked.
Scofield just stood there quaking; rippling shudders wrenched him all the way down to his legs.
John shook him roughly by the shoulder. “Are you hurt? What the hell happened?”
That brought him around, at least to the point at which he could speak, if not yet in full sentences, then in a torrent of disconnected chips and chunks of speech, from which at least some sense could be made. “Someone… I was just, just standing… that, that spear, it, it…”
It didn’t take long for them to understand that the obvious had happened. Someone had hurled a spear at the Adelita. Scofield had been watching the dolphins, his back to the nearby shore. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, when suddenly, next to him, the window exploded and the spear came crashing through, showering him with glass shards. The wooden shaft had actually brushed him in passing. Look, you could see the abrasion on the back of his right hand. And see the little splinters of glass stuck in his arm? He had almost been killed! But miraculously the point had passed him by. If it had been even six inches to the left…
“Come along, now, Arden,” Maggie Gray said in her teacherly, dismissive, Our Miss Brooks tone, taking his other arm. With some of the others, she had come to see what the clatter had been about. “Let’s go and sit you down in the dining room. I’ll get the splinters out of your arm. You’ve got some in your hair too.”
“Don’t patronize me, dammit,” he snapped at her, shaking his arm loose, but then, mumbling, let himself be led away, “Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Maggie… It was just so… I mean, if I’d been standing…”
John had been peering keenly at the shore, seeking out some movement, some glimpse of the thrower, but there was nothing; no stirring fronds, no flash of a brown body retreating into the undergrowth. He sighed and turned to Gideon. “So there aren’t any more headhunters, huh? Well, that’s sure a relief. They just spear you now.”
Gideon shrugged. “What do I know?”
Vargas, looking about as distraught as a human being could possibly be, waved helplessly at the mess in the bar and shook his fist at the shore. “Goddamn Indians, what have they got against my poor Adelita? Did I ever hurt them?”
“You mean this kind of thing has happened to you before?” John asked. “They throw spears at passing boats? It’s just something that happens?”
“No, no, it never happen to me before. I never hear that it happen to anyone.” He shook his head in distress. “Chato, where the hell are you? Bring a mop! Look at that window! Look at that bottles! What I’m supposed to do now?” The excitement was playing havoc with his English.
The question was presumably moot, but John answered anyway. “Well, first off, Captain,” he said mildly, “I’d suggest you get us a little further away from the shore.”
The suggestion snapped Vargas out of mourning his lost supplies and he ran clumsily toward the wheelhouse, shouting in Spanish. “Hulbert, quick, put us in the central channel, what are you waiting for? Hurry up, don’t waste any time… mother of God…”
NINE
Although the tip of the spear was still hidden from sight in the vodka carton, Gideon knew what it was. He had seen a pair of them in the South American collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. It was called a shotgun lance, used by several Indian groups in the Amazon basin. It was made by taking the barrel from a worn-out rifle or shotgun, pounding its base into a point, and then sticking a wooden shaft, honed to the diameter needed for a snug fit, into the muzzle end. It was, he knew, a man-killing spear (as opposed to the lighter ones used for hunting animals). But he thought he’d read somewhere that they had gone out of use by the 1950s, by which time new firearms had become more freely available. So how did…?
Maggie stuck her head out of the dining room. “Arden could really use a drink. Scotch.” The door popped briefly open again almost before she’d closed it, and once again her head poked out, one eyebrow raised. “For that matter, my dears, so could I.”
“I’ll get them,” Gideon said, stepping gingerly through the space where the window had been. “Looks like the bar’s open early today, anyway.”
In the dining room he found Maggie standing over Scofield and meticulously plucking bits of glass from his crew cut, which she then laid on some paper towels that had been spread out on the table. Scofield grabbed for his drink so convulsively that he spilled half of it. The other half went down his gullet in a single swallow, followed by a grateful sigh. Maggie, on the other hand, sipped primly, then went back to exploring Scofield’s scalp while Scofield, passive and docile, sat motionless. Gideon felt a highly inappropriate bubble of laughter trying to work its way up his throat. The thing was, it was like watching a pair of rhesus monkeys at grooming time.
He managed to stifle the thought, however. “Can I do anything else for you?” he asked.
“No thanks, I’m fine,” Scofield said, and indeed the Scotch seemed to have gone a long way toward restoring him. The ruddy little disks that were natural in his cheeks were coming back. He even tried a feeble little joke. “But I’m beginning to think that becoming an ethnobotanist might not have been such a great career move after all.”
Gideon smiled. “I’ll admit, you’re not having much of a day so far.”
“And it’s not even six o’clock yet,” Maggie dryly observed.
“Say, Doc?” John had opened the dining room door. “Could you come on out when you have a minute?”
His overdone nonchalance (John wasn’t much of a dissembler) made it clear that it was something important, and Gideon went out to join him. Most if not all the others were there now, gathered around the smashed bar, gabbling away and gesturing at the spear, which had been pulled from the floor and laid on one of the salon tables.
John pointed at its front end, which had formerly been hidden by the vodka carton. “Is that thing what I think it is?” he asked soberly.
Gideon bent to examine it. The others quieted down, watching. Attached to the base of the metal spear point by a length of twisted fiber was a sinister, misshapen object a little bigger than his fist.
“Ugh,” he said. “I hate these.”
Looking up at him was a distorted, monkeylike, yellowish-brown face made even creepier by the rim of beautiful, combed chestnut hair that framed it. A dangling length of string had sewn each eye shut, and three more knotted strands threaded through the grotesquely distorted lips. The nose too had been stretched to impossible proportions.
Gideon gingerly turned it to peer into the nostrils. He pressed a finger against the closed eyes. He moved the long hair aside to study the ears. Finally, he put it down.
“No,” he said.
It had been several minutes since John had asked the question and people looked confused.
Phil spoke for them. “No, what?”
“No, it’s not what John thinks it is.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not a shrunken head?”
“It’s not a shrunken human head, which is what I presume you meant.”
“What the hell is it, then? A monkey head?” He frowned. “Do monkeys have eyebrows?”
“Not so to speak, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not a head at all. This is a tourist item. They make them from monkey skin or goatskin, and carve them and mold them to look like this, and add a little hair where they need to.”
“It’s true,” Vargas said. “You can buy such things in Iquitos.”
“You can buy them on eBay,” Gideon said.
All the same, Duayne Osterhout was intrigued. “But it looks so… Why are you so sure it isn’t human?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” Gideon said. “This is a pretty good one, as they go, but there are some things that are almost impossible to duplicate in a fake head.” He turned the head upside down. “For one thing, as you see, where’s the neck opening? But, more important – there’s no nasal hair.”
“If it was real, it would have nose hair?”
“Oh yes. I’m talking about the bristly little things in the nostrils – they act as filters – that everybody has. They stay right there even when a head has been shrunk. To fake them, you’d have to plant each one separately, which would take a long time, and even then it’d be hard to make them look authentic. But since just about nobody knows to look for them, they don’t bother with it. And then, these threads from the eyes, from the lips – they’re obviously commercial twine, the kind you can buy at the local hardware store, not the kind you get from slicing palm fronds into narrow slivers and twirling them into a cord. And the ears…” He pushed back the hair. “Human ears are very intricately shaped, very difficult to reproduce convincingly. You can see how crude these are. That’s why these things always have so much hair hiding them.”
“Yes, yes, I do see,” Duayne said, nodding.
“And then the skin itself. There are tool marks on it, see? Burn marks too, right under-”
“Okay, enough already, Doc,” John said. “Now the next time we’re in the market for a shrunken head, we’ll know if we’re getting ripped off. But what’s it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of curse or something?”
“A warning?” Tim suggested. “Are they threatening us?” His eyes slid sideways to the slowly passing shore, now a safe three miles away.
Gideon put the head down and straightened up. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m reasonably sure it’s not meant as a gesture of welcome, but I’ve never run into this custom before: tying a head to a spear. On the other hand, I’m not exactly up on South American ethnography.”
They all stood staring down at the head as if expecting it to open its sewn-together lips and provide answers on its own.
“Chato says he knows what it is,” Vargas announced into the silence. Chato, the Indian crewman who had mutely conducted Gideon, John, and Phil to their cabins earlier, had appeared a few minutes before to begin mopping up broken glass and spilled liquor. But now he was standing on tiptoe, whispering excitedly into Vargas’s ear.
“ Que quieres decir, Chato?” Vargas asked impatiently.
The Indian began to whisper again.
“Speak up so everyone can hear,” Vargas ordered.
Chato, looking uneasy at the attention, raised his voice to just barely above a whisper. Not only was he almost inaudible, but he spoke in a Spanish-English-Indian patois with which even Phil had a hard time.
“Translate, will you, Captain?” Phil said.
Vargas accommodated him, translating after every couple of phrases. “He has heard of it before, this custom… In olden days, one of the native groups used it as a – a what, Chato?… ah, a death-warning, a revenge warning, to an enemy tribe… They would use… no, they would take… no, they would shrink the head of a killer, someone who had killed one of their own people, and they would attach it to a spear… and they would, they would throw the spear into the hut, into the wall of the hut, of the family of this killer… to tell them that one of them would soon die too… for the purpose of…” He searched for the English word.
“In retaliation?” Gideon suggested.
“Yes, professor, that’s correct, in retaliation.” He thought Chato was done and began to say something else, but Chato hadn’t finished. Vargas listened some more.
“Ah. You see, the fact that the victims received the shrunken head of their own kinsman back, that was to show the contempt that the attackers had for them… that the head wasn’t even worth keeping. And sometimes it would not be the head of the actual killer, but the head of another member of the enemy tribe. Sometimes two heads would be-”
“So… what’s this got to do with us?” Tim asked. “Why would they… I mean, what reason would they…?”
“Ask him what tribe,” Scofield said hoarsely. He had emerged from the dining room while Vargas was translating.
Vargas put the question to Chato.
“ Los Chayacuros,” Chato said.
“The Chayacuro,” Scofield said in a dead voice and then, as he sagged back against the dining room wall, laughter started gurgling out of him, limp, helpless laughter that built until it convulsed his whole body, so that he slid slowly down the wall into a sitting position on the deck.
The others stared at him, appalled. Vargas hurried toward him with his arms out, but Scofield, still shaking with deep but silent laughter, waved him off. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said when he finally stopped and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Oo, ow, that hurt.”