State of Wonder (28 page)

The shouting caused Benoit to raise his eyes from the field guide he was studying. He pointed to the top of a tree and said in English, “Look!” But neither of the Drs. Saturn looked, nor did Marina, and of course Easter missed it completely.

“I know his wife!” Nancy said, her voice high. “I know his mistress! If I didn’t know those two women I feel certain you’d be right. It would be just another bit of gossip from the annals of history, but that isn’t the case. You can’t separate it out when it’s someone you know. I can tell you he wasn’t a good man.”

“He was the greatest man I ever knew.”

“He
left
you with a tribe of Indians in Peru when you had a fever of a hundred and five!”

“And they took me to Iquitos and eventually I got to Lima. It wasn’t as if he stretched me out next to a log in the jungle and walked away. We all understood the terms of the agreement going in. Anyone who slowed down the group would be cut from the group. Dr. Rapp was there to work and we were there to learn.”

“You were nineteen years old and he was picking mushrooms!” Nancy Saturn had a wild look in her eyes, as if she were telling the story of what had happened to her child and not her husband. “His mistress must have been through medical school by then. At the very least you would think
she
could have stayed with you.”

Alan Saturn would have stormed away at this point, the desire to leave her was plainly twitching in his muscles, working through his jaw, but they were on a boat on a river in the jungle. “The incident you are referring to happened a very long time ago.” His voice was steady and low. “I clearly made a mistake in confiding it to you.”

“I’m your wife. It would have come out eventually.” Nancy Saturn was not in the least bit ready to break away. She saw she had a game advantage and did not blink.

“You knew nothing about Annick and Dr. Rapp?” Alan said to Marina finally. There were still sparks of rage in his voice even when it was directed to her.

“Not a clue,” Marina said. She would have liked to separate herself from the Saturns now, to find a place on the boat without roaches where she could sit down, because even though she could say that based on the information that had been presented Alan Saturn was wrong—Dr. Rapp had behaved badly, and Nancy Saturn was right, such matters were worthy of judgment—she found herself siding with Alan because there was much in his single-minded devotion to a mentor that sounded a familiar note. In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

“Yes,” he said, trying to slow his breathing, perhaps another learned technique. “Well, a private matter.” Nancy opened her mouth but he put his hand gently on her forehead and used his thumb to rub in a clot of sunblock that was clinging to the roots of her hair. He cleared his throat. He was trying very hard to settle them both. “You see that river there?” He was speaking to Marina. He nodded towards a tributary. It would have been easily missed, the small opening folded into the jungle so discreetly. “You follow that river to the Hummocca tribe. It’s two or three hours from here. They are the closest tribe to the Lakashi and yet in all the times I’ve been here I’ve never seen them.” It was his one heroic attempt to change the subject. He took his hand from his wife’s head and there passed between them a tacit agreement. They were on a boat. They were not alone. They would find a way to stop this.

“Dr. Swenson said that Easter was Hummocca,” Marina said, understanding that her part in the play was to pretend that nothing had happened.

“No one really knows,” Nancy said, weighing her words out carefully. “But it’s the only logical explanation. The Jinta wouldn’t have left him.”

“Did anyone try and take him back? See if they were missing a boy?” Marina looked over at Easter but he did not turn his head in the direction of the smaller river. Benoit was showing him a picture. He was steering with one hand.

“Tribes are like countries,” Alan Saturn said. “They each have their own national characters. Tribes like the Jinta are essentially Canadian. Other tribes, like the Hummocca, are more North Korean. Because we have no direct contact with them we have very little information about what they do, and the information we do have keeps us away.”

“Dr. Swenson has seen them,” Marina said. “She told me so when we were coming in.”

“And that’s all she’s told you,” Alan said. “The story doesn’t go any farther than that one piece of information: she’s seen them and they frightened her. Just the idea of Annick being frightened of something is enough to keep me away.”

“They’re cannibals,” Nancy said.

“They
were
cannibals,” Alan said, “which is only to say a small part of the meat was eaten in rituals, not that they subsisted on a regular diet of human flesh, and there haven’t been any reports of it happening in the last fifty years.”

They had passed the opening in the jungle now. Looking back over her shoulder Marina found it nowhere in evidence. Had they turned the boat around she wasn’t sure that she could find it. “No reports in the last fifty years, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is going up there taking regular surveys about their habits.”

“They’ve shot poisoned arrows at traders,” Nancy said. “Either they’re not very good shots and the arrows have landed wide of the boats, or they are very good shots and they mean it to be a warning. If Easter were at some point in his life a Hummocca, no one has plans to send him back.”

When they arrived at the trading post it seemed less like Canada and more like Florida. A dozen or so tourists had come with their guide in an open boat from their eco-lodge to watch the Jinta children in their grass skirts as they twitched their nonexistent hips in time to the thundering rhythm of drums. The drums were played by middle-aged men, shirtless and thick, who were most likely the fathers. The fathers had run stripes of what looked to be red lipstick down their noses and across their cheeks and thrashed their heads from side to side like members of a garage band. The drummers were good but their children were better, their wrists encircled in tufts of grass. There were twenty of them or more ranging from very tiny to a few who were slightly bigger than Easter, and they stamped out a complicated pattern of footwork and then hopped in a large circle on one foot while sounding out the hue and cry of warriors. The tourists, enchanted, took pictures with their cell phones. A girl of ten or twelve with a red hibiscus tucked behind her ear stepped forward to dance a solo with a boa constrictor around her neck and so nicely did it hang and sway from her arms that one could not help but be reminded that a feather boa was made to imitate a snake. The mothers of the dancers quickly spread cloths on the ground and set out an array of small blow guns, tiny carved white herons, and string bracelets woven with red seeds. Having been given an opportunity to shop, the white women began bartering, wanting a bracelet and a necklace for the price of the bracelet alone. One of the women handed her husband the camera and then came and stood beside Marina. “Take my picture with this one,” she said. “She’s twice the size of the rest of them.”

Marina, in her Lakashi dress, put her arm around the woman’s waist so that her own red seed bracelet would show in the picture.

Easter went and stood beside one of the men with a tall kettle drum and put his hands on either side of the base. After a minute he began to nod his head in time. A boy came out with a three-toed sloth and hung it around a tourist’s neck and the animal, barely awake, tilted back its head and seemed to smile at her. The sloth, for posing in pictures, was an even bigger hit than Marina. A heavyset woman in a dirty T-shirt and cutoff jeans then arrived with a struggling fifty pound capybara in her arms. She held it on its back the way one would a baby, possibly thinking the large rodent would take a nice picture as well, but the animal squealed and writhed and then finally bit her so that she was forced to drop it and watch it sprint away into the undergrowth, shrieking in fear. That was when two very old men in enormous feathered headdresses came skipping slowly out of a thatched hut shaking rain sticks, and the dancing children fell into a line behind them. The elder of the two men, the one with no teeth, stopped and took Marina’s hand, tugging at her gently.

“You’re supposed to dance,” Nancy said.

“I can’t do this,” Marina said.

“I don’t think there’s any choice.”

Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chief’s hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marina’s cheekbone, and together they did the slow skip forward while the men beat their drums and the tourists took their pictures and the children followed with their dances, their snake and their sloth. In this group Marina danced with the people who were not white while the white people watched them. It would never have been her preference to be part of a tourist attraction. One of the children handed her the sloth and she took it. She hung it around her neck and continued her dance, feeling the soft, warm hair against her skin. Had anyone given her a choice, she would have chosen instead to be back on the porch behind the storage shed beneath her mosquito netting reading
Little Dorrit
. Still, she knew it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them.

Dollars accumulated in a woven basket, offerings to the gods. The letters were given to the tourists’ guide, who said he had two hours off in Manaus the next day and would mail them himself. Benoit had been talking to the man the entire time and receiving strong advice on the importance of English and German. He should speak Spanish as well. Portuguese was nothing more than a baseline accomplishment.

O
n their way back from the trading post, Marina and the Saturns gave Benoit all of their attention. They looked at every bird and monkey he pointed to and when he found the correlating picture in the book they told him how to pronounce the words in English,
spot-billed toucanet
. Alan had brought binoculars and showed Benoit how to use them. Perhaps the tourists had rubbed off on them because they behaved as tourists now. They kept their collective gaze focused on the water and the leaves and the sky and scarcely looked at one another at all. They caught a glimpse of pink dolphins and discussed birds. They took a few unnecessary turns up very small tributaries because Benoit pointed them out to Easter and Easter, being free of all agenda, was happy to oblige. Marina and the Saturns had burned through so much emotion earlier in the day that now they all felt remarkably placid, or perhaps only exhausted. They had not passed another living soul since they left the Jintas and the world seemed something silent and wide, belonging only to them. On the left there was what appeared to be a crisp field of floating green lettuce. Benoit tapped at Easter’s arm and the boy turned the wheel and took them in.

Beneath the sounds of bird calls there was the most delicate sound of crunching, as if the boat were making its way through a lightly frozen pond in December and the ice, half the thickness of a window pane, was breaking apart to let them pass. Marina leaned over the front of the boat and watched the lettuce compact beneath the pontoons while behind them the plants knitted themselves back together, smoothing over the path they had made without so much as a damaged leaf. We are here, Marina thought, and we were never here. It was a green so much brighter, so much fresher than anything she’d seen in the jungle. Long toed birds strolled across the delicate meadow with such confidence it was tempting to think those tiny floating plants might hold the weight of a single pharmacologist. The question then was whether the water was a foot deep or twenty feet deep. Benoit smacked at Easter again and held up his hand and Easter stopped the boat. Benoit lay down on his belly then, his head and shoulders over the side. He had seen something. The Saturns came and leaned over him, Marina leaned over him. “Is it a fish?” Nancy said. “Peixe?”

Benoit shook his head.

“I don’t see anything,” her husband said.

Easter kept his eyes on Benoit, who, without looking at his captain again, pointed his hand to the left, to the right, and then a little back. Easter held the throttle low and scooted the big boat around in the smallest possible increments until Benoit, every ounce of his attention fixed into the sweet spring of lettuce, abruptly raised his hand and Easter killed the engine altogether. The silence was startling. The budding naturalist, still flat on his stomach, then dove that same hand down through the leaves and began to pull the colossus of all snakes into the boat.

Human instinct dictated first that the snake must be kept away from the face, and so Benoit straightened his arm to rigid as if wishing to cast it away from his body while holding on too tight for the snake’s comfort. The reptile’s long, recurved teeth snapped ferociously into the air, diving towards Benoit’s wrist while Benoit whipped the head from side to side, buying time until he could close the distance between hand and head. He rolled onto his side and then his back, managing somehow to pull the first half of the reptile on board while it flailed like a downed electrical wire. At its neck the snake was as big around as Benoit’s wrist, and from there its body, smooth scales of darkest green with black blotches on the back and then creamy light underneath, swelled into a size more in keeping with his thigh. The snake kept pulling up and pulling up, more and more of itself slithering up and onto the deck in thick, muscular rolls where it sought to make its way onto Benoit’s body, extending out against him, kneading him, while Benoit struggled mightily to keep their two faces apart. Do not let the faces touch.