7
THE NATIVES ARE mutants, unslowed by the swelter. They hike, they climb, they hack. Strickland has never seen so many machetes. They call them falcóns. Call them whatever you want. He’ll take his M63, thank you. The inland trek begins on a penetration road some forgotten hero plowed straight into the rain forest. By 1100 hours, they find the plow strangled by creepers, the seat sprouting philodendron. Fine—he won’t shoot his way through the jungle after all. He takes a machete.
Strickland considers himself strong, but his muscles are liquid by afternoon. The jungle, like the vulture, detects weakness. Vines rip hats from heads. Spiked bamboos stab outstretched limbs. Wasps with finger-length stingers seethe atop papery nests, waiting for a reason to swarm, and everyone who tiptoes past shudders in relief. One man leans against a tree. The bark squishes. It is not bark. The tree is layered with termites, and now they’re thronging up his sleeve, looking to burrow. The guides have no maps but keep pointing, keep pointing, keep pointing.
Weeks pass. Maybe months. Nights are worse than days. They strip off trousers rock-heavy with dried mud, pour liters of sweat from their boots, and lay in mosquito-net hammocks, helpless as babies, listening to the frog croaks and the malarial moan of mosquitoes. How can so much space feel so claustrophobic? He sees Hoyt’s face everywhere, in the burls of tree fungus, the patterns of tracaja turtle shells, the flight formations of blue macaws. Lainie he doesn’t see anywhere. He can barely feel her, like a dying pulse. It alarms him, but there is so much that alarms him, second by second.
Days into the hike, they reach a village of vestigios. A small clearing. Thatched malocas. Animal hides stretched between trees. Henríquez darts about, telling the crew to stow their machetes. Strickland complies, but only to better grip his rifle. Being armed, isn’t that his job? Minutes later, three faces surface from the maloca dark. Strickland shivers, a queasy sensation in such heat. Soon bodies follow the faces, picking their way across the clearing like spiders.
Strickland feels diseased on sight. His rifle twitches. Wipe them out. He’s shocked at the thought. It’s a Hoyt thought. But it’s attractive, isn’t it? Get this mission done, fast. Go home, see if he’s the same man who left Orlando. While Henríquez carefully unveils his gifts of cooking pots and one of the guides tries to establish a shared pidgin, a dozen more vestigios bleed from the shadows to stare at his guns, his machete, his ghostly white skin. He feels flayed and finds no pleasure in the following festivities. Sour wildfowl eggs cooked over a fire. Some half-ass ritual involving the daubing of paint upon the crew’s necks and faces. Strickland waits it out. Henríquez will get around to asking them about Deus Brânquia. He better do it soon. There are only so many insect bites Strickland will accept before he starts doing things his way.
When Henríquez leaves the fire to hang his hammock, Strickland puts himself in the way.
“You gave up.”
“There are other vestigios. We will find them.”
“Months down the river and you’re just going to walk away.”
“They think speaking about Deus Brânquia robs it of its power.”
“That could be a sign it’s close. That they’re protecting it.”
“Oh, you have come to believe?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m here to get it and go home.”
“It is not so simple as one protecting the other. The jungle is more, how do you say it? Back and forth? Existing together? These people believe all natural things are connected. To introduce invaders such as we, it is setting a fire. Everything burns.” Henríquez’s eyes trail down to the M63. “You are holding your gun very tightly, Mr. Strickland.”
“I’ve got a family. You want to be out here a whole year? Two years? You think your crew will stick around that long?”
Strickland lets his glare do its work. Henríquez is no longer strong enough to resist such a look. Beneath his filthy white suit, he’s a skeleton. A rash of tick bites on his neck suppurates and bleeds from scratching. Strickland has seen him wander off the trail to throw up out of sight of his men. He grips his logbook to stop his hands from trembling. Strickland wants to hurl the worthless pile of papers to the ground and fill it with lead. Maybe that would keep the captain motivated.
“The young tribesmen,” Henríquez sighs. “Gather them after the elders are asleep. We have ax heads and whetstones to trade. They might still talk.”
Talk they do. The adolescents are greedy for loot and describe Deus Brânquia in such detail that Strickland finds himself convinced. This is no legend like the pink river dolphin. This is a living organism, some sort of fish-man that swims and eats and breathes. The boys, beguiled by Henríquez’s map, tap the Tapajós tributary region in recognition. Deus Brânquias’s seasonal migrations stretch back generations, the guide translates. Strickland says that doesn’t make sense. Are there more than one of them? The guide asks. Long ago, the boys say. Now there is but one. Some of the boys begin to cry. Strickland’s interpretation is that they are worried their greed has put their Gill-god in danger. It has.
8
TWO STORES STAND opposite Elisa’s bus stop. Thousands of times Elisa has stared at them; zero times has she visited either during business hours, sensing that to do so would be akin to shattering a dream. The first is Kosciuszko Electronics. Today’s deal is BIG SCREEN RECTANGULAR COLOR TVS WITH WALNUT GRAINED FINISH, and several models, each with legs like Sputnik’s antenna, are broadcasting the night’s final images. An American flag cedes to a “Seal of Good Practice” screen before signing off, a sight that confirms Elisa’s lateness. She prays for the bus to come. Who did the girl in the movie pray to tonight? Chemosh? Maybe Chemosh works faster than God.
She shifts her eyes to the second store, Julia’s Fine Shoes. She does not know who this Julia is, but tonight she envies her so much she is pinpricked by tears, this bold, independent woman with a business all her own, inevitably beautiful with bouncy hair and a bounce in her step, so confident in her store’s value to the Fells Point neighborhood that instead of turning the lights off at night, she leaves a spotlight upon a single pair of shoes placed upon an ivory column.
The gambit works. My, how it works. On nights when she isn’t running behind, Elisa crosses the road and rests her forehead against the glass to get a better look. These shoes don’t belong in Baltimore; she’s not sure they belong outside of Parisian runways. They are her size, square-toed, and so low slung they’d slip off the foot if not for the snug, inward-leaning heel. They look like hooves in the best way: of unicorns, of nymphs, of sylphs. Every inch of lamé is encrusted with glittering silver, and the inserts are as shiny as mirrors—she can literally see herself in them. The shoes stir in Elisa feelings she thought that the orphanage had beaten out of her as a youth. That she could go places. That she could be something. That all was within the realm of the possible.
Chemosh answers her call: The bus hisses down the hill. The driver, per usual, is too old, too tired, too spiritless to drive safely. The bus makes its hard right on Eastern, hard right on Broadway, and barrels north past the heartbeat of fire-engine lights and the blood spill of the melting chocolate factory. The leaping, licking destruction is, at least, a kind of life, and Elisa contorts herself to watch it, feeling for a minute that she isn’t rumbling through civilization’s scabwork, but rather darting through some vicious, vital jungle.