Little Tiny Teeth

SEVEN

“Welcome, welcome, my dear friends, my good friends, welcome,” enthused the overexcited Captain Vargas. “Or as we say in Peru, bienvenidos amigos! It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Adelita with pisco sours, the national drink of Peru. Or you can have Inca Kola, the other national drink of Peru, both completely without any necessity of payment. Only for this one time, of course. Afterward, payment will be gratefully accepted, ha-ha. Please, help yourselves, all you wish, go ahead.” He motioned them into action with his hands.

The “ship’s salon” had turned out to be a small open area on the lower deck, bounded by the dining room on the forward side and a storage room to the rear. Projecting into this area from the dining room wall, on the left side of the entrance, was a small, glassed-in bar fitted with a Dutch door, the upper half of which folded outward to make a serving counter. There were four white plastic tables with a few green plastic garden chairs around them. Two of the tables were empty. One was fully occupied, with four people around it. The last had only one person at it, and it was there that Phil, John, and Gideon had sat down. Their companion was a quiet, lost-looking individual who had introduced himself as Duayne V. Osterhout and who looked like a cartoonist’s version of John Q. Public, right down to the toothbrush mustache, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the air of timid, put-upon uncertainty.

There was a breeze wafting through the open space, created by the vessel’s movement, that would hardly have qualified as “cool” in the Northwest, but that felt wonderful here. On each table was a small pitcher of foamy white liquid – those would be the sours – several dark green bottles of Inca Kola, and some bottled water. John and Phil twisted the caps off water bottles, Gideon tried the Inca Kola, and their tablemate reached for the pitcher. “Never had one of these,” he murmured, pouring himself a brimming glassful. He took a tentative sip, cocked his head, and swallowed. “Say, this isn’t bad!” He tried another sip and obviously enjoyed that one too. “Salty, sweet, and bitter at the same time.” He smacked his lips. “And sour too. It engages all the taste receptors. Well, except for umami, of course, inasmuch as there wouldn’t be any glutamic acid in it.”

“You a professor, by any chance?” John said.

“Ah… no,” said Osterhout, returning to his enthusiastic sampling of the sour.

“So what’s the Inca Kola like?” John asked Gideon.

Gideon rolled the liquid around his mouth and swallowed. “Mmm, something like a Vanilla Coke, but with some kind of, I don’t know-”

“Try to guess!” Vargas boomed, overhearing. “No? It’s lemongrass! The secret ingredient. No lemongrass in Coke! Hey, you know Peru is the only country in the world where we got our own drink that sells better than Coca-Cola? It’s a known fact. Tastes pretty good, huh?”

“It’s delicious,” said Gideon, who thought it might conceivably have been passable if the sugar content had been cut by 60 percent or so.

Vargas then provided a general introduction to the ship and the cruise. They would cruise for the remainder of today and the next along the southern bank of the Peruvian Amazon. At the Colombian border they would take a northern, more remote branch of the Amazon known as the Javaro River, on which they would travel for several more days, until they rejoined the main body of the Amazon at Leticia, Colombia, at the end of their journey.

“You mean we don’t even spend two days on the Amazon?” their tablemate Duayne Osterhout asked, plainly disappointed. “I thought-”

“Let me explain,” interrupted a stocky man of forty-five, with a tanned, ruddy face, a reddish crewcut just beginning to go gray, and small, bright, intelligent eyes. “You see, the Amazon River itself, as you get anywhere near Leticia, is pretty broad and well-traveled… crowded, you might almost say. But the Javaro is much smaller, a dark, serpentine, little-known stream through an almost totally unpopulated area. Hardly anyone uses it as a thoroughfare because, with all its S-curves and its looping back on itself, it takes forever to get anywhere.”

“Still, the Amazon…!”

“You won’t regret it, I assure you. Because of its remoteness, you see, the Javaro is an absolute treasure-house of exotic plants and wildlife. Like the Amazon was forty years ago.”

“If you say so,” said Osterhout with a pallid little sigh.

“I guarantee it.”

Vargas waited politely until, with a wave of his unlit pipe, the man signaled him to continue. In addition to the passengers, they were carrying a cargo of coffee, along with a few miscellaneous items – a generator, a few dozen pairs of rubber boots for a jungle store, a dining room table and chairs, a wooden door, and some miscellaneous lumber. The coffee was bound for a warehouse on the Javaro; the other items would be dropped off along the way. All other stops would be at the discretion of the expedition guide, and of Dr. Scofield – he nodded at the stocky man, who returned it with another wave of his pipe, by now lit and smoking and emanating a sweet, coconutty aroma.

“Speaking of our expedition guide,” Scofield said genially, “the famous Cisco. I don’t believe I see him among us. He is aboard, I hope?”

“Aboard?” Vargas said as if the question were laughable in the extreme. “Of course he’s aboard. He’s, ah… resting at present. Yes.” Gideon could practically see the sweat popping out on his forehead. “You’ll meet him soon, don’t worry.”

He hurried on before Scofield could pursue the matter. The Adelita , the group was told, would provide them with many amenities. Their cabins would be cleaned each day, their linens replaced two times during the week. A fresh liter of drinking water would be placed in their rooms every morning. There would be three healthful meals a day, the precise timing to depend on the day’s excursions. Today’s dinner would be at six-thirty. Coffee, fruit, and more drinking water would be available twenty-four hours a day on the buffet table in the dining room. The bar would open for an hour before dinner each day, and drinks could be signed for and accounts settled at the end of the cruise.

The list of nonamenities was shorter but more striking. Between Iquitos and Leticia, there was no TV reception, no e-mail, no Internet, no cell phone transmission. Here in the nearly unpopulated jungle there were no communication satellites zipping overhead for such things. Unless any of the passengers happened to be carrying a shortwave radio, the sole communication with the outside world would be the captain’s shortwave in the wheelhouse.

Were there any questions?

“Yeah, I’d like to organize my notes on my laptop in the evenings,” said a man with a Neanderthal jaw and a tree trunk of a neck, but a friendly, open face, “but there aren’t any outlets in my room. How do I recharge?”

“Unfortunately,” Vargas said sadly, “the cabins don’t have electrical outlets yet. This will be repaired in the future. But there is an outlet in the dining room that is available to you at any time. Other questions?”

“I notice the rooms don’t have locks either,” Scofield said. “Also to be repaired in the future, I assume?”

“Yes, of course, everything in due time. I can’t do everything at once, ha-ha. There used to be great, big locks, enormous locks, from the prison days, but I had them taken off. They made such a bad impression. But I still have them, so if you don’t trust each other,” he said archly, “I can have them put on again.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Scofield said drily.

Were there other questions?

Yes, Duayne V. Osterhout had one too. He had noticed that the water coming out of both taps was the same lukewarm temperature. And a definite greenish cast could be seen in the water in the toilet. Was that river water in their bathrooms?

“Ye-es,” said Vargas, as if to say, “What else would it be?”

“Do you mean untreated water? Straight out of the Amazon? And when we flush the toilets it goes-”

“Straight back. Out of the Amazon, back into the Amazon.” Vargas chuckled. “That’s recycling, my friend.”

A mild tremor passed through the ship, and then a more pronounced juddering, along with a scraping noise. “Don’t worry, this is not a problem,” Vargas said, glancing nervously over his shoulder toward the bow of the boat, “but it is best perhaps that I attend to it.”

“I knew it,” John muttered. “Didn’t I say the damn thing wouldn’t float?”

With Vargas gone, having promised to return shortly, Arden Scofield took over. He stood, placed a foot on the seat of his chair, leaned one elbow on his knee, and inhaled a long breath. In his hand was his unlit pipe. Behind him the jungle slid smoothly by on the far bank.

“To those who know nothing of botany,” he began dreamily, “a great rain forest can only be a jumble of colors, forms, and sounds, unintelligible and mysterious.” He had a nice voice, chuckly and avuncular, well suited to his lively eyes. “Beautiful, yes; treacherous, certainly; awe-inspiring, perhaps; but in the end without meaning or coherence. Only for the botanist does the jumble resolve itself into a precise and harmonious whole of many parts, a mosaic, if you will, of discrete components, each playing its prescribed part in the natural order. And only for the ethno botanist do these components present themselves as a cornucopia of almost untapped gifts that can heal and nourish and protect, gifts the uses of which it is our great good fortune to study and make known to the world at large.”

He paused to gaze out over their heads and to contemplatively put the pipe in his mouth and chew at it, as if thinking hard about what to say next, but Gideon, who had plenty of experience delivering “spontaneous” lectures of his own, knew a fellow fake when he saw one. He had to hand it to him, though; it was well prepared and mellifluously delivered – well, maybe a little bombastic (Gideon could have done without the “if you will” and the “cornucopia”), but effective all the same.

Scofield judged that his pause had been long enough. The pipe was taken from his mouth. “The isolated, little-known rain forest into which we now sail is not only the greatest, the least discovered, and the most prolific forest on earth, it is one of the very most ancient. When we enter it, we go back in time to a primeval jungle hardly changed, hardly disturbed, in a hundred million years. The temperate European and North American forests that are more familiar to us are only as old as the end of the last ice age, eleven thousand years ago – one ten-thousandth ” – the words were drawn-out and caressed by his tongue – “of the age of the Amazon Basin. In this rich, nurturing…”

Gideon had been marginally aware that something was bothering him about the people at Scofield’s table. Something wasn’t right, something about their postures, or the way they toyed with their drinks, or what they chose to rest their eyes on. Something.

He suddenly realized what it was. Why, they don’t like him. Not one of the people at his table likes him, or at any rate they sure don’t like listening to him. There was a long, gangly, beak-nosed guy in his late twenties – a graduate student, probably, or maybe post-grad – who was following every word with avid fascination plastered all over his face, but any experienced professor (including Scofield, you would think) could recognize the grim, deeply resented necessity to suck up that was in those glazed, rigid eyes. Scofield’s probably his major prof, Gideon thought. Poor guy. Gideon himself had no doubt worn that sorry look on his own face many a time during his graduate years at Wisconsin under Dr. Campbell.

The other two people at the table weren’t being quite as obvious. There was a tall, bemused-looking woman of forty with a decades-out-of-date Laura Petrie hairstyle – a flip, was it called? – whose expression was opaque enough, but Gideon could see an impatient, sneaker-clad foot jiggling away under the table at supersonic speed. Next to her was the big guy who had asked about outlets. Thick-chested but showing the usual middle-age signs of losing the battle against weight and gravity, he looked plain bored out of his mind, as if he’d heard Scofield speak two or three hundred times too often, and it took every ounce of his willpower simply to sit still and listen. His eyes had been tightly closed for a while, as if he had a headache.

This is going to be one interesting trip, Gideon thought.

“This confluence of land and water is also the most biologically diverse reservoir of life on earth,” Scofield was saying. Lost in his own presentation, he appeared to be oblivious to the cloud of aversion that enveloped him. Either that, or he just didn’t give a damn. “There are at least a hundred thousand plant species here, only a fraction of them known in the scientific literature,” he said, “and only a fraction of those whose potential attributes are understood. There are two million species of insects – five thousand species of butterflies alone and-”

There was a gentle throat-clearing sound to Gideon’s right. Duayne Osterhout’s left forefinger rose tentatively.

Scofield pretended not to notice. “ – and almost two thousand species of birds. The river itself is home to two thousand species of fish – compare that to the hundred and fifty that are found in all the rivers of Europe combined.”

Osterhout’s finger remained in place, gently waggling. Scofield’s lips compressed. He nodded – at the finger, not the man. “Did you want to say something?”

“Only a minor correction, professor,” Osterhout said. “I believe that four thousand butterfly species would probably be a safer estimate if it’s generally accepted classified species that we’re referring to.” He was being very deferential, very unassuming. Uneasy under Scofield’s cool glare, he cleared his throat a couple of times more. “Of course, there’s little doubt that five thousand species, perhaps even more, do exist here but are not as yet all identified. Perhaps that’s what you meant?”

“Thank you,” Scofield said sourly. “Four thousand, then. We certainly wouldn’t want to exaggerate the butterfly population. In any case, that’s enough blather from me. Let’s go on to something else.” This was not a man who appreciated being interrupted, Gideon saw. Throw off his timing and the show was over. Glowering, he looked down at his pipe and plucked an offending shred of tobacco from the bowl. When he raised his face a moment later he was back in his twinkly, avuncular mode – an instantaneous, apparently effortless switch.

“Not everyone here knows everyone else,” he said pleasantly. “In fact, there isn’t anyone here who knows every one else – so I guess we’d better introduce ourselves before we go any further. My name is Arden Scofield, I’m an ethnobotanist, and I’m lucky enough to teach at the University of Iowa and at a wonderful little college called the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva down here in Peru, in a little town called Tingo Maria. Which is enough about me.”

He sat down and reinserted the pipe between his teeth. “Tim, you take it from there,” he said to the tall young man sitting with him, the one with the beaky nose.

Tim started, as if he’d just come out of a trance, which was probably not that far from the truth. “I’m, uh, Tim Loeffler,” he said, almost knocking over his drink when he unfolded what seemed like more arms and legs than he strictly needed. “I’m a student of Professor Scofield’s at UI, and I’m here hoping to learn more about, uh, the ethnobotanical practices and, um, resources of the Amazonian Basin, and, uh-” At a subtly impatient jiggle of the lighter that Scofield was using to relight his pipe, Tim skidded to an abrupt halt. “And, um, I guess that’s about it.”

“Thank you, Tim,” Scofield said around the bit of his pipe. He clicked the lighter closed, turned to his left, and tipped his head benignly at the woman with the Laura Petrie hairdo. “Maggie?”

She stopped jiggling her foot, uncrossed her jeans-clad legs, and turned to face Gideon’s table, the table of strangers. “My name’s Maggie Gray-”

“Oh, I forgot,” Tim blurted. “I should have said – I’m also a student of Maggie’s – of Professor Gray’s.”

“-and, as Tim indicates, I also teach in the ethnobotany program at the University of Iowa.” She paused. “At the moment, anyway. My primary interests are in the area of ethnopharmacology with a concentration on anaesthetics, hypnotics, and opiates.” She had an unusual, not unattractive manner of speaking, biting and humorously ironic, as if everything she said was half taunting – self-taunting as much as anything else. The set of her face, with its wide, sardonic mouth, and with one eyebrow slightly raised – much practiced, Gideon suspected – added to the general impression of barbed, above-it-all skepticism.

“Mel?” said Scofield.

Beside Maggie, the fourth person at the table, the big guy with the bull neck, now smiled affably. “Hi all, I’m Mel Pulaski and I’m not a botanist, I’m a writer, so in a way I’m kind of just along for the ride-”

“Wait a minute,” Phil said. “I know you. Didn’t you used to play for the Dallas Cowboys?”

“Minnesota,” Mel said, pleased. “You got a good memory.”

“Running back, right?”

“Linebacker. But that was a few years and a few pounds back. I’m a freelance writer now. I’m writing up an article on the cruise for EcoAdventure Travel. I also worked with Dr. Scofield on his latest book-”

“Indeed you did, and we’ll come to that in just a few minutes, Mel,” Scofield said, talking over him. “But there at that table are four gentlemen whom I haven’t met.” He leaned forward, smiling at Osterhout and radiating cordiality. “I think I can guess, however, who that particular gentleman, our butterfly expert, is.”

“Well, I’m Duayne Osterhout. Yes, I’m an entomologist, an ethno entomologist, I suppose I should say in this august company, and I’m with the Department of Agriculture.” He was still on his first pisco sour, but obviously he wasn’t much used to drinking, because it had gone to his head. He was speaking a little too carefully, almost visibly preforming the words before trying them out. “In other words, I’m a bug man.”

“Dr. Osterhout is being unduly modest,” Scofield said. “He is not just any bug man, he is one of the world’s leading bug men, and an internationally recognized authority on the order Blattaria.”

Visibly pleased, Osterhout simpered and waved a dismissive hand. “Oh now, really, I don’t know that I’d say…”

“What’s Blattaria?” John whispered to Gideon.

“Cockroaches.”

John inconspicuously shifted his chair a few inches further away from Osterhout.

“Surely this isn’t your first trip to the Amazon, Dr. Osterhout?” Scofield asked. “I imagine your studies must have taken you here many times.”

“Not really. I can assure you that if it’s cockroaches one is interested in, one has no trouble studying them in the Washington, DC, area, so as a matter of fact, yes, it is my first visit. You see, my work at Agriculture has been so time-consuming, and then my wife was never in favor of my going, but since she left…” He clamped his mouth shut. Apparently it had struck him that the potent drink had made him a little too forthcoming. “Well, anyway, here I am.”

“And we’re delighted to have you as part of our merry band,” Scofield said smoothly. “I’m sure we’ll have a lot to learn from you. I should add, by the way, that I had the great pleasure of having Dr. Osterhout’s charming daughter Beth as a member of last year’s expedition in the Huallaga Valley. That lovely young woman is someone you can really be proud of, Dr. Osterhout; she’ll be a real credit to the field. If I can ever be of help to her, I hope she’ll feel free to call on me.”

These generous if overdone remarks of Scofield’s obviously called for an appreciative response from Osterhout, but they were met instead with a searing, squint-eyed look of what Gideon took to be pure malignity. Somebody else who has some kind of a grudge against Scofield? he thought. Osterhout’s ferocious glower lasted but a second, however, before lapsing back into mildly intoxicated passivity. “Thank you, sir,” he said tightly, through a barely opened mouth.

If Scofield was disturbed, he didn’t show it. He moved his glance to Phil. “Sir?”

Phil offered a casual salute to all. “Hiya. I’m Phil Boyajian. I guess I’m just along for the ride too. I’m with On the Cheap, and I’m reviewing the Adelita for possible inclusion in our Amazon guidebook.”

“Happy to have you with us, Phil,” Scofield said. “I hope you’ll feel free to join our little excursions whenever you like.” He pointed the bit of his pipe at Gideon. “Sir.”

“My name is Gideon Oliver. I’m a prof too, at the University of Washington, but I’m afraid the last time I studied botany was in high school. I’m here to help Phil out, basically, but I’m looking forward to learning a little about what all of you do too, if you’ll let me.”

Scofield was looking keenly at him, his clear blue eyes narrowed. He placed the bit of the pipe against his temple. “Am I wrong, or do we have yet another celebrity among us? Would you be a physical anthropologist, Dr. Oliver?”

“Well, yes-”

“Hey, right, the Bone Detective!” Mel Pulaski exclaimed, jabbing a thick finger at him.

“ Skeleton Detective,” John corrected helpfully.

“Yeah, right, Skeleton Detective. I knew you looked familiar. You were on the Discovery Channel or the Learning Channel or something, just a few weeks ago. All about – what was it – identifying people from their skulls, I think, or figuring out how old they were, or something like that. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it probably was,” Gideon said, repressing a sigh. He didn’t mind being identified as a forensic anthropologist, but he’d been looking forward to going a whole week without being the Skeleton Detective.

“Son of a gun,” said Mel, visibly impressed.

“Well, we’re certainly happy to have you aboard, professor,” Scofield said. “I think we’d all love to learn a little about what you do, so shall we assume we have a quid pro quo to that effect? That leaves you, sir,” he said to John.

“John Lau here. I’m also with Phil.”

“You’re a writer? You work for On the Cheap?”

“No, I’m just helping out too, so I guess you could say I’m along for the ride also. Actually I’m a special agent for the FBI.”

“FBI?” Scofield cried, twinkling away. “Good heavens, are we under investigation?”

“Nope,” said John. “Well, not yet, anyway.”

Scofield chuckled, the others smiled civilly, and Scofield got to his feet again. “Well, now that we’re all friends, I hope you’ll let me present you with a little welcoming gift and do a little bragging at the same time. As most of you know, I have a few publications to my credit-”

“A lot more than a few, sir!” Tim enthused a little too ardently, then blushed bright pink.

“Well, thank you, Tim, but be that as it may, until now I’ve never written anything for the general public. So when Javelin Press asked me to put together something of an autobiographical nature, something that wasn’t full of technical jargon, I didn’t know where to turn for help. Fortunately, they were able to recommend a first-rate writer to assist me.” He smiled at Mel Pulaski, who grinned back. “I want to thank you for all your help, Mel. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Hell, you did all the work, Arden,” Mel said. “I just tweaked a word or two here and there. I was ashamed to take any money for it.”

“Not true at all. Don’t you listen to him. I would have been helpless without his guidance.”

John made a rumbling noise low in his throat. He was getting tired of the bowing and scraping, the kowtowing, and the self-inflating modesty. As was Gideon.

“And here are the fruits of our joint venture,” Scofield said. Reaching into a backpack, he took out a stack of four brand-new-looking books in their wrappers. “Hot off the press, ladies and gentlemen, and soon to be available at fine bookstores everywhere, I give you Potions, Poisons, and Piranhas: A Plant-hunter’s Odyssey.” He handed out the handsomely embossed, silver-and-green books to Maggie, Mel, and Tim, and walked the few steps necessary to give one to Duayne.

“I fear I brought only enough with me for our formal expedition members,” he said apologetically, “so John, and Gideon, and, ah-”

“Phil,” Phil said.

“-and Phil, I’m afraid I don’t have copies for you, but if you’ll give me your addresses at some point, I’d be pleased to send them to you.”

There was a chorus of thanks all around and Scofield took his seat again. Gideon peeked at Osterhout’s copy, opened to the title page, and saw that there was an inscription: “To Duayne V. Osterhout, with admiration, Arden Scofield. November 26, 2006, somewhere on the Amazon.” Osterhout looked pleased.

“Of course,” Scofield was saying jocularly, “this means that you three will be excused from the quiz on chapters one through five tomorrow morning, but I’ll be glad to arrange-”

“What the hell,” Mel Pulaski said under his breath.

“Is something wrong, Mel?” Scofield asked.

Mel was leafing – roughly pawing was more like it – through the opening pages of the book. Paper crumpled under his heavy hand. “I thought…”

“You thought what?”

“Nothing,” Mel said grimly.

Scofield looked perplexed and a little unsure of himself. “If you’ll notice, I did acknowledge your help. On page two of the acknowledgments, about midway down, you’ll find-”

“I said ‘nothing,’ all right?” Mel slammed the book shut without bothering to check page two of the acknowledgments. Whatever was eating him, he was done kowtowing for the day.

The two were still staring at each other – Mel sullen, Arden with a concerned frown – when Captain Vargas appeared from the forward passageway, closely trailed by a man Gideon hadn’t seen before.

“I am sorry about the interruption earlier,” Vargas said. “A few trees in the water from the timber plantations. No damage was done. As I said, there is nothing to worry about. And now I have the pleasure to present to you the gentleman who will be your guide on this excursion. He has guided expeditions in this region for more than ten years, including many scientific expeditions like this one, and I am sure he will meet every expectation. I assure you, there is no one who knows the Loreto jungle and its inhabitants better. He is a true professional in every respect. And a man who knows so much about the ancient teachings of the jungle shamans that he himself is known by many as” – a dramatic pause – “the White Shaman – el Curandero Blanco .”

He stepped aside to give the stage to his companion, whose appearance didn’t live up to the introduction.

Gaunt, gray-bearded, and hollow-cheeked, he was bizarrely dressed in baggy, bulgy camouflage pants, new faux combat boots with peppermint-striped shoelaces, and a grimy Chicago White Sox baseball cap worn backward. A loose red tank top with Maui Rules on it bared stringy, leathery arms with a multitude of pale scars. Down the back of his neck ran a dingy gray ponytail tied with a knotted blue rubber band. All he needed was three coats and a supermarket cart stuffed with plastic garbage bags and he would have fit right in mumbling at the tourists from a park bench in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.

Several crew members were standing off to the side watching, and Gideon heard one of them speak to another. “ El Curandero Blanco,” he repeated with a derisive laugh. It was Chato, the one who had taken them to their rooms. “ El Lechero Blanco.” The White Milkman. The other one laughed as well.

Swaying slightly, the White Whatever-he-was looked vaguely at his charges. His head was held slightly to one side at a rigid, upright, unnatural angle that immediately engaged Gideon’s interest. (Fused cervical vertebrae? he wondered.)

“Okay, I’m Cisco.” He spoke in a mushy, moderately accented English that wasn’t easy to follow. His teeth, as many of them as could be seen, were gray-brown, in terrible shape, which didn’t help in understanding him. Visibly thinking hard about what else to say, he came up with: “So, like, does anybody want to ask anything?” He spoke in a thin, strained voice, as if he’d been shouting for the last two hours. His Ahab-style beard had been trimmed a week or so ago, but it looked as if he hadn’t shaved around the edges since. Silvery stubble glinted down his throat, across his upper lip, and on his dark, starved cheeks.

“Yes, tell us about your plans,” Scofield said.

“My plans. Well, we’ll take a few treks, you know? I know some cool places, great botanicals, weird pharmaceuticals. It’ll be fun, you’ll be able to collect some stuff you never saw before, never heard of before.” He dug at his bristly cheek with a ragged fingernail and yawned. “You know?” His mind was very obviously elsewhere, or possibly nowhere. Not there with them on the Adelita, at any rate.

Understandably, his audience was less than overwhelmed. “And when exactly is our first trek planned?” Maggie Gray demanded, sounding like a schoolteacher wanting to know what had happened to some miscreant’s homework, but with no expectation of a satisfactory answer.

“Tomorrow, probably. I mean, yeah, tomorrow, sure.” Gideon sensed a ripple of unease go through the group. It was clear to everyone that Cisco was making this up as he went along.

“And you’ll be able to get us audiences with working curanderos, is that correct?” Maggie’s doubt increased with every word.

“Oh, yeah, I think so. I don’t know about tomorrow, though. Weather. Conditions. Maybe. Prob’ly.” He’s spent time in the States, Gideon thought. The accent was Spanish, but the speech rhythms and intonations when he spoke English were American.

Maggie wasn’t about to let him off the hook yet. “From which groups?” she wanted to know.

“Which groups?” Cisco took a few seconds to reconnect. “I don’t know yet. I mean, how can I know? We have to see how it goes. Depends on which side of the river we go along.”

“Captain Vargas has already said we’ll be on the south bank through tomorrow.”

“He did? Okay, then the Huitoto, or maybe the Mochila, or even the Chayacuro if you want to see some really-”

“Oh, I rather doubt that Arden’s going to want to meet with any Chayacuro,” Maggie said archly. Mel and Tim grinned, although Tim quickly covered his mouth with a hand.

“You’re right enough about that,” Scofield said with an affable roll of his eyes. “Let’s leave the Chayacuro out of this, if you please.”

Now what’s that about, I wonder? Gideon thought, intrigued. The Chayacuro were a famously fierce Amazonian Indian group, notorious as headhunters and headshrinkers. They and the equally feared Jivaro, to whom they were related, were the only South American Indians whom the Spaniards had never been able to subdue. Neither had anyone else. Even now, they were as free and dangerous as ever, occasionally linked to the murder of a missionary or a traveler. A couple of years earlier they had hacked a doctor and his assistant to death when the two had unknowingly violated their rules of proper behavior in their examination of a Chayacuro girl. As far as Gideon knew they had never been prosecuted for these things. An isolated and seminomadic people, they were hard to find when they didn’t want to be found. Besides, the authorities, perhaps wisely, preferred to stay out of Chayacuro territory.

So what was Scofield’s connection to them? Had he had a run-in with them? When he got to know them all a little better, he’d ask.

Cisco shrugged. “Okey-dokey, no Chayacuro. Anybody got anything else?”

“Do you have a schedule for us?” Mel asked. “I could use a copy.”

“A what?”

“A schedule.”

Cisco looked at him as if he was having trouble understanding the word. “Schedule,” he repeated with a whinnying laugh. “Hey, I don’ got to show you no steenkin’ schedule.”

Scofield managed a polite chuckle. “That’s funny, Cisco – that was your name, Cisco? – but I think all of us would appreciate having some idea-”

“I don’t use schedules, man. Schedules don’t work in the jungle.”

“You could be right about that, but they do work aboard a ship. It would help me – help all of us – to plan our other activities – pressing, drying, and so on – if we knew, for example, that on Monday at two there was a plant-collecting expedition, and on Tuesday at nine we were to meet with-”

Cisco interrupted. “What’s your name, buddy?”

“Arden Scofield.”

“Well, Arden” – Gideon saw Scofield’s jaw muscles stiffen – “let me let you in on something. Last time I knew what day it was, or even gave a shit, was probably about 1992. And I don’t wear a watch, so don’t talk to me about Tuesday at nine o’clock, man. And I got news for you. The curanderos don’t wear wristwatches either, so Tuesday at nine don’t mean anything to them either. When it’s time to go, I’ll come get you. Let me worry about it, okay? I mean, it’s not exactly like you’re going to be hard to find, is it?”

Scofield’s face had revealed a momentary flare of anger, but he decided to let it go and held up his hands, palms out. “It’s your show,” he said coldly. “Man.”

“Okay.” Cisco suddenly shuddered, put a hand to his face, and massaged his temples. “Hey, look, Arden, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start off on the wrong foot. I’m not feeling that great today, that’s all. I get these frigging headaches, and this new stuff I’m taking for them, it didn’t agree with me – look, I didn’t mean no offense, okay?”

“None taken, my friend,” said the wonderfully changeable Scofield, now all ruddy cordiality.

“I have a question, Cisco,” Duayne said. “Or rather a request. I’m primarily interested in insect life, especially unusual or rare insect life. So if there are opportunities to see some on some of our treks, I’d appreciate it-”

“You want to see bugs?”

“Well… yes.”

Another whinny from Cisco. “Well, you sure as hell picked the right place to come, Chief. We got bugs up the wazoo.”