Little Tiny Teeth

EIGHT

A surprisingly good buffet lunch, its service genially overseen and described course by course by the captain, was set out for them in the dining room: Amazon River codfish in tomato sauce (a Peruvian national delicacy, according to Vargas), fried plantains, rice, beans, and cucumber-and-onion salad. There was a bowl of watermelon slices for dessert. Only the coffee service – open jars of Nescafe instant and powdered creamer, each with a crusted teaspoon stuck in it – left something to be desired. Still, considering where they were, thought Gideon, there was nothing to complain about.

Cisco had shakily disappeared down the corridor from which he’d come, but the rest ate at three trestle tables that had been pulled together. The tensions that had shown themselves earlier were no longer apparent, except in the case of Mel Pulaski, who sat as far as possible from Scofield, wolfed down his food without conversation, and left early. Everyone else, in good spirits, made an hour-long meal of it, most, including Gideon, even going back for more of the coffee.

Toward the end, when the general talk had broken down to conversations between two or three people, Maggie Gray and Scofield found themselves quibbling over the biochemical properties of Tynanthus panurensis, a rainforest vine used to treat fevers and rheumatism.

“I have a copy of Duke and Vasquez in my duffel bag,” Scofield said, rising. “If that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will. It’s in that first storage room.”

Tim Loeffler, sitting nearby, leaped to his feet before Scofield was all the way up. “I’ll get it, Professor.”

“Thank you, Tim,” Scofield said, sinking to his seat again. “It’s a blue bag with something about Peru on it. ‘ Peru: un destino privilegiado,’ or something. It’s stuck way in a corner by the back wall.”

Tim returned shortly with the bag and set it on the table in front of Scofield, who unzipped it, reached in, and jumped back with something between a yelp and squeak, a colossal, hairy, brown spider clamped around his hand and halfway up his forearm. When he reacted with a shudder, the thing flopped down to the table with an audible thwack, unharmed, its body held a good three inches off the surface by its jointed, yellow-banded legs. It glared at Scofield with two highly visible red eyes (and probably with the other six as well, Gideon supposed) and reared malevolently up onto its four back legs like a crab ready to do battle.

By now they were all on their own legs, well away from the table. Three of the chairs lay on their backs.

“ Jesus!” a pallid Tim said. “What is that?”

“Whoa,” Phil marveled, “look at that thing. It’s the size of a medium pizza. That’s got to weigh three pounds.”

Duayne, staring at it with something like ecstasy on his face, responded in an awed whisper. “It’s Theraphosa blondi, the Goliath spider. A male, if I’m not mistaken.” He turned to the others. “It’s the biggest spider in the world. It eats birds.” Tears of happiness had formed at the corners of his eyes.

“Did you hear that? The damn thing just hissed at me!” Scofield cried. As, inarguably, it had.

“No, no,” Duayne said, “not really. It’s not a hiss. He does that by rubbing the bristles on his legs together.” He pointed. “See? He’s doing it now. He does that when he feels threatened.”

“ He feels threatened! How do you think I feel?” Like everyone else, Scofield had his eyes fastened on the creature, which was still in its reared-up position, its upper body swaying slightly. “Tim, go get a broom and mash the damn thing.”

“Yuck,” said John.

“Me?” Tim asked woefully.

He was saved by Duayne, “No, you don’t want to frighten him any more than he already is.”

“The hell I don’t,” Scofield growled.

“Believe me, you don’t,” Duayne said, asserting himself. “He’s not particularly poisonous, but he defends himself by using his legs to flick off the hairs on his abdomen. He can send them five or six feet through the air” – everyone other than Duayne moved back another step – “and they’re barbed, you see, more like thorns than hairs, so they’re very irritating, like a nettle rash. And if they happen to get in your nose or mouth, they can swell the mucous membranes enough to choke you. Look, you can see the way his hair is standing on end right now.”

“He’s not the only one,” John muttered.

Osterhout, clearly enchanted, moved gingerly forward for a better look. The spider dropped down on all eight legs and ran with amazing rapidity to the far end of the table, its feet making an unsettling skittering sound. There it turned to face them again.

“Jesus, it’s fast,” marveled Phil.

“It certainly is,” affirmed Duayne. “It eats birds, you know. Did I tell you that? And it doesn’t need a web to catch them. It sneaks up on them, and then… bam! It’s got them.”

“That’s all very fascinating, doctor,” Scofield said. He was beginning to take command again, having largely collected himself by this time. “Now, perhaps you’d like to tell us how we get rid of the thing?”

“Oh, I’ll take care of it. I have to get some equipment. It’ll take just a minute.” He trotted to the door. “Don’t let it get away,” he called over his shoulder.

“Right,” John said to Gideon. “And how are we supposed to stop it again?”

“I didn’t hear that part,” Gideon said.

But the creature cooperated, remaining at the very edge of the table, immobile except for its moving mouth parts. (Were they slavering, or was that just Gideon’s imagination?) Duayne returned with a large, open, plastic jar – it looked like the sort of thing you’d get five gallons of peanut butter in at Costco – which he slowly set down a foot behind the spider.

“If someone would come very slowly back here and hold the jar steady…?”

Gideon volunteered, holding it with both hands and leaning as far as possible away from the spider, while Duayne, who had slipped on a long-sleeved shirt, had put on thick work gloves, and had gotten a dust mop somewhere, went around the table to the spider’s other side. The spider turned with him, presumably to keep its two rows of eyes on him, and began to hiss again.

“He can’t really see me, you know,” Duayne said softly. “Even with all those eyes it only sees differences in light levels. It relies on those hairs to feel the slightest vibration…”

While he spoke he very slowly slid the working end of the mop toward the spider, then, tongue between his teeth, very gently nudged it. The spider obliged by immediately leaping backward directly into the jar. It seemed to Gideon he saw a few of its eyes widen in surprise, but he put that down to his imagination as well. In the meantime, with more speed than he would have judged possible, Duayne rammed a large rubber stopper into the neck of the jar, sealing it. Everybody, Gideon included, heaved a sigh.

“Now what?” Maggie said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to keep it.”

“Of course, I’m going to keep it. It’s a Theraphosa blondi, for God’s sake!”

“Alive?” John asked.

“Ah, no, unfortunately. They can live for twenty-five years in the wild, but they don’t do well in captivity, and, sad to say, they tend to be a little aggressive. They don’t make very good pets.”

“Oh dear,” Maggie said. “That must be sad for you.”

But Duayne was impervious to sarcasm at this point. He was holding the jar proudly aloft for all to see, at the same time slowly rotating it in front of his face. The spider turned in reverse as the jar turned, looking steadily back at him from six inches away. “I brought along some alcohol, of course,” Duayne said dreamily, “and this will do for a killing jar.”

“Duayne, are you sure the Peruvians will let you take something like that out of the country?” Phil asked.

“I would have thought the Peruvians would be more than glad to have it taken out of the country,” Maggie said. “I’d think your problem would be with the United States letting it in.”

“Not to worry, they don’t much care about dead specimens. Anyway, I’ll have filled-out copies of FWS 3-177 all ready for them, just in case. Will you just look at those pedipalpae go!”

He lowered the jar and looked at his fellow passengers, smiling. “I have an insect and arachnid collection that covers one whole wall of my living room. It’s excellent, really, but what a showpiece this little fellow is going to make.” He wrapped both arms around the jar to hold it to himself and left smiling.

Gideon turned to John and Phil. “You know, I think I just might have a clue,” he said, “as to why his wife left him.”

Once the excitement of the spider episode had died down, the regular passengers, all of whom except Scofield had spent the night in the Lima Airport, trudged off to their cabins to recuperate. Phil, who had had a good night’s sleep in Iquitos, but who rarely passed up the chance for a snooze when he was traveling, did the same. Gideon and John went back to their cabins to unpack to the extent that the closetless, drawerless accommodations allowed, then came back downstairs to the open-air salon at middeck, pulled a couple of chairs up to the boat’s starboard railing, and, in the shade of the upper deck and the soft breeze from the ship’s motion, settled back to watch the jungle go by.

There wasn’t much to watch. In the middle of the afternoon, with a blazing sun hanging motionless overhead, the jungle was hazy and still, seemingly without inhabitants other than an occasional darting swift or flycatcher or swallow along the shore. The already slow-moving river seemed to have slowed down even more. The two men did a lot of yawning, maybe even dozing, for a pleasant half hour, and then their desultory, sporadic conversation, which had mostly concerned giant spiders, turned to their shipmates.

“So what do you think of our companions?” Gideon asked lazily. “Interesting bunch, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not too bad, all in all. And yeah, this ethnobotany stuff could be interesting. I don’t know about Scofield, though. I mean, maybe the guy’s a big-time expert, but he’s a phony right down to his toenails. All that chuckle-chuckle crap and that cutesy business with the pipe.” He dug an imaginary pipe stem into his cheek. “The others can’t stand him. I don’t know if you noticed. Even Duayne’s got something against him, and he never even met the guy.”

As it often did, John’s perspicacity caught Gideon by surprise. Not that he thought John was dumb – far from it – but the man didn’t show much, and even when he seemingly wasn’t paying attention he was taking things in.

“I noticed.”

“And what about the Cisco Kid?” John asked. “Oh, that’s gonna be great, following him into the jungle.”

“Yes, he was a little… off, all right. Obviously, the guy has a problem.”

“Yeah, the problem is, his brains are fried. He’s put in a lot of years stuffing stuff up his nose, or however they do it down here.”

He wrinkled his own nose. “I smell smoke.”

Gideon pointed toward the shore. “There’s a fire. Several fires.”

Up ahead, atop a high bank, was what looked like the epicenter of a gigantic bomb blast, a huge wound in the jungle, a good three hundred feet across, littered with hundreds of felled trees and piles of burning, smoking, head-high debris. At least a hundred nearly naked men were scrambling through the hellish scene, trimming branches with machetes and chain saws and tossing them into the smoldering piles. An earthen ramp, red and raw, had been chopped into the bank, and on it lay some of the trunks, tilting down toward the river, where an old barge waited. Another group of workers toiled, their brown backs glistening, pulling and pushing one of the trunks down toward the barge with nothing but chains and ropes and rough posts used as levers. Shouted orders and cries could be dimly heard through the racket of the chain saws.

“It’s like something out of the Inferno, isn’t it?” a suddenly subdued Gideon said.

“Or the building of the pyramids,” John said. “Not a machine in sight. Not a backhoe, not a crane.”

“And how would they get a crane there?” said Vargas, who had strolled up behind them. “They could barge it down the river, yes, but how would they get it up the bank? Forty feet, almost vertical.” He shook his head. “Impossible.”

“What are they doing?” John asked. “Is it logging?”

“Oh, yes, logging. There are many such. Ugly, yes? And do you know what is the most amazing thing about it?”

They looked at him.

“It wasn’t here at all two weeks ago,” Vargas said. “The forest here was untouched. And two weeks from now, they will be gone, doing the same thing somewhere else along the river.”

“It’s controlled, though, isn’t it?” Gideon asked. “I mean, there are regulations, oversight…”

Vargas smiled. “This is Peru, my friend. It’s regulated by how much money changes hands.”

“How long does it take to grow back?” John asked.

“Oh, it grows back quickly enough. A year from now, all will be green again. From here, it may look the same, but it will not be the same, it will no longer be, I forget the word, natural forest, first forest…”

“Virgin forest?” offered Gideon.

“Yes, professor, virgin forest. No, it will be all brambles, and thorns, and swamps, and mosquitoes. The big trees won’t be back for a hundred, two hundred years.”

Silently, the three men watched the gash disappear behind a wall of jungle as the boat moved on. All were glad to see it go.

“Well, well,” said Vargas brightly, to introduce a change of subject. Had they spotted any of the Amazon’s famous pink dolphins yet? No? Well, they must be sure to look for them, they were something that shouldn’t be missed. Would they care for a drink from the bar? Technically, it wasn’t yet open, but it would be no trouble at all – it would be a pleasure – to pour something for them. In their cases, of course, he whispered with a wink – an actual, literal wink – there would be no charges at the end of the voyage, and the same went for their excellent friend Phil. Their tabs would discreetly be made to disappear, poof. Only please – he looked around and leaned closer – don’t tell the other passengers.

This offer they politely declined in their own and in Phil’s behalf, and Gideon asked if it was possible for the boat to travel a little closer to the shore so that they might perhaps catch a glimpse of the rain forest wildlife. Vargas, as always, was anxious to oblige: as it happened, there was a sufficiently deep channel on the starboard side that ran along only a hundred feet from the southern bank, and he would be pleased to have the Adelita cruise in it for the next few hours. John and Gideon were to make certain to be on the lookout for monkeys and sloths in the trees, and down below for caimans and capybara, who liked to come down and lounge along the waterside when the heat of the day was on the wane.

Indeed, as dusk approached, and enormous, pink-tinged, end-of-the-world clouds began to build on the horizon, and the light turned from brassy to golden, the small, darting swifts and swallows were replaced by larger birds: white cattle egrets and brilliant toucans and macaws. The caimans did show up along the shore, as still and gnarly as old tree stumps, their eyes and nostrils poking out of the water. And life within the trees became visible. They saw a sloth making its lethargic, languorous upside-down way along the branch of a tree – it covered only three or four feet in the five minutes it was in view – and a spider monkey and a family of squirrel monkeys chittering among the leaves.

“This is what I was hoping it would be like,” Gideon said happily.

“Yeah. Hey, is that a capybara?” John gestured at a pig-size animal wallowing in an eddy along the shore. “With the nose?”

“Tapir,” Gideon said, as confidently as if it weren’t the first one he’d set eyes on outside of a zoo.

“Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t see them in Seattle.” He shook his head and considered. “We are really a long way from civilization here, you know?”

“Can’t argue with that.”

The local denizens, the ones aboard the ship, also began making their appearances as the air cooled. Arden Scofield, in gym shorts and with a towel draped around his neck, came out to circle the deck for exercise. “Hundred and ten feet per circuit,” he informed them as he zipped by. “Forty-eight circuits to a mile.” Apparently completely recovered from his earlier encounter with Theraphosa blondi, he merrily mimed exhaustion and panting. “Only forty-six to go, if I can last.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Adelita slowed and Vargas returned with exciting news. There was a school of pink Amazon dolphins playing up ahead and if they cared to move back to the port side of the boat they could see these remarkable creatures for themselves.

They saw three of them slipping in and out of the water in concert a few hundred yards ahead; gleaming, blubbery objects not as sleek or graceful as the more familiar dolphins of the north, but assuredly, indubitably pink.

“Aren’t they marvelous?” Scofield called out from behind them. He had finished his walk and now stood leaning against the bar, mopping his face and watching the dolphins play.

“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…”