The Codex

26

The following morning the fine weather had come to an end. Clouds gathered, thunder shook the treetops, and the rain came pouring down. By the time Tom and the rest had set off, the surface of the river was gray and frothing under the force of a violent downpour, the sound of rain deafening among the vegetation. The maze of channels they were following seemed to get ever narrower and more convoluted. Tom had never seen a swamp so thick, so labyrinthine, so impenetrable. He could scarcely believe that Don Alfonso knew which way to go.

By afternoon, the rain ended suddenly, as if a spigot had been turned off. For another few minutes the water continued running down the tree trunks, with a noise like a waterfall, leaving the jungle misty, dripping, and hushed.

“The bugs are back,” Sally said, slapping.

“Jejenes. Blackflies,” said Don Alfonso, lighting up his pipe and surrounding himself with a foul blue cloud. “They take a piece of your meat away with them. They are formed from the breath of the devil himself after a night of drinking bad aguardiente.”

At times their way was blocked with hanging vines and aerial roots that grew down from above, forming thick curtains of vegetation that hung to the very surface of the water. Pingo remained in front, hacking them down with his machete while Chori poled from the back. Every blow of the machete dislodged tree frogs, insects, and other creatures that dropped into the water, providing a feast for the piranhas below, which thrashed and boiled around every hapless animal. Pingo, his great back muscles working, slashed left, right, then left, flicking most of the vines and hanging flowers into the water. In one particularly narrow channel, while Pingo was slashing away, he suddenly gave a cry, “Heculu!”

“Avispa! Wasps!” Don Alfonso cried, crouching down and putting his hat over his head. “Do not move!”

A compact, boiling cloud of black came racing out of the hanging vegetation, and Tom, crouching and protecting his head, immediately felt a tattoo of fiery stings on his back.

“Don’t slap them,” Don Alfonso cried. “It will make them madder!”

They could do nothing but wait until the wasps had finished stinging them. The wasps left as quickly as they had come, and Sally doctored the stings with more sap from the gumbo-limbo tree. They pushed on.

Around noon, a strange sound developed in the canopy above them. It sounded like a thousand smacking, gurgling noises, like a crowd of children sucking on candies, only much louder, accompanied by a rustling in the branches that grew in volume until it was like a sudden wind. There was the flashing of black shapes, just seen through the leaves.

Chori shipped his paddle, and instantly a small bow and arrow was in his hand and pointed skyward, tensed and ready to go.

“Mono chucuto,” Don Alfonso whispered to Tom.

Before Tom could say anything, Chori had loosed his arrow. There was a sudden commotion above and a black monkey came falling out of the branches, still half alive, grasping and clutching and sliding through the foliage as it fell, finally landing in the water five feet from the dugout. Chori leapt up and snatched the bundle of black fur out of the water, just before a large swirl from underneath indicated something else had the same idea.

“Ehi! Ehi!” he said with a vast grin. “Uakaris! Mmmm.”

“There are two!” said Don Alfonso, in a high state of excitement. “This was a very lucky strike, Tomasito. It is a mother and her baby.”

The baby monkey was still clinging to the mother, squealing in terror.

“A monkey? You shot a monkey?” Sally said, her voice high.

“Yes, Curandera, are we not lucky?”

“Lucky? This is awful!”

Don Alfonso’s face fell. “You do not like monkey? The brains of this monkey are truly a delicacy when roasted lightly in the skull.”

“We can’t eat a monkey!”

“Why not?”

“Why, it’s… it’s practically cannibalism.” She rounded on Tom. “I can’t believe you let him shoot a monkey!”

“I didn’t let him shoot anything.”

Chori, understanding nothing and still grinning proudly, dumped the monkey on the floor of the boat in front of them. It stared up at them, eyes filming over, tongue halfway out. The baby leapt off the dead body of its mother and crouched in terror, hands over its head, making a high-pitched scream.

“Ehi! Ehi!” Chori said, reaching to grab the baby monkey with one hand while raising the machete with the other, ready to deliver the coup de grace.

“No!” Tom snatched the little black monkey up into his arms. It nestled down and stopped screaming. Chori, his machete half raised, stared in surprise.

Don Alfonso leaned forward. “I do not understand. What is this about cannibalism?”

“Don Alfonso,” Tom said, “we consider monkeys to be almost human.”

Don Alfonso said something sharply to Chori, whose grin vanished in a look of disappointment. Don Alfonso turned back to them. “I did not know monkeys were sacred to North Americans. And it is true they are almost human, except that God put hands on their feet. I am sorry. If I had known, I would not have allowed it to be killed.” He said something sharply to Chori and the boat moved on. Then he picked up the mother’s body and tossed it into the water; there was a swirl and it was gone.

Tom felt the monkey nestling more vigorously into the crook of his arm, whimpering and trying to burrow into the warmth. He looked down. A little black face peeped back up at him, eyes wide, and a tiny hand reached out. The monkey was small — no more than eight inches long and weighing no more than three or four pounds. His hair was soft and short, and he had large brown eyes, a tiny pink nose, little human ears, and four miniature hands with delicate fingers as slender as toothpicks.

Tom found Sally looking at him with a smile on her face.

“What?”

“Looks like you’ve made a new friend.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

The little monkey had recovered from its terror. It crawled out on Tom’s arm and began poking around his chest. Its little black hands went scurrying and plucking into the folds of his clothing while it made a smacking sound with its lips.

“He’s grooming you,” said Sally. “Looking for lice.”

“I hope he’s disappointed.”

“Look, Tomás,” said Don Alfonso, “he thinks you are his mother.”

“How could you eat this beautiful creature?” Sally asked.

Don Alfonso shrugged. “All the creatures of the forest are beautiful, Curandera.”

Tom could feel the monkey combing and picking through his shirt. The monkey crept about, using his buttons as handholds, and lifted up the flap of his giant, explorer-style vest pocket. He rummaged in there with a hand, made a smacking noise, and then climbed in it and wriggled himself into place. He sat there, his arms folded, peering around, his nose slightly elevated.

Sally clapped her hands together and laughed. “Oh, Tom, he really likes you now.”

“What do they eat?” Tom asked Don Alfonso.

“Everything. Insects, leaves, grubs. You will not have any trouble feeding your new friend.”

“Who says he’s my responsibility?”

“Because he chose you, Tomasito. You belong to him now.”

Tom looked down at the monkey, who was now peering around like a miniature lord surveying his domain.

“He’s a hairy little bugger,” said Sally in English.

“Hairy Bugger. That’s what we’ll call him.”

That afternoon, at one particularly convoluted maze of channels, Don Alfonso stopped the boat and spent more than ten minutes examining the water, tasting it, dropping spitballs into it and watching them drift to the bottom. Finally he sat up.

“There is a problem.”

“Are we lost?” Tom asked.

“No. They are lost.”

“Who?”

“One of your brothers. They took that channel to the left, which leads to the Plaza Negra, the Black Place, the rotten heart of the swamp where the demons live.”

The channel wound between enormous tree trunks and clumps of hanging vines, a layer of greenish mist hanging just above the black surface of the water. It looked like a watery pathway to hell.

It must be Vernon, Tom thought. Vernon was always getting lost, literally and figuratively. “How long ago?”

“At least a week.”

“Is there a place to camp near here?”

“There is a small island a quarter mile further.”

“We’ll stop there and unload,” said Tom. “We’ll leave Pingo and Sally in camp, while you and I and Chori take the dugout on a search for my brother. We’ve no time to lose.”

They landed on a sodden mud-island while a rain of such intensity that it was more like a waterfall poured down on them. Don Alfonso gestured and shouted, supervising the unloading and then reprovisioning of the boat, holding back the supplies they would need for their journey.

“We may be gone for two or three days,” Don Alfonso said. “We must prepare to spend several nights in the dugout. There might be rain.”

“No kidding,” said Sally.

Tom handed Sally the monkey. “Take care of him while I’m gone, okay?”

“Of course.”

The boat pulled away. Tom watched her in the pouring rain, a dim figure growing dimmer. “Tom, please take care of yourself,” she called, just as her figure vanished.

Chori poled strongly down the channel, the unburdened boat moving swiftly. Five minutes later Tom heard a screeching noise in the branches above the boat, and a little black ball came bouncing from branch to branch and finally shot out of an overhead tree and landed on his head, shrieking like a lost soul. It was Hairy Bugger.

“You rascal, you didn’t wait long to escape,” said Tom, taking the tiny monkey back into his pocket, where he snuggled down and instantly fell silent.

The dugout pushed deeper into the rain-rotten swamp.