Chapter 13 - Adventure book

8/8/2019 Chapter 13 - Adventure book

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Chapter 13


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A half-day or so before we finally arrived at San Miguel, I called a halt in a small clearing in

the jungle, and assessed my team. Lars had already stripped down to khaki shorts and jungle

boots. He carried the M-60 machine gun across his shoulders like it was a toy; bandoleers of

ammunition were slung across his bronze chest, and he looked like God's avenging Teuton come

south to kick some darky ass. Steve Reeves with surfer hair he was, and he scanned the thick wall

of the jungle with a 101st Airborne slit-eyed, gunslinger stare. Him I didn't worry about. He was in

his element.

Tyrone had scored some kind of local dope from the porters, and had started hallucinating

right after we left the river. Each time he chewed a plug of coca, he seemed to peak anew and, from

time to time along the trail, he would drop into his knife fighter crouch and hack off a vine like it

was a Trey Eight Rollin' Crip's hand come to put the touch on him. Nevertheless he looked

comfortable. The streets of south Central L.A., the dark alleys of Tijuana, the souks of Morocco,

they are all the same to a con man. And all Tyrone needed to figure out was a con for the jungle,

and he would be fine.

Destri was all big-eyed little girl enthusiasm for the jungle. She couldnt keep her hands off

the shrubbery, pinching this leaf, sniffing that one. She wrote almost constantly in a little leather-

bound field notebook which was decorated with Celtic knots, and kept up a running commentary on

the extraordinary diversityof life in the Amazon drainage. I could picture her holding forth in

front of 300 freshman in Biology 101. A real-life Amazonian of a prof, ticking off phyla and genera

from memory. The nineteen year-old boys in class and, a good share of the girls as well, would be

having a hard time keeping their minds on the lecture, rather than teachers bod. Professor

ORiordan would describe this rainforest through which we now slogged as the source for about

one-fifth of the worlds fresh water. These tall, thick trees and their underlings were the high-rise

condos in which lived one of the most diverse collections of living, breathing things on the planet.

We were hacking our way through the lung tissue of Earth.

The clearing where we had stopped to take a breather was little more than a wide spot in the


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trail. Thick cascades of green veggie life rose above us in canopy after canopy, and the light,

although the sun was almost directly overhead, was green and dense. It felt like light that had been

trapped between the earth and the jungle eons ago. The air buzzed in the heat, and was like

something solid when I took a breath, thick and viscous. Smells rose up from the undergrowth

along the trail, smells like bleach, saltwater marshes and honeymoon sheets hung in a hothouse to

ferment.

Destri said, Potty break. Boys to the left side of the trail, girls to the right. The jungle

swallowed her whole. When she came back, she had her hair down and a flush on her cheeks.

Wow, guys! It smells like endometrium in there. I have neverfelt so much fertility in all my life,

she said breathlessly. Its like the whole jungle is a concentrated form of life. If I was ovulating

right now, I bet I could have gotten pregnant in there just from taking a pee. As we got ready to

start back up the trail, I stole a glance at her, and she had a hand lightly on her tummy, checking for

any new roundness, and probably wondering at the strange new genetics such a union would

produce.

We reached Saint Mike in late afternoon, just at the end of siesta, and the town still had

sleep in its eyes. A knot of brown, potbellied little urchins stood around a sleeping pig in the town

plaza, taking turns pissing on it. A crumbling stone mission building stood to one side of the little

square, and chickens wandered in and out of the doorless entry. The remainder of the dozen or so

houses in Saint Mike were low, mudwalled affairs, either roofed with broad jungle leaves for thatch,

or left open to the air save for the cantina, the only two-storied building in town. We tethered our

pack burros to a rotten wood rail beside the cantina, and went inside to escape the sun, fierce even

this late in the day. Lars was the last inside, backing in, and scanning the street and rooftops for

possible sniper positions, for enfilading fields of fire and avenues of escape.

Inside the cantina, the air was marginally cooler, but had been fouled by an old dog that lay

at the end of the bar farting regularly. A half dozen tables had been fashioned from oil drums and

ammunition crates, and were arranged on the wooden floor. The flooring planks had been worn


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down by years of dancing feet, feet belonging to bodies now long dead. At intervals in the floor,

bright nailheads stood above the flooring atop tiny pimples of wood left untouched by the dancers

or drinkers. Our war party collapsed on rickety chairs around the tables, and Tyrone said,

Welcome to San Miguel, garden spot of the third fucking world. Patron, he shouted toward the

vacant bar, you got paying customers in here, amigo. He turned back to us and spat on the dirt

floor. Place is a goddam pigsty, man. Lars, you oughta shoot that stinkin' dog. Wait, on second

thought don't. They'd probably just put him in the chili. Tyrone tooka long look around the dark

cantina, shapes indistinct in the weak light that managed to fight through the greasy windows.

Cowboy, this is one backward place. Wonder what century they're in down here. Anyone else

seeing these bats? He swatted at the empty air in front of him.

Destri shot him an offended glance and said in her most professorial tone, Mr. Alvarado, I

would have thought that you would be more familiar with your own heritage. This region, and she

swept her hand around the dusky room and the thick jungle outside, ,was the center of the Ixtec

empire a thousand years ago and had a culture more advanced than contemporary civilizations in

western Europe. When the Spanish conquistadors first arrived here, they found a culture in

equilibrium with its surroundings, one that had developed, and here she counted off on her long

delicious fingers, a calendar more accurate than the Georgian, mathematics that included algebraic

functions that we haven't even figured out yet, surgery, astronomy...why, they had even laid out

huge figures that some scientists consider attempts to contact alien life and...and...

And a political system that resisted internal corruption, Dr. O'Riordan. Don't forget their

perfect politics. The voice was deep and soft, like the warning growl of some jungle cat, and it

came from a shadowed corner of the cantina. Destri jumped in her seat, and Lars bolted for his M-

60. I had to stifle a chuckle. Don't move so quickly, when you are not used to this heat, Mr. von

Rindt. It is not healthy. This last was punctuated by the unnerving click of a pistol being cocked

and Lars, to his credit, did move much more slowly as he sat back down. The tattered dog wagged

his tail at the sound of the voice, and the bony tail made a rhythmic thump against the wooden floor.


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Esteban, I said, being very careful to show my hands, can we get a waiter over here?

Wed like to order drinks.

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Chapter 13 - Adventure book