There was a second pause of silence. Then with hesitation Sparky said: "Yeah… yeah, I guess so."
"Good! Then it's settled." And with that Selena held out her hand. In her palm two small tablets of White Lightning were washed by the tropical sun. The woman wet the index finger of her other hand and touched it to one of the hits, then she transferred the drug on her fingertip to the end of her protruding tongue. Closing her mouth, she swallowed.
"Okay, now it's your turn. Go on. Sparky, take one."
Taking the tab. Sparky examined it, swallowed it and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
The two of them had spent the previous day drifting lazily down the Santiago. As the afternoon wore on the sun leaned out of heaven to beat down harshly upon the surface of the water; a shimmering haze hung between the trees and a languorous smell of vegetation drugged Selena's senses. Occasionally Sparky would tap her arm and point to the riverbank.
On one occasion Selena heard a woof of displeasure and saw an evil eye go blank, a long snout and gray-green body sinking into the water. When she looked toward the brown mudbank not twenty yards from the side of the boat she saw another knobbly reptile with a pale throat, its eyes glassy and half-closed, its jaws wrinkled and half-open, its expression as wicked as a Notre Dame gargoyle. "They're called jacare," Sparky said, "or sometimes cocodrilo. They make nice handbags."
Another time she saw a covey of vampire bats hanging upside down in a hollow tree, their bellies bloated with blood that their victims could ill afford.
Then yet another time she heard the crack of twigs and voices murmur with a low, guttural sound. Scanning the riverbank to the right and squinting her eyes, Selena could just make out the features of several dark faces peering from behind the trunks of trees. It shocked her to notice that some of their mouths were filled with sharpened teeth. Then they were gone, these furtive men, leaving only the rustle of disturbed leaves and the soft smack of released branches.
Abruptly a disagreeable stench, a fetid musky odor came off the riverbank. Wrinkling her nose, Selena turned in that direction just in time to see something detach itself from the ground and flap up into a tree. As she watched, another followed. Then another. And another. And another, until the foul air resounded with the flap of wings and the branches of the vegetation lining the river were covered with black and white urubu.
"Vultures," Sparky said, as the boat nosed toward the shore. "They're Nature's gravediggers. They bury the jungle dead in the warmth of their gizzards."
As the dugout neared the bank, the birds sat in glum silence along the limbs of the trees. The meal of which they had been deprived still lay on the sundrenched mud. The back of the animal was now a sea of blood, clotted and sticky where the hide had been wrenched from the muscles of the flesh. Great strips of skin dangled downward from these wounds, and the horns of the bullock had been smashed and splintered by savage blows from wooden clubs. The intestines lay looped about the hooves and a number of broken spears stuck out from the haunches of the beast. Most unsettling for Selena, however, was the fact that no sooner had the uruhu abandoned the corpse than it was covered with a blue and white and yellow flock of butterflies. She could plainly see brilliant wings fluttering in ecstasy as their slim legs pressed into the flesh and their faces sank into the prey.
With eyes wide Selena said: "I thought butterflies lived on flower dew."
"Even the world's most beautiful hunger with hidden desires," Sparky replied.
"Yeah, but who butchered that animal and smashed it up like that?"
"Probably Jivaro. In a violent mood."
"You mean those Indians I saw back there? The ones along the river."
"The same ones," Sparky said, guiding the boat back out into the stream. "They used to be headhunters not so long ago."
"Fuck me! I hope they're civilized now."
"They are," Sparky said. "Or at least that's what I'm told."
As the boat passed on, Selena saw the vultures dropping one by one back down to their interrupted meal.
But that was yesterday.
Selena had awakened this morning to dawn in the Ecuador jungle. She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the sky, awed by what she saw. Here the huge equatorial forest was set in an eternity of somber gloom — a gloom as silent as a cellar filled with clinging mist. Enormous trees with trunks almost forty feet in diameter stretched two hundred feet above her head, their lower branches rich with every shade of green, their dense leafy canopy almost white where the sun had bleached the life-blood from the leaves. Already it was stifling down here yet it was only 6:00 a.m.
What struck Selena most of all was the network of parasitic growths that hung down in a tangle from the armpits of the trees — bright purple orchids adhering to gum-tree trunks, spiral creepers hundreds of feet in length that twisted like gigantic serpents slithering from branch to branch, poisonous fruits that fell down into the undergrowth emitting noisome odors. It was a world so strange, so alien, that down here among the ferns that held the low ground mist she felt as if she lay at the bottom of an ocean.
Selena looked around for Sparky but her companion had left the campsite. Climbing to her feet and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she began to head for the river a hundred feet away.
When Selena reached the bank of the stream. Sparky was in the dugout thirty feet from shore.
"Hey good mornin', savior. What the hell ya doin'?"
Sparky turned to look at her while screwing the lid on a jar. "Just taking the last of the water samples. I'll only be a minute."
"Take your time," Selena said. "I ain't going nowhere."
As she sat down on the riverbank, the young woman took a long, slow look around her. Late yesterday afternoon they had abandoned the main channel of the Santiago River for a small sidestream. Two miles up, this tributary had opened into a lagoon, and they had pitched their camp for the night by its shore. Sitting now at the water's edge, Selena let herself relax and revel in the morning — for gone here was the oppression of the forest with its constriction and decay. Gone too was the dirty flow of the Santiago, its current opaque with loam scraped from its banks in the scurry to connect with the Amazon. Here instead was stillness, peaceful and serene. The mud flats, barren and free from life, were shadowed purple by massive overhanging trees that paddled their roots in the water. The fireflies were not awake. No fish mottled the surface of the river. The bullfrogs were asleep, preparing for their nightly choir practice.
Low in the sky to the east, the sun and the moon had paired off to spend the day blazing at each other, while down on Earth their light shone on the clear lagoon, forging it into metal. The eastern side was silver, tinged here and there with mauve; the western part was glaring like a sheet of hammered bronze.
As Selena watched, through the water, slightly raised by the weight at the helm, foam creaming around its prow, the blunt nose of the dugout came in toward the shore.
"Jesus!" she said, standing up. "This place is a blow-away."
"Like it, eh?" Sparky said, as the canoe bumped against the bank.
"And how! What a day! Here, you want some help?"
"Sure. Take these jars up the bank while I moor this thing." Sparky passed the water samples to Selena, then stepped out of the boat.
"How long ya been with the Peace Corps, out in this wilderness?"
"About six months," Sparky said. "I'm not a member though. I just work with them."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"I'm not a US citizen. That's a bar to volunteering."