Lee smiled. "Just imagine some old humanist German doctor. I say, 'Well, Doc, you done a great job here with malaria. Cut the incidence down almost to nothing.'
"'Ach, yes. We do our best, is it not? You see this line in the graph? The line shows the decline in this sickness in the past ten years since we commence with our treatment program.'
"'Yeah, Doc. Now look, I want to see that line go back where it came from.'
"'Ach, this you cannot mean.'
"'And another thing. See if you can't import an especially debilitating strain of hookworm.'
"The mountain people we can always immobilize by taking their blankets away, leaving them with the enterprise of a frozen lizard."
The inside wall to Lee's room stopped about three feet from the ceiling to allow for ventilating the next room, which was an inside room with no windows. The occupant of the next room said something in Spanish to the effect Lee should be quiet.
"Ah, shut up," said Lee, leaping to his feet. "I'll nail a blanket over that slot! I'll cut off your fucking air! You only breathe with my permission. You're the occupant of an inside room, a room without windows. So remember your place and shut your poverty-stricken mouth!"
A stream of chingas and cabrones replied.
"Hombre," Lee asked, "¿En dónde está su cultura?"
"Let's hit the sack," said Allerton. "I'm tired."
Chapter 9
They took a river boat to Babahoya. Swinging in hammocks, sipping brandy, and watching the jungle slide by. Springs, moss, beautiful clear streams and trees up to two hundred feet high. Lee and Allerton were silent as the boat powered upriver, penetrating the jungle stillness with its lawnmower whine. From Babahoya they took a bus over the Andes to Ambato, a cold, jolting fourteen-hour ride. They stopped for a snack of chick-peas at a hut at the top of the mountain pass, far above the tree line. A few young native men in gray felt hats ate their chickpeas in sullen resignation. Several guinea pigs were squeaking and scurrying around on the dirt floor of the hut.
Their cries reminded Lee of the guinea pig he owned as a child in the Fairmont Hotel in St.
Louis, when the family was waiting to move into their new house on Price Road. He remembered the way the pig shrieked, and the stink of its cage.
They passed the snow-covered peak of Chimborazo, cold in the moonlight and the constant wind of the high Andes. The view from the high mountain pass seemed from another, larger planet than Earth. Lee and Allerton huddled together under a blanket, drinking brandy, the smell of wood smoke in their nostrils. They were both wearing Army-surplus jackets, zipped up over sweatshirts to keep out the cold and wind. Allerton seemed insubstantial as a phantom; Lee could almost see through him, to the empty phantom bus outside.
From Ambato to Puyo, along the edge of a gorge a thousand feet deep. There were waterfalls and forests and streams running down over the roadway, as they descended into the lush green valley. Several times the bus stopped to remove large stones that had slid down onto the road.
Lee was talking on the bus to an old prospector named Morgan, who had been thirty years in the jungle. Lee asked him about Ayahuasca.
"Acts on them like opium," Morgan said. "All my Indians use it. Can't get any work out of them for three days when they get on Ayahuasca."
"I think there may be a market for it," Lee said.
Morgan said, "I can get any amount."
They passed the prefabricated bungalows of Shell Mara. The Shell Company had spent two years and twenty million dollars, found no oil, and pulled out. They got into Puyo late at night, and found a room in a ramshackle hotel near the general store.
Lee and Allerton were too exhausted to speak, and they fell asleep at once.
Next day Old Man Morgan went around with Lee, trying to score for Ayahuasca. Allerton was still sleeping. They hit a wall of evasion. One man said he would bring some the following day. Lee knew he would not bring any.
They went to a little saloon run by a mulatto woman. She pretended not to know what Ayahuasca was. Lee asked if Ayahuasca was illegal. "No," said Morgan, "but the people are suspicious of strangers."
They sat there drinking aguardiente mixed with hot water and sugar and cinnamon. Lee said his racket was shrunk-down heads. Morgan figured they could start a head-shrinking plant. "Heads rolling off the assembly line," he said. "You can't buy those heads at any price. The government forbids it, you know. The blighters were killing people to sell the heads."
Morgan had an inexhaustible fund of old dirty jokes. He was talking about some local character from Canada.
"How did he get down here?" Lee asked.
Morgan chuckled. "How did we all get down here? Spot of trouble in our own country, right?"
Lee nodded, without saying anything.
Old Man Morgan went back to Shell Mara on the afternoon bus to collect some money owed him.
Lee talked to a Dutchman named Sawyer who was farming near Puyo. Sawyer told him there was an American botanist living in the jungle, a few hours out of Puyo.
"He is trying to develop some medicine. I forget the name. If he succeeds in concentrating this medicine, he says he will make a fortune. Now he is having a hard time. He has nothing to eat out there."
Lee said, "I am interested in medicinal plants. I may pay him a visit."
"He will be glad to see you. But take along some flour or tea or something. They have nothing out there."
Later Lee said to Allerton, "A botanist! What a break. He is our man. We will go tomorrow."
"We can hardly pretend we just happened by," said Allerton. "How are you going to explain your visit?"
"I will think of something. Best tell him right out I want to score for Yage. I figure maybe there is a buck in it for both of us. According to what I hear, he is flat on his ass. We are lucky to hit him in that condition. If he was in the chips and drinking champagne out of galoshes in the whorehouses of Puyo, he would hardly be interested to sell me a few hundred Sucres' worth of Yage. And, Gene, for the love of Christ, when we do overhaul this character, please don't say, 'Doctor Cotter, I presume.'"
The hotel room in Puyo was damp and cold. The houses across the street were blurred by the pouring rain, like a city under water. Lee was picking up articles off the bed and shoving them into a rubberized sack. A .32 automatic pistol, some cartridges wrapped in oiled silk, a small frying pan, tea and flour packed in cans and sealed with adhesive tape, two quarts of Puro.
Allerton said, "This booze is the heaviest item, and the bottle's got like sharp edges. Why don't we leave it here?"
"We'll have to loosen his tongue," Lee said. He picked up the sack and handed Allerton a shiny new machete.
"Let's wait till the rain stops," said Allerton.
"Wait till the rain stops!" Lee collapsed on the bed with loud, simulated laughter. "Haw haw haw!
Wait till the rain stops! They got a saying down here, like I'll pay you what I owe you when it stops raining in Puyo.' Haw haw."
"We had two clear days when we first got here."
"I know. A latter-day miracle. There's a movement on foot to canonize the local padre. Vámonos, cabrón."
Lee slapped Allerton's shoulder and they walked out in the rain, slipping on the wet cobblestones of the main street.
The trail was corduroy. The wood of the trail was covered with a film of mud. They cut long canes to keep from slipping, but it was slow walking. High jungle with hardwood forest on both sides of the trail, and very little undergrowth. Everywhere was water, springs and streams and rivers of clear, cold water.