I leaned toward him, squeezing off four fast shots with the pistol, and watched the rounds knock him backward, contorting his face and body as if he were taking blows from an invisible bat. He continued firing wildly as he fell.
I dived to the right, rolling as I did, still focused on their small group. Two of his own men-one of them the kid named Marcos-were backpedaling drunkenly, both of them hit by black-beard’s fire. The other two had dropped to their bellies.
I screamed, “Get your hands away from those weapons!” as black-beard hit the ground and the firing stopped. I sprayed another short burst just above them to make my point. Then I got to my feet, heart pounding.
The girl was still there. I was surprised by that. Why hadn’t she run-let these crazy men fight it out among themselves?
The two rebels who’d been hit were writhing in the dirt, crying for help. They’d both taken rounds in the back and legs. Black-beard was still moving, too, trying to get to his stomach, trying to crawl.
I could see that the two healthy rebels were giving it some thought, trying to decide what to do, so I walked toward them yelling, “Hands behind your heads! Hands behind your heads!”
As I repeated it a third time, black-beard tensed, then his body seemed to deflate.
I didn’t want to get so close that they could use their hands to try to trip me, so I said to the girl, “Do you speak Spanish?”
In the orange light of the burning helicopter, her eyes were black pools, her face a brown mask. She nodded.
“Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”
She shrugged.
“Okay. Then I want you to walk behind them, take their weapons, and place them over there, near the wreckage. Be careful, they can go off. Don’t throw them. Put them down carefully.”
She stared at me for a moment, thinking about it. Her voice was deeper than I expected to be, but still girlish. A teenager in the rain forest. “You’re not going to kill them?”
I shook my head. “We get their weapons, throw them in the river, they’re not going to bother us anymore. I’ll help you. I promise. You can trust me.”
Once again, she gave me a considered look that seemed void of emotion. Then she walked quickly to where the guerrillas lay on the ground. At black-beard’s body, she paused, touching him experimentally with her bare foot.
He did not move.
I said, “I think he’s dead.”
Her response surprised me. “Too bad.”
Then I watched her kneel and pick-up the AK-47 that black-beard had used. She looked at the barrel, looked at the trigger, then looked at me.
Why was she behaving so oddly?
“Hurry up! We need to get moving.”
The two wounded guerrillas were still groaning, calling for help, and she looked at them, rifle in her hands, before looking at the two men on the ground at her feet. Then, before my brain could process what was happening, she shouldered the rifle, and shot both of them in the back and head with short bursts.
“What are you doing?”
I was running toward her as she turned and emptied the rifle into the bodies of the two wounded men.
“Stop it!”
Then she looked at me, as if I might be next, but I could see her brain processing it. No, she would not shoot me… and so she threw the weapon away from her, her eyes staring into mine.
I stopped running, looked at her through the jungle’s vacuum of silence, and heard her say. “Good. They’re all dead now.”
Then she turned to black-beard. “I wish you had not killed this pig. He was the worst. Him, I would have taken back to my village and given to the old women for a night. They know the ways to deal with bad men. Then I would have taken his head.”
26
Her name was a windy, guttural sound- Kee-shew-ha-RA?-that I tried to pronounce several times, but couldn’t get right.
Finally, she said, “The year that the missionaries came, they called me Keesha. I hated them, but it is a name that you may use for the time we’re together.”
At the wreck site, she’d insisted that I wait while she yanked a few strands of hair from each guerrilla. It was a compromise: She’d asked me for a knife. She wanted to decapitate black-beard.
When I refused, she told me, “The things he did to me I will never say.”
After hearing that, waiting for her while she plucked out a few strands of her kidnapper’s hair seemed a minor indulgence.
Now, as she led me through the forest toward the river, walking single file and fast, I listened to her explain that she was from an Amazon people called the Jivaros, but that her smaller tribal group was called the Shuar.
“My family would be very angry at me,” she added, “if I did not exercise my right to tsantsa, or untsuri suara. Those men hurt me and my brother, so I killed them. But their spirit still remains in their hair. You would not allow me to take a head, so taking their hair is an acceptable alternative.”
Back in her village, Keesha told me, she would use beeswax to attach the hair to gourds.
“In that way,” she said, “I will still have taken their heads. When I marry, I will hang the gourds outside my door, and so continue to own my enemy’s muisak, their avenging souls. My husband will show me greater respect because of it.”
I told her, “That I don’t doubt.”
The guerrillas had crossed the river in what she called an obada, a large dugout canoe that looked to have been hollowed out using fire and an ax. It was pulled up on the bank, hidden among bushes.
“The sun will be above the trees in an hour or two,” she said. “We must get as far down the river as we can. The dead men have friends only an hour’s walk from here. A military camp. They will soon be looking for us. If they find us, they will shoot us.”
I told her, “I need to get to a telephone. It’s very important. Or a highway where I can flag down a car and get help. I have to hurry. Friends of mine, their lives depend on it.”
“The soldiers control the only road. There are many of them. You can’t help your friends if you are dead. We must go by river.”
“Is there a telephone in your village?”
The slightest hint of a smile came into her voice. “If there were a telephone in my village, I would find a new village.”
That morning, just after 6:30 A.M., the river was slowly transformed from water, to clay, and then molten wax. Then it became a tunnelway of brass streaked with golden mist. Overhead, the sky absorbed the river’s incandescence and mirrored the gradual evolutions of color and light.
We were deep in a ravine of vine and leaf, two human specks riding a vein of silver. The forest walls were sheer as rock cliffs, matted with wildflowers and shadows, but hollow, alive inside.
I was in the front of the canoe because the girl refused to let me take the stern, even though I insisted that I was very experienced in boats.
“All men say that they know boats,” she told me. “I have been building and paddling obadas all my life. Can you make such a claim?”
She was a superb paddler, no denying that. No wasted effort, no unnecessary ruddering, and she could steer a straight line, too.
So I concentrated on paddling. Hard. For the first hour, we exchanged only a few words. With the aid of the river’s steady current, we probably put seven or eight miles between us and the crash site.
Finally, Keesha stopped us, saying, “I have to make water.”
I turned to see her standing nearly naked behind me, the blue skirt in her hand, brown thighs paler than her legs, the thin strip of pubic hair very dark. There was no shyness as she squatted over the side and urinated.
As she peed, she said, “If you need to make water, this is a good time.”
So I stood, feet spread wide for balance, and did, feeling her eyes on me. There was no coyness in her. She was curious, wanted to look, and so she did. Unused to an audience, I took longer than usual to relax my bladder, and that seemed to amuse her.