Elise sighed, waving flies away from her face. She hated fish in general. It was Jack’s idea that she come. He told her that she’d never know Peru, the real Peru by hanging around the hotel in Pucallpa. And her answer to that was she did not want to know the real Peru. Pucallpa was bad enough with the bugs and the stench coming in from the docks, she didn’t need to get devoured by man-eating fish to boot. But Jack had explained that there was nothing to fear. There were twenty-five species of piranha in the Amazon and most fed on other fish, on insects, on fruit that had fallen into the water. Only six species were true flesh-eaters and of those six, only the Red-Bellied Piranha and the larger Black Piranha were dangerous to man.
So here she was, deep in the backwaters of the Amazon with a guide who kept telling one raunchy tale after another, showing off the stump of the finger he’d lost taking a hook from a piranha’s mouth. There was absolutely no breeze. The air was damp, the river stank like something dead. They had rubbed Vick’s Vapo-Rub over their faces and arms so the clouds of mosquitoes wouldn’t drain them dry. As it was, she was drenched with sweat, her eyes were burning, and Cutler kept staring at her.
From the moment they stepped into the boat-a flat-bottomed motorized skiff-Elise was aware of his eyes on her. His gaze was perverse. Something about it made her stomach roll. Not that she hadn’t dealt with men like him before, but the way he looked at her, sizing her up like a tasty slab of beef, was just too much.
“Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she told him.
Cutler grinned. His teeth were yellow, tobacco-stained, there was a sheen of sweat on his face. “Was I staring?”
“Yes, you goddamn well know you were.”
Cutler shrugged, licked his lips, and stared out over the shimmering expanse of the upper Amazon. What he saw was pale green flora growing in and out of the dirty brown water, clouds of gnats rising and falling, broken stumps and dead trees rising up like monuments. A steam condensed above the water, rolling over its surface like a sluggish fog. Tanagers and barbets cried out in the treetops, insects buzzed and flies nipped. None of which was as remotely interesting to him as Elise and her fine cleavage which made him feel weak in the pit of his belly.
“Simmer down,” Jack said under his breath and not for the first time.
Elise scowled at him. “If he keeps staring at me, he’s going overboard.”
“Quit staring at her, Cutler,” Jack said, smiling. “I won’t have it.”
Cutler was one of his drinking buddies from Pucallpa. He was a small, wiry man with the eyes of a rodent. He made Elise’s flesh crawl. Basille, the other occupant of the boat, was a round, portly businessman from Lima. The only thing that excited him was money.
Elise tried to ignore the both of them.
They were on the Ucayali River in central Peru, the main headstream of the Amazon formed by the junction of the Apurimac and Urubamba. A wild green world like something out of the Mesozoic: hot and steaming, clotted with palms and creepers and hanging vines, the jungles haunted by jaguars and poisonous snakes, black caimans and anacondas waiting in the stagnant river bottoms and flooded undergrowth.
They had come because Jack wanted to go piranha fishing.
And that was so like Jack, Elise thought. If he couldn’t catch it with a hook or shoot it with a gun, he had no interest in it.
The jungle seemed endless as it pressed in from all sides. Rank, uniform, monotonous, licked by the foul-smelling serpentine river. Now and again they came upon clusters of palm huts belonging to families of Yorba Indians. But that was it. Rico moved the boat along, still telling stories, still making the men laugh. Elise sighed. He was exactly the kind of man Jack always seemed to find.
There was a sudden gagging stink of fleshy decomposition that put Elise’s belly in her throat. She smelled it right through the Vapo-Rub and the pungent brown river. And from the looks on the faces of the others, they smelled it, too. Rico steered them around a few stumps, navigated a turn in the river and there-in the center of a wide channel-was the bow of a large boat rising from the murk. A wood stork sunned itself atop it. All around the bow were hundreds of dead fish floating, belly-up. There were flies all over them.
“ What the hell is that about?” Jack asked.
Rico shrugged. “Some kind research boat…she sink. Hit something and sink. They suppose to come, tow her away. Ah, but the state…ha! Probably be year before they do!”
“ What killed the fish?” Cutler wanted to know.
Rico shrugged again. “Chemical or something. It were a biotech boat out research things. Everyone get off okay. So no worry…except for them sonofabitch fishies, eh?”
Elise was holding her nose. The stink of those rotting fish was hot, nauseating. It crawled up her nose and down her throat, tried to drag her stomach back up with it. She noticed that there was a funny purple sheen to the water around the sunken ship. Something about that she did not like at all.
But no one else seemed bothered.
Rico steered them away from the main channel and into the igapo, or flooded forest. The meltwaters of the Andes overflowed the rivers between January and June, creating a weird world of flooded jungle. He steered them around huge vine-covered trees and clotted stands of foliage, finding the channel where he knew the fishing would be good.
“ Yes,” he said, “this will do. Them sonofabitch pirayas travel in schools, hundreds of them, eh? They come to the igapo because they know game in the water and the eating she is good.”
Jack was excited. “All right, let’s do some fishing.”
*
As they made ready with the long bamboo poles, Rico told them that during flood season the pirayas were not truly dangerous. Their hunting range was expanded into the jungle and there was plenty to eat. They were only really a threat when there was no food. In fact, he said, during this time of year men wade into the river and spearfish, women wash clothes, and children swim in piranha waters without any harm.
Elise figured he was saying that for her benefit.
The jungle was primeval, silent, unbearably eerie. The channel they were in was maybe forty feet across, a stew of brown steaming water. Leaves and sticks floated on its surface. Trees grew from the water in tangled, knotted masses to either side, rising up on snaking roots and filling out, growing thickly until their twisted limbs joined together overhead like woven canestraw. The result was like being in a tunnel…a hot, smelling, claustrophobic tunnel of stagnant water and warm decay.
Rico tried to give Elise a pole, but she refused. The bamboo poles were about four feet long, set with six-pound nylon lines and triple-barbed hooks that were baited with chunks of raw beef and chicken liver. To attract the piranhas, Rico tossed some bloody chum into the water.
“They smell this for miles,” he said.
The men tossed their lines into the water.
Rico rolled a cigarette, told a story about Isobel, his first wife, who was so crazy she’d once chased him down the muddy, winding streets of Cerro de Pasco with a baseball bat. She had been naked at the time. “And that, my friends, is no thing to be looking on first thing in morning.” He shivered. “Yah!”
Then the waiting began. Elise sat there, beads of sweat rolling down her face. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes hovered over the water. Dragonflies buzzed about. Howler monkeys wailed in the treetops. Elise listened to the blue macaws screech and watched palm vipers thread through the spoking branches.
Basille suddenly stiffened, his bovine face beaded with perspiration. “I…ah…I think I have a nibble,” he said.
“Easy,” Rico told him. “The piraya is sneaky little devil. Don’t scare him off. Let him take good bite first…then he yours.”