Chapter 6
Monti was persuaded to take a tentative bite. She savored the meat, then ate ravenously, throwing the picked bones out the open door of the plane beside her. She watched the passing shore as she ate. Food dispelled some of her gloom.
They’ll start searching for us soon, she thought. Her mind turned to Gettler. When we’re rescued. Then we can find out the truth of what happened at the rancho. The government will send soldiers. They’ll get at the truth.
Jeb, too, watched the passing jungle, saw the heat devils spiraling from the treetops. Now, the river bank was more open: lined by cabbage palms and with tree ferns weaving delicate patterns below.
Shadows were longer as the sun began its descent toward the peaks in the west.
Infrequently, in the spotted sunlight beyond the river’s edge, Jeb’s eyes caught flitting movements. It occurred to him that live things in the jungle were mostly sudden—darting so quickly that you seemed to see them only after they’d gone: like frozen afterimages.
A loose rumbling sound from the rear of the plane caught Jeb’s attention. Snoring. Gettler? Jeb turned, and his muscles locked.
David was bent toward Gettler, a look of total concentration on his young face. His right hand crept toward the butt of the big revolver in Gettler’s belt.
Gettler was sleeping with his mouth open, the rifle cradled against one knee.
David heard us! thought Jeb. The crazy kid’s going to start a battle royal! I’ve got to stop him! He watched the slowly moving hand. But maybe he can get it!
Jeb glanced quickly at Monti. She stared out her window, oblivious of the tableau in the rear. Jeb returned his attention to David. The boy’s hand hovered over the gun butt, moved down, touched it.
Gettler’s eyes jerked open. His hand smashed out, caught David on the nose, hurled him into the corner.
“I thought so!” bellowed Gettler.
David cowered in the corner, blood flowing from his nose, running down his chin, down his neck, staining his shirt.
Jeb had started to dive for the gun himself. He froze as Gettler jerked up the revolver, waved it menacingly.
Monti had whirled at the sound of the slap. She reached for David, drew back as Gettler thrust the gun toward her.
“Did you put him up to that?” he demanded.
“Up to what?”
The gun muzzle moved toward Jeb.
“I just wanted to look at the gun,” said David. “You said you were going to let me.” He wiped the blood away from his chin. “Why’d you hit me? You gave me a bloody nose!”
Gettler’s face underwent an abrupt transformation: the cheek muscles sagged, his eyes lost some of their glaring fire. He lowered the gun, turned to David, spoke as though he had just that moment awakened:
“Sorry son. But you shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” said David.
“Don’t ever do that again,” said Gettler. He produced a red bandana from one of his jacket pockets. “Here. Press this against your nose.”
He lied to me, thought David. He doesn’t really want me to have a gun.
Jeb wet his lips with his tongue.
Gettler’s attention shifted. He stared at Jeb through slitted eyes. “What’re you trying to prove, Logan?”
And David thought: He’s trying to prove that you killed my dad! Did you? The question formed on his lips.
“David, are you all right?” asked Monti.
“Yes, Mother.”
“You shouldn’t try to play with guns, David.”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
We’re at the mercy of a madman! thought Monti. He could have killed Roger!
Jeb had followed the same line of thought, but now, something else occupied his mind. David has some power over Gettler. How can we use that?
“In the jungle you have to sleep on a hair trigger,” said Gettler. “Never trust anything that touches you to be safe. Do you understand, David?”
David wiped his cheek with the bandana, nodded.
Gettler looked at Monti. “There’s the one thing your husband never learned about the jungle, Mrs. Bannon. He was too trusting, always hobnobbing with the savages. Precious lot of good it did him!” He lowered the revolver to his lap.
“What do you mean he hobnobbed with them?” asked Monti. “Did he visit with them in their villages?”
“Stayed for weeks at a time,” said Gettler.
Jeb said: “Do you want me to look at David’s nose, Monti? See if it’s okay?”
“You heard him say he’s all right!” snapped Gettler.
David shook his head. “It’s already stopped bleeding. I’m okay.”
Roger visited with the Indians, thought Monti. They would’ve accepted him. He was that kind. There was no longer any doubt in her mind. Gettler murdered him!
Gettler glared at Jeb. “What’re you staring at?”
Monti put a hand on Jeb’s sleeve. He turned around, faced forward.
The back of Jeb’s head fascinated Gettler. I could kill him right now! He suspects. That’s as bad as knowing. It’s his fault the woman and boy haven’t warmed to me. He dies if I want him to die!
Gettler suddenly felt that he occupied a pool outside of time—remote and godlike. If Logan dies I’ll have the woman and boy all to myself. His face took on a dreaming look, filled with a drunken expression of power. His hand on the butt of the revolver tingled and trembled.
“Hadn’t you better put that gun away?” asked David. “It might go off and hurt somebody.”
The mood was shattered. It dissolved completely, and he swung on a hurtling pendulum into a ragged chaos of memories. One face dominated the memories: a boy. His name was … was … Peter! And Gettler asked himself: Why is Peter talking about guns? We never let him play with guns. His mind dodged the question, relaxed into a lecture hall memory, the familiar podium beneath his fingers. Ahhh. Comparative logic: the mind slashing through a wilderness of dark things to the one bright kernel sprouting in a glade.
And Jeb thought, I’ve got to get those guns away from him!
Silence invaded the plane: an impressive solitude magnified by the heat and hypnotic flow of shoreline.
Jeb stared at his hands. He had never before been forced into a position where both fear and idleness forced him to look inward. The experience was both terrifying and fascinating. Fear is the penalty of consciousness, he thought. He felt that somewhere in his past had reached a glowing summit where there were no complications of before and after. It was a plaintive half-thought: a looking for a place of no doubts.
The images within my mind are part of me, he told himself. I don’t need to fear them. They’re the past.
But he sensed that there might be a tip-over point with introspection, that somewhere within him lurked a memory, which could engulf him.
Monti lighted a cigarette, her second of the day. She studied the glowing tip. The same pressures of introspection were at work on her, and she found them equally disturbing. Her reaction was to run away to the present, a place just as repugnant.
The future, then.
They’ll start looking for us soon. She looked up at the sky. A plane could come over any minute now. Her attention went to the mountains in the western horizon. The mountains grew and diminished as the river twisted through its blue furrow.
The plane drifted on an enchanted river that meandered between curtains of drooping lianas. They rounded a bend, and the current carried them toward the towering brilliance of three Fernán Sanchez trees: a startling red against the overpowering green. Water was slowly undercutting the witch finger roots that clutched at a muddy bank.
Rising waves of heat encased the plane in dead air. The sun was a throbbing inferno that drifted over them, crushed them.
The river edge became quilted with evening shadows. Night swept upward from the trench of slow current to the blazing peaks. The sun dipped behind the mountains. Amethyst vapors in the sunset produced a space of polished ruby water ahead of them—like flowing blood.
There came a moment at dark when the river seemed to cease all movement. Then they were into the damply cushioned night: the time of the timid and the terrible.
The melon slice of moon was slightly larger, a thin curve of bright metal. Its light spilled over the jungle edge like a pale waterfall, flooded the river with a cold glow of silver.
In the plane, the absence of the sun was a weight lifted from their heads. They nerved themselves to eat the last of the K-rations.
Something splashed in the river behind them.
Slowly, the hush of first-dark was replaced by the noises of the early night: low rippling calls that could have been a bird or animal, the distant scream of a prowling jaguar, a flutter of wings overhead, the chiming of frogs.
Monti’s voice came low and devoid of energy: “Do you think the Indians have given up?”
“Not likely,” said Jeb.
Are they really after Gettler to avenge my husband? wondered Monti. And again she began to doubt her suspicions.
“They’ll choose a narrow place in the river,” said Gettler. “Probably at rapids.”
“I wish I knew what set them off,” said Jeb.
“Plain filthy nastiness!” snarled Gettler. “That’s the way they are!”
“One atom bomb would kill all of them!” said David. “When I grow up I’m going to drop an atom bomb on them!”
“Then you’d never know why they did it,” said Jeb. He stared ahead along the moon trail.
Gettler said: “Logan, you’d better keep …”
“Oh, stop it!” snapped Monti. “It’s so close in here! We have to be together, so why can’t we make the best of it?”
“Arrrrrgh!” said Gettler.
“Maybe if we talked about ourselves,” said Monti. “If we got to know each other better.”
“The practical female,” said Gettler.
“We did a movie on the Mississippi—oh, six or seven years ago,” said Monti. She counted on her fingers. “Seven years.”
“I saw it,” said Jeb.
“I thought then how wonderful it’d be to just drift down a river,” she said. “So peaceful.”
“You played the part of a captain’s daughter,” said Jeb. “A river boat captain.”
She laughed. “It was a terrible story, as trite as something from a third grade reader. But I liked the songs. And it was light-hearted. We had fun.”
“There was a song about moonlight on a river,” said Jeb.
She hummed two bars. “That one?”
“Yes! God, it seems like yesterday! I was in Washington, D.C. I took a Pentagon secretary who lived way out in Maryland. And I got a ticket for speeding on the way back. Big fat patrolman who said, ‘The war’s over, Mister!’ So it was.”
“This isn’t like the Mississippi, is it?” asked Gettler. “No Jivaro on the Mississippi to separate you from your head.”
“There are several differences, Mr. Gettler,” she said.
“I would prefer you to call me Franzel,” he said.
“What’s in a name?” asked Jeb.
Monti chuckled. Then: “Franzel?”
“Yes. As you say: we are thrown together, and should make the best of it.”
“Franzel,” she said.
And Gettler thought: That’s what Gerda called me: Franzel. And his mind sheared away from the memory. He found himself thinking of a graduation ceremony in 1934. There had been a sprinkling of jack-booted National Socialists in the audience, but no one had paid much attention—then. There had been no disturbance. Dr. Auber had been the speaker, his theme: “Freedom for the Academic Mind.” Dr. Auber had disappeared the following week.
“Where were you seven years ago, Franzel?” asked Monti.
“I thought it was a very good speech,” said Gettler. “If you chain down the academic mind, it discovers nothing new.”
“What?” asked Monti.
Gettler shook his head. “Eh? Oh, yes. I was just thinking about someone who’s been dead many years. I wonder how he encountered death. As an illusion? Or as a cataclysm?”
“I asked where you were seven years ago?” said Monti.
“Seven? Lovely number. Full of religious significance. Let me see. Seven. I was in New York. Yes. There was a position at Columbia, but someone else got it. His wife was a friend of someone important in the school administration.”
“That’s too bad,” said Monti.
“Oh, no! It was a narrow escape! I could’ve been trapped in civilization!”
“Trapped?” asked Monti.
“Civilization is bossed by women,” said Gettler. “The jungle is where men are supreme. This is man’s last frontier. We don’t like you here.”
David crouched in his corner, listening. The words were strange and fascinating to him. He found Gettler’s voice compelling, and the man’s thoughts were contagious to the young mind.
“What’s it like—the movie life?” asked Jeb. “Is it as hectic as the magazines make out?”
“It’s a living,” she said. “A job.”
“Women make a hell out of the world!” said Gettler. “They’re dictators in a marriage! So literal. So practical. So down to earth!”
David listened in enchantment. She did try to boss my dad, he thought.
“Is it hard work?” asked Jeb.
“God, yes. You’re lucky if you get six hours of sleep a night when you’re shooting.”
“They’re supposed to hold the secret of duration,” said Gettler. “But they lose the secret because they always try to take over the ways of men!”
“We did a story about bullfighters,” said Monti. “In Mexico.”
“I saw that one, too,” said Jeb. “In Korea. A Quonset hut bijou. No heat. Damn near froze to death.”
“Another company was doing a similar kind of story in Spain at the same time,” said Monti. “It was a race. Jesus! Twelve and fourteen hours a day!”
“And women keep superstition alive,” said Gettler. “Intuition? What’s that but superstition? Men are the creative beings. Women destroy creation.”
And David thought: Dad never would’ve run away if it hadn’t been for her! He’d be alive right now!
Monti turned, looked into the shadowy rear of the plane. “What’re you going to do when we reach civilization, Franzel?”
Gettler broke off a ranting thought. Her voice! How like Gerda’s voice!
“What am I going to do?”
He thought about the emeralds in his jacket. “I like the American Southwest,” he said. “The houses are air-conditioned. Lovely clean air. You can put perfume in the air. I will have a swimming pool. The beds will have silk sheets. Silk is so clean to the touch. There will be a shower with glass walls. So antiseptic, glass. No filth. No perspiration. I’ll …”
He stopped, cleared his throat.
“Go on,” murmured Monti.
“This is stupid!” said Gettler.
David filled the pause. “I’m going to kill Indians! All I …” Abruptly, he was crying.
Gettler’s voice came strangely soft and pleading: “Please don’t cry, son. Please. Look: you lean back here and go to sleep. Let Franzel worry about killing Indians.”
“I’m sor-ry,” sobbed David. “It’s … just … that … I … never … ever … got to know him. Now … I’ll never have the chance!”
Monti turned, pressed her face against Jeb’s shoulder. Silent sobs shook her.
Jeb took her shoulders, pulled her head down onto his lap. “You try to get some sleep, too,” he whispered.
Slowly, she quieted. She felt herself giving up to fatigue. Jeb’s like that part of Roger I loved best, she thought. Gettler’s like the part I hated.
It was a curious thought. Her mind turned it over and over until sleep broke into the circle.
David’s crying subsided.
Gettler made murmurous sounds over the boy. Like Peter, he is. How like Peter. But again his mind refused this trail. It will be a small house with one servant. And I will discourage visitors.
The moon path crawled beneath the plane, rippling with spider lines in the eddies, flowing like painted silk in the broad reaches.
Jeb stared downstream.
The Jivaro can’t hold off much longer, he thought. They know all the best places for an ambush. The experts say they won’t attack at night, but …
This thought turned every shadow into a source of peril. Jeb strained his senses against the night.
Gettler tipped his head back, looked up at the moon through the side window. Bronze earthlight filled out the hidden circle. There was a look in this darker area like a human face. Then he recognized the face: Roger Bannon. Good old Rog. The face looked deeply introspective as it had whenever they’d talked philosophy. There was even a dark spot on the moon that could only be Roger’s pipe.
And for the first time, something like remorse touched Gettler.
So I killed him. He should’ve realized how important the emeralds were to me. He should’ve known how much I hate filth! How I need clean things around me! Everything was fine until the emeralds. Maybe the emeralds killed him. Or the part of me that had to have the emeralds.
David had seen Jeb pull his mother down. He looked at the single silhouette in front where there had been two. His mother’s Bohemian life had given David a knowledgeable cynicism beyond his years.
Will she marry this pilot or just have another affair?
He was beyond feeling hurt or surprised about his mother: only curiosity.
Before the moon went down they beached the plane on a narrow islet no more than fifty feet long, the center criss-crossed with logs deposited in the last flood.
Jeb took the first watch. He listened for a deepening of Gettler’s breathing. Let him fall into a deep sleep and I’ll get the gun from his belt!
But every slight shift of motion in the plane, the bump of flotsam against the floats, animal sounds from the jungle all brought a momentary holding of breath, a waiting silence from Gettler.
And at midnight he straightened, said: “Now I will take the watch.”
“All quiet,” said Jeb.
“Good.”
Jeb turned his head against the seat. Monti’s head was still cradled in his lap. She breathed quietly, evenly. He noted that the mildew smell was stronger in the plane. And there was an acrid tang of rust. The smells filled him with a feeling of melancholy, as though deterioration in this symbol of civilization represented all human decay and mortality.