09-Twelve Mile Limit (45 page)

Not that there were many people in this small branch of the larger Jivaro tribe. There were a dozen huts, home to three dozen men, women, and brown-eyed children, and an amusing variety of pet monkeys and macaws. The huts were framed with bamboo, built beside small cooking fires and roofed with banana leaves that fauceted off the afternoon downpours.

When it rained that way—a waterfall that crashed down through the forest canopy—Keesha would lead me to the big, woven hammock, and we would cling to each other there, and use our hands to explore each other’s bodies, and give comfort.

I stayed a month. Longer. I don’t know. I lost track. It was long enough to be accepted and, I hope, respected by the men. I hunted with them and learned to use the long blowguns with which they took howler monkeys and three-toed sloth, though I was not a good shot. I made certain, though, that I did more than my share of any unpleasant jobs that had to be done—a sure way to win allies in any survival situation.

One night, squatting around the communal fire, Keesha’s brother, Zarabatana, handed me a huge gourd filled with what he called cashiri. It was a kind of beer made from the mandioca root, and slightly psychedelic. The village men—as men are likely to do—proceeded to get me, the cashiri novice, absolutely shit-faced. They thought it was hilarious when I tried to show them how to limbo by drunkenly imitating Tomlinson’s artistry. Still roaring, they mimicked the sounds I made as I vomited into the bushes.

Two days after that, Zarabatana returned to the village, paddling his carved obada, and said to me, “Finally, our people have located the men you seek. They are in a village in the jungle where the tourists come to see the big river. I think they will not be there for more than two nights. Our people say they are running from something, hiding. They say that they get very drunk at hotel where they yell insults, then sleep.”

Feeling a great stillness inside me, nearly whispering, I said, “Is this jungle hotel close?”

“Yes. A half-day’s paddle. Hotels such as this, there are more and more of them near the big river.”

I grilled Zarabatana for all the details I could assemble before asking, “I don’t suppose anyone raises pigs in the forest near this place?”

He looked at me like I was insane—and perhaps I was.

“Pigs?” he said. “No. Of course not. Why would our people raise pigs when we have peccary to kill and eat?”

That night, when I told Keesha what I must do, she insisted on painting my body. “You are in my heart, big man. It is the only way that I can protect you.”

Another village woman, plus the curandeira, the old shaman, helped her. They built the fire high and stripped me naked as the rest of the village watched. First they smeared my face and body with a dark-red powder they called carujuru, and then kneaded it into my hair.

Then Keesha brought out a wooden bowl that contained dark-blue genipapo dye. With a brush made out of a twig, she painted my ankles in the fashion of her tribe, then began to paint my face with a series of parallel lines.

I didn’t mind. I could picture the jungle resort where Kazan and Stallings were holed up. One of those travel-adventure outposts where people were boated in for quick bites of wilderness and prepackaged ecology lessons. For two murderers, it was perfect cover.

For a man painted like a Jivaro warrior, the same was true.

Zarabatana let me borrow his obada and offered me his pucuna, too. I refused the blowgun but promised to return the dugout to him soon.

“It does not matter,” he said, with the easy indifference of his people when it came to material items. “I can always make another.”

Just before I pushed away from the bank, Keesha came trotting down the path, something in her hand. “Would you care to wear this, as your muisak, the avenging soul of your enemy? As a necklace for luck.”

I looked into the tiny, wizened face of Niall McCauley, his eyes sewn closed, head suspended on a leather strap, and said, “No. That guy ran out of luck long ago.”

The jungle hotel was not hard to find. In six hours of paddling through darkness, past the occasional village fire, it was the only human stronghold with a generator and incandescent lights.

The place consisted of a main hut and outdoor Tiki bar, then a series of little bamboo cottages, all set along a dock fronting this broad section of river. A place for the tour boats.

Nor was it difficult to find the cottage where Kazan and Stallings were staying. From the darkness, after peering through half a dozen screened windows, I saw an open bottle of Moët on the kitchenette counter and a carton of Dunhill cigarettes.

All people create a personal spore, and this was the spore of Hassan Atwa Kazan, the man who’d murdered Amelia.

I went inside and searched the two small bedrooms. In one, I found clothing that would fit only a giant. In the other, I found the clothes of a very tall, very thin man, plus several linen kaffiyehs, in several colors, folded atop the chest of drawers.

I turned off all the lights, sat in a chair by the door, and unholstered the SIG Sauer. In my left hand, I held an obsidian knife with a mahogany handle, beautifully polished, that Keesha had given me as a present. I waited, expecting both men to return at the same time, after the little bar had closed.

They did not.

Stallings returned first, and I watched the surprise register in his face when he switched on the overhead light and saw me, a strange, painted vision, a big man wearing only a breechcloth, pointing a gun at his belly.

The bully in him came to the fore. “This better be some kind of joke, asshole!”

I hit him in the face with the heel of my open palm and dropped the full weight of my elbow on the back of his neck. Then I walked him at gunpoint out into the jungle. Once he said, in a tone of dawning realization, “Jesus Christ, it’s you. I know who you are now!”

His last words were “I didn’t kill her. I swear it.”

When Kazan came in, wearing baggy pants and a crooked linen kaffiyeh roped around his head, he was so staggering drunk that his slow-motion reaction was the second disappointment of the day.

The first was the fact that there were no wild hogs nearby to which to feed a wounded man.

He had a surprisingly high voice and a stink about him, like curry, or toads kept in a jar too long. It is one of our oddities that, as humans, we invest in our enemies strengths they do not possess and qualities of evil that elevate them while diminishing us.

Hassan Kazan seemed weasel-like, not evil, and surprisingly frail—though why I was surprised, I do not know. Only weak people take pleasure in imposing on the vulnerability of others and causing them pain.

Out in the jungle, far enough from the camp so no one could hear, I slapped his face, hoping he would fight back. Instead, he began to cry and to chant a repetitive phrase—a prayer, perhaps—in a language I did not understand.

But when I asked, “Why did you kill her?” and he replied, “Because she bit my hand. I had no choice!” the cold fury in me returned.

I dropped both weapons, ducked under his arm, behind him, and locked my fingers beneath his jaw, tilting his head back, my right knee pinned against his spine. With teeth clenched, I said, “I have done this ten times, and each time I whispered something into their ear. I’ve never told another living soul what that was.”

Kazan was crying again. “I’m sorry. Please. I don’t want you to do this. I truly am sorry.”

His words so surprised me that I heard myself reply, “Yes. Very close. That’s almost exactly what I’ve told them. But not now. Not to you. This time, it would be a lie.”

Then, with my hands still locked around his neck, I allowed my legs to collapse beneath me, my full body weight plummeting earthward, pulling Hassan Atwa Kazan down as if we’d both been dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows.

In what an editorial in the Sanibel Shopper’s Guide would call “a clear conspiracy between the makers of Guinness beer, whiskey, and other strong drink,” Florida’s state legislature showed uncommon foresight and backbone by postponing the implementation of the so-called “manatee protection laws.”

They postponed them, at least, until lawyers of Save All Manatees filed briefs explaining why they had “(allegedly) intentionally perverted and misrepresented certain scientific data to advance their organization politically and economically to the detriment of the economic well-being, and maritime freedoms, of the citizens of Florida.”

The fact that the legislature made its announcement on Thursday, March 16—the day before St. Patrick’s Day—catalyzed the tongue-in-cheek editorial in the Sanibel newspaper.

The article went on to say, “Nowhere on the islands will this evil Celtic conspiracy be more self-evident than at our own Dinkin’s Bay Marina and Fishhouse. Tomorrow, the marina’s traditional Friday pig roast and cotillion—always popular—will reach gala proportions. The fishing guides, liveaboards, sad old hippies, and other misfits who have lived there, unproductively, for years will be celebrating the fact that the government will not be kicking them out of their slovenly, floating homes. Not yet, anyway.”

The article even quoted Mack—and probably accurately. “According to Graeme MacKinley, the marina’s owner, the local package stores have hired extra personnel just to deliver the massive quantity of dyed draft beer and liquor he’s ordered. Hundreds of locals are expected to attend.

“‘There’s only one thing that really scares me,’ MacKinley told this reporter. ‘We all know how marina people are when they get a few beers in them, and it’s dark on the docks, and they have to relieve themselves. I’m afraid we’re going to wake up Saturday and the whole damn Gulf of Mexico will be shamrock green.’”

It was good news. Even to my face, it brought a small smile—and I had not smiled much since returning from Colombia. There were a couple of obvious reasons. For one thing, in the rain forest, I had seen myself in another incarnation, and my name was Curtis Tyner. As much as I’d fought the truth, I’d proven it true. As much as I hated the truth, I now had no choice but to acknowledge it. It was not an easy thing to live with, yet I would have to find a way to do exactly that for the rest of my life.

Mostly, though, I missed my friend, Amelia Gardner. From her mother, I’d asked for and received several nice photographs of her. In my little house, I’d tacked the photos on the wall at eye level, so I could look into her eyes when I felt the need. It was the only way I knew to try to blot out the way her face looked the last time I saw her. I wanted to replace that sad, small image with the face of the person I knew and loved.

Sometimes, it worked.

I know enough about mental illness to have realized I wasn’t doing well, or behaving normally. All people have emotional boundaries, limits beyond which there is no return. I was on the very outer fringes of mine. I recognized in myself certain troubling symptoms of depression—a malady to which I’ve never been prone. So, early on upon my return, I paid a visit to Dr. Dieter Rasmussen aboard his forty-six-foot Grand Banks and asked of him a favor.

In his heavy, German accent, he replied, “Yah! Of course, I will treat you. Doctor-patient confidentiality. I am a psychiatrist and a scientist. You haf my word!”

I didn’t tell him everything, of course. But I did discuss my symptoms and my strange inability to cry.

After seven visits, I found his diagnosis amusing but not surprising. “You, my friend, will never be an entirely happy man because you are a rational man. In you, and people like you, intellect and spirituality will always be in conflict. My advice as your physician? Find a new good woman and make love to her. Drink more, laugh more, show your friends that you care. Concentrate on some of the many good things that have been happening lately! Remember what I’ve learned in all my years of practice: Freudian psychiatry is absolute bullshit. We are chemical, genetic creatures, but we still have the option of choosing our own direction.”

So, wanting badly to follow his advice, I made a choice. Some good things had happened, and I decided I would focus my attention on them.

The return of a transformed Janet Mueller had had a healthy, happy impact on the whole marina family, as well as on more than a few individuals. The teenage boy she was in the process of adopting, Ron Collins, was among them. So, surprisingly, was my cousin, Ransom Gatrell. Ransom and Janet had both lost children in earlier years, and the two of them had become the closest of friends and confidants. Grace Walker—a truly gorgeous woman—had been included in their sisterly triad. In the three of them, I now saw a peace, and a sense of self-security, that I envied but that also pleased me greatly.

It was more surprising that Jeth Nicholes had not benefited in a way that most of us at the marina had expected. Oh, he was happy to see that Janet was back home, healthy and alive, but a curious thing had happened in her absence. He and Janet’s sister, Claudia Kohlerberg, had fallen quickly, passionately, and devotedly in love. When he tried to tell Janet what had happened, he stuttered so badly that Claudia had had to interpret.

Only Janet’s great gift for understanding, and her new strength, saved what could have become an ugly, community-damaging situation.

She’d actually laughed as she told me, “Irony, Doc. Irony and love. Those are the only two things that separate us from the beasts.”

Another good thing was Tomlinson—who was still Tomlinson, thank God. He continued to demonstrate his universal quirkiness, which is to say, he never followed the path that those of us who know him expect. The most recent example was that, while I was away, he hired an attorney, started a small corporation, and embraced—of all the strange disciplines available—the American free-enterprise system.

He was fascinated by chili peppers and had grown them for years. First, in pots aboard the No Mas. Then whole lots of them on land he leased near Periwinkle Boulevard. A natural extension of that passion was bottling and selling his own hot sauce. He said he had his sights set on a small catalogue company: sarongs from Indonesia, hammocks from Panama, things like that.