Jungleland (18 page)

Angel sat on a pile of supplies at the center. He didn’t joke with his cell phone anymore or mention the girls he was hunting back home. The smile was gone. He stared out over the churning water with a troubled look. So did his father. The last time Pancho had gotten that look, we’d been driving through bandit country. I wondered if we’d just paid some guys to kidnap us.

At first the water was calm, with bugs hovering over the surface, and no one talked, except for the occasional barks from the leader at the stern and the constant sirenlike noise of the jungle. In some places the river was almost fifty yards across, other times it narrowed into a sliver, with gigantic trees casting everything into deep evening shadow. Vines dangled from high branches like elaborate chandeliers. We slipped through steep canyons of schist rock and limestone—the “grotesque pillars” that Morde had seen. Crocodiles lounged on sandbars. The jungle grew denser, like the jungle that I had read about in Morde’s journals. I grew excited. White skeins of mist clung to everything like fake Christmas tree snow.

Something howled.

“What was that?”

“Monkeys,” said Chris.

“It sounded like a huge wolf.”

“They just sound big.”

“Like the monkey men,” I said. “The Ulaks.” I looked up into the green canopy above, but there was nothing.

“Watch the river,” Chris urged. He began, “You gotta—” but then stopped and pointed. Beginning as a distant clamor, the water soon began to roar, shutting out the din of the monkeys. Pancho emitted a cowboy yell. “Hold on!” We were about to hit rapids. I threw my notes into a Ziploc bag, and the bowman grabbed for his six-foot oar. Suddenly I felt the boat being sucked downstream, as if caught in a chute. The boat accelerated toward a minefield of rocks, the water churning a hard white. I grasped the wood gunwales just as the engine struck ground and then began to squeal as the stern jumped out of the water.

The river bent right and then left, and then, once through the minefield, we were heading for a jutting cliff face at a hundred miles per hour. It felt as though we were locked onto a rail, the way the boat was going straight for it. But what scared me most was that the bowman didn’t move right away. He just stood there, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, a man prepared to die. “Rock!” I yelled, thinking that would get someone doing something. For a second I considered leaping overboard, even though I wasn’t wearing a life jacket. But the bowman stabbed his oar into the white water and, in one hulking pull, sent the boat off in the other direction.

AFTER TWO HOURS
, we left the Río Cuyamel and entered the much wider Patuca, one of Central America’s longest rivers. Once the Patuca leaves the highlands of Olancho, it skirts the Nicaraguan border and travels into the sticky swamps and unmarked jungles of the Mosquitia, where the Indians lived and the lost city was thought by many to be hidden. The river travels in a winding way for about 150 miles, then opens up, expanding in places to almost a mile wide, before dumping into the Caribbean Sea. One thing I had been told about the Patuca before I came was that it served as a superhighway for drug running and that small, bloody wars between the military and traffickers sometimes erupted along its waters. I heard about pitpans filled with cocaine and about an American fugitive who lived somewhere along the riverbanks. The Patuca was flooded. The river in similar shape had forced Morde to abandon his lost city. A gazillion side channels had opened up and were running out of the interior, ripping up entire trees and brush and sending them to threaten us as we motored downstream.

The rain hit, and for a good half hour we hunkered down under a black tarp. When I looked out again, the boat had been pulled ashore. “What are we doing?” I asked.

Chris groaned. “Got me.” There was nothing around us but a crawling jungle.

The leader stepped out of the boat and shook the water off his sombrero. “Gringos,” he said. He announced that he wasn’t happy with the fee we had negotiated. His two sidekicks stood on either side of him now, unsmiling, hands on their waists. I felt that the situation was about to turn ugly. The leader spat. He wanted $300.

Chris tried reason, but the man shook his head and gestured at the high mountains. We paid him $200 in the end, but I still wasn’t convinced that we were done. What was keeping him from demanding more—or just robbing us or even killing us and taking everything we owned? Surely our equipment, not to mention the thousand dollars we had stowed secretly in a plastic bag at the bottom of one bag, would be worth the risk of getting rid of us.

We went on but didn’t get very far before the leader said, “We’re not going any farther today.” With night coming, he said, it was too dangerous to go on. “I’ll take you the rest of the way tomorrow.” We tried to argue, but there was no point. He nodded toward the top of a hill, which was covered in trees and creeping plant life, and steered the boat to shore. Protruding from the green hell was a wood hut with a metal roof. “We’ll stay here tonight,” he said.

THE LEADER INTRODUCED
himself as Ernesto. He was vague about what he did on the river. “It’s interesting here,” he said. “We do many things.” He laughed and made a chopping gesture, as if he were throwing an ax at a tree trunk—or somebody’s neck. Darkness had come, and we sat around a fire inside Ernesto’s two-room hut and stared out at the cornfield he’d just planted and the impenetrable leafage beyond. The hut was made of fresh-cut pine, with raised wood floors. It was a palace compared with the other places we had slept in. At least five other men were in the shadows. Machetes and guns rested against one wall, and clothes hung from the rafters. This was Ernesto’s little fiefdom.

Pancho and Angel excused themselves to set up our hammocks outside as a young woman with black hair boiled coffee over the fire. “It gets very dark,” said Ernesto, pointing at the clammy air around us. His gold teeth twinkled in the firelight. The woman handed us coffee, and for the most part we drank in silence before she and Ernesto withdrew to the second room. The moaning that followed could have been the two of them or the jungle.

“What do you think?” I asked Chris.

“It’s gonna be a long night.”

We were days from any paved road, and I was too tired to think about escaping. Where exactly would we walk? I couldn’t have walked if I’d wanted to. For a moment I swore at myself for being so stupid. I had been on the road for almost two weeks now—through dusty cities, on buses and in 4×4s, through rivers, and over mountains. My pants were ripped, my boots shot. My blisters were now oozing a grayish milky liquid.

“I feel drugged.”

“It’s like that,” Chris said. He had been hearing me complain for the last few days.

“I’m so fucking tired. I can’t do this.”

Chris shook his head.

“Hell,” I said.

“Worse.”

I was sick of beans and tortillas, sick of Clif Bars, sick of sweet fucking coffee. We dreamed out loud. “Cheeseburger,” I said. Chris wanted Pizza Hut pizza with the works.

“Maybe I’d take a shower over food right now,” I said, rethinking it, looking at my blackened hands. “A luxury hotel,” I said.

I had tried to bathe in the river an hour before, imagining that the fresh rain-forest water would cleanse me—both wash away the physical dirt clinging to every inch of my body and clear away my mucked-up mind. But it hadn’t gone as planned. I had stripped to my boxers and dunked my head under the muddy water but raised it when I felt a stick bump into my calf and shore up there. It was not a stick, however. It was brown like one but softer and rounder, with flecks of corn. One of Ernesto’s men had gone upriver for his own private purge.

“Hell,” I said again.

That’s when Chris brought up the space suit. He did that when we’d been walking for miles through rain or when the sun was blasting or just when he felt us cracking.

“It would be air-conditioned,” Chris said about the suit. “And sealed up, maybe motors to help you walk up the hills.”

“Mine would have a jet pack,” I said.

“And there would be a refrigerated panel for water,” Chris said.

“And a satellite phone that actually worked.”

“An LCD panel on the face of your helmet playing the best movies.”

I asked Chris, “Why do you even do this?”

He laughed.

“I know,” I said, “I’ve been doing stuff like this for years, dangerous things. But this is worse—the snakes, the airborne disease. Stuff you can’t even control. This is awful.”

“The people trying to kill you,” he interjected as he looked at the shadows behind us. “It can be really tough here.” He paused. “It’s difficult to explain why I do it. It’s not risk for its own sake.”

“But this is risk,” I said, gesturing at the shadows.

He said his sense of risk was probably a lot different from others’. When he went on trips, he usually had a reasonable expectation of making it back.

“Usually?”

“Of course, what’s reasonable may be different to me than some others.”

There had been one time, though, that had nearly gotten Chris to rethink that way of living. One summer he had come down with malaria, and as he lay in bed he thought he wasn’t going to make it. Around that time he heard the news of a colleague who had been stung by a stingray and died. “It really hit home that what we do can exact a price,” he said. But none of it ended up changing him. “The payoff is doing this—out here,” he said.

I nodded. I wanted to believe it, that there was truly a purpose, that at least I would find the city that Morde found and be able to tell my family about it. That Amy would understand and that Sky would get why I wasn’t a fireman at the station around the corner. But I couldn’t think of any of that right now. “How bad do you think these guys are?” I wondered.

Chris shrugged. “I have no idea. But they don’t look like good guys.”

As he said that, two men appeared. The bigger one was Frog, the bowman. The other I had never seen. He was shorter and less muscular, with a white shirt open at the chest and faded jeans held up by a brass buckle the size of his fist. Had they been listening to us all this time? The toothless bowman laughed. “Gringos,” he said.

“The Jungle Does Not Seem Like It Wants Us to Go”

S
TANDING IN FRONT
of a mirror, Morde didn’t fully recognize the man staring back. His thick beard could be taken for tree bark. Two tropic ulcers had suddenly opened on his left leg, one the size of a half-dollar. What had the jungle done to him?

On the way down the Patuca, the men had decided to stop their canoe at the Germans’ and clean up. It took Morde half an hour with the razor to see his old self—the man who had first come to this faraway place.

The next day, they reached the hut of the American exile George Brayton and pressed him for news about the war. Paris had fallen, and Hitler now controlled France. Brayton told them that the United States was sending aid money to Britain and that President Roosevelt was rumored to be contemplating joining the battle. The Americans were practically in the war.

The news lent Morde and Brown a sense of urgency. “We decided to . . . get back to La Ceiba before the war marooned us down here,” Morde wrote.

A rainstorm held them up at Brayton’s for a day, however, and they were further waylaid when a local boy arrived with urgent news. His mother had just died that morning, and a fever was quickly infecting his tiny forest village. He pleaded for the men’s help. Without a second thought, Brown and Burke refused to venture into the “fever district” for any amount of money. They said it was crazy, the equivalent of a death sentence. Morde disagreed. “Since we had medicine that might possibly help,” he wrote, “it was clearly a duty to render whatever assistance possible.”

Morde grabbed his medical kit and slogged alongside the boy for four and a half miles through the muck. Secretly, he knew his mission was foolhardy, but he steeled himself with the knowledge that he was immunized against typhoid. The hot mud sucked at his rotting boots. Immediately he was more worried about the deadly creatures hidden among the shadows. “The fear of lurking snakes in such swamp served to take my mind off the fever danger for the time being,” he wrote. Just outside the village, that changed. Human misery assailed his ears. The delirious cries and screams of the sickened could be heard plainly.

As he entered the village, the first thing he saw was a dead pig wedged into the drinking well, bobbing just underneath the slimy surface. The stench was overwhelming. It was the settlement’s only water supply, and as far as Morde could tell the well was still in use. Trudging into the village, he covered his nose with a wet handkerchief.

In the village’s ten thatched huts, Morde found twelve sick people. The boy introduced him as “the doctor.” One man’s urine was pink. Morde discovered a girl prone on the floor, “staring wildly.” Some villagers had taken flight. Among those who stayed it was believed that an evil spirit had descended to wage a war.

The most obvious source of the sickness, Morde guessed, was the pig in the well. He believed that the tribespeople had contracted blackwater fever and instructed the village elder, who had just buried one of his daughters, to dig a new water supply and burn every sleeping mat and blanket.

Although Morde never specifically addressed in his notes why the tribespeople hadn’t extracted the pig, he suggested that it had something to do with their fear of the evil spirit’s presence in the corpse. Moving the pig, they thought, might further agitate the spirit. “In such cases,” Morde reported, “the tribe often moves out entirely.”

In the meantime, he gave the elder the antimalarial drug atabrine, which was also used to treat giardiasis, a disease caused by a tapewormlike intestinal parasite. At first the elder was a bit suspicious of the pills. He held one pill in his palm, eyeing it as if he had never seen such a thing before, as if Morde was asking him to swallow a stone. To show them it wasn’t poison, Morde took a dose himself, and that was enough to change the man’s mind. “So torn was he by grief and fear, the elder accepted my advice and medicine without hesitation,” Morde wrote.