In Flames (10 page)

Something was growing coherent, incredible facts clearer, simply to save her own skin Elaine was handing him an absurd story about me. I choked at the realization.

“You're wrong,” I said, “she's lying—” And the gunman hit me hard across the mouth, blood spurting over my chin. My attacker looked around at the man with the shotgun standing behind Elaine, as if searching for confirmation or encouragement or for no reason at all, it wasn't clear.

“Rebels,” Elaine said. The darkest fear,
Santos Malandros
, the holy evil ones. “Do as they say, Dan, don't be stupid.”

“We're not interfering in anything.” Muttering through bleeding lips I sounded pathetic.

“If you got brains, Señor Petro—and I know you want to live—no one interferes.”

“I'm no Señor Petro—”

The shotgun exploded in the air next to my head. A warning shot. I stood rooted in terror, my mind flashing wild possibilities. Kidnap. Elaine gang-raped. Myself trapped in a jungle, devoured by bugs, fever-stricken, dying.

“I'm no Señor Petro, I have nothing to do with oil. No one will pay a ransom for me.” I raged at being helpless, utterly unable to move. I raged at Elaine and her speed and skill as a liar. I prayed for time, for something to change. I opened my hands and spread my arms like a suspect complying with police, showing I held nothing, would try nothing. I prayed for everyone, even Elaine, my lying Judas. My legs quivered, and I felt my bladder grow loose.

The impossible isn't happening
…

I shut my eyes as if I half expected our assailants to vanish as quickly as they appeared, and I listened for apologies, retreating footsteps, the limber rush of vegetation as the rebels faded back into forest because this was all such a terrible mistake. The tall thug grabbed the shotgun and shoved the barrel hard up into my crotch. I deflated, gasping, choking, utterly airless. The attacker rammed the gun again.

“Stand still, Señor Petro. Listen and answer the truth.”

Puffed and bloodied, my mouth couldn't move. I closed my eyes, once, twice, before looking around. The driver in our car was clutching the steering wheel, terror freezing his features. The car carrying Klauer and the poker players was gone. In an hour, maybe less, the police would learn what was happening, our assailants knew this, and it was exactly what they wanted.

“We make a price, Señor Petro, a fair price. BP boss, how much he get paid last year?”

I shook my head, I had no idea. The thug snapped at Elaine's captor in rapid patois, and the potbellied beast grabbed her hair. Her neck trembled with an awful weakness, and the muscles of my limbs turned bloodless, every joint locked.

“How much, señor, remember? No? I tell you. Hundred twenty-two million. News on Internet. How much your life worth, Señor Petro, half that? You cost only half that, from your company, okay. Six months, fair price.” They were insane, their ideas totally mad.

“I'm nobody,” I said, and the thug spit in my face.

Potbelly looped his foot around the back of Elaine's knee, pulling her down, and she collapsed forward, her face in his groin. He held her there, grinding his genitals on her face, reaching under her dress with his free hand to squeeze her breasts. My body stayed rigid as stone. A noise, chuckle, groan escaped the thug's labored breaths, and he gripped her throat, prepared to strangle her if we uttered a word of objection. I heard only his grunts, no other sounds in the world. Shame burned, I felt helpless, futile, pitiful. The attackers were accomplished in assault, as if they'd done precisely this before, as if they'd been doing it all their lives. The thug with the gun to my head appeared impatient.

“Okay, no more on her.” The molester released a final grunt, and Elaine gagged as he pushed her head away from his groin. “Señor Petro, she goes home now, and they buy you back, okay. A doctor can visit, check your health. I'm sure they agree on everything, and you return to your beautiful wife. Now, señora, go with your driver praying over there, you go home and stay home. You get contacted.”

My eyes opened, clamped shut, and opened again.

Dark trees swayed and dipped like ship masts on seething seas, and a pain of horror cut through my chest like a hot wire.

I felt as if I were in a tunnel filled with swarming dust, and a rush of grass passed me as my captors dragged me into the forest. The sound of Elaine's car grew distant, and my hands ached to seize her molester. Tear his eyes out. Crack his windpipe. I had no clear idea of how to do this, and this made me feel worthless. My arms and legs trembled, struggling to remember movement.
Escape and evade
…that was what I had to do, but my legs were tubes of water, an almost impossible effort just to keep moving, until a strange survival mode took over my mind, a conscious process that started,
Shit, this is really happening
…and then a strange detachment, trying not to panic, the struggle to remain as rational as possible. Running from these brutes was unthinkable, and an ineluctable slide began, a darkness of utter despair as black as the night we fled in.

After several hours, somewhere far in the forest we stopped to drink water, and they let me sit on the soggy ground. My mouth ceased bleeding, blood soaked into my shirt, a filthy stain of humiliation. I pressed my limp and clammy hands against my face, impossible but despite the heat my teeth chattered, and I turned cold, my heart thumping in heavy spasmodic leaps, torso drenched in sweat, limbs like wet bags of mud, my head a hollow space of wind and bitter pain. Stillness was sudden, and with the first shafts of green light falling through cracks in the forest canopy, the nocturnal animal chorus ceased. A dawn mist rolled through vegetation, and the trees above me swirled so wildly it hurt my eyes to look up. My body grew diffuse as though drifting skyward through cathedral vaults of green, floating up between arboreal arches as plant colors revived under first light, turning into explosions of stained glass. My eyes fought to focus. A giant moth flapped blue and yellow wings, and I swore I could hear every beat of those wings. A captor spoke, but I didn't register words—
Spanish?
English?
—words made no sense. I tried squeezing shame from my heart, hate and fury from my brain, but my heart filled, and filled again, and my brain stayed broken in rage and humiliation. “More water,” I said, and they gave me a second canteen.

“Mierda, vámonos!”

“I can't move.”

“We're not lost, señor. Trust us.”

“We're lost.”

“No, señor, keep moving.”

I could neither argue with them nor believe a word they said. I fought to hold surrender at bay, lose the struggle and I'd drown in despair. I grasped for strength to push on, propel myself past trauma, sweep away nightmares of disorder, rerouting aimless red rage, transforming my mind from budding madness to staying alive. This effort made me intensely aware of my partners in the battle to survive. Striving for escape, I had to put myself into the minds of brutes and forge a link with them. I looked to my captors to find a way out. To be alienated, to hate too much, was suicide. Aiming for prudence, I experienced a sudden surge of fraternity, I'd adapt and find a power more potent than fury's disorder. A victim no longer, I'd be a team player welded into a common machine, driven only by a desire to flee, cursing everyone like them, damning the earth they stood on and the dumb dense sky above, while saving my real strength, my secret strength, for escape. I heard a noise, a hollow shout, loud, yet to my mind far away, a distant voice rising and crashing in waves, until rolling around my ears. “Don't sleep, señor, wake up, move.” The tall one hovered over me, a yellow leather-face, lunatic eyes, and a hard pistol. He nudged me with the toe of his boot. “We have to reach a river. Get up.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Get to work. You can use this?” He held up a machete, not a large one, about the same size, eighteen inches, as the blade Santería priest Cardenio Morena swung in his Saint Lazarus ritual, avenging angel slashing at invisible spirits. “Can we trust you, señor?” He waved the machete. “We have to, if you want to live.”

“It's a huge mistake, I'm not her husband. And I'm not an oil man.”

“Of course not. Who is? Meanwhile, it's you, you're Señor Petro. You're all we have. Sixty million. Half year pay for one man, but for us…”

He handed me the machete. He didn't have to warn me, he didn't have to explain the blade was no match for their weapons. With the machete, I could hack a chunk out of one of them, but in jungle forest I wouldn't take three steps before they unslung the rifles from their backs and shot me. And so I worked for them, and for myself, slicing dense vegetation, my shirt a filthy rag sodden with sweat. The tall one led with a makeshift spear, its machete blade carving into green chaos, and we pushed deeper. Backhand, forehand, swipe. Almost like tennis, cutting through jungle, only this was no game, no court, no lines, no net to rush, nor any trail to follow as we chopped a tunnel into wild growth. Reeds, cane, thorn bamboo burst overhead, curving under the weight of fanning leaves, elephant-ear leaves so huge a person could hide behind a single leaf. Great clusters of roots like twisted entrails covered the ground, sharp-leaved vines sprouting sprays of pink and white flowers turned around tree trunks, leafless vines hanging like suspended cables purposely set out for ensnaring limbs. Twigs, leaves, fallen branches carpeted the forest floor, pierced by shoots and small blooming plants. Mushrooms sprouted from fallen trees, yellow moss draped around bark, and everywhere a stench of decay suffused the air. Insect life was copious, hairy spiders with long bony legs, shiny black scarabs, beetles mottled yellow and black and orange, immense bugs the color of old gold, columns of ants, termite parades, showers of blue grasshoppers jumping clear of our footfalls. I learned to recognize and avoid the light-barked trees where the soldier ants lived, and the tiny red fire ants that burned your skin. Spiderwebs were ubiquitous, veils of gauze stretching across the emerging trail leaving irritating threads on hands and face. My numbed brain stirred, and an absurd thought struck, I had no idea what anything around me—plants, trees, bugs—was named in Latin, I had no idea of any plant's purpose, any insect's life cycle, everything was confusion and mystery, an immense green variety of mesmerizing anarchy, yet there was something about all this wildness, its immediacy and vastness, permanence linked to transience, a continuous fight for survival, all the hidden possibilities touched a spot in my brain, and my body responded. In a kind of backward evolution, an ancient forest creature inside me came alive, as it did for my captors, and we were all jungle brutes.

Near me a rebel with rotting teeth erupted in a string of chanted words. And at the instant the spear and machetes rose to strike at vegetation, the chanter fell silent, and a dozen voices called back in response. The chant grew more forceful and spirited, and the spear and our machetes plunged deeper into green chaos. Three swipes of the blades—this was the rhythm, exactly—then a brief pause, breaths caught, and the ferocity of the chorus calling back resumed, striking out against the forest, the exercise repeated hundreds, maybe thousands of times. My face muscles strained, eyes narrowing under sweat, and I came to anticipate the moment when the lead chanter would wail his part again. I began learning sounds, if not actual words, and certainly not the meaning of their patois lyrics. The man with the rotten teeth recited his bit with an encouraging lilt, and I noticed how, hour after hour, the lead chanter changed only a word or a phrase each time, and a variety of facial expressions—sometimes surprised, sometimes laughing or grinning—passed over his comrades' features when the altered lines rang out. And always our blades rose, suspended in air, and the voices exploded before a plunge into green. I surprised myself, I was startled when I realized I was observing my captors in a spirit of almost friendly curiosity, my fears calming. I felt as though I were somehow being cheated out of rightful expectations in this improbable musical drama playing out around me.

The rebels concentrated on their work, looking ahead, eyeing me furtively whenever they chanted or laughed at a funny verse, before slashing out again with an air of fierce determination. Was their song about me, were they judging me, weighing a possibility of soon executing another human? They had promises to keep, even if I was a team player, working with the same resolve and energy. I tried grasping their lives from their point of view, and it all seemed so vastly more complex than the simple lives of black servants back at the club, or local men on the streets of Ciudad San Iñigo, going about their business affairs in suits and shirts and ties. A video of my horrifying predicament might prove not only riveting for a viewer, but even picturesque—jungle setting, exotic insurgents, vigorous chanting—a classic compelling image of captivity, white American civilian surrounded by black foreign fighters speaking an incomprehensible tongue. But more than picturesque, the images were shocking, enveloped in nature at its rawest, everything terrifyingly
un
natural. Madness wasn't anything my life was supposed to be about. I took in all these sensations, absorbed sounds and smells until the heat grew more suffocating and the unceasing fight against forest forced me to shut down my thoughts and turn off my mind.

Time dissolved…

Time that I could never measure exactly, and by mid-morning (after how long?) the tall captor stopped, raising his spear in a gesture for silence, and listening. Sounds of insects, even of heat itself, were the only noises.

And then something else was there, something steady, smooth, and unending.

We clambered up a high bank, rustling through broad heavy leaves. At the top, a rotting tree lay upended, toppled over on the far side of the incline. The yellow-face man,
el más loco,
the craziest one, beat on the tree trunk with the butt of his rifle. “Snakes.” He laughed and the others laughed with him, a he-man stunt played to impress me. They appeared to enjoy the idea of doing what great men of the forest were supposed to do, and as we dashed down the other side of the bank in long jumping strides, I laughed right along with them, until we landed in mud over our ankles. Walking was slower in the ooze, sludge sucking at our feet with every step, thorn bamboo tearing our legs as we crawled under interlacing saplings and knifelike cane. A great noise surrounded us, and we hopped through shallows toward the sound. Several hundred yards above our heads, a waterfall shot out from a mountain outcrop about thirty yards wide. Water from rains and forest mists ran in one great smooth sheet, dropping a few feet in a straight fall like a plate of pale green glass, before crashing and cascading over a jumble of rocks down a hundred yards into a deep shimmering pool, a pond about thirty yards across, the water drawing in rays of sunlight reflecting off the dark surface. Around the edges, tree branches cast long shadows, the shade silken and still over water, greens fading to black, vines drooping into the lagoon. A pebbly beach stretched along the far side, behind which a line of large smooth lava black rocks restrained jungle growth from creeping into water. Along the perimeter between smaller stones, plants bobbed in a rhythm of wavelets. An almost magical spot, and I'd have loved a swim, but the tall man seemed to read my thoughts. “No stopping. We move, señor, not far. Keep the river on the right.” We slid back into thick woods, frightening a flock of red and green macaws, the giant birds soaring skyward, cries filling the air, hundreds of screeches reverberating overhead.