Little Tiny Teeth (12 page)

“Did you hear that? The damn thing just hissed at me!” Scofield cried. As, inarguably, it had.

“No, no,” Duayne said, “not really. It’s not a hiss. He does that by rubbing the bristles on his legs together.” He pointed. “See? He’s doing it now. He does that when he feels threatened.”

“ He feels threatened! How do you think I feel?” Like everyone else, Scofield had his eyes fastened on the creature, which was still in its reared-up position, its upper body swaying slightly. “Tim, go get a broom and mash the damn thing.”

“Yuck,” said John.

“Me?” Tim asked woefully.

He was saved by Duayne, “No, you don’t want to frighten him any more than he already is.”

“The hell I don’t,” Scofield growled.

“Believe me, you don’t,” Duayne said, asserting himself. “He’s not particularly poisonous, but he defends himself by using his legs to flick off the hairs on his abdomen. He can send them five or six feet through the air” – everyone other than Duayne moved back another step – “and they’re barbed, you see, more like thorns than hairs, so they’re very irritating, like a nettle rash. And if they happen to get in your nose or mouth, they can swell the mucous membranes enough to choke you. Look, you can see the way his hair is standing on end right now.”

“He’s not the only one,” John muttered.

Osterhout, clearly enchanted, moved gingerly forward for a better look. The spider dropped down on all eight legs and ran with amazing rapidity to the far end of the table, its feet making an unsettling skittering sound. There it turned to face them again.

“Jesus, it’s fast,” marveled Phil.

“It certainly is,” affirmed Duayne. “It eats birds, you know. Did I tell you that? And it doesn’t need a web to catch them. It sneaks up on them, and then… bam! It’s got them.”

“That’s all very fascinating, doctor,” Scofield said. He was beginning to take command again, having largely collected himself by this time. “Now, perhaps you’d like to tell us how we get rid of the thing?”

“Oh, I’ll take care of it. I have to get some equipment. It’ll take just a minute.” He trotted to the door. “Don’t let it get away,” he called over his shoulder.

“Right,” John said to Gideon. “And how are we supposed to stop it again?”

“I didn’t hear that part,” Gideon said.

But the creature cooperated, remaining at the very edge of the table, immobile except for its moving mouth parts. (Were they slavering, or was that just Gideon’s imagination?) Duayne returned with a large, open, plastic jar – it looked like the sort of thing you’d get five gallons of peanut butter in at Costco – which he slowly set down a foot behind the spider.

“If someone would come very slowly back here and hold the jar steady…?”

Gideon volunteered, holding it with both hands and leaning as far as possible away from the spider, while Duayne, who had slipped on a long-sleeved shirt, had put on thick work gloves, and had gotten a dust mop somewhere, went around the table to the spider’s other side. The spider turned with him, presumably to keep its two rows of eyes on him, and began to hiss again.

“He can’t really see me, you know,” Duayne said softly. “Even with all those eyes it only sees differences in light levels. It relies on those hairs to feel the slightest vibration…”

While he spoke he very slowly slid the working end of the mop toward the spider, then, tongue between his teeth, very gently nudged it. The spider obliged by immediately leaping backward directly into the jar. It seemed to Gideon he saw a few of its eyes widen in surprise, but he put that down to his imagination as well. In the meantime, with more speed than he would have judged possible, Duayne rammed a large rubber stopper into the neck of the jar, sealing it. Everybody, Gideon included, heaved a sigh.

“Now what?” Maggie said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to keep it.”

“Of course, I’m going to keep it. It’s a Theraphosa blondi, for God’s sake!”

“Alive?” John asked.

“Ah, no, unfortunately. They can live for twenty-five years in the wild, but they don’t do well in captivity, and, sad to say, they tend to be a little aggressive. They don’t make very good pets.”

“Oh dear,” Maggie said. “That must be sad for you.”

But Duayne was impervious to sarcasm at this point. He was holding the jar proudly aloft for all to see, at the same time slowly rotating it in front of his face. The spider turned in reverse as the jar turned, looking steadily back at him from six inches away. “I brought along some alcohol, of course,” Duayne said dreamily, “and this will do for a killing jar.”

“Duayne, are you sure the Peruvians will let you take something like that out of the country?” Phil asked.

“I would have thought the Peruvians would be more than glad to have it taken out of the country,” Maggie said. “I’d think your problem would be with the United States letting it in.”

“Not to worry, they don’t much care about dead specimens. Anyway, I’ll have filled-out copies of FWS 3-177 all ready for them, just in case. Will you just look at those pedipalpae go!”

He lowered the jar and looked at his fellow passengers, smiling. “I have an insect and arachnid collection that covers one whole wall of my living room. It’s excellent, really, but what a showpiece this little fellow is going to make.” He wrapped both arms around the jar to hold it to himself and left smiling.

Gideon turned to John and Phil. “You know, I think I just might have a clue,” he said, “as to why his wife left him.”

Once the excitement of the spider episode had died down, the regular passengers, all of whom except Scofield had spent the night in the Lima Airport, trudged off to their cabins to recuperate. Phil, who had had a good night’s sleep in Iquitos, but who rarely passed up the chance for a snooze when he was traveling, did the same. Gideon and John went back to their cabins to unpack to the extent that the closetless, drawerless accommodations allowed, then came back downstairs to the open-air salon at middeck, pulled a couple of chairs up to the boat’s starboard railing, and, in the shade of the upper deck and the soft breeze from the ship’s motion, settled back to watch the jungle go by.

There wasn’t much to watch. In the middle of the afternoon, with a blazing sun hanging motionless overhead, the jungle was hazy and still, seemingly without inhabitants other than an occasional darting swift or flycatcher or swallow along the shore. The already slow-moving river seemed to have slowed down even more. The two men did a lot of yawning, maybe even dozing, for a pleasant half hour, and then their desultory, sporadic conversation, which had mostly concerned giant spiders, turned to their shipmates.

“So what do you think of our companions?” Gideon asked lazily. “Interesting bunch, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not too bad, all in all. And yeah, this ethnobotany stuff could be interesting. I don’t know about Scofield, though. I mean, maybe the guy’s a big-time expert, but he’s a phony right down to his toenails. All that chuckle-chuckle crap and that cutesy business with the pipe.” He dug an imaginary pipe stem into his cheek. “The others can’t stand him. I don’t know if you noticed. Even Duayne’s got something against him, and he never even met the guy.”

As it often did, John’s perspicacity caught Gideon by surprise. Not that he thought John was dumb – far from it – but the man didn’t show much, and even when he seemingly wasn’t paying attention he was taking things in.

“I noticed.”

“And what about the Cisco Kid?” John asked. “Oh, that’s gonna be great, following him into the jungle.”

“Yes, he was a little… off, all right. Obviously, the guy has a problem.”

“Yeah, the problem is, his brains are fried. He’s put in a lot of years stuffing stuff up his nose, or however they do it down here.”

He wrinkled his own nose. “I smell smoke.”

Gideon pointed toward the shore. “There’s a fire. Several fires.”

Up ahead, atop a high bank, was what looked like the epicenter of a gigantic bomb blast, a huge wound in the jungle, a good three hundred feet across, littered with hundreds of felled trees and piles of burning, smoking, head-high debris. At least a hundred nearly naked men were scrambling through the hellish scene, trimming branches with machetes and chain saws and tossing them into the smoldering piles. An earthen ramp, red and raw, had been chopped into the bank, and on it lay some of the trunks, tilting down toward the river, where an old barge waited. Another group of workers toiled, their brown backs glistening, pulling and pushing one of the trunks down toward the barge with nothing but chains and ropes and rough posts used as levers. Shouted orders and cries could be dimly heard through the racket of the chain saws.

“It’s like something out of the Inferno, isn’t it?” a suddenly subdued Gideon said.

“Or the building of the pyramids,” John said. “Not a machine in sight. Not a backhoe, not a crane.”

“And how would they get a crane there?” said Vargas, who had strolled up behind them. “They could barge it down the river, yes, but how would they get it up the bank? Forty feet, almost vertical.” He shook his head. “Impossible.”

“What are they doing?” John asked. “Is it logging?”

“Oh, yes, logging. There are many such. Ugly, yes? And do you know what is the most amazing thing about it?”

They looked at him.

“It wasn’t here at all two weeks ago,” Vargas said. “The forest here was untouched. And two weeks from now, they will be gone, doing the same thing somewhere else along the river.”

“It’s controlled, though, isn’t it?” Gideon asked. “I mean, there are regulations, oversight…”

Vargas smiled. “This is Peru, my friend. It’s regulated by how much money changes hands.”

“How long does it take to grow back?” John asked.

“Oh, it grows back quickly enough. A year from now, all will be green again. From here, it may look the same, but it will not be the same, it will no longer be, I forget the word, natural forest, first forest…”

“Virgin forest?” offered Gideon.

“Yes, professor, virgin forest. No, it will be all brambles, and thorns, and swamps, and mosquitoes. The big trees won’t be back for a hundred, two hundred years.”

Silently, the three men watched the gash disappear behind a wall of jungle as the boat moved on. All were glad to see it go.

“Well, well,” said Vargas brightly, to introduce a change of subject. Had they spotted any of the Amazon’s famous pink dolphins yet? No? Well, they must be sure to look for them, they were something that shouldn’t be missed. Would they care for a drink from the bar? Technically, it wasn’t yet open, but it would be no trouble at all – it would be a pleasure – to pour something for them. In their cases, of course, he whispered with a wink – an actual, literal wink – there would be no charges at the end of the voyage, and the same went for their excellent friend Phil. Their tabs would discreetly be made to disappear, poof. Only please – he looked around and leaned closer – don’t tell the other passengers.

This offer they politely declined in their own and in Phil’s behalf, and Gideon asked if it was possible for the boat to travel a little closer to the shore so that they might perhaps catch a glimpse of the rain forest wildlife. Vargas, as always, was anxious to oblige: as it happened, there was a sufficiently deep channel on the starboard side that ran along only a hundred feet from the southern bank, and he would be pleased to have the Adelita cruise in it for the next few hours. John and Gideon were to make certain to be on the lookout for monkeys and sloths in the trees, and down below for caimans and capybara, who liked to come down and lounge along the waterside when the heat of the day was on the wane.

Indeed, as dusk approached, and enormous, pink-tinged, end-of-the-world clouds began to build on the horizon, and the light turned from brassy to golden, the small, darting swifts and swallows were replaced by larger birds: white cattle egrets and brilliant toucans and macaws. The caimans did show up along the shore, as still and gnarly as old tree stumps, their eyes and nostrils poking out of the water. And life within the trees became visible. They saw a sloth making its lethargic, languorous upside-down way along the branch of a tree – it covered only three or four feet in the five minutes it was in view – and a spider monkey and a family of squirrel monkeys chittering among the leaves.

“This is what I was hoping it would be like,” Gideon said happily.

“Yeah. Hey, is that a capybara?” John gestured at a pig-size animal wallowing in an eddy along the shore. “With the nose?”

“Tapir,” Gideon said, as confidently as if it weren’t the first one he’d set eyes on outside of a zoo.

“Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t see them in Seattle.” He shook his head and considered. “We are really a long way from civilization here, you know?”

“Can’t argue with that.”

The local denizens, the ones aboard the ship, also began making their appearances as the air cooled. Arden Scofield, in gym shorts and with a towel draped around his neck, came out to circle the deck for exercise. “Hundred and ten feet per circuit,” he informed them as he zipped by. “Forty-eight circuits to a mile.” Apparently completely recovered from his earlier encounter with Theraphosa blondi, he merrily mimed exhaustion and panting. “Only forty-six to go, if I can last.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Adelita slowed and Vargas returned with exciting news. There was a school of pink Amazon dolphins playing up ahead and if they cared to move back to the port side of the boat they could see these remarkable creatures for themselves.

They saw three of them slipping in and out of the water in concert a few hundred yards ahead; gleaming, blubbery objects not as sleek or graceful as the more familiar dolphins of the north, but assuredly, indubitably pink.

“Aren’t they marvelous?” Scofield called out from behind them. He had finished his walk and now stood leaning against the bar, mopping his face and watching the dolphins play.