Little Tiny Teeth (8 page)

At six o’clock the three of them proceeded to the departure lounge for their hour-and-a-half LAN Peru flight to Iquitos, refreshed and upbeat, only to find that they weren’t yet out of the woods. They were met with a burst of noise: a long, excited announcement in Spanish. Too rapid-fire for Gideon to understand, but the distressed faces and thrown-up hands of the other passengers told him that the news wasn’t good.

“What’s up?” he asked Phil. “Please, don’t tell me there’s a delay. I need a shower fast.”

“Unfortunately, yeah, that’s exactly what’s up,” Phil told them. “ Un problema grande.”

Phil was something of a language prodigy. He was impressively fluent in Spanish, as indeed he was in several other languages. Gideon could generally get along in Spanish and a few other languages if the other person spoke slowly enough, but John was hopeless. His existing repertory consisted of si, no, por favor, gracias, buenos dias, and bueno, mostly gleaned from old Westerns. Currently, he was working on “ Me llamo Juan.”

“What’s the problem?” John asked.

“Well…” Phil shook his head, perplexed. “I didn’t exactly understand all of it.”

“ You didn’t understand it?” Gideon echoed.

“Well, I thought I understood it, but I must have gotten something wrong. Some kind of local slang or something. I thought he said… wait, let me go talk to the guy.”

Two minutes later he was back. “No, I understood it, all right. Condors. Vultures. There’s a mob of them circling over the Iquitos airport. It’s too dangerous to try to land.”

“Vultures!” John exclaimed. “Jesus, Phil, where are you taking us?”

“The thing is,” Phil explained, “there’s a garbage dump near the airport, and when the wind is right, the smell wafts over that way and brings the vultures. There are also some chicken and pig farms around the airport, and that draws them too. Not to worry, though,” he added cheerily. “They’re going to try to scare them off with cannon fire. Shouldn’t be too long.”

“Vultures. Cannon fire.” John rolled his eyes, appealing first to the ceiling and then to Gideon. “Can I please go home now, Doc?” Since the first day they had known each other, Gideon had been “Doc” to John, and they’d never gotten around to amending it.

“No, you can not go home,” Gideon said severely. “You wouldn’t want Marti to find out you can perfectly well take care of yourself on your own, would you?”

With an indefinite length of time to wait, they split up. Gideon tried unsuccessfully to call Julie in Cabo San Lucas and then went looking for an Internet cafe, John went back to the food court to do some more grazing, and Phil went back to sleep.

There was no Internet cafe, but the bar, which had opened at five, had a few computers set up along one wall. No charge, but order something to eat or drink, and you could use one of them for as long as you could make your order last. Gideon got a good, fresh orange juice and a cup of weak but bitter coffee, and tapped out an e-mail to Julie.

Hi Sweetheart,

We’re all safe and sound in Lima – not too bad a trip, although we’re a little grubby by now. We’re waiting out a slight (I hope) delay on the Iquitos leg. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you the reason. It’s six A.M. here – nine in Cabo, I guess – and I just tried calling you, but you weren’t in the room. Probably at the spa getting your nodes uncrystallized. Don’t overdo it now. I really admire your nodes the way they are.

Nothing else to say, really – I just wanted an excuse to “talk” to you. I love you and I’m already missing you, and I’ll see you next week. Have a great time, honey.

XXX Gideon

With a sigh he turned to his e-mail inbox.

It took a couple of hours, but the artillery blasts did the job. The vultures flew away, the flight loaded up and left, and by ten A.M. – about the time the attendants were handing out welcome trays of warm, tasty ham-and-cheese sandwiches, orange juice, more bad coffee, and rum cake – the plane had left the coastal plain behind, had cleared the craggy, snowy peaks of the Andes, and was beginning its long descent to the Amazon Basin and Iquitos. Gideon pressed his face to the window.

He had flown over other jungles, in Central America and the South Pacific and Africa, but he’d never seen anything like this. For minute after minute the flat, gray-green mat stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by meandering loops of brown river the color of coffee with cream. What was especially strange was that the landscape looked almost the same from five thousand feet as it had from twenty-five thousand feet: like a huge green sponge, evenly pimpled and almost perfectly level, with no visible open spaces, even small ones, other than the river itself.

At five thousand feet visibility was cut off due to the misting of the windows, an ominous indicator of the heat and humidity to come. Gideon, who had long ago grown to love the cool, crisp air of the Pacific Northwest, valiantly prepared himself to suffer.

“Hey, look at this, this is cool,” John said with unintended irony as he came down the steel steps that had been rolled up to the Airbus. “It’s like being in an Indiana Jones movie.”

Gideon nodded his agreement. The Iquitos Airport consisted of two crisscrossed runways sitting in a sharp-cornered rectangle carved out of the jungle. No other planes there. No sign of a city or anything like it, and no sign of the twenty-first century, either, for that matter. Except for the jet airliner they had just left, they might have been in the 1930s. There was a long, low, one-story terminal awaiting them, and a few thatch-roofed huts around the perimeter of the field. At the very edge of the clearing, up to their bellies in weeds, were two rotting, doorless, windowless passenger planes of indeterminate age that had obviously made it to Iquitos once upon a time but hadn’t managed to make it back out.

The air was everything Gideon had dreaded, as thick and hot as soup. Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, his shirt was wet with sweat and his unshaven face was greasy. He felt like a turkey basting in the oven.

“A little hot,” he said mildly.

“You think this is hot?” Phil said. “Ho, ho, this is only the morning. Wait till the afternoon!”

The ride into town was by means of a couple of two-passenger “ motokars” – open-sided, surrey-like conveyances (including the fringe on top) perched on three-wheeled motorcycles driven at break-neck speed that forced the riders to hang on for dear life at every curve. These were the only taxis to be found in Iquitos, and the streets were full of them, all skidding and scooting around each other (and around the occasional hapless pedestrian trying to cross a street) with a reckless elan that would have earned the admiration of a London bicycle courier.

The liveliness and bustle of the city came as a surprise. Gideon had known that it was the second largest settlement on the Amazon, with a population of over a quarter million, but all the same he’d anticipated a languid, heat-frazzled sort of place, where nobody moved very fast and everybody got out of the sun at midday. Instead, careening down Calle Prospero toward their hotel, he found a tacky, colorful, hard-working town that was anything but languid. There were block after block of surplus stores, off-brand clothing shops, luggage stores, check-cashing services, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and tobacco and liquor stores, most of them with bars on their windows but their doors wide open. Many of the merchants seemed to be out on the street arguing or chatting with passersby. If not for the absence of anything taller than three stories, he might have been on Canal Street in lower Manhattan.

Still, there was an unmistakable frontier quality to it, perhaps from the musty, jungly smell of the great river only a few blocks away, perhaps from the people themselves, an extraordinarily diverse mix of tall, blond, blue-eyed Europeans, short, black-haired, wary-eyed Indians, and absolutely every possible variant between the two. The whole scene, Gideon thought, could have come straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel.

The motokars screeched to a stop in front of a grand, multi-columned hotel, with nothing at all tacky about it, that fronted a pretty square with fountains and neat green lawns. Phil made a show of paying all their fares – a total of four nuevos soles for the four-mile ride: a little over a dollar. The drivers seemed happy with their two soles each.

“This is the Plaza de Armas, the main square,” Phil told them after they’d pulled their luggage down from the racks at the backs of the taxis, “and that monstrosity is your hotel, the Dorado Plaza. Go freshen up, take a nap or something, and I’ll meet you right out here at, say, four o’clock, after things have cooled down. I’ll give you a quickie tour. I’d go inside with you in case there’s any problem at the desk, but they’d never let me through the door.”

At this stage of their journey, none of them looked very appetizing, but Phil was in a class of his own. He was, to put it mildly, not a man greatly concerned with outward appearances. His come-again, go-again, pepper-and-salt beard was three weeks on its way in, and his lank, thinning gray hair looked as if it had seen its last pair of clippers six months ago. In addition, he was dressed in his standard travel apparel: a tired T-shirt with a sagging neckline, baggy, multi-pocketed, knee-length khaki shorts, scuffed, sockless tennis shoes that did nothing to enhance his skinny legs, and a faded On the Cheap baseball cap with a sweat-stained, curling bill. Gideon knew that in his backpack – Phil’s first rule of travel was never to take anything that couldn’t fit into a backpack – were duplicates of each item of clothing that he wore and a few necessities such as toilet paper (you never knew), toothpaste, insect repellent, and a pair of flip-flops. That was it. He would be dressed exactly the same every day of the trip. And he would spend a lot of time washing clothes in his bathroom sink.

“You know,” he said, shrugging into the backpack for the short walk to his own hotel, but hesitating before starting, “it’s not too late to cancel your reservations here. You can still get a couple of rooms at the Alfert with the rest of us.”

“Why would we want to do that?” Gideon asked.

“Because it’s sixty bucks cheaper, and also because almost everyone else on the cruise is there, but mainly because it doesn’t have air-conditioning, and minifridges, and TV, and all that crap that you tourist types go for. What’s the point of coming down here at all if you’re going to live the way you would in Seattle or New York? The Alfert is a real Iquitos hotel. It’s the kind of place the real people stay.”

“Phil,” Gideon said with a sigh, “I am a real person. Even John is a real person.”

“Damn right,” agreed John. “Wait a minute-”

“To appreciate a certain amount of material comfort,” Gideon continued, “does not mean you are not a real person.”

Phil shook his head sadly. “And you call yourself an anthropologist,” he said, dripping contempt, as he had on similar occasions in the past and was sure to do again in the future.

Phil was right about the afternoon heat. Even at four o’clock, supposedly after things had “cooled down,” the thermometer in the lobby of the Dorado Plaza read thirty-seven degrees centigrade. Approximately ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit. And the relative humidity was even higher, according to the humidity sensor: 100 percent. The air couldn’t hold any more moisture if it tried.

Gideon’s crisp, fresh shirt went limp even before he and John were all the way through the revolving door to the plaza, where Phil, also apparently in fresh clothes (although, who could tell for sure?) was waiting. From there he led them on a walking tour of the highlights of Iquitos: the moldering once-grand, porcelain-tiled houses of nineteenth-century rubber barons on the Malecon Tarapaca; the strange Iron House, made entirely of engraved iron plates (it looked like a house made of tinfoil), designed by Gustav Eiffel for the Paris exhibition of 1889 and shipped to Peru by one of the barons; and the floating “village” of Belen, a swarming, astonishing, malodorous marketplace hawking everything from native medicines to capybara haunches, smoked monkey arms, and fresh turtle eggs.

By five-thirty even John was drooping from the heat, and they were all ready for a cold beer and something to eat. Gideon suggested the Gran Maloca, a nice-looking restaurant they’d passed, with white-shirted waiters visible through the windows and Visa, Master-Card, and aire acondicionado stickers on the door. But he was outvoted, as he knew he would be, by Phil and John, who opted for the open-air Aris Burgers; John because of the word burgers and Phil because it was where the motokar drivers and other “real” people ate.

The food was good enough, however – there were Peruvian dishes as well as burgers – the beers were cold, and the real people were colorful. By the time they finished they were relaxed and contented, and very much ready to call it a day. Phil headed for the Alfert and John and Gideon walked back to the Dorado Plaza. On the square, they found a crowd of at least a hundred people watching a remarkably good Michael Jackson imitator go through his routines to the accompaniment of a boom box. Gideon and John watched too, for a good twenty minutes, while the young man with fedora and single sequined glove gyrated and tapped and moonwalked.

“How does he do it in this heat?” Gideon said, shaking his head.

“I guess you can get used to anything,” said John.

They each left a dollar in the can he was using for donations and went up to their rooms.

Thirty minutes later, exhausted, lying in his bed with the air-conditioning turned up to high, Gideon could still hear the boom box going.

There are no roads into or out of Iquitos. A few supplies come in by air, but the great majority of its goods come and go via the river. As with almost every settlement on the Amazon, however, it has nothing resembling a working port or pier or dock. This is because every year the river rises forty to sixty feet in flood season, and then, of course, sinks again six months later. To build a commercial pier able to handle that kind of elevation change is beyond the resources of these jungle communities.