Contraband (Bantam spectra)

Book by Foy George

The pilot had been on the run for almost twenty years before anyone realized, much less did anything about, it.

The first murmur of pursuit came faint and abstract as the sound of strangers whispering in a forgotten language in another room.

It happened on an autumn Sunday in a village 85 miles up the Rio Chingado, in the corner of South America where Brazil, Colombia and Peru are stitched together by rivers.

The pilot was sitting, waiting for cargo, on the porch of a tinroofed hut.  The hut hung over the river on long thin stilts.  It smelled of coffee and minerals and rot.  The hut belonged to the Brazilian, who always sat in the corner behind the weighing table.  If you came in without knowing you might not see the Brazilian, so still was he, so much a part of the jungle gloom inside this corrupted structure.

A board of green wood linked the hut to the riverbank.  The Cayman came down the plank like a ballet star, toeing delicately in soft gaucho boots.  He peered behind the weighing table, noting the shine of metal and how it was reflected in the Brazilian's eyes, apparently without reference to light.

"T'ree tolas," he said.  With one hand he lifted a cellophane bag against the window, against the canopy of fattened trees overhanging the river.

The Cayman's other hand gripped a two-foot-long glass jar.  It was an old-fashioned specimen bottle with a bell-shaped end, of a type that might have been used one hundred years earlier for experiments concerning phrenology, and the seat of intelligence.  Behind a ceramic stopper, the glass was full of long and curled silver.  Two copper wires twisted out of the ceramic.  "No fuck con migo, man," the Cayman went on, "dis t'ree at least."

The Cayman was fat and gray; fever had leached color from his skin the way rain leached the forest's meager topsoil when the lumbermen had been and gone.  His eyelids had folds so that when he blinked, three different cowls had to be moved in sequence to cover and uncover his pupils.  A grimy mauve waistcoat failed to close over his large belly.  Sweat dripped from his bellybutton, darkening his loose pants.  It looked like he had pissed himself.

The Brazilian was thin and taut as piano wire.  He kept on spooning gold dust from a small gourd to an even smaller bronze scale.  Kerosene lamps wrestled the jade gloom.  The gold took this light, broke and yellowed it, played it against the brass weights.  Smoke from the steam pumps of the emerald mines upstream formed parentheses around the hut.  The tin roof cooled the air's vapor, condensing it into water that dripped steadily on the floor.

Clouds rubbed bruise-marks into the jungle shade.  A gunboat churned grayly upriver, radar turning in circular, arachnid alert.

The Cayman spat into the river and picked his way over soft planks, through the riverside door, to the porch at the shack's far end.

The pilot did not look up.  He stuck the second finger of his left hand in a mug of tinto.  He squinted through black glasses toward his float-jet where it crouched warily among the tendrils of smoke and the coiled black muscles of the river, rocking slightly in the gunboat's wake.

The Cayman leaned forward, almost touching the pilot's ear with his lips.

"Bokon Taylay.  He look for nosotros," the Cayman whispered.

The pilot lifted his finger out of the coffee.  The movement pulled sweat from every pore in his body.  The boil in the pulp of his finger was plummy and taut.  He stuck it in an adjoining cup of cachaca rum, and winced.

"Go away, Fawcett," he muttered.

Upriver on the same side, an ancient paddlewheeler lay half awash, braided to the bank with vines.  Indios had slung hammocks from brass fittings in the saloon.  Even from the hut you could hear their guitars rub, like rough tools scraping music from the substance of the jungle itself.

In the trees overhead, bearded monkeys flung papaya rinds at each other.  The trees' roots were lean, and white from lack of sun.  They touched the fallen rinds and closed on them, seeking food.

"My last two cargoes, Bokon take."

"You're breakin' my heart."

"Bokon Taylay, he get everybody now.  Tu sabes?  He know de code.  He know de dance."

"I told ya.  No."

The Cayman smiled sadly.  No man trades for love, he thought.  It was as close to an article of faith as he possessed.  He shifted the glass jar from left hand to right, and reversed the procedure for his bag of gold.

"Fifteen tolas," he said.  A tola was a wafer of gold, 3.75 Troy ounces in weight.  "Is K-Y, man.  For dis you run only twelve bale of jisi.  Next run, you bring Deutschmark.  Or maybe you wan' jive wi' my pescado?"

"Your fish don't bother me."

"Escucha me."  The Cayman leaned close.  "Listen."  The jungle had rotted his insides first and his breath smelled like mulch.

"If you don' help, my cargoes no run.  If cargoes no run, my Indios no manjay."

"I got too much weight already."  The pilot spoke too loud.  He did not want to think about the Indians.  "An' I'm down with a tailo, for this run.  So forget it."

A raindrop the size of a walnut cracked into the water.  A gun coughed from the Brazilian side of the Chingado.  A soldier came out of the frontier post and stared through night-vision goggles over the dark water.  It was two in the afternoon.

"Dey sell their M-2s.  Can't buy bullets.  Already day go back to blowpipes." The tone was full of hurt, but the Cayman's face was rejigging itself in different directions--a curious sequence where the eyelids slid up, one after the other, and large cheek muscles hauled plates of fat out and up to reveal sharp teeth--a smile.  His pupils narrowed.  He jammed the bag of dust in a pocket of his waistcoat.  The pilot dropped his right hand toward the switchblade in his boot, but the Cayman was quicker.  He grabbed the glass jar with both hands and shook it very hard in front of the pilot's face, the wires almost touching his nose.

The jar exploded in a convulsion of finned and rounded silver, turning, twisting, folding.  In the vortex of spasms you could catch a freeze-frame of Horror; its ratchet mouth and chainsaw teeth and psycho eyes.

The pilot backed away from the electric eel and the sparking wires that conducted its fury.  His chair tilted.  The doubled pressure under the back legs finally tore the soggy fibres of the deck planks, and the legs broke through.  The pilot toppled backwards, without hope or possibility of saving himself; fingers spreading in a prayer for flight, he rolled straight over the edge of the deck, into the arterial river.

The Chingado was hot as blood, thick as gruel, the color of double-strong espresso.  As the water closed over his head and leaked through his lips the pilot thought he could taste the whole history of its run; the flatness of Cordillera snow, the grit of stolen soil.  Lime of murdered Indians, of poisoned jaguars.  In his mouth he knew the death of peasant squatters who wound up tied hand and foot in the Chingado's middle stretch.  He knew the quickness of alligators and blue piranhas and coral snakes, and the tiny silver fish that swim up your asshole and wedge themselves with hypo spines against the pink corruscations of your tripes.

He shot out of the water faster than a panicked porpoise.  At the top of his arc he wrapped both arms around one of the hut supports.  With elbows and knees he tried shinnying up the pole toward the broken deck.  Algae grew green, inch-thick on the support, and for every upward thrust the pilot lost almost as much ground as he'd gained, so that at the end of two minutes his ankles still hung in the umber water.

The Cayman and the Brazilian stared over the edge of the deck, watching the pilot struggle among the fumes of mingled rivers.  The Brazilian was laughing so hard he vibrated like an instrument and had to be held up by the fat man.

The clouds released their water.  The opposite bank disappeared behind metallic folds of rain.

On the paddlewheeler, the guitars had stopped, or maybe it was just that the noise of rain overpowered their soft rhythms.

In the forest behind the paddlewheeler an Indio wadded a dart, and lifted his blowpipe toward the invisible sun.  The Indio belonged to a tribe that thought they were parrots.  He wore yellow feathers around his neck to protect himself from humans.

"I will radio to Chico Fong," the Cayman shouted.  "He will make you take my jisi."

"Rot your balls," the pilot screamed.  "You did this on purpose; you knew I hate getting my duds wet, ah you scum! "

But the pilot's anger was largely chemical, and soon faded.  When it was gone, he hung onto his pole, wondering when the two would get over their giggling long enough to throw him a rope.  He wondered, also, how to prevent the Cayman from getting in touch with Chico.

Wondered who in hell "Bokon Taylay" was.

It was his last trip to the Chingado, the pilot decided.  He hated places with no horizon.

The Indio's dart found its mark.

A baby monkey fell with no sound while its mother screamed from above.