This trashy little adventure romance novel is a sequel to Flowers in a Field of Evil. It is available for publication.

Copyright: 1997 Glenn Cheney

Click here to returnto the Sampler Page.

Click here to go to Flowers in a Field of Evil.

Click here to comment on this book. glenncheney@comcast.net

Passion in an Improper Place

Chapter One

This is the truth of what happened to Ysa, Kit and Soong Tan in Amazonia. The reporters didn't get the whole story, not by a long shot. The American consulate in Belém released only the official information, which is to say nothing. The officials probably knew more than they reported. They didn't mention the rain of porpoises or anybody getting sawed in half or the three crude coffins, small, medium and large. They alluded to a plane crash but not as a cause of death. Nothing about a war.

If it were anyone else but Ysa, it would sound like a make-believe adventure movie, the kind made for TV. But somehow she really got herself involved in such situations. A couple of years ago, for example, she found herself going to Burma and parachuting out of an airplane disguised as a nun. But, quite un-nun-like, she knocked off the biggest drug lord in the world, rescued the prettiest little girl you ever saw, and ended up the arms of Mr. Perfect. He moved right in. They didn't get married, but they're shacked up like married people except that when they had sex they made love, too.

The little Dutch-Burmese girl, the green-eyed Soong Tan, went right into the sixth grade. Ysa got a job identifying microbes in a pathology lab. Kit quit his job as a not-for-profit commando and opened up an ice cream stand off Virginia Route 169. Kit's Kones. Incredible place. A hundred and forty-four flavors. Blueberry-mango. Guava and cheese. Cinnamon-pumpkin. Bourbon. Bourbon and cloves. Cloves and cranberries. You'd weigh five hundred pounds before you tasted all his flavors. People come all the way from Washington, sometimes even whole busloads of people. He had congressmen in there. Senators. Ambassadors. Generals. People came to have an ice cream cone just to see who else was having an ice cream cone. He'd have a whole mess of famous people sitting around picnic tables, licking their cones and blotting ice cream off their shirts. Kit made so much in the summer he could afford to take the winter off.

Last winter he got a call from his foster-brother. Edgar. The last guy in the world named Edgar. Edgar lived in Brazil, right on the mouth of the Amazon in a city called Belém. Edgar had a Brazilian wife named Elizama. Kit hadn't heard from Edgar in years. Now all of a sudden Edgar just had to talk to him. He had big plans. He was going to get rich. He wouldn't tell Kit what it was. He wanted him to come down to Brazil and see it first-hand. Kit said, "This better not be some Amway deal," and Edgar said, "Amway's nothing compared to this."

Well, it was winter and Soong Tan had two weeks off for Easter and Ysa said she'd always wanted to see the Amazon. She packed safari shorts, half a dozen T-shirts, malaria pills, a blank diary book, a camera, binoculars for watching birds, a magnifying glass for weird insects, a little field microscope for tropical germs, a telescope in case there was an eclipse or something, a ten-pound first aid kit in case there was a war, enough other junk for Kit to consider taking a camel for their baggage. She called her friend, Susan, and said, "Can you watch my ferrets for a couple of weeks? I'm going up the Amazon."

Susan said, "The Amazon. Are you nuts?"

"I need to get away from civilization," she said. "Just for a while. I want to see how the planet used to be."

So the next thing you know they're on their way. Varig Airlines down to Rio. Some rattletrap puddle-jumper up to Belém. Susan pictured it with vines and boa constrictors hanging off the wings. She could just see Soong Tan's round, Oriental face pressed up against the window, all wide-eyed and saying "Like, wow." But then a postcard from Ysa said it wasn't all that bad in Brazil. They were about halfway civilized, in the cities anyway. It was when you get out into the interior that you found your boa constrictors. Your alligators. Your piranha. Your malaria, yellow fever, elephantiasis, jungle rot and everything else the human body can catch.

So of course Ysa went there. She wasn't worried. She had Kit.

She's also had the kind of looks that let a girl get away with murder. Being of Dutch-Norwegian stock, she had green eyes and yellow hair. Being the kind of person with a little discipline at the refrigerator, she kept her feisty little butt in shape. She was the kind who, when she smiled, everybody just trusted her and liked her. Guys started clowning around. Women wanted to tell her their problems. Kids wanted to tell her stories about their little lives. Traffic cops let her go with a warning.

Yet she was nice. A regular person. She liked a cold beer on a hot day. She cut coupons. Sometimes her car didn't start. She got headaches.

Anyway, she and Kit and little Soong Tan made it to Belém without the plane crashing or anything. Edgar met them at the airport. They were two degrees south of the equator? The humidity's like something from dinosaur times but with garbage in the streets and a big outdoor fish market right downtown. In a postcard, Ysa said it was like walking through clam chowder. Not that Ysa would ever break a sweat or anything. Not her. Not Kit. They looked like a deodorant commercial coming across the airport lobby, as fresh as a mouthful of Scope.

Edgar looked like Larry the Lounge Lizard in his flowery shirt unbuttoned halfway down his golden-brown chest and great gobs of 14-karat gold chain swinging around his neck. He was all over Kit with the handshakes and hugs and pats on the back. Ysa wrote in her diary that it felt like getting hugged by a reptile in a wet fur coat. He had yellow teeth and smelled like a half-empty cup of coffee that's been used as an ashtray. He had a kind of hatchet face with a nose that had steep sides and tall, deep nostrils which in certain light you could see up inside.

This was the first time Kit had seen him since Edgar left home and joined the Marines. Kit was just a foster kid in the house, three or four years younger than Edgar. The parents treated Kit like dirt. Edgar treated him like a gnat. So as soon as he could, he did like Edgar. He joined the army. Except Edgar ended up being a cook at Parris Island. Kit ended up in Special Forces in Southeast Asia.

But first thing at the airport, Edgar bellows out, "Yo, bro!" and starts with the Brazilian-style back-slaps.

Kit backs off for a conventional hand-shake and just says, "Hello, Edgar. Long time no see."

"Boy, you can say that again, little brother. When was it?"

"A good twenty years ago. You were seventeen and full of pimples and had the grubbiest little mustache I ever saw."

"Haw! Time sure goes by, doesn't it? I could barely remember what you looked like. I had this memory of somebody about four feet tall who needed his nose wiped."

"Well," Kit says, "it's been wiped."

"Haw, haw, haw!" More back-slaps. Edgar loves his little brother. Suddenly they've been the best of bros since day one. Kit keeps giving Ysa looks of complete disgust. When he introduces her, Edgar not only moves in for a real tight hug but also, she's sure, feels around for her bra strap.

She pulls away and turns his attention to Soong Tan.

"What a little cutie-pie," he says, pinching one of her chubby little cheeks. "Jeepers, creepers, where'd you get them peepers, kid?"

The source of her pretty green peepers was a long story. Ysa didn't go into it. She just smiled wanly and said, "So do you have a car here or what?"

Edgar takes them home in his Fiat. He's got a big apartment in a building that looks to Ysa like a concrete block with windows. The apartment's got four bedrooms plus a bedroom for the live-in maid. Edgar never finished high schoo ,but he's got a live-in maid. He snaps his fingers and the maid comes running. He says, "A little more ice for my drink, Maria," and she brings it. Even if the house were on fire, he wouldn't have to drag his heels off the coffee table. He could just snap his fingers and say, "Maria, would you put out that fire, please?"

Susan got a post card from Soong Tan, written on one of those first days in Brazil. All it said was, "Dear Aunt Susan: It is incredibly boring here. Hot, humid and nothing to do. TV sucks here. Why did they bring me to such a place? I don't get it. Yours truly, Soong Tan."

Ysa sent Susan a letter describing Elizama, Edgar's wife. it fit the stereotype of Brazilian women. Very tan. Very bright red lipstick so powerful it stains her big white teeth. Very curvaceous body, especially around the rump. A little heavy on the hips, maybe, but she moved them around like a professional. Great gobs of black hair. Nails to die for. Matching toenails. Lots of flashy rings on all her fingers. Jeans meant for women who get lots of exercise. She had big dark eyes that stretched waaaay open when something amazed her and that narrow ed down to the size of snake eyes when she had something dark and personal to say.

Elizama had the apartment decorated all weird with Umbanda stuff. Umbanda is weird religion that got brought over from Africa by the slaves. Then it mixed with Catholicism to create bizarre gods and goddesses named after the saints but in charge of things like the sea, the sky, bad luck, lightning, and stuff. When believers worship, they burn candles and incense and go into trances and sacrifice chickens and practice voodoo. Edgar and Elizama didn't believe in it. They just had the stuff for decoration all over their walls and hanging from the ceiling and lurking on whatnot shelves. They had swordfish bills, porpoise eyes, dried monkey feet, rattles made from bones. And crucifixes. No air conditioning. Just ceiling fans. A little breeze came off the river, which is about ten miles wide there. Sometimes a rain storm would pass by and cool things off a bit. Ysa and Kit just sat around the apartment feeling like a couple of damp rags. It took all their energy just to snap their fingers for Maria to bring more ice.

Edgar treated them well. Big meals. Tours of the town. Juices you've never heard of. Fresh Brazilian coffee in tiny little cups. Elizama took Ysa out to have her fingernails done right and her body hair waxed so she could go to the beach in one of the itsty-bitsy tangas they wear in Brazil. Dental floss, they call it. Because it gets down into the crack. Ysa went to the beach and got sunburned in twenty minutes flat.

While Ysa was getting herself tuned up to Brazilian standards, Edgar took Kit to a whore house. Not a bordello or anything. Just a whore house. Plain as can be. It reminded him of the lobby of a college dorm back in the days when college was cheap. He said he was afraid even to touch the walls. The lobby was just plastic chairs and drunk guys sitting around waiting to get laid. The closest thing to a frill was a humongous gumball machine over in the corner. It was the kind that's six feet tall with flashing lights and a million gumballs. When you buy one it rolls down a long winding chute inside a clear column under the globe of gumballs. Kit found that very weird. He never seen a gumball machine like that, and he never would have imagined he'd first see one in Brazil. And on top of that, he wondered, who would go into a whore house for a gumball? He figured it was probably for the girls. They're always chewing gum, right? He'd never thought of it before, but it kind of made sense. A whore house would have to have a supply of gum. But it was weird, this big thing standing there in the corner like some kind of a Martian with a huge head full of multicolored brainballs.

Edgar makes like he practically owns the place. "Take your pick," he says, calling out a parade of girls who didn't look old enough to vote. "Vanilla. Milk chocolate. Licorice. We've got 'em all here. Twelve dollars each. Buy two, get one free." He wasn't talking gumball flavors. Kit backed off. He didn't need to hire a girl. He had Ysa. She was gorgeous. Hair the color of white corn. The prettiest face in the world, a cross between her Norwegian mother and her Dutch father. She had the kind of legs that bring men to their knees, and her breasts look like something off a marble statue. Kit wasn't going to do it with some chick who probably had more diseases than a hospital.

So Edgar says, "OK then, be a chicken, see if I care. I've got a little business to attend to with my sweetheart here -" and he strokes this half-naked teenager who looks like she just got off the boat from Africa. "If you want, you can go across the street and have a beer, I'll be there pretty soon. The word's cerveja."

And off went Edgar with his sweetheart. Kit had nothing against beer on a hot day, but before he went, he plopped a coin into the gumball machine, just to see how it worked. It took him a while to figure out which coin, but it turned out to be worth twenty-five cents, same as in America. He gives it whirl, and a yellow gumball drops down from the globe and starts down the chute, around and around and around. Something trips off a kind of a little siren, a pinwheel up on top spins around, whistling and shooting off sparks, and the yellow ball of gum pops out a little door down near his ankles and rolls across the floor. Kit almost fell down laughing. It was the fanciest gumball machine in the world, and there it was, in a grubby little whore house on the outskirts of the Amazon jungle.

So he's across the street drinking Brahma and trying to fit all this on a postcard when Edgar comes out with a great big smile on his face. Kit thought that was odd. Men don't usually smile when they're done with a whore. They're always sad. But Edgar's got this big grin across the front of his head. He sits down at the table with Kit - it's a little metal table out on the sidewalk, under a canopy - and signals for the waiter to bring another bottle of beer. Kit says, "You look mighty pleased with yourself, Edgar. Something tells me you're out at least twenty-four bucks."

Edgar just ignores that and says, "So whadja think?"

"I hope that's not the business you brought me here to see."

Edgar smiles up a big moutful of crooked yellow teeth. Kit feels like smacking him with a chair. But then Edgar says just one word: "Gumballs."

Kit's taken aback. He almost spills beer on himself. Gumballs.

"I heard you try it out," Edgar says in a sly tone, as if he were talking about one of the girls. "You couldn't resist, could you."

Kit thinks about it. He supposes he could have resisted just fine. He's sure he will next time. It was twenty-five cents down the drain. A little entertainment, maybe, but once you've done it, well, as he wrote to Susan, "It's time to move on."

Bear in mind: Kit's been around the block a few times. He's parachuted behind enemy lines. He's flown helicopters. He was in on Ysa's mission into Burma. He climbed Mt. Blanc in bare feet. He did survival training in the Congo. He was in the Olympic try-outs for marksmanship. So if a gumball machine manages to get a quarter out of him just once, well it must be a pretty good machine. But it's going to have to fly around the room backward to hold his interest for long.

Edgar isn't holding his interest any better than a fancy gumball machine. Kit's already getting bored with him and his constant pressure. He's always saying, Come on, have another drink, or You know what y'oughtta do, y'oughtta buy some land here, or Do you have any idea how many square meters of frog skins this country produces in a year? It's a lot of pressure when the temperature's a hundred and three and the humidity's almost as high and the city buses sound and smell like Russian tanks and everybody's got their TVs turned up all the way and there's nobody else to talk to but Edgar.

Edgar signals for the waiter to bring him a pack of Hollywoods. The waiters there have white jackets. Kit likes that a lot. It reminds him of the French colonies in Asia and Africa. So far it's the best thing about Brazil, besides the gumball machines. The waiter brings Edgar's cigarettes, waits until Edgar has one in his mouth, lights it for him. Edgar hardly seems to notice. He squints through the smoke but doesn't say anything while some kind of impact's supposed to be sinking into Kit. All Kit was thinking was that he could make a fortune in this country if he started a brewery and made beer out of something other than swampwater and rice.

Finally Edgar leans in close and says something. Kit can't hear it because a bus is going by. He leans in a bit to hear it better. This time, just as Edgar says it, a kid on the sidewalk lets loose with two-fingered whistle and shouts something to somebody on the other side of the traffic. Kit just smiles as if he heard what Edgar said and leans back.

"You didn't hear me," Edgar says in a moment of relative lull. He looks hurt.

"Say what?"

"I say that was my gumball machine."

Well that raises Kit's eyebrows a bit. His half-brother owns the fanciest gumball machine in all of South America and he's got it installed in a roach motel. And by the look on his face, he's as proud as the father of twin boys.

Kit says, "That's quite an asset. Hell of a good location." He can already smell what's coming. He's glad it won't be tempting.

"That's just one," Edgar says. "I've already got ten of them deployed all over Belém."

"In whore houses?"

"Naw. One in a supermarket. One at the bus station. You probably saw the one at the airport..."

Kit tilts his head pensively. He searches his memory banks for the image of a six-foot gumball machine or even the distant whine of a siren. "'fraid I missed it," he says.

"Yeah, the idiots who run the place put it over near the police kiosk. It's safe, but who's going to go near cops just for chewing gum?"

Edgar waits. It takes Kit a while to realize he meant it as a real question. He wanted an answer. Who goes near cops just for chewing gum?

"Oh, um, well...I don't know. Other cops, I guess."

"Wrong! The answer is nobody. It's a wasted asset. If you want to make money off a recreational flavored gum dispenser, you need traffic. In the United States, it has to be kids. In Brazil, hell, everybody's a kid. These Wiz-Bang machines - that's who makes them, Wiz-Bang, Ltd. - are like carnaval waiting for a quarter. I average two hundred and seventy dollars a month per unit. Ten units is twenty-seven hundred per month. In a country like this, that's money. But now look: a hundred machines, twenty-seven thousand. Per month. You know what that adds up to in a year?"

Kit doesn't even bother trying to figure that out in his head. Edgar sits back with his cigarette, waiting for Kit's jaw to hit the sidewalk. But Kit's jaw remains locked. Finally, Edgar gives him the answer. "Three hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars. Per annum."

Kit whistles with disbelief and says, "That's sure a lotta gumballs." He knows what's coming.

Meanwhile, Ysa had two girls working on her nails at the same time. She was having them painted with rainbows on a background the color of watered-down Bordeaux.

Soong Tan was getting hers done the same way but quite against her will. She looked like she was getting her fingernails ripped out, not painted up. She came right out and expressed her opinion. "This is stupid," she said. "Even if they look like rainbows, it's unnatural. I bet it causes cancer."

"We'll just do it once," Ysa said. "For the experience. A little civilization to take with us into the jungle."

Elizama didn't hear any of this. She was under the hair drier. The few moments of solitude filled her head with things to say. As son as she came out, she hit the ground running.

"Man in zis country, no good," she said. Her accent made her sound like a little girl. "I never marry wis Brazilian man. No way. Zey don't hispect you."

Ysa, half dizzy with fingernail polish, said, "Is Edgar a good husband?"

"Oh, yes. He's good. He comes home at night. He talks to me. He always tell me his plans. He's soooo eentelligent."

Ysa hadn't detected much in the way of eentelligence in Edgar. As a matter of fact, she thought he was pretty dumb. And to her he seemed the worst kind of dummy, the kind who thinks he's smart. Trouble was, he had irrefutable proof of his superior intelligence. He could beat just about anybody at just about any kind of board game or card game. He played Kit and Ysa in poker the same day they arrived and cleaned them of all their American coins. The next morning he whipped Kit's butt in chess. By afternoon Kit would play him in anything just because it gave him an excuse not to talk for a while. So Edgar beat him at Chinese checkers and then Crazy Eights and then backgammon. Kit knew his foster-brother was cheating just to see if he could do so undetected. He didn't care. At night they played a Brazilian card game something like gin rummy with a lot of extra rules. Pretty soon Ysa could tell Kit was just tossing in cards to get rid of them, handing Edgar vast combinations. Edgar beamed with joy as he clobbered everybody else by several thousand points. Smart dummy that he was, he couldn't see that no one else was even trying. Elizama didn't seem to notice much either. She never shut up.

Nor did she shut up at the beauty salon. Watching the work on Ysa's nails as if they might end up in a museum, she gave a detailed report on the errors and inadequacies of Maria, the maid. Maria had failed to clean behind a certain toilet where Edgar tended to leave a puddle. Maria bought wilted collard greens at the market. Maria always came back late after her day off. Maria neglected to fill the ice tray. Maria had fleas.

Ysa never knew what to say to Elizama. She tried to maintain a look of sincere concern, but when it came time to contribute to the conversation, she found her brain devoid of any possible offering. Once she managed to ask what Edgar did for a living. Elizama answered, "He has a booziness."

"A booziness?" She had no idea how one could earn a living at that. "What kind of booziness does he have?"

"Oh, I don't know. In Portuguese, we call it negocios."

Then Ysa understood. Negocios meant business. It sounded like the Spanish. That was how she was learning Portugese. Every time a word sounded like the French or the Spanish, both of which she spoke, she learned it. This would come in handy later, out in the jungle, when things got serious.

Once they got their bodies all tuned up, Eleizama took Ysa and Soong Tan to the beach. Ysa thought she was gazing out over the Atlantic until she swam and discovered it was fresh water. That vast expanse of sea was the Amazon itself.

The sun burned down from directly overhead. Ysa kept slathering on the Number 15 sun screen, but she still felt herself burning. When she asked Elizama to pass the sunscreen, Elizama reached over to squirt a blob into the palm of her hand. But rather than squirt, she gasped. Her index finger, with its incredibly long rainbow-streaked nail, darted to Ysa's palm and jabbed into a place just below the middle fingers. With eyes so wide her eyeballs almost fell out, she looked up at Ysa and said, "Meu Deus!"

At first she thought the pedicure girls must have done something to her hand, but then Elizama leaned in real-real close and poked the tip of her nail into a crack in Ysa's palm.

"Are you seek?" Elizama asked.

Except for the effects of the sun and some lingering dizziness from the morning of nail polish fumes, Ysa felt fine. She said, "No, I'm not sick...not that I know of."

"Is somebody in your family very hich?"

"Very hich?"

"Hich. Much of money. No?"

Ysa shook her head. No rich people in her family. No family, in fact. Her father was killed in Burma. Her mother died of cancer. No brothers, no sisters. She thought she had an uncle in Netherlands who worked in a bank, but she didn't even know his name. "Does it say I'm sick?" she asked, squinting into her palm.

"It says you die," Elizama whispered, looking up with wide-eyed wonderment. "But hich. You die, but vehy, vehy hich when you go."

Chapter Two

But Ysa didn't believe that stuff. She was too rational. Susan had taken her to see a psychic once, back in Virginia, before Burma. Moi was her name. Moi told Ysa she was going to fall in love within a year. She told her she was going to have a child. She told her she was going to take a long trip to a warm place. And it all came true. She met Kit. She adopted Soong Tan. She went to Burma, and now Brazil. But Ysa still didn't believe it. She said that could have happened to anybody. Like everybody dressed up like a nun armed with a semi-automatic weapon and parachuted into jungles.

Elizama was a psychic, too. She read palms. She did Tarot. She saw the future. She looked at Ysa's palm and knew she was going to die and then become very rich. She saw a flock of parakeets and knew Kit was going to leave her for another woman and then become an angel. She looked at the last bit of coffee in a cup and knew Soong Tan was going to be alone for a long, long time, with danger lurking around her like jackals. Entrails in a butcher shop window showed her coffins headed for the sea.

* * *

That night, the same night Ysa got her nails done and Kit heard the Gumball Plan, they were in bed, maximizing their appreciation of human perspiration. As Ysa wrote to Susan, when you're in Amazonia, you do as the Amazonians do. You sweat. You get into it. It's good for you. It cleans the pores. It cycles water through the body. They were in bed cycling a lot of water through their pores. Kit was fascinated with the dental floss lines of Ysa's new sunburn. Ysa didn't mind the attention at all, his fingers and lips walking the fine line between gringo winter-white and equatorial Brazilan tan. She was fanning the fire, licking the sweat off him, off just the right spots. He was doing the same. They licked sweat until the salt got the better of them. Then they drank vodka tonics. Then they licked more sweat from more places, which of course just got them sweating more.

Ysa paused from her lingual exploration of his thigh and said, "Do you think it's possible to tell the future?"

Kit said, "I think I'm going to love you forever. Care to take a bet whether it's true?" He pulled her up and licked a swath from her collarbone to her ear.

"No bet," she said in a close-up hush, kissing the dampness from from his earlobe. "But that's not what I mean. I mean can the lines on your palm tell you how long you're going to live?"

Kit just chuckled. "I can see how maybe....just maybe something about your palms can hint at your health fifty years down the road. Maybe. But how could they possibly know that ten years down the road you're going to get run over by a bus?"

As soon as he said it, Ysa started thinking about bus accidents. She saw herself looking one way as she stepped into the street as a bus came barreling along from the other direction, the wrong way down a one-way street - illegal and unlikely, but that's how accidents happen. Especially in Brazil. She had no trouble imagining it. She could see little Soong Tan, her pinched, round oriental eyes in her own father's chubby Dutch face, eyes and face both gaping to take in the impossible scene of her big sister dead in the street, not believing it, suddenly gushing with tears as she rushes to her sister's crushed body. Suddenly she's alone again, on the street, defenseless, this time in a country foreign to the foreign country she moved to from Burma. In this irresistible nightmare that Ysa kept having - having in a dozen different forms - somebody eases Soong Tan from her fallen sister, leads her under a protective arm to a car, takes her away and throws her into the hell she thought she'd left in the slums and mountains of Burma.

She never ever mentioned these nightmare scenarios to Kit. Though scary, they were born of silly, baseless paranoia. She let each scenario play itself out, knowing that in the end Kit's strong hand would reach in to solve the problem.

That, especially, she never let him know.

She sucked the sweat from one of his longest finger and said, "What about seers? Psychics? Can they know what's going to happen?"

"Edgar thinks he can. He sees glorious fortunes showering down upon him."

"Oh, really? And how's that going to happen?"

"Gumballs."

"Gumballs?"

"Tons and tons of gumballs. He's going to be the Amazonian King of Gumballs. I swear. That's his plan."

"Oh, he has a plan, does he?"

"Chewing gum far and wide. He's going to install these big fancy dispensers all over Amazonia. According to him, he's bringing civilization to the Stone Age. He says he wouldn't be surprised if someday they put up a statue of him."

"Yeah, right. And who's going to chew this gum? Monkeys? Jaguars? Toucans?" Ysa's mind treated her to an image of jungle animals blowing blue, red, yellow and green bubbles as they swung from trees and stalked the jungle floor.

"There's a lot of people living in the rain forest," Kit said. "You'd be surprised." He was quoting Edgar almost word-for-word. "There's Indians, gold miners, loggers, little villages, even some towns with ten ot twenty thousand people."

"Oh, yeah? Name one. Besides Manaus."

Manaus she already knew. It was the only city of any size upstream from Belém. But she'd never heard of anywhere else. She tried to distract him by scratching the blonde fuzz at the top of his left thigh.

"OK," Kit said. "How about Itaituba."

"What kind of tuba?" She could tell he wasn't entirely focused on the city with the funny name. His scrotum was roiling with desire.

"Itaituba," he gasped as if it were suddenly irrelevant. "It's half...halfway up the Tapajós."

"Hey, you really know your geography, don't you?" She was studying the geography of his groin, the mountains and valleys that were moving around like something in a slow earthquake. She was crazy about Kit. She couldn't keep her hands off him. She wouldn't let him talk geography for long. But he held out long enough to mention Jacaréacanga.

"Zhaca-what?" she said, wondering how he knew so much after three days in Brazil.

"Jacaréacanga. It's way upstream from Itaituba, which is already plenty upstream from the Amazon at a point which is way upstream from here."

Ysa pulled back from Kit's swelling desire. She smelled trouble. "What's that place got to do with us?"

"Well, it isn't us. It's mostly Edgar. He's got this plan to install gumball machines in all the places where there's nothing else. Jacaréacanga is just the jumping off place. That's as far as civilization goes. He's going to put one machine there and then branch out. Every Indian village is going to have one. Every gold mine. Every logging camp. Every little school and military outpost. Everybody gets a gumball machine."

"Wait a minute. Go back to the part about it's mostly Edgar."

Kit's strong broad hand cupped her shoulder blade and pulled her up to lie atop him. She loved to ride his chest as it swelled and sank, pressing to her breast and pulling back. In sleep, his heart beat six times between each exhalation, the slow k-thub...k-thub...k-thub of a healthy man at rest. He loved to stroke her silky yellow hair as she lay on he pillow of his chest. When he spoke, she could hear the words forming deep within him.

"Well," he said. "It is Edgar. But he's invited us to go with him."

Ysa raised her head to look him in the eye. "To that place?"

"Repeat after me: Jacaréacanga."

"Zhaca-reh-a-kanga. How do you spell it?"

He told her. She peeled her sweaty skin from his and grabbed Edgar's big green-and-yellow English-Portuguese dictionary from a shelf. With her elbows on Kit's chest, her breasts lightly against him, she searched the pages until she found half the word. Jacaré.

"Alligator," she reported.

"I like this place already. Look up the other half of the word. Canga."

Adjusting herself to keep her elbows from digging into her one and only, she flipped back through the dictionary, looking for the C's.

"Canga," she said. "Yoke."

"Yolk like egg yolk?"

"No, dummy, yoke for an oxen."

"Alligator Yoke. I love it. Let's let Edgar take us to Alligator Yoke."

That place sounded perfect - the frontier of civilization, the outskirts of the twentieth century. Exactly what she was looking for. Ysa dropped the dictionary and told Kit she loved him. He pressed his open mouth to her head, squeezed her hair in both hands, searched out her ear and breathed into it. Her sweat turned to ice in a wave that swept over her body, head to toes. He was strong and hard and ready. She arched against him and brought him inside, turning her belly to lava. He took her breast in his mouth, toyed with the nipple, sucked it to full height. She rose and descended, rose and descended, extracting his passion and filling herself with it. They they fell back to the damp sheets and bathed in the caress of the overhead fan.

Yes, she would go to Alligator Yoke with Kit. She would go anywhere with him. But she worried about Soong Tan.

"Is it a place for an eleven-year-old?" she asked, quite out of the blue.

Kit knew what she meant. He said, "Hey, it isn't a war zone, you know? It's a town. People live there. Kids. I wouldn't want Soong to live in a place called Alligator Yoke, but hell, how bad can it be to visit?"

Ysa felt better, I'm sure. After all, she went. She trusted Kit. He could do anything. What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter Three

The boat had rats. Elizama knew that before they arrived at the dock. She, Ysa, Kit and Soong Tan were still in squashed up against each other in the back and front seats of a Volkswaggen cab. The driver had the air conditioning on, but it did little good. It was a cab full of clam chowder.

Elizama hadn't actually seen these rats or even the boat they called home. She saw them in her head, a vision. "Kilo-rats," she called them. A kilo is two-point-two pounds. Imagine two pounds-four ounces of hamburger. Form it into the shape of a football. Put a tail on one end, a black olive on the other. There's you're kilo-rat.

Ysa almost threw up just thinking about it.

But Edgar said, "Don't worry about it. They're down in the hold, with the bananas or whatever."

"No bananas," Elizama injected. "Bananas come down the hiver. We go up the hiver."

"What goes up the river?" Ysa asked, trying to eclipse the image of fat rats. "What products?"

"Oh, everysing ze peoples need. Oil for coo-king. Kerosene. Cigahettes. Cachaça. Everysing."

"And recreational snack food dispensers," Kit added. "Can't leave without the recreational snack food dispensers."

"Is going to make a lot of money," Elizama said, rubbing her palms together. When she smiled, her teeth looked big and white behind her bright red lips. Ysa thought she looked like the kind of woman who could make the most of a big pile of money. She looked like the shopping type, and from what Ysa had seen so far, she had little on her mind besides acquisition. Much of what she had acquired she was taking on her trip up the Amazon. It was in a footlocker in a taxi following behind them. Ysa could imagine the clothes therein - brilliant red Bermudas, filmy peasant blouses, T-shirts with things written in English, eighty-seven pairs of shoes, forty pounds of make-up.

Ysa wasn't that type. She didn't need flourescent lipstick to make men notice her. It didn't matter what she wore. On this trip, she wore a simple shift held up by shoulder straps. It let air circulate around her body. Kit seemed to like it. He touched her a lot. When he touched her shoulder, his finger went under a shoulder strap. When he reached for her knee, his pinky would go up under the hem. Ysa liked that. Meanwhile, he was always joking around with Elizama, trying to learn Portuguese, being a regular clown but not showing any kind of interest in her. Not that Ysa was worried. But she had her eye on him.

She had to. He was too close to perfect. Smart and loving and responsible and better looking than any normal person. Every girl in the world wants a man like that.

The taxi took them down to a dock on the river and pulled up at a boat that looked like it most certainly had rats. Kilo-rats. It seemed to lean up against the dock as if exhausted, arthritic and maybe a little drunk. A bunch of guys in nothing but little shorts were loading boxes and gunny sacks into the hold on the lower deck, which was only about a foot above the water. The men were dark, sweaty and muscular.

Ysa whispered, "They look like slaves."

"Zey are," Elizama said. "Zey work for food and cachaça and somesing like tree reais a day. Is nossing."

"But they look like they're having fun."

"Zey are. Zat's what ze cachaça's for. You give zem a little wiss lunch and zey sink zey are in heaven."

Cachaça had the same effect on Ysa, though she didn't drink it with lunch. It was made from distilled sugar cane juice and had a kick like a mule. But what's wrong with getting kicked by a mule once in a while?

Kit wasn't worried about the dock workers. He was worried about the boat. It was made of wood and needed painting, which to him meant the wood had to be at least a little rotten, which might be OK in some places but not in a river famous for its piranha and electric eels. It had three decks: one down near the water, for the cargo, middle deck, open on the sides, and an upper deck, really just a roof over the middle deck. Kit thought it looked like the kind of vessel you hear about sinking in thirty seconds flat in the middle of a school of piranha. Typical of Kit, he didn't say anything. He just made plans for evacuation. As soon as he reached the end of the gangplank, he knew where the life preservers and fire extinguishers were.

Edgar wasn't worried about the boat. He was worried about his gumball machines. Only after a lot of asking around did he find out they'd already been put on board and stored down in the hold. Which made Edgar go berserk.

"Não," he told some guy on the dock. "Não fucking way. Elizama...explain to this guy..." Edgar spoke medium-advanced Portuguese, but when something really important needed saying, he called in Elizama. The really important thing in this case was that the gumball machines absolutely could not be down in the hold with the rats.

"Rats love bubble gum," he told Kit and Ysa while Elizama rattled off about ten thousand words that somehow added up to mean não fucking way. "We already learned that the hard way. Down at the bus station. They chewed right through the plastic and climbed up into the storage ball. They ate so much gum they died in there. Their guts busted open. Not that that gave me any satisfaction. I still had to replace half the stock."

"Half?" Kit blurted. "The gum was in there with dead rats and you didn't replace it?"

"Hey," Edgar said, leaning in close and shifting to a whisper. "These people don't care. Especially if they don't know. Did you know they still have elephantiasis in this town? Elephantiasis."

"They probably got it from the goddam gum."

Edgar liked that one. He guffawed through his big, toothy grin and smacked Kit on the back. "You kill me, bro," he said. "You really slay me."

Elizama reported. The guy on the dock could do nothing. It wasn't his job. It wasn't his boat. They'd have to go talk with the captain.

So they boarded the boat, the 21 de Março - the 21st of March. Ysa said it reminded her of an old Mississippi steamboat, sort of, except smaller and with a pointed bow and no paddle wheel or smokestacks or steam, which I think just means it was made of wood and looked like it could burst into flames at any moment. They found the captain down in the hold, swinging in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, reeking of cachaça. He was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt over his rotund beer-belly, green plaid shorts over his spindly legs, black knee socks slung low around his ankles, and no shoes on his feet. He looked Elizama up and down as she explained the problem with the gumball machines and the rats and the importance of sanitation. When she finally finished her impassioned plea, the captain tilted his head toward Edgar and said, "You are married to him?" Ysa didn't understand until the man indicated his own wedding band.

Elizama confessed that she was indeed married to Edgar. That shifted the captain's sleazy gaze to Ysa. He looked her up and down but then saw Kit's hard, cold look and came back to Elizama. "OK," he said as if he already knew he'd regret letting these gringos onto the 21st of March. "Move your damned gumball machines. Put them up on the leisure deck. But don't ask my crew to do it."

So Edgar and Elizama returned to the dock to negotiate with the workers. Kit and Ysa stayed to string up their hammocks on the passenger deck. That's how you travel on these boats. In hammocks. That's your cabin. A hammock. You want to sit down somewhere, you sit in your hammock. You want to sleep, you sleep in your hammock. You want to change your clothes, you pull your hammock up around you and do it in there. You want to make love, well, you wait till the lights are out and then you do it quietly while you sway in the breeze. Ysa summed it up rather well in a postcard to Susan. She wrote, "A Carnival Cruise it ain't."

At first she liked it. They set up their five hammocks like covered wagons in a circle, with all their baggage in the middle. They were all swinging in the breeze and thinking about lunch while Edgar hustled a crew of slave-types from the hold to the roof with twelve gumball machines, two men to each machine, twelve trips up and down. Edgar, nervous as an old maid watching gorillas handle her priceless china, had to supervise each twist and turn up the narrow ladders and through hatches barely wide enough. As each one came up onto the passenger deck, Edgar couldn't resist showing it off to the passengers. Each machine was a different model. One had the siren and pinwheel. One had little stairs instead of a spiral chute going down. One had stairs and a chute. One had a computer chip that said, "Muito obrigado, amigo!" - "Thanks a lot, friend!" Another one said, "Compra mais uma!" - Buy one more! All this in Edgar's voice, no less. The passengers marveled at the machines. Unfortunately ,nobody had money for gum. Most of them didn't have money for shoes.

Topside, Edgar had all the machines huddled together under a plastic tarp and bound with a rope so they wouldn't fall over. They looked like a bizarre Mardi Gras football team seeking shelter from the elements. When he finally joined his family at their hammocks, he went straight for a bottle of cachaça in his trunk. "I need this," he said, lying back to pour it straight into his mouth from several inches above. "I deserve this."

Elizama said, "Tcht," and turned her head to face away from him. "I hope you don't be drunk all zeh way to Itaituba."

"Not me," he said. "Maybe close to it, but not drunk."

Much to Ysa's surprise, Kit said, "Lemme try some of that." He took the bottle, leaned back in his hammock and poured a trickle right into his mouth the same way Edgar had done. He grimaced but said, "Cachaça and I could develop a relationship."

Ysa said, "You better not." She was surprised to hear herself saying it. Kit didn't drink a lot, and she never gave him any problem about it. As a matter of fact, she probably drank more than he did. But I know how she felt. There's something about seeing a man take a little too much pleasure from a bottle, even for a second. It's a bad sign.

Well, the boat finally got underway. It just kind of chugged along, hugging the coast. That's what Ysa called it. The coast. Because the river's so wide sometimes you can't see the other side. For the first day it didn't matter that it wasn't a Carnival Cruise. They were just swinging in their hammocks and watching the jungle go by. Ysa had little binoculars so she could watch for animals. Elizama never stopped talking except when Edgar interrupted her.

Soong Tan was all over the boat, friends with passengers and crew alike. Ysa tried to get her to stay out of the hold, which she pictured as crawling with kilo-rats. But there was no stopping her. She was already speaking a funny little Portuguese crossed with English and Burmese. Kit kept quiet and took the occasional swig of cachaça.

But then Ysa discovered the bathroom. Three toilets for fifty passengers, most of whom weren't especially well potty-trained. Three showers, too. Ysa said the floors were so slimy she had to wear sandals or catch instant gangrene. The water was just river water. No hot. No cold. Just the temperature of the day.

Not that lukewarm was going to kill anybody on a hot tropical afternoon, but I think maybe Ysa was expecting just a little more comfort on her Amazon vacation. As for the leisure deck, the "leisure" part consisted of some benches you could sit on for as long as you could stand the sun. Benches and all the gumballs you could eat.

Edgar spent his time making enemies at the dining table that stretched across one end of the passenger deck. When it wasn't being used for a meal, men played dominos there, and of course Edgar cleaned up. Not that the pennies of peasants amounted to much, but he took great satisfaction in scooping them in. They tried to win back their hard-earned pittances in poker, but again Edgar's game skills out-shined them all. He came back to the circle of hammocks patting a jingly little bulge in his pocket.

"They should have bought gum," he said with a big smile. " I gave them a chance. At least they'd have something to show for their money."

"Why don't you treat them to a round of gum, Edgar?" Ysa suggested. "Let everybody have a piece. Show off your machines. What the heck. It's their money."

Edgar tipped another squirt of cachaça into his maw, wiped himself off with his bare forearm, and tilted his head in consideration.

"Let's do it," Kit said, swinging around in his hammock. "Gumball kings, hell. Let's be gumball gods. Hey, gimme a snorta that stuff."

Edgar passed the bottle. Ysa gave him a look. He looked back, then took a quick hit. "Come on, Ed," he said, still looking at Ysa. "Let's go buy us some gumballs for the gang."

Good thing they went, too. Drunk or not - the jury's still out on that one - they didn't need a whole heck of a lot of brains to figure one thing out: their gumballs were melting in the hot tropical sun.

Not completely melting. They hadn't turned into tutti-frutti lava or anything. But they were all stuck together. Edgar loosened them by banging his fist on the plastic globe, but it was obvious they were going to have big gumball problems well before they got to Itaituba.

"We've got to get these things out of the sun," Edgar said.

"What an emergency!" Kit shouted to the broad equatorial sky.

"Trouble is, who's going to do it?"

"Never any slaves around when you need them."

"Maybe I can get some of those peasants to help me," Edgar said. "We're all friends."

Kit said nothing. He didn't expect much, and that's exactly what Edgar got. He lobbied all over the passenger deck, pulling on guys and saying, "Vamos! Vamos!" But they wanted nothing to do with him. Not after he'd taken their miserable excuses for life savings. He came back up to the leisure deck, wiped sweat from his eyes and said, "Looks like it's you and me, buddy."

"This is not a problem for a couple of gumball gods like us." Kit always liked a challenge, and he got bored much too easily. Moving twelve giant gumball machines down two decks looked a hell of a lot more interesting than hanging around in a hammock. He embraced one machine like a sumo wrestler, leaned back and lifted the thing an inch off the deck.

"How many gumball you got in these things, Ed?" he grunted.

"Two thousand, each one. It's the motor that weighs so much. That and the car battery."

Kit ended up dragging the thing across the deck to the ladder that led to the passenger deck. "You better get down there and support it from below," he said.

So Edgar went down first. Elizama came over to coach. "Be carefully," she said, her fists gripped tight.

Ysa said, "I think you'd be better off just letting them melt," but nobody was listening. Edgar shouted, "OK! Ease her down onto my shoulder." But that didn't work at all. The weight tilted him back. He lost his grip on the handrail and then on the stairs of the ladder, and then the gumball machine descended upon him, bouncing down the little stairs like a demon out of Disneyland. Edgar fell flat but rolled to the side just as the machine dived headlong to the deck. The plastic globe shattered like glass, and two thousand gumballs clattered across the 21st of March, dodging around the baggage, scurrying under the hammocks, rumbling past the dining table, diving over the side like lemmings blipping into the dirty brown water of the Amazon.

Chapter Four

Things went downhill after that. Distressed at his busted recreational snack dispenser, Edgar slipped into morose depression. He lay in his hammock, hugging a pillow, staring at nothing. Kit, always the responsible one, used the power of the almighty dollar to persuade a couple of crew members to help him move the machines down to the hold. The machines, too, looked depressed, leaned up against each other in a dark area behind at least a thousand plastic cases of bottled beer.

"Rat bait," Kit told Ysa at the dining table.

"Do you think I care?" She reached across the table to help herself to a ladle of spicy fish stew. It was very heavy on the coriander and some herbs she had never tasted before. Twelve other passengers sat with them and Soong Tan. Three dozen others waited their turn. Those seated served themselves from three tureens. They were jolly folks, laughing and talking even though they hadn't met until the day before. Their dining behavior was both polite and crude. Before taking their first bite, they would make a symbolic gesture with their bowls to offer food to anyone who hadn't eaten. They spoke those magic words, por favor and obrigado. But they kept their elbows on the table and leaned in low to the bowls and slurped from their spoons and smacked their lips as they carefully plucked meat from the long, thin fish bones.

"Sweetness," Kit said, secretly touching her bare knee below the table. "Don't blame me."

"He's your brother. Soong Tan, chew with your mouth closed, please."

"He's only sort of my brother, and this gumball business is his business. We're just going along for the ride. Remember?"

"Tcht."

She obviously wasn't enjoying the ride. Kit felt a little guilty but not real guilty. She was the one who wanted to see the Amazon. If she'd wanted to see it from the deck of a luxury liner, well, she should have said so.

Elizama wasn't having such a good ride, either. She didn't like seeing one of her gumball machines bite the dust before it sold a single ball of gum. Nor could she suffer the destruction of a machine and loss of two thousand gumballs in silence. Standing over Edgar's hammock, she berated him in words visibly ferocious. Ysa, just a few feet away in her hammock, understood only a few of the words, including estúpido and idióta, which were repeated several times and punctuated with the longest, nastiest, sharpest index finger Ysa had ever seen. Some of the other words could have been applied to the 21st of March bathroom just as well as they applied to Edgar. Everybody else onboard understood everything, and Ysa understood their smirks well enough. The herd of gumballs that had escaped into the river would probably go down in Amazon history, becoming part of the lore of the river that would be passed down through many generations to come.

Soong Tan, running around in little yellow clip-clop sandals, mashed her big toe on something in the hold. When she first rose up through the hatch and came across the deck limping and bleeding - but not crying - Ysa's first thought was that a rat had bitten her. But no, she'd whacked it up against an anchor or something.

That's when Ysa discovered that the hydrogen peroxide in her medical kit had spilled, probably because some irresponsible drunkard had been pawing through there in search of aspirin or something. If she needed disinfectant, she'd have to find it herself. God only knew what filthy, rusty, contaminated iron thing her foot had found down there in kilo-rat country. The obvious thing to do was go see the captain, which was going to call for some Portuguese. Elizama was asleep. Ysa thought it best to leave her that way. She could figure something out for herself.

So she and Soong Tan limped on up to the little cabin where the captain stood at his big, round wooden wheel. With his wide belly perched atop his short, stilt-like legs, he looked like an over-grown misshapen elf from out of the tropical woods. Ysa knocked gingerly on the side of the open door and said, "Pardón, senhor capitão...ummm" He took his eyes from the river for only two seconds. He spent the first second eating Ysa's face, the next second ravashing her body in a downward motion, the third second grasping the basic situation of the toe that she was pointing to. With a nod, he turned his attention right back to the river. After a slight alteration in course, he called out for someone named Rogério. Rogério popped in and took the wheel. The capitão took Ysa and Soong Tan to his cabin just behind the wheelhouse.

And closed the door behind them.

Oh, he had a first aid kit, all right. He gave it to Ysa and patted a spot on his little bed where she could sit to perform her little operation. She couldn't very well just walk out. Soong Tan was standing there breathing hard, her big toe, all bloody, sticking straight up in the air. So Ysa sat and had Song Tan sit next to her, turned sideways so her foot was in Ysa's lap. The captain sat down, too.

Real close. His thigh and hip against hers. His big belly all but in her lap. He made cooing noises and examined the toe very closely. His arm came around behind Ysa as if to hold her steady. Ysa just wanted to finish the job as quickly as possible and dash out of there. But just as she had one hand on Soong Tan's quivering foot and the other on a ball of cotton dripping wet with peroxide, the captain leaned over for a little nibble of her neck. She tried to shrug him off, but he stay in there, his tongue licking out to touch her skin like a hot garden slug. A nauseating stench of stale cachaça, sweat and cigarettes oozed out of him. His whiskery cheek scraped her neck like rough sandpaper.

Ysa wasn't one to put up with that stuff. If the capitão had known what she'd done to the druglord of Burma, he wouldn't have been pushing himself on her. But he didn't know, and she was stuck with Soong Tan's throbbing foot in her lap and the hydrogen peroxide ready to go. It wasn't the right moment to dismantle the man. So, good nurse that she was, she pretended nothing was going on. She gently dabbed the disinfectant onto the toe while Soong Tan winced and sucked in air and the good capitão accepted the lack of resistance as evidence of desire. He went for her ear, first nuzzling it with his nose, then kissing it, then probing it with his tongue.

Normally, once a man's got his tongue in Ysa's ear, she's pretty much his. What happens after that is pretty much out of her control. In this case, however, she felt most disgust, but it was mixed with just a teentsie bit of desire.

Kit knew, too. So when he eased open the door just a bit, looking for his woman and little girl, he no doubt sized up the situation at first glance. Apparently the captain, his face buried under Ysa's sweet yellow hair, didn't even notice Kit's arrival. Ysa jabbed back with an elbow, but she had to do it lightly to keep from hurting Soong Tan. To Kit, it looked more like a nudge than a jab.

Kit said, "So, what's going on?"

That snapped the captain out of his desire. For a second, he looked scared. In Brazil, messing with another guy's wife is grounds for murder. But he quickly shifted that into a look of indignation. Kit read his face correctly. It said, What the hell are you doing in my cabin? Kit, not knowing Portuguese, came back at him with a look that said, What the hell are you doing with my woman and kid in your cabin? Ysa, smelling testosterone in the air, said, with typical cool, "Don't do anything till I'm done." And she continued to dab on the peroxide and examine Soong Tan's torn flesh. It didn't seem to need stitches.

Soong Tan shook her stinging foot and said, "Ooooooo, Ysaaaaa!"

"One second more. Then Kit can punch the nice captain in the nose."

The men continued to glare at one another. The captain said something Kit could not understand. Then Kit said something the captain could not understand. Ysa said, "Momento...momento..." and hurriedly wrapped a bandage around Soong Tan's toe.

"OK, gentlemen," she said, standing up. "Have at it." And she slipped out the room, Soong Tan in tow.

Kit could have pulverized the captain with his bare hands. He knows how to do that. And when Kit pulverizes somebody, they stay pulverized.

But Kit's not one to start a fight. Especially with the captain of the boat he's on. Kit's not dumb. Besides, he didn't really know what had been going on in the room before he showed up. Ysa hadn't exactly been fighting the guy off. So Kit did what he says is always best when you're faced with a fight. He turned around and walked away.

Ysa had expected more than that. She wanted some damage done. She really hated it when guys bother her, which tended to happen a lot . You don't get yellow hair like that from a box. You have to get it from Norway and Holland. But what did it get her? Guys bothering her all the time.

For the rest of the day there wasn't a whole lot of talking around the gringo hammocks. Everybody was mad at everybody else. They all smelled like they needed showers. Only Soong Tan was happy. At Ysa's orders, she stayed within the circle of hammocks, keeping her foot clean by playing Crazy Eights with a couple of kids she'd met. She already knew enough Portuguese to explain the rules.

That night, as the passengers slept in their hammocks like fifty butterflies wrapped in colorful cocoons, Ysa awoke under the weight of a man. Without a word he slipped into the curved, muted womb of her hammock. She didn't even open her eyes. She knew who it was by his smell and the tongue that filled her ear like a warm animal burrowing into her head. She did not need to tell him to stroke her arms and then her belly and then up under her T-shirt to tease her nipples and gently rub her breasts in opposite directions. She did not need to tell him to put his mouth there. All she needed to do was keep quiet, to breathe without moaning, to try to keep the hammock from swinging too wildly as he kissed his way downward, across her ribs, across her tummy to the oasis of her navel. His tongue explored that fuzzy little cave as if it went so deep within her that he might find her soul in there. Indeed it felt as if he were extracting her soul through that little well of wet desire. Her fingers dug into his hair, moving his head in circles against her as she guided it places to where it felt really good. The hot, tropical air pulled sweat from every cell of her body and his, and her brain boiled over with steaming desire. Had she ever wanted him as much as now? She could not be blamed for what she did. Passion had taken control. It lifted her out of herself and left a throbbing body of flesh craving all the pleasure it could suck from any source it could find. Lifting her hips, she let his hands slide her panties down, inch by inch, his lips in hot pursuit. He nibbled at her thighs, inside and out. He slobbered over her knees, returned to her thighs, kissing spots he'd missed on the way down. His hands searched for curves and nooks and spaces which they desperately needed to visit. She wanted those hands and his lips in all those places, too. She wanted them everywhere at once. No sooner had he gotten her toes into his mouth than she wanted his head between her breasts, his fingers between her legs, his tongue in her mouth, his lips sliding down the small of her back, all at the same time, an impossibility of contortion. She could not have him or any one man that way, so she took what she got. And she loved it. She loved his weight upon her, inside her hot, tight hug of arms and legs. His animalistic thrusting rocked the hammock in a shuddering contrapuntal sway. She didn't care if anyone noticed the unusual movement of their private cocoon. She didn't care if the whole boat rolled over. All she wanted in that hour of overheated passion she was holding tight within her total embrace. So the next morning they were in love again. At least for a while.

Chapter Five

Soong Tan wrote Susan a letter.. Susan thought it was pretty funny how kids can be doing something while grown-ups think they're doing something else altogether. But for some reason Soong Tan thought she could tell somethings to Susan but not to Ysa.

Dear Susan,

You're a grown-up. Maybe you can tell me. How come the bigger people get, the more they sit around doing nothing? I don't get it. We're going up the Amazon on a boat. It's so cool! And all Ysa and Kit and the others do is hang out in the hammocks.

I'm already friends with a bunch of kids. We went down in the cargo hold. They knew their way around. We went crawling and climbing all around the cargo. There's this one spot where's there's a hole a bout big enough to stick your foot into if you wanted to, which you'd be stupid to do because if you wait long enough, pretty soon a big, fat rat comes out. The kids had a sling-shot. We used it to shoot Brazil nuts at the rat. The nuts came from a big sack that we cut a hole in the bottom of. Pretty soon there were nuts all over the place, and we never hit the rat.

The crew sleeps down there. One guy has a huge turtle in a gunny sack. I think he's smuggling it. When he showed me, he held one finger to his lips and whispered, "Contrabanda." I'm pretty sure that means contraband. I couldn't think how to ask him why he was smuggling a turtle. I mean, I've heard of smuggling drugs, and I think I've heard of smuggling weapons, but smuggling turtles, that's a new one. I guess they smuggle different stuff here.

We're traveling with this weird lady named Elizama. She keeps making predictions. Everything predicts something for her. She can read your palm, read your tea leaves, read the dried coffee in the bottom of a cup. When a flock of big pink birds flew overhead, she gasped like she was dying and said, "Soong Tan, you be sure to stay close to Ysa!"

Like, how far does she think I'm going to get? Where does she think I'm going to go? I said, "What do you mean?"

"I see danger. I see you all alone wiss great danger all around. Many friends and great danger." Then she grabs my head with both hands and looks at me real close. She's got the grossest face, with bright red lips and blue stuff all around her eyes and her eyelashes plucked so she looks like a doll...an old doll with wrinkles a five o'clock shadow over her lip. She holds my head so close I can smell her lipstick and chewing gum. "You be carefully!" she says. "I do not know what weell hoppen, but you must be very, very carefully!"

Well, before too long I knew what she was talking about. I was down in the cargo hold playing hide-n-seek, which they call scondji-scondji here, and I was just running for home when I stubbed my toe on a piece of pipe that was lying there for no reason. Yow! That really hurt! It bled and everything. But at least because of it I got to see the captain's cabin, and you know what? You're going to think this is weird, so I'm kind of glad it happened. Now it's over with. Elizama warned me, and then it happened, and now I can forget about it. Thank God. Because the stuff she predicts, sometimes it comes true.

Yours truly,

Soong Tan

Chapter Six

Edgar snapped out of it in Santarém, where the Tapajós flows north into the Amazon. There they had to change boats, a pretty big deal when you've got a dozen gumball machines and the temperature's way over a hundred and you've got a medium-sized crowd watching because you're the most interesting thing to come up the river in two hundred years. According to Edgar, this was the arrival of civilization, He'd figured out he could buy a new storage globe to replace the one that had broken. It wasn't the end of the world.

They had to spend all day in Santarém waiting for a boat up the Tapajós. Crack entrepreneur that he was, Edgar saw it as opportunity. He deployed his machines across the dock like a row of Beefeaters. Performing a shameless "Step-right-up-and-get-yourself-a-gumball" routine, pointing out the machines' features with some kind of pointer, he all but dragged people up to the face of temptation. He passed out twenty-five centavo pieces to get a few kids to try it. As the pinwheels spun and the sparks shot out, the crowd went nuts. The full splendor of civilization had arrived. And all it cost was the equivalent of a U.S. quarter.

Later, in a not-too-sleazy open-front sidewalk bar just across the street, Edgar counted his take. He had piles of coins all over this table, silvery columns among the sweaty glasses of beer. Soong Tan kept to her own table, where she worked on a postcard to her sixth-grade class at Beauville Elementary School. It said, "This place reminds me of Burma," she wrote, "but at least I'm not alone."

Ysa was scribbling away at a letter that already almost filled a notebook. She just kept jotting down her thoughts and observations. She thought that maybe if something exciting happened she'd write a book about it. So far, however, it was just rambling notes, a conversation with a friend who wasn't there to hear it.

His chin down at table level so he could see the little towers of his fortune, Edgar said, "Twenty-eight reais and twenty-five centavos in two hours." He nudged the columns around to make the money look like as much as possible. "Not bad."

Elizama took up her beer glass and rotated it to find a spot she had not yet stained with a curve of blood-red lipstick. The glass looked like it suffered from multiple lacerations. "What you can to buy wiff twenty-eight reais?" she asked in a cynical voice. She seemed to be thinking in terms of Mercedes Benzes.

"Fourteen bottles of Brahma beer," Edgar replied. He tapped one of the coins on the empty bottle. A waiter came to life and rushed over with another bottle.

"That's just two hours in one location," Edgar explained. "Now imagine twenty-four hours a day in twelve locations. You sure you don't want in on this, Kit?"

Ysa could tell that Kit was already tired of hearing about it. "I'll have to talk with my attorney," he said, gazing out over the river. It glimmered in the early-afternoon sun. Several buzzards soared in lazy circles, riding the heat while waiting for something dead to float by. "What happens if some kid chokes on a gumball way out in the jungle. Can I be held liable?"

"They don't have liability in this country," Edgar said, missing Kit's cynicism. "Responsibility is a foreign concept. Here comes more logs."

He pointed upstream at four barges stacked high with enormous trunks.

"I thought they stopped cutting down the rain forest," Ysa said.

"Ha! No way. They might talk about it, but as long as there's money in it, they'll keep cutting it down. It's entirely possible those logs came off a federal forest reserve. But they're worth so much that the loggers can afford to buy off the polícia militar."

This disgusted Ysa. She was a confirmed bunny-hugger. Save the salamanders. No nukes. Adopt a dolphin. All that stuff.

"Don't they ever worry about oxygen?" she asked.

"Not till oxygen's worth money," Edgar said. Something about the gleam in his eye, a laser trained on a small fortune in logs, told her that he didn't give a damn one way or the other.

Kit said, "Where's the gold? I thought there was gold in the Amazon." He was happy they were off the topic of gumballs. He had his shirt pulled up a bit so his belly could cool off. He had his shoes off, too, his feet up on one of the shaky steel chairs.

"We'll be up in gold territory," Edgar said. "I wouldn't recommend drinking any river water unless you know what's upstream. It's all poisoned by mercury."

"They have mercury mines?"

"No, dummy. They use it to mine gold. When they've got a little gold dust mixed in with sand and dirt, they stir in a little mercury. It combines with the gold. Then they pour it off and heat it up. The mercury evaporates and leaves the gold behind."

"That doesn't sound too healthy," Ysa said. "Mercury's highly toxic. I wouldn't want to breathe it in."

"Health isn't their concern. Gold's their concern. And don't you see how all this relates to gumballs?"

Kit smiled wryly. "I had a feeling it would."

Edgar continued. "When you come right down to it, what good's gold? It's worthless. You can't eat it, can't live in it, can't brush your teeth with it."

"So?"

"So suppose the nearest supermarket's three days away by canoe. Your boss is paying you big money to muck around in the mud, not to mention poison yourself with mercury. The only thing you've got to spend your money on is cachaça and bubble gum. You're bored and you've got a hangover. So what do you do?"

Kit thought a second and said, "Any girls around?"

Ysa gave him a playful shove with her elbow. Edgar said, "Sure. Plenty of girls. And they've got every disease under the sun. And there stands a magnificent, disease-free gumball machine."

Kit was tired of this. Very, very tired. The heat hung over him like a heavy wool blanket. "I'd buy gum," he said. "I'd buy the goddam gum. OK?"

"My point exactly."

Kit surrendered in silence. Nobody said anything. They just sat, oppressed with the humidity, looking through the heat waves rippling off the street, vaguely seeing the gumball machines lined up on the dock, the little blue and white boat that they would soon board, the tan river beyond that, and the vast blue sky bleached pale from the sun. Ysa wanted nothing more than to climb into her hammock and doze off her beer-soaked doldrums as a light water-breeze drifted across the deck. She was tired of the Amazon. In fact, she hadn't even seen jungle yet. No monkeys. No anacondas. No jaguars or tucans or pecaries. Just an endless parade of medium-sized trees along the bank, second-growth forest replacing a jungle long ago cut down or burned. The upper Tapajós was supposed to be primal forest, but by this point, she really didn't care. She was hot, tired, sweaty, dirty, and her bowels felt like trouble brewing. At this point she was pushing on for Soong Tan's education and Kit McCracken's entertainment. She herself had had enough.

Due to lack of absolutely anything else to do, and to kind of pay rent at the table, and at Edgar's relentless insistence, they went ahead and had another beer. Soong Tan had another soda, some Brazilian stuff called guaraná. Everybody was just starting to think about the possibility of finally raising their overcooked carcasses and hauling them across the street to the boat when a couple of hippy-types came along.

Not hippies, exactly, but youngish, early twenties, she in a long flowery dress of translucent fabric, he in stylishly torn and faded jeans, both of them with backpacks, both pulling cardboard boxes on little luggage carts, both wearing sandals, both looking just as hot and sweaty as the other. Her ditch-water brown hair hung in a ponytail almost to her waist. His did, too, though it was blonde and prettier than hers. They'd come upon the bar by apparent accident, suddenly looking up and in, then saw Edgar's morose band of gumball hucksters. Their reaction was that of all gringos when they meet some of their species in a way-off place. They noticed and tried to pretend they didn't. But they couldn't. There was no denying it. They were all from the same place. The first words from the girl's mouth were crisply British: "Oh!" she chirped. "Gringos...right?"

The first thing Kit noticed about her was her light blue eyes. They sparkled. As he would later tell Ysa, they had absolutely no effect on him what-so-ever. It was just something he happened to notice.

To which Ysa would say, "Yeah, right."

The first thing Ysa noticed, of course, was that the girl had a large bead of sweat dangling from a single curly whisker on the end of her chin. And the guy, she said, looked like he hadn't shaved in about two days. Blonde beard.

She just happened to notice.

So there they were, everybody just happening to notice everybody else, and the girl's question was hanging in the air like wet laundry. Gringos, right?

Kit finally said, in clipped British, "Right...gringos."

"Whew," the girl said, and she stripped off her pack. It almost threw her off balance. The guy remained standing, his thumbs under the straps of his pack as if he expected to move on in the next thirty seconds. Ysa looked mildly miffed. Kit swung around a chair from a neighboring table.

"Have a seat," he said. "You look bushed."

Ysa said, "We were just leaving."

"Ve are lookink for a boat," the guy said. He had a German accent. "Zuh São Francisco do Assis - II. You haff heard off it?"

"Heard of it," Edgar blurted. "We've practically bought it. That's her right across the street. The one with the gumball machines on the...roof! Goddamit, I told them..."

"You're kidding," the girl says. She was one of those chicks who's just sooooo gushy about everything? "You're kidding," she gushed. "Are you going to...to...what's that place, Goose?"

"Jacaréacanga." With his German accent he made it sound like Transylvania or something. Ysa's skin crept. Two degrees south of the equator and she gets goose flesh. Maybe it was because he was wearing a little necklace of what looked like snake fangs. Behind her, Soong Tan slurped the last of her guaraná and said, "I'm still waiting for somebody to spell that place for me."

"Yeah, that place," the chick says.

"We sure are," Edgar said, taking control by reaching out his hand. "Edgar Entwhistle," he said. The girl shook it. Her name was Gaia. The guy was Gustav. He took off his pack before shaking everybody's hand.

"So," said Kit. "What's going on in Jacaréacanga?"

Gaia did all the talking. Ysa knew right then and there that Goose had to be the brains of the outfit. Gaia was the energy. She spoke at the speed of sound, her train of thought a discombobulated torrent on no particular track. In a nutshell, she was out to save the world. Step one: toss a thousand tiny purple porpoises out of an airplane over a logging camp a hundred miles south of Jacaréacanga. She extracted a porpoise from her cardboard box. It was wrapped up in a tiny green parachute.

Ysa said, "I don't get it."

'It's a statement," Gaia said, raising her chin in a gesture of defiance. "Clear-cutting the jungle doesn't just hurt the local ecosystem. It reaches into the sea and around the world."

"But aren't they plastic?" Edgar asked. "Suppose one floated downstream and a porpoise choked on it?"

"Don't mind him,." Kit injected. "Have some beer." He handed her his glass.

"They aren't plastic. They're pressed bicarbonate of soda and soy solids, with grape juice added for coloring. It dissolves in water." She handed Edgar the little porpoise, freeing her hand for Kit's beer. "You could actually eat it."

So Edgar bit off the tail. It was kind of gummy and stuck to the front of his teeth. "Weird," he said.

"It iss psychology," Goose said in a serious growl. "If ve convince vun logger zat he does wrong, ve sink he vill convince uzzers."

Edgar, using his fingernail to peel purple bicarbonate of soda and soy solids off his teeth, said, "Good luck's all I got to say to that." His lips buzzed as he struggled to spit out a fleck of porpoise.

"Ve shoot get tickets for ze boat," Goose said to Gaia.

Too exhausted to move, she waved faintly in the direction of the dock. "You do it," she said. "I'll watch the stuff."

Goose obeyed, scuffing across the street to the dock and the boat. Kit signaled the waiter for another beer.

Elizama looked oddly suspicious as she reached across the table toward Gaia. "Please," she said. "Let me to see your hand."

Gaia extended it to the center of the table. Elizama turned it over, perused the palm, traced a few lines. "I'm going to live a long time," Gaia said. "I already know that." She was squinting into the sun, watching her Goose negotiate with someone at the boat.

"Zat's not what it says here," Elizama cooed sweetly. "It says somesing very strange. It says you will get lost and you will divide in two pieces. I sink zat means you will die, but I don't know."

"Let me see that hand." Gaia snatched it back to herself and held it up close to her face. She picked at it, then spit on it and rubbed a clean spot. "You know what it is?" she concluded. "I'm a Gemini. That's all."

Elizama looked dubious. "Maybe is," she said. "Maybe is not."

Ysa became conscious of her own heartbeat. It was an odd sort of fear. She thought it might be sunstroke or something. She didn't tell anybody, though, and she forgot about it when Elizama suddenly said, "I feel a storm coming on."

The sky was blue for as far as anybody could see, but Kit took advantage of the break in subject. He dragged his feet off the chair, slapped both knees and said, "Then we'd better get our gumballs in gear." He stood up and held his hand out over the sidewalk as if it might catch a drop of rain from the clear, blue sky. "You mean like a thunderstorm?" he asked.

Elizama tilted her head to the left. "Yes," she said heavily, "and no. Yes, like a sunderstorm, but no...not a sunderstorm. Somesing worse."

Chapter Seven

Ysa didn't especially like the trip up to Jacaréacanga. It took another five days on two more boats. She spent the whole time writing an eighty-three-page letter, noting every little detail that crossed her mind. She explained how Soong Tan just loafed around because there were no kids on these boats. They carried only a few passengers, peasants who hauled their belongings in bundles and jugs. The first boat was a smaller version of the one that had come up from Belém. Ysa described the beer belly of a man in a nearby hammock and how he scratched it with great pleasure. She described the Tapajós, its clear water, its steep, forested banks, its emptiness of anything but the occasional canoe. The river gradually narrowed, from a couple miles wide where it joined the muddy Amazon, to only half a mile wide at Itaituba. In Itaituba, they had to get out to change boats. Because of a wall of rapids that stretched all the way across the river, they had to board the back of a cargo truck - gumball machines and all - and take a laborious three-hour ride up a dirt road to a backwater port where smaller boats stopped. There they boarded a motorized fuel barge, a craft not meant for passengers, but Edgar knew the owner of the fuel company, so they were able to hitch a ride. They strung their hammocks on a half-open deck stacked high with crates of basic necessities bound for Jacaréacanga. Below them rode ninety thousand liters of diesel fuel.

Ysa was scared to death Soong Tan would fall overboard without anyone noticing. The river was different above Itaituba, shallower and silently turbulent. The water swirled and bubbled and humped up over unseen boulders on the river bed. She saw whirlpools and imagined the little girl spinning around, arms upraised until she disappeared in the dark vortex. Amazonia was getting interesting, but she wasn't sure if she was glad. It was starting to look dangerous.

The vegetation on the bank, often just a short stone's throw away, became real rain forest, an uncut jungle of trees so high they seemed to dangle from the sky. She never saw any jungle animals, only birds. But at night, when they tied the barge to a tree, she heard them in there - screeches, gnawing, a snort, a maniacal laugh. She wondered whether snakes could follow a rope from a tree to a barge. She supposed they could if they wanted. She supposed they could rise right up and slink into a hammock. You wouldn't even know if they did...until you rolled over.

She slept light. She listened to mosquitoes and wondered whether they carried malaria. She listened to Soong Tan breathe. She listened to Kit breathe. She listened to Edgar snore and Elizama whimper and moan in her dreams. She wondered whether clairvoyants had different kinds of dreams. She wondered whether Elizama really was clairvoyant and what kind of storm she had foreseen, the one worse than a thunderstorm. Did they have tornadoes in tropical rain forests? Ysa wondered a lot of things. Sleeplessness at the fringe of a jungle gives a person time for that - that and letters, which explains the ninety-two pages that arrived in Virginia in Susan's mailbox in an envelope postmarked Jacaréacanga and plastered with enough Brazilian stamps to cover everything but her address.

Their hippy friends didn't relate to each other much. Goose spent hours at a time up on the bow, his legs over the edge, his feet just inches from the frothing water. Gaia seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time with Kit. He didn't seem to mind much. They played a lot of dominoes on the little table where everyone ate their one-dish meals, five people at a time. Gaia just talked and talked and talked. Kit just listened and listened and listened. Ysa couldn't tell whether he looked bored or not, but now and then he cracked a joke, and Gaia practically collapsed with laughter. But when she lost at dominoes, she stomped off in a huff, pouted in her hammock until dinnertime, then bounded out in the cheeriest of moods.

Once, just to get some kind of reaction out of Kit, Ysa went to sit with Goose. As she gingerly took a seat at the edge of the bow, she noticed him noticing her legs. Her sunburn had baked to a lucious tan,which her safari shorts showed to great advantage. Goose noticed.

She pumped him for information about Gaia. It turns out they'd met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London. Ysa didn't dare ask him precisely what had led them there, but Goose, after hesitating, said, "I can only tell you she vas...ve both vas...how you say in English, ' very, very fucked up.'"

"But then you stopped."

"Oh, ya! Ve had to. If ve did not, ve die for sure."

"And now everything's OK?"

Goose kept his eyes aimed at the river where it passed beneath them in a constant licking of froth from under the bow. "OK, I guess," he said. "I think Gaia still has some problems. She doesn't use anymore...no, no more. But she suffered, how you say, effects. You know?"

Ysa just nodded, hoping he'd tell more.

He did. "She needs lisium now," he said.

"Lithium?"

"Ya, lisium. And Prozac. But sometimes she stops. She sinks she doesn't need it. And then...ho-boy! Such problems she makes!"

"What kind of problems?"

"Oh...I can't say. It is hard to describe. She becomes very depressed. She becomes...I don't know...crazy. You know?"

She knew.

Kit knew, too.

"You can tell," Kit said as they snuggled in her hammock after the boat had tied up and everyone else had gone to sleep. "The flightiness, the sudden bursts of happiness and fascination, the appearance of disconnectedness with anything in reality that might hurt. Besides, she asked me if I thought they might sell lithium in Jacaréacanga."

"You mean she's like...running out of it?"

"I didn't ask, but that would be my guess."

"Then what?"

"Well, I guess that's her problem. And Goose's. I guess they'll dump their porpoises and head for home."

He held her as they talked. His arms wrapped around her from behind. From where they lay they could see the Southern Cross, not to mention a million other stars they'd never seen before. His hands gently, absently stroked her breasts. The back of her head lay against his shoulder. Finally she whispered, "Do you find her attractive?"

"Who? Gaia?" She felt his head shake behind her. "Nah. Too skinny. And nuts to boot." He nuzzled through her hair to her neck and gave it a little lick in a certain place. Despite the heat of the night, the moist touch of his tongue sent a shiver clear down to her right knee. She wanted that tongue, but there was no way to turn around in the hammock without creating a major disturbance and attracting the kind of attention she did not want.

She closed her eyes. She had never heard of a man complaining about a girl being too skinny. Kit was just saying that. She was sure of it. He wanted her to think he wasn't interested. That meant he was. The day had come. She'd known it would. He had grown used to her. Bored. Along came someone who laughed at his jokes and looked him in the eye and sat with her legs crossed like a man, and that was the end of him.

She pulled his hand harder to her breast, pressed her nipple into the center of it. His broad hand was so strong and comforting. Her finger found a plump vein that curled around his knuckles. She did not want to lose him or even to share him, not even for a minute. She did not blame him for looking the other way, at another woman. Men looked. They always had; they always would. And women would always try to attract those eyes. And sometimes they attracted more than the eyes. If that nitwit bitch Gaia had any such intentions, she was dogmeat. The only question was how best to handle it.

Or maybe it was just her imagination. Just because he found Gaia's company entertaining didn't mean he was going to hop into bed with her.

But men did that, and Ysa wasn't sure whether any of them, even Kit, was immune to the urgings of the groin. She knew she could trust him in every possible way except maybe that one. And she wanted him completely, without exceptions. If Gaia made the wrong move, she'd find herself in a can of Alpo. And if Kit drifted a little too far, well...she'd just reel him back in. He'd be sorry, and she'd tuck away his regret like money in the bank.

* * *

Ysa's first postcard from Jacaréacanga - a Washington, D.C. postcard that she found in the bottom of her backpack - said, "This place is definitely worth the trip if you're into suffering." She described it as looking a lot like an old town out west back when the streets were dirt and people rode around on horses and shot each other with revolvers. Such is Jacaréacanga, except that as soon as you ride out of town, you're in a jungle. And the gnats! Great, frantic clouds of tiny black flies pounced on the new visitors as if they hadn't eaten in weeks. There they was in the middle of a tropical forest and they had to wear long pants and long sleeves.

It turned out there were two hotels in town. A normal person wouldn't set foot in either place, but one of them had electricity, from its own generator. The other didn't. Kit wanted to stay in the one that didn't. He said it was more real. Edgar thought that was a good idea because it was cheaper, only $7.00 instead of $16.00 at the fancy place. But Elizama pointed out that the fancy place had an indoor bathrooms, albeit just a couple, for all the guests. The other place had just one bathroom, an outhouse several yards from the back door. Ysa voted on Elizama's side, which made it a tie. Soong Tan broke the tie, voting the way Ysa told her to. Goose and Gaia went to the other place.

Edgar immediately went out in search of the airport. Elizama stayed behind in a room full of gumball machines. She hardly had room to move around. Not that she wanted to move much. Like everyone else, she was exhausted. She turned on her ceiling fan and lay down half-naked on her bed.

Ysa wanted a shower before she did anything else. Kit followed her down the hall. They hadn't been really alone in almost two weeks. It was so tight inside the little shower room that they could barely close the door. It was hard to strip off their clothes, but they helped each other, and neither was in the mood for elbow room. She was kind of in a hurry. She wanted his shorts down and off. She wanted him rising in her hand. She liked to feel him coming to life. But Kit wanted it slowly. He liked to take her bra off little by little, kissing her as she came out of it. He liked to be down there as he slowly rolled her panties around her bottom, across her thighs, bit by bit exposing her to his leer and lick.

It was crowded, but they managed to get each others' clothes off and then bring their flesh together as the water rumbled out of the broad shower head that hung a good three feet above them. They soaked and kissed and fondled and reviewed all the places they hadn't touched for so many days. Ysa remembered how much she loved him. No other man could be so firm and gentle. He loved her whole body, and he ignored no part of it. They cupped her shoulders, then slid down her spine to wallow in the water that slid down the small of her back. They caressed the curves of her buns, traced the line of her crack, tickled the tops of her thighs.

"How long do you think we'll be here?" he asked, breaking off from a succulent kiss.

"I could stay all day." She took his breast into her mouth and massaged his nipple with her tongue. His hand came to the back of her head.

"I meant in Jacaréacanga," he said. "Edgar seems to think he's gong to find a home for those gumball machines in about three days."

"I'd be surprised if he finished by the end of next year. Have you got the soap?"

He handed her a green bar of Brazilian soap. She lathered up her hands and proceeded to cover him with filmy suds that smelled of cheap perfume. He stroked her arms as she worked her way from his neck, across his blonde-fuzz chest, down his hard, flat belly, around the massive passion at his groin. He loved it when she stroked him there. He came to full, breathless, quivering attention. She left him that way, sliding her sudsy hands around his waist to the rock-hard mounds of his rear.

He pulled her upward to bring her against him, smearing her body across his, eating at her mouth, licking the insides of her cheeks, wrestling with her tongue, needing her. She wondered if it would be like this if they ever got married.

He stopped before he exploded, pulling back just in time. Her chest was slick with his suds. "Do you think you speak enough Portuguese to get us out of here?" he asked, now sliding his hands around her breasts, sending his fingers skiing off their slopes. "I mean, if we had to." Her nipples loved the attention. They rose and pointed at him. They glowed with urgent desire. How did he know just how to treat them, how to twirl around them with his thumbs, to flick them with his fingers? It felt as if he had her womb in his two soapy hands.

She spoke just to keep herself from orgasm. She didn't want her legs to collapse onto the slimy floor. The drain below lookedl ike it might harbor flesh-eating invertebrates. "I have no idea how we'd get out. Either we wait for the next fuel barge, whenever that is, or maybe there's a plane at the airport."

"Oh, yeah. I bet there's a 747 waiting for us right there at Gate 15. Scratch me right down here, would you?"

He scratched her, too. He knew all the spots. Nobody else in the world knew where those places were, let alone how to scratch them just right. She gasped with inexpressible pleasure as his hand burrowed between her legs from behind. As if he knew of some secret anatomical pathway, his tongue wiggled under her earlobe, completing a connection stimulated by his hand below. He was such a wonderful man, so caring, so eager, and he desired her so much.

She was attempting to shinny up him when the shower head started spitting and coughing. The water flow reduced to a trickle. They should have used those last drops to wash the soap from themselves, but they didn't. They were too busy.

* * *

Edgar comes back from the airport. He's all excited. He's found a plane that will fit a gumball machine. The pilot has agreed to take him to a certain gold mining operation about an hour away.

"It's perfect," he says, punching his fist into the palm of his other hand, his eyes gleaming with a mixture of greed and dream. "It's the biggest mining camp within five hundred miles. And they've got a runway. Something like three hundred and fifty men there. They're panning out twenty kilos of gold a month. Do you have any idea how many gumballs just one percent of that money represents?"

He was pacing around the little dining area of the hotel. Ysa, Kit, Elizama and Soong Tan sat around one of two long tables. That was the image that remained in Ysa's head later, her image of Amazonia before everything statred happenng: the bunch of them sitting around in the heat, sucking up beer as if their lives depended on it, and Soong Tan off to the side, drinking guaraná and writing letters to her class. "Greeeting from Bug City," she wrote, and "This is as far as I go," and '"I am sick of bubble gum. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick."

Ysa felt guilty sitting around like that, but to go outside in Jacaréacanga was to subject yourself to the blood-sucking gnats and an assault of sunlight. Besides, they'd seen all of Jacaréacanga. Seven minutes to walk to the other end of town, five to walk back. Along the way they saw exactly two cars that looked like they might run, two that definitely wouldn't, four horses, a dog that looked like it had just lain down in the street and died, a vulture just standing there looking at it, a dozen lizards and about as many people.

"No airplane," Elizama said without looking up from her fingernails. She was brushing on a lacquer to keep them from chipping. Ysa had suggested flying back to Belém instead of taking boats. ButElizama said, "No airplane.Forget about. I saw one airplane in my dream. It crash-ed. It crash-ed but was very strange. Eet deedn't heet ze ground."

"Oh, my!' Ysa gasped, perhaps too theatrically. She was just trying to veer the conversation away from Edgar. She was by this time quite sure Elizama was full of hogwash. "Was anybody hurt?"

"I don't know," Elizama said, wagging her head. "But when one airplane crashes, zat usually happens, no?"

Ysa told me she was actually kind of comforted to hear this prediction. Nothing else Elizama had predicted had actually come to pass, not even the alleged rats on the boat out of Belém. If she predicted a plane crash, then only one thing was certain: no plane would crash. Not that Ysa would have minded Edgar going down in flames.

On the other hand, maybe Elizama's latest prediction was only half-wrong. Maybe there would be a plane crash that actually hit the ground. In fact, the more Ysa thought about it, the more that made sense. A plane that crashed without hitting the ground wasn't much of a crash. What was it going to do, crash into a cloud?

Along came Goose and Gaia, all washed up and looking chipper. Gaia entered the room with an exuberant "Greetings, gringos!" She embraced Elizama with the silly kind of little hug-and-kiss women do in Brazil. They hug without really touching each other, and they kissed by putting their cheek near each other and making little kissy noises with their lips. It's the kind of hug and kiss that's good for women who hate each other, perfect for a simultaneous stab in the back.

And of course Kit and Edgar stood up to get theirs, too. In both cases it was more like a Russian hug, full-bodied, with warm poundings on the back and wet kisses to the cheek.

Ysa remained seated.

Soong Tan didn't notice anything amiss.

Goose shook everyone's hand in a rather formal European way, tilting at the waist, dipping the head slightly, shaking with only the slightest movement of the hand.

"So," Edgar said with a clap of his hands, "anybody for a game of Canasta?"

"Canasta!" Gaia spouted. "How quaint. No, sorry. We don't play."

"But ve haff mate progress on our mission," Goose said. "Ve already haff found a small plane zat can carry all uff our porpoises. Ve shall be taking off tomorrow."

"Not we exactly," Gaia said. "The plane can only hold one pilot, one passenger and twenty thousand porpoises. So I shall be going, and Goose shall maintain ground control."

At this moment, Ysa felt a secret and slightly guilty glee. Maybe Edgar's plane would crash. Maybe Gaia's plane would crash. Ideally they would crash into each other. She thought, maybe that's what Elizama meant. There would be a mid-air collision. By the time they reached the ground, the crashing part would be all over. Technically speaking, the prediction would be true.

It was a dumb and cruel thought, and she knew it. Or at least later on she thought she knew it. She never really hoped it. That's what she told Susan, blubbering with tears, over a radio-telephone that cost twelve dollars a minute to connect with the rest of the world. The crash wasn't her fault. It was all Kit's fault. And she felt so guilty about it she could die.

That was her last contact from Amazonia. Those were her last words. "I just want to die," she said, her voice dripping with tears. "I just want to die." Death, however, was not an option at that point.

Chapter Eight

Actually there was one more letter. She mailed it within hours beforfe her phone call. It arrived two weeks later.

Dear Susan,

Something terrible has happened. It's worse than you can imagine. Far, far worse. I can barely write the words. I write them only because they hurt. I want them to hurt. I want them to kill me. Nothing hurts more than this. Here it is:

Kit ran off with another woman, and now it looks like he's dead.

Her, too, or so I hope. I hope she's rotting in hell. Her and her fucking porpoises.

Fucking Edgar is fucking useless. He doesn't even care. I don't even know where he is. Nobody does. He's not dead. He didn't crash. We know that much. He's still flying around with goddam gumball machines. Like fucking Santa Claus bringing his goodies to every God-forsaken mining and logging camp in Amazonia.

I have to tell you what happened. It has to be in writing. Because I might not come back.

There's this Indian who lives in town. He's from some tribe way, way out in the bush. He looks like a regular person. I mean, he's got those Indian eyes that look practically Chinese, and that straight, shiny-black hair, almost like Soong Tan's, and he's about as short as her, too. But he wears jeans and a T-shirt and sunglasses just like everybody else. He's a Mundurucu, which, in case you happen to meet one walking down the street, is pronounced Moon-doo-roo-KOO. His name, in case you ever need to know, is Ronsh.

Yesterday morning Ronsh showed up at the hotel. He wanted to know if we wanted to take a canoe up a little tributary to some kind of beautiful waterfall. Of course I was all for it. Jacaréacanga gets mighty boring after about fifteen minutes. Kit was in bed, taking his third nap of the day. Soong Tan had nothing to do but read Brazilian comic books. So I said, "Come on, Kit, let's do it!"

But it's like he's on drugs or something. He just lolls around. He's like that sometimes. Unless there's something real interesting to do, he just isn't interested. If it were a beautiful waterfall surrounded by anti-tank missiles, he'd be all for it. Up and at 'em. But water running over a cliff? He couldn't care less. Besides, he thinks he's got a headache and maybe intestinal problems coming. So he says, "Go. OK? Just go." He's lying there on his back with his arm across his face.

I felt his cheek. No fever. "Let me see your eyes," I said. I was worried about hepatitis. He showed me. They weren't yellow.

"Let me feel your liver," I said. He lets me. I push in on it. Not swollen. So it wasn't malaria.

So I said, "If you get diarrhea, save a sample of it, OK? We'll see if you've got a bug or worms or something." He nodded without taking his arm off his face.

I've never seen Kit sick before. If he gets the sniffles, it's all over in about fifteen minutes. It's pretty much inevitable that people get sick in the rain forest. City people get malaria and dysentery. Loggers and miners get malaria and hepatitis. Indians get hepatitis and tuberculosis, and if they catch a cold, it lasts three months. Children get worms. Everybody gets dysentery. Nobody escapes unscathed. It's just a matter of who gets cured.

So I figured I'd take Soong Tan and go see this beautiful waterfall and come right back. Ronsh said it would take about half an hour to get there in his motorized canoe, and twenty minutes to get back downstream. I checked with the owner of the hotel. He said Ronsh was cool. No problem. I could trust him.

And I could. He was a real nice guy. He had this twenty-five-foot aluminum boat with a Yamaha engine. He brought his little wife and five kids and some cousins and two dogs. And a machete because, as he said, "Who knows?"

And off we go. First down this little stream to the Tapajós. Then up the Tapajós for ten minutes, then up this other little river. It was great! Just a few feet away was the real thing - the jungle, the primeval world, the planet as it used to be.

Ronsh and I had a good talk. As long as he talks slow, I can understand him. He understand my Spanish-Portuguese mixture pretty well, and when he doesn't understand, Soong Tan usually knows the right word in Portuguese. Anyway, he tells me all about being an Indian, which isn't as easy as you'd think. When I told him I'm a nurse, he tells me I should go to his village. Everybody's always sick. No doctors are willing to go there. No medicine.

Well don't you know it doesn't take half an hour to get to the beautiful waterfall. It takes twice that, mostly because his motor dies. But he gets it running, and off we go again. No problem.

The waterfall was beautiful. Nice clean water pouring from about twenty feet up and thundering into this nice little pool like you'd see at Disneyland. Everybody except Ronsh and his wife went swimming.

And then we came back. No problem. We get to the hotel, and there's this note lying on my pillow. From Kit. It says, 'Gaia's pilot is too drunk to fly so I'm going to take her up myself so she can dump her porpoises. Shouldn't take long. Goose can tell you more. See you later. Love, Kit."

Love? What nerve. And there I'd thought it was his liver.

So I go storming off to the cheap hotel. And what do you think? No Goose. They let me have a quick look in their room. Gaia's pack's there. His isn't. The owner of the place said she saw him buy a dugout canoe and start paddling down the stream toward the Tapajós. With his pack. So, like, that's the end of him. Care to guess why he suddenly took off? My guess: he was mad about something - same thing I was mad at.

So I go back to the hotel. I just can't believe the whole thing. I'm crying and growling and swearing vengeance on that bunny-hugging bitch. I couldn't decide whether to just leave the both of them right there in the jungle and somehow head for home with Soong Tan, or whether just to kill her and haul him back home and make him suffer until he's down on his knees.

But then they didn't come back. Four hours passed. It got dark. Where the hell were they? Twice I tromped over to the other hotel, expecting to catch them with their pants down. They aren't there.

There was nowhere else in town to go. Where could they be? Finally I thought of the airport. At least I'd know if they'd landed.

They hadn't.

Now when I say "airport," I hope you know I mean a dirt strip with grass down the middle. The control tower's a goddam shack with a screen door. There's two guys inside. One of them speaks a little English. When I first walk in, he looks at me like a stripper who just came on stage. He even looks at Soong Tan. Then I tell him I want to know about a man and a woman with a couple of big boxes who took off in a small plane. Suddenly his face gets this washed-out look. He asks me who I am. I tell him. He asks me who was on the plane. I give him Kit's full name and Gaia's first, which I can't even spell. Then I ask why he wants to know.

He says it's really nothing to worry about. This kind of thing happens, and often there's no problem. It's too soon to be really concerned about it. It seems the plane has disappeared.

I say, "Disappeared?"

He nods to the side. "Yes," he says. "We hear them on ze radio. In English. First ze girl. Zen ze man. I could not understand everysing, but they say 'Emairgency, emairgency. We are going down.' They say it many times. Then the radio stops. No more. Morto."

I didn't know what to say. All I could do is just stand there with my mouth open. I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream. I was speechless. I just held Soong Tan against me.

"Maybe zey are OK," the man said. "Planes fall a lot in Amazonia. Sometimes they are OK. Sometimes...", and he just wiggles his fingers.

"So...is there a search party?"

He leans in closer to hear me again.

"A search party," I say. "Is somebody looking for them?"

"Oh, yes. I understand. Look for. Yes. No. I am sorry. Zere are no ozzer planes. Only one. Another gringo has. But he has good pilot. He does not become lost."

"And my husband?"

"We do not know where zey go, what direction. He show me pilot license and keys for ze plane. I say, OK, clear for take-off. And ze go." His hand imited a plane rising into the air.

Susan, I can't tell you how scared I am. He's out there in the jungle, dead or dying. I'm sure he wouldn't play around about something like that. I'm sure it's that bitch's fault.

I waited all day for Edgar. He never came back. Elizama got worried, too. We went back to the airport in the morning. They said they just got a message from Edgar's pilot. They ran out of gas at some missionary camp in the middle of nowhere. They'll have to stay until a boat can bring them some aviation fuel. By boat, of course, they mean canoe. A fucking canoe has to fill up a fucking barrel with aviation fuel and take it on out to wherever the fuck they are. Pardon my French, but I can't believe how fucking ridiculous this whole fucking thing has gotten. The guy at the airport says that would probably take two days, maybe three, to get out to the missionary place if they could find somebody stupid enough to go into the jungle with forty-four gallons of aviation fuel in a barrel.

Plus of course nobody's stupid enough to go charging off into the jungle in a canoe with a forty-four gallon incendiary device. Except me. And Ronsh, after I gave him two hundred bucks. I also promised him a gumball machine.

I know it's stupid, but what else am I supposed to do? I don't see any other way out. I can't sit and wait. I can't just go home and abandon him. So tomorrow morning Ronsh and I leave in his canoe. If you don't hear from me pretty soon, well, you know where I went. Sort of. That's all I can say. Pray for me, Susan, though by the time you get this letter it'll probably be too late.

Ysa

Chapter Nine

All through his travails in the jungle, Kit kept a journal. He wrote it on the back of the pages of the flight book that was in the plane. He'd learned the importance of a journal when he was in Southeast Asia. When he went out on mission, he had to write things down or the days would blur into a meaningless mush. It was forbidden to write journals or letters or anything, but he wrote in a code that only he could understand, an uninterpretable mixture of Spanish, Pig Latin and words in English written backwards. That was so the enemy couldn't read it if he got captured. In Brazil, he just wrote plain English. He wanted someone to be able to understand it and to know what had happened - in case he didn't live to tell it. Mainly he wanted Ysa to know. He knew she would suspect the wrong thing. So he wrote it all down.

August 29

I hate to admit I've made several sequential mistakes. I equally hate to admit I am alive by luck alone. And I hate to acknowledge that I may not live much longer. I have inserted myself into a situation that is not completely hopeless but still far from sure. In short, these words may be among my last.

First mistake: taking off in a plane with no map.

Second mistake: believing a plane's instruments.

Third mistake: taking a risk without reason

Fourth mistake: Letting myself get sweet-talked by a woman.

A nit-wit, I might add. A certifiable nut-case.

Nut-case defined: Anyone who would take a thousand tiny porpoises into Amazonia in hopes of saving the rain forest. What in the world was she thinking? These are illiterate lumberjacks who risk malaria, cobras, Indian attack and God knows what else in their desire to make quick money by cutting down trees. Are baking soda porpoises going to change their minds? I don't think so.

Nor did I think so when she showed up at the hotel and reported her pilot so drunk he couldn't stand up. Of course she's crying. If there's one thing I can't resist - or at least couldn't until now - it's a woman crying. So I give her a little hug and a pat on the back, and she hugs me and rubs my back, and I get all excited like some kind of a junior high-schooler, when her hand happens to brush two inches below my belt. What kind of a magic button she found there, I don't know. I never knew it was there.

All of a sudden I'm drying her tears with my shirt sleeve and telling her that maybe I can fly the plane.

Big mistake. It turned out I could indeed fly the plane. It was a single-engine made-in-Brazil version of the Piper Cub we used to fly on observation missions in Cambodia. A piece of cake. A kindergartner could fly one.

Except a kindergartner wouldn't take off without a map, and if he had a lick of sense, he would have known that "Made in Brazil" translates as, "Caution: Instruments-Don't-Work."

The altimeter worked. The wind speed indicator worked. The oil pressure guauge worked. The compass, however, was erratic, and the gas gauge was stuck on full. It read full when we took off, it read full when we dumped our porpoises, and it read full as the motor began to cough.

It was a mistake for me to assume that I could successfully follow a river for a certain distance, then follow the compass to the drop site, and then reverse my course. It was after the drop that I recognized the problems with the fuel gauge. Half an hour later I realized the compass was jamming. I navigated by the sun and memory as best I could, but there were no recognizable landmarks below. Just forest.

I used the radio to contact the airport, but if their reception was as bad as my reception, they could barely understand me. On top of that, of course, my Portuguese was less than intelligible. I shouted in English and Spanish and what I figured was probably Portuguese, but it didn't matter what I said. I didn't know where we were, and neither did they. There was nothing we could tell each other. After a while I gave up. I had other things to think about.

I never thought I'd say I was lucky to have made an emergency landing in Cambodia. At the time, I thought it was the end of me. But my pilot, a Vietnamese who'd been flying since French biplanes first flew in Indo-China, knew what to do. He didn't make it look easy. I never saw a man sweat so intensely. He'd never made a landing like the one he had to make, but he knew the theory of it. He knew how to land a plane in a tree.

I think I would have been less nervous if I hadn't had a weeping Buddhist in the co-pilot's seat. I don't mean in Cambodia but now. I mean Gaia. Buddhism failed her as soon as she came within nodding distance of death. Typical of the completely irrational person, she responded to the threat by screaming, "No! No! No!" repeatedly, as if her denial might make the threat disappear. It didn't. It just added a headache to my problems.

Then she thought she could find support - physical support, the kind that might keep her from crashing into the ground - by climbing on top of me. I've heard that an animal faced with imminent death will go to whatever extreme's necessary to mate, to make a last attempt to propagate the species. They wiull also head for high ground. Gaia was attempting to do both.

We actually had a lot of time on our hands. By the time I figured out we were lost, I figured we were probably, or at the very least, possibly low on fuel. It was a very tough decision, whether to keep searching for the airport or a landing strip, or to select a suitable tree and circle it until the fuel ran out.

So, for about fifteen minutes, Gaia knew she was going to die. She did not believe I was going to land the plane in a tree. Perhaps I was too honest with her. I, too, doubted I could land the plane in a tree.

As I saw her mind disintegrating under the stress, I suggested she try meditating, which she had told me she does on a regular basis. But she just kept weeping and denying the situation.

Suddenly she turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck and began eating at my face and neck and ears. She kissed my cheek and sucked on my earlobe and viciously licked my neck and forced my head around so she could attack my lips. I must confess that I found it exciting. After all, I, too, recognized the possibility of death. As if landing a plane into a tree isn't hard enough, we'd still be in the middle of a jungle that stretched as far as we could see. I saw little hope of rescue and less hope of walking out. If we couldn't find the right direction by plane, we'd certainly never find it on foot.

So the distraction of a young and not entirely unattractive girl throwing herself at me was an odd and yet welcome relief. All I had to do, until we ran out of fuel, was keep circling. When I found myself with a breast pressed to my face, well - God and Ysa forgive me - it was as welcome to me as a man as it no doubt once was to me as a babe. I needed it. I wanted it. I took it as I might take life itself.

Need I say it brought some comfort to my co-pilot as well? She had the top of her granny dress pulled down on one side so I might take her into my mouth. As I did, she maneuvered to place a knee between my legs and bring her whole chest to my face. She caressed the top of my head, kissed it wildly as I suckled, first on one sweet breast, then, as it came from within the translucent mustiness of her dress, the other. Both were small, rounded, succulent and, under the circumstances, very sensitive and responsive. Her nipples swelled and pointed, and her weeping deepened into a quivering moan. We both needed that affection, that gesture of giving life and support.

The sensation was enhanced by the slow floating of the plane as we continued in our lazy circle. I had never done such a thing in a plane, let alone while in the pilot's seat, and I wouldn't recommend it as standard FAA practice, but one thing's for sure: it's quite different from doing it in, say, an earth-based bed or even on a raft in a gentle sea. It's a different kind of floating, a lofty weightlessness intensified by the nearness of death.

So I was loving Gaia as much as I've ever loved any woman - though I use the word "love" only in a certain sense here. It was a love of passion, or maybe the phrase is passionate love, and nothing more. It's a cheap and easy love, totally engrossing, undeniably pleasurable, but inevitably short-lived. It wasn't like loving Ysa, which is passion combined with that love of mind and soul, the love we call true love.

To be brutally honest, I was not thinking such philosophical thoughts. I was loving Gaia, or Gaia's body, with absolute dedication. The plane could have crashed during those moments. I would not have seen it coming. I would not have cared. I was enthralled. Totally enthralled. Her breasts were in my face, my hands were squeezing the thin flesh of her buttocks, stroking each tender bun, kneading them, exploring their curves, substance and texture as if I might never again touch a woman. And she joined me in my passionate reverie. She cannot be blamed for what happened between us. She, too, was foundering in the lust for life. She could not control herself. I don't know if her state could be described as orgasmic, but she groaned and shook, weakening and stiffening as my hands and fingers probed her in a frantic search for something lost. Her hands, desperate for skin, burrowed through my shirt like an animal seeking shelter. They slid down my hips and into my pants, digging deeper and deeper. I wanted her to have me. I wanted those hands to find what they wanted so much...but the plane's single engine began to sputter and cough, and even before it stopped, the plane sank noticeably. My hard desire died as quickly as the engine. I heaved Gaia off me and again became a pilot - a pilot and a man who, even if not officially married and endowed with offspring, nonetheless a man with familial obligations and a woman who loved him. I speak of Ysa, my one, my only...my reason to live.

The plane had circled far from the target castanheira tree, the tree of the famous Brazil nuts. I spotted it a good five hundred meters to the south. Its phenomenally broad canopy spread wide and high above the other trees. The expanse of its dense, yellow-flowered dome stretched a good hundred feet across.

The theory of what I had to do went like this. Without power, the plane could circle as it descended. I would circle the tree from above, as tightly as possible. As the plane wound below the highest part of the canopy, I would pull back on the wheel, raising the nose and lifting the plane with the last of its inertia. At the same moment, I would hit hard rudder to the side, rotating the axis of the plane about ninety degrees to face the tree. The plane would briefly rise and tilt into the tree, then suddenly stall, hesitate, and nose down to fall straight to earth...unless, of course, there were a tree in the way.

By some combination of skill and miracle, the plane did just as I hoped. It stalled just a few feet above the peak of the tree, nosed over, and inserted itself into the foliage. There it stopped just as gently as could be, hung up in the dense tangle of branches and vine.

I don' t think the plane would be worth much on the used plane market, but we were alive. Gaia was barely still a part of our world. She just babbled through her tears and touched her trembling fingers to her teeth. We were facing almost straight down, but we couldn't even see the ground. That's how high up we were and how much vegetation grew between us and our home planet. It brought back a distant memory of a carnival ride I once took with a couple of buddies. It swung us around and around in a pod, like a pendulum gone mad. And then something went wrong, and suddenly we were far above the earth, stuck but facing down. It took them four hours to fix the machine and get us down. That may have been the last time I was truly terrified. Life's been easy since then.

I guess Gaia had never had such adolescent training in terror. This was her first time poised hundreds of feet above death. All I could do was hold her until she stopped shaking. We didn't get passionate this time. We just clung to each other as if the other might somehow not succumb to gravity.

Chapter Ten

Ysa did not know the details of the crash. All she knew, really, was what the air traffic controller had told her, which was basically nothing, and what Elizama had predicted, which was too weird to believe. but she did believe he might still be alive. Her only hope of searching for him, however, was to first go get Edgar, who was also in a plane that had run out of gas, except that he had enough sense to land on a regular runway, not a tree.

So Ysa hired Ronsh to take her and a barrel of aviation fuel up to the camp where Edgar was stuck. Soong Tan was supposed to stay with Elizama, but that morning, just before dawn, when Ysa showed up at Elizama's room, Ysa found her drunk as a skunk. She was weeping and moaning about losing her husband - she assumed he'd died in the crash she'd dremed about - and, oh my God, oh my God, what was she going to do now. All she had in life was eleven deluxe recreational snack dispensers. So she stayed up all night drinking cachaça with lime juice.

No way was Ysa going to leave Soong Tan with a drunk, so, with all due reluctance, she took the little girl to Ronsh's canoe and off they went. Ysa wasn't happy about it, but what could she do? She was especially pissed off that she had to rescue that jerk Edgar before she could rescue her own man.

Ronsh didn't bring his wife and kids and cousins and dogs this time. It was just him, Ysa, and Soong Tan. The canoe was pretty heavy, with the aviation fuel plus fuel for the canoe motor, plus food for two days, plus Ysa's and Soong Tan's packs, plus a cargo of staples, like kerosene, soap, flour, rice, salt, and cigarettes. When she asked him what it was all for, he said, "You'll see." She figured he just didn't want to try to explain it. Everything she said, and everything he said, took a long time because they had to figure out which words the other would understand. Ysa's Portuguese was pretty good, she told me, but it was always hard to get all the facts straight. She wasn't learning it so much as converting it from Spanish.

Once they got underway, they didn't talk much. Ronsh sat in the stern, clutching the steering arm of the motor and studying the river. They sped up the Tapajós, then up a tributary that looked as wide as the Mississippi, then up a tributary to that river. Ysa and Soong Tan sat in the bow, squinting into the wind, hunkering under the sun, getting their faces so wind-burned and sun-burned, they looked like a couple of cowboys who'd been left out all winter.

It was a pretty interesting trip for the first couple of hours, penetrating the Amazon, going deeper and deeper into it, farther and farther from the kind of life you're used to leading, farther and farther into a forest as wide as an ocean. Ysa kept writing in her journal. She said she couldn't believe how many trees they passed. Ronsh stayed close to the wall of brush that leaned out over the water. Deeper in, where the trees grew tall and dense, the ground was pretty free of vegetation. It was too dark for much to grow. Ysa kept looking for a jaguar or something, but it was just trees, trees, trees.

They spent the night at the little house of some crusty old guy. The house was up on log stilts. The walls were bamboo lashed to each other with twisted strands of something. The roof was grass thatch. It was just one room with a little porch, all about six feet above the level of the river. The yard was a swamp. Practically nothing in the house came from any kind of factory. Everything besides a few cooking utensils, a hammock, and the old man's clothes were rustic stuff he'd made right there. All the colors in the house were earth tones of brown, gray, green and black. The old man was half Indian, half black, half white and half something else. He looked several hundred years old. "Like walking leather," Ysa wrote. He had three teeth in his mouth, earlobes that hung halfway down to his shoulders, black skin, blue eyes, Indian hair, two fingers missing, feet and toes cracked like old shoes, hands as meaty as slabs of beef. He looked the kind of guy you'd cross the street to avoid, yet he was an angel of a man and mighty happy to have company. Ronsh was some kind of relative. The old man served them up boiled manioc, fried fish, fried bananas, rice made with coconut milk, juice from a fruit called açai. He and Ronsh slept in hammocks on the little porch so Ysa and Soong Tan could have the single room of the house.

I just can't imagine myself in a place like that. I can't imagine why Ysa wasn't scared out of her mind. I mean, these two guys could have done anything they wanted with her. They could have raped and murdered her, chopped her up with a machete and tossed her to the alligators. There was sure no dialing 911. But she wrote that she felt safer there than she did in her own home. These were real men, she said. Her honor and safety were in her hands. If Amazonia is a lawless jungle, she said, it's the honor of a few men who keep it civilized - more civilized than a place where nobody's going to help you unless you pay for it.

Or so she assumed. Because the next day, things got complicated. Real complicated.

She didn't know where she was, of course. Way out in the woods, that's all. Upstream. Waaaaay upstream. Then Roinsh turned left up a little creek so narrow and winding that he could hardly get it around bends without backing and filling and bumping into branches that hung low over the water. He had to back and fill. Ysa was getting very worried, but what could she do? Get out? Tell him to go back?

She smelled wood smoke before they arrived at an Indian village. A dozen or so Indians were waiting at a sandy spot on the side of the stream. These were real Indians. They weren't wearing boxer shorts like Ronsh. They were wearing loin cloths. They had bones stuck through their nostrils. The women were bare breasted. Breast didn't even seem like the right word. Teats was more like it. Everybody stared at Ysa and Soong Tan as they unfolded themselves from the canoe and for the first time in six hours stepped onto solid land. It was like stepping into cave-man times. And to the Indians, it was probaby like the twentieth century arriving in a Yamaha-powered canoe. Soong Tan hung real close to Ysa. Kid Indians hung back, silent. Oddly enough, the Indian women were crying. That was when Ysa noticed there were no men, at least none visible.

The village was in a clearing cut into the forest. It had six huge bamboo and grass huts as big as barns. Smoke wafted up through the grass roofs. Ysa took a quick guess that at least twenty people lived in each hut. Six times twenty is a hundred and twenty. Yet there were only a dozen or so people visible. Where were the rest? Out hunting? Gathering nuts and berries?

Ysa got nervous when Ronsh ordered some of the women to unload the canoe. After everything was out, they removed the fuel barrel by just tipping the canoe over and letting the barrel fall into the water. Then they rolled it up onto the landing area.

"Ronsh," she asked. "Why are we here?"

"We visit for a little time."

"But...how little?"

Ronsh wags his head the way Brazilians do when they either don't know the answer or don't want to give it. He flutters his hand, palm down, fingers spread, a gesture that means more or less the same thing. "Maybe short time," he says. "We have a problem here. A big problem."

She had already told him she was a nurse, back when they had goen to see the beautiful waterfall. So he probably got his big idea not long after Ysa asked him to take her to Edgar at the gold mining camp.

He led her into the village. The smell overwhelmed her. She had never seen such a filthy place, not even in Burma. Pigs and chickens rooted around the open area among the huts. She'd seen that kind of thing before, and even as a nurse she didn't see it as especially unhealthy. But the place smelled of human excrement, too, and the powerful smell of a dead thing infected the air. It smelled just plain evil. The acrid smoke of a smoldering cook-fire put a wicked edge on the smell. Then she saw the dead pig and the ungodly cloud of flies around it. Then she noticed vultures standing around. Like the Indians, the motionless vultures seemed to be observing her, wondering what she was, where she'd come from, and what she'd come for.

Ronsh picked up a smoldering stick of firewood from a small fireplace outside one of the huts. He waved it in the air to heat it up a bit and release more smoke. Then he lifted aside the blanket that hung across the doorway of the hut. A fetid breath of human rot and dry sewage swelled out. Ronsh recoiled, grimaced, waved the smoky stick inside the door, gobbled a lungful of air and gestured for Ysa to follow him.

Ysa motioned for Soong Tan to wait outside. She already suspected what she'd find in the hut. This was where they'd keep the old ones dying of pneumonia or tuberculosis. Indians were especially susceptible to these "White Man diseases." Even the common cold, when it penetrated Amazonia far enough, hit Indian villages like a bowling ball. By the smell that issued from the door of the big, high-roofed hut, Ysa expected to find someone in there pretty close to death.

The only light was what little leaked in through the cracks in the bamboo wall. Before Ysa saw the people, she heard the flies. They buzzed as if sharing a secret, as if not wanting outside flies to learn of the treasure they had discovered. Their trove was a population of people too weak to move, people well on their way to death. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Ysa saw the tangled forest of hammocks and then the mounds on the floor, people lying on mats, motionless and for all she knew, dead.

But no, they weren't dead. They were just dying. Ronsh led her to an orange and yellow hammock. An old woman lay inside, wrapped as if in a cocoon. Ronsh laid a hand upon the woman's shoulder and said to Ysa, "My mother."

The woman panted as if out of breath. He skin was paler than Ronsh's. With a nurse's instinct - and she knew it was a stupid thing to do - she lay her hand on the wokan's forehead. Though under a blanket, the emaciated woman quivered as if freezing. The fever was mild, perhaps a hundred, at most a hundred and one. The woman's dark eyes opened a crack, then closed in silent agony.

Ysa shouted out, "Soong Tan!"

"What?" The girl's voice came outside, from near the door.

"Don't come in! Go open my backpack. Get my medical kit. Just leave it outside the door. Then go wait at the canoe."

"Will do."

That's what she liked most about Soong Tan. No questions. No backtalk. Will do.

Ysa took out her stethoscope, warmed it with her hand, then snaked it under the sick woman's blanket to place it against her chest. The left lung sounded normal, but the right worked with a wheezing rumble in the lower lobe.

"I need some light in here," she stated to Ronsh. In a moment, a match scratched. Yellow light flared up with a tiny, vicious roar, and then settled into a calm flame atop a candle. Ysa held it in front of the woman's face. With thumb and forefinger she peeled open the woman's eye. It showed a slight yellow of jaundice but not enough to indicate a serious case of hepatitis. She felt for the woman's liver. It wasn't firm enough to suggest hepatitis or malaria, but the woman flinched at the touch. She also flinched when Ysa pressed in on the area around the appendix.

Ysa didn't know how to say stool sample in Portuguese, but her suspicions led her to a dab of the stuff between her buttocks, a deposit inevitably left by dysentery. She scraped up a bit on the blade of her pocket knife. It looked tainted by blood and mucous.

"I'll need to look at this under a microscope," she said to Ronsh.

"No microscopes here," Ronsh answered, almost laughing.

He was wrong about that. Ysa had one, borrowed from the pathlogy lab where she worked. Her colleagues there had joked about her brining back specimens of strange intestinal beings. Ootside, she set up her microscope on a wooden crate, touched a bit of the stool sample to a glass slide, adjusted the little mirror on the microscope so it shined sunlight up through the sample, and bent to have a look.

She saw an amoeba. Peeling through the tissue-thin pages of her Merck Manual, she found a description that matched the bug pretty closely. The symptoms matched, too.

"Entameba histolytica," she murmurred. "Amoebiasis."

Ronsh, thinking she was speaking to him, leaned in and said, "Enta-what?"

"I think it is entameba histolytica," she said, pronouncing the medical term with a Portuguese accent,"complicated with diffuse amebic hepatitis."

"Many have died of this," Ronsh added, quite needlessly.

Ysa nodded heavily. "Untreated, it kills," she said. "Where do you get your drinking water?"

"From the river," Ronsh said. "We always have."

"And what's upstream?"

"Several kilometers up, men mine for gold. Many bad men there. Very bad."

Ysa already suspected the source of the problems. "Do they come here?"

"They come. They pay our boys to pan for gold. They take our women to cook. They pay with gold, but what good is gold? The women come home sick. Sometimes they die. Others become sick. Gold does not cure them."

This pained Ysa. The disease was spreading not just from contaminated water but sexually. That complicated matters and explained the infections in the liver and lung. It could also get into the brain.

"We need to treat these people," she said to Ronsh. "If we don't, they'll die."

"Why do you tell me this?" he said. "Many have died already. You are a nurse. I brought you here to treat my people. Will you do it?"

"It's not that easy," Ysa said. "You need the right antibiotic. It's just a tablet, but if you have the wrong one, you can make it worse. I don't really know...I'm not a doctor...I can't presribe pharmaceuticals."

Ronsh looked her straight in the eye. "I know this tablet. The gold miners have it. The disease comes from there. It is their gift to the Indians."

"The tablets?"

"The disease. They do not give medicine to Indians. They only give us disease."

"Why idn't you tell me this before we came? We could have bought medicine in Jacaréacanga..."

Ronsh shook his head. "No. They have no medicine for this there. Only in Belém."

"Where do the miners get it?"

"A plane comes with food, cachaça, medicine. But no more."

"No more what?"

"No more plane. It fell."

"Fell?"

With his hand, Ronsh showed her how it had fallen, curving into a nosedive, hitting the ground and exploding. "Pilot died," he said. "Now no plane comes. Maybe miners go away soon. They go or they die." Just a hint of a smile cracked through his lips.

"Maybe we can go ask them for medicine."

That made Ronsh laugh. "Very good idea," he said, his laugh pierced with agony. "Brilliant! We will go ask the miners to die so that Indians can have their medicine. I'm sure they will like that idea very much!"

"Well...we could go there and ask."

Ronsh's eyes narrowed to glinting dark slits. "Yes," he said. "That is a good diea. You go there and ask."

She sensed the danger in that. She hadn't meant for herself to go. "No," she said. "It is a problem of the Indians. An Indian must go."

"Indian go, Indian die. You must go."

"No."

Ysa counted four heartbeats before Ronsh replied. Still burning into her with his dark, narrow eyes, he simply said, "Yes."

Insisting, she knew, was not going to work, so she shifted into a tone of firm pleading. "Ronsh, you have no right to..."

"This is not a question of rights," he stated. He sounded like a completely different person from the one she had known just moments ago. "It is a question of survival. Not just of these people..." - his hand swept over the dozens of patients - "...but survival of our tribe. Our language. Our memory. Everything. It will all die."

"Why should this be my problem?" Ysa asked. "This is an Indian problem."

"No. It is not an Indian problem. It is a White Man's problem. White Men brought disease to us. First the Portuguese, centuries ago, and now the miners."

Ysa drew the conclusion for him: "I think the Indian's problem is the White Man." But as soon as she said it, she took the thought one step further. The solution to that problem would be very bloody. Had Ronsh not thought of it? Or did it scare him?

If he'd thought it, he backed off. He placed the problem squarely in Ysa's lap. He said it not as a request, not as an order, but as simple instructions. "Go to the camp," he said. "Get the medicine. Bring it back."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you stay here and die with the Indians."

"And if I go and don't come back?"

"Your little girl stays and dies with the Indian."

Under any other circumstances, she might have considered this a death threat, and to her, a death threat was grounds for murder. Threatening the death of Soong Tan made it grounds for decapitation. Ysa loved that little girl more than she loved her own life. Ronsh didn't know what he was messing with.

But he was already as deep toward death as a man can get. His people were dying, and unless he paddled away and never came back, he would die, too. Ya knew he was not the kind of man who would abandon his people. He was the type who would do anything to save them. Unfortunately, "anything" in this case meant delivering Ysa and Soong Tan to death's door.

The very air Ysa was breathing made her so sick she could hardly stand up. Flies with death on their feet were landing on her neck, her hands, her ankles, any bit of exposed skin, and she was almost to the stage where she no longer cared. That's when it's time to leave the tropics, she wrote later - when you don't even bother to shake off the flies.

Worst of all, she felt very stupid - stupid and guilty. She'd wanted to take a vacation on the Amazon. She just had to bring Soong Tan. For her education. And look what she got.

She worsened the pain by remembering how she'd smelled trouble from the time they left Belém. Elizama had even warned her. But no. She wouldn't listen. And then she decides to trust a virtual stranger and go charging off into the jungle in search of a man perfectly capable of taking care of himself. As if she might save him. Now she was up a creek off a stream off a tributary off a river and was being asked to do the impossible so that she could get back to the business of merely accomplishing the difficult so that she could set off on a mission most unlikely to succeed, and even if it did, all she could hope to get out of it would be the decomposed remains of the only man who had ever really loved her, and maybe the bones of the other woman who loved him.

Oddly enough, it was an easy decision. There was only one way out. Without lifting her head from arms, she asked, in words as cold as a corpse, "Are you sure they have the medicine?"

"If they don't, they can get it."

"So?"

"So...tell me when you're ready."

He clearly didn't mean ready to go home. He meant ready for Hell. She saw no need to answer immediately. She just wanted to keep her face down against her arms, alone in the darkness behind her eyes. She didn't want him to see her crying. She did it carefully, trying not to make a sound or let her breathing change. Invading a camp of cut-throat gold miners in the middle of the jungle was not a job for her. It was a job for Kit, but Kit wasn't there.

Chapter Eleven

Just as Ysa was wishing kit were there to save her, Kit was in his plane up in the tree with Gaia and wishing Ysa was there to bring some sanity to the situation. He knew she peformed well under pressure. She did not let fear get in her way. She did what she had to do and did it well. Gaia, however, was a different story.

August 30

Now I know what it's like to spend a night in a tree with an insaniac. I will always wonder what makes women so afraid to die. Why can't they realize that they'll never be free until they're ready to treat their lives like something disposable?

I'll admit it was a rather hairy experience. The plane hung a good three hundred feet in the air, gripped nose-down by branches. I myself considered it rather thrilling to know that at any moment, with any passing breeze, a crucial twig could snap, releasing us to the pull of gravity. I like sleeping that way - light but not too light.

Granted, it wasn't the most comfortable of beds. Gaia and I were basically up against the cockpit windshield. It took us a while to find comfortable positions wrapped around the (steering wheels -- ) and seats. We had to move very carefully to avoid shaking the plane and loosening it from the tree's tenuous grip. Gaia attained what might be called an altered state of consciousness. It might also be called a nervous breakdown. She just kept whimpering. It got to me. I kept my arm around her all night, offering what comfort I could.

But we did not - I repeat: not - get into the death-fearing passion that almost got us killed before the crash. I felt Gaia's fingers on my neck and on my belly, just below the bottom of my shirt, but I don't think she was in her right mind. She just needed to touch someone. If I'd been a gorilla she would have held onto me the same way. And I think that if she'd been a gorilla, I would have let her hold me the same way, too.

Come morning we had to find a way down from the tree. I certainly didn't expect rescue. I had to practically break Gaia's arms to get her hands off me. Still insane with fear, she seemed to think she might save herself by holding on to me. But I had to go out alone to prowl around the branches and see how we might get down.

I felt like I was climbing around a giant stalk of broccoli. That's what it was like. I was so far up I couldn't see the ground, just the sea of trees that rose to within fifty feet of the crown of this one giant tree. I moved very slowly and carefully, hugging each branch more tightly than I ever hugged Ysa - a fact I vowed to change, and not by hugging the branches more lightly.

The branches were slippery with moss and crawling with ants and other insects. The tree supported its own little forest of moss, fungus, vines, spider webs and insect life. It made maneuvering very precarious.

Vines grew very thick where the lower tier of forest reached the bottom of the crown of this tree. From there I knew we could climb down. Or at least one of us could.

It took me a good hour to climb back up to Gaia and the plane. But that was the easy part of our escape.

"Gaia," I said as calmly as possible, "we're going to have to climb down. It's that or die here."

She was crying again, but at least it was a real cry. She wasn't wrapped in her subconscious cocoon. She said, "No, I can't. I...I'm afraid of heights."

"Then you stay," I said, hoping that would scare her. "I'll be back in a couple of weeks to recover your remains."

"My remains?"

"Well...you know...whatever the snakes don't get."

"Snakes?"

"Snakes, rats, buzzards, whatever."

She looked down through the windshield, thought about it for a second and said, "No...I can't. I just can't." Tears flowed down her face as if somebody behind her eyes had left a faucet on.

So I hit her. Once. Hard. Just right. Boom. Knocked her out. I cut off the seat belts with my pocket knife and tied them into a sling. I tied her wrists and ankles together with wire from behind the instrument panel. Then I slung her over my shoulder like a big papoose.

I was extra careful climbing down. The last thing I wanted was to fall and be found dead with a young girl strapped to my back. It was tricky with all that weight back there, but she didn't weigh much over a hundred pounds. Sometimes it's nice to have a skinny woman, but such situations are rare.

I wish I'd taken the time to search the plane for some duct tape or something - something with which to tape her mouth shut. Because she regained consciousness shortly before I reached the vines I'd planned to climb down. That's when she started screaming. Like a maniac. A lunatic. A jungle animal. Maybe that's why jungle animals scream so loudly. It's the maniacs among them, scared shitless as they swing through the trees.

In my particular case, the screaming was point-blank in my ear. Her body, soaked with sweat, shook against my shoulders like a hundred and ten pounds of Jello. I had planned to slowly shinny down a nice thick vine, but after about ten minutes of being strapped to a lunch whistle gone berserk, I decided to hurry things up. A certain vine climbed from our tree over to a tree about thirty yards away. Maybe by the theory of grass looking greener elsewhere, that other tree looked easier to climb down. So I cut the vine, grabbed hold, and jumped. I guess we sounded a lot like some kind of female Tarzan as we swung down and across like a pendulum. It worked even better than I'd figured. The vine loosened its upper grip and lowered us almost to the ground. The quickest way to get Gaia to shut up was just to let go and fall the rest of the way. Brush broke our fall, and we landed on a dense mat of roots and moss.

We survived.

As soon as I got Gaia untied, she turned mad. She kicked and slapped at me and screamed holy hell. I just let her. I could see where she was coming from. Some people just can't handle fear. It scares them.

She had an astounding amount of energy to dedicate to her little attack, and plenty to say about the situation. Somehow she neglected to consider that the whole trip had been her idea in the first place.

She was pretty much pooped out by the time she stopped, but the reason she stopped was as much a surprise to me as it was to her. It was a gunshot from no more than fifty feet away. That shut her up good.

We looked over to see three men, each holding a rifle, though not in an especially aggressive way. The looked like three scruffy-types from out of a movie about outlaws in Nevada. One man held a little purple thing in his hand. I knew enough Portuguese to understand him. He said, "Is this yours?"

It was a little purple porpoise with a parachute. Gaia said nothing. She couldn't even breathe. All I could think to do was hold up my hands and say, "É dela" - It's hers.

Chapter Twelve

After the porpoises came raining down, the loggers wondered what the hell was going on. Then they watched the plane in the distance as it went around and around. They figured out what was probably happening, so they jumped in their motorized canoes and headed for the general area. Then they saw the plane go down. And the next morning they heard Gaia swinging through the trees. After that, it wasn't hard to locate the source of the commotion.

And everything would have been plenty cool if Gaia hadn't chosen that moment to get brave. At the top of her lungs she started telling these guys off, ranting on about preserving the rain forest, saving the earth, voting Green, going solar, stopping the nukes, standing up to multinational corporations.

Kit tried to interrupt her. "Umm...Gaia..." he said tentatively.

But she just kept going. The whales. The furry little creatures of the earth. The sky above us. The clean waters that nurture us. All the little fishies in the deep blue sea.

Fortunately it was all in English, so the men didn't understand a word. They just gawked in amused bewilderment. Kit watched her with pretty much the same attitude, figuring that as soon as she tired herself out, he and the men could begin man-to-man discussions about how to get out of there. But her big words gave her courage, and all of a sudden she was charging the men, screeching as if to kill.

"Die, fascist pigs!" she screamed. "In the name of Mother Earth!"

But it wasn't much of a charge. The dense mat of roots, moss, and rotten branches grabbed at her feet and legs and held them down like lead weights. She'd sink one leg in halfway to her knee, then plunge the next in just as deep and struggle to pull the other leg out. The men just watched her come, enjoying the flash of white thigh they saw with each step. The last step, however, was a drop-kick to the groin of the man with the porpoise, bringing him to his knees.

The other men were still in what-the-hell-is-this mode when Kit started toward them. He knew what they'd do before they thought of it. Before he got there, one man kicked his black rubber boot against Gaia's face, toppling her over. The other man swung his rifle around and stopped Kit in his tracks. Kit knew when to quit, or at least when to pretend to quit. He put his hands out, palms facing the man in a gesture of surrender and peace.

The man looked at Kit, pointed at Gaia with his whole hand and jabbered something Kit couldn't understand. All he could do was shrug and give the international sign language for "she's crazy," a twirling of the finger beside the ear. He knew the word. "Doida"

"Doida," they agreed. They seemed to sympathize with him. Maybe they could imagine being stuck in the rain forest with such a woman. At least they didn't shoot him dead or kick him in a tender spot. The situation didn't seem completely hopeless - not until the men tied his and Gaia's hands behind their backs, marched them at gun-point a couple of hours through the forest, rolled them into a canoe, and raced off toward the logging camp.

"Are they going to kill us?" Gaia whimpered at the top of her lungs. The word blew back over her head to Kit, who sat behind her. He was glad that the man in the stern did not speak English.

"They might kill us, and they might not," Kit said, wanting to neither scare her nor let her think of pulling any more commando stunts. "I think in the future maybe we should try diplomacy rather than direct frontal attack. Whaddya say?"

Gaia shook her head, letting her long, brown hair dance in the wind. It tickled Kit's face, which he didn't mind as much as he might have. Given the discomfort of sitting in the bottom of a canoe with his hands tied behind him, the hair was a nice relief, a nice touch of softness.

"Do you have any idea how many species they're driving to extinction?" she said.

Kit hesitated before confessing what he'd never told anyone. "Gaia," he said in a loud but passionate whisper. "I voted for Ralph Nader."

"You're kidding!" she screeched. "You're Green?"

"I am not kidding. I'm as concerned about the environment as you are. But...we've got to be rational about it. A porpoise attack isn't going to solve any problems. Besides, one more stupid move like that little attack of your and these guys are going to drive us to extinction."

"They wouldn't actually do it, would they?"

"They kill porpoises, don't they?"

That shut her up for a good long time.

Meanwhile, Ysa's problems were just as bad as Kit's, or even worse. Kit was held captive by a bunch of loggers. Ysa was held captive in an Indian village where everybody was dying. To make matters worse, she had Soong Tan with her. She couldn't think just about herself. She had a kid to worry about. And of course she was worried about Kit. Was he dead? Was he off fooling around with a skinny chick from England? Would she ever find him? Was she risking her own life and Soong Tan's to search for somebody who was already lunch to vultures?

That was her most horrifying image, she told me. Kit's beautiful body being torn apart by urubus, the vultures that glided in vast circles high in the sky and stood around garbage dumps and fish markets like a bunch of morticians waiting for the end of a funeral. She couldn't help but imagine them fighting over his organs, savoring his eyes, munching on his tongue, flying off with his bones. If the same thing happened to Gaia, well tough shit. She had it coming. No that she had enough meat on her bones to please a buzzard.

While Ysa was wondering what to do about getting amoebiasis medicine out of the mining camp, Soong Tan was already befriending her Indian peers. They were showing her how to use a bow and arrow. The bow was as tall as she was, and the arrow just as long. The Indian kids were shooting it with astonishing accuracy, launching arrows across the full width of the village and hitting a coconut that hung from a branch. Soong Tan was obviously a stranger to the bow and arrow, but by the intense look in her eye as she drew it back, Ysa knew she'd get the hang of it very quickly.

Ysa sat by the canoe down by the river, doodling in the sand with a stick while she thought. A thin cloud of gnats quivered around her head, frantic with the insane desires of small insects. She did not swing at them. They were as much as part of her situation as the rancid air she breathed but no longer smelled and the heat she no longer felt. The jungle was no longer a thing of discomfort or fear. It was merely backdrop to real problems, the kind that came from cities.

The big question was whether to even bother trying to get the medicine. The men in the mining camp certainly weren't going to just hand it over. Somehow she'd have to steal it. The odds against success were beyond calculation. She just had no idea. She'd tried robbing a bank once, and it had not gone well. She learned her lesson. Theft was something best left to thieves. Her profession was nursing and biomedical research.

Still, Ronsh wasn't going to let her go if she didn't cooperate. The longer she stayed in the village, the higher the odds that she and Soong Tan would contract amoebiasis. They had food and bottled water for a few days, but eventually they'd have to choose between starvation and contamination. It occurred to her to grab a canoe and make a run for it, but trying to out-race Indians on their own turf certainly would not work.

So she pretty much had to at least try. That left the question of what to do with Soong Tan. Should she take her along? Would she be safer among a bunch of prospectors or in the middle of an epidemic? At least the Indians were friendly. If something happened to Ysa, Ronsh might eventually take Soong Tan back to Jacaréacanga. God only knew what the prospectors would do with a girl.

The deciding factor was the stench of the village. She could take it no longer. The quickest way out, long-term and short-, was to go take a stab at the mining camp. She'd just go see what she could do. If things worked out, well, she would get on with the business of looking for Edgar so she could get on with looking for Kit so she could get on with getting the hell out of that goddam jungle.

And if things didn't work out, well, she'd just do what Kit would do - think of something else.

Soong Tan was now learning to chop firewood. The little Indians found this even more entertaining than watching her shoot a bow and arrow. It was clear that if she ever went into the Indian business, she'd be better as a hunter than as a squaw.

Ysa called her over. Ronsh looked up from a squat-down conversation he was having with a couple of old men, apparently the only adult males in the village. Soong Tan dropped her ax and ran over.

"Sit down, kid," Ysa said, placing a hand on the girl's shoulder. "We've got a problem here."

Soong Tan took a seat on a log. Ysa knelt before her. "Soong Tan," she said, "we're in a real tough spot. I'm sure glad you're good at tough spots, because we're in another one."

"No problem," Soong Tan sang in Burmese half-tones. "What's up?"

It brought such joy to Ysa's heart to see the little girl already wielding English as well as any kid from the American heartland. What a superior child she was - a gift from her father, no doubt. You could drop her in rural Virginia or a boat on the Amazon or any Indian village, and she'd get along with everybody. And she looked like such a doll with her circular green eyes pinched at the corners, her broad Dutch jaw, her slick, shiny Asian hair, her rounded face. Who could help but love her? In fact, that's what had gotten her into so much trouble in Burma. The last thing Ysa wanted was to have a nightmare like that start all over again in Brazil. She trusted the Indians far more than the men at the mining camp. People who loved gold enough to inhabit some jungle backwater camp were people who could not be trusted with anything.

"Soong Tan," she said, "I have to go get medicine for these people. They're real sick."

"Like, no kidding."

"I mean like, they're dying. They're all going to die if we don't do something."

Soong Tan said nothing. She suddenly understood the seriousness of the situation.

Looking straight into the girl's eyes, Ysa continued. "I have to go to a mining camp upriver from here. I don't know how long it's going to take. I want you to wait three days. If I'm not back, tell Ronsh to take you back to Jacaréacanga. Find Elizama and stick with her. If she's not there, then you just keep asking for the American consulate until they take you there. Consulado Americano. Can you remember that?"

"Consulado Americano. No sweat."

"Good. Meanwhile, I want you to sit down and write a letter to Susan. Write down everything that's happened, every detail you can remember. Tell her where I'm going and why. Tell her about Kit being missing. Write everything, even if you don't think it's important."

"But why?"

"I just want somebody, somewhere, sooner or later, to know what happened. If you get back to Jacaréacanga before I do, send the letter to Susan. You know her address."

"Got it. Anything else?."

"Yes. This is where it gets complicated. You don't want to catch the disease these people have. The way to catch it is to drink their water or water from the river, or to eat from anything they've touched, or get their spit on you or anything like that. No kissing the boys!"

"Yuckers!" She made a face of utter disgust.

"Yuckers to say the least. So look: I'm going to leave you some bottled water, some canned food, some crackers and other stuff. That is all you are to eat. Nothing else. If you eat any of their food or drink their water, you'll get sick and die. I'm not kidding. You'll really die."

"No problem."

"I mean it. You'll die. This is the real thing. So promise me."

When Soong Tan crossed her heart, Ysa exploded with tears. She pulled her little sister in close and sobbed over her shoulder. Soong Tan's little hand stroked Ysa's hair. "Don't worry, Ysa," she cooed with the confidence of a child who doesn't know better and an adult who knows all. "You'll get us through this. You always do."

"I don't know, Soong Tan. Maybe not this time."

"That's not what Kit would say."

"It's not what our father would say, either."

Ysa's father had been as gung-ho as Kit and every bit as capable of pulling off the impossible. He'd done everything he could to teach his only daughter to be the same way. And she tried. She didn't take guff from anybody, and whenever there was something to fear, she knew how to face it down. But fear is one thing; deep concern for your safety is another. And Ysa was deeply concerned for her safety, hers and Soong Tan's. And, for that matter, Kit's, too, but she was so worried about her own situation that she hardly thought about Kit. He - whatever was left of him - could wait. Again she picked vultures scuffling over his bones.

Ysa figured the best thing to do was pack some essentials in her daypack and take the canoe alone upstream to the mining camp.

Ronsh pulled the engine off the long aluminum canoe and mounted it on a dugout about half as long and twice as shaky. He looked sad and serious as he adjusted the motor and tightened the C-clamps on the gunwale.

"It will be a very difficult mission," he said. "I understand that. I hope you understand the importance."

Ysa wanted very much to hate him for tricking her and putting her in danger. But she understood. She knew that, under his circumstances, she would have done the same to him or anyone else.

"The prospectors," she asked in carefully assembled Portuguese. "Are they bad men?"

Ronsh leaned his head left and right. "Some good, some bad," he said. "They have one thing in common. They all love gold."

"Are there women in the camp?"

"It is possible. A cook. Someone to clean things. Putas. Sometimes one girl does all three jobs. For gold, of course. The pay is good but the life is short. Indians say, 'Gold is Death.'"

"And what will they think when they see me coming up the river in this canoe?"

Ronsh forced his face into a painful smile. "They will assume you are a puta from Belém. You may be very certain they will be very, very happy to see you. A puta with hair the color of gold...it exceeds their dreams."

She didn't like the sound of that scenario. It certainly did not meet her expectations when she set off for a vacation in Amazonia. Nor had she foreseen it as part of the gumball machine business. She did not want to go to that camp any more than a cat wants a tour through a dog kennel.

But Ysa was a big girl. She'd been around. She knew the power sex has over men. She'd used it before. She knew she could do it again. Not that she wanted to go. she didn't want to subject herself to the situation. Men, she knew, were the most dangerous creatures of the jungle. They could be tamed. Domesticated. But like any household pet, at their core, in their soul, they were animals. Properly cared for in the suburban environment, with a TV and cold beer at their disposal, a ballgame to keep their minds busy, they were capable of behaving themselves indefinitely. Left to their own devices a thousand miles from clean linen, however, they would quickly revert to their natural instincts. Stir in gold and a woman, and the results were as dangerous and unpredictable as a wildfire in a wind storm.

So she was scared. Plenty scared. But she did it for her man - one man whom she knew to be as strong and powerful as any animal, yet as secure and self-controlled as anyone who ever bore the title man. For such a man, she would die if she had to. She didn't want to, but for him, for Kit, she'd run the risk.

Ronsh got the motor running for her, showed her how to set the choke, how to accelerate without drowning the carburetor. She knew she looked a little silly as she set off. The engine roared in high-pitched whine, almost tossing her off the stern, throwing her off balance so bad she aimed the bow right into a bush that hung over the bank of the river. In a few seconds the current pulled her out. She didn't look back. She tested the throttle gingerly, got the feel of the steering system, and accelerated slowly. The canoe handled well once she got the hang of it. She accelerated more. The steering arm of the motor vibrated almost painfully, but the bow lifted a little., and the breeze of movement cooled the sweat from her skin. She was getting somewhere. It felt good.

And there went Ysa, all alone, in a canoe, deeper and deeper into the rain forest. The river, fifty yards wide, wound back and forth like a snake, bend after bend after bend. Fearful of getting far from shore, she got very good at steering. The trick was to throw the steering arm hard to the left or right at just the moment that would point the bow around the apex of the bend. If she did it right, the stern would swing around in a headlong sweep that barely cleared the bushes along the bank. The vegetation seemed to grab in at her. Tentacles of moss and vine groped down. When she got too close to the bank, they stroked her with lukewarm dew. She heard monkeys screeching in the trees. She saw a green and brown snake swimming, wiggling across the water like a sidewinder.

Over the course of four hours, the color of the water changed from dirt-brown to clay-brown to chocolate milk. A thick slick of oil coated the surface with surreal colors. The trail of brown froth behind the canoe looked as permanent as plastic. Clumps of trash clung to roots and branches that touched the river water. When she slowed to maneuver around a log, she saw that it was wearing a shirt. It was a man, dead, floating face-down. She throttled back to stay beside it in the current. It showed signs of attack by piranha or God knew what else. She felt compelled to do something about the body but could think of nothing. She certainly wasn't going to touch it. After a minute or two, she decided she had no choice but to keep going. She'd report it to the next government authority she saw. Black hair, yellow shorts, a gray T-shirt - that was all she could offer to identify the body. It could have been anyone.

And it could have been her. She could very well find herself floating face-down in the river, slowly becoming fish food, a body that would never be found or identified. Soong Tan would always wonder what had happened to her. The poor kid would be an orphan again.

Or did women float face-up? She vaguely recalled reading that fact somewhere. Pondering that morbid question, she wondered whether she was going to find out the hard way. But she didn't stop. She didn't turn around. She didn't go home and take up knitting. She kept going, probing the throat of death. Because she was in love. Real love. The kind that stops at nothing, not even when it should.

Chapter Thirteen

Susan received three letters from Soong Tan. The first somehow made its way from the Indian village back to the post office in Jacaréacanga, which, despite a lack of stamps, sent it on its way to Virginia.

Dear Aunt Susan,

Ysa told me to write to you to tell you what's going on. Believe me, it hasn't turned out to be the vacation we were expecting. I thought it was going to be dull! And Ysa thought she was going to be lying around on the beach in her bikini. I don't know what Kit expected, but last we heard, he was in a plane crash.

Not that I'm worried. Kit doesn't die. The plane might have crashed, but Kit didn't. He's good with a parachute. I'm pretty sure that's what happened. He parachuted into the jungle. Right now he's probably wrestling with an anaconda or something. But that's OK. He likes that kind of stuff.

Ysa just took off for some kind of gold mine to get medicine for some Indians who are dying of a disease. She went in a dugout canoe with a little motor on the back. I cried when I saw her go around the first bend, but then I laughed when she ran into a bush and came floating back. But she tried again, and off she went.

So I'm still here in the Indian village. It's a pretty cool place. I don't think it's as dangerous as she says. The kids play a whole different bunch of games here. One's like tag, except you tag a kid with a long stick, which would be easy except everybody has a long stick, and tagging a kid's stick doesn't count. It's kind of like a running sword fight.

They also play target practice with a bow and arrow. Boy are they good at it! You should see! They can shoot a coconut that's hanging on a long string and swinging back and forth from a branch. They're trying to teach me. I've kinda got the hang of it, but I'll never be an Indian, that's for sure. One kid shot a teenie-weenie little bird that was way up in a tree. I can hit the coconut sometimes, but not if it's swinging.

I think they want to take me hunting. (I'm never sure what they want. I don't speak Mundurucu, and they don't English or even Portuguese. And forget Burmese. So we use sign language a lot, and somehow we know what each other is saying. I think they said they want to go hunting and shoot a monkey. I'll go, but I hope they just shoot an alligator or something. I don't want to see any dead monkeys.

Ysa didn't say anything about me not going hunting. But I'm not supposed to do everything else. Can't drink any water but what we brought. Can't eat Indian food. Can't let the boys kiss me. (Like she had to tell me that!) Can't go in the hut where everybody's dying.

But she didn't say don't go hunting.

Get this: I could be wrong, but I think these guys poison their arrows with venom from some kind of a frog. The kids showed me the frogs. They're bright green and kind of skinny and small, with big red eyes. The Indians keep them in a little pit. When I reached out to pick one up, the kids went nuts. They pulled my hand back, and their eyes were as big as saucers. They acted out what would happen if I touched one. First my finger would hurt. Then my hand would hurt. Then I'd stop breathing. Then I'd flop around on the ground. Then I'd die and all the Indians would cry over me.

Shouldn't somebody have told me about these frogs before I came here? I mean, suppose I just picked one up? What else have they forgotten to tell me?

None of the men are in the village, except for Ronsh and a couple dying in the dying hut. The rest are off hunting, I think. Or on the warpath. I couldn't really tell. The kids tried to explain by drawing on their faces with berries and yellow stuff that looks like it might be sap or something. (Ysa told me to tell you all these details. If you don't like it, you can skip over them. I don't care.) They painted my face, too. I look awesome - or at least I think I do. There's no mirrors here. The only thing I could see my reflection in was a gourd full of dirty water. For all I know, it was their drinking water. I don't know. If Ysa should ever ask, tell her I didn't drink it! I didn't even lean in very close. It was so gross!

Ronsh is the only one I can talk to. He knows Portuguese, which I kind of know. A little. He told me my mother is very brave. I told him she isn't my mother but I knew what he meant. And he's sure right. She's brave and Kit's brave. So I guess I have to be brave, too. It runs in the family.

But look where the family is! I'm in an Indian village. Ysa's headed for a gold mine. Nobody knows where Kit is. I don't know why, but when I start thinking about it, I don't feel very brave. I just feel...I don't know...like, scared. Like something's going to happen.

Yours truly,

Soong Tan

Chapter Fourteen

Kit and Gaia got taken to the logging camp. The loggers weren't sure what to do with them because their big boss was away and wouldn't be back till the next day. So they did the logical thing. They chained Kit and Gaia to a couple of trees. Then they went off to cut trees. Kit still had his journal - he'd stuffed it down the back of his pants when they descended from the tree - so he kept writing. He still doubted he would survive, so he noted every detail, hoping that by some miracle Ysa would read his words and understand what had happened.

August 24

The situation is rather serious. I have a chain around my neck, and the chain goes around a tree. Same with Gaia. Her tree's about twenty feet from mine, but our chains are too short for us to touch. We squat here like a couple of dogs.

I worry about her sanity. She has not taken the situation well. Though she no doubt considers herself a liberated feminist, her reaction has been typical of the old-school, unliberated female. She has been crying constantly and blubbering "No, no, no," as if denial might rectify the situation. She does not respond when I call to her.

Just as I'd do with a growling dog or a crying baby or a wild bear, I keep talking to her as soothingly as I can. "Let's try to stay calm," I tell her. "The worse things get, the calmer you have to be." But she just keeps moaning, "No, no, no." I think I heard her talking to her mother. That's a bad sign.

For the record, I estimate that some twenty men work at this camp. The operation involves a single bulldozer that pulls the logs out of the forest, a simple, open-air sawmill, and a crude log dock at the river. Best as I can tell, the logs get sawed into slabs a few inches thick. The slabs get dragged to the dock, and pretty soon I expect a barge will come along and pick them up. From here I can see that they've cut a good hundred acres from the side of a hill that rises from the river. The bulldozer hauls down a new log every hour or so. I can hear the chain saws just over the hill. The logs are massive, some more than ten feet in diameter.

From the air, this clear-cut area must look like an open and festering wound. These loggers harvest only the main trunks of the trees. They leave behind a sea of amputated branches. They clutter the ground six or eight feet deep as far as the eye can see. God forbid they should catch on fire.

Most of the men sleep in tents, which are just sheets of plastic thrown over rope. There's just one real structure, a large shack of rough-cut wood. The whole place looks very temporary. It's my guess that this is an illegal operation. Government authorities either don't know about it or have been bought off. I have a feeling that come rainy season, the whole operation will pick up and disappear.

The illegality probably explains the chains that leash us to trees. As I understand it - and I probably don't - we're waiting for the Big Boss to show up. He'll know what to do with us. I hate to think what his options are. I suppose they are a) let us go, or b) kill us. I have no idea which way he'll go or what his reasons will be. I wish I knew something about him so I could better prepare to deal with him. Is he a rational man? Is he thoroughly evil or merely greedy? Is he paranoid or confident? I hate this lack of information. It makes it hard to plan and decide.

In the absence of information, and leashed to a tree, I have no choice but to simply wait. I wish Gaia would come to the same conclusion. If death is our lot, so be it. That's no reason to break down in tears and denial.

I can't imagine what must be going through Ysa's head. At best she's learned that our plane has crashed. If I know her, she isn't going to just pack up and go home. I have a terrible feeling that if she tries to take any action to find me, let alone save the situation, she's just going to end up in more trouble. Amazonia is not for people from other places. We should never have gotten involved in anything here. Now I know that. The only question is whether I'll live long enough to make use of that knowledge.

I wonder how much help Edgar has been. I have very shaky feelings about any man so obsessed with financial enterprise.

I also wonder what Goose is doing. How attached to Gaia is he? I perceived a certain distance between them. I wouldn't be surprised if he was getting tired of traveling with her. Attending to her psychological needs must be a full-time job.

By the time the sun set, Gaia was weeping softly. Her face was still buried in her arms, which were across her knees. As it became obvious that we were going to spend the night under our respective trees, I coaxed her out of her psychological shutdown.

"Gaia..." I said just as calmly and soothingly as I could, "Gaia...I think we're going to have to sleep out here."

She sniffled and lifted her face from her knees. Starlight reflected in the teary bubbles in her eyes. She was exhausted from crying all day. Her long brown hair lay across her shoulders like a cape, covering her chain.

I thought it would be good to touch her. She needed a human touch. I crawled to the end of my chain and reached out. Gaia looked at my finger tips for a long moment before creeping forward and reaching out. Our fingertips could barely touch. It was just the slightest tickle, but it was human and warm.

I lay down on my back so that my legs extended toward her. It was the only way to reach her. Without a word, she understood and assumed the same position, her legs toward me. We were thus able to stretch our legs along each other. Our feet came to each others' waists. It was very comforting for me, and I'm sure she felt even better. Still, we did not speak.

I held her foot and stroked her shin and calf. She did the same for me. It was as tender, soothing and, yes, as exciting as any caress I've ever had. I fingered her toes one by one, knowing each individually, exploring their curves and indentations, the line of their nails, the bend and bump of their tiny, fragile knuckles, the valleys between them. Their undersides were as tender and nubile as the most delectable parts of a young woman. My fingers played with them, squeezing them ever so gently, plucking at them, sensing them respond. Each toe pulled back from my gentlest touch but came back for another taste of the pleasure.

Gaia has beautiful feet, small and graceful. I hadn't noticed before, but now, even though I could barely see them in the moonless starlight, I knew them intimately through touch. The instep curved as sweetly as the underside of a derriere, and the heel bulged with the rounded swelling of a young breast. Following its curves with my finger created in me the same kind of indirect pleasures and desires that are generated by the stroking of a beautiful woman in her most beautiful, womanly places.

How I wanted to kiss those feet! To take each toe in my mouth and make love to it, to wrap my tongue around it and nibble at its sensitive flesh.

I did not tell Gaia what I was feeling as I fondled her tender foot, but as her hand kneaded and stroked my own, she communicated a similar feeling. My toes stood erect and quivering with hard desire. They craved her sweet touch. The sensation shot through me, spreading heat up my legs, through my groin, into my belly. If not for the chain around my neck, I would have gone to her. As much as I love my Ysa, I could not have resisted the call of Gaia's fingertips. They raced lines around the ball of my foot, across the broad valley to the heel, around the indentations of my ankle, up a few precious inches of my calf - as far as she could reach. But she did not need to reach further. She had reached to the center of my being, to the place where deep desires are born. They were born within me, and I was as satisfied to have them as I was frustrated to not be able to act on them.

I don't know if it was her foot that crept up over my thigh or mine that crept over hers, but quite beyond my control, we each ended up with a leg extended between the other's two legs. Her foot pressed to my groin, and mine pressed to hers. As I rotated my heel against her, she scrunched against it. At the same time, her little foot ground against my thighs and scrotum. It was a sensation most tantalizing. I was as swollen with urgency as I've ever been, but I could come no closer to her without hanging myself. Sweat poured from my body. Droplets trickled down the sides of my chest.

She was pretty moist herself. I thrust my foot against her, as far as it could reach, again and again, pumping in a rhythm that matched her own heavings. Again I heard her whimpering, but this time it was not the whimper of sadness or fear. It was the heat of deep satisfaction filling her and bubbling from her throat. Then, suddenly, with an implosive gasp of orgasm, she jerked her knees back to herself and rolled to her side. Her breathing shook as she shuddered unto herself. She whispered something that I couldn't hear. Gradually her breathing slowed and her body sank into sleep. My own unsatisfied desire soon withdrew, and then I, too, was asleep.

Chapter Fifteen

About that same time all that was going on, Ysa was motoring up to the gold mining operation. She said it looked like a World War I battlefield after a bad day. Apparently the gold was coming down a stream that fed into the river. The prospectors had dug up an unbelievable amount of dirt, gravel and clay, broadening the mouth of the stream to an area a hundred yards wide. The stream now trickled through a web of canals that wound among muddy island plateaus. The prospectors, scores of very muddy men, stood ankle-deep in mud or knee-deep in water as they shaved clay from these plateaus and washed it around in broad, concave pans.

But they stopped when the blonde woman in the canoe purred to the edge of their mud. They didn't drop their tools. They didn't move from where they stood, but they stopped and they watched.

Ysa described them as a typical mix of Brazilians - a few with light hair and blue eyes, a few as black as coal, most a shade of brown. Some had the hair of Germans, some the hair of Blacks, some the hair of Indians. All were thin and stringy with sinuous muscles, and all had mud plastered on their naked chests and legs. As Ysa put it, "They looked like they'd all missed their annual bath and had resolved to go another year without."

As she stepped out of her canoe into the mud, they watched her with paralytic dumbfoundedness. No one came to help her as she slung her daypack over one shoulder and set into the strenuous process of sinking one foot into the mud and then the other, followed by a heavy club-foot of clay.

She did not kid herself. She knew she was going to get dirty. Very dirty. Once she had recognized that, it was not hard to become at one with the mud. As she plodded across the delta of muck, her legs often sank in to he knees. She was glad she had worn shorts. So, apparently, were the miners. With intense interest, they watched every step. She could practically feel their shared assessment. She wondered whether she would get out of there alive. She wondered how she would extract adequate gratitude from Kit if she ever found him alive.

She aimed for the apparent nerve center of the operation, a cluster of grass and bamboo huts on a rise above the delta. They seemed to cower in a nook cut out of the towering forest. The forest itself seemed sick at its fringe. The outer-most trees, stripped of many branches, stood as stark as cactus. A few half-starved vines rose from the bushes and clung to the trees like desperate, half-dead snakes. The wall of trees deeper in the forest seemed to trp a pall of blue-gray smoke within the encampment. It smelled not just of burnt wood but of excrement, garbage and metallic chemical.

Hell. That's what she thought. Hell would be a lot like this. Here all hope had been abandoned. Miserable people, dirty, hungry, lonely, sick and enslaved, were stripped of any reason to live beyond the collection of a scarce mineral which, once found, would only make them more miserable. These poor prospectors had not died yet, but they were already serving their time in Hell. At best, death might bring them release.

So their eyes, as they watched her slog from the mud to a slippery stairway of packed clay, drooled with a desire that went far beyond that of the merely lecherous. They saw in Ysa - she could feel this - they saw in her the touch of human warmth, the glimmer of human love, the soft company of a woman. They saw a meal cooked with caring hands, the cure of a mother's hand to the forehead, the liberating cleanliness of spring water and scented soap. They saw the opposite of Hell, appearing like a miracle, suddenly walking among them, muddy to her thighs - Heaven incarnate.

Ysa was a nurse to her core. She could not turn a blind eye to human suffering. She could not just walk past these men without briefly looking into their eyes and nodding a minimal greeting. They did not nod back. They turned their eyes away as if ashamed to have looked on such beauty, as if afraid to have remembered a world far from hell.

A man awaited her at the top of the clay stairs. He was relatively clean, wearing a long-sleeved shirt that might once have been white. Unlike any of the other men, he wore boots, black rubber things that came almost to his knees. With his hands on his hips and a revolver in a holster, he had the look of authority. That authority came through in his first words to her: "Who are you?"

It was not an easy question to answer. Her name would mean nothing. The man really meant what are you; where do you come from; why are you here?

But with her limited vocabulary, she could not delve into complexities. She just answered his question. -"Ysa van der Meer" - and let him figure out what to do about it.

He just kept looking at her, up and down, his eyes making one trip in flat-out curiosity, then another trip for the sheer lust of it, and another perhaps for signs of a weapon.

"Why have you come here?" He made it sound like an accusation.

She certainly wasn't going to tell him the truth, that she wanted to steal his medicine. But she hadn't thought up the right lie yet. The best she'd thought of was that she was a nurse and had come to conduct a routine check-up. But somehow that defied credibility. It would put her close to the medicine, but maybe too close. The man before her radiated suspicion. The last thing she wanted to do was hint at her real purpose. So she looked him in the eye and said a simple sentence she could readily formulate in Portuguese. It was not far from the truth. She said, "I am lost."

At that, her eyes met his. It was easy to read his mind. She knew exactly what he was thinking. It was a thought as old as the animal kingdom. Though her arrival must have seemed to him too good to be true, the temptation was too much to resist. It was a crucial moment. It guaranteed her entrance to the camp. Unfortunately, it would make leave-taking equally hard.

The man gestured her toward one of the huts. The exaggeratedly polite sweep of his arm brought to her mind the phrase Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, and he seemed to confirm that feeling when he said, "The name is Rodrigo," and he extended his hand.

It was not the kind of hand she wanted to shake. It wasn't muddy, but it had dirt ingrained into it. The fingernails looked as if rats had worked them over. Skin had scaled off. She didn't want to touch it - she didn't want to touch anything in the whole damned camp - but for Kit and Soong Tang, she placed her hand into his, gave a quick shake, and tried to pull it back. He held it for a second while some sick ooze of imagined romance dribbled from the center of his dark eyes.

The path to the hut was a series of slabs of wood that had been shaved off the outside of a tree. As she walked along it she kept thinking of little Soong Tan back in the Indian village, alone among strangers and far, far from home. She might never get back to the United States. She might find herself living among Indians for the rest of her life - and probably a very short life it would be. Ysa felt the tentacles of tragedy wrapping around her heart as she walked toward the grass hut at the gold mine, Rodrigo behind her. Soong Tan, having been plucked from the hell of Burma and placed in the heaven of Virginia, might very well live out her final days in another corner of hell.

Ysa knew she could not afford a mistake, but the very weight of that thought threatened to grip her with panic. She tried to keep her cool, but she was sweating large-caliber bullets. The man was right behind her, his boots clumping on the long, thin board, and twenty other men were watching from below, all thinking the same thing.

Again with Victorian politeness the man motioned her into a hut. The air inside was stale and hot and tinted yellow by the light coming in through the bamboo walls and grass roof. The furnishings consisted of a hammock, a table made of planks across four wooden crates, a small, dented refrigerator shut with a chain and padlock, a radio that looked of army issue, and a stool made of a split log on four stick legs. On the table was a small scale, the kind with two pans suspended from an arm that tips toward the heavier side. It was tipped toward the side that held a tiny volcano of gold dust.

"Senta," Rodrigo said, indicating the little stool. As soon as Ysa had perched upon it, knees together, he lay back in the hammock, perpendicular across it in the posture of one in an easy chair. He put his hands behind his head to hold it up so he could see her. Broad seas of sweat stained his shirt below the arms, and the yellowish outlines of older sweat ringed the wet area.

"You are lost," he stated slowly, as if each word were a piece of a puzzle that had to be nudged in to connect with the rest. "A blonde comes a hundred miles up the Rio Mundurucu all alone in a canoe...and finds herself lost." He shook his head as if to shake a missing piece of the puzzle into the right place.

"Yes," Ysa said unsurely. He was very suspicious. He wasn't going to buy anything she said, not cheap, anyway. She'd have to work for his belief. "I am...a geologist. I am here with my husband. And other men. All geologists. And some soldiers from the Policia Militar." She was surprising herself with her imaginative fabrication. She hoped the mention of armed men would hint that he'd better not mess with her. The little refrigerator beckoned her with the promise of a cold drink. She would have paid ten dollars for an ice cube. She understood why the little refrigerator would have to have a chain and lock, but she wondered how any machine could keep things cold in such a hot place, and then she wondered where they got the electricity to run it. The wire went right out through a crack in the bamboo wall. No doubt they had a gasoline generator somewhere.

"Geologists!" The man said it with a wide, toothy smile. She couldn't tell if he was delighted or just laughing at her. Unlike most men Ysa had seen in Amazonia, he had all his teeth and they weren't crooked. "Geologists from...where?"

He had detected her accent. Knowing that the best lie is the one based on truth, she said, "From the Estados Unidos."

"Ah, very good! Geologistas americanos! And you are studying the geology of this region?"

"Yes, we are. And I became separated."

"Ah! Separated. Yes, that can be dangerous. And you realize, of course, that you are deep in an Indian reservation." His eyebrows rose way up.

"Oh! No...I...um...I...I'm just a geologista. No map. I only look for..." - she didn't know the word for rocks. She made the mistake of letting her eyes wander in search of one. They came upon the little volcano of gold dust. Once they saw it, they could not detach themselves. It was a very captivating sight, a salt-and-pepper mixture of black and gold. "I only look for minerales." It was Spanish, but she knew he'd understand.

"Minerais," he said, nodding with agreement and subtle correction. "Gold?"

"Oh, no! No, not gold. No. We are interested in other metals. Umm, how do you say...ferro." Iron.

"Ah, yes, ferro. A very good mineral." He smiled inwardly, his eyes shifting low and to the side. He brought both hands to a pensive position at just below his mouth, one finger resting against his lips. "How curious that you have come onto an Indian reservation in search of minerais." His eyes came back up to her. "There can be no mining here. Do you and your geologistas americanos know this?"

She was playing chess with a chessmaster, she knew now, and he had boxed her bluff into a corner. Suddenly claustrophobic, she panicked. She felt the need to say something immediately lest he see through her hesitation. She opened her stupid mouth and said, "But you are mining here, no?"

His eyes stabbed into her with cruel amusement. "Yes," he said. "We are mining here. And that is the problem."

Chapter Sixteen

By this point, Ysa was in deep, deep trouble. So was Kit.

Soong Tan was in trouble but didn't recognize know it. She was playing with fate with the way other kids play with a puppy. She had charmed the Indian children, and they had charmed her. She was a really bright kid and just as curious as can be. So these Indian kids were showing her how they do all kinds of stuff, from shooting arrows, to making a fire without a match, to skinning a turtle, to making things out of gourds. She was eating it up like honey-dipped peanuts.

She was also eating up the food and drinking up the water Ysa had left her. Eventually she was going to have to eat and drink whatever the Indians offered her. She already recognized that.

As if hepatitis weren't dangerous enough, the kids wanted to take her hunting in the rain forest. They got their bows and arrows and dipped the arrowheads in toad poison. The bows were as tall as the kids. The arrows were five feet long and very thin. The arrowheads were monkey teeth, small but as sharp as pins. The arrow itself wouldn't kill anything bigger than a bird. It was the poison that killed. All the little hunters had to do was get the arrowhead into some flesh and then follow the animal until it dropped dead.

Soong Tan thought this was a whole lot better than the games kids played in Virginia. This was their way of life. They probably couldn't operate the controls of a television set, but they could take their bows and arrows into the woods and kill a peccary, a pig-like animal that weighed more than all of them put together.

And it was a peccary they were out to get. Soong Tan wrote it all down.

Dear Aunt Susan,

You won't believe what happened. You won't believe what I did. I'd better start at the beginning or you'll think I'm making it up.

First, you wouldn't recognize me if you saw me. I'm practically an Indian. It's soooo cool! My body's all painted up like a panther, and I've got a little loin cloth made out of an animal skin. Believe me, I'd never wear it in Virginia. Not even on the beach. The kids gave it to me. It used to belong to a little girl, but she died. They showed me where she was buried. Right next to her mother and her father. It was weird to see three graves right next to each other like that. I guess Ysa was right. People are dying here like crazy.

They gave me her bow and arrow, too, and necklace made of monkey teeth. They even gave me her name, too. They call me Mrypri . As far as I can tell from their sign language, it means "Cry a Little Bit." It's weird to be called that, but it makes me feel like a real Indian. I could practically live here forever.

But look what happened. Talk about weird. The kids wanted to take me hunting. I really didn't want to kill any animals, but I thought it would be cool to go hunting in a real jungle.

That night I slept in Ronsh's canoe, like Ysa told me to. The kids woke me up just at dawn. It was a weird dawn. The sky was funny, kind of rosy and kind of blue. Some of the clouds were high up and white, like long stripes, and there was this huge dark-blue thudnercloud coming in. The way it all looked, it was kind of like a giant American flag stretched across the whole sky. I woke up worrying about Ysa. I wondered what she was doing at that moment, whether she was looking up at the sky and seeing a flag or something else.

The jungle was cool. Real cool. It sure isn't like the woods of Virginia. Not by a long shot. First of all, the trees are so tall you can't see the top of them. You just see trunks going up and up and up until they disappear in leaves. And the leaves are way up there, so it's like you're walking around in a cathedral or something. Except cathedrals don't have carpets several feel thick and big logs lying all over the place and swampy spots.

In places, the forest floor's a mat of roots so thick you can sink your whole leg into it. God only knows what kind of bugs and snakes are down there, so I don't recommend it - just in case a bunch of Indians decide to take you out hunting in the jungle.

And don't take boots. You'd think boots would be a main thing to take, but no. Bare feet's what you take. Because it's tricky walking. You don't just stroll down a path. You have to be climbing over stuff and walking along mossy logs and tromping through water. The Indians don't even wear sandals. Also, bare feet help you be quiet. Nobody can hear a bare foot setting down. But you might have to have feet like the Indians. Their feet are like real good at grabbing onto whatever they're walking on, like a log or a big fat root or something. I don't mean they're like monkey claws or anything, but it's like they can grip things with their toes. I can do it better than I used to, but not as good as them.

So we all had these great big bows and real long arrows and we go stalking off into the forest. There were monkeys all over the place. Up in the trees, I mean. They screech and howl and even throw stuff. They know a bunch of Indian kids with bows and arrows means trouble.

I can tell you this about Indians. When they're on the warpath, they move! Bare feet or not, once they get on a path, they practically run. And I don't think you could hear them if they were walking right by your face. It's a lucky thing I'm used to jogging with Ysa because otherwise I don't think I could keep up.

It was after about an hour of weaving through a bad stretch of roots and logs and stuff that we hit a trail. I think it was an animal trail. Peccaries, I guess. Somehow these kids knew right where this path was. So off we go, jogging along, swinging our bows, keeping our heads down below branches and vines. The forest was a lot more dense and low here. The smell was weird, like thousands of flowers in the kind of air you usually get after a thunderstorm. And it was dark like right before a thunderstorm. No more monkeys, either, so it was quiet - just the soft padding of bare feet across soft earth.

I kept thinking that we could have been cavemen running through the woods. I bet it was exactly the same ten million years ago, just a bunch of hunters with bows and arrows and no clothes sneaking through a jungle full of all kinds of dangers.

We were single file. I was about fifth, and there were a couple of kids behind me. All of a sudden the guys in front stopped short. Everybody looked ahead at where the lead kid was pointing. "What?" I asked (in Portuguese!).

"Cobra," he said. "Look."

Well I couldn't see anything. He was pointing at a tree, I think, about ten feet off the ground. I was wondering if there was such a thing as an invisible snake. The lead kid strung up an arrow. He didn't look worried at all, but he aimed very carefully. When he let the arrow go, it flew off right where he aimed, and all of a sudden there was this big, fat green snake with red spots on it wiggling in the air as it fell to earth, an arrow in its side. When it hit the ground it kept wiggling, fierce and hard, flopping all over the place. I was like real scared. It must have been ten feet long and as big around as a fire hose. I'm sure it could have killed me in about two seconds, and I never would have seen it up there in the tree.

So, like, if you ever think you might want to be an Indian, think twice. It isn't as easy as it looks. You've got to be alert and a good shot with a bow and arrow.

We jogged for a long, long time. A couple of times we stopped when we came to some fruit that I wouldn't even have noticed. But these Indian kids noticed everything. They climbed up a tree and dropped down some fruit which I've already forgotten the name of. It was kind of a cross between watermelon and squash, juicy and sweet but kind of pulpy. Basically you just chew the juice out of it and then spit it out. We ate some mangos, too. They're the best, but you end up sucking stringy stuff from between your teeth all day long.

Finally we found what we were looking for: peccary poop. A nice little pile of it in the trail. The kids poked at it with a stick. I think they were figuring out how fresh it was. It was fresh enough. We were in the vicinity of peccaries. We walked a little farther and came to a regular little intersection where another trail crossed the one we were on.

Shooting a peccary isn't as easy as you'd think. You don't just stroll up to one and shoot it. You have to ambush it, and the best way to do it is to have a whole bunch of hunters strung out along a trail where pecaries walk. The hunters hide as far from the trail as they can, I guess so the peccaries can't smell you. For our particular ambush, since we didn't know which trail the peccary would come down, we had to have kids stationed in all four directions.

They used sign language and acted out the whole ambush so I'd know what to do. One kid got down on all four and trotted along like some kind of weird animal, snorting as he went. We all laughed so hard that we probably scared away every peccary within a hundred miles. Then another kid pretended to shoot him, but he didn't die. He just screamed and ran along the trail and turned onto the other trail, where another kid shot him again. And then he died.

OK: I got it. One kid would shoot the first arrow, and then everybody else would shoot theirs when the peccary came running by.

They stationed me up in a tree about ten feet above the trail. I could see about fifty feet up the trail. I'd have time to see the peccary and take aim and shoot. It was a real fat tree with a fork in it. I squatted in the fork. Talk about feeling like a caveman! It was like being a caveman and Tarzan combined. Which beats the heck out of being a fifth-grader at Beauville Elementary. I was up there in the tree wondering why we even bother going to school, why we don't all just live in the woods and hunt our food with bows and arrows instead of credit cards. But then I started hearing this noise coming down the path, a huffing and thumping that turned my skin to the worst case of goose flesh in the world. I never heard a peccary before, but somehow I knew it wasn't one, because if it was, kids wouldn't be out hunting them. But I stood up in the fork of the tree and drew my bow back and sighted down the trail. Whatever it was, it was going to take an arrow between the eyes. Unless I missed. I just hoped it wasn't something that could climb a tree.

Yours truly,

Soong Tan

Chapter Seventeen

Soong Tan's peccary problem was nothing compared with theproblem Kit had at just about that same time. His particular problem was a 9-millimeter automatic stuck in his ear. There wasn't a whole lot he could do about it. His hands were tied behind his back and he had a chain around his neck. Gaia stood about ten feet in front of him, stripped to her panties, which Kit and several loggers were fascinated to discover were a camouflage print. She had a .38 pressed to her temple and a man's arm around her throat.

The man with the 9-millimeter was the Big Boss. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He was a roly-poly guy in need of a shave and wearing a T-shirt too short to hide his belly. He saw some kind of humor in having Kit helpless and Gaia all but nude and crying so hard she drooled. He used the edge of a machete to scrape sweat from Kit's forehead.

"Hot today, isn't it?" he suggested. The words were in English, a rather clear English, tinged with a bit of British accent inside the deep, stretched Brazilian-Portuguese vowels.

Kit didn't answer and tried not to look surprised at hearing his own language. That's his policy. Don't show your ignorance; don't answer stupid questions. His silence got the better of the man. He said, "I assume you do speak English, do you not?"

"I do."

"How very pleasant to meet a civilized person out here in the woods. I haven't had a chance to practice my English since high school."

"You were an exchange student?"

"Bully for you! My good man, you are most perceptive. You have guessed quite correctly. My name is Leon, and I studied at Exeter for a year. That was long ago, however. Now, pray, let me ask, what in heaven's name are you doing here?"

Kit thought it very odd to hear such words come from someone who held a pistol to his ear. He couldn't decide whether the man's experience with the "civilized" world meant more danger or a possible reprieve, a settling of the matter in a gentlemanly manner.

Despite the genteel words and invitation to confess his intentions, Kit watched not the Boss but Gaia, hoping to catch her eye. He wanted her to see him looking at her. He didn't want her crying like that. It wasn't helping at all. But he couldn't speak to her. That's what Big-Boss Leon wanted. He wanted to see Kit's concern for her. He pressumed that Kit and Gaia were closer than they actually were. Kit himself wasn't sure how close he and Gaia had become, and the semi-British Bossman didn't know the complexities involved. He didn't need to. He had a 9-millimeter automatic in Kit's ear. He was trying to crack Kit by threatening Gaia. It was a standard device of torture. They did it in Southeast Asia, and apparently they did it in Brazil, too, regardless of overseas education.

"Very pretty girl," the man said, pointing at her with a thrust of his chin. He kept the tip of the gun in Kit's ear. The hammer of the gun was pulled back. It wouldn't take much for the trigger to drop it. "A little thin for me. I like a girl with meat. But out here in the woods, we have to take what we can get. Don't we, old chap?"

Kit said nothing. He revealed no emotion. He kept his eyes on Gaia's face and considered his options. If Leon took the gun from his ear, he was pretty sure he could swing a foot out in a Tae Kwon Do move that would probably break the man's neck or at least knock him unconscious. Then it would take three to four seconds to finish him off, even with two hands tied behind his back.

But that wasn't possible if someone else held Gaia and if any of the ten other men who squatted around the scene could effectively interfere. So this was not the moment to attack. He'd wait until he got his hands free, until there were no more than three men near him, and no one had a gun pointed at anyone.

"Please," Leon said with sincere concern in his voice, "tell me who sent you here. I need to know. It's very important."

Kit wasn't going to answer until he knew what to say. The truth hadn't worked. When he told the man that the porpoises were a message to stop cutting trees, the man just laughed, and not just at his pathetic Portuguese. It was a big, round, deep-throated laugh, the guffaw of a fat guy who lives to eat and drink and tell jokes. Kit thought, then, that it would be nice to befriend this guy and go out drinking with him. They'd have a good time.

But the man was really serious about protecting his illegal logging operation. It no doubt involved local politics well beyond Kit's imagination. Suffice it say that the policia militar carried M-16s and that the arrested often never made it to jail. Kit assumed that the man had to know who was on to him.

"Please tell me," the man said. "Is it the policia militar? Or the army itself? Or is it a federal agency? The Indian commission? The environmental ministry? The Banco do Brasil? Or perhaps it is your CIA? Or do you have a business interest in the wood? Maybe we are in the same business? Hmmm?"

The truth hadn't worked, and the wrong answer meant death. If he confessed to working for a government agency, they might well kill him on the spot. If he claimed to be a competitor, they'd probably make an example of him. At the same time, silence was virtually an admission that he represented something undesirable. He was betting that the man wouldn't kill either one of them until he had the information he wanted.

The man holding Gaia didn't show any interest in her, though he held her tight against him, pulling her back so hard her spine looked ready to snap. But the other men looked like maybe they wanted a turn. Her bulimic belly was pulled taut across her bulging pelvic bone, and her fatless breasts were pulled flat against her chest. Her face shinedwith tears and sweat.

"Tell him something," she wept. "Tell him to let us go."

Leon raised his eyes expectantly, looked at Kit and adjusted the gun in his ear.

"I can't say nothing more," Kit stated coldly. "I am a pilot. She is an environmentalist. I only fly the plane. She cannot hurt you."

"No, she cannot hurt us," the man said with a smirk "Of that I am certain. But I am sorry to say, we will have to hurt her. You can stay here and think while she and I have a little conversation."

With that, he pulled the gun from Kit's ear, let the hammer down, and gestured for the other man to bring Gaia. Kit watched helplessly as they wrestled her across the muddy bulldozer tracks to the wooden building. Boss Leon went into the building with Gaia.

Kit wrote about it later:

I knew what was going on in there. It wasn't pleasant. He was making it hurt as much as he could. He might well have been killing her in the process. Just for the joy of it. I can't express the agony in my heart - to be chained a hundred yards from the rape and murder of the woman I'd held for two nights in a row.

The other men, the workers, just squatted around to watch the show. I gave them a good one. I could not help myself. Feigning indifference was of no use. The end was near. She would gang rape her and then kill her, and then they'd decide what to do with me.

So I howled at the end of my chain like the dog they wanted me to be. I strained against it, bellowing: "Gaia! Gaia! Gaia! Gaia!" I hoped to hell she could hear me. I hoped that down there in that shack she knew she was not alone in the world. My spirit was with her. Though Leon was raping her, I was loving her, albeit from a distance. I prayed as best I could. I turned my eyes upward and asked God to do something. I questioned Him. I questioned His motives. Why was He letting this happen to her? I saw a dark thunderhead rising from behind the hill that had been stripped clean of timber. For a second I thought, 'Here comes God.' But I caught myself. It was not God, and God was not going to come solve my problem.

And with that my prayer turned into the greatest and most uncontrollable anger I've ever felt. I turned and attacked the nearest man, a little guy the color of mud with black teeth in the kind of smile that just begs to get kicked down his throat. I leaped at him, but the chain stopped me short. Another two feet and I would have ripped his throat out with my teeth - and he knew it. He flinched but didn't back off. He just kept showing me those black teeth, watching me growl and strain. He had black snot, too, chunks of it in his nostrils. How I wanted to kill him. He was all that is evil in this world. He was the Big Boss in the shack and every evil man who ever wielded his dick with hatred.

Just for pleasure, just because he liked seeing a man driven to the wild helplessness of a chained animal, he shot me with a line of spit. Right across my face. Then he made the mistake of turning to see if his friends were laughing, too. That gave me the half-second I needed to swing my foot around and slam the side of my heel into his mouth.

He doesn't have black teeth anymore.

The other men stood. I knew they weren't going to let their buddy get kicked around like that. They'd been waiting for a good reason to beat the crap out of me. There were seven of them. In no way could I avoid what I had coming. But I was going to see how many I could take down first. I was already ahead by one. In fact, I'd already won the game. From there on, I was in it for the dignity.

They were careful. They didn't come right up to me. They knew I could strike at them only with my feet. So they inched in from all sides, each man ready to leap back if I came at him. I feinted to one side, then to the other, trying to keep their circle disorganized and unbalanced. I managed to get my foot around behind one man, knocking him down but not hurting him. He rolled away. The other men laughed. It was clear to me that we were in a battle of testosterone. To them, whoever won this one-sided battle was the better man. I already know who was the better man, but I was going to pound the lesson into them until they overpowered me, or a miracle came along.

The man I knocked down decided to do the manliest thing he could. He got a rock the size of a softball and, from a safe distance just beyond chain length, heaved it at me. Probably because they don't play baseball in this country, he threw like a girl, leading with his elbow. I had plenty of . . . .

To read the rest of Passion in an Improper Place, in a paperback from PublishAmerica, send email to Glenn Cheney at gcheney @ adelphia.net.

Click here to return to the Sampler Page.

Click here to comment on this book. gcheney@adelphia.net