Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller

  Shadowline Drift

  Alexes

  Razevich

  One

  Heat and dirt. Air like molasses. Eighty degrees, but it was early still. One hundred and fifty feet from his tent to the hut, though it seemed further in the hot, wet air. Jake was good at that sort of thing—figuring out temperatures, people’s height and age, the desires of their secret hearts.

  From habit, he checked his watch—half past seven—and rubbed the titanium-cased face for luck. The watch had been a gift from his parents on his thirtieth birthday. It was much too nice and certainly too expensive, and a bit too big for his size, but then, wasn’t everything? He’d been embarrassed by their generosity, but pleased with the gift. In the three years since, it’d been a lot of places with him, some of them dicey, and he’d grown superstitious—as long as he wore the watch, he’d come home safe and successful. Safety mattered in the backwaters of the Amazon, but success this trip was critical. He drew a breath and stepped into the palm-sided hut occupied by the man he’d come a long way to see.

  The hut felt dark inside after the bright sun. Dust motes hung in the still air, caught in the thin shaft of light streaming through a small slit in the wall opposite the door. The man, Mawgis, sat cross-legged on a thick, woven-leaf mat. An identical mat lay across from him. Beneath the mat, the packed-dirt floor was a brown so deep it was nearly black. A pile of small stones lay near Mawgis, and nothing else, so it wasn’t living quarters. A place for gatherings? It struck him as odd. Why would the Tabna, a small tribe of twenty-seven people, need a building just for that? Unless a bedroll was stashed out back. That was possible. He’d been well briefed for this meeting, but the briefings had focused on what someone else thought he should know, not the small things he might wonder about.

  Mawgis squinted up at him, appraising. “Not very tall, are you?”

  The man’s voice was rich and deep, a bow drawn slowly across cello strings, Hebrew or Gaelic sounding. The raisin-sized translator nestled in Jake’s ear droned, sorting language from the background noise of calling birds and nattering monkeys.

  “Three and a half feet,” Jake said, knowing the measurement had no meaning for the Tabna man. “About the same height as you.”

  The older man was thin and wiry, and though Mawgis calmly sat, Jake felt an electric energy in him. His face was interesting: golden-brown skin barely wrinkled with age, and loam-colored eyes. High cheekbones. Broad nose and thin-lipped mouth. Three precise rows of vertical scars on each cheek—the scars rubbed with yellow dye. The man’s features went together so well, he seemed more drawn by an artist’s hand than something natural-born.

  Jake felt Mawgis inventory him in return, the man’s eyes flickering over him. Blue shirt, khaki shorts, leather hiking boots. Dusty-brown hair—longish. Blue-gray eyes. Sunburned skin, glazed with perspiration. Jake certainly didn’t look like the Salesian missionaries who’d discovered the previously unknown tribe, each priest tall and dark of skin, hair, and eyes. He wondered what Mawgis made of him, of all of them—the five pale men and one brown man who’d come to see him now, each for his own reasons.

  Mawgis ran a knuckle across one of the scars on his right cheek and adjusted the blue and red parrot feather circlet at his neck. Other than the feathers, he wore only a leaf folded around his penis. The Amazonian humidity had plastered Jake’s shorts and shirt to his body like an ill-fitting skin. He resisted the urge to pull the fabric away.

  Mawgis glanced at the empty mat across from where he sat, indicating that Jake should sit. He cleared his throat. “How was your journey?”

  “Difficult,” Jake said, settling onto the mat and crossing his legs into a loose pretzel form that mirrored his host’s. “We traveled the Amazon and the Japurá Rivers, then branched off to a tributary with terrible rapids. One boat turned over. No one was hurt, but we lost supplies and equipment. We hiked six days through the forest with our gear on our backs to reach you.”

  The older man gazed at him. “You’ve been other places?” he asked, making no comment on the ordeal.

  “Many,” Jake said.

  Banshees screamed in the trees—howler monkeys. It was hardly the first time Jake had heard them, but the sound still made his shoulders tense.

  Mawgis tapped his chest. “I, too, am greatly traveled.”

  Jake nodded and kept his face blank. Well traveled was a matter of perspective.

  The other man swept up a pile of pea-sized stones from near his feet. “When were you born?” The stones in his hands rattled softly—a sound like dry grass hissing in the wind.

  “I’m thirty-three.” He knew it was a meaningless answer. The Tabna had no concept of the 365-day cycle of the earth around the sun. They reckoned time by events—when the ants left their nests to forage, when the rains stopped, when the jaguar ate the old chief. That’s what he’d been told by Father Canas, the missionary who had spent eighteen months living with the Tabna, compiling a Tabna-English dictionary. Last month he’d helped Jake prepare for this job.

  Mawgis touched the translator in his left ear. “You misunderstand,” he said. A small yellow ant crawled up his leg and he squashed it between his thumb and forefinger. “I ask—when did you leave the womb?”

  Jake tried to figure a way to answer, but came up with nothing.

  The older man peeked at the stones in his hands. A quick smile lit his face—bright white teeth, the middle two a little long. “You were born when your chief first walked in his new house, though it wasn’t his then.”

  Jake silently cursed Father Canas, who’d assured him the English translations were at least ninety-seven percent accurate. They were going to have a hard time doing business if their words continued to be scrambled.

  “Delacort,” Mawgis said, the stones clicking in his hands. “Present Delacort.”

  He seemed so sure of himself; Jake tried to make sense of it.

  Jesus. President Delacort. Jake had indeed been born the year Jonathan Delacort, as a newly elected senator, first arrived in Washington. Now in his late sixties, Delacort was president.

  Jake bent his mouth in the smallest of smiles. Better to let Mawgis think him amused, not surprised. “Yes. How did you know?”

  The Indian’s eyes slid away from Jake.

  The morning mist turned into a sudden shower—fat raindrops falling like dotted lines outside the hut’s open doorway, thudding against the palm-thatched roof. Something—Jake saw only a flash of rat-like tail—skittered above the hut’s simple tree-branch framing, through the palm fronds overhead. He waited.

  Mawgis opened his hands and held out the stones. “Choose two.”

  A dozen or so pebbles of various colors, some speckled and some solid brown, white, or black, rested in his cupped hands. Jake chose one white and one gray-speckled. Mawgis closed his fingers over the remaining stones, chanted a few words that came through the translator as static, and threw the pebbles on the ground between them.

  On a job in Haiti, Jake had watched a thin, bumpy-spined woman read chicken entrails, bent over so far that her nose practically touched the offal, her eyes being not as sharp as they’d once been. Mawgis wore the same concentrating yet confident look as he studied the pebbles, though his spine was straight, his shoulders down and relaxed.

  “What do the stones tell you?” Not that Jake believed a handful of gravel had told Mawgis the year he had been born or had given the man a context in which to express the time. Not that he thought any significance lay in which two stones he’d chosen. What Jake wanted to know was this: what did Mawgis want to tell him?

  “The stones?” Mawgis said, and blinked slowly, like a turtle. The blink didn�
�t go with the feeling of pent-up energy Jake sensed in him. “That you are a plain man. More clever than you like people to know, and resolute. You will fight to the end for what you believe is right.”

  A moment passed, the ever-present noise of the forest leaping into the silence. Mawgis shook his head as if trying to clear his thoughts. “Follow,” he said, stood, and headed out the door.

  Jake walked out behind him, thinking that the description Mawgis had given for him could fit any number of people. Thinking, too, that he had no more idea now what Mawgis wanted him to know than when he’d awoken that morning in the yellow canvas tent he’d hurriedly pitched the night before. He’d finally made it to his destination only to discover that the man he’d come to see was out in the forest somewhere.

  The rain stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving the air so thick with moisture Jake felt he almost could have rolled it between his hands and formed a solid ball. He peered through the wet haze at the Tabna camp. His mind had been on his meeting with Mawgis when he’d come through the camp that morning. He hadn’t paid much attention to his surroundings. But these things mattered—appreciating where and how people lived, being friendly to and getting to know the people around the decision maker. A perk of the job, in Jake’s opinion.

  Spaced around the camp’s perimeter were eleven palm-sided huts the same size and shape as the one Mawgis and Jake had left. The thatched roofs were A-shaped, with wide eaves to let the rain slide off. Vine-woven hammocks hung between poles set in front of the huts. Some were in use, their occupants swinging contentedly. The people must have all been inside while the rain fell. None of them were wet.

  Three canvas tents were set up near the camp’s perimeter, Jake’s and the two used by the men who’d accompanied him on this trip—four Brits making a documentary about the Tabna, and Joaquin Machado from FUNAI, the Brazilian government office charged with protecting the rights of indigenous people. The film crew’s four-man tents were about the same size as the Tabna huts. Jake’s tent, big enough for two normal-sized adults, was smaller than the huts but spacious for him.

  A young Tabna woman—Jake guessed her to be fifteen, sixteen at most—swayed lazily in a hammock, one slim brown leg hanging over the edge. Small white dots covered her shoulders and upper arms like a shawl. Her thick, straight black hair was cut short, like Mawgis’s. Her breasts were small and firm. She eyed Jake and smiled. He smiled back.

  Birds called in the jungle now that the rain had stopped, every throat proclaiming its own loud and raucous song. Gnats as small as grains of salt whirled near Jake’s head. He batted them away and tried to come up even with Mawgis, but no matter how fast he walked, the older man stayed half a step ahead.

  In the large central area where the communal socializing, cooking, and eating took place, two Tabna men were showing a group of boys how to make spears. Ian, one of the British film crew, had his camera trained on a child struggling to attach a spear tip to the shaft. The boy looked up at the camera and grinned. Jake wondered what the Tabna thought about all the sudden attention they were receiving.

  Mawgis led him toward the smoke and then past the big iron cauldron that served as the community cooking pot. A dozen men and women worked at preparing the evening meal, which was, Jake saw, going to be termites, squirrel monkey, and kinkajou. Over the years he’d downed fish-eyeball soup, mountain oysters, and raw prairie dog. He could manage roasted monkey and a few bugs, but would pass on the beer two women were making by softening tough cassava stalks with their own saliva and spitting the juice into a bowl to ferment. Derek, the Brit filming the women, looked a little green. Jake bet himself a dollar Derek wouldn’t join them for dinner that night.

  Mawgis tapped Jake’s shoulder. The tiny translator felt loose in Jake’s ear. He pushed it back into place.

  “Shall we walk among the trees?”

  The forest loomed like a presence, something felt as well as seen, lurking just beyond the clearing’s edge. Jake inhaled a deep, wet breath. Two steps, four, half a dozen. The spacious camp surrendered to a dense landscape, pulsing with too much color, writhing with too much life. Leaves in a thousand shades of green blocked the sun’s light, leaving the forest floor as dim as evening. Orchids in vibrant purples, yellows, and glowing whites clung to trunks and branches of trees so tall Jake couldn’t see their tops.

  “Walk carefully,” Mawgis said.

  The ground beneath Jake’s boots was spongy. Moisture seeped out of the dark mulch, oozing around his heels with each step. Rainwater fell from the leaves like a second cloudburst, soaking his clothes and making his skin prickle in spite of the heat. He sluiced off the water with his hands as best he could.

  Mawgis chuckled under his breath. “By parrot hatching, the water will seem fine to you.”

  Water dripped from the leaves constantly, even now in the dry season. The bugs were huge, many of them poisonous, and they got into everything. Jake didn’t know when parrot hatching might be, and he didn’t want to stay long enough to find out. “Make the deal and get out,” he’d been told. That was fine by him.

  They walked awhile without speaking, Jake following carefully in Mawgis’s footsteps along a narrow path that wound through the dense trees. A small green tree frog croaked angrily, leaped from a branch, and seemed to simply disappear. The idle translator hummed in Jake’s ear. The monkeys had departed, but the forest rang with the wild cackling of birdcalls.

  “Why have you journeyed all this way to see me?” Mawgis asked over his shoulder, not breaking stride.

  It seemed an odd question. The Salesians had set up the meeting, given Mawgis the translator, and taught him how to use it. They must have told Mawgis why he was coming.

  “I’ve been asked by the chiefs of many countries and businesses—a society of helpers,” Jake said, wondering how else he might describe a humanitarian aid group, “what we call World United, to speak with you about benesha.”

  Mawgis stopped and turned back to face him. “Benesha? Benesha is just rocks.”

  Benesha meant “soft fire,” according to the Tabna-English dictionary. Ashne Simapole, the head of World United, had said the name was fortuitous, being so close to the English beneficial and the Portuguese benéficio. The similarity put people in the right frame of mind, he’d said.

  “Why do your people want rocks?”

  “You and I are men who’ve been many places and seen many things,” Jake said. “There are places in the world where children are too weak from hunger to brush the flies off their faces or even to cry. Every day children and mothers and fathers die because there is not enough to eat. Our scientists have discovered that if animals eat grain mixed with benesha, their meat is more nourishing. A bird that would feed only you and me could, with benesha, feed us and eight more.”

  Mawgis’s tar-colored eyebrows shot up. His eyes went wide. “Ten people can eat one small bird and all will have enough? Such great magic. Your wizards must be strong to have found out this thing.”

  In truth, it had been mere luck that the mineral’s protein-enhancing properties had been discovered. The benesha had originally been fed to mice. The mice were fed to dogs. The dogs didn’t get hungry again for a very long time.

  “With benesha,” Jake said, “everyone can have enough to eat. No child need ever go hungry again. You can make that happen.”

  “Humph,” Mawgis said. He made a quick turn and sped down the faint path that nearly disappeared in the choked tangles of roots and thick layers of decaying leaves.

  Jake bolted after him, almost running into him when Mawgis came to a sudden stop. They’d come in a circle. The camp lay a few yards ahead.

  “I will think on this,” Mawgis said, and moved off faster than Jake could follow, leaving him standing alone in the forest among the oppressive trees.

  Jake slept surprisingly well, considering how loud the forest rang at night. Maybe he was getting used to it. Or maybe it was relief at having finally met with Mawgis the day before. He sensed that
things would proceed quickly with the Tabna chief. Mawgis didn’t strike him as a patient man—more the type who knew what he wanted and wanted it now. It was a matter of digging through the rhetoric. There was always rhetoric and bombast, people trying to seem more noble or concerned or hesitant or even greedy than they were. Just once, Jake thought, he’d like to deal with someone who said it straight out: This is what I want, no more, no less. Give it to me and you can have what you came for.

  Near the cooking area, several women and young girls sat cross-legged, chattering low and sharpening digging sticks. Two women wearing short banana-leaf skirts were mending small woven sacks. The Brits sat by a dying fire, finishing breakfast, tin plates in their laps, blue-speckled enamel mugs in their hands or sitting near them on the ground. Jake glanced around the camp, unease churning in his stomach as he walked toward the film crew. Where were the Tabna men?

  “I fuckin’ hate these fuckin’ bugs,” Kevin said by way of a greeting. He was sitting and Jake standing, which put their heads at the same height.

  “Damn BBC,” Kevin said, warming to his complaints. “‘Wanna take a crew to the Amazon?’ they said. ‘Have a grand adventure, Kevin,’ they said. ‘Be the one to record this unknown, untainted tribe on film.’ Bloody hell.”

  His crewmates laughed. All except Ian, who never seemed comfortable when Jake was around. Jake noticed Ian now, how he looked at the ground or into the trees beyond the camp, anywhere but at him. On the river journey, when they’d settled into the habit of riding with the same people every day, Ian had asked Kevin to switch with him—taking the cameraman out of the canoe Jake rode in.

  He’d been around plenty of Ians in his life—people who didn’t know what to make of his stature, people uncomfortable with his small size, the seeming wrongness of it, as though it were a malady that might be catching. It stung him every time, though he’d gotten very good at not letting it show.

  But here in this world, the Brits were the freaks, giants in a place where he and the Tabna were the norm. Even Joaquin, who wasn’t more than five foot six, was oversize. It felt good to Jake, being right-sized and comfortable in this world. He wasn’t surprised by how much he liked it, or by the twinge in his stomach—knowing that this wouldn’t last, that he’d soon return to the regular world.