Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Yes,” Maggie agreed. “I’ve known Arden a long time, and I’ve never seen him like that. Not even close. Arden is usually – always, really – one of the most in-control people you’ll ever…” Shaking her head, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Just go ahead and tell it, Mel.”

“Okay, why not? Here’s the story.” Mel lounged back in his chair, his massive brown legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his hands in the pockets of his shorts.

Thirty years earlier, he told them, Scofield, as a twentysomething-year-old graduate student, had been on a rubber seed-hunting expedition in the Amazon with his two best friends, fellow students at Harvard.

“They were on assignment for a big Malaysian rubber plantation,” Maggie put in. “They made a lot of money from it. Arden did, at any rate. The other two never made it out.”

“You want to tell the story, be my guest,” Mel said grumpily. No less than Scofield, he didn’t care for having his narrative flow disrupted or his punch lines telegraphed. But with this Gideon could easily sympathize.

Maggie threw up her hands. “Well, please excuse me. I was just trying to fill in a few details. You go ahead, you’re the professional storyteller, after all.”

“Okay, then,” Mel said uncertainly, not sure whether or not he’d just been insulted. “So while they were coming back through the jungle to their boat, they were attacked by this band of Chayacuro Indians. First one of his pals gets it – a poison dart through the neck. So Arden and his other buddy drag him along, trying to stay ahead of the Indians, but in a few minutes they could see he was dead, and they have to leave him there. Then the second guy gets hit-”

“Wait, before that happened,” Tim said, “they actually heard the sound of them chopping off the first guy’s head, chonk! And the first guy was the second guy’s brother!”

“His brother!” Vargas exclaimed with a shudder. “ Ay, que asco!”

Mel sighed, seeing how it was going to be, but he took it in good stride and continued: “When the second brother was hit by a dart he went sort of crazy-”

“Arden went crazy?” This time it was Phil. “Or the brother?”

“No the brother, for Christ’s sake. He ran off in a panic, into the jungle, and Arden chased after him, trying to get him back to the path.”

“Which was pretty brave, when you think about it,” Gideon said. “He could easily just have taken off, trying to save himself.”

“Yeah,” said Mel, “assuming that the way he tells it is the way it happened.”

It was the second time Mel had expressed doubt. “And you don’t think it is?” Gideon asked.

Mel thought before answering. “No, I didn’t say that. Look, I’m a careful writer. I’m serious about fact-checking, that’s all, and I get uncomfortable when there’s no way to check something out, especially when it happened a long time ago, and it’s a story that makes somebody out to be a hero – or a coward, for that matter. People forget, they embellish, they like to look good, you know? I’m not talking about lying, just about maybe remembering something the way they want to remember it. But no, I don’t have any real reason to doubt him, just…”

“Come, come, tell us what happened,” an engrossed Vargas urged. “The other brother, he died also?”

“Yes, but not before one of the Chayacuro, a big guy for an Indian, catches up with them. As Arden tells it, the guy has his blowgun to his lips, aiming it right at his throat from only fifteen feet away, and Arden shoots him just in time.

“Whoa,” said Phil, shaking his head. “That’s hairy.”

“Yeah. Anyhow, then the second brother dies too, right in his arms. Arden leaves him for the headhunters too – in all fairness, what else could he do? – and runs for the boat they’d stashed at the river, and he gets away. And that’s it, that’s the story.”

But he couldn’t resist a final aside. “As Arden tells it.”

A thoughtful silence now settled down over the group, moderated only by the soft, steady swish of water against the hull and the clinking of broken glass as Chato quietly finished sweeping the last of the shards into a dustpan.

After a time, Duayne spoke. “I guess I don’t understand. Does he think these Chayacuro are still after him? Why would they be?”

“Presumably because he killed one of them,” Mel said.

Duayne shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. It was kill or be killed. He had no choice. They were chasing him; he was defending himself. It was completely justified. What else could he do?”

“No, you don’t get it; that’s not the way their minds work.” The speaker was Cisco, making his first appearance since the introductions that morning. He had returned to take a chair against the dining room wall, a little away from the others, where he sat. Looking not quite so much on his last legs as he had earlier, he had changed to shorts and flip-flops that revealed knobby, hairy knees and bony, callused, misshapen feet that looked like illustrations from a podiatric pathology textbook.

“See,” he said, “to them, there’s no such thing as ‘self-defense’ or ‘completely justified.’ They just don’t think that way. A dead guy is a dead guy.” He paused to take a shaky pull on the cigarette he’d brought with him, an action made more difficult by the stiff, uncomfortable way he held his head. “If it’s caused by somebody else, it has to be avenged. Period. Hell, even if it’s not caused by somebody else, they find somebody to take it out on; in their world, nobody except the old folks dies because he just plain got sick and croaked; it’s always a murder, a curse, you name it. Booga-booga. Somebody did it to him. Witchcraft, poisoning, whatever. These people, they got a very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality.”

Gideon nodded. It was a common enough world view among nonliterate peoples, especially fierce groups like the Chayacuro. Cisco seemed to be a bit more on the ball than he’d given him credit for. He was considerably sharper than he’d been earlier. Apparently he’d had more education than his manner suggested too. “A very fixed, well-integrated belief system regarding causality” – that was hardly the language of your typical dope-addled drifter or dropout or whatever he was, especially considering that English wasn’t his first language. Gideon was even beginning to have an easier time understanding his mush-mouthed speech. Still, there was always a sense of something being “off” about him. When you spoke to him, it was as if your words were going by about two feet to the left of his head, and his were missing yours by about the same distance.

“But it was so long ago,” Tim said. “How could they remember? Would anybody still care?”

“They don’t see time like you do,” Cisco said. “They see connected events: killing, revenge. The first, like, requires the other, you know? The time in between doesn’t have anything to do with it. It doesn’t compute, you know?”

“And what do you think about it, Cisco?” Maggie asked. “Was it really them? Were they really trying to kill him?”

Cisco shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” Thin ribbons of smoke trailed from his nostrils as he spoke. “All I’m saying is, look around, look where we are.” He waved, without turning, at the darkening jungle behind him. “This ain’t Kansas, Toto. It’s a different world, it’s got different laws you and me can never understand in a million years.”

“Wow,” murmured a thrilled Tim. “Damn.” Others murmured similarly.

“Hold on a minute, folks, this doesn’t hold water,” said Gideon, for whom things were veering too close to the occult to be comfortable. “What Cisco says is true enough, generally speaking, but it doesn’t apply in this case. How could they recognize Arden after so many years? How would they know he’d be aboard the Adelita?”