Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Ha-ha-ha,” laughed Vargas. “Yes, the next one, ha-ha.” He waited, peering around the wheelhouse corner post until Gideon was out of sight, then crossed himself.

The Amazon is the greatest river in the world, possibly only the second-longest after the Nile (geographers are still arguing about it), but certainly the widest, and by far the first in volume. From its mouth pours almost a quarter of the world’s river water; four times that of the Congo, the second greatest river, and ten times that of the Mississippi. In one day it delivers as much water as the Thames does in a year.

Yet its pace is measured, even sluggish. From its beginnings at the base of the Andes to its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the continent, nearly four thousand miles away, it drops an average of a quarter inch a mile, barely enough to keep it moving, so being on it is more like drifting on an enormous, quiet lake than like being on a river. This sense of drifting, of passive floating, is enhanced in the dark, when not even a suggestion of the black, lightless jungle is visible.

It was in the dark, a couple of hours after dinner, that Phil, John, and Gideon were sitting out on deck, their legs stretched out, enjoying the tranquil, exotic ambience of the vast river. They were not in the salon on the lower deck, but on the flat, open roof of the vessel. Phil had discovered a stairwell leading up to it from the cabin deck, and they had carried up chairs from the salon to enjoy the solitude and the fresh breeze. There was no awning to protect against the sun, so the area would have been hell during the day, but at night it was different. Earlier there had been a brief, hard rain – Phil said it was very nearly a daily late-afternoon occurrence – so the heat had moderated and the gentle, moist wind from the boat’s slow progress was like lotion on the skin. And more than two stories above the river as they were, there was an exhilarating feeling of being on the very roof of the world. Gideon had showered and changed clothes before dinner, and his fresh shirt was only barely damp with perspiration. Above, the carpet of stars was so stupendous and crowded that he had at first thought that the Milky Way was a huge cloud of smoke from the fires of another unseen logging operation.

The Adelita traveled at night with the aid of a single, powerful spotlight bolted to the front of the wheelhouse. This was flicked on for fifteen or twenty seconds every couple of minutes to sweep the milky surface of the water for a few hundred yards ahead in a slow, back-and-forth arc that brought home how very isolated they were, and in what an alien place they traveled. The stars themselves were exotic, the unfamiliar configurations of the southern hemisphere not even recognizable as constellations to a stranger’s eye.

Phil had picked up a liter bottle of aguardiente in Iquitos and had poured generous portions into the tumblers they’d brought from their rooms.

John took a first sip, rolled it critically around his mouth, and swallowed. “Whoa boy, now this is what I call, mmm…” He had another judicious taste, swallowed again, and blew out his cheeks. “… real rotgut. How much did you pay for it, Phil?”

“Four soles, a buck thirty.”

“That’s what I thought. Jesus.”

Gideon, sipping more gingerly, winced. “This is what the real people drink, am I right, Phil?”

“Absolutely. Good, plain firewater. That’s what it means, you know? Agua, water, ardiente, fire.”

“Gee, I wonder why that is,” John said, but his views on the potent liquor had apparently changed. He held out his glass. “I guess I could stand another.”

Phil picked up the bottle beside his chair, poured some for John and himself, and offered some to Gideon.

“No, thanks, I’m fine.” Actually, Gideon liked the sharp, rough taste, the overtones of anise, the scraping, sandpapery sensation in his gullet (maybe that’s what had done in Cisco’s voice), but Phil had poured them with a heavy hand and one was more than enough. He added a little water from the plastic bottle he had brought from his cabin and had earlier refilled in the dining room.

Cisco’s gargling voice, at this moment, was irritatingly audible to them in the nighttime quiet. Unfortunately, he and Tim had also discovered the roof a little while ago and had brought up a couple of chairs from below for themselves. They had apparently gotten over their earlier prickly exchange and were having an amiable, frequently uproarious conversation on the other side of the boat. Every now and then, the cloying smell of marijuana smoke would drift over from them.

Cisco was telling a joke. “So these two guys are sitting on the beach at night, you know, smoking weed, totally psychedelicized,” Cisco was saying, “and the first guy shines his flashlight up at the sky, okay? And the second guy says, ‘Whoa, man, that’s beautiful. I bet you could walk all the way up that beam, right up to them stars, wouldn’t that be something?’ And the other guy says-”

Tim interrupted, giggling. “The other guy says, ‘Screw you, you must think I’m really stoned. I know you, you’d switch off the goddamn flashlight when I was halfway up.’”

Gales of choking, coughing, knee-slapping laughter followed.

John shook his head. “Is there anything worse than listening to a couple of wasted potheads thinking they’re being funny when you’re stone-cold sober?”

“And how would you know?” Phil asked. “You’re not stone-cold sober.”

Phil, far more of a free spirit than John, had gotten into more than one argument with him over the pros and cons of marijuana usage, and whether or not it was really more of a health and social menace than alcohol, and so on, and for a moment Gideon thought that this was going to be another one of them. But John was feeling too mellow to bite. Instead he sipped again and nodded gravely.

“This is true,” he allowed.

The wind changed slightly so that both the smoke and the noise drifted off in another direction, and the three men sat peaceably and companionably drinking their aguardiente. A few minutes passed before Phil spoke again.

“I know we’ve been through this a gazillion times, but when it comes down to it, I just can’t make any sense of what happened today.”

“I think we’re all in pretty good agreement about that,” John said.

“Yeah, but nothing makes sense. I can’t come up with a single scenario that works. How could anybody out there know ahead of time we’d be close enough to shore for a spear to reach? He couldn’t. So what are we left with, some guy who just happens to be carrying around a shotgun lance, which just happens to have a fake shrunken head attached to it, and who just happens to be standing around right next to the river, wondering what to do with it, when, what do you know, along comes-”

“I’d like to put forward an alternative supposition,” Gideon said.

“Oh boy,” John said, “watch out. When he starts talking like that, it means things are gonna get complicated.”

“No, they’ll get simplified. Look, why are we so sure the lance was thrown from shore? Couldn’t somebody on the boat have done it?”

Like fans at a tennis match, their heads swiveled in his direction. “Somebody on the boat…?” Phil repeated.

“Sure. Come on down, let me show you.”

John was inclined to stay where he was and let Gideon’s alternative supposition wait till morning, but the others prevailed upon him and got him, complaining affably, out of his chair. On the lower deck, Gideon stood them in front of the bar’s Dutch doors, just where Scofield had been when the lance smashed through the window.

“Now. John, you and I were sitting right over there, up against the railing on the other side, watching the dolphins, right?”