Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth

Arden recoiled from it as if it were a snake. The skin on the back of his neck tightened instinctively against the prick that must surely come at any moment. “Frank-”

Instead of a dart, a slender, naked Indian burst out of the brush only five yards from them and froze, staring shocked and open-mouthed at them. He carried an immensely long blowgun, longer than he was, but he was only a youth, thin and unmuscled, Arden saw, no more than twelve or thirteen.

“Hahhhh!” He shook the blowgun at them.

Arden, in a sort of dull shock of his own, raised the Beretta and shot him in the chest, then shot him again as he crumpled with a sigh.

Whether Frank was even aware of what had happened was unclear. His gaze was loose and unfocused. “Arden, don’t leave me here,” he said thickly. “I can make it. Just help… just… uhh…”

Arden turned and fled, but quickly came to a stop. Hesitating for only a moment, he ran back to where Frank and the boy lay. The boy’s eyes were open, staring at the sky. A pool of blood was spreading out from under his shoulders, but the two black holes in his chest were almost bloodless.

“Arden…,” Frank said, his eyes shining. “Thank… thank you. God bless you… I knew… I knew you wouldn’t…”

Arden tried not to look at him. He snatched up the bag of seeds that had come untied from his belt when the two of them had fallen and dashed back into the jungle, toward the river.

August 12, 1976

Mr. A. K. Chua

Executive Vice President, Research and Development

Gunung Jerai Industries Sdn. Bhd.

Level 3, Amoda Building, No. 22 Jalan Imbi

Kuala Lumpur

Dear Mr. Chua:

It was a pleasure meeting with you in Miami earlier this week. I hope that you (and the Hevea seeds) had a safe flight back to Kuala Lumpur.

As you requested, I am putting into writing the tragic events that attended the securing of these seeds.

On August 4 of this year, having acquired the thousand blight-resistant Hevea brasiliensis seeds which we had contracted for (plus another two hundred as backup in case of spoilage), my companions, Theodore and Franklin Molina, and I were attacked without provocation by Chayacuro Indians as we returned to the boat that we had left on the Amazon for the return journey to Iquitos. The first sign of them was when Theo was struck in the neck by a poisoned blowgun dart. A second dart hit my backpack.

We immediately fled toward the boat, which we believed to be some two miles farther on. For several hundred yards we hacked our way through the jungle with the Indians in pursuit some distance behind. When Theo was no longer able to run, or even walk, Frank and I carried him between us for a few hundred feet more, until it became inescapably apparent that he was dead. With our own strength failing and the Indians closing in, we had no choice but to leave him and continue our own escape.

A few minutes later, Frank was also hit by a dart, and at once showed signs of hysteria. I was unable to stop him from running wildly off through the jungle in what I was sure was the wrong direction. Nevertheless, I ran after him, catching up to him only when he stumbled and fell. At this point, one of the Indians suddenly appeared, brandishing his blowgun. I managed to shoot him just as he was about to release another dart.

By this time, Frank was completely paralyzed, able only to move his eyes. Apparently his frantic activity had hastened the circulation of the poison. He died in my arms.

Using the failing strength I had left, I again made for the boat, where I started up the engine and arrived in Iquitos that evening.

Once there, I made a full report to the police and waited for five days at our base hotel in the faint hope that I might have been wrong about my companions having perished, that I might have mistaken paralysis for death, and that either or both of them had somehow survived and would show up. Needless to say, neither of them did.

If you require further information, I would be glad to provide it.

In closing, I would like to thank you for your prompt initial payment. I wish you the best of luck with the seeds, and I look forward to accepting your kind invitation to visit the Gunung Jerai plantations to see the new plantings for myself.

Sincerely yours,

Arden Scofield

Iowa City, Iowa, Thirty Years Later: November 2006

What with pitchers of beer at not much more than half price and hot buffalo wings at ten for a buck, Brothers on a Wednesday night was not the best place in the world, or even in Iowa City, for quiet, sober reflection. The place was jammed with students – the university campus was a scant block away – and the noise level was enough to rattle the windows up and down Dubuque Street.

Nevertheless, quiet, sober reflection was exactly what Tim Loeffler, a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s prestigious Ethnobotanical Institute, was shooting for. Unfortunately, the “quiet” part had been out of the question from the start, and the “sober” part was beginning to get away from him, inasmuch as he and his four buddies were working on their third pitcher of Bud. But with his friends now taking their turns at the nearby foosball table, he was able to more or less collect his thoughts and sort through what was bothering him.

He’d gotten cold feet; that was it in a nutshell. When he’d first heard about the upcoming Amazon cruise and learned that none of his fellow grad students had signed up, he’d jumped at the chance. Almost a full week in the wilds under the direction of his major professor, Arden Scofield, with no other students competing for Scofield’s attention; it would be a heaven-sent chance to get on his good side, and – at long last – to get his Ph. D. dissertation topic approved, maybe right then and there. The other two members of his committee – Maggie Gray and Dr. Gus Slivovitz – had signed off on it six months ago. Only Scofield had held back his approval, merrily sending him back to the drawing board each time Tim had submitted it to him, always with one niggling, incredibly time-consuming “suggestion” or other. And the ironic thing was, Tim had taken on the miserable topic specifically to please Scofield, who went in for such subjects: “Agrobiodiversity conservation relating to consumer-driven strategies as they pertain to chick pea cultivation in the central Midwestern United States.” Just looking at the title practically put him to sleep, and here he’d been laboring on the wretched thing for almost three years, with no end in sight as long as Scofield kept waffling.

But this was it; he’d had it. Three years of classes and three more years slaving over the damn dissertation were enough. It was now or never. He’d been offered a fantastic postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Botanical Museum – Harvard, for God’s sake, the grand-daddy of ethnobotany! – scheduled to begin the next academic year, the catch being, of course, that he had to be a bona fide postdoc himself to accept it. His coursework, comprehensive exams, and language requirements had been gotten out of the way long ago. All that remained now was Scofield’s squiggle of a signature on the title page, and he was determined to get it from him before the trip was over. There would never be a better opportunity.

So why the cold feet? Because it had finally dawned on him that a big part of his problem with Scofield – or more accurately, Scofield’s problem with him – was that the man simply didn’t like him, had never liked him. Who knew why? Maybe Scofield, who loved center stage and thought he was the greatest lecturer on God’s green earth, didn’t like him because Tim had once or twice inadvertently stepped on his punch lines. (It was hard not to when you were hearing them for the tenth time.) Or maybe Scofield, underneath the hail-fellow-jolly-well-met act, disapproved of Tim’s interest in ethnopharmacology. Tim’s original choice for a dissertation topic had been an examination of the preparation and use of hallucinogenic plant extracts among the Indians of Southern Ecuador – now that was something he really could have gotten his head into. But at the idea, Scofield’s caterpillar eyebrows had come together, he had stuck his pipe in his mouth, and he’d made one of his friendly, phony, well-now-let’s-you-and-I-think-this-through-together faces that meant anything but. Cravenly, Tim had caved in and accepted the agrobiodiversity topic the moment Scofield suggested it. He had even more cravenly thanked him for it, though his heart had been plummeting.