The Codex (22 page)

The boiling went on for a good five minutes before it finally began to subside. Hauser was pleased. He turned to see Philip’s reaction and was gratified by it.

Very gratified indeed.

29

For three days Tom and his group continued traveling through the heart of the swamp along an interconnecting web of channels, camping on mud-islands scarcely higher than the waterline, cooking beans and rice with wet wood over smoking fires because Chori could find no fresh game. Despite the endless rain the water had been going down, exposing waterlogged tree trunks that had to be chopped through before they could proceed. They carried along with them a permanent, malevolent humming cloud of blackflies.

“I’ll think I’ll take that pipe now,” said Sally. “I’d rather die of cancer than endure this.”

With a smile of triumph Don Alfonso removed it from his pocket. “You will see—smoking will lead to a long and happy life. I myself have smoked for over a hundred years.”

There was a deep booming sound from the jungle, like a man with a cough, only louder and slower.

“What was that?”

“A jaguar. And a hungry one.”

“It’s amazing what you know about the forest,” Sally said.

“Yes.” Don Alfonso sighed. “But today no one wants to learn any more about the forest. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all they care about is soccer and those fat white shoes that rot your feet, the ones with the bird on the sides made in those factories in San Pedro Sula.” He pointed at Tom’s shoes with his lips.

“Nikes?”

“Yes. Up near San Pedro Sula there are entire villages of boys whose feet rotted and dropped off from wearing those. Now they have to walk around on wooden stumps.”

“That’s not true.”

Don Alfonso shook his head, clucking disapprovingly. The boat moved on through curtains of vines, which Pingo slashed away at. Tom could see a patch of sunlight up ahead, a beam falling from above, and as they moved forward he saw that a giant tree had recently fallen, leaving a hole in the canopy. The trunk lay across the channel, blocking their path. It was the biggest tree they’d encountered yet.

Don Alfonso muttered a curse. Chori picked up his Pulaski and hopped out of the bow and onto the log. Gripping the slippery surface with his bare feet, he began to chop, the chips flying. In half an hour he had notched the log deep enough to slide the boats through.

They all climbed out and began to push. Beyond the log the water suddenly got deep. Tom waded through it, up to his waist, trying not to think of the toothpick fish, the piranhas, and all the diseases lurking in that soupy water.

Vernon was ahead of him, holding the gunwale and pushing the dugout forward, when Tom saw a slow undulation in the dark water to their right. Simultaneously he heard Don Alfonso’s piercing cry. “Anaconda!” Tom scrambled in but Vernon was just a fraction too slow. There was a swirl of water, a sudden humplike rise, and with a scream—cut short—Vernon disappeared beneath the brown water. The snake’s glossy back slid past, exposing briefly a body as thick as a small tree trunk, before it sank and disappeared.

“Ehi! He has Vernito!”

Tom pulled his machete out of his belt and dove into the water. He kicked, swimming down as deep as he could. He couldn’t see more than a foot into the murky, brown glow. He scissors kicked toward the middle, feeling ahead with his free hand, trying to find the snake. He felt something cold, round, and slippery and slashed at it before he realized it was just a sunken log. Grasping it, he pulled himself forward, feeling around desperately for the snake or his brother. His lungs were about to burst. He shot to the surface and redove, groping ahead. Where was the snake? How long had it been? A minute? Two? How long could Vernon survive?

Desperation drove him forward, and he continued his mad search, feeling among the slimy sunken logs.

One of the logs suddenly flexed under his touch. It was a muscled tube, as hard as mahogany, but he could feel the skin moving, the waves of contracting muscles.

He shoved the machete into its soft underbelly, driving it in as deep as it would go. For a second, nothing: and then the snake exploded into a whiplike motion, which slammed him backward in the water, knocking out his air in a violent expulsion of bubbles. He clawed his way to the surface and sucked in more air. The surface was boiling as the snake thrashed. He realized he no longer had the machete. Now roiling coils of the snake flew out of the water in a glossy arc, and for a moment Vernon’s hand appeared, clutched into a fist, followed by his head. A gasp, and he was gone.

“Another machete!”

Pingo tossed him one, handle first. He grabbed it and began slashing at the coils lashing about on the water’s surface.

“The head!” Don Alfonso cried from the boat. “Go for the head!”

Where was the head in this mass of snake? Tom had a sudden idea and jabbed the snake with the tip of the machete, once, twice, prodding him into a fury—and then, rearing out of the water, came the brute’s head, ugly and small, with a plated mouth and two slitty eyes, searching for the source of its torment. It lunged at him, mouth open, and Tom shoved the machete right into the pink cavity and straight down the monster’s gullet. The snake jerked and twisted and bit down, but Tom, clutching the handle, held on even as his arm was being bitten, giving the machete one hard twist after another. He could feel the flesh yielding inside, the sudden gush of cold reptilian blood; the head began thrashing back and forth, almost jerking his arm out of its socket. With all his remaining strength he gave the machete a final massive twist, and the blade came out behind the snake’s head. He rotated it and felt a spasmodic tremble in the jaws as the snake was decapitated from the inside. He pried open the mouth with his other hand and pulled his arm out, searching frantically for his brother amid the still-churning water.

Vernon suddenly rose to the surface of the pond, facedown. Tom grabbed him and turned him over. His face was red, his eyes closed. He looked dead. Tom dragged him through the water to the boat, and Pingo and Sally hauled him in. Tom fell in after him and passed out.

Sally was leaning over him when he came to, her blond hair like a waterfall swaying above him, cleaning the teeth marks in his arm, rubbing them with cotton soaked in alcohol. His shirt had been ripped off above the elbow, and there were deep scores on his arm. Blood was welling out.

“Vernon—?”

“He’s okay,” Sally said. “Don Alfonso’s helping him. He just swallowed some water and got a nasty bite on his thigh.”

He tried to sit up. His arm felt like it was on fire. The blackflies were swirling about him worse than ever, and he breathed them in with each breath. She pushed him back down with a gentle hand on his chest. “Don’t move.” She sucked in smoke from her pipe and blew it around him, chasing the flies away.

“Lucky for you anacondas have teensy weensy teeth.” She scrubbed.

“Ouch.” He lay back, looking up at the canopy slowly passing by. Nowhere could he see even a speck of blue sky. The leaves covered all.

30

Tom lay in his hammock that evening, nursing his bandaged arm. Vernon had recovered well and was cheerfully helping Don Alfonso boil some unknown bird that Chori had shot for dinner. It was stifling inside the hut, even with the sides rolled up.

Only thirty days had passed since Tom left Bluff, but it seemed like an eternity. His horses, the red sandstone buttes etched against the blue skies, the drenching sunlight and the eagles flying down the San Juan ... It all seemed to have happened to someone else. It was strange ... He had moved to Bluff with Sarah, his fiancée. She loved horses and the outdoors as much as he did, but Bluff turned out to be too quiet for her, and one day she’d packed up her car and left. He had just taken out a big bank loan and established his vet practice, and there was no way he could pull out. Not that he wanted to. When she left, he realized that given the choice between Bluff and her, he’d take Bluff. That was two years ago, and he hadn’t had a relationship since. He told himself he didn’t need one. He told himself the quiet life, the beauty of the land was enough for now. The vet practice had been intense, the work grueling, the compensation almost nil. He found it rewarding, but he could never quite shake the longing he had for paleontology, his childhood dream of hunting the bones of the great dinosaurs, entombed in the rock. Maybe his father was right, that it was an ambition he should have outgrown when he hit twelve.

He turned in his hammock, his arm throbbing, and glanced over at Sally. The partition was rolled up for ventilation, and she was lying in her hammock reading one of the books Vernon had brought, a thriller called Utopia. Utopia. That’s what he’d thought he’d find in Bluff. But what he’d really been doing was running away from something—like his father.

Well, he wasn’t running away from him anymore.

In the background he could hear Don Alfonso shouting orders to Chori and Pingo. Soon the smell of stewing meat came drifting through the hut. He glanced over at Sally and watched her read, turn the pages, brush back her hair, sigh, turn another page. She was beautiful, even if she was a bit of a pain in the neck.

Sally laid down the book. “What are you looking at?”

“Good book?”

“Excellent.” She smiled. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“That was a real Indiana Jones rescue back there.”

Tom shrugged. “I wasn’t going to stand around while a snake ate my brother.” This wasn’t really what he wanted to talk about. He asked, “Tell me about this fiancé of yours, this Professor Clyve.”

“Well,” Sally smiled at the memory. “I went to Yale to study with him. He’s my doctoral thesis adviser. We just ... Well, who wouldn’t fall in love with Julian? He’s brilliant. I’ll never forget when we first met at the weekly Faculty Sherry. I thought he was just going to be another academic type, but—wow. He looked like Tom Cruise.”

“Wow.”

“Of course, looks mean nothing to him. What matters to Julian is the mind—not the body.”

“I see.” Tom couldn’t help looking at her body: It put the lie to Julian’s claims of intellectual purity. Julian was a man, like any other—just less honest than most.

“He had recently published his book, Deciphering the Mayan Language. He’s a genius in the real sense of the word.”

“Do you have a wedding date?”

“Julian doesn’t believe in weddings. We’ll go to a justice of the peace.”

“What about your parents? Won’t they be disappointed?”

“I don’t have any parents.”

Tom felt his face flush. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Sally said. “My father died when I was eleven, and my mother passed away ten years ago. I’ve gotten used to it—or at least as used to it as you can get.”

“So you’re really going to marry this guy?”

She looked at him, and there was a short silence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” Change the subject, Tom. “Tell me about your father.”

“He was a cowboy.”

Yeah, right, thought Tom. A rich cowboy who raised racehorses, probably. “I didn’t know they still existed,” he said politely.

“They do, only it’s not what you see in the movies. A real cowboy is a laborer who just happens to work off the back of a horse, who makes less than minimum wage, who’s a high school dropout, who’s got a drinking problem, and who gets badly hurt or killed before he’s forty. Dad was the foreman of a corporate-owned cattle ranch in southern Arizona. He fell off a windmill he was trying to fix and broke his neck. They shouldn’t have asked him to go up there, but the judge decided it was his fault, because he’d been drinking.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry”

“It’s good to talk about it. At least that’s what my analyst says.”

Tom was unsure whether to treat this as a joke or not but decided to play it safe. Most people in New Haven probably went to analysts. “I figured your father would have owned the ranch.”

“You thought I was a little rich girl?”

Tom colored. “Well, I did assume something like that. After all, here you are a Yalie, and with your riding ability ...” He thought of Sarah. He’d had enough of rich girls to last him the rest of his life, and he’d just assumed she was another.

Sally laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. “I’ve had to fight for every little thing I have. And that includes Yale.”

Tom felt his color deepening. He had been reckless in his assumptions. She wasn’t like Sarah at all.

“Despite his shortcomings,” Sally continued, “my father was a wonderful dad. He taught me how to ride and shoot, how to head, heel, and cut cattle. After he died my mother moved us to Boston, where she had a sister. She waited on tables at Red Lobster to support me. I went to Framingham State College because it was the only place I could get into after a pretty miserable public high school education. My mother died while I was in college. Aneurism. It was very sudden. For me, it was like the end of the world. And then finally something good happened. I had an anthropology teacher who helped me discover that learning was fun and that I was not just a dumb blond. She believed in me. She wanted me to become a doctor. I was pre-med, but then I got interested in pharmaceutical biology, and from there I went into ethnopharmacology. I busted my ass and got into Yale Graduate School. And at Yale I met Julian. I’ll never forget when I first saw him. It was at the faculty sherry party and he was standing in the middle of the room, telling a story. Julian tells wonderful stories. I just joined the crowd and listened. He was talking about his first trip to Copán. He looked so ... dashing. Just like one of those old-time explorers.”