Max stopped, his powerful fat fingers inches from Carlos’s throat. He straightened slowly, the rain pouring off him in tiny cascades, and stared downriver, searching perhaps for the destination he would not reach. A red bubble appeared in the center of his forehead. It burst on his brow, spilling off his nose and lips, thickened and slowed by the dense hair that protruded from beneath the shirt collar where he was forced to stop his daily shaving, diluted by the ceaseless rain.
He toppled slowly over the side.
Breathing hard and fast, Carlos scrambled to a kneeling position and watched the body recede astern. Spitting out rain, he worked his way to the back of the boat and took control of the tiller. The dugout swung around, pounded back upstream. There was a boiling in the water that did not arise from a submerged stone. The blood had drawn piranhas, as Carlos had known it would.
He circled the spot until the river relaxed. There was nothing to be seen. It was quiet save for the yammer of the engine and the ceaseless rain. He tossed the little pistol into the deep water, then headed for shore. When he was within easy swimming distance he rocked the boat until it overturned, then let it go. From shore he watched it splinter against the first rocks. Exhilarated, he turned and started into the jungle, heading back the way he’d come.
Almost, he had been surprised. Almost. Now it was finished. Nina was his, and he Nina’s. Max was a harmless memory in the bellies of many fish. Carlos thought of the hot, smooth body awaiting him, and of the money, more than he’d ever dreamed of having. Both now his to play with. Together they would flee this horrible place, take a boat across the border into Bolivia, thence fly to Santiago. He harbored no regrets over what he had done. To gain Paradise a man must be willing to make concessions.
She was waiting for him, tense, sitting on the couch in the greeting room of the little lodge. Her eyes implored him as she rose.
He grinned, a drenched wolf entering its den. “It’s over. Done.”
She came to him, still unable to believe. “The truth now, beloved. There was no trouble?”
“The ape is dead. Nothing remains but bones, and the river will grind them between its rocks. By the time the Madre de Dios merges with the Inambari there will be nothing left of him. We will speak of it as we planned; that the boat hit a rock and went over. I swam to shore, I waited; he did not surface. There is nothing for anyone to question. Everything is ours!” He swept her into his arms and fastened his mouth to hers. She responded ferociously.
They were alone in the lodge, the buildings empty around them, thunder echoing their passion as she led him toward the back building. There she flung back the thin blanket and put a knee onto the bed, her eyes beckoning, her breasts visible behind the neck of her thin blouse. He leaned forward, only to pause with a grimace.
“Dirty, as always.” He bent and began brushing at the sheets. She nodded and did likewise. Only when the last of the brown, curly hairs had been swept to the floor did he join with her in the middle.
They spent all that night there and all the following morning. Then he crossed the river and paid one of the Indians to carry downstream the message announcing the unfortunate death of Max Ventura.
They ate, and made a pretext of tidying the lodge lest the swollen river carry any unannounced tourists to their doorstep. Then they showered, soaping each other, luxuriating in their freedom and the cleanliness of one another, and walked out through the rain toward the back building.
Once again Carlos was first to the bedside, and once again he was compelled to hesitate. “I thought we cleaned out the last of him yesterday.” He indicated the sheets.
Nina too saw the curving brown hairs, then shrugged and swept them onto the floor with a hand. “There was always hair everywhere from him. Not just in the bed. In my own hair, in the clothes, on the furniture, everywhere. It was disgusting.”
“I know. No more of that.” He brushed hard until he was sure his own side was spotless, then joined her.
No police came the next day, or the next. It would take three or four days by motorized dugout to reach Maldonado, a day again to come upstream to the lodge. Carlos wasn’t worried. The jungle was dangerous, the river unforgiving, and he, Carlos, had been made foreman of this place. Why would he kill his beloved employer? Indeed, hadn’t he risked his own life to try to save him, battling the dangerous current and threatening whirlpools before exhaustion had forced him to shore? It was a sad time. Nina cried manfully for the Indians who came to offer their sympathies, while Carlos hid his smile.
In the bed that night they found the hair again.
“I don’t understand.” She was uncertain as she regarded the sheets. “I swept and dusted the whole building. We brushed these out.”
Clearly she was in no mood for lovemaking. Not while memories of him still lingered in this place and in her thoughts. Angrily he wrenched the sheets from the bed, wadded them into a white ball, and tossed them across the room. Hairs spilled to the floor.
“Get fresh sheets. I’ll wash these myself. No.” Carlos smiled. “I’ll burn them. We should have done that days ago.”
She nodded, and her own smile returned. With the bed freshly remade they made love on the new sheets, but there was a curious reluctance about her he had not noticed before. He finished satisfied, saw she had not. Well, it would not be a problem tomorrow.
He burned the old sheets in the incinerator in the maintenance shed, the damp stink of the cremation hanging pall-like over the grounds for hours. By nightfall the rain had cleansed the air.
That night he made a point of carrying her to the bed. Though it was woman’s work he had cooked supper. His concern touched her. She relaxed enough to talk of all they were going to do as soon as it was decorous enough to sell the lodge and leave. By bedtime her languid self-assurance had returned.
He tossed her naked form onto the sheets, watched her bounce slightly, and was about to join her when she screamed and scrambled to the floor.
He lay on the bed, gazing at her in confusion. “My love, what’s wrong?”
She was staring, her black hair framing her face, and pointing at her side of the bed. Her face was curiously cold.
“L-look.”
He turned, puzzled, and saw the hair. Not just one or two that might have floated in from a corner of the room left undusted, but as much as ever, brown ringlets and curlicues of keratin lying stark against the white sheets.
“Damn!” Rising, he swept sheets and blanket off the bed, went to the cupboard and removed new ones, made the bed afresh. But it was no good. She could not relax, could not make love, and they spent an uneasy night. Once she woke him, moaning, and he listened in the dark until she finally quieted enough to sleep.
The next morning she was curiously listless, her gaze vacant, and his anger turned to alarm. Her forehead seemed hot to the touch. She tried to tell him not to call the doctor, saying that it would cost too much money, money better spent in Rio or Caracas, but he was truly worried now and refused to listen.
He paid the village chief an exorbitant sum to send two men downstream in the lodge’s best remaining boat, to go even at night and return with the doctor from Maldonado. He was in an agony waiting for their return.
Meanwhile Nina grew steadily worse, unable to walk, lying in bed and sweating profusely from more than the heat. She threw up what little food he tried to feed her. When he spoke to her she hardly reacted at all.
Not knowing what else to do, he applied cold wet compresses to her forehead and did his best to make her comfortable. By the fourth day he was feeling feverish himself, and by the sixth he was having difficulty keeping his balance. But he was damned if having won everything he would give up now. He had fought too hard, had committed what remained of his soul. Where was the goddamn doctor? He tried to cross the river but was unable to start the remaining outboard.
That afternoon a couple of Indians approached the bank on which the lodge was built, but when they saw him they turned and paddled furiously back the
way they’d come. He yelled at them, screamed and threatened, but they paid both threats and imprecations no heed.
Her fever grew steadily worse (there was no longer any doubt it was a fever). He tried to feed her medicine from the lodge’s tiny pharmacy, but by this time she could keep nothing down. Her once supple, voluptuous form had grown emaciated with shocking speed, until he had to force himself to look at the skeletal frame beneath the sheet when he cleaned her from where she had dirtied herself.
Nor did he prove immune to whatever calamity it was that had struck so suddenly. He found himself losing his way within the lodge, having to fumble for the sink and for dishes and clean towels. By the eighth day he alternated between crawling and stumbling, stunned at his own weight loss and weakness.
He staggered toward the back building, spilling half the pitcher of cold water he was carrying to her. He dropped the clean washrag but was too dizzy and tired to go back for it. Shoving the door aside, he nearly fell twice as he stumbled over to the bed.
“Nina.” His voice was a dry croak, a rasping echo of what once had been. His swarthy machismo had evaporated along with his strength.
He tried to pour a glass of water, but his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t control it. The icy liquid shocked his hand and wrist. Frustration provided enough strength for him to heave the glass against the far wall, where it shattered melodiously. Exhausted by the effort he sank to his knees next to the bed, his forehead falling against his forearms as he sobbed helplessly. He lifted his eyes, hardly able to gaze upon her shrunken face anymore.
Emotions colder than the water rushed through his veins. For an instant he was fully alive, wholly aware. His vision was sharp, his perception precise.
There was hair in the bed. Always hair in the bed, no matter how much they’d swept, how hard they’d brushed and dusted, no matter how many times they changed the sheets. Brown, curly hair. His hair. It was there now.
One of the hairs was crawling out of her nose.
He knelt there, the bed supporting him, unable to move, unable to turn away from the horror. As his eyes grew wide a second hair followed the first, twisting and curling as if seeking the sunlight. He began to twitch, his skin crawling, the bile in his stomach thickening.
A hair appeared at the corner of her beautiful right eye, twisting and bending, working its way out. Two more slid out of her left ear and fell to the bed, lying motionless for a long moment before they too began to curl and crawl searchingly, imbued with a horrid life of their own.
With an inarticulate cry he stumbled away from the bed, away from the disintegrating form. More hairs joined the others, emerging from the openings of her body, from nostrils and ears, from between her once perfect lips, falling to the sheets, brown and curling and twisting. He reached up to rub at his disbelieving eyes, to grind away the nightmare with his own knuckles, and happened to glance at his hands. There were at least half a dozen hairs on the back of the right one, moist and throbbing.
Screaming, he stumbled backwards, frantically wiping his hands against his dirty pants. Staggering out of the room, he stumbled back toward the lodge. After weeks of unending rain the sun had finally emerged. Steam rose around him as accumulated moisture was sucked skyward. The mist impeded his vision.
Thin lines crisscrossed his line of sight. The lines were moving.
Crying, babbling, he flailed at his own eyes, delighting in the pain, digging at the hair, the omnipresent hair, the memories of him and what had been done. He felt the crawling now, no more than a slight tickle, but everywhere. On the surfaces of his eyes, in his ears, his nose, pain in his urethra and anus, tickling and scratching and burning, burning. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, curling into a fetal position as he dug and scratched and screamed at himself, at his wonderful body which was betraying him without reason, without explanation.
The doctor’s assistant gagged when he saw the body in the garden, and the Indians muttered to themselves and drew back. The doctor, who was an old man, thin and toughened from forty years of practicing medicine in that part of the jungle known as the Infierno Verde, forced himself to bend over and do his job. There wasn’t much left to examine.
The smell led them to the rear building. This time the Indians wouldn’t enter at all, and the doctor had to use all the strength in his elderly frame to drag his reluctant assistant with him. Up till now the young man had made good on his internship. Eventually he would return to a fine hospital in Lima where he would issue papers and prescribe pills at excessive fees for wealthy Limineros, while the doctor would remain in his sweltering office in Maldonado, treating insulting ungrateful tourists for diarrhea and locals for promised payment that the government sometimes sent and sometimes didn’t.
The corpse on the bed had been that of a woman. If possible (and until he had actually seen it the doctor would not have thought it was), it was in a state of even more advanced desiccation than the one on the grass outside. He examined it closely, careful not to touch any of the small, squirming shapes that were burrowing through what remained of what had once been a human form.
“Here, give me a hand.”
“What for?” The intern held a handkerchief over his face, protection against the odor.
“I want to look at the back.”
They used towels to protect their hands. Turning the body was a simple matter. Having been consumed from the inside out, it weighed next to nothing. The sight thus revealed forced even the old doctor to jump back involuntarily.
Beneath where the body had been lying, the entire bed was a seething mass of millions of tiny, twitching brown shapes.
“Nematodes,” the doctor announced with a grunt, though if he was worth anything at all, his youthful companion had already reached the same conclusion on his own. “Without question the worst Secernentea infestation I have ever seen.” He leaned fearlessly over the boiling mass. “Here, see? The mattress is stuffed with horsehair. That would provide sufficient protein for them to propagate within. These unfortunate people were infected through the bed.” He extended a hand. “My case.”
The intern barely had enough presence of mind remaining to hand over the doctor’s kit. The old man rummaged inside and removed a small stoppered tube and a tweezer. Carefully he extracted one of the millions of swarming worms from the mattress, slipped it into the glass container, where it coiled and twisted frantically, feeling for meat.
“This would appear to be a particularly virulent species. The selva is full of thousands of such loathsome parasites, many of them still unclassified. See how they seek the darkness inside the bed? I would venture to guess that this variety feeds nocturnally and is dormant during the day, which might explain how an infection could be overlooked until it was too late. Treatable at a hospital, I should think, but in the advanced stage such as we see here, immune to simple over-the-counter remedies.” His eyes narrowed sorrowfully as he regarded the sack of skin and bones crumpled on the bed.
“Once infected, they were doomed. You would have thought that, living here, they would know about this particular parasite and would have taken proper precautions to keep it out of their living quarters. It always astonishes me how little interest some people have in their immediate surroundings.” He raised the specimen. “Observe.”
The intern reluctantly took the glass tube, twirling it back and forth between his fingers as he studied its single wiry, voracious occupant. “It doesn’t look like much, just one of them.”
“No,” agreed the doctor. “Not just one.” He stared at the heaving, pulsating mattress, tapped the glass tube. “Notice how much it resembles nothing so innocuous as a human hair?”
DIESEL DREAM
When the big rig passes you on the road, do you ever pause to wonder what the driver of that monster of an amalgam of rubber and steel and petroleum products is thinking? Do you think he’s just looking out for you and your fellow drivers? What image do you have of him (or her)? Chances are it’s wrong. He doesn’t look th
e way you think he probably looks, and he doesn’t think the way you probably think he does.
Truckers are just folk, more independent than most. Seamen of the highway, sailing narrow concrete seas, always impatient to make the next port of call and then as equally impatient to leave it. They get places most of us never think about, dream dreams the rest of us don’t have the time for.
Sometimes, rarely, ports and journeys and dreams all come together in the oddest ways and places . . .
Whatthehell. I mean, I know I was wired. Too many white crosses, too long on the road. But a guy’s gotta make a living, and everybody else does it. Everybody who runs alone, anyway. You got a partner, you don’t have to rely on stimulants. You half a married team, that’s even better. But you own, operate, and drive your own rig, you gotta compete somehow. That means always making sure you finish your run on time, especially if you’re hauling perishables. Oh sure, they bring their own problems with ’em, but I’d rather run cucumbers than cordite any day.
Elaine (that’s my missus), she worries about me all the time. No more so than any trucker’s wife, I guess. Goes with the territory. I try to hide the pills from her, but she knows I pop the stuff. I make good money, though. Better’n most independents. Least I’m not stuck in some stuffy little office listening to some scrawny bald-headed dude chew my ass day after day for misfiling some damn piece of paper.
Elaine and I had a burning ceremony two years ago. Mortgage officer from the bank brought over the paper personal and stayed for the burgers and beer. Now there’s a bank that understands. Holds the paper on our house, too. One of these days we’ll have another ceremony and burn that sucker, too.
So I own my rig free and clear now. Worked plenty hard for it. I’m sure as hell not ready to retire. Not so long as I can work for myself. Besides which I got two kids in college and a third thinking about it. Yep, me. The big guy with the green baseball cap and the beard you keep seein’ in your rearview mirrors. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself.