around huge vine-covered trees and clotted stands of foliage, finding the channel where he knew the fishing would be good.
“ Yes,” he said, “this will do. Them sonofabitch pirayas travel in schools, hundreds of them, eh? They come to the igapo because they know game in the water and the eating she is good.”
Jack was excited. “All right, let’s do some fishing.”
*
As they made ready with the long bamboo poles, Rico told them that during flood season the pirayas were not truly dangerous. Their hunting range was expanded into the jungle and there was plenty to eat. They were only really a threat when there was no food. In fact, he said, during this time of year men wade into the river and spearfish, women wash clothes, and children swim in piranha waters without any harm.
Elise figured he was saying that for her benefit.
The jungle was primeval, silent, unbearably eerie. The channel they were in was maybe forty feet across, a stew of brown steaming water. Leaves and sticks floated on its surface. Trees grew from the water in tangled, knotted masses to either side, rising up on snaking roots and filling out, growing thickly until their twisted limbs joined together overhead like woven canestraw. The result was like being in a tunnel…a hot, smelling, claustrophobic tunnel of stagnant water and warm decay.
Rico tried to give Elise a pole, but she refused. The bamboo poles were about four feet long, set with six- pound nylon lines and triple-barbed hooks that were baited with chunks of raw beef and chicken liver. To attract the piranhas, Rico tossed some bloody chum into the water.
“They smell this for miles,” he said.
The men tossed their lines into the water.
Rico rolled a cigarette, told a story about Isobel, his first wife, who was so crazy she’d once chased him down the muddy, winding streets of Cerro de Pasco with a baseball bat. She had been naked at the time. “And that, my friends, is no thing to be looking on first thing in morning.” He shivered. “Yah!”
Then the waiting began. Elise sat there, beads of sweat rolling down her face. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes hovered over the water. Dragonflies buzzed about. Howler monkeys wailed in the treetops. Elise listened to the blue macaws screech and watched palm vipers thread through the spoking branches.
Basille suddenly stiffened, his bovine face beaded with perspiration. “I…ah…I think I have a nibble,” he said.
“Easy,” Rico told him. “The piraya is sneaky little devil. Don’t scare him off. Let him take good bite first…then he yours.”
Basille waited, looking very nervous. Suddenly his rod jerked, then bowed as something below tugged at the line. He pulled up his bamboo pole and there was an oval-shaped fish on the hook. It was silvery, its belly a dull orange. Jack and Cutler cheered. Elise was the only one that saw something was terribly wrong with the fish. But as Basille swung it on board they all saw it. On one side the fish looked like any other Red-Bellied Piranha, though maybe faded in color, but on the other: just bones. The head was intact, but it was just bones straight down to the tail.
“You hooked a dead one,” Cutler said.
Jack laughed.
“It wasn’t dead,” Basille said. “You saw how it attacked my bait.”
Rico swallowed. “Yes…but they are the cannibals, them piraya. They attack one another. You hook a live one, but its fellows… ha!…they strip it before you pull him in.”
And that seemed a perfectly logical explanation…but then the fish moved. Stripped to bone on one side or not, it began to flap its tail and writhe on the line, its hooked jaws snapping.
“That’s not possible,” Jack said.
Elise was getting a real bad feeling now. She didn’t believe for a moment that other piranhas had cannibalized this one, at least not recently. Because the fish stank…it was putrescent.
Basille, a look of horror on his face, just stared at the fish dangling over his lap. Then a slender green worm slid out of its side and dropped into his crotch. He tossed the pole, shrieking, brushing the corpse worm off him and smashing it beneath his shoe.
Cutler jumped away from the dropped pole and what flopped on the end.
Rico, looking dead serious now, grabbed it and threw the line overboard. He slashed out with his knife and cut the piranha free. The fish hit the water and swam away like it was perfectly healthy. Nobody said anything for a time. They listened to the jungle. The silence was deadly, ominous.
Then Jack’s line was hit. Cutler’s, too. Both men looked at each other, for the first time in their lives almost afraid to see what was on the end of their hooks.
“This not right,” Rico said.
And then, from below, something hit the boat. In fact, several things hit the bottom of the boat in rapid succession. One after the other, like hammers. Then it stopped. Everyone just sat there, wide-eyed, the boat moving in a slow counterclockwise rotation from the impact. Then it started again and this time there was no stopping it. From below it was hit again and again and again, maybe hundreds of times. The boat shook. It canted this way and that. Bamboo poles were yanked from hands and dragged beneath the surface.
“This is crazy!” Basille cried out. “We’re being attacked!”
Jack held Elise to him, either for her protection or his own. He looked frantically at Rico. “Croc? Is that what it is? A croc? A big fucking croc?”
The boat was hit so hard from beneath that it jumped an inch out of the channel and came back down with a cascading splash of murky brown water. Basille lost his nerve. He screamed, elbowed Cutler out of his way in a frenzied attempt to get out of the bow. Cutler took hold of him. They wrestled, they swore. Rico shouted for them to stop it, stop it, stop it But it was too late.
Tangled together, they fell over against the lip of the boat and it flipped up out of the water from the sudden shift in weight. For one frightening second it hung there, its side parallel to the river, while everyone tried to hang onto the seats for dear life.
Then it flipped right over and all five of them went into the drink.
*
Elise surfaced, her legs bicycling and arms thrashing. She spat out a mouthful of water that was brown, slimy, and warm like some primordial ooze. Rico was only maybe five feet away, pulling himself up onto the overturned boat. Crying out, she swam towards it as it drifted away from her. She could see several fish attached to Rico’s legs as he dragged himself out of the river. They had bitten right through his pants and blood was blossoming from the wounds.
Somebody shoved her forward and she was never sure if it was Cutler or Basille. She heard Jack shouting out in a high, almost girlish voice: “Swim! Elise, swim for the boat! Swim! Swim! Swim!” His voice broke into a note of absolute terror.
Elise pounded through the water to the boat. She felt something bite into her knee. Her ankle. Her hip. Then she was at the boat and Rico hauled her aboard by grabbing her hair and yanking her up out of the water with considerable strength. She flopped onto the bottom of the overturned boat, glad to feel the hot sun upon her. She spit out more water, coughing and gagging. Cutler pulled himself aboard and so did Basille, both men tearing biting fish off their legs. Rico grabbed the one chewing on her knee. It was bloated green, eyeless, its triangular teeth red with her blood. It was so rotten it went to a soft, oozing pulp in his fingers. He tossed it away.
“Jack!” Cutler cried. “Jack!”
Elise, shocked and trembling, looked for him. In her panic she had forgotten about everything but survival, everything but getting out of the water and getting away from those flesh-shearing jaws.
Jack was still in the water.
For whatever reason, he had been thrown out farther from the others. The drift of the overturned boat had put him even farther away. He was closer to the trees so he swam for them. They saw him grip the solid spiraling anchor roots rising from the water. He got his hand on one and pulled himself to it, then up out of the water and it seemed like he was going to make it, he was really going to make it And then, as he pulled his upper body out of the slop, the water around him began boiling like a pot, seething in a great fountain of thrashing silver bodies. Jack screamed. Screamed with a wild, almost animal sound of agony and horror that echoed off into the jungle and sent a flock of birds winging into the sky. “Help me! Help me! Somebody fucking help me-”
