Little Tiny Teeth

62

FIVE

ITis an axiom among airport personnel in Iquitos that Yanquis are a cranky and irksome lot. There may or may not be something to this, but in fairness it should be pointed out that nobody arriving in Iquitos from the United States is likely to be at the top of his form when he gets there. There are no direct flights to Iquitos from anywhere in the United States. To reach it, one must fly first to Lima and then change planes for the flight to Iquitos. The problem is that while almost every incoming flight from the States to Lima arrives between eleven P.M. and midnight, nothing leaves for Iquitos or anywhere else until six-thirty in the morning. This means that already flight-weary through-passengers generally spend the night in the airport, inasmuch as the two-hour customs and immigration hassle they went through upon arriving, and the hour or so that would be consumed in getting to and from a hotel, would leave something like an hour and a half for sleeping (or trying to sleep) before being roused by a four A.M. wake-up call, amounting to something closer to torture than rest.

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And when you’ve arrived in Lima by way of a round-trip, bargain-basement $599 itinerary all the way from Seattle, Washington, there are a few additional catches. John, Phil, and Gideon had boarded an American Airlines flight to Dallas at six A.M. the previous morning, from where they’d flown to Miami, and then finally on to Lima’s Aeropuerto Jorge Chavez. By the time they cleared customs in Lima they’d been in transit for twenty hours and they looked and felt it: grungy, stubble-faced, and weary. To make things worse, the chairs at Jorge Chavez are famous for being few in number and extraordinarily uncomfortable for sleeping.

Still, four hours later, awaiting departure for Iquitos, they were again in reasonable spirits. Phil was a world- class sleeper. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the airport proper, he had been snoozing away in a corner of the polished floor on a $1.59 plastic air mattress purchased from a Seattle-area G.I. Joe’s for this express purpose. A fair number of other experienced old hands were already doing the same, paying no attention at all to the nighttime floor-polishers moving slowly among them.

As for John and Gideon, they were both enthusiastic trenchermen, and there was an all-night food court at the airport at which they had spent their last couple of hours. John had been joyfully surprised to find that it included a McDonald’s, a Papa John’s, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he had happily indulged himself in the kind of fats-and-sugars orgy that was strictly verboten on the Lau home table. He had proclaimed the McDonald’s cuarto del libro every bit as good as what you got at home, and the donuts an acceptable facsimile. Gideon went to the nearby Manos Morenas counter to try his first Peruvian meal and also pronounced it good: marinated chicken bro

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chettes and salsa on a bed of chewy hominy, accompanied by thick slices of boiled potato that had been fried to crisp the surfaces. Milk shakes de chocolate from McDonald’s and picarones from Manos Morenos—wonderful-smelling, deep-fried fritters that looked like onion rings but tasted like pumpkin—satisfactorily finished off the meal for both of them.

At six o’clock the three of them proceeded to the departure lounge for their hour-and-a-half LAN Peru flight to Iquitos, refreshed and upbeat, only to find that they weren’t yet out of the woods. They were met with a burst of noise: a long, excited announcement in Spanish. Too rapid-fire for Gideon to understand, but the distressed faces and thrown-up hands of the other passengers told him that the news wasn’t good.

“What’s up?” he asked Phil. “Please, don’t tell me there’s a delay. I need a shower fast.”

“Unfortunately, yeah, that’s exactly what’s up,” Phil told them. “Un problema grande.”

Phil was something of a language prodigy. He was impressively fluent in Spanish, as indeed he was in several other languages. Gideon could generally get along in Spanish and a few other languages if the other person spoke slowly enough, but John was hopeless. His existing repertory consisted of si, no, por favor, gracias, buenos dias, and bueno, mostly gleaned from old Westerns. Currently, he was working on “Me llamo Juan.”

“What’s the problem?” John asked.

“Well . . .” Phil shook his head, perplexed. “I didn’t exactly understand all of it.”

“You didn’t understand it?” Gideon echoed.

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“Well, I thought I understood it, but I must have gotten something wrong. Some kind of local slang or something. I thought he said...wait, let me go talk to the guy.”

Two minutes later he was back. “No, I understood it, all right. Condors. Vultures. There’s a mob of them circling over the Iquitos airport. It’s too dangerous to try to land.”

“Vultures!” John exclaimed. “Jesus, Phil, where are you taking us?”

“The thing is,” Phil explained, “there’s a garbage dump near the airport, and when the wind is right, the smell wafts over that way and brings the vultures. There are also some chicken and pig farms around the airport, and that draws them too. Not to worry, though,” he added cheerily. “They’re going to try to scare them off with cannon fire. Shouldn’t be too long.”

“Vultures. Cannon fire.” John rolled his eyes, appealing first to the ceiling and then to Gideon. “Can I please go home now, Doc?” Since the first day they had known each other, Gideon had been “Doc” to John, and they’d never gotten around to amending it.

“No, you cannot go home,” Gideon said severely. “You wouldn’t want Marti to find out you can perfectly well take care of yourself on your own, would you?”