Little Tiny Teeth

Milkman. The other one laughed as well.

Swaying slightly, the White Whatever-he-was looked vaguely at his charges. His head was held slightly to one side at a rigid, upright, unnatural angle that immediately engaged Gideon’s interest. (Fused cervical vertebrae? he wondered.)

“Okay, I’m Cisco.” He spoke in a mushy, moderately accented English that wasn’t easy to follow. His teeth, as many of them as could be seen, were gray-brown, in terrible shape, which didn’t help in understanding him. Visibly thinking hard about what else to say, he came up with: “So, like, does anybody want to ask anything?” He

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spoke in a thin, strained voice, as if he’d been shouting for the last two hours. His Ahab-style beard had been trimmed a week or so ago, but it looked as if he hadn’t shaved around the edges since. Silvery stubble glinted down his throat, across his upper lip, and on his dark, starved cheeks.

“Yes, tell us about your plans,” Scofield said.

“My plans. Well, we’ll take a few treks, you know? I know some cool places, great botanicals, weird pharmaceuticals. It’ll be fun, you’ll be able to collect some stuff you never saw before, never heard of before.” He dug at his bristly cheek with a ragged fingernail and yawned. “You know?” His mind was very obviously elsewhere, or possibly nowhere. Not there with them on the Adelita, at any rate.

Understandably, his audience was less than overwhelmed. “And when exactly is our first trek planned?” Maggie Gray demanded, sounding like a schoolteacher wanting to know what had happened to some miscreant’s homework, but with no expectation of a satisfactory answer.

“Tomorrow, probably. I mean, yeah, tomorrow, sure.” Gideon sensed a ripple of unease go through the group. It was clear to everyone that Cisco was making this up as he went along.

“And you’ll be able to get us audiences with working curanderos, is that correct?” Maggie’s doubt increased with every word.

“Oh, yeah, I think so. I don’t know about tomorrow, though. Weather. Conditions. Maybe. Prob’ly.” He’s spent time in the States, Gideon thought. The accent was Spanish, but the speech rhythms and intonations when he spoke English were American.

Maggie wasn’t about to let him off the hook yet. “From which groups?” she wanted to know.

“Which groups?” Cisco took a few seconds to reconnect. “I don’t

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know yet. I mean, how can I know? We have to see how it goes. Depends on which side of the river we go along.”

“Captain Vargas has already said we’ll be on the south bank through tomorrow.”

“He did? Okay, then the Huitoto, or maybe the Mochila, or even the Chayacuro if you want to see some really —”

“Oh, I rather doubt that Arden’s going to want to meet with any Chayacuro,” Maggie said archly. Mel and Tim grinned, although Tim quickly covered his mouth with a hand.

“You’re right enough about that,” Scofield said with an affable roll of his eyes. “Let’s leave the Chayacuro out of this, if you please.”

Now what’s that about, I wonder? Gideon thought, intrigued. The Chayacuro were a famously fierce Amazonian Indian group, notorious as headhunters and headshrinkers. They and the equally feared Jivaro, to whom they were related, were the only South American Indians whom the Spaniards had never been able to subdue. Neither had anyone else. Even now, they were as free and dangerous as ever, occasionally linked to the murder of a missionary or a traveler. A couple of years earlier they had hacked a doctor and his assistant to death when the two had unknowingly violated their rules of proper behavior in their examination of a Chayacuro girl. As far as Gideon knew they had never been prosecuted for these things. An isolated and seminomadic people, they were hard to find when they didn’t want to be found. Besides, the authorities, perhaps wisely, preferred to stay out of Chayacuro territory.

So what was Scofield’s connection to them? Had he had a run-in with them? When he got to know them all a little better, he’d ask.

Cisco shrugged. “Okey-dokey, no Chayacuro. Anybody got anything else?”

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“Do you have a schedule for us?” Mel asked. “I could use a copy.”

“A what?”

“A schedule.”

Cisco looked at him as if he was having trouble understanding the word. “Schedule,” he repeated with a whinnying laugh. “Hey, I don’ got to show you no steenkin’ schedule.”

Scofield managed a polite chuckle. “That’s funny, Cisco—that was your name, Cisco?—but I think all of us would appreciate having some idea—”

“I don’t use schedules, man. Schedules don’t work in the jungle.”

“You could be right about that, but they do work aboard a ship. It would help me—help all of us—to plan our other activities— pressing, drying, and so on—if we knew, for example, that on Monday at two there was a plant- collecting expedition, and on Tuesday at nine we were to meet with—”

Cisco interrupted. “What’s your name, buddy?”

“Arden Scofield.”

“Well, Arden”—Gideon saw Scofield’s jaw muscles stiffen—“let me let you in on something. Last time I knew what day it was, or even gave a shit, was probably about 1992. And I don’t wear a