other, you were there, standing on the side.”
“Yes,” Chato said warily.
“And when Cisco got introduced as the White Shaman, you laughed and called him something else.”
“I mean nothing bad,
“No, I realize that. I just need to know what you called him.”
Chato licked his lips and looked to his pals for help, but they gaped blankly back at him.
“You’re not in any trouble, my friend; there’s nothing to worry about. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I called him...everybody calls him ...the White Milkman.”
“Ah, that’s what I thought,” Gideon said with satisfaction. “And why was he called the White Milkman?”
“What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?” Gideon heard Phil ask John.
Chato’s explanation, a torrent of overexcited pidgin Spanish-English, was too much for Gideon, and he had to ask Phil to translate. Phil listened, nodding, then explained:
Cisco had been labeled the White Milkman by many of the locals in Iquitos in sarcastic reaction to his self- aggrandizing references to himself as the White Shaman. Cisco’s knowledge of authentic shamanism, it seemed, was held in low repute by those who—
“Fine, fine, but why do they call him a
“Because that’s what he is. Well, not the kind who delivers milk—there’s no such animal in Iquitos, because apparently nobody drinks it—but there’s this little dairy farm nearby that makes cheese, the one and only Amazonian dairy farm they ever heard of, and sometimes he worked there, taking care of the cows, milking them, feeding them—”
“What do they mean, ‘little’? How big is ‘little’? How many cows?”
“Gideon, what the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Just ask them, Phil.”
Phil shrugged and asked. “Maybe a dozen, they say. Maybe less. Little.” Another shrug. “Which proves?”
“Which suggests that it wasn’t big enough to make milking machines worthwhile. The cows would have been milked by hand, the old-fashioned way.”
“Which proves?” This time it was John.
“Plenty. In fact, that about settles it.” He went back to where the bones lay, picked up the skull, and gazed with extreme attentiveness into the face that was no longer there.
“ ‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,’ ” Phil intoned as the crewmen, increasingly uneasy, quietly went back to the ship.
With a half smile, Gideon slowly looked up. “I did know him, Phil. So did you two.”
Phil and John stared mutely at him.
“It’s Cisco,” he said quietly.
NINETEEN
THEcrushed cervical vertebrae, he explained, were part of a syndrome known to forensic anthropologists as “milker’s neck.”
When a cow was milked by hand, the milker sat on a low stool beside it and leaned his head at a somewhat awkward angle against the animal’s flank while he reached underneath to do the milking. So far, no problem. But a cow does not stand perfectly still while being milked. It shuffles its feet. It shifts its weight. And when it shifts its considerable mass sideways against the milker, he is more or less pinned between the cow and the stool . . . with his neck sharply bent—that is, flexed. When this happens, the vertebral column can “give” at its most stressed point, the junction of neck and torso, where the flexion occurs. In other words, the already flexed neck is hyperflexed, and pressure is focused on the lowest two cervical vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. The result—by no means always, but often enough—is a crushing of their cervical bodies.
“Like these,” he finished, holding the two vertebrae up again for
their inspection. “Remember Cisco’s headaches? And the way he held his head, kind of on the side? Well, you’re looking at the reason.”
John looked at them with a puzzled frown. “Yeah, sure, well, that’s all great stuff, Doc, but how could it be Cisco? It
“Did he? Maggie wasn’t that positive it was him. And I’d say that what we’ve got here pretty strongly suggests it wasn’t.”
