About this time he heard another voice.
He spun around to face in the direction of the town, which had now grown nearer. There, just a few feet from him, was another boat, somewhat smaller. Three men were in it. Two of them sat watching Coba idly while the third stood at the front of the boat, smiling broadly underneath a comic bushy mustache. Coba was confused; he looked at them and looked at Catherine and then back at them, wondering if he should rush to the girl and throw the cloth over her. Hi ho, said the man with the mustache to Coba; he tipped his hat to Catherine and called her señorita. Been on the river long? he asked cheerfully. Since the last town, Coba said; he laughed his laugh. Is this a welcoming party? he said, a bit more uneasily than he had planned.
Yes, that’s it, said the man with the mustache. A welcoming party. I’m sort of the town’s diplomatic service, let’s say. Trying to fix things before they get broken.
Uh huh, said Coba, still confused.
That’s it, said the man emphatically. Trying to fix things before they get broken, save everyone a lot of trouble. You, for instance. I’d like to fix you before you get broken, save you a lot of trouble. Give yourself a chance to take yourself out of the hand before it’s too late.
Coba did not like the gambling metaphor.
Now you can do one of three things, the man with the mustache explained with great joviality. You can sail into town, where a more formidable welcoming party is waiting for you and where you’ll find yourself put in a small jail and kept an undetermined period of time until it’s decided what’s to be done with you. Or you can sail back to the town from where you just came, at which place you might be given similar treatment if you’re very lucky. Or you can continue to sail downriver where it narrows, and where the jungle thickens so as to blot out the day, and long living vines throttle men slowly, and there are fast rapids, fanged serpents, fierce wild cats, mosquitoes the size of oranges with malaria that runs like juice, and natives the size of children that eat men the size of you. How’s that sound?
Coba said nothing.
The man with the mustache said, That’s about how I figured it sounded.
We have no food, Coba said in a dry mumble. We’re getting low on water.
Well now, that has to be your problem there, said the man with the mustache jauntily. During this discussion the other two men continued sitting idly in the boat, not saying a word but staring at Coba and Catherine with heavy lidded eyes. Now they picked up the oars and turned the boat in its place, starting back for town. We’ll be waiting for your decision, the man with the mustache said with a wave. Adios.
Coba sat a long time staring at the other boat as it grew smaller and the approaching town grew bigger. When he was close enough he could see that, as the man with the mustache had advised, a throng was waiting on the makeshift dock. They carried hatchets, machetes, guns and ropes. Coba decided he didn’t want to go there. He also knew he didn’t want to go back to Town Three. So, aimlessly, without any real command on his part, the boat slid past the town and approached the beginning of a more astounding lethal maze than any he had sailed. The entrance to the new jungle seemed to ooze darkness. He noticed there was a funny roar that seemed to come not from the ooze but from all around him, or behind him; and then he realized that it came from the town itself, and the roar was the laughter of the populace, ushering him off to oblivion. As Coba closed in on the jungle the merriment seemed to grow instead of fade.
Or perhaps it was mirth at another turn of events. For he turned to find that Catherine, who was still at her place on the other end of the boat, now instead of bonds was wearing two ragged rope bracelets, the two wrists having been separated from their captivity to each other. In her hands she held the knife with which the sailor had been cutting fruit.
Later in Los Angeles, when the dreams began, she would remember, but only vaguely, the way the knife felt in her hands on that boat on the river while she was watching him. No vengeance coursed through her, and she was nearly beyond hatred, she was beyond the color of it, into something white. Rather she was caught by the necessity of it, as though by slashing the knife across the pale of his throat she would sever herself from a cord, through which she had once been nourished with food and air but by which now, at the moment of a kind of birth, she could only be strangled. He was not this cord of course, but her memory of him was a cord attaching her
