State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [156]
Easter took down the speed and the boat glided quietly ahead, the trail of purple smoke vanishing ten feet behind them. Marina couldn’t understand how this part of the jungle could be so much worse: those were the same trees; this was the same water. They went along for an hour before the river widened, and then another hour before it narrowed again. Marina stayed close to Easter now. She kept a hand on his back. “I’d like to be out of here before dark,” she said to him, because the sound of a voice, even her own voice, was a comfort, and that was when the arrows came raining down on either side of them, half of them making sharp clicks as they hit the deck while the others parted the water like knife blades and slipped inside. Easter leapt to push the boat ahead but Marina caught his hand. She pulled the throttle down to stop the engine and put her arms around the boy. This, she thought, was the outcome of the letter Mr. Fox had brought into the lab that she and Anders had shared: this moment, these arrows, this heat and jungle. Together she and Easter stared into the matted leaves. There were no more arrows. She opened her mouth and cried out in Lakashi, the series of pitches she sincerely hoped she had remembered correctly. She had a gift. She said it again as loud as she could. “We have brought gifts.” It was ridiculous. They were not words, they were sounds. They were the only sounds she knew.
The wall of trees sat before her silently. She eased the throttle forward to counteract the current of the river that pulled them back. The arrows had fallen at least three feet away from them and Marina was willing to take this as a good sign. It wouldn’t have been so difficult to hit the target had they meant to. She kept her hands on Easter’s back and counted the seconds by the regular beat of his heart. Minutes passed. She called out to the jungle again, a sentence without meaning, and it echoed through the trees until the birds called back to her. She saw a movement in the leaves and then, slipping out from between the branches, a single man came forth, and then another. They were created wholly from the foliage, one and then one more stepping forward to watch her until a group of thirty or more were assembled on the bank of the river, loincloths and arrows, their foreheads as yellow as canaries. The women came behind the men, holding children, their faces unpainted. Marina thought of her father extolling the virtues of the pontoon boat but while it was steady in the water it was nothing more than a floating stage. She and Easter stood on an open hand offered to the Hummocca, and though she waited for her own fear it did not come. She was finally here. This was the place she had been trying to get to from the very beginning and here she would wait for the rest of her life. She tapped at the throttle to hold her place. They watched her and she watched them. Marina pushed Easter behind her and picked up the basket of Rapps. She tried to throw a few mushrooms as far as the shore but they fluttered into the water like a handful of blue feathers. She put down the basket and very slowly took an orange out of the box, holding it up first as an exhibit and then pretending to throw it and then throwing it so that it landed close to the middle of the group of them. They took a step back from it, making a wide half circle, and watched the orange where it lay in the mud until a man stepped forward from the back of the group and reached over for it. His hair was long and the color of sunlight, his beard ginger and gray. He looked to be thinner by half and yet he was there, still himself. Anders Eckman, just as his wife had speculated in