A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg Read Free Page A

rubble of a hurricane-ravaged shoreline. The ruins had taken on the syrupy odor of all that triumphant vegetation. I was standing on the scene of some slow, choking horror, and I was alive, I would survive, and these thoughts left me feeling blessed and giddy.
    I sat next to an investment counselor on a recent flight from Miami to a jungle island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. I told him about the picture—the white woman in panty hose, the three impassive Indians—and what it meant to me. We worked our way around that meaning, just as I am doing here, by swapping jungle tales. The man told me this story:
    “I have a friend who is a very successful contractor, and his wife is what you might call an adventurer. She’s a pilot and has been all over the world. Well, she heard about some gold mines up one of the rivers of Brazil and wanted me to see if I could find investors. It looked a little too iffy for me, so she went ahead and raised the money on her own. She got all the permits and certifications that you need and hired two Vietnam vets to help her work the site.
    “One day, a government plane set down on their landing strip and they were arrested. The charge was murder—multiple counts. It seems there was another operation in progress in the area. The guy who headed the thing was hiring criminals, escaped convicts and various other unsavory types who might feel comfortable in the jungle, away from any legal agencies. These fellows would work a site, and each of them, I suppose, had a percentage of the take. The fellow who was running the operation would fly to the site with a couple of thugs and shoot the miners, take the gold, and save the percentage.
    “This must have gone on for quite some time. Few of the dead men had family or friends who would worry about them or even know where they were. Anyway, the Brazilian government finally caught on to the operation. My friend was charged in connection with seventy-eight murders.
    “She and the two vets were tossed into jail in Manaus along with seven other men. One man, who wore a two-pound gold medallion around his neck, got bail the next day. It turned out that he was running the mining-and-murderoperation. My friend was left in the cell with six thugs. She slept against the wall. One of the vets slept beside her while the other kept watch. The other six never made a move.
    “Well, you can imagine the field day the Brazilian press had with the case. They found out that my friend had a small canister of Mace in an oversized belt buckle. One headline went something like: AMERICAN AVIATRIX, ALLEGED MASS MURDERESS, IN POSSESSION OF DEADLY NERVE GAS .
    “After three weeks, it became apparent that she could not have committed those murders, and she was released.”
    “Did they ever catch the guy with the medallion?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. But my friend still has all the permits, and she’s going back.”
    “She’s going back?”
    “Gold’s up over six hundred dollars an ounce again.”
    S ome poor guy was sobbing in the next room, and I was just coming off another case of dysentery, swigging paregoric and thinking about that damned picture again. The picture and the jungle. The hotel was located just outside Flores, a town in the northern Guatemalan state of El Peten. It was a civilized sort of place, with clean beds, running water, and flush toilets. But it was in the jungle, after all, and the elements had conspired to sabotage the hotel’s pretensions. Several months before, the hotel had been situated on the shore of Lake Peten Itza. Now it was
in
Lake Peten Itza.
    The lake had been mysteriously rising for more than a year, and the steady, unseasonable rains of the past few weeks had been disastrous. The swimming pool, in what had been the courtyard, was underwater, and a foot or more of Lake Peten Itza lapped up against the building. Flocks of tropical water birds floated by the windows, glanced inside, and blurted out horrid little