At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait

“It’s got a nifty picture of me. Care to see it?”
    She smiled again. “May I?”
    I hauled out my wallet, opened it, handed her the ticket. As she examined it, I studied the photograph on the teakwood table. Eight by ten, once black-and-white but yellowed now, it showed a much younger and very beautiful Alice Wright standing before a gray backdrop of jungle. She wore a white flat-brimmed western hat, a khaki blouse, and khaki slacks stuffed into the tops of heavy black boots. On either side of her stood an Indian wearing a kilt-like wrapper that fell from waist to shin. Both men were squat and muscular, both carried long and lethal-looking blowguns, and both looked extremely glum—bored or homicidal or maybe both. Alice Wright was grinning with a good deal more merriment than I would’ve shown under the circumstances.
    She handed back my ID. “Thank you.” She smiled. “A helpless old woman can’t be too careful.”
    Old, maybe; but beneath that easy aristocratic graciousness she was as helpless as a drill sergeant.
    I nodded to the photograph. “South America?”
    She nodded. “Ecuador. The Montana. I did my fieldwork among the Jivaro.”
    The woman would not stop surprising me. “The Jivaro,” I said. “They were the headhunters.”
    She smiled. “And still are, I expect, what’s left of them.” She crossed her legs in a gesture that was at once feminine and professorial. “An interesting people. Do you know they were never conquered? Not by the Incas, not by the Spaniards. In Fifteen ninety-nine, there was a Spanish governor nominally in charge of their province. When he demanded a tribute in gold from the Jivaro, they attacked and destroyed his town, killing everyone in it, perhaps fifteen thousand people. And mutilating most of them into the bargain, quite horribly.” She smiled. This was apparently one of the pleasantries she’d mentioned earlier.
    â€œThey captured the governor,” she said, “trussed him up, and then they gave him his gold. They melted it, pried open his mouth, and poured it down his throat.”
    I nodded. “I guess that put kind of a damper on the tribute thing.”
    She surprised me once again—startled me—by laughing. A good hearty laugh, up from the stomach, like a stevedore’s. “A damper indeed,” she said, and laughed some more. She cocked her head again. “But you know, curiously, the Jivaro themselves found the entire incident so insignificant that it never became a part of their folklore. Their stories contain only the vaguest recollection of the conquistadors. I’ve always rather admired that.”
    I nodded. “And how’re they doing these days?”
    â€œAh,” she said. “Well. When I was with them, they had perhaps the most sophisticated pharmacopoeia in the Amazon basin. In the world, perhaps. They used literally thousands of medicinal herbs. And hundreds of psychotropic drugs.”
    She frowned. “Not too long ago I read an article written by an ethno-botanist who visited the Jivaro in Nineteen eighty-five looking for native medicines. He found one shaman whose most prized possession was a jar of Vick’s VapoRub.” She pursed her lips, shook her head sadly. “The rain forests all around them are being burned away. The oil companies are drilling nearby. The Jivaro that I knew, their culture, their way of life, they’re all gone now. Forever.”
    I shrugged. “Maybe they like Vick’s VapoRub.”
    Another laugh. “Oh, I’m sure they do. And I’m sure they’ll like television as well. And microwave pizzas. And polyester jumpsuits.” She frowned suddenly, shook her head, and then smiled. “Do forgive me, Mr. Croft. An occupational hazard. Anthropologists tend to become proprietary about the people with whom they’ve done their work.” She turned toward the door.