palm.
"Maybe you'll need this instead."
It was a brand new, black Beretta, fully loaded and ready to smoke: Ethel's twelve-round
life insurance policy she'd wrapped in a towel as if it were nothing more than a snazzy bathing
suit. Rodrigo looked hard at the plastic carrier I placed between us on the dry grass, and even
harder at me. To my surprise, he threw back the gun.
"New rule," he said, reaching into his own bag to pull out a silver six-shooter revolver,
"all twentieth century men go armed."
Chapter 7
Taking careful inventory of our supplies, I nibbled a chocolate Bourbon biscuit Rodrigo
gave me. Each now dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt--his was cream, mine was maroon--we
flung the heavy bags over our shoulders and sauntered up the verge toward the forest.
As we approached the first emerald thicket, I slowed to a creep. The place seemed
conspicuously quiet, and I sensed we were being watched.
"Keep a sharp eye," I said, wrenching a rotten branch to one side. "We're not alone."
The oppressive gloom ahead felt thick, tropical, over-cooked: a hotbed of stakes holding
up an evergreen roof. Rodrigo stretched the front of his t-shirt to soak up sweat from his
forehead. Our guns handy, we pressed on. After a while, insect noises drowned out the
silence.
The first half hour was hard going. Without a machete, forging a route through the brush
proved taxing. On some of the taller trees, the buttress roots were so pronounced we had to
negotiate an insanely convoluted route just to walk around them. Rodrigo explained how these
buttresses provide stability for tropical rainforest trees, whose roots are ordinarily not as deep as
those in temperate zones. Apparently, these ridges can reach thirty feet in height before blending
fully into the trunk; the highest we came across was closer to fifteen feet.
Rays of intense sunlight extended to the forest floor every now and then, illuminating all
manner of insects and dry particles in the air, similar to a cinema projection beam in a darkened
theatre. As we stopped to rest, I tried to absorb as much of this humid realm as I could.
"I wonder how much of this is extinct in our own time," I said.
Rodrigo sighed. "We're talking paleobotany come to life, that's for sure. I didn't even
realize there was ever a land mass where we're standing, so Christ only knows how far
back this is."
"Tell me about it. Dumitrescu said the fabric was from an animal that vanished nine
thousand years ago. He never said how long the species was actually around."
"Would it have made a difference?" Rodrigo asked.
"Probably not."
"Well, I have to say, Baz, this is the most reckless time travel I've ever been a part
of."
I laughed. "Don't thank me now. We're not even lost yet."
His faced remained deadpan as he shook his head and replied, "English optimism."
A remarkable acoustic effect was created by the dainty chirruping of birds we could only
partially glimpse, perched high above us, atop lofty lianas. These adaptive, draping vines either
climbed into the tree canopy, reaching for sunlight, or started life already up there and sent roots
down to the ground.
Rodrigo took to naming new, strikingly colored species of birds he spotted through these
creepers as a means of keeping his spirits up. It proved a helpful distraction for me, also, from the
ever-so-elusive rustling sound I swore kept pace on either side. By the time our path opened up
into a stunning glade awash in a deluge of sunlight, my friend had named over a dozen fresh,
possibly endemic, species: 'Nice With Soya Sauce', 'Robin Under-the-Hood' and 'Luke
Vinewalker' are the ones I can recall.
The heat in the forest hollow was stifling. A liquid haze emanated from its singed yellow
grass like the flames of a phantom inferno. An hour earlier, our bones had creaked in a cavernous
chill. Now, fully thawed, we were roasting. I'm inclined to believe the old adage for persistent
rotten luck was prefixed thousands of years before by our
"Maybe you'll need this instead."
It was a brand new, black Beretta, fully loaded and ready to smoke: Ethel's twelve-round
life insurance policy she'd wrapped in a towel as if it were nothing more than a snazzy bathing
suit. Rodrigo looked hard at the plastic carrier I placed between us on the dry grass, and even
harder at me. To my surprise, he threw back the gun.
"New rule," he said, reaching into his own bag to pull out a silver six-shooter revolver,
"all twentieth century men go armed."
Chapter 7
Taking careful inventory of our supplies, I nibbled a chocolate Bourbon biscuit Rodrigo
gave me. Each now dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt--his was cream, mine was maroon--we
flung the heavy bags over our shoulders and sauntered up the verge toward the forest.
As we approached the first emerald thicket, I slowed to a creep. The place seemed
conspicuously quiet, and I sensed we were being watched.
"Keep a sharp eye," I said, wrenching a rotten branch to one side. "We're not alone."
The oppressive gloom ahead felt thick, tropical, over-cooked: a hotbed of stakes holding
up an evergreen roof. Rodrigo stretched the front of his t-shirt to soak up sweat from his
forehead. Our guns handy, we pressed on. After a while, insect noises drowned out the
silence.
The first half hour was hard going. Without a machete, forging a route through the brush
proved taxing. On some of the taller trees, the buttress roots were so pronounced we had to
negotiate an insanely convoluted route just to walk around them. Rodrigo explained how these
buttresses provide stability for tropical rainforest trees, whose roots are ordinarily not as deep as
those in temperate zones. Apparently, these ridges can reach thirty feet in height before blending
fully into the trunk; the highest we came across was closer to fifteen feet.
Rays of intense sunlight extended to the forest floor every now and then, illuminating all
manner of insects and dry particles in the air, similar to a cinema projection beam in a darkened
theatre. As we stopped to rest, I tried to absorb as much of this humid realm as I could.
"I wonder how much of this is extinct in our own time," I said.
Rodrigo sighed. "We're talking paleobotany come to life, that's for sure. I didn't even
realize there was ever a land mass where we're standing, so Christ only knows how far
back this is."
"Tell me about it. Dumitrescu said the fabric was from an animal that vanished nine
thousand years ago. He never said how long the species was actually around."
"Would it have made a difference?" Rodrigo asked.
"Probably not."
"Well, I have to say, Baz, this is the most reckless time travel I've ever been a part
of."
I laughed. "Don't thank me now. We're not even lost yet."
His faced remained deadpan as he shook his head and replied, "English optimism."
A remarkable acoustic effect was created by the dainty chirruping of birds we could only
partially glimpse, perched high above us, atop lofty lianas. These adaptive, draping vines either
climbed into the tree canopy, reaching for sunlight, or started life already up there and sent roots
down to the ground.
Rodrigo took to naming new, strikingly colored species of birds he spotted through these
creepers as a means of keeping his spirits up. It proved a helpful distraction for me, also, from the
ever-so-elusive rustling sound I swore kept pace on either side. By the time our path opened up
into a stunning glade awash in a deluge of sunlight, my friend had named over a dozen fresh,
possibly endemic, species: 'Nice With Soya Sauce', 'Robin Under-the-Hood' and 'Luke
Vinewalker' are the ones I can recall.
The heat in the forest hollow was stifling. A liquid haze emanated from its singed yellow
grass like the flames of a phantom inferno. An hour earlier, our bones had creaked in a cavernous
chill. Now, fully thawed, we were roasting. I'm inclined to believe the old adage for persistent
rotten luck was prefixed thousands of years before by our
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