Chapter 16

Venezuela

“Where do you go at night, Jaron?”

He mumbled something about the jungle.

“I knew that. Show me.” Robbie debated making it a request, but didn’t dare risk giving him an out. Her grant was up and she had to walk out in the morning, nearly a week to tramp to the nearest port. Jaron had decided to leave at the same time, to once again cross the Sierra de Curupiras into the Upper Amazon.

And she was damned if they were going to sleep apart on their last night of three months together. He still flinched away if she even brushed against him by accident and, though she could easily find some sexual partner once she was back in school, she didn’t want to wait. There were some hidden depths here that drew her. And, dammit, she liked the man.

There was a look of panic as his eyes repeatedly darted in her direction and away. He arranged his empty journals and pencils for the twentieth time on the desk. He rearranged the hardcopies of the journal articles they’d cowritten. Under her name alone at his insistence, although she’d argued long and fruitlessly against taking the credit for his research. He truly cared only about the truth and was terrified of having his name released anywhere.

He didn’t answer, but rather edged to the door. She slung a machete and water bottle over one shoulder and followed him out into the evening light as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Harold swooped down out of the sky and landed on Jaron’s shoulder.

“Harro, Brobrie.”

“Hey there, Harold.”

The macaw bobbed his head at her and rode backwards on Jaron’s shoulder for a while. Sometimes inspecting her, sometimes the sky above. Once they were clear of the camp Jaron turned to the east.

“But you always leave camp to the southwest.”

Harold rode up and down on Jaron’s apologetic shrug. “I start southwest and then circle around each night.”

The heat of anger rose up within her. Why was she wasting time with this man? He was so closed off. So bloody gun shy that she wanted to slap him sharply just to shake him out of his own world a little bit. But then there were the moments when they were working together.

Jaron would forget she was a woman or even a person distinct from himself. When they worked together there was a synergy that echoed from one mind to the other until they were finishing each other’s sentences, working out problems level by level. Neither able to climb the height on their own, but together reaching easily right out of the superstory and up into the stratosphere.

Somewhere inside him, that passion must exist for something other than his work. She kept telling herself. It must. Harold’s love of the man supported that intuition. Great. Now she was envious of a parrot.

She almost turned back to sleep her last night on the bunk she’d rigged in the back of the lab, but then he turned to make sure she was still following. Robbie couldn’t be sure, perhaps it was the set of his shoulders, or the way he moved, but he must have crossed some threshold himself. He hadn’t looked back in hope that she wasn’t following, but rather to make sure she was.

Harold turned to face forward as they penetrated deeper and deeper beneath the canopy. The failing light of the day barely reached down to the forest floor.

She wished she’d thought of a flashlight as Jaron moved nimbly ahead and she stumbled over hidden roots and nearly twisted an ankle in a rodent’s burrow. At least a kilometer from the station he halted at the base of one of the largest Diplotropis trees she’d ever seen. The great arching roots rose high enough to make separate rooms in the spaces around the base.

Jaron indicated a tangle of vines which she quickly realized was a harness.

“But there’s only one.”

“I don’t need one.” True to his words, he dug his hands into the leaves of the vine-wrapped trunk and began ascending rapidly upward. It took her a while to adjust the harness for her much larger frame. Someone as slender as Jaron must have been the last to use this.

“Hurry,” his whisper shadowed down through the jungle. He was already halfway up by the time she had the harness sorted out.

Once in, she ascended rapidly. When she arrived high in the tree, she clambered out onto a wide crotch where half-a-dozen branches reached out to form their portion of the canopy. But Jaron was nowhere to be seen.

“Where are you?” For some reason she whispered. There was a waiting hush this close to the sky. The sunset speckled the leaves above her. And then she picked out the unnatural shape of a small square platform above her. A narrow ladder, barely enough for her to place two feet on the same rung, continued up the main trunk to the platform. When she reached the wooden structure, the ladder continued yet again upward. There, lit in a dazzle of orange light, Jaron was perched and looking out across the jungle.

Robbie edged up below him until her face was even with his feet and she turned to look. They were over a hundred meters in the air, a few feet above the top of the tree. The world bobbed and swayed with the gentlest breeze, and Harold was nowhere to be seen.

The rolling hills of the jungle rose and fell in shining yellows and greens along their crowns, and pitch-dark shadows of night in the valleys. Above her, swirling against the pink sky were a hundred gnats. But that wasn’t the right perspective.

Parrots. A hundred, a thousand, filled the sky, climbing ever higher until they were the last things lit by the sun, now set beyond the horizon of trees. Groups, small at first, then larger and larger, broke and descended toward the trees. Harold, identifiable by his size and aim soared down like a bullet to land on his friend’s shoulder.

The empty sky shaded from blue to purple-black as the first stars peeked out into the firmament. A lone bat swung up into the night sky. A fury of wingbeats after the long, gliding swoops of the parrots. Then another and another joined in the diving flight to begin their nightly meal of bugs.

She descended reluctantly back to the platform. And Jaron followed close behind. With the two of them, the narrow platform was dangerous enough simply standing, no railings against the hazard of rolling over in one’s sleep even if there’d been enough room to stretch out.

“Where do we sleep?”

He pointed downward.

“I don’t know about doing that whole descent in the dark. I’d never find my way back out of the jungle.”

Without a word the man continued down the ladder past the platform and she was left with no option but to follow his lead. At the crotch in the tree, which she found more by touch than sight, he waited for her.

“Here,” was all the guidance he offered. There was no way for two of them to sleep there without touching, which was fine by her, but for Jaron it was clearly a major concern.

They performed a silent dance of body parts and branches until they were both sitting in relative comfort. Robbie sat with her back against the main trunk, a wide branch sweeping beneath her right arm holding her in place. Her feet rested easily on a slightly lower branch shooting off into the darkness. She kept the harness on, loosening it more than she knew she would if she could see how distant the forest floor lay.

Jaron’s left thigh was pressed hard against her right one as they faced each other. He had supports for his back and legs as well. The open drop to his right didn’t seem to bother him or the parrot on his shoulder, so she decided she’d better not make an issue of it. She kept her left hand ready to grab him if it should prove necessary.

It was the first time they’d touched, other than by accident, since she’d helped him back into his chair on that first day. They sat for a long time in the darkness before she could bring herself to break the night’s stillness.

“Thank you, Jaron.”

“For what?” She could no longer see his face in the darkness. She knew the moon would be up later. But here, beneath the platform and the tops of the skylit trees, any stray starlight only showed the vaguest outlines.

“For the parrots. It was… It was breathtaking.”

“I know.”

“You know, but you’ve never written about it. After three months, I know your data as well as you do. There is nothing on the nocturnal habits of parrots, not even under your sister’s name. Why do you do that anyway?”

He didn’t answer and his breathing became ragged in the night air. She wished again she’d thought to bring a handlight. This time so that she could see his face.

A shudder passed down his leg where it pressed against hers. She rested a hand against his leg as the shudders grew worse.

“What is it, Jaron? What?”

“I…” the word was torn from somewhere deep inside him. Harold squawked in concern. “I killed her.” Part cry, part scream from the soul.

“What? How?” It was hard to believe this gentle man of the jungle could have hurt anything, never mind his own sister.

“I… I submitted,” his voice choked and broke and stammered, “my doctoral thesis in her name. When she wasn’t here. Then the WEC came. You see, I was so excited, I couldn’t wait. Couldn’t stand to wait for her. They came. I couldn’t wait for her to get home from the city. The WEC must have seen her in two places. They… I killed her.”

Robbie reached toward the sobbing man and pulled him against her. He laid his head on her chest and wept. Harold, robbed of his perch by her arms enfolding Jaron’s shoulders, climbed onto her shoulder for the first time. Though lighter than she’d guessed, he was a solid comforting weight. She could feel the parrot leaning forward to preen Jaron’s hair in an attempt to comfort him.

She’d heard stories of the WEC. Though she’d never lost anyone herself, many of her friends had. A few people simply left class and never returned, but she’d never given them much thought. Maybe they too were victims. Why would Jaron be hiding behind his dead sister’s name and why was all their work this spring under her own name only? Because they had come hunting him. That must be it.

Was she embracing death, here in the center of the Orinoco, hundreds of feet above the jungle floor?

Well, if she was, then to hell with them. Jaron was a good man. She’d trust her own instincts, and Harold’s. Jaron was so gentle with the parrots. They trusted him. She held him tightly against her as his sobs eased and he slowly quieted into a deep slumber. Harold moved onto her wrist where it lay across Jaron’s shoulder, tucked his head beneath his wing and joined his master in sleep.

She’d find a way back here next spring, grant or no.

The moon was a long time rising.