The Trade Mission by Andrew Pyper

Author:Andrew Pyper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

WHERE is all this blood coming from?

There certainly is enough of it to make you wonder, curling up in little whirlpools in the water that has seeped through somewhere along the twenty feet of the canoe’s hull. None of us know exactly where that’s coming from, either. Bates bails out what he can with an empty coffee tin, Wallace keeps a grip on the stuttering outboard, and Barry lies jackknifed across the prow, a sickly mermaid, eyes shut in a way unlike sleep. None of us have spoken for a good while. The last English we’d heard was a woman’s screams.

Dawn long given way to morning, morning to the hard hours that brighten everything into pastels, like an old black-and-white movie that’s been colorized. Each blink a snapshot of where we are: the hunched back of jungle, the chocolate river, two of those white parrot things that mate for life but spend the whole time screeching at each other.

When someone finally speaks, it’s Wallace. And when he does it is the words of polite conversation between strangers, the banter of elevator and waiting room. The most globally civilized words one can think of.

“It’s going to be a hot one today,” he says.

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