nce Strickland finds the fifty-foot riverboat in its appointed place, he uses his new lighter to burn Hoyt’s brief, SOP. Now the whole thing is black, he thinks, the whole thing is redacted. Like everything down here, the boat offends his military standards. It’s garbage nailed to garbage. The smokestack is patched with hammered tin. The tires atop the gunwales look deflated. A sheet stretched between four poles offers the only shade on the vessel. It’ll be hot. That’s good. Burn away torturous thoughts of Lainie; their cool, clean home; the whisper of the Florida palms. Boil his brain into the kind of fury a mission like this requires.

Dirty brown water squirts between dock slats. Some of the crew are white, some tan, some red-brown. Some are painted and pierced. All lug wet crates across a plank that dramatically dips with the weight. Strickland follows and reaches a hull stenciled Josefina. Small portholes suggest the most perfunctory of lower decks, just big enough for a captain. The very word captain rankles him. Hoyt’s the only captain here, and Strickland is Hoyt’s proxy. He’s in no mood for fatuous ship-steerers who think they’re in charge.

He finds the captain, a bespectacled Mexican with a white beard, white shirt, white pants, and white straw hat signing manifests with excessive flourishes. He shouts “Mr. Strickland!” and Strickland feels like he’s been transported inside one of his son’s Looney Tunes: Meester Streekland! He’d committed the captain’s name to memory somewhere above Haiti: Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez. It fits, starting off well enough before ballooning into pomposity.

“Look! Escoces and puros cubanos, my friend, all for you.” Henríquez hands over a cigar, fires up one of his own, and pours two glasses. Strickland was trained not to drink on the job but permits Henríquez his toast. “¡To la aventura magnífico!” They drink, and Strickland admits to himself that it feels good. Anything to ignore, just for a while, the looming shadow of General Hoyt, what it might mean for Strickland’s future if he fails to properly “motivate” Henríquez. For the duration of the scotch, the heat of his innards equalizes with that of the jungle.

Henríquez is a man who has spent too much time blowing smoke rings: They are perfect.

“Smoke, drink, enjoy! It is all you will know of luxury for much time. It is good you came no later, Mr. Strickland. Josefina is impatient to depart. Like Amazonia, it waits for no man.” Strickland doesn’t like the implication. He sets down his glass and stares. Henríquez laughs, claps his hands. “Quite right. Men like us, pioneers of the Sertão, it is not necessary we express excitement. Los brasileños honor us with a word: sertanista. It has a fine sound, sí? It stirs the blood?”

Henríquez recounts in dull detail his trip to an outpost of the Instituto de Biologia Maritima. He claims that he has handled—with his own dos manos!—limestone fossils said to resemble descriptions of Deus Brânquia. Scientists date the fossils to the Devonian Period, which, did you know, Meester Streekland, is part of the Paleozoic Era? This, Henríquez intones, is what attracts men like them to Amazonia. Where primitive life yet thrives. Where man might page back the calendar and touch the untouchable.

Strickland holds his question for an hour. “Did you get the charter?”

Henríquez stubs his cigar and frowns out the porthole. There he finds something to grin about and gestures imperiously.

“You see the face tattoos? The nose dowels? These are not Indians like your Tonto. These are índios bravos. Every kilometer of the Amazon, from Negro-Branco to Xingu, they know in their blood. From four different tribes they come. And I have secured them as guides! It is impossible, Mr. Strickland, for our expedition to become lost.”

Strickland repeats: “Did you get the charter?”

Henríquez fans himself with his hat. “Your Americans mailed me mimeographs. Very well. Our expedição científica will follow their wiggly lines for as long as we can. Then, Mr. Strickland, we move on foot! We locate the vestigios, the remains of original tribes. These people have suffered from industry more than you can imagine. The jungle swallows their screams. We, however, will come in peace. We will offer gifts. If Deus Brânquia exists, they will be the ones to tell us where to find it.”

In General Hoyt’s parlance, the captain is motivated. Strickland gives him that. But there are warning signs, too. If Strickland knows anything about untamed territory, it is that it stains you, inside and out. You do not wear white clothing unless you do not know what the hell you are doing.