PART THREE: Eat My Dust, Joseph Conrad In Which Our Intrepid Traveler Tames The Untamed Javari; Is Bored Into a Coma By The Fat-Mouthed Renato; And Meets His First Tribesman. Renato and I have chugged down the Javari River for some nine hours when we finally reach the jungle outpost of Atalaia do Norte. It is a welcome sight, as I'd forgotten to bring cards. I had also come to the unfortunate discovery that Renato is the most boring man in the universe. To pass the time on our boat ride, I try playing I Spy with him, but the poor backward clod's never heard of it and refuses to play. "But I don't know what you're looking at," he maintains, with a look of blank incomprehension. "That's the game, you idiot," I say. "I spy something with my little eye, and you have to guess what it was my little eye spied." "But your eyes are huge. Besides, you're looking right at me. Any fool can see that." "No, what I was looking at before," I explain. Huge eyes? What did he mean huge eyes? "How should I know what you were looking at before?" Renato says, shrugging his bony shoulders. "We are on a quick-moving boat on the Javari. By the time I have time to guess, what you saw will be yards behind us. I do not see howÑ" "Jesus, never mind," I say, turning my attention back to the scenery. I decide to just ignore him. Renato, for his part, downplays the awkwardness of the situation by cleaning out first his ear and then his nose with that enormous thumb of his. Finally I can't take the suspense any longer, and wheel back around to face him. "What do you mean I have huge eyes?" But Renato pretends to see something interesting in the outboard motor and won't answer. "You have a humongous forehead," I say. "All the natives were laughing at you in that last town." The next eight hours and forty-five minutes pass slowly. At around hour four, Renato interrupts the silence by pointing out a few mountains in the distance, and I in turn interrupt him by falling asleep. Undaunted, Renato tries to wake me up several times to go on about the mountains, which in his opinion are very important for some reason. An hour later he wakes me up to see a pair of frolicking blue-and-silver dolphins leaping over our boat. Whoop-tee-do. After several more interruptions, I just begin to imitate him the second he starts talking, crossing my eyes and lolling my tongue, until he mercifully gets the hint and watches the stupid dolphins and mountains himself. By hour six I can't pretend to nap anymore, so I try to get Renato to talk about girls he's had sex with. But he doesn't seem to want to talk about it, and conversation once again trails off. I play with my binoculars for the next three hours, and program the time into the digital clock on them. Luckily, Atalaia do Norte soon looms ahead of us. We disembark from the boat with considerable joy, as the long voyage has taught us one inescapable fact: Renato and I despise each other. We cast one another looks full of baleful spite as we stretch and survey our surroundings. The first thing that grabs my attention is a native man with a string fastened around his hips and looped around his penis. It is hard to miss. "Hey, Renato," I say, our earlier animosity melting away on dry land. "Check out this character." Renato tells me that the man is a Matis Indian, and that he speaks a dialect similar to the Tobatu. His name is Booma, and he will be our translator. He also vetos my wish to pull the string and make a "toot toot" noise. "Hello, Booma," I say, by way of introduction. "That's a nice tattoo you've got there." "This shows that I have the spirit of the leopard," he replies in halting English, pointing to the blotchy lines decorating his face. "That's nuts. Here, check this out." I show him my David Lee Roth tattoo, which has Roth decked out in tribal facepaint and making a face. Below the face are the letters EAT 'EM AND SMILE in devilish lettering. Booma is suitably impressed. We sit down to a quick meal of rice and what I still think were just leaves. The meal is bitter and tastes like shit, but Renato tells me to be quiet because I'm embarrassing him. After the meal we retire to a large fire, and there Booma tells us tales of the savage forest until I pay him five dollars to stop, as it's been a long day and I can't even pretend to be interested. I nestle into my sleeping bag knowing that I will be rubbing elbows with Tobatu by this time tomorrow. The fire crackles as I curl up close to it. I try to think about my home in America, and not of the frightening naked man with the rope tied to his genitals five feet to the left of me. Within minutes I am in deep sleep. I should have known better. intro / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8