by T. R. Ultra
He slouched back at the sofa, exhausted, and spoke through lips barely opened, “I told you. She let them know, Emily. She let them know. We can’t trust nobody.”
My stomach shriveled into a mass of grunts and anguish as the shards of the phone, of my only hope, shattered over the house floor. Camila stepped back, shifting her gaze between my eyes and the pistol in my hand.
She must have believed I’d use it at any moment. But Renato was losing his mind. I’d struggled too much, had been chased for too long, to believe that using a stranger’s cell phone would make the sky fall—like it hadn’t already.
Renato, after all, had crushed my best chance.
“Don’t let her out,” he said. “Don’t let her out.”
I fixed my eyes on Camila. Tears welled up in my eyes. I stifled an urge to cry and squeezed the pistol grip. Not to set it off, but to throw it against the wall, to smash it into pieces, along with the TV, the chair, anything to bury myself into, a perfect analogy of what my life had become.
Tears dripped down my cheeks, blurring my sight. When I rubbed my eyes with my back hand, I lost sight of Camila for only one or two seconds. When I opened my eyes I was staggering back, trying to keep straight. Those few seconds I didn’t stare at her, Camila darted toward me like an agile tiger, shoved me aside, and fled out the door.
“Não!” Renato said. “Emily, I told you. Damn it... cough... We gotta go, now. We gotta leave.”
I was destroyed, trying to muster the courage to continue, but I felt relieved. Camila had run away without getting shot.
“I’d never kill her, Renato. I’ve already killed today, and that’s enough for a whole lifetime.”
“I understand, Emily. I know you’re a good person. But we are fighting our own war inside a battle zone. The war for our lives. You have to understand that people die in wars. A life spared might be the one pulling the trigger against us in the future.”
It was hard processing his words. I still carried the illusion that I had been merely undergoing a nightmare, as though at any moment, someone would find me, and pull me out of it, just like waking up. But Renato’s reality drowned my hopes and made that nightmare continue.
“I’m sorry, Renato. I just . . . can’t believe she really intended to give us away.”
“The Devil has pretty faces, Emily. From now on, let me have the gun.”
“But you can barely walk,” I said.
“I’m strong enough to pull the trigger. There’s no room for hesitation if we want to stay alive.” He shifter over the couch, moaning. “Now, let me have it.”
I felt dizzy, incapable of taking in my surroundings, of properly recognizing the signs my eyes and my other senses were catching.
When coming up to Gloria Santa, I wasn’t welcome in the slum. The ugly stares were convincing. Yet, Renato assured me they came from frightened, fragile people that could only trust what they knew. And now, when certain of having found a helpful hand, it was rotten from the inside, belonging to a treacherous young girl, as Renato had said.
Shivering, I passed the gun over to him. He got up by himself.
“Now, let’s find our way out of here.”
Chapter 24
We walked out of Camila’s house and changed our plans once again. Instead of walking down the steps to the bottom of Gloria Santa, Renato said the safest, easiest way to reach the lower grounds would be through the cable car that linked the top of the slum to the bottom.
The heat in Rio created a goo in the air that made it heavy and difficult to breathe. But for the first time, I noticed the sky had an overcast of dark clouds about to dish out an ocean of rain above. Gusts of wind swooshed in and out of windows, pushed garbage cans to the ground, and stirred roof tiles that seemed about to rip apart.
Renato acted as though his energy had been replenished. Maybe this sudden twist in his physical condition was from how his body reacted to the herbs Fátima had given him. Perhaps it was due to the absence of the scorching sun in the sky, which dried out the life force of living beings.
Such a change might also have been related to the gun, because once he took hold of it, he went into an improved, self-assured state of mind. His physical condition, even his walking posture, soared once had the pistol in his hand.
Either way, Renato had gotten better after spending less than an hour stretched over Camila’s couch. And that was good enough for me.
When I asked about the cable car, or why he hadn’t suggested it before, Renato said it was because it was the most well-guarded entrance to the slum. A direct way to its summit, to the place where narcotics were kept hidden before being dispatched to the black market.
“And why are we going there now?” I asked.
“Because of the crowd rioting. There’s too much going on for the police to worry about us going down the cars.”
The sky dimmed to barely black, mostly because of overcast clouds, but also due to being late in the evening. We trailed along corridors of damp and blotched walls. While we marched over seedy paths, I remembered when Marlon and I had visited the Loretto Chapel, in New Mexico, where the marvelous engineering and the sanctity of faith met. Inside the chapel, a spiral wooden staircase towered up without a single nail being hammered. Rumor is that St. Joseph, patron of carpenters, blessed a stranger with the plans to build the structure that even today gets engineers flabbergasted.
Gloria Santa was no marvelous work of art, even though its not-caving-in could certainly be regarded as a miracle. It was a place where no engineer had ever set foot, aside from assembling the cable car and setting up its supporting towers. Yet, Gloria Santa sparked a resemblance to Loretto Chapel inside my mind.
Both had been built by unnamed strangers. Both had been towered up and held together in inconceivable ways. Both had stairs leading up and down.
And both had death as a recurring visitor. They only diverged in God’s presence. While one seemed to be a bold statement of his earthly affairs, the other was the exact opposite. Gloria Santa had been taken over by monsters.
Renato walked ahead of me, carrying the pistol in his hand. He went on slowly, not hopping over two steps on each stride, but certainly straighter on his feet as I followed behind. We crossed the hill sideways, toward the cable car upper entrance. Night slid into the sky, dawning the veil of darkness over the whole of Rio. But for whatever reason, in Gloria Santa, the night seemed darker, and certainly louder due to the rumbling at its feet.
The cable car top platform, as though willing to preserve consistency with local architecture, appeared to be altogether makeshift, blending itself into the uneven walls and crooked roofs that populated the favela. Its foundations crossed random buildings in diagonal lines, splitting the sight of poverty in two.
The platform had its pillars and walls coated in red paint. Weak white lights that surrounded the setting reducing the red to a taint of diluted blood, just like the blemishes on the ground of the clinic. I didn’t notice any ticket window from where we might find our entrance to the cars. As a matter of fact, even if there was a ticket window, we wouldn’t be able to buy anything from it. We were both broke.
Silence engulfed the platform, its support cables swaying slightly under wind gusts, but not carrying trolleys in nor out.
“Is it closed?” I asked Renato. I tugged at the corner of a peeling wall and pulled myself over the steps. I looked down from an upper vantage point over the cable car station. Buildings draped the face of Gloria Santa in its entirety. They tightly streamed down the hill, rooftops poking out here and there, threatening to cascade down the steep rocky slope after any minor nudge—a castle made out of poker cards.
Filtered through the layer of a drizzle that had started falling, bonfires blazed over at the bottom of the slum, its shine bouncing up against the brick walls more vividly than any light bulb in the alleyways.
“Trolleys are probably under a halt. Let me look around,” Renato replied. We went up more steps. They led into a coverage that
resembled a waiting place for trolleys. And a gate locked up with chains stated that service was shut for the day.
Renato walked toward the gate and leaned his good arm against it, producing a rattling that gave me chills. We were still two people being hunted, and even though we hadn’t come by any drug soldier between Camila’s house and the cable car, we needed to be careful.
Inside the platform, I made out the outline of a cable car against the night sky, even though all lights were turned off. The light came either from the buildings around or from street poles next to the platform.
Lightning flashed in the sky. Its light lingered in my eyes, and I caught the silhouette of a man on a narrow slope that streamed upward from the station. The figure leaned forward between the gaps of two buildings where artificial lights didn't reach.
“There’s someone there,” I said, pointing out the place to Renato.
He squeezed the pistol in his hand, bent his body double as though willing to protect himself from projectiles coming toward him.
A new strike of lightning and a thunderclap crackled in the sky, heavy drops of water hammered the aluminum ceiling above our heads. Through the deafening noise that pounded our ears, I kept my gaze at the gap between the buildings. But the silhouette of the man was gone.
Maybe I had seen a ghost.
I had already started sketching a new route to take us out of the slum. Going down was an option, but going up, across the soccer field, down into the forest, could work. Before I could tell Renato my idea a hand gripped my hair. When I turned around, I clashed against Renato’s lips.
His tongue dove into my mouth like smoldering coal into cold water. Startled, I jerked back, but then relented as his feverish tongue swept my troubles aside, even momentarily, putting us into a bubble of tranquility amid the chaos.
When we parted, I looked at his face barely lit, his eyes riveted to mine, and everything went silent. Even the raindrops stopped their plunge to the ground.
“It’s been too long since we kissed,” said Renato, “I had to taste you one more time.”
“When we leave this mess . . . we’ll have plenty of time,” I said.
Renato raised the corner of his mouth.
“My path is coming to an end, Emily.”
When he finished speaking, I froze. Not because the ill-fated inflection he brought to his words in spite of his smile, but due to the decisiveness of his statement, as though he was aware of facts I didn’t know.
“We’re leaving Gloria Santa alive,” I said. I wanted to say we’d leave unharmed, as though his shoulder injuries were only a small scratch on his body, but that would have sounded over the top.
We stood facing each other in a last minute bid of goodbye, the sound of the rain falling against the ceiling slowly rolled back in. A drip fell over Renato’s forehead coming from a hole in the aluminum, a shiny stream of water reflected the flashes of the storm and the bright of my own fired up stare.
It was at that moment, when again the world seemed to stop, that a light turned on inside the platform.
Chapter 25
A door opened inside the cable car service area. A door to what looked to be its control room. From a small window studded on the adjoining wall, a yellow incandescent light flicked on. Through the door of that same room a scoop-shouldered man came out. He ambled toward us, both hands cupping the nape of his neck, and stopped. He stretched his body out as though he had just got startled awake.
He and Renato exchanged words in Portuguese.
The man motioned his arms, as though in negation. Maybe a response to Renato’s querying if the cable car would be opened that night. Given the amount of wind punishing the slum, and the denseness of the rain, I could hardly believe his response might be any other than: “Can’t you see the storm, you fucking idiot?”
The man didn’t come closer to the gate. He remained a few steps away from us trying to gauge what kind of danger we might present to him, or, how long we would keep disturbing his sleep. A cool freshness blasted through Gloria Santa. The evening air was a great invitation for a quick nap, or a long sleep. Like cold water poured over sore skin.
The man was smaller than Renato, slimmer, older and rougher. There was barely enough contrast to picture his shape on the platform, the man was a mass of blackness highlighted by thin lines where light, coming from behind, ricocheted on his skin. In this gloomy environment, Renato was able to hide the gun, the cold metal barrel camouflaged among shadows.
The man raised his hand and pointed at me. His coarse cigarette voice all over the place.
I didn’t budge. He clearly wanted to know something. Probably after guessing the storm might be softening his voice, he raised the volume, repeating the sound patterns I’d heard before.
Renato followed the direction of that man’s raised finger and glimpse back at me. “He thinks he’s seen your face somewhere.”
“On TV?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t play the odds.”
I stared at Renato as the old man walked away from us toward the wall of the control room. The rumble in the sky offered a quick truce, but darkness loomed around us, as though coming in closer, dimming even the bright artificial light. The glistening metal barrel of the gun in Renato’s hand wedged between two iron bars at the gate, aimed at the man walking away from us.
“No!” I shouted.
When the man looked back at us, a flash erupted from the pistol, a whip-like snap of the bullet firing. The thud of a body hitting the floor, not so much the muffle of a bag of sand dropping on wood slats as the popping of a coconut bouncing on concrete.
The man inside the cable car bent over, his hands protecting his head, ran back into the control room. Renato’s body lay dead stretched on the ground beneath me, as a glimmering puddle started to form underneath his shadowed torso.
I looked back towards the winding slope that set off from the cable car platform. The ghost that I thought I had seen between two rickety buildings was now under the light, walking toward the cable car. Another one also in SWAT like uniforms appeared at the right corner of my view, coming out from behind a ramshackle of a house. He was the one who shot Renato. And I realized I had come to a dead end.
A hide-and-seek game. After I had been found, I ought to hit a home run, or my freedom was gone.
A deep, dragon-like roar thundered in the sky, lightning strikes painting the night white. I cringed under the din of nature and noticed, beside my feet, the pistol that had been in Renato’s hand.
“What do you want from me?” I cried. My voice mingled with the stormy weather delivering both the power of nature and the sorrow of a desperate life in a single blast of sound.
The men in SWAT uniforms did not respond. They came closer, uniforms wet, rifles glistening—ready to take another life. Higher in the slope, other figures protected from the storm by small, black umbrellas. They were the devilish counterparts to Mary Poppins and descended the hillside in black suits.
“Haven’t you killed enough people? What do you want from me!” I screamed.
Officer Paulo Pinto and Roberto Rôla shuffled down the slope with the sway of a demon. They did not offer any reaction. It was as if their affairs had been settled on top of Gloria Santa.
Their goons in uniform kept closing the distance between us.
Then I saw it. It was in the span of a couple of seconds, between the flashes of a night sky crackling apart. Tucked beside the cable car platform. Between one of its foundation pillars and the foot of a three-storey building that seemed on the verge of collapsing. Into where a stream of churning rainwater flew down. I saw the chance to hide again. I would run for home base in this deadly hide-and-seek game taking place in Rio.
I looked at Renato’s body and immediately regretted it. Instead of the memory of a last kiss, of his warm and tanned body, I would take with me the picture of his lifeless eyes. His body laid on the ground, motionless, coated in white only when lightning hit Rio, otherw
ise draped in shadows of gray.
I reached down and picked up the pistol. Then I ran. Out of the coverage. Into the falling sky. My face dripping from the fresh drops of rain and the sour taste of tears.
When I plunged into the only way out, it all went black.
Chapter 26
I clutched my fingers around the pistol grip as my body slid through the crack between the buildings. A narrow slope that slithered past walls of brick, serving as a gutter during storms and an alleyway in dry weather. I slipped and landed on my ass. And then I went down a jagged-surfaced water slide, which ripped my jeans apart and opened cuts on my skin.
I raised my hands to protect my head. The tide of rainwater flowing downstream splashed against the nape of my neck, and pushed my floating body to the bottom of the alleyway. I looked up and found only darkness. Wet darkness. Then thunder rumbled in the sky. I saw at walls like clouds blurring past me.
“You better reach for it, Emily.” I heard Marlon’s voice inside my head. I was climbing a tree to where our cat, had hidden himself away. The Neighbor’s dog had attacked him on the street. Even though the dog was gone, Joshua would not come down from the tree. I tried soothing him out both with low and loud calls, tried to lure him down with treats, tried to get him out with a broomstick, but all attempts failed. Seven hours later, already exhausted and freezing, I latched onto the tree and clambered up.
Marlon stood waiting, uttering motivational words. Yeah, I better rescue Joshua. And I better find a way out of this ill-fated slide fall.
The blackness receded as I rounded a corner into a new, steeper, slicker human-sized gutter between buildings. Looking down, toward my feet, I saw light specks accelerate toward me. I bounced against the rocks, heard a buzz inside my head after grazing my temple, and had air forcibly expelled from my lungs. When I breathed, mouth gaped open, I filled my lungs with equivalent amounts of air and dirty water.