by John Koloen
His camp lay about fifty miles east of Jacareacanga, surrounded by massive, ongoing deforestation by landowners bent on replacing slow-growing hardwoods with fast-growing and more profitable oil palms to produce biofuels. To the south, landowners had harvested trees in wide strips that extended several miles, leaving equally wide strips of old growth forest waiting to be harvested. They stood out like green islands amidst a sea of barren sandy devastation dotted with piles of charcoal and stumps, waiting for heavy equipment or dynamite to rip them from the earth. Eventually, all of the terrain would be repurposed.
A wall of granite and sedimentary rock rose on the opposite side of Braga's claim, paralleling the riverbed. Behind it lay the remains of old growth forest that had been harvested, leaving an exposed landscape of vegetative debris savaged by heavy machinery. Huge clouds of dark smoke towered in the distance as crews reduced the remaining vegetation to ash. Where the devastation had been completed stood vast stretches of palms, planted in grids.
Braga’s operation was suboptimal, but produced enough return to convince him that better times lay ahead. Problem was that he didn’t have access to enough water. The rainy season was underway. But so far, little rain. He’d had his men dam a creek and construct a small reservoir. But he was always pulling out more than was coming in, and he could do the math in his head and see where he was headed. One day, there’d be no water and he’d be finished. Or, if he managed to maintain a water supply, eventually the landowners would take it away from him.
For the most part, the men who did the work were illiterate and had few skills, compensating with endurance and strong backs. The money that Braga paid would have fallen far short of a living wage in Manaus, but it was enough to keep them in the camp that Braga had established on a sandbar between the reservoir and the hillside. Four high-walled tents and several freestanding canopies were arranged on the sandbar. Three of the tents housed the dozen workers. The fourth, Braga shared with his cook. Each of the three tents contained bunk beds with decent mattresses supported by sheets of plywood. A rickety shed stood near one end of the camp, constructed of scrap lumber. The front was open with a canvas awning providing shade. This was the camp’s cook shack and the domain of the oldest crew member, Octavio Grimaldi, who kept the younger men well fed and happier than they might otherwise have been. Grimaldi had spent much of his life at sea, mostly as a cook on oil tankers plying the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Unlike the younger men, who clamored for instant wealth and complained about not having anywhere to spend their meager wages, the cook wasn’t excitable and was content with his life. Braga liked the stories he sometimes told of exotic ports, and the Pão de Queijo he served every week.
Braga knew his operation wouldn’t last long. He could sniff it in the air. Every day the distant smoke and flames drew closer, and with it the landowners who claimed title to the land. Braga felt that, because the area had already been decimated, authorities were less likely to be patrolling in search of operations such as his. That and the remoteness of the location, served by makeshift roads that turned to mud for half the year, but not this year. Not yet.
31
Victor Machado was disappointed that his cousin wouldn’t accompany him on his first and only solo hunt, but this was the third time he’d entered the forest, twice as a spectator while other miners hunted, and it felt familiar to him. He wasn’t following a trail as such, just the remnants of footprints left in the barren ground separating the worksite from the first strip of forest, or as he called it, the jungle, one of a number of English words that he’d learned in school, though he was not proficient and could not string together more than two foreign words before drawing a blank. Still, he thought of himself as worldly and above average on most things.
He carried the bow and three arrows in one hand as he made his way. A city boy, he’d fantasized about the jungle but hadn’t spent any time in one until he’d become a miner. This would be the first time he’d gone into it alone. It was also the first time he’d gone hunting on his own. It was a day of firsts. He’d practiced with the bow. An optimist, he thought that if he got close enough he could bag a small mammal, though it would be up to the cook to prepare it. Victor had no idea how to field dress his quarry.
Entering the forest in the late afternoon, he paused several times to listen and watch for movement in the undergrowth. He avoided straying far from the path the previous hunters had taken, though it wasn’t a path as such, just a meandering, thinly vegetated cleavage between the understory on either side. But as alert to movement as he was, jacked on the trepidation of being alone under the unforgiving canopy, he advanced slowly, looking over his shoulder at the once visible opening that in the distance resembled a tunnel through which he’d entered the forest. It had disappeared as the twists and turns led him deeper into the shadowy and suddenly noisy bush.
He thought he saw movement everywhere in the surrounding ferns, vines and trees, loud with spider monkeys, and higher up in the canopy birds that he couldn’t see chattering in various dialects, perhaps in response to his presence. All eyes were on him as he took aim at what he imagined to be an undersized tapir not far off the trail, mostly hidden by shade and underbrush. He could not tell for certain what it was. Animals that he’d seen in a zoo looked different in the wild and he just hoped that his arrow would find its mark. Inching forward from a squatting position, he pulled the string back and held it for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for his left arm to steady before releasing the arrow, nearly as long as he was tall, watching as if in slow motion as the slender shaft bounced off the soft ground before drawing a shriek from the target. The animal lurched deeper into the forest but, skewered by the arrow, pinned itself against a vine, its piteous squeals unnerving the startled hunter.
Victor’s image of the hunt had not included a wounded animal, and for a moment he debated whether to walk away. Not only was his prey squealing, but the canopy erupted with noises from the audience. But then the squealing stopped. Was the animal dead? he wondered. Taking several brave steps, he moved past the ferns that had camouflaged the animal only to see that instead of a tapir he had killed a red-rumped agouti, which looked to him like a large rat. Setting his bow and remaining arrows on the ground, he approached the rodent, pulled on the fletched end of the arrow and, satisfied that it was dead, lifted the shaft perpendicular to the ground. The carcass slid until stopped by the arrowhead. It was heavier than he’d expected, and now he was preoccupied with deciding on the best way to carry it back to camp. Blood was dripping from the end of the arrow and he didn’t want to get it on his shoes. He wasn’t even certain whether he should bring it back, since he’d never eaten agouti and didn’t know whether it was edible. But it was proof that he was a hunter. He couldn’t turn his back on that. If nothing else, his cousin would be impressed. But absorbed by these thoughts he was unaware of what was going on around him, of movement on the shadowy forest floor as if it had come alive, advancing toward him, undulating and rippling like a wave relentlessly ascending a beach.
Monkeys watched from above, their volume increasing as if in warning, except that Victor had tuned them out. It wasn’t until he felt something crawling up his legs that he distractedly slapped at them as if they were mosquitoes, suddenly aware that they weren’t mosquitoes. Dropping his kill, he started hopping, aware that he was being attacked but knowing nothing about the attackers. Instinctively, he pulled at the bullet-shaped insects on his legs, longer than his middle finger and thick as his thumb. One at a time he grabbed, pulling against resistance as they buried their sharp forelimbs into his flesh. It wasn’t working. Looking down at the ground, he could see that the insects had covered his shoes and his ankles and watched in horror as they scuttled up his legs, embedding themselves in the soft flesh of his inner thighs, which quickly oozed with blood.
Screaming, in full panic mode, he stumbled on a vine, falling to all fours, his head down, insects swooping onto him from above, the low-pitched whirring of their
wings adding to his terror. Rising, his body enveloped by the roiling mass, he covered his face as if he could protect it any better than he could protect his legs. The insects responded by squeezing through the gaps so that they could mutilate his eyes, chopping through the cornea and pupil, their heads buried in the vitreous body, sucking drops of it as he stumbled into a tree, knocking himself onto his back, the insects squeezing into every opening, feasting on his soft parts while burrowing into his body one scoop at a time. In shock, every inch of his body covered by the quivering mass, he was no longer able to clench his teeth, a handful of the killers filling his mouth, stifling his screams, gagging him as they quickly worked their way into his esophagus where they stopped to excavate.
All the while, the monkeys and birds squawked and howled at the scene, like spectators at a medieval execution. For a brief moment, on this otherwise cloudy day, the sun sent a shaft of warming light through the aperture in the tree tops revealing the now quivering lump as Victor’s life drained out of him, his fluids soaking into the moist ground, his digested body to be returned to the forest as insect excrement while his prey lay undisturbed, its sturdy hide too much to bother with when Victor offered more nourishment than the large Reptilus blaberus scouting party could consume.
32
Word was circulating that Braga’s men had uncovered several shallow, unmarked graves. He ascribed them to previous mining operations conducted by other operators. Men die in the floresta, he told them, just as they die in cities. Most of the miners shrugged. He promised that if one of them died, he would return the body to his family rather than leave him in the forest. It was a promise he never expected to keep until one of his miners failed to return from hunting. Victor Machado, armed with a bow and several arrows that he’d purchased from a tribesman in Jacareacanga, had designs on a small tapir or monkey.
His absence was first noticed by his cousin, Ramon Gaspar. The cook, who had delayed the evening meal expecting fresh meat, quickly responded to the hungry men with rice and beans. The boss knew that nothing settled men’s minds better than a full stomach. Other than the promise of payment, there was little to hold a miner to someone else’s claim. It was hard, dirty work. The hours were long and the rewards weren’t guaranteed. Braga had not been the first to search for gold on his claim, for which there was no legal basis. He considered himself an expert at finding gold that others had left behind. A scavenger. The area he was working had never seen the big, industrialized outfits that washed away mountains of earth in the pursuit of wealth. There wasn’t enough water to sustain such operations, nor were there enough minerals to cover the cost of road building. But a small operation like Braga’s could succeed.
Had it not been for the cousin, Braga might have ignored the incident. Men come and go. Looking for someone in the forest was pointless, unless you had some idea where he had gone. It wasn’t the first time a worker had disappeared. The cousin insisted that his relative could not have gone far and that he had had no intention of quitting, noting that his clothing and personal items were in his tent. But Braga was having none of it. The missing man didn’t have permission to leave.
“I am not paying you so you can go hunting whenever you want,” Braga said brusquely.
“I didn’t go hunting,” Ramon said.
“You knew about it.”
The cousin looked away sheepishly. The day had not gone well for Braga. The diesel generator powering the water pump had stopped running several times and the boss had spent much of the day listening to the motor, trying to discern clues as to what ailed it. The machine seemed to have a mind of its own. And the last thing Braga wanted to see were idle men. It wasn’t just because no work was being done but because he knew that idleness on the job site led to gambling and fighting. He wanted his men to work hard all day so that at night they were too tired to do anything but sleep. It was the reason he banned alcohol from the camp.
“You are free to go look for him. But if you do, don’t come back,” Braga said sharply. “Take your things and your cousin’s things with you.”
It was already too late to look for his cousin, though Ramon had a good idea where his relative had gone. Surprised by Braga’s threat, he spent the night asking God what he should do.
Braga’s attention was again riveted to the balky generator the next day. It seemed that every time he took his eyes off it for five minutes it would stop running. Ramon started the day hopeful that his relative would return soon, with or without game. But as the day progressed, his anxiety increased as Victor hadn’t returned. He could accept that his cousin might have gone too far to make it back before nightfall and was hopeful that he’d found a safe place to spend the night. But not two nights. But it wasn’t just because his cousin was missing. It was about what he would say to his relatives if he didn’t go looking for him. It gnawed at him throughout the day until it got to the point that he was on the verge of sneaking out of camp, and he asked a tentmate if he could cover for him.
“I worked for Braga before in a different place,” the man said. “There was a worker once who got drunk and challenged him to a fight. He was angry about something the boss had done. I don’t remember what exactly, but he was upset like you. Ready to do something. Of course, he was drunk and irrational.”
Ramon eyed his tentmate expectantly.
“The man confronted Braga face to face. He screamed at him. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Braga stood there like he was listening to every word. And then he bent down like he was going to tie his shoes and—wham—just like that, smashed him under his chin with an uppercut.”
The storyteller paused, letting the tension build.
“What happened?”
“He hit his head on a rock and never woke up. He had no relatives on the crew, and we only knew him as Arturo. Nobody knew where he came from. We buried him in a sand pit. So, the answer to your question is no, I won’t cover for you.”
He wasn’t certain whether he should bring up his cousin’s disappearance a second time. Braga had been yelling at the men all day, exhorting them to make up for lost time whenever he restarted the generator. It was clear that he was frustrated and angry, and the men, including the cook, avoided him as best they could, not even making eye contact for fear of unwanted attention.
But Ramon couldn’t shake it off. It would be better if Braga prevented him from searching for his cousin than to do nothing. His relatives would understand. Braga was the boss. He had a reputation for violence. He was armed. But in his own mind, he needed Braga to put an end to the uncertainty that had come to infect his thoughts.
He approached Braga after the evening meal. The workday was behind them. Lanterns glowed in the tents. Stars began to appear in the moonless sky, wisps of smoke passing overhead like gauzy clouds. Braga stood over a small fire, chatting with the cook, smoking a cigar. He told Octavio Grimaldi that he finally figured out what was wrong with the generator and was confident that the mining operation would return to normal in the morning. The cousin didn’t know this as he approached Braga, the light from the flames turning his bearded face into an otherworldly mask.
“Senhor,” the man said, timidly.
Unexpectedly, Braga wrapped his arm around him, causing Ramon to tense.
“Ah, Ramon,” he said warmly. “Are you here again to talk about your cousin?”
The man nodded.
Had the circumstance been different, Braga might have put his foot down but he was feeling triumphant insofar as he believed he had singlehandedly defeated the recalcitrant generator.
“So he hasn’t returned today, has he?”
“No, senhor. There’s something wrong. He would never stay out like this. I have pictures in my mind of him lying injured. I can think of nothing else.”
“If I say you can go look for him tomorrow—” Braga started to say, holding the cigar near his face, but was interrupted.
“Oh, Senhor Braga, I will forever be in your debt.”
Braga smiled, nodding benevolently.
He knew that the man would be no good to him if he didn’t allow him to look for his cousin. He knew if it was his cousin, he would at least go through the motions of a search, even if he believed it useless, just so he too could report honestly to his family that he had tried.
Expecting nothing to come from it, Braga gave the cousin the next day off without pay to find his relative, but specified that he would have to go alone, as he could not afford to let more men take time off. However, when the next day came, the generator wouldn’t work. The diesel ran for several minutes, then belched a huge cloud of black smoke and quit with a shudder. Men watched and waited while Braga alternately cursed and worked on the device, assisted by Grimaldi. Within an hour he’d identified the problem as electrical in nature, but as he had no manual and little experience making electrical repairs, he couldn’t predict how long it would take to fix, assuming he had the parts. He ordered his men to clean up the camp and not to loaf, which is what they would have done had Ramon not returned to the camp with his cousin’s bow, shouting and crying.