by A. D. Flint
Chapter 18
Jake
The early-morning sun was streaming through the gaps in the curtains, carving golden slashes across seats and slumped heads. The bus whined through the gears as it slowed to pull off the single carriageway to a roadside café for a breakfast stop and driver switch.
A couple of hours after the lunch stop, struggling to tell whether his backside was aching or numb, Jake saw the first signs for Cruzeiro, his destination.
This was where the priest had said he should start looking for Vilson’s mother. He had contacted Padre Francisco through Eliane and stopped to meet him en route to the bus station. His mother’s lucky-dip Catholicism had never rubbed off on him and he didn’t have the highest opinion of priests, but Padre Francisco had projected a sense of calm that had settled over him like a blanket. In the cramped little office in the Candelária church, everything had seemed clear and simple.
“I think it is better that you go without Vilson,” Padre Francisco had said. His eyes had clouded then, Jake recognising a look of regret. He had seen a fair few of those in his life.
“Please don’t expect too much,” Padre Francisco had said. “A lot of time has passed. I don’t even have an address for his mother, just a town, and she may have moved on by now.”
Seventy-three kilometres to go, the latest sign said. The town was north of Rio and inland, somewhere out in the heartland of Brazil beneath the thick, green crown of the Amazon. Vast fields of sugar cane, tall and strong under the fierce sun, rolling away on either side of the road. The tarmac was black and shiny in the tyre tracks, covered everywhere else in a fine, red dust.
The bus chugged up and then ran down a series of hills along a stretch of straight road before finally turning off. It wound down a slope through the edge of town, bridged a dried-out riverbed and climbed through a newer, more sparsely populated area. The driver announced Cruzeiro’s bus station as he pulled into what was little more than a big concrete shelter. It was completely deserted.
“I hope you’re here somewhere,” Jake said to himself, the baked air sucking the moisture from his lungs as he stepped from the bus.
Small town, smaller pool of people to trawl. That was a plus. But the reality was he had no photo to go on, little in the way of description and no fixed address. He did, at least, have a starting point. The church. An overheated horse and cart plodded past; he hadn’t seen a moving car yet. It looked like a taxi was out of the question.
He started back down the hill, over the dried-out riverbed and up the other side into the centre of the town. He resolved to stop any middle-aged woman he saw and ask her name, but he only passed a couple of young mothers with covered buggies protecting their babies from the sun, and a few old folks, gently desiccating in the heat as they hobbled from one patch of shade to another.
The modest church was in the central square. An oasis of greenery and trees surrounded by a parade of shops and the town’s older, colonial-style houses. The whitewashed church walls were scrubbed free of the red-earth stains that were splashed up the skirts of many of the houses he had passed.
He had to wait a good hot while in the square before the old priest turned up. He was still looking blank after Jake’s introductory spiel. “Father, Padre Francisco from the Candelária church in Rio, he said he would be contacting you?”
The priest squinted and looked away, as if his recollection was written on some distant board. “Yes, I heard from your Padre Francisco, but I have not heard of this woman, this…”
“Goretti Lima, Father, her name is Goretti Lima.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. But like I told your Padre Francisco, I don’t know this woman. I only came to this diocese in the last six months.”
“But this is a small town. Surely it couldn’t be that hard to find her?”
The priest looked surprised, as if unused to being questioned. “Are you sure she still lives here?”
“I know she was here, so this is where I’ve got to start looking.”
“Well, I don’t know everyone in town yet, but I will make enquiries for you.”
Jake used his frustration as a spur, going on to buttonhole every shopkeeper and customer in the parade running alongside the square. He probably would have caused a stir as the only gringo in town even without his car-crash looks.
An hour later he was slumped against the wall surrounding the square, drinking cold bottled water. The shops were beginning to close as the sun dropped behind them, shade enveloping the square. No one knew Vilson’s mother. He had learned nothing other than that he could get a room in a motel on the edge of town.
He started putting one sweaty, cooked foot in front of the other, ignoring his empty, cramping stomach, instead focusing on the goal of a long, cool shower. His scars throbbed, his legs were weak.
The motel was about half a kilometre out of town on the main road. He hoped his first impression from a couple of hundred metres away was wrong.
It wasn’t.
The building was a low, shabby, concrete job in an approximation of Wild-West-stroke-Mexican-stroke-take-your-pick style and painted a dirty pink. A love motel. A place for cheating spouses and young lovers, rather than knackered single gringos. The unlit plastic sign on a pole in the forecourt carried an ace of hearts design in front of the reception. Whether or not someone in town had had the idea of sending him there as a joke, Jake was beyond laughing.
He was finding that when he got tired his speech started to slur, his brain misplacing the adaptation it had made to the new shape of his mouth. It was a struggle to make himself understood, and the receptionist filled in the gaps by gamely listing the by-the-hour prices, the extra services and themed rooms. Jake was vaguely intrigued by The Space Station and The Underwater Love Suite, but what he really wanted was that shower and a lie down in the most basic room they had. He got one that just had a number.
The decor in his room was lurid and shabby, but clean. The shower was good enough and he had got used to the bare wires poking out of Brazilian showerheads for the heating element. They were just a passing worry now. He came out, dripping on the postage-stamp bathmat, rubbing some life back into his skin with the thin, sandpaper towel. He flopped onto the small double bed, the mattress like chewed marshmallow, the pillows thin and lumpy. And he slept like a baby.
In the early morning he enjoyed half an hour of lolling in the frigid air rattling out from the air-con unit in the wall before wandering into town, getting some pastries and coffee at the bakery in the square. Fuelled up, he started working his way out from the square, speaking to every shopkeeper, shopper and passer-by he came across. He stuck to the shade as much as possible, moving at a speed that he hoped would generate the least amount of body heat, sticking so diligently to the task that he was in danger of getting overtaken by some of the town’s more elderly residents.
By late morning he was losing the will to live. He had almost got to the end of a residential street toward the edge of town, small shops and businesses strung along it. This was the last one before lunch. He wasn’t sure he would manage to go for much longer after lunch.
He walked past a bungalow, a white metal fence fronting its garden. An old man was turning the dry soil of a flowerbed with a hoe. Slugging it out in the hottest part of the day in frayed clothes, it looked to Jake like he was doing paid work.
He stuck with his most polite Portuguese to get the old man’s attention.
The old man pushed up his hat, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and then blew his nose loudly. He shook his head. “Never heard of her. Maybe you should look in the other end of town,” he said.
“Which other end, sir?”
“The wrong end,” he said, rolling a lump of dirt with his tatty boot.
Jake hadn’t come across anything that looked like a wrong end. He looked up the hill.
“The other way,” the old man said, pointing downhill, “and turn left over the river.”
Walking down and then back up the hil
l on the other side of the dried-out riverbed and taking the left turn, he noticed there were more cracks in the paving slabs, the surface more uneven. The shabbier part of town. The houses were much smaller, the build more homespun. A couple of open doors revealed rough concrete floors and the most basic of furnishings.
This was the place he would find Vilson’s mother.
*
Sitting at a small, round table on a plastic chair with his head in his hands the next evening, Jake wasn’t so sure. The bar, if it even qualified as one, was on a corner in the wrong end of town, with a lean-to beneath which were a few more tables and chairs, all empty. A handful of locals sat on a ragtag row of high stools at the bar.
The night had just settled in, the bar lit by two bare bulbs, each a miniature solar system, a mad host of insect planets careening around and crashing into their star. Jake spent a while staring at them, a place far from here.
He took a slug from his bottled beer. His third evening in Cruzeiro and already just about everyone in town knew him, and not in a good way. The scar-faced gringo, pestering everyone at least twice, had fast become the person to avoid. And all he had learned was that, if Vilson’s mother had ever lived in this town, she didn’t now.
He wanted to finish his beer, get a night’s sleep and get the first bus back to Rio. It would not be the return of the conquering hero.
A guy strolled in and took a stool at the bar. Jake didn’t recognise him.
He had already heard the other drinkers at the bar muttering dark things about gringos when he had bought his beer. He was getting pretty sick of the gringo thing. He prevaricated and stewed for twenty minutes before downing the warming dregs of his beer.
Hauling himself out of the chair, shoulders were tensing at the bar before he even cleared his throat.
“Meu Deus,” one of the guys said in exasperation, whirling on him before he had even got his introductory patter out. “Why don’t you just leave us in peace?” he said in a low growl. “You’re driving everyone around here crazy.”
A couple more turned on Jake, eyes swimming with drunken belligerence. He was an irritant, he was willing to admit to that, but this was definitely an overreaction. He stood his ground. “Goretti Lima lived in this town, someone must have known her. Her son is desperate to find her.”
“No one knows this boy’s mama, and no one cares,” the growl was becoming a snarl, “so why don’t you disappear before someone really loses their cool?”
The raw scars on Jake’s cheek were beginning to throb. He rubbed the corner of his brow to distract from it.
“Maybe your friend’s mother doesn’t live in town.” That came from the guy whose back had remained turned on Jake, the one he had wanted to question. The others stared at him.
The man turned slowly on his stool, took a drag on his cigarette and scratched at the greying bristles on his chin. “Could be that she works on one of the farms out of town.”
“Yes,” said Jake. His readiness to grasp at hope seemed like it was a sting to the other drinkers. “That would fit. She wanted a small farm to set up with her son.”
“She wouldn’t be running any place out there,” said the helpful smoker.
“How would I get to these places?” Jake asked.
“I am driving out that way tomorrow. I can maybe drop you by one if you want.”
The growling barfly shook his head and sucked his teeth. “You take him out there to stir that shit and we’ll smell the stink from here.”
The smoker shrugged. “Who am I to stop a boy finding his mother? Who are any of us?”
“You’re as crazy as he is,” the growler growled.
Chapter 19
Jake
The agreed time was eight in the morning, on a corner opposite the bus station. It hadn’t come easy but the army had fixed his aversion to early mornings, and he was there for seven-thirty. He couldn’t miss this opportunity.
There was a clock hanging from the flat concrete roof of the deserted bus station. Sitting on the kerb, he watched it mark the seconds, the low sun warming his skin.
The next two hours gave him plenty of time to regret missing breakfast and only bringing a small bottle of water. He had noticed that he was forgetting things, basic everyday stuff that he would never ordinarily miss.
His lift eventually drew up in the shape of a dusty old pickup, a cigarette hanging from the corner of the driver’s mouth. He did no more than lift a couple of fingers from the steering wheel at Jake’s greeting. Jake looked in the back of the pickup: it was a jumble of sacks and tools and empty buckets, with a mangy old dog sitting on a pile of plastic sacks.
“Up to you,” the driver said. “Ride in the back if you want but it’s more comfortable up here.”
They drove in silence for a few kilometres, before turning off the main road that skirted Cruzeiro. The driver then bucketed along a smaller, broken road for ten kilometres, trying to avoid the worst of the potholes and cracks, until he finally slowed, came off the crumbling tarmac and pulled up by a turn-off to a dirt track. It ran down a hill between a field of sugar cane on one side and a field of coffee on the other, the little red berries beginning to ripen. There was a rocky plateau out in the milky distance, a slab sitting on the horizon. A bent metal sign hung off a wooden post. Whatever message it had once carried was long lost to peeled paint and rust, only a few faded letters surviving. Getting out of the pickup, Jake felt like he was stepping onto the set of a Western.
The driver spoke through the lighting of another cigarette, the tip twitching. “There are other farms along this road, but down there is your best bet.”
He chunked the pickup into gear and started to roll forward in the dirt. And then braked. An afterthought, leaning out the window: “Watch out for yourself, understand?”
Jake nodded. “Always.” If the driver got the irony of that, given his scars, he didn’t show it. But then Jake didn’t really know what he was supposed to be watching out for either.
“Vai com Deus,” – Go with God – the driver said and stepped on the accelerator, rocking the creaky old pickup back onto the tarmac.
Jake watched it disappear up the road in a low haze of dust before he set off down the rutted track. The sun was cranking up to full power in a sky as hard as metal, and he had already drunk most of the water in his bottle.
The track was a downhill trudge, then a hot sweaty grind back uphill. And repeat. Every turn promised something but delivered more of the same. Rolling pasture with coarse tufts of grass was starting to fill in gaps in the sugar cane and coffee. The shade of the occasional tree at the edge of the track gave only fleeting respite. The first farm he came to was no more than a smallholding. He found the old farmer working at the back of the property in a grove of mango trees. Jake’s heart was thumping. But the old man hadn’t heard of Goretti Lima. And it was the same with the second and third places he came across. It seemed that inquisitive strangers were as popular out here as back in town.
He only had a few drops of water left in the bottle, and his throat was dry. The rolling fields were mostly pasture now with healthy, green copses and thickets of waving bamboo, twenty metres tall. The distant plateau he had seen from the road was slowly becoming the dominant feature of the landscape. Its sharp slopes rose from a tract of forest, the crown mottled grey and red, earthy rock and boulders, strangled vegetation sprouting here and there. It bent around the farmland, shepherding a giant corner.
He stepped over an old cattle grid, alongside a broken gate with rusted barbed wire dangling off ancient wooden posts. The track faded halfway across the next field, just cattle paths snaking away through the fields beyond. This was the last farm. He noticed a puff of smoke out in the distance, rolling upward in the still air. Another followed it.
The farmhouse was built in the same bungalow style as the others he had passed. It had an abandoned look, the whitewash grubby and the terracotta-tiled roof bowed. But there were vegetables growing in a watered square of til
led earth to the side of the house. Fruit trees and a banana plantation lay beyond. On the other side of the building there was a low cattle shed and a rough-timbered pen. Raggedy chickens were flipping over dead tree leaves and picking through the soft dirt between piles of fresh cow shit. There was an old, blue VW pickup parked under a tree alongside the pen.
“Hello?” he called out, slumping to the smooth, cool tiles of the shady veranda, no more than a low platform upon the rough concrete surround. His face was burning and his scars throbbed. Droplets of sweat fell from his drooping head onto the tiles. He rested for a couple of minutes and then checked out the yard at the back, calling out, his voice ringing off the hot walls of the outbuildings. Nothing.
“Follow the smoke, then,” he muttered, surprised at talking to himself.
The smoke was still going up in irregular puffs somewhere out beyond a rise in the next field.
The earth around the farm was sandy, making for soft going as he laboured up the rise, draining more of his already depleted energy. Pushing up his body temperature. Over the rise the track dropped to a shallow ford in a stream, the banks around it eroded into deep ruts by the hooves of cattle. He splashed water over his face and head, resisting the urge to drink.
Cattle paths meandered up from the ford into dense scrub and low, scorched-looking trees. And the smoke.
Jake caught the whack whack rhythm of human labour. Someone was either cutting something or hitting it.
He weaved his way up a cattle path through thorny shrubs that pulled at his clothes.
The whack whack was getting louder, the rhythm sometimes broken, sometimes rapidly repeated. There was more than one person. His heart quickened.
The sharp tang of wood smoke caught in his nostrils. Lifting his arms to edge sideways through a gap in the thorns, he found himself at the lip of a shallow bowl that had been half cleared. Beyond it was the tract of forest and then the plateau, looming now.