by Dan Smith
‘He’s not going to like it.’ She tilted her head in Leonardo’s direction and I looked over my shoulder to watch him.
‘I’II work something out,’ I said. ‘I don’t think the old man will make it to Mina dos Santos. If we try to get there with him like this ...’ I shook my head and looked over at Leonardo.
I thought about killing him.
I could probably do it now.
I could draw my revolver, turn, point and shoot. It was dark, but I was a good shot and didn’t think it would take more than one bullet. I would be able to take Daniella and the old man home without Leonardo getting in the way.
But then Daniella would see the shadow that cloaked me.
She would see the ugly side of me that I didn’t want her to see.
There was the old man’s money to think about, too. His dream of moving to Imperatriz and buying a better boat. If Leonardo was dead, I could try taking the guns on to Mina dos Santos, but there was a strong chance I wouldn’t leave that place alive. The old man would lose his money and I would lose my life.
I also wondered if Daniella would be any safer in Piratinga with Luis and Wilson than she was here with Leonardo.
I rubbed my face and clenched my jaw with frustration. Whatever I did, whichever way I turned, there was no way out. I was trapped on this course of events and there was no way for me to escape. Daniella had to stay with me and Leonardo had to stay alive. The only two things I might be able to gain some control over were taking the old man home and disarming Leonardo. But I didn’t know how I was going to arrange either of those things.
After a while, we lay on our backs and stared at the stars, listening to the old man groaning in his sleep. Rocky forgave us for sending her away and came to lie between us, pressing her back against me. From the water’s edge, the night stretched out across the river and into the eternity of the forest. Behind us, it crawled over the shrubs and molasses grass, encircling the buriti palms that stood sentinel on the bank, and it flowed on through the savannah, wrapping everything in its darkness.
We were a hundred kilometres from the nearest town, a thousand from the nearest city, and my best friend was fading away. There was nowhere I could take him. Nothing I could do to help him.
Daniella’s breathing grew deeper as the night pressed on, but I tried to keep awake. I checked on the old man, soaking a cloth in river water and putting it to his head in a weak attempt to keep him cool.
Leonardo remained in his spot, sitting up and watching. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid of me or the night, but he kept his pistol in one hand and a torch in the other. He flicked it on from time to time, scanning the bank behind us and playing its light across the ripples in the river. I ignored him, tending to my friend, wishing there was more I could do for him.
‘There’s something out there,’ Leonardo said.
I stopped, one hand pressing the cloth against the old man’s forehead.
‘Out there.’ He stood up. ‘On the water.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ I told him.
‘You think I’m lying? Come and look.’ He lowered his voice, as if whatever was out there was going to hear him.
I paused, dropped the cloth in the pan of water and went over to where Leonardo was standing.
He shone the torch onto the river, moving it back and forth until he caught them in the beam. There were a dozen of them. Eyes. All staring back at him.
‘What the fuck is it?’ His voice heightened and he raised his pistol at them.
‘Maybe it’s Iara,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You don’t know about Iara? She lives under the water.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The fishermen talk about her all the time. She sits on the bank and sings to them, but if she really likes you, she casts a spell on you with her song. She makes you go to her, and when you do, she takes you down into the river and drowns you.’
‘And that’s her out there?’
‘No. That’s the jacaré watching you. This is their beach and maybe they want it back. Maybe they have eggs here. Jacaré are much worse than Iara,’ I said. ‘She sings to you; they eat you.’
Going back to the old man’s side, I sat close to the fire and reached into my shirt pocket to remove the newspaper cutting.
There was more on my mind than what was here on the beach.
The old man’s sickness, Leonardo’s threat, and Daniella’s company had all been more immediate, but there was another presence on the boat; a woman who was not here in person, but whose existence still played on my mind.
I opened out the cutting and looked at the photograph of Sister Dolores Beckett. A spattering of grey and black dots that shifted in the flickering firelight as if they were alive. ‘Just one more job,’ Costa had said, but I heard Just one more life.
I stared at the picture until I couldn’t see it any more. It became a blur as my eyes lost their focus and I wondered what it was that Sister Beckett had done to make her life worth five thousand dollars to a man like me. Costa had said that she deserved it, but that didn’t mean anything and when I remembered how the boys in the favela had killed Father Tomás, just as Costa wanted me to kill Sister Beckett, I still felt the loss of his death. I felt the guilt and shame of it as surely as if I had killed him myself.
I had to think about the money, though. I had to think about Daniella and the old man. Taking one life was a small price to pay for the safety of theirs.
In the newspaper cutting, Sister Beckett was wearing trousers and a T-shirt and didn’t look much like a nun. I tried to imagine her wearing a habit, sandaled toes poking from beneath the hem, but somehow it didn’t look as if it would suit her. She was coming out of a building that might have been mentioned in the words, but their undecipherable meaning was lost to me. She was surrounded by people and everyone’s focus was on her, as if they were intent on knowing her thoughts.
Only one person who was close to her was looking away. A woman who was striking because of both her height and her posture.
Costa had said that Sister Beckett would not have any security, but seeing the tall woman made me think he might be wrong. The woman looked as if she were there to protect Sister Beckett and I suspected there might be someone standing between me and my money, after all.
I returned the clipping to my pocket and lay back, closing my eyes and wishing life wasn’t so complicated. Close by, the old man grumbled in his fever while Rocky had slinked back to press against him and fall asleep. Beside me, Daniella breathed heavily.
Eventually, sleep took me, too, but it was broken and troubled and filled with disturbing images. Flashes of me standing over Sofia while she begged me not to kill her. Leonardo leering over Daniella. The old man slipping away to a fevered death.
And in the early hours of the morning, I woke to the sound of chaos.
27
Rocky was barking. But this was no ordinary warning bark. It was a savage and primal sound that turned my blood cold. She was snarling and growling like a wild animal.
My muscles ached from lying on the beach, and my head was woozy with half-sleep, so the effect of her vicious noise was multiplied a thousand times, and it took a moment to remember where I was.
Opening my eyes, I sat upright and grabbed the pistol tucked into the pack beside me.
Close to my feet, Rocky was moving from side to side, continuing to produce that dreadful sound. The hair on her neck bristled, her tail sprung out behind her and her eyes rolled up. Her lips were pulled back to bare her teeth, and saliva hung from her mouth.
There was another sound breaking into the dawn air. Leonardo.
His voice was shrill but there were no words, just a scream full of fear and pain.
Beyond the corpse of last night’s fire, Leonardo writhed in the sand, screaming for my help. It was hard to tell exactly what was happening, the day was still only preparing itself, and the sun had not yet begun to rise over the trees. The grey li
ght gave a strange hue to everything, and all I could see of Leonardo was his frantic movement and the commotion of the sand.
He shrieked, his voice rising in desperation.
Rocky continued to snarl and bare her teeth like a forest devil.
Pulling my revolver free, I jumped to my feet, but stopped myself from rushing to Leonardo’s aid. I didn’t know what was happening and I would be a fool to hurry into the fray. It was better to know what I was dealing with. The commotion had shocked me, my heart thumped hard, my breathing was erratic and my whole body trembled.
‘Get it off!’ Leonardo finally managed to shout, and once the words had formed, he repeated them over and over, desperate for my help. ‘Get it off! Get it off!’
I moved closer, squinting in the grainy light, seeing Leonardo twisting and kicking in the sand. With one hand, he was hitting at his leg, raising his arm over and over again, pounding at something. A dark shape that shouldn’t be there.
A young jacaré, maybe a metre and a half long, had sunk its teeth into Leonardo’s right calf and was trying to drag him to the water. The creature’s teeth were not designed for much more than grabbing, and its prey would usually be small enough to swallow whole, but as they grew bigger, these river monsters would take larger and larger prey, which they would drag into the river and drown. Twisting and rolling, they would disorientate their victims, fill their lungs with water, then wedge them somewhere beneath the surface until the flesh was rotten enough to eat.
This particular jacaré had decided to punch well above its own weight, because although it was strong, it was too small to be much threat to a human. Anyone with enough experience of the river would have known that, but to Leonardo it must have been terrifying. This creature had slipped out of the water while he was asleep and clamped its jaws around his calf. Its teeth were big enough to cause considerable pain, and it would take a hard man not to be alarmed when he woke to find a jacaré trying to drag him into the river. Perhaps if it had been a little bigger, or had another to help it, it might have succeeded.
‘Get it off me!’ Leonardo yelled as he continued to writhe and hit at the animal with one hand, while stretching for his pistol with the other. His weapon was just beyond reach, his fingertips brushing the grip.
‘Do something!’ The pitch of his voice heightened in panic as the jacaré tugged at him in jerking movements, trying to pull him towards the water. ‘Kill it!’
There was something fascinating about seeing Leonardo battling the jacaré, struggling in a storm of limbs and sand. It was almost mesmerising, like some bizarre dream come to life, and as I watched, I considered turning away and leaving them to it. Perhaps it would solve my problems if the animal dragged him into the water and drowned him. Maybe he deserved such a death. I even found myself wishing the creature were larger, or wondering if I should just kill Leonardo myself.
‘Help him.’ Daniella woke me from the trance. It was she who spurred me into action. She was a better person than I, and she saw only that we should help Leonardo. We couldn’t allow him to die like this.
And we had come a long way – the old man needed his money.
I took a step closer, raised my revolver, and shot the creature through the eye.
‘You hesitated,’ Leonardo said. ‘You thought about letting it have me.’ He was sitting on the sand, with his left leg extended in front of him and his foot up on his backpack.
‘It wasn’t big enough,’ I said, wrapping his calf with a bandage. ‘And these aren’t much more than puncture wounds.’ I glanced back at the dead jacaré lying a few feet away. There was more than just one hole in it now.
Leonardo’s rage had overcome him once he had recovered from the shock of waking up to find a jacaré attached to his leg, and though he had lost his grip on his pistol during the attack, he made up for it afterwards. He had emptied his pistol’s magazine into the dead creature before reloading.
I might have done the same thing. The thought of being in the water was still fresh in my mind; the fear I had felt when I was under the boat, trying to free what remained of the boto. All kinds of thoughts had come to me then; of being dragged down into the darkness.
‘Well they hurt like fuck,’ he said.
‘You’ll live. Just be thankful the jacaré wasn’t any bigger. Some of them are as big as four metres long. If it had been one of those, you’d be wishing you were dead.’
I used my teeth to tear the bandage, then ripped it a short way down the middle and tied it off before putting everything back into the first aid box I’d taken from the Deus. ’You going to say thank you?’ I asked, standing and looking down at him.
Leonardo scowled. ‘All right. Thank you.’
The sun was peering over the top of the trees in the distance, and the morning was still fresh. On the bank behind us, the cicadas creaked in the molasses grass and a pair of magpie tanagers played in the closest buriti palm. The black and white birds hopped from frond to frond, their heads turning in jerky movements as they picked insects from the leaves. They were undisturbed by our presence.
‘How about you?’ I asked the old man. ‘Any better?’
He was sitting up now, drinking water from a plastic bottle, and tried to smile in reply to me, but it hurt his head too much, so he let it go halfway. He saw the worry on my face before I could disguise it. ‘It’ll pass,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. Flu, maybe, something like that.’
‘There’s been dengue in Piratinga; you know that.’
‘Dengue passes, Zico. I’ve seen it before.’
‘So have I. But it doesn’t always pass. Sometimes it gets worse.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Sure.’
Raul stood up and stretched his back, pretending not to feel the pain in his joints, then walked to the river and put his toes into it. They disappeared under the silt-laden water.
‘Be careful,’ I told him, thinking about what had happened to Leonardo, but he made a dismissive sound and waved a hand.
‘On Tocantins, the water is much clearer than this,’ he said without looking back at me.
‘Then your job will be easier when you get to Imperatriz.’
‘I like it muddy,’ he replied. ‘I like it that you can’t see what’s down there. It’s like we’re not supposed to know. There are things down there we shouldn’t see.’ He paused, worn out from the effort of talking, and I watched him, thinking about what we’d left beneath the surface yesterday, and what had crawled out of the river and attacked Leonardo this morning.
‘You know,’ Raul went on, ‘I heard about some gringos came down this way, brought some fancy gear so they could get a good look at all our fish. Scientists, they were, coming down here with diving suits and cameras, spending all their gringo dollars on equipment to study our river. And you know what they saw?’
‘What?’ asked Daniella, her voice lazy, the increasing heat sapping her strength. ‘What did they see?’
‘They saw shit, that’s what they saw. It was too damn dark and dirty for them to see anything. Went home with pictures of sand and mud and dark.’ He waved one foot from side to side in the water, feeling the gritty sand settling between his toes, then he stopped and turned to me, saying, ‘How long have we been doing this, Zico, you and me? Up and down this river?’
‘Two years?’
Raul nodded. ‘Two. And before that I was doing it alone, sometimes with Carolina, for fifteen. Things have changed a lot since then. For one thing, I feel old.’
‘You are old. You can rest when you get to Imperatriz. Take it easy on your new boat.’ I knew that Raul would never have enough money to do it, that maybe he didn’t even really want it, but I allowed him his dream of escaping Piratinga. ‘You got something else lined up after this?’ I asked, saying it for no other reason than to make conversation, but the old man just grunted and waved a hand, making me want to say something else. ‘I’ll get us work,’ I said, knowing it might not be
that easy.
‘You want to hear something funny?’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘I don’t want to go to Imperatriz. I couldn’t give a shit for that place or for its river.’
‘What about joining Francisco?’ Daniella said. ‘What about being with your son?’
‘And buying a boat,’ I added. ‘Tourists ... that whole thing. You’ve been talking about it all the time I’ve known you.’
‘Talk,’ he said. ‘Talk is just talk. I never wanted to go there. We make dreams to pass the time, and we pretend that we want to be somewhere else; it’s what men do. Maybe we do it for our women or maybe we do it because it’s expected of us, I don’t know, but we’re all supposed to have dreams, Zico, we’re not supposed to be content.’
I waited for him to go on.
‘I mean, my son ... sure, it would be good to see him from time to time, but time to time would be enough. I don’t need to live in his pocket.’ Raul reached for a cigarette, looked at it for a moment and put it back into the packet. ‘And what do I want another boat for? I got one already.’
‘So you can do the tourist thing on Tocantins,’ said Daniella. ‘That’s what you always said you wanted. You want to work there, you’ll need a bigger boat, one with beds, a kitchen.’
‘Beds and a kitchen.’ Raul let the words fall from his lips like they had numbed his mouth and left a bad taste. ‘Who needs beds and a kitchen on a boat when you’ve got the shore right alongside you? You want to eat, you make a fire. You want to sleep, you make a bed. What’s wrong with eating under the open sky? What’s wrong with sleeping in a hammock? Or on the beach?’
‘A hammock’s OK for you and me to sleep on, maybe even Daniella,’ I winked at her, ‘but these tourists, they want something different. They’re soft. They’re used to beds.’
‘Then let them stay in their beds. What do they want to come here for anyway? Why do they want to live like us when they’re nothing like us? They have no idea how we live.’
I smiled at my friend. A sad, understanding smile. I knew him better than I had known my own father and probably loved him more. I would do almost anything for him, including help him lie to himself, it seemed, because now that I thought about it in light of what he had just said, I knew he didn’t want a better life. He already had it. And, in my heart, maybe I knew the same was true for me too. ‘You belong here,’ I said. This is your river, it’s where you need to be.’