* * *
After two months of being cautious, Jim began jumping out of his hammock at dawn. This was the real life, just as Ramon Vega had said. Jim wanted to dive deeply into the pool. His great desire spread out in all directions, and for a time he confused it with immortality. He felt confident he wouldn’t get malaria. He wouldn’t take a bullet. He wouldn’t crash in the plane, although each landing and takeoff was a close brush with tall trees at the end of the very short runway. Animals couldn’t get him. One morning Ribamar grabbed Jim’s arm when he was reaching into a hole. It contained poisonous frogs. One bite might have killed him, but Jim was moving like a magic arrow.
Ribamar taught Jim where to step, what roots he must eat if he got an infection. If he got lost, Jim learned to beat the trunk or the massive exposed roots of a sumaumeira tree, and Ribamar could hear the resonant thump two miles away.
Jim tried to adopt Ribamar’s style of traveling through the bush gently moving the vegetation aside. It was like swimming through the greenery. In a month, Jim was moving at the older man’s brisk pace. Jim quickly devoured the signposts and mysteries of the rain forest. Creatures were hiding everywhere. Ribamar showed Jim small bats protecting themselves behind the drooping leaves of trees. He pointed out lethargic armadillos burrowed into the ground and a twelve-foot boa constrictor that was practically invisible moving slowly along the leafy jungle floor.
Jim tracked deer, tapir, and wild pig for Martha’s outdoor grill. Ribamar sensed early on that Jim had a gift for finding animals; he could see and feel them like an Indian. Jim had learned about tracking animals as a young boy in Canada. He would show Ribamar a bent blade of grass, or the traces of an animal moving along a dry riverbed. One time, walking along a tiny path to the river, they both stopped at the same instant, sensing something foreboding and powerful. They looked up, and just ahead of them there was a black jaguar crouched on a tree limb. They grinned at each other and gave the cat a wide berth.
Jim was learning this world in huge gulps. At dawn in his hammock he would think how his dad would have loved this life, foraging in the wild for game and fortune. But oddly, he had Ribamar’s face.
* * *
Jim stalled calling Phyllis for as long as he could. Every second or third trip back to Manaus, he reluctantly dialed his house in Canada. He’d quickly mention something about the jungle to appease her curiosity while feeling chagrined for tarnishing his experience with insipid conversation. Then he’d ask her to wire money so he could pay his men. Jim was beginning to sell small amounts of gold in Manaus, he explained, holding in his exasperation, but he was supporting a large crew of men and still had to spend thousands building the camp. He needed money, as much as she could get.
One day she told him Marvin had stopped depositing checks in Jim’s account; there were problems with the business. He cut her off in mid-sentence. He didn’t want to know about Marvin. After a pregnant pause he ordered her to sell her diamond engagement ring. Jim had spent thirty thousand for it. He needed funds to buy a water cannon. What is that? she asked him. Don’t worry about it, Phyllis. Just sell the ring.
Phyllis was hardly more than a voice on the other end. He’d married her impulsively six months after Ava had run off. He didn’t feel anything for Phyllis and didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be dragged back. He had been another Jim in Canada.
But it was hard to get her to stop talking. She insisted that he hear about his cook and chauffeur, a married couple who were still living above the garage, in the servants’ quarters; they had stayed on even though Phyllis could no longer pay them a salary; they couldn’t find work and had no place to go; it was a painful situation for Phyllis; he was jumping out of his skin listening to this. What did she know about hardship? She dressed like a party favor. She wanted Jim to understand that the manner of the cook and chauffeur had changed. She used the word “paranoid,” although Jim didn’t trust Phyllis’s choice of words. It was painful listening to her. He didn’t care about the chauffeur and his wife.
There was no sense or fairness to it. Phyllis had a big heart, and she was trying so hard and failing. She came without guile and without Ava’s deep pool of regret. He soon began to resent Phyllis for this.
Phyllis dressed in gypsy outfits, all bosomy in the style of Brazilian women; she looked at pictures in books and tried to imagine her way into his life. She wanted to be appealing for Jim when he came home. Some of his Canadian friends considered her a duped woman, but she ignored them and pushed ahead bravely, doing his bidding. She told her friends she needed money for Jim’s Brazil project; that’s the phrase she used, as if he were constructing a majestic dam to save the rain forest and local Indians.
Mara scowled each time Jim referred to Phyllis. Even now, with his former wife vanquished from their lives, maybe sleeping in a park frequented by homeless people in North Miami where Jim had brought her two shopping bags of clothes and twenty bucks, three months before, even now, Mara held Phyllis in contempt. The story of Phyllis’s struggle in Canada, twenty-five years earlier, disgusted Mara. It was something more primal than Phyllis’s naïveté: Mara seethed as if his spurned wife were trying to worm her way back into their lives, into these last repellent rooms. Even while Mara was contemplating her separation from Jim, if you’d call it that, she feared being robbed by Phyllis. Mara wanted every drop that was left.
Phyllis was only twenty-six and young for her age when Jim had disappeared into the jungle in 1980. She was living by herself in the house he had built for Ava. Jim’s monument on Lake Ontario was waiting for the next run of good times, with half the designer rooms unheated and the furniture covered with sheets. His game house on the beach was closed down like a chilly mausoleum. Phyllis believed that Jim would soon come back to her with a fortune and they’d amp it up again, the tennis parties and feasts on the deck with dancing lights spilling out onto the lake. She was keeping it for him. Phyllis appeased her anxiety and poverty with positive thinking. She could not imagine that Jim no longer thought about his dream house.
Usually he didn’t call home for two weeks at a time, and during these stretches she was mostly by herself. Jim had never explained to her anything about Marvin’s aversion to paying corporate taxes. But now with her husband mostly unreachable, government investigators sometimes referred to as CPAs with guns were all over Jim and Marvin’s factories. Marvin’s clever tax evasions had reached back years and amounted to tens of millions. It would prove to be one of the largest tax fraud cases ever prosecuted in Canada. Authorities had tapped the phones on Jim’s estate as part of their investigation. Jim’s business friends were alarmed about being implicated and didn’t want Phyllis stopping by or phoning. She was frightened and in way over her head. Jim did not want to hear about any of it.
Then he stopped calling home. As the weeks passed, she decided he was punishing her for not sending money. Then she began to worry he was dead. Phyllis tried to stay positive, but how would she continue without him? She couldn’t pay the bills. Not one word from Jim for three months. She began dressing in black and avoided seeing people, even her sister.
When he called, finally, Jim sounded distracted and tired. She didn’t know how to respond. Was it right to be elated or deeply offended? So Phyllis rushed ahead breathlessly. She told him that one afternoon, out of the blue, Ava had rung their front doorbell. This had been a singular moment in Phyllis’s life. She had never met Ava, who was Jim’s great love and the wellspring of his existence. Ava was so monumental in his life that Phyllis had never felt jealousy. But rather, during her months with him, she was daunted by the specter of Ava. She understood from the start, if Ava changed her mind, Jim would install her back in the house and Phyllis would be out. Perhaps this was the moment.
When Phyllis opened the door, she greeted a battered woman. Ava’s mouth and the left side of her face were scraped and bruised and she was missing a tooth. She had been pushed out of a moving car by her elderly boyfriend, the father of Ava’s husband
before Jim, who was also a drunk. Standing beside Ava was Jim’s son with long stringy hair and a pasty, pimply complexion. He was clutching a little white poodle. Meeting Ava and Jim’s son in one moment was a lot to take in.
Ava sat on the L-shaped brown leather sofa that she had once selected from an Italian furniture catalog. She looked around the living room and noticed the paintings unmoved from where she had placed them. She smiled.
Aren’t they beautiful? Phyllis asked nervously. She had a feeling Ava saw more deeply than she did.
Ava shook her head, and took a breath.
I can’t take care of him anymore, she said in a flat voice, gesturing toward the boy. Even all beat up, she was still beautiful.
Ava wanted to leave for California to try to salvage her life. She knew someone there. She’d hoped the boy and dog could stay with Jim.
The wives nodded.
Ava was trying to locate where she’d once fit in here, if she ever had. She shivered a little at the loneliness. And yet the house was more appealing to her now, in its repose. The great expanse of the lake was regal without Jim’s noisy motorboats and glamour splashed all over. She had learned from him about taking chances to win big. Ironically, Jim had given her the courage to try with Lenny. It still seemed right.
Ava hadn’t heard Jim was living in Brazil. She hoped he was happy.
I don’t know if he’s alive, Phyllis said helplessly. She was feeling so lonely. She thought about inviting Ava to spend the night or maybe even a few days. She wondered what Jim would think. Would it be wrong?
Ava was drawn to Phyllis’s helplessness. She might have stayed if Phyllis had asked. That was in the air for a minute or two.
Ava made an expression of resignation. Her son was distracted and wild-eyed. Phyllis thought he might be on drugs. He was clutching his mother’s white poodle. Phyllis gulped at the face of this monumental change in her life.
* * *
She rushed ahead with her story fearing that Jim would cut her off; it was so easy to misconstrue his silence on the phone from Manaus.
Jim, Phyllis said, Michael is cuckoo. He sleeps on the ground in his old room above the garage with piles of clothes all around him. The kid washes his hands and then goes to the sink and washes again, and again. You get what I’m saying? Peter and Susan, she said, referring to Jim’s chauffeur and cook, have convinced him that I want to sell his dog or put it to sleep. I’ve told him, I would never do that, but he doesn’t believe me.
There was much more to say, but Jim stopped her. He needed to absorb this news. Jim promised to call back. Then he was gone again.
Phyllis tried to accept the silence on the other end. She tried to feel the jungle. She wanted to be a good wife. She tried to be cheerful. She wanted to come there, but he’d made it clear she would be out of place. He told her to look after his affairs.
* * *
Jim couldn’t quite envision Ava and the boy. It disturbed him to have Phyllis narrate the story and he tried to pick through it setting aside her singsong voice. He surely could have them back now; it’s what he had wanted beyond everything else. Jim couldn’t quite remember Ava’s face. Even the ache of Ava disappeared into the warm, humid evening and the bedlam of parrots and insects. Jim was standing on the back porch of the large house outside Manaus watching Angela walk across the yard watering plants. He fancied that she’d grown from the land like her trees. Near the west wall, she had started putting in an area of seedling pineapple trees in the spirit of her mother. Angela was so confident and fulfilled. He liked the sight of her legs soiled with dirt from kneeling on the ground. He savored the smells of her cooking. He liked all of her smells.
* * *
Why should he want to go back? Jim had the jungle, the girl. He was king here. Gold was coming soon, truckloads. He loved it in the camp; all the men did. It is important to remember this in light of what happened. No one wanted to leave. The life was so exciting. The music at night wafted into the forest, calling the men camped beside the river. Every night Frank Sinatra invited the little miners. A cold beer in the jungle was the best a man ever tasted. In the city Jim’s girls were attractive, but out here with the jaguars and snakes they were a dream.
Every key decision went past Jim, particularly for the first year. He decided how much punishment a man deserved and who got a seat out on the small plane. In most renegade mining operations in the Amazon, gunmen spent their time sitting around waiting for war. They flirted with the girls and drank beer. In Jim’s camp he had them working on construction projects and later on they toiled over the sluice box. Even the two mangy camp dogs lived by Jim’s rules. The mongrels barked whenever any animal or person approached the clearing from the forest, but Jim could not stand their yelping when he returned from walks with Ribamar or climbed out of the plane returning from Manaus. He trained the dogs to greet him with silent joy, wagging tails and squirming at his feet.
More and more garimpeiros showed up at the camp. They came out of the trees in bunches. Jim offered them a cold beer and a hearty pat on the back and Martha had her big pot of rice and beans and something cooking on the barbecue; often it was monkey, which the men favored. The miners came through the jungle flashing victory and tired smiles as if they’d crossed a big ocean in a little boat. Each month, one or two were killed by jaguars. Almost always they were men who tried to brave it through the jungle alone. Within several miles of the camp, there was an unusual infestation of little cats the local Indians called jaguatiricas. Likely, it was the smells of garbage and cooking that lured them close. These ferocious animals, the size of large house cats, attacked in small packs of three to five, and if a man survived he recalled the sound of whining babies, but almost always a single man was doomed. The small cats sprung out of the underbrush with thin devil faces and raced up a man’s body, ripping and biting. Even these horrible creatures didn’t keep the miners away. After a year, there were three hundred garimpeiros working on the land and selling their gold to Jim.
Sixty percent of Jim’s men came down with malaria or dengue fever, which was even worse. Occasionally, an Indian dropped down, hemorrhaging, and died beneath the trees. Some of the sickest workers flew out, but most of them suffered for a few weeks and then went back to work. Men didn’t want to leave. The life was so exciting and fraught with the chance for wealth and glory.
Luis was the exception. In camp, his expression was forlorn. He felt feverish half the time and was afraid to bathe in the river where there were too many things waiting to kill him. Luis couldn’t distinguish between the heat, malaria, and worry. He was miserable without his wife and mistresses. In the camp he avoided Jim because he was embarrassed by his weakness, and he felt overshadowed by Ribamar. Luis hunted for shady spots to keep cool. He did a little construction work or waited around, wiping the sweat from his eyes until, finally, Jim signaled it was time to return to Manaus for a few days or a week. Then, Luis could emerge from the shadows and become, once again, the progenitor of business associations and intimacies, if he could only survive until then.
28.
At first the prospect of running a cantina had made Jim uneasy. But he was advised that he needed to have a place with music, drink, and girls or the men would become moody and go off to other garimpos to find gold. Even Ribamar agreed that it was so. The cantina was a part of the life here, a gift for the men in this harsh place; that’s how Jim justified it to himself. There really wasn’t any choice if the camp was going to run effectively.
Jim paid his girls 50 percent of their take. He might have kept a larger cut for himself, but it appealed to him to make poor women wealthy, as if the Lord had stepped in to change a woman’s destiny. In a year working in Jim’s camp, a girl cleared about two hundred thousand dollars. It was an inconceivable sum for a poor person from Manaus.
In return, the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old delivered her gifts in a tiny, hot cubicle only large enough for a small mattress and a washbowl to clean her men. She began each ses
sion with a kind of foreplay by dipping her thumb and two first fingers into the miner’s narrow leather pouch and slowly withdrawing as much gold as she could hold in one pinch. The men loved this starter that proved their virility in the jungle, something that went beyond sex, and the girls were very impressed by what they felt with their fingers in the pouch and teased the men, took a little extra with the hint that what would follow would be indescribable bliss. Usually, it came to about three hundred dollars for twenty minutes of love in this wild outpost where greed and privation pushed desire to the limits.
The men were always falling hard for girls and would sometimes pay a favorite fifteen hundred dollars for the entire night, as much as a man earned digging and sifting for two months or more. Men fought over girls. Jim stayed clear of these drunken battles, even when one of the men took out a pistol and shot another worker. This happened several times. But Jim dolled out harsh punishment if a man abused one of his whores.
It was true, all the men loved the cantina. Some garimpeiros made monthly visits as if taking a short holiday in the city. What a treat after suffering weeks of wretched mosquitoes and slinging mud from a hole. A few of the older men walked to the clearing two or three nights a week for conversation and a cold beer. Setimbrano was one who no longer visited the girls. He was a tall, imposing white-haired figure of about fifty with the gravitas of Ribamar. Jim liked to sit with him and Ribamar drinking beer like three old fishermen at the end of the day. The garimpo is a psychological illness, the tall man reflected, and then he smiled, just barely, to affirm it was a malady that captivated him still.
The Dream Merchant Page 21