Iliana wanted a piece of the action. She would deliver a lot. His choice.
For a few minutes now, Angela had been standing in the doorway and she could feel the room alive with bold plans. Soon there would be a course change in her life. But where would it lead? She came to Jim and leaned against him with her arm draped softly on his shoulder. She had no idea of the scope of Jim’s conversations with this stranger or how they might come to affect her. Most of her life with Jim was based on guessing. Whenever Angela listened to his business dreams her wonder took the shape of a slightly bemused smile that he loved, even now, when he had been revealed.
* * *
Each morning Iliana and four men headed out from the camp, hacking their way through heavy underbrush and tough, tangled vines. They inched north toward the Rio Novo, clearing away swatches of vegetation so she could measure rises and dips in the land and in some areas digging down until they found gravel; then they moved a little to the east and worked back to camp; it was exhausting work, back and forth, steadily edging east toward the far end of the landing strip. Even in the baking heat and humidity, Iliana dressed in tailored khakis like a model on a shoot. But she kept pushing into the forest, nearly oblivious to the hordes of gnats and sand flies and the danger of the cats, and she was methodical and forceful with the men. She brought a few instruments to make basic tests, but mainly she was looking around. There were certain key tells: the color of the topsoil, the placement of rocks. Again and again, she ordered them to clear patches of earth so she could examine the shape of the exposed land. She worked long hours. Once she got to the end of the landing strip, she planned to widen the search to the east and, if necessary, she would study the land closer to the river, but for logistical reasons it would be much better if the sluice box could be constructed close to the camp.
At dark she slumped down on a rough bench in front of the cantina and drank a beer. She was exhausted from the heat and swatting bugs. She pulled off her socks and massaged her feet. She had pretty little feet. The gunmen looked her over. A few of them knew that she was Ramon Vega’s girl, or had been, and the news spread through the camp and spawned rumors and racy conjectures about the future. In a little while, she asked Luis or Ribamar to watch the door while she washed herself in the communal shower area, just off the dining hall.
The finished camp consisted of three rectangular thatch-roofed buildings, held up by rough-hewn wooden poles that had been the skinny trunks of young aaí trees. The buildings were strung along the western end of the landing strip. The dormitory, farthest to the west, had twenty-five cots and was where Iliana slept, curtained off from Jim’s gunmen and Luis. Jim’s small sleeping and office space was on the east end of this building. Next came the cantina, a plain room large enough for seven tables and a small bar where late at night a short raven-haired Indian girl named Maria danced for the men. Each night of the week men fell in love in this unadorned place with uneven planks resting on the dirt and a leaky roof. The six tiny cubicles where the girls worked and slept were a separate structure just east of the cantina.
Iliana sized up the cantina, did some math in her head. She was very good with numbers. She considered the irony of these uneducated girls lying on their backs and making more in a month than she could in seven or eight years. She thought about what it would be like working for one year in the jungle and then living rich for the rest of her days. She thought of the gold coming into her hands each day and it made her peevish and then slightly forlorn. If the arrangement with Jim didn’t pan out, and finding a rich vein of gold was a long shot, Iliana would be back in Manaus working as a shopgirl. She was only twenty-six, but in this part of the world that was old. Any of these whores could have bought her. It was maddening and she had to remind herself each day to smile and be lovely.
At night Ribamar set up his chair in front of the door to Jim’s little room on the east end of the dorm. In a side holster Ribamar carried a pearl-handled .38-caliber revolver that was a gift from Jim. Leaning against the wall was the single-shot bolt-action rifle that Ribamar had carried into the forest for thirty years. He smoked a cigarette and listened closely to the jungle and the occasional barking of the dogs. The camp was falling asleep. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but he was listening. He was no longer protecting Jim so much from animals. Ribamar’s concern had passed to Jim’s own gunmen, or maybe there was something else. He was listening deeply. There were too many deals in the air. Too many promises. Too many delays and disappointments. Some of Jim’s men would have killed him for a better deal, for money instead of promises. Jim never took this seriously. He believed too much in what he was selling.
Ribamar was a force of nature. The men thought of him as a spirit, perhaps impossible to kill, and that helped to keep Jim alive. There were favorite stories and speculations about Ribamar’s unusual powers that the older garimpeiros passed along. It was said that he had developed immunity to malaria and even to some snakebites, and that he could find food in the jungle when garimpeiros would have starved, that he could will himself to heal from diseases and even grave wounds. No one knew exactly what was true or exaggerated because he wouldn’t speak of his gifts. Ribamar had become a fable even while he watched Jim’s back and tried to distinguish the friends from the enemies. It was said that when he was a young man Ribamar had once wrestled with a large black jaguar. According to Setimbrano’s narration, Ribamar had been surprised by the jaguar and was badly mauled. Then he rolled free and in one split second there was an opening and he threw himself onto the jaguar’s back. He cinched his left arm around the animal’s head and coiled his legs tight against the cat’s belly. The jaguar went wild, smashed the two of them into trees, clawing, but couldn’t shake this phantom fighter. While he held tight on to the neck Ribamar reached with his other hand for his knife and slit the animal’s throat. The cat began spinning, with blood flying everywhere. That’s the last Ribamar remembered until he came to, pressed against a tree trunk with the bloody cat on top of him. To survive, Ribamar had become a jaguar himself, Setimbrano said with reverence. Jim had seen the scars on Ribamar’s neck and back, but the old man only shrugged when Jim asked about the story.
Then one day Iliana observed a pattern of declivities in the land three hundred yards east of the airstrip. Close beneath the leaves and shallow topsoil they found suspended sediment, silt, and sand. Five feet deeper there was black gravel. She could barely contain herself but didn’t say a word for two more days. The men kept cutting back the bush and vines as she mapped the course of the sloping basin that snaked northwest toward the Rio Novo. It was what she’d been looking for all along, an old dried-out riverbed. Almost surely, this one had been an offshoot of the Rio Novo. Iliana knew some basics about geology, but also she’d been very lucky. The gravel was rich with gold, in some places five times the concentration of the best areas discovered thus far by garimpeiros prospecting Jim’s territory.
In the following weeks, Jim worked alongside his men for sixteen-hour days. He had more energy than any of them, and he was game for the dirtiest jobs. Jim and his crew burned down the trees and hauled away charred limbs and mountains of green bramble and young vines that wouldn’t burn. The tractor shoved the mess into the dense jungle, terrifying spider monkeys, jaguatiricas, birds, and snakes. A few of the little cats became disoriented and sprinted across the newly scorched ground. Jim was beating back the jungle. His surly gunmen worked without complaint alongside fifty garimpeiros. The time for promises was past. Everyone could see the gold flecked in the gravel.
Before breakfast Ramon Vega’s brightly painted orange helicopter whooshed over the tree line; beneath its belly hung a heavy load of aluminum cross sections, called riffles, for Jim’s sluice box. From the air Ramon could see a swath newly cut into the jungle as though a meteor had burned out the trees and left a large crater. In a few days, Jim would divert a stream to fill the huge hole with water. Just east of the landing strip a vast superstructure rose from the jungle floor like a f
lattened-down ski jump. No one had ever built anything like this before in the Amazon. Men were climbing all over it, hammering and sawing. Soon the riffles would be bolted in place, perpendicular to the long sluice, and Jim’s water cannon would bust loose tons of gravel. It would rush down the chute carried by a flood of water from the dam and the riffles would make small eddies in the sluice water to give the heavier material, black sand and gold, a chance to drop to the bottom behind the aluminum riffles. Gold would gather behind a hundred riffles, buckets and buckets of gold each day—that’s what Jim was counting on.
The morning air was fresh smelling and dewy, newly born. Jim’s girls were lovely at the start of day washing their clothes like innocents. Ramon took in the sights of the camp. Already there was bustling, building, a hundred great plans spooling out. Martha was hard at work preparing the evening feast. Even before sunset, the music and dancing would begin, hand-holding, caressing; Jim’s girls would incite dreams and yearning. Ah, there was so much good fortune here. Ramon watched his friend, rushing here and there, directing a dozen projects; there wasn’t any time for small talk. They shouted to each other, promised to meet up in the city. Ramon Vega smiled and shook his head. Jim was into his long sprint. Jim was winning. Jim. Ramon had this way of saying the name, Jim, so that it rang with irony and lament.
* * *
One night she came to visit Jim in his little room. Ribamar was in his chair leaning against the door frame. He didn’t want her to pass. He hadn’t liked her from the first day. She could feel his rebuke and great strength, though he wasn’t a large man. With Ribamar you were either in or out. You couldn’t buy his love. She had to slide past him to get inside. Iliana smiled back at him. She liked dares and crossing lines.
The gold had opened her up. She felt flamboyant and newly minted. It was such a big relief to find it—no more sullen shopgirl afternoons. All the money was playing out in front of her like a gaudy movie. They were both watching it, the gold flooding her ancient dried riverbed. Life would rush ahead from this point. It was almost funny. She was free and didn’t have to pretend. She and Jim had had sex twice before this in Manaus, and she had been tentative, like a sweet girl trying her hardest. This night, however, they started to laugh while they fucked. They were watching the same movie. They were both coming home from disaster waving a banner. She became excited almost immediately and started to come, but then she shook her head, no, made him back off. In a minute, they had started again. She took his hands and put them on her throat. Jim didn’t get it. She ground her hips into him. She then took her hands and put them on top of his hands and began to squeeze his hands with hers. She arched her head back, extending her neck. Harder, she said. Jim had never even heard of such a thing. Iliana started to gasp and he took the pressure off of her throat. She nodded to him, yes. After a minute or two she looked at him and nodded again. He put his hands on her throat. Jim was a very strong man. He could have easily broken her neck. That occurred to him. Surely it occurred to her as well. She began to gasp, change color, and two veins in her forehead engorged. He loosened his grip. Her eyes were bulging and she began to kiss him passionately. Then she wanted more. It went on like this for an hour, with Iliana nearly passing out, cutting the edge closer, until she was drenched and exhausted.
29.
In February 1984, about a half year after I had first met Jim in the Bahamas, he and Phyllis were newly ensconced in their posh condominium on the Intracoastal Waterway in Miami and were already holding parties four and five nights a week, recruiting salespeople for his new business. I came to a half dozen of their network-marketing bonding sessions. I couldn’t take my eyes off my new friend while he worked the room, describing how easily a man can make a residual income for the rest of his life. Jim was charming and convincing, at least for this sad group. Even shy types opened themselves to him. Men and women became emotional and surprised themselves telling him their secrets. Jim honed in on disappointment and avarice as he probed for the hot button. What do you really want? he asked confidentially, enigmatically, or impishly depending on his customer.
Sometimes, it was adventure. Many of his recruits were so flattened down by long expanses of mundane lives, or in some cases poverty, that they didn’t know life held the capacity for real adventure. The faces of men and women glowed when he told his stories while Phyllis walked around in a low-cut gown serving her delectable hors d’oeuvres. She was a wonderful and inventive cook.
More times than I care to remember, I watched him go to his custom Plexiglas gun locker with a few starstruck network-marketing recruits in tow. He would push the magic buttons with a grin, and the Plexiglas door glided open with a rush of air and Jim would reach inside and pull out his stainless-steel .232-caliber miniature M16. It was the gun he’d hunted with in the rain forest, the very same semiautomatic he used to fire rounds at the Colombian speedboat while I was crouched down on the deck of his yacht cowering in fear. He said a few words about the gun and then let each of the men handle it, and feel the thrill, because that gun had a lethal, deadly look with its vicious little cooling slits like nostrils. It seemed to have a conviction, a living presence.
Then Jim told a few of his yarns. He was a little drunk, and the stories weren’t interesting to me. But he knew his audience. Jim wasn’t entertaining me at these parties. He crafted his adventures to impress recruits and sell product; at first it was a health line of powders and vitamins, but a couple of years later he was using the gun and Amazon stories to hawk magnetic back braces and mattresses. He knew just what to tell and what to leave out. He had perfect pitch for selling: Yes, I lived in the jungle for a while. No, right in the middle of the Amazon jungle. He told a few hunting stories to close deals for $79.95. The men looked at him as though he had traveled inside a black hole and survived. They were right about that much. Sure, we’ll take a trip to the Amazon, Jim would say. As soon as you’re up to speed in the new business we’ll fly into Manaus. He made this promise a hundred times, maybe more. He promised them the Amazon.
I would leave the room when he began talking about Brazil to this needy group. I was trying to keep the fragments of the story I knew straight in my mind. I didn’t want them getting mixed up with therapeutic magnets or some mundane or carefully crafted sense of right and wrong; night after night he watered down the jungle for his audience, leaving out the real things.
Jim’s Brazil life just wasn’t something you could tell at a PTA meeting or a bonding session for network marketing, or later on he couldn’t tell it to Mara’s little kids. They would never understand how this new father in their lives could have done such things. He couldn’t even tell large parts of it to Phyllis, who adored him.
As the years passed, Jim told his Brazil stories ever more cleanly. He wanted to be a saint in the Amazon. He just wanted to use the jungle to sell products and meet new people. I tried not to listen.
And meanwhile the real story grew darker and more astonishing as I learned more. My friend had fashioned a reality that mirrored his ambition and avarice and the aspirations of his father. Jim had written an original and then had fallen into his own illusion along with his men. He’d made up rules and enforced them. He’d done this at fifty-five, when many men are beginning to focus on early retirement. Every afternoon, he’d run into the jungle with Ribamar without fear of dying. He’d constructed a machine that pulled buckets of gold from the earth. He’d captured the imaginations of jaded, vicious men who would do anything for a few dollars. Even Ribamar had fallen under Jim’s spell. He had loved a young Indian girl from the jungle. I think he would have married her if he’d had the chance. That would have changed the story greatly.
I hated when Jim showed off the gun and then described the time he shot some animal off a tree limb. But Jim knew better than me. He knew just what to say and leave out. He had the recruits nodding and fawning. He told his stories and he signed up hundreds of men. The distance between freewheeling desire and deafening banality is a flicker.
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br /> * * *
In the late afternoon Jim walked with one of his men from the cantina toward the edge of the forest. He was a gunman named Rolf whom Jim had put in charge of scheduling flights to Manaus. There were few seats available for garimpeiros to travel on Jim’s planes and it was common knowledge that Rolf demanded payoffs to get out. Jim had brought up this matter several times, but Rolf heeded no one. Over time he had carved out his own small but profitable power base within Jim’s operation. Except for booking flights, miners and other gunmen stayed clear of Rolf, who was a flagrantly cruel and violent man even by the standards of this lawless world.
That morning there had been two mortally sick workers with dengue fever scheduled to fly home. By chance, Jim had noticed that the men hadn’t boarded the plane. Later in the day one of the miners came for Jim and brought him to the bodies of the sick men who had been dragged into the forest, not two hundred yards from the clearing. Their throats had been slit and they hadn’t been buried or even covered over with foliage, as if they had been served up for the cats.
Rolf shrugged. It didn’t matter, he explained, because the men would have died within a day or two. They were finished and didn’t need to go back to Manaus. He’d put them out of their misery and then sold their space to two others, doubling his profit.
The Dream Merchant Page 23