The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  After three days in the hotel he said he needed to get back to Manaus. There was no discussion. Jim, she said, shaking her head. She’d just wanted him to feel her caring heart; she’d kept it for him. But he couldn’t. Despite the savings accounts they had just opened together in ten Miami banks, she never expected to see him again. She could never have guessed that from this point in the story they had another twenty years of marriage ahead, many of them rich with travel and friends and Jim’s contagious optimism.

  31.

  On a clear Sunday morning, Iliana flew from Manaus to the camp with Ramon Vega and his youngest brother, Herman. When they were ten miles out, she called the radio operator to say she was arriving in Ramon’s helicopter and there was no need to remove the logs from the airstrip; they’d set down in front of the cantina. She added to tell Ribamar, if he was around, that she’d managed to find a replacement water pump for the spare generator and that Ramon had brought gifts for the men. That was code for Cuban cigars and fine Kentucky bourbon. Jim’s men all liked Ramon. He was one of them.

  Ramon banked the orange helicopter over the tall trees on the east end of the clearing, passing over Jim’s gold sluice, and then at twenty feet he came racing down the center of the landing strip. He took a swing over the dormitory and cantina, and he hovered there, creating a tornado above the buildings. A few of the girls ran outside and waved. What a cowboy!

  As he brought her down in front of the cantina he could see Jim’s gunmen appreciating their lazy Sunday morning. Most of them were relaxing on benches and chairs along the two westerly buildings, about twenty men, Ramon guessed. Some were talking to the girls, who looked angelic with their sleepy faces. He knew the men would be hungover from Saturday night.

  The day was gorgeous, not so hot as usual, and yet the morning sun cloaked the jungle in a honeyed glow. Ramon stretched and smiled at his kid brother, who nodded once, sharply. If Jim had been here to see the helicopter bank down over the trees on this lazy day of rest, he might have recalled Ramon’s warning.

  While the rotors idled to a stop Ramon waved to the men from his window. Ribamar was standing a few yards away at the corner of the barracks, leaning against his old carbine. Iliana, seated behind Ramon, took in the morning camp and gestured hi to Luis, who smiled back meekly. Then one of the girls waved and Iliana turned away.

  Jim had always liked Ramon’s brother, who was a strong kid of about twenty-four. Herman was fearless and he understood the jungle. He could track game and despite a thick-muscled body, he could pull himself up a tree like a cat. And he was true, like Ribamar. Herman would gladly take a bullet for Ramon, whom he adored. Jim would have hired Herman, made him a top guy, but that wasn’t possible. Herman always wanted to be with his older brother.

  Ramon was smiling as if he were off to a picnic with his wife and kids. Herman was wired, but he was also pleased about the morning’s adventure, nodding to some musica inside his head. On their laps, beneath the line of the Plexiglas window, the brothers were holding short-stocked Uzi automatics with long clips that rode up into their bellies. Herman kept finding the trigger with his finger.

  Don’t shoot your legs off, Brother, said Ramon. The brothers grinned broadly, and then on the beat Herman pushed open the door on his side and stepped out, blocked from Jim’s men by the cockpit. There was no one on the outboard side of the helicopter and Ramon took his time climbing down like an old creaky guy, he was such a player, and he liked tweaking his little brother, who was very high-strung. Herman shook his head, oh man.

  Then the brothers took four long steps in tandem, clearing the front of the fuselage, and they leveled the guns and started firing. They fired and fired with the guns pulled tight against their shoulders, fired at everyone in sight. The men dropped like deadwood and the air was filled with burning metal and smoke. In the cockpit, Iliana was shouting, No, no! and shaking her head.

  Most of the men and women were already down and the brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, glued to their guns, crisscrossing their fire, showering everything with lead.

  Ribamar managed to get off one shot before he was hit. He struggled to get around the corner of the building.

  Then Herman seemed to stumble over his own legs and he flopped onto his back. He reached up with his hand, grinning toward his brother.

  Ramon slapped one more clip into the gun and began firing at bodies, though most of them were still. Herman couldn’t get off the ground, though he tried to get his powerful legs moving. He was holding his belly. Iliana was staring out the window with a dead expression.

  In less than half a minute the brothers had shot off four hundred rounds into twenty-odd men and five women. The air smelled like it was burning up.

  Ribamar had made it behind the barracks. He had been shot through a leg. Ramon thought about chasing him down. Ramon could have caught him in a minute, but Herman was bleeding through his fingers and Ribamar was as good as dead. He’d try to make it into the jungle before Ramon’s men arrived. The men would kill Ribamar before the day was out or the jungle animals would do it, unless he first bled to death. Everyone else in the camp was dead except for the radioman and one of the girls. They both came outside with their hands up. Ramon shrugged. Now they worked for him. He hauled his brother into the helicopter, started the engine, and pulled out of the clearing.

  * * *

  The following afternoon, when Jim arrived at his estate in Manaus, he found the front gate open and the place nearly deserted. Everyone had left except for a maid and two of his gunmen who were packed to go and clearly unnerved by Jim’s unexpected appearance. They told him of the massacre in measured words. Now it was Ramon’s camp. Jim could feel loyalties shifting even while they spoke. He asked about Luis and Ribamar, and one of the men shrugged. They’d heard that many had been killed, even some girls. Jim needed to get out of the house fast. Any minute, Ramon could drive through the gate with his men. He would kill Jim on the spot unless Ramon restrained himself to first enjoy a beer and a few laughs. Jim went to his bedroom, took the remaining cash from his wall safe, a few pieces of clothing, and the stainless rifle, and shoved them into a large duffel bag. He left in the waiting taxi.

  He recalled something Ribamar had once said to him. All problems are small problems. He wondered if this was a small problem. He got out of the cab in the downtown area of the city, across from the opera house, and walked a few blocks down a side street until he found a nondescript hotel. He checked in and went up the elevator to his room. Jim, when you are afraid, don’t move; think about the situation. It was Ribamar’s steadying voice.

  But in fact, Jim didn’t feel afraid. He needed to decide what he wanted to do. The logical alternative was to go back to the States. But the Manaus airport would be very dangerous. Ramon Vega ran a charter service and his men were usually sitting around. If they saw Jim, they would kill him and the police would be paid off. Jim was a fugitive. If he went to the Canadian embassy for help, he’d be arrested and sent back to Canada.

  The life in Brazil had led him to a set of alternatives that would have been unthinkable three years earlier. But Jim was no longer that person. Phyllis had recognized this immediately in Miami when she saw him and touched his arm. This moment was an expression of who he had become.

  Jim could try to escape or fight. His education in the jungle had prepared him to do either of these things with considerable skill. If he had the opportunity he would kill Ramon Vega. Killing was no longer a line that stopped Jim or even caused great turmoil. It was one of his options. This pleased him, although he knew it was much more likely that he’d be seen by Ramon’s men and killed himself. Either way, it didn’t seem earth-shattering.

  Jim had a lot of cash. He could hire a car and drive to Barba or Ayrao or perhaps take a slow riverboat to Tabatinga. From these places maybe he could rent a small plane and get to Rio. He had to decide.

  He kept imagining Ribamar, wounded and hiding out in the trees, waiting for him. He tried to shake it off a
s a bothersome fantasy. Ribamar was dead. But sneaking out of the country felt wrong.

  Jim had long been guided by appetites, needs, and urges, like his own father half a century before. In this one respect Brazil had not changed Jim. He had never been moved greatly by formal religion or social conventions except insofar as precepts that might facilitate his selling. His fidelity toward family and friends flowed naturally from his affection and caring, which was intense and deeply felt. Loved ones were a sublime pleasure and yet over the years their faces changed like the seasons. Old favorites were cast out for misunderstandings or financial treasons or because Jim grew bored and needed to change venues, but for that finite and acute period of inclusion those closest to Jim were held very dear, and for them he’d walk the line.

  In Brazil, he had been greatly affected by certain people. He loved the girl, and increasingly so. In the passion of traveling from the city to the jungle and back again, while he built his own world with his own hands, Angela had made it possible for him to slow down a little and savor the ride. He would have missed most of the best except for her. Ribamar had become Jim’s soul, perhaps his true father. Certainly his good father. Jim was haunted by Luis, pathetic and loveable, brilliant, possessed.

  Jim was still engaged with his jungle theater. Florida was dead to him. He didn’t want to go back. He was fascinated by the clearing and he yearned to see it again. He felt that it was his, even though Ramon had taken it away. Jim didn’t feel outraged so much as perplexed and stopped in place.

  Jim had left twenty gunmen in the camp. They knew exactly how to defend the camp. Ribamar was there directing things. Something had gone wrong. Jim had an inkling, but he really didn’t know. It wasn’t classical revenge that drove him ahead. Even now, Jim could imagine sitting down with Ramon Vega and reflecting about what had happened at the camp. If they did that, Ramon could almost surely make Jim smile, even now. He felt like they were still playing their game, conning each other, posturing, testing.

  Jim wanted everything as it was before. He couldn’t turn off the switch. He was hearing the voice of Ribamar as though they were walking in the forest together hunting for tapir and monkey for Martha’s barbecue pit. He wanted to do that again. Lust was making this key decision for him, as it always had. He couldn’t stop thinking about the sluice box. It was a beautiful thing, the way he’d built the dam and directed the flood to strain tons of gravel in a day; buckets of gold fell into the riffles. He couldn’t give it up.

  * * *

  The following morning he walked to the tiny shop of the white-haired gun vendor he and Luis had often visited. It was a big chance going in there. The old man could easily have heard about the massacre. Such news from the jungle travels fast. But the gun seller acted normal, not a twitch or tightness on his face. Jim said that he needed two good men for the camp, and the old man nodded and dialed a number. Jim had no idea who he was calling; it might have been Ramon. After a half hour, two men came to the shop wearing fatigues and uncaring faces that Jim knew so well. He left with his new friends.

  Even at this late hour, he didn’t have a plan so much as a direction. He decided that he needed to go north to get south. If Ramon Vega had learned that Jim was back in Manaus, his men would be checking the traffic on the two-lane road leading south from the city in the direction of the camp; they wouldn’t care about the few cars leaving the city on the dirt road north. Jim and the men bumped along in a taxi seventy kilometers to the town of Ayrao, where there was a landing strip. He paid triple the normal price to charter an old four seater for the four-hundred-kilometer flight south to Angela’s tiny village on the Igapo-Acu River. The pilot knew of the river but hadn’t heard of Angela’s village. He wasn’t confident there would be any place to land. Jim listened and nodded, but these weren’t his concerns.

  * * *

  He fell asleep with the engine roaring close to his head. An hour south of Manaus, the old plane entered a broad, dark storm and was thrown all over and pelted by rain. They were flying in a black pit. For twenty minutes the pilot struggled to hold her, and the gunmen feared they would be thrown from the sky.

  Finally, they were into the clear, and the pilot tried to get his bearings. Below there was a vast expanse of burly green jungle, lakes and blue ribbons of rivers and streams. All the green terrain was indistinguishable. It went on like this for an hour, many, many winding rivers, none with defining features, and Jim wondered if the pilot was just conning him, trying to make a show of finding the village before turning the plane back to the north. Jim understood that he couldn’t allow the man to land his plane at the Manaus airport even if it meant forcing him to put it down in a field. Then the pilot turned toward a river that was perhaps broader than the others. The little plane headed east, a few hundred feet above the muddy water, for about ten minutes and then Jim began pointing, There, he said, there!

  Jim could count five, no, six hovels on the riverbank. Not much. There were a few grazing cattle. Kids were waving up at the plane. Just to the south of the village, if you would call it that, there was a wide dirt swath, a rudimentary landing area just as she had said. The whole place could have been pushed aside with a shovel and a rake.

  Jim was suddenly aglow, waving stupidly and trying to catch a glimpse of Angela running out to see the plane. His heart was beating all over his chest and stomach. She’d described the village perfectly. The children were playing by the river, beautiful kids with black curly hair. He’d come just as he’d promised. She’d be amazed.

  For a few delirious minutes he forgot about Ribamar, Luis, and the others. He said Angela’s name to six or seven kids who now surrounded the plane, and they all pointed to her house only a hundred feet away. Everyone knew Angela. There was her toothless father, Juici, sitting on the porch working on his fishing nets. There were a dozen gray squirrel monkeys watching him or fidgeting or climbing off and on the simple raised porch. Also, there was a beautiful little girl with lustrous black hair and a slightly flattened nose. She was resting her head on a sleeping monkey. She was Angela at three years old. It was her baby niece.

  Angela’s father was a very nice man, simple and pleasant, happy to meet his daughter’s good friend from far away. He clearly knew about Jim and didn’t seem to mind that his daughter had an older boyfriend. She had been home visiting for weeks, but a few days before she had left the village with three garimpeiros who were passing through. She’s gone back to her work, her father said with pride. It was highly unusual for a girl from this tiny place to work in the city.

  This news only made Jim happier. Angela had left the village to come back to him. He’d been worried that she wouldn’t want to leave her family. Jim was on a roll of good luck. He’d have to find her in the city, but he could do this, easily. Right now he needed to put Angela out of his mind.

  The four men slept the night sitting up in the plane. At dawn Jim instructed the pilot to meet them at the village in five days and to wait an extra day if they weren’t back. Then, Jim and the two gunmen ate an early fish breakfast with Angela’s father and mom and Jim accepted a gift of some dried fish for their trip. The three of them caught a lift across the river with one of the village fishermen.

  32.

  The early morning coolness of the rain forest is precious and a traveler wants to breathe it deeply. The leaves have a fresh, fragrant wetness and the ancient place seems newly spawned. Even while walking fast, a man feels like a lighter person. Seamen have a similar experience when the distant shoreline drifts below the horizon. The heaviness of one’s being stays behind.

  On the south bank of the Igapo-Acu River, fallen trees from past rainy seasons had miraculous shapes, some of them curled around one another like petrified cobras. Now pushing into the virgin jungle, Jim looked at tall trees, sumaumeira, with very thick trunks and huge buttress roots that stood higher than a man. Above the buttress roots, twelve or fifteen feet from the ground, he could see the watermark from past rainy seasons. In a few months the rain
s would come again and four-hundred-pound fish would swim right here where the three men were walking.

  Jim had no map. He navigated through the jungle using a little hand compass. Some months before, when Angela visited his camp, they’d looked together at a map and she pointed to where her village was located on the river, although the map didn’t show any village. Jim knew the distance from her community across two rivers to his camp was sixty kilometers and the heading was, more or less, southeast. He hoped Angela had been accurate when she’d pointed to the map. Jim had explored stretches of the Rio Novo and figured that if they crossed the river anywhere within five or six miles east or west of his camp he would be able to find his way.

  When they had first started taking walks and hunting together, Jim couldn’t keep up with Ribamar. Jim had struggled not to fall on his face or break an ankle, and he couldn’t keep air in his lungs. When the brush was nearly impenetrable, the older man seemed to swim through it while Jim’s face was whipped by branches and coarse vines. Ribamar had teased and pushed Jim to move faster, trained him to run across logs until he didn’t worry about falling and to feel his way through the trees and vines at night because one day that might be important.

  Ribamar had prepared Jim for this jungle passage. He knew that to be safe from cats, or fairly safe, he must sleep in a natural clearing, never in dense jungle. He knew where to look for hearts of palm and Brazil nuts to eat on the run. He had learned the habits of many animals from Ribamar. Jim knew to steer clear of coatimundis, fierce thirty-pound creatures that looked like little bears with long snouts. Coatimundis are brilliant animals who kill cobras but understand that they must not take on the deadly snake unless there is a tree root with an anti-venom nearby. When wounded by a hunter, these uncanny creatures play dead and are known to rip a man apart when he approaches incautiously.