by Nancy Burke
As he approached, he could see Aran and Anok squatting side by side in front of the lean-to, bent over their paints. They looked up when they heard him coming, and Anok rose to her feet and greeted him warmly, holding onto his arm as she called him by name. Aran stood shyly off to the side as though he were a stranger, and cast her eyes downward when he looked at her. Their friendliness was relieving and unsettling at once, since it made him doubt that they had been cold to him before.
“You seem well,” said Anok, looking him over, holding him away from her in order to see better. “Panar Ak made a good cure,” she added, pulling him around toward a log and motioning for him to sit.
“He doesn’t come to see me any more.”
“You’re well now, and Tapata baby is sick.”
“A sick baby,” Larry said in an unconvincing voice, trying to sound sympathetic, when in fact he was distracted. “Why haven’t you come to see me?”
“Listen,” said Anok, shaking him by the arm. “It’s not good for you to move into Dabimi’s house and a baby gets sick next door.”
“They think it’s my fault?” he said, suddenly alarmed.
“I can’t say what they think.” Anok trailed off as she turned away and stood up. She motioned to Aran, who stood and came to her side. The two whispered for a moment, and he imagined them disparaging him in low voices, shaking their heads solemnly while they plotted to betray him. He imagined the entire village turned against him, as he knew had happened once, in his first year in Pahquel, even to James. That was why they hadn’t visited, he suddenly realized; why they hadn’t spoken to him; why they had looked away. He leapt to his feet and reached into his pocket for the coins, holding out one in each hand.
“Dabimi said I had offended you by not giving you gifts when you came,” he said hurriedly, as though to patch over the more disturbing thought with the less disturbing one. They looked at the coins for a moment and then quickly away. Neither moved to take one. He pushed his hands toward them, and they moved back slightly.
“What did I do wrong?” said Larry, returning his hands to his pockets. Anok nodded to Aran to bring the food. While she was gone, Anok leaned toward him and whispered, “It’s not time now to make your claim.”
“Huh?” said Larry in English. “What are you talking about?”
Aran reappeared for a minute. She passed a bowl to her mother and then left again. Anok offered some dried greens in honey from the bowl.
“I’m not making a claim,” said Larry, pulling out one of the greens by the stem. Anok took the bowl and set it on a log. “I just want to know why you haven’t been talking to me.”
“You can’t make a claim just because you want to leave Dabimi’s, or because some men are blaming you. It shouldn’t be for such a reason.” Anok shook her head and stared at him. “You should at least wait.”
“I’m not making any claim,” said Larry, holding up his empty hands. “I need to talk to you. I need to see you. No one talks to me.”
“They say you still do nothing but sit and look at your legs.”
“What else can I do?” he asked, making fists in his pockets around the coins.
“I thought this conversation was for two hands of days ago,” Anok said. She looked up at him to see if he understood her, but he looked lost. “Asator’s not going to tell you what to do. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. Why aren’t you helping Xaper with the planting, or Lanon with gathering honey? They always need help with the skinning, but I don’t know if you’re even skilled enough.”
“Not skinning,” said Larry, stalling for time, knowing that he had no skill for any of them. “Not honey.”
“There’s gathering medicines with Kakap. Amakar’s son is good with the bees anyway.”
“Why can’t I work with you again?” said Larry, remembering the feel of the maata in his palm.
“I already have Aran. I’ll take you tomorrow to Kakap,” she said, patting his shoulder. “He’s Ak. You’ll be good for him.” She left him for a minute to help Aran with the food. He drew lines in the dirt with his toe. When they came back, he forced himself to eat what they had brought, even though he had just had a meal at Dabimi’s. He felt full and stiff as he headed back towards his hut, but his mouth held the taste of their food, which was different than the food at Dabimi’s, despite its being made of the same few ingredients.
As he approached Dabimi’s house, he slowed down as he passed the kaawa of Tapata. One of Panar Ak’s nieces was coming out through the doorway and ran to him, greeting him as “Rara,” “patient,” or “troubled one.” The word eddied in the air, creating an emptiness.
“How’s the baby?” he asked her, steeling himself for the worst.
“He is better now,” said the niece, holding out her cupped hand. “We’re giving pikar.” In her palm, she held strips of bark like the ones he had been given at Anok’s. “But he doesn’t have any teeth, so we have to chew for him.”
“That’s a hard job. It doesn’t taste good,” said Larry.
She seemed to find the comment funny, and ran back into the house laughing, looking over her shoulder.
He stood and watched as she disappeared through the doorway. The front of the house was wide and even, and looked back at him with a stare as blank and anxious as his own. The chajan was painted only to a child’s height, and the ring of thatch that grazed its brow was trimmed neatly across, like the niece’s. From time to time, he sensed movement beyond the doorway, an indistinct roiling of the darkness, but no one else emerged. On the sides of the house, to the right and the left, were two long covered troughs, the smaller one for manioc flour and the larger filled with water for drinking and cooking. As he passed by on his way back to Dabimi’s he caught sight of a thin-handled ladle resting on the side of the water trough, and suddenly remembered that he had drunk from that smooth, oiled cup, had held it with both hands and felt the stalk of the handle graze the hair above his ear. His upper lip, beaded with sweat, had left its mark on that pale wooden bowl, which he had set down in the trough, to bob like a dinghy in a pond.
LXX
ALTHOUGH SR. CATALPA dressed each morning and went upstairs to his office to sit at his oversized desk with its hand-tooled leather blotter and its hand-blown glass inkwell, there wasn’t much for him to do since most of the business of running the prefecture had already been relocated to the central office. He might just as well have arranged for the move to Brasilia earlier, but for the characteristic way he had of drawing out every process, a habit that had paid off exponentially in his work as a government official. He felt the need to close files, to confirm arrangements, and to pack boxes with exceptional care, personally supervising the cataloging and wrapping of each of his mementoes and antiques. Occasionally he had a visitor, a fellow paper-pusher from downriver, who came in search of an antidote to the monotony and isolation which the promise of a pension demanded, as well as a bit of cheer from the Prefect’s well-stocked store of brandies and liquors. The Senor was known as a generous man, so long as what he shared was not of value to him personally. He lived by a few simple precepts, the guidance of which had never failed him: Retain the service of those in your employ, and never hire natives for tasks that can be done by loyal, Portuguese-speaking long-time dependents; curry favor with indigenous elders through the judicious distribution of well-timed gifts; never share hard drink with children, women or natives; and never overindulge yourself. In his choice of goals as in his actions and decisions, Sr. Catalpa appreciated pragmatism over ambition, safety over risk, stability over change, a greased palm over conflict. Thus, he owed Joaquim Rocha a greater debt for having fired him than he did for hiring him in the first place, and a greater one still for having situated him in a position so compatible with his character.
Most of all, Sr. Catalpa was not used to strong feelings, so he had been surprised by the sense of deflation he felt at the departure of his four visitors, and particularly of Larry, who was so close to his eldest son in
age and degree of apparent naiveté. His guests’ disappearance upriver played over and over in his mind as he arranged and rearranged his files, and mingled with the remembered scene of his three children floating off around the same curtain of walnut trees, propelled by his least favorite brother-in-law’s oar. This foreign sense of longing, noticeably absent after his wife’s passing, was only exacerbated when one evening he came across a file of his old correspondence with James, chronologically arranged and indexed, and settled in to read it in the parlor, accompanied by a glass of Merlot and a plate of tinned smoked oysters. At first, he was distracted by the day-to-day interruptions of the household, and by the disagreeable fact of being forced to sip his Merlot from a tumbler, as the stemware had already been packed. Every so often, his maid Ana would walk through to adjust the draperies, or her husband Gabriel would straighten pictures or remove insects with a long-handled dustpan and broom; both had learned well from their employer the art of keeping busy by attending to details, creating an infinite array of new tasks in the process of completing old ones.
“You’re a man of deep integrity,” James had written in one of the letters, dated the same year the Senor had been removed from the SPI, obviously in response to some bid for reassurance on his part. James’s sincerity obviated the shame of accepting a compliment, even from a dead man, and Sr. Catalpa read the line several times, reluctant to put down the letter in response to a knock on the door. Before he could stand up, Gabriel had already ushered in the stranger, who stood surveying the opulence around him while the Prefect collected himself.
“Eduardo Catalpa. Welcome,” he said, extending his hand with particular graciousness, as he was still under the influence of James and his compliment.
“Kamar Sodeis,” said his visitor, grasping the Prefect’s limp grip in his firm one.
“What can I do for you?”
“I have reason to think you can help me,” said Sodeis, seating himself, in response to the Prefect’s gesture, on the divan. “I’m with Q. P. Comercio Ltda. Let me give you my card.” He extracted one from a tooled silver case and put it on the table.
Sr. Catalpa ignored the card, his attention drawn to the inlay on the case. “Lovely,” he said under his breath. He motioned to Ana to come over. “What can I get you? A glass of wine? A whiskey?”
“I suppose just a drop of whiskey, if you’re offering,” said Sodeis, pulling papers and maps from a zippered case and setting them on the table on top of the card.
“Of course,” said Catalpa, pausing for a minute, mesmerized by the impossible blue of Sodeis’s eyes, before shooing Ana away.
“I’m recently back in these parts, after some time away,” Sodeis set in, accepting the glass tumbler Ana offered him. “In my previous incarnation, I was an independent mineral prospector, with years of experience in claim staking, soil assessment, mapping, geochemical assay sampling and the like. I’ve been administrator for the Clarante and Duorios Agreements, and I’ve created the most current and up-to-date maps of activated and deactivated logging roads in Para state.”
“I see,” said Sr. Catalpa.
Sodeis drained his glass and spread out one of the maps on the table. “This is mine,” he said, gesturing towards it. “I compiled this one myself.”
Sr. Catalpa distractedly refilled Sodeis’s glass and bent his head over the map in front of him, nodding. “So how can I help you?” he repeated, feeling suddenly exhausted.
“I’ve always said that if you want to know the area, ask the people who have lived there the longest,” said Sodeis, raising his glass as he scrutinized the Prefect’s lined face. “I thought you might have a sense of which of the natives in your area might really know their lumber. I’m especially interested in hardwoods, you know, Ipe, Cumaru, Angelim Pedra, the most popular, but also the rarer ones. I thought you might know of a native or two who might allow me to use my time more efficiently,” he said, intuiting that his phrasing might appeal to his audience of one. “For your information, I speak fluent Tupi and several other native languages, as well as half a dozen European ones. Foreign service brat,” he said with a tinge simultaneously of derision and pride. He drained his glass and set it on the table within reach of his host, who refilled it.
“I’ll certainly give it some thought,” said the Prefect, to close the discussion. “Efficiency is always to be wished for.”
“Yes,” said Sodeis, holding his glass to the light. “This is fine stuff! Where did you come by it?”
“By courier from Scotland,” said Sodeis “Can’t trust the mail boats for that sort of thing.”
“Exactly,” said Sodeis in English, with a brogue. He began to struggle with his map in an attempt to fold it. Sr. Catalpa reached for it and began to pleat it neatly, realizing with a start that his visitor was drunk. He had a deep distaste for all forms of inebriation, and stood up to indicate the end of the conversation, but Sodeis reached for the bottle, pouring another for himself, and topping off his host’s glass, which still contained the Merlot, as well.
“How long have you been at this particular post?” he said, clearly showing no inclination to leave.
“It’s been about twenty years now,” said Catalpa reluctantly.
“A veteran! I’ve been at it for thirty, off-and-on, since I was sixteen years old, though I spent the past ten or so out west. I’ve done pretty much everything.” Sodeis said sloppily. “A woman in every village, maybe two, you know how that goes, been shot at ten or a dozen times, the whole bit. Never got caught in the government service trap, though!”
Sr. Catalpa nodded glumly, aware that he could not, in good conscience, rid himself of his guest in his current state so easily. He sank down beside Sodeis, trying to figure out his next move.
“Never shot at them myself, though. That’s no way to get your work done. No, that’s not the way to go about it,” he said, shaking his head with a drunkard’s certainty. “They’re always going to outnumber you.”
“So how do you do it?” said Sr. Catalpa, stalling for time.
“You have natives do it for you,” said Sodeis, leaning back. As he did so, a silver pistol slid noiselessly from his portfolio onto the divan’s cushioned seat.
The Prefect stared at it in horror for a minute and then turned his gaze quickly back to Sodeis. “Is that so?”
“They’re an excitable bunch, in general,” said Sodeis. “And they don’t like being interfered with. Makes sense! I bet you don’t either,” he said, laughing conspiratorially in the Senor’s direction.
Senor Catalpa riveted his eyes upon his guest while he slowly slid his hand across the divan and grasped the pistol, pulling it behind his back and transferring it to his other side.
“No, that’s the important thing to remember. They do make sense, like everybody else. That’s why I get so far with them. I understand that. Just basic respect. What’s good for me is good for them.”
Senor Catalpa pushed the gun between the bottom cushion and the frame of the divan without interrupting the rhythm of his bobbing head. At that moment, Gabriel entered the room and the Senor threw him a distraught, silent appeal. “I’m wondering if we can offer you a bed tonight,” he said, now bowing as well as nodding. “We’ve got plenty of spare rooms.”
“I might take you up on that,” said Sodeis, still showing no sign of moving. He poured himself another, allowing some of the whiskey to over-flow onto the carved table. Sr. Catalpa grabbed the rag from Gabriel’s belt and blotted at the table. “Ask Ana to make up a room for Mr. Sodeis, if you don’t mind,” he said loudly over his shoulder.
“Yeah, if you’re forced to take action, it’s best to enlist one of their trading partners to set them right,” Sodeis continued. He had started alternately to drool from the corner of his mouth and to draw his blue shirtsleeve back and forth across his lips. “And that goes for the hired guns too,” he went on, “your meddlers, your surveyors, your SPI, your seringais,”
“Why don’t you help me show Mr. Sodeis t
o his room,” said the Prefect, pushing back a wave of nausea as he stood and offered his arm. With Gabriel at his other side, they lifted Sodeis and guided him to a bedroom in the back of the house, and then returned to the parlor. Almost instantly, they could hear the sound of snoring echo in the hall. Sr. Catalpa slid the gun from between the cushions of the divan and tentatively held it out to Gabriel. “Do something with this!” he said in a low voice, handing it over. “I’m wondering if we should send Joao to the mission.”
“I don’t think he’s dangerous right now,” said Gabriel, who was perhaps the only man in the region other than his employer who could count himself a stranger to the hardscrabble world of guns and schemes and immoderate drink (except second-hand and for only a short period, during which he had had some trouble with his eldest son). He added hastily, “I don’t think we’ll need to shoot him.”