by Nancy Burke
Ironically, the only one Jorge could imagine wanting to hear from at that moment was Larry, perhaps because he was the only one Jorge knew who was even more lost and pitiful than himself. He pretended not to listen to Joaquim, but he knew he had no other choice.
“I’m not saying you’re a child,” Joaquim continued. “I’m only saying that it takes a grownup to rely on people, and to let others see it.” He motioned to Martina’s back.
It occurred to Jorge for the first time that Martina could probably hear everything they said, although she, too, was pretending not to listen.
“Why don’t you talk to her about it,” said Jorge, sotto voce, motioning with his head. “She’s the one who’s so willing to close doors and just move on!”
“Good idea,” said Joaquim, and stuck his head out the window. “Martina, can you come in here a minute?”
Martina looked at them through the windshield. Then she closed her book and slid off the hood. After walking slowly around the car, pausing at the back door, she finally came up to Jorge’s window. “Welcome to Bob’s! Can I take your order?” she said. “Burger and fries?”
Despite himself, Jorge couldn’t suppress a smile, for which he hated them both.
“The deal is you get your mustard and ketchup on the side. No, the deal is we don’t have to talk to each other,” she said. ‘That’s what your mother told me.”
Jorge got out of the car and walked past her toward the plane. “The deal is if you’re man enough to go through with it, you’d be doing something decent for a change. At least then all those fathers of yours might be able to admit to being proud of you again,” she said after him, shouldering her pack.
CXIX
IT WAS LATE by the time Sodeis hauled his boat onto the sand at Paruqu and tied it off to the side, to one of the trees by the bluff. In his haste to leave Lamurii, he had neglected to pack food, so he was no doubt driven in part by hunger to summon to mind the well stocked and poorly defended larder of Sr. Catalpa, as well as by some perverse need to revisit the scene of his latest crime. From the dock, he could tell that the house was in darkness, a fact that might have portended either well or ill. Too tired to bury his gas cans, he left them with the boat and made the climb up the bluff nearly on his hands and knees, balancing his pack. When he arrived at the door, he pushed at it tentatively and it opened with a creak. He felt for his revolver in the side pocket of his cargo pants, but he could tell even before the door had opened fully that the house was deserted; the Senor had vacated his post. He set down his pack in the parlor where the Senor’s coffee table had been and headed off to the kitchen to scout for any well-sealed canisters the help might have abandoned in the pantry. He found a can of soup but no opener, and debated, for a moment, shooting a hole in it, before putting it away. He found a bag of what tasted like sugar and licked a spoonful out of his palm. He found a large sack of dried beans, which he shook out on the table. A scorpion fell from the sack onto the floor and skittered off into the corner by the back door. He put a handful of beans into his mess looking around for water. To his sudden elation, he found an entire cabinet stacked chest-high with bottles of water, and containing as an added bonus, a large tin of chocolate bars. He unwrapped a bar and sucked on a piece of chocolate while he uncorked one of the bottles to pour it onto the beans, jumping back when he heard a sudden whoosh and looked down to see the beans hissing in the pot; he’d forgotten about carbonation. He covered the beans tightly and made his way back to the parlor with the bottle in hand, taking big swigs from it and belching loudly as he untied his bedroll and spread it across the floor.
CXX
NO ONE SAID a word as they entered Sara’s car, each by a separate door. Out their windows were separate habitats of thought, into which they each disappeared for several minutes, until Lino broke the silence by swearing.
“So what are your plans?” asked Sara, trying to assess whether it would be safe to have him in the house.
“You can go call the bastard and ask him,” said Lino, “He’ll tell you one thing, and you can figure out the opposite, and that’s what he’s going to give me.”
“I thought they said you were needed in Tarampa,” said Sara, knowing full well why Silvio’d excluded him.
“He needs me, he needs me,” muttered Lino, swearing under his breath and staring out the side window of the car. From the back seat, Bella leaned forward and put a hand on Sara’s shoulder, to indicate that she was talking only to her.
“So yesterday I ran those numbers while you were out, and I never got a chance to tell you what I found!”
“Yes,” Sara undercut her. “You’ll have to tell me when we get back.” There was anxiety in her voice. Lino straightened as though to listen better. “But in the meanwhile, you’re both probably hungry. We should stop at the market,” she said, pulling into a space in front of a small grocery. She got out of the car and motioned for Bella to come along. Lino started to get out also, but she patted him on the shoulder. “Let the women wait on you. Your day’s been hard enough. You’ll eat, and then you can call Silvio and work it out.”
While the butcher was slicing the ham, Sara leaned towards Bella. “No data, no information, nothing until we get him sent off,” she said, nodding at the weight on the scale. They approached the car with the bags in their arms, just in time to see Lino straighten in his seat. Sara tried to catch a glance at what he’d been looking at. There was a sheaf of folded papers jammed into the space between the run and the rise of the seat, but the outermost layer was blank. Clearly, the three were too suspicious of each other to engage in small talk, so the women entered the car in silence.
“I’m getting the feeling you don’t care much for Joaquim,” said Sara at last, resigned to learn what she could.
“That vaqueirito? What would I like about him?” Lino thought for a minute, filtering what he said. “And everyone knows, that other rat, Silvio, is in the palm of his hand.”
“You think so? They were both here for two weeks before you got here, and it seemed to me like they couldn’t agree about anything! I wanted you to tell me why they fight all the time.”
“What did they fight about this time?” said Lino, with obvious false disinterest.
“About everything! Whether to go at all, whether just to leave Larry alone, whether it was Joaquim’s fault that Larry was out there in the first place, what to bring along. I don’t know. I don’t know the details.”
Lino seemed to brighten as Sara talked, as though he had begun to suspect that she really was an outsider.
“That guy has his nose everywhere!” he burst out, as though Sara’s ignorance had given him permission to talk. “He’s busted up most of my best contracts. I get something set, he busts it up. I go do something else, get it set, he busts it up. He should have quit twenty years ago! He’s an antique. He’s stuck in some dark age, and he’s costing me my bread and butter, and he’s smug! Smug, holier-than-thou, thinks-he’s-an-old-wise-man, skinny little bastard. Now I have to live with the regret that I didn’t at least rough him up for his trouble!”
They had pulled up in front of Sara’s. “Ready for lunch?” she said.
“I’m ready to make my calls,” said Lino.
“They’re about five hundred percent cheaper at the Telepar,” she said, knowing he’d realize they were cheaper still when you could leave somebody else with the bill.
Sara and Bella headed for the kitchen table to lay down the cold cuts while Lino strode to the phone and stood with his back to them, swearing and twisting the cord. “I’m done with SPI,” he said, turning to them briefly while he waited for the operator. “Just for your information. You’ve just witnessed the birth of Lino Araujo, LLC, Prospecting, Brokerage, and—this is the best part—soon-to-be Private Corporation!”
CXXI
AS LINO HUNG up the phone and turned to them, Sara and Bella could see he was a changed man. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to pack up and go,” he said, whistling to himself a
s he set off down the hall. He came back ten minutes later with his leather-trimmed suitcase and its matching leather attaché and set them by the front door.
“So that’s quite a bit of time you were on the phone,” said Sara.
“I’ll send you a cheque,” said Lino, “as soon as I get myself settled. But in the meanwhile, I may need a ride to the airport,” he squinted out the front window. “Although I guess there’s no shortage of cabs. You heard that call of course,” he said. Sara and Bella had feigned interest in their own private chat, but they had both listened carefully to Lino’s end of various conversations, with Sara paying particular attention to the expense he had incurred on her behalf in placing his extended calls from her house.
“This is going to make me wonder why I stuck with SPI for so long,” Lino said brightly, reaching for a slice of ham, rolling and eating it without bread. “So it turns out that my friends have friends, and a few of those friends are politicians, and a few of those politicians have influence, and it looks like I have a golden opportunity right in front of me and I’m going to reach out and grab it. You can tell your friend Joaquim Rocha that despite his best efforts, I seem to be landing on my feet, which is more than he’s likely to do,” he looked at Sara and checked himself, remembering that her son was out there with him, “tramping around after some fool kid! Now there’s a waste of time and men!”
“Did you call Silvio and let him know you’ve quit?” said Sara, moving toward the kitchen counter and leaning on it, facing Lino, obscuring the pad on which he had been jotting notes as he had made his plans.
“Let’s let him guess!” said Lino, shouldering his pack. “Thanks to you ladies for your hospitality,” he said, bowing slightly at the door.
CXXII
SINCE LARRY REGARDED himself as someone who had never had a childhood, the daily lives of his sons filled him with wonder and confusion. As quickly as Oji had overtaken his older brother in height and weight, the two had seemed to form, before his eyes, their own sensibilities and roles vis-à-vis each other. Oji, for his own part, still seemed to revel in the fact that he could run faster, climb higher, and throw the spear farther than Iri could, and Iri’s regard for his brother seemed equal parts resentment, admiration, and dismissal. But most of all, Iri would cleave to his father, joining him in singing to the plants, or in reading the smaller words in Henry Walter Bates, or listening to the stories he brought with him after gathering trips, some his own and some that Kakap had told him. Where there was an ever-present sense of distance between Oji and his father, the connection between Larry and Iri was undeniable, despite his efforts to care for them equally. Others often remarked on the resemblance between Oji and Aran, but never between Oji and his father. Larry had to continually push aside the urge to tell Iri stories about his past, about his life outside the world, an urge he never felt with Oji.
One night when Aran was out visiting in the far village, he knelt on his mat to hug Iri and then approached Oji, kneeling beside him.
“I’m too old now, father,” he said, loudly enough for Iri to overhear.
“Are you?” said Larry, trying to hide the hurt in his voice.
“How old were you when your father stopped?” said Oji. Iri sat up and leaned forward on his elbow, listening. “How old were you when you moved to the men’s hut?”
Larry sat without speaking for several minutes, not sure how to answer. “My father never hugged me,” he said at last.
Iri got up from his mat and put his arms around his father. Despite himself, Larry could feel sudden tears roll down his arm onto his leg, and then unexpectedly, a hand on his knee. It was Oji’s hand. He took it in his own, and held it against a wave inside him at the thought that what had been missing between himself and Oji might not have been Oji at all, but only a part of him. When Aran came in later that night, she found him asleep between his two boys, having moved his mat to the ground.
“Are you feeling well?” she whispered as she shook him.
“Tuara,” he whispered back. “Tuara, mboa, tuara.” “Beautiful from the living and the dead.”
CXXIII
SODEIS BENT OVER his maps and lists, squinting in the dim half-light of a kerosene lantern to read his hand-drawn numbers and symbols, his lines as thin as razor-cuts. Whatever perversity there was in his nature that always led him to return to the scenes of his various crimes, that drew him back to Catalpa’s, the thing was not so reckless as to lead him to fire up the electrical generator, which anyway now within six months of Catalpa’s leaving, was already overgrown with moss and ferns and home to several colonies of swiftlets. He felt convinced that he could make the trek without a map at all; it looked to be a good ten days’ hike in as the spot was unusually distant from any consistently navigable river. But ten days was time he did not have. What he needed was a shortcut that could trim four from that monumental ten, allowing him to scratch the unbearable itch of those two faint numbers and still have plenty of time to set himself up on his next logging venture before his impatience got the better of him.
He mulled over ways to optimize his time on the river as he walked to the kitchen, lantern in hand. There were at least twenty boxes in the pantry he hadn’t even looked into yet; he pulled them open one by one and stacked them off to the side; a dozen bottles of bleach, an entire carton of mop-heads, a case of red wine of an inferior vintage if the price on the box was any indication. To his delight, there were several cases of still water and some tins of tuna and mackerel, an odd find in a house on the river with men right there to fish it. It occurred to him that with all the opportunities he had no doubt had over the past days and weeks, in bars and villages, he still hadn’t remembered to bring a can opener. He piled the cases of fish on top of the ones with the bleach and put a pot of the water on the kerosene stove. The only thing to do, the water in the pot somehow told him, was to follow the river south in a light canoe (like one of the dull silver fish that lay beached, clearly unused, by the pier) and then portage the thirty miles—two days’ worth of misery—to catch the Aramaya headed north. Five days at most, he told himself, even though most of the rowing would be upstream.
After downing two bowls of rice and beans, nicely spiced, thanks to the Senor, Sodeis strung his hammock from the same hooks that had once held Joachim’s and lay nursing one of the disappointing but nevertheless drinkable bottles from the Senor’s stock, staring deep into the noisy tangle of darkness. If he had been a man to know peace, he would have known it then. But Sodeis had never possessed an apparatus to detect that gift of the forest, and his longings were so deep as to be capable of satisfaction only through harder more definite forms of contact, of the kind that could be found only in conflict. As he dozed off, the images in his head had little to do with the forest itself, with friendships from long ago, or with any of the women he had known, all briefly, from a time some years back. Rather, the story that unfolded as sleep overtook him was confined, tragically to just two characters: himself and Joaquim.
CXXIV
ONLY AFTER THEY had hung their hammocks on the deserted verandah of Sr. Catalpa’s faded manse did Jorge admit to Joaquim that he’d lost the bag containing Larry’s envelope. Joaquim got up without saying a word and shook his head, heading out into the forest.
“Where are you going?” called Jorge as the others unpacked their bedrolls.
“To take a leak,” said Joaquim heading up the trail behind the house.
They were digging out their toothbrushes and stuffing their pillowcases with rolled-up clothes when Sodeis sprang at them from the doorway, wielding his revolver.
“You’re squatters in this house!” he shouted. “Get out! The house is mine now! You have no right to be here!”
“How is it yours?” said Martina, betraying no fear. “It’s Catalpa’s!”
“He left it to me,” said Sodeis with a smirk.
Joaquim came up behind Sodeis swinging a thick branch. “I doubt it,” he said as Sodeis went down. He stood with hi
s foot on Sodeis’s outstretched arm while Jorge kicked the gun away. “I can’t imagine you’re the sort Catalpa’d choose as an heir.” Then he turned to Martina. “Would you mind looking in my case for a purple velvet pouch?” he said while he stood straddling Sodeis. Sodeis began to squirm, and Joaquim fell on him. The two rolled over each other, and Sodeis squirmed out from under him and jumped to his feet, heading for the water. Jorge grabbed the pistol and took off after him, with the rest of them trailing behind.
At the pier, Sodeis seemed to consider taking their boat, but looking up at Jorge, who was training the gun in his direction, thought better of it and jumped into his own rig, starting the motor with a snap.
“Should I shoot him?” Jorge asked Joaquim.
“Morrer, se preciso for, matar nunca!” said Joaquim, while Sam and Martina in unison shouted, “Shoot! Shoot!”
“I thought that applied only to Indians,” said Jorge, lowering his gun as Sodeis disappeared upriver.
“Mierda!” said Joaquim under his breath.
CXXV
LARRY HAD ENTERED their hut the evening before as the father of an only child and a stranger, but he awoke as the father of two. Whatever had happened that night was not erased, as were most dreams, by the light of dawn, but rather lingered in the swirling fog that bathed their kaawa as they squatted together, eating their root pancakes and handfuls of dried cashews. Oji whistled as he collected his darts and rolled some of the pancakes in dried leaves, and when it came time for him to leave with his hunting group, he embraced each of his parents in turn, keeping his hand on his father’s arm as he stood to face his mother’s usual litany of admonitions and orders. When he left, and Iri had gone off gathering with his own group, which now consisted of sons who were three rains younger than he was, Larry squatted beside Aran at the side of their hut, grinding her pigments while she mixed them with the oils. As he turned the maata with his palm, he was surprised to find that his hand was moving in time to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” as it had long ago, when his only other job had been to cradle the infant Aran. Still under the spell of the night before, his reunion with that old song from childhood only deepened his sense that the scattered and half-buried shards inside him had revealed themselves as the pieces of a puzzle which, if only they could be turned and positioned just so, might someday fit together into a whole.