“Besides,” says Tommy, “it’s Boss who says don’t tell. He doesn’t want the Company Men to be worried.”
They must be important, then, if Boss is also afraid of them.
“You’ve told us, then,” I say. I suspect something. I say, “You want to stay? I have smokes.”
He looks tempted. I think it might be him who had been stealing my cigarillos, but he doesn’t give away enough in his face for me to be sure.
“No, I need to get back. You should get back, too. They need people to help with the visit.”
“Not me,” said Chelo, and looks up to me for confirmation.
I don’t give it. “I think I will come. I would like to see these VEE EYE PEAS,” I say.
Chelo puts a sulking face on, like the boy he will always be. “You can stay, Chelo,” I say to him. Stay, little-brother. Please stay.
“No, I want to see, too,” he says, lying.
I shrug.
Fletcher only hunted with arrows, and he forbade I should use my knife. I was not allowed spear or club or any weapon. Only arrows, and only those arrows that were made by Fletcher.
Hunting became very bad after I had my bow. The villagers had taken far too much game and we had to make a long trek every day. There was trouble, then, among our tribe. Some wanted to move the longhouse up past the Spirit-Tree Hill, closer to where the game was. Some wanted to hunt the villagers, and to chase them from the forest.
Fletcher would not say one way or another. I did as he did, and remained silent.
One day, as we rested in his hut, Fletcher said “If the tribe goes upland, we will find other tribes, other villages, and we will soon have to go upland again. And again. Then we will reach the green mountains where game is sparse. In your life, maybe your child’s life, we will be gone. We need to stay where we are. But if we fight the villagers, they will soon hunt us with rifles.” A long time he thought about this. All night and into morning.
The next evening he announced to all the people in the longhouse that he and myself would hunt Pig together, just the two of us, and there would be a feast for everyone afterwards, because we would bring back the game that had gone away.
Every night, for seven days, he told his wives to cook yams on the embers so they became sweet to taste and sweet to smell. We went over Spirit-Tree Hill to the plateau and found a run where a great old boar had been rooting. He put the yams on a banana leaf on the ground and every day we checked that they had been eaten and placed them much closer to the longhouse.
“When hunting Pig, you must draw your prey to the place where you will kill him,” he said, “because the Little-Man of Pig is different, and will help us. They are closer to men than other prey.”
On the seventh night, Fletcher’s wives led the dancing, and they asked the bush-spirits to guide us. On the eighth day, we kept the yams with us and we dug a pit down near the village, where the villagers hunted. He showed me how to knot the bark of the panaka-vine into rope and from rope into a net strong enough to hold Pig. He told me this was an up-lander net. Down-landers only made nets for catching fish.
“The up-landers are good hunters, but they are foolhardy. When they hunt Pig with the arrow, too often the hunter is killed. Pig will hold on to his life until he has put his death into you. Then he will tear you open and take his death back. Unless you hit him just right, an arrow will not kill him, and he will not give you time for a second.”
I looked down into the pit. It was muddy, and it looked like any pig that fell in would get out easily. “So how shall we kill him when he comes? With a stone?”
“No, you must use the arrow.”
“So we will shoot him from here? That does not seem right. It will make him angry.”
“Only with the arrow. But here is how it will be done: without a bow. The bow will bring the death only to you. You must not use a bow with Pig.”
He did not explain more. Instead, he sat me down on the other side of the track with the yams between us.
We waited for Pig. Quietly, so quietly I could barely hear him, he spoke while we waited. “Today’s hunt is different. We will not take a Little-Man to the tree. Instead, we will make him work for us.”
We waited, listening for the racket Pig makes when he come through the thicket. Nobody is bigger than Pig, and he moves without fear and, so, without caution.
“Pig’s death is great,” he continued after a while, “almost as great as a man’s. It is greater than any of the Little-Men who now frighten game.”
“But it is the villagers that frighten the game,” I said to Fletcher.
He smiled. “But the game stays away because the Little-Men crowd the air around here. They swarm like biting-flies, without purpose, chasing away others of their kind or driving them mad, and drawing their enemies. Pig will clear the Little-Men away. That is how Pig dies. Then the game will come back.”
“Pig too?”
“No, Pig will never come again to where he was killed. He is too wise for that. Kill him, and you drive him away forever.”
When Pig did come, the ropes bound his legs, and the netting wrapped him tight. It took all our strength to drag him out. Fletcher showed me how to kneel on his shoulder and to push the arrow into the vessel in his neck. All the while, Pig screamed like a child being burned alive. It was the loudest scream I have ever heard in my life. My ears hurt with the screaming, even after Pig’s last blood drained out, taking his death with him. Fletcher told me this is why you must bleed a pig. To let the death out, or it will stay there and try to get into you. It is the way of Pig, to always try to put his death in you before it takes him.
“He is so loud. I wish he would stop.”
“No you don’t!” he said, grinning, “The screaming chases the Little-Men. Nothing is stronger against them!”
And for a while, the game did return and the villagers stayed away. But I never saw Pig again this side of Spirit-Tree Hill.
Emmanuel the houseboy is missing, ever since last night. Balthazar swears he was in on the robbery, but I can’t believe it. Emmanuel is a calm man, young, and slight of build. When we left the longhouse he was half my height and he grew taller but not strong. There is no strength in him to swing a club, no fire in his heart to want to.
“So why is he gone, then?” Balthazar asks me and, truly, I cannot say. I try to imagine Emmanuel striking Raul with a club and I can’t. Emmanuel always apologizes, even when he has done nothing wrong. I remember being harsh with him when I was drunk. He just looked down, said no word. I told him to go away, to get out of my sight. He kept his head down and ran, like a little boy, away from me. We have neither seen nor spoken since then. I wish we had. I want to tell him I’m sorry for making him run. He is a good boy. I don’t know why I made him run away. I think of what Yalai told me, and I think I am becoming a wicked man.
One of Boss’s helpers catches me in the hallway as I am headed for the kitchen.
“You have good clothes you can change into?” he asks.
I say “yes, I do,” which is true. I bought them before I came to the camp, although I never wear them. I have a fine shirt and some good pants and shiny good shoes. I don’t want to say how I got them.
“You need to wash up, though,” he says to me. This is also true. I smell of rum and sweat from the hillside. I ask where I am to go. He says, “Kitchen duty. Go to Balthazar. He’ll tell you what you need to do.”
“No, you tell me.”
He tells me. I laugh. “They can’t serve themselves coffee?” I ask.
Boss’s man looks at me sternly. “They are too important!”
I am about to say that he can find someone else. But I don’t. I want to see these Company Men. I want to hear them talk.
The last hunt with Fletcher was for Leopard-Cat. I did not know it was the last hunt. Maybe he did.
It was a night hunt. There are no dances when one hunts Leop
ard-Cat. Leopard-Cat is wise, and he listens at the edge of the firelight and listens to people talking. When Fletcher told me what we were going to do, he whispered it in my ear through his cupped hands. Then we made loud talk about how tired we were and how we were going right to sleep. That is how you fool Leopard-Cat.
We met him by the stream that runs down from a seep on Spirit-Tree Hill. The moon was half-full, which is the right time to be hunting Leopard-Cat. When the moon is full, he can see everything in the forest and will stay away from you. When the moon is dark, you will never see him, even if he walks beside you on the track. But at half-moon, you can see him in the water and that is the only time you can kill him, because his Death is blinded by the sight of the moon on the water. It is like looking into the sun is to us, but when Leopard-Cat is thirsty, he will risk blindness for water.
Fletcher and I had hunted so many years together that we no longer spoke. He knew what I was going to do before I did it, and I could feel him move before he moved. When we moved together through the forest, our thoughts were mingled like breath, and like breath, we felt the other’s movements without seeing them.
So when Leopard-Cat came to the water, I knew it was I who would be taking him. And then it happened the second time. I saw right into Leopard-Cat’s eyes and he knew me, and he gave me his life with his eyes. The shaft struck him between the ears, and like Civet ten years earlier, he was dead before the arrow pierced him.
Fletcher saw what had happened, and the cold light of the moon on his face was terrible to see. And I understood something, then, that he never had to explain. Death was in Fletcher, like a Little-Man that had not been purged. Death had grown steady and patient and fat in Fletcher, and his time had come.
Right there, he skinned Leopard-Cat with my good steel blade and put the bloody skin over my head, the fore-claws knotted under my chin, the tail and back claws on my back.
“Now you will carry the Little-Man of Leopard-Cat in you. Like Leopard-Cat, you will walk unseen and silent. No one will see or hear you, and you will deliver them their death.”
“Am I to be Fletcher now?” I asked, but he said nothing.
I know the answer. The last arrow I will ever make had already been broken and burned.
Balthazar shows me how to hold the tray.
“Remember,” he says, “always come from their right. Let them fill their cup on the tray and put in sugar or milk. Let them do it for themselves. That is what they prefer.”
I nod. I almost want to laugh at how serious he is treating this. He sees my face, and he is troubled, more frightened than angry.
“Don’t laugh. Please don’t laugh. It will go badly for us if you laugh.”
“I won’t laugh. Don’t worry. But why so serious?”
“These are big men. Very powerful men.”
“I know. VEE EYE PEAS. You said.”
“Listen to me. Without these men, there would be no camp. There would be no logging at all. These are the men that began this camp. More than that. Many camps. I have children, brother. I need these men. They feed my family, and without them, we would starve.”
“You could hunt,” I say.
He looks at me like my father catching me killing sparrows, and I feel the shame I felt then. It was unworthy to show him his weakness.
“There are a hundred camps like this,” he says in a whisper, “a hundred Balthazars. If they decide that they don’t like this camp, they could close it. Like that,” he says and snaps his fingers under my nose. “Don’t get me in trouble. Not me or any other Balthazars.”
“Don’t worry, Balthazar. They will not hear or see me.”
This much, I know, is true.
The first time I heard an “iron dragonfly,” or so we called them, was the morning that Fletcher died. I heard the noise coming from below and I thought it was a night-spirit coming to take me to the dream-place where they live. I had heard that noise once, in a dream. A Little-Man grabbed me once while I was sleeping and the noise was everywhere around me, like I was caught in a drum being played. I was terrified, and he shook me a long time before he let me go. Fletcher told me it was just a mischievous ghost and I should ignore it.
But after that, I was frightened of the night-spirits, so when I heard the noise again, I got up quickly so he could not catch me. Then I noticed the noise was coming from outside the longhouse, not from a dream. I had just made it down to the ground by the light of daybreak when the first rockets hit.
I am a logger. I have grown used to the sound of wood being torn apart by dynamite, but this was the first time I had heard that noise. I believed the world was over. The world was over, in a way. I could not tell the difference between the scream of wood and the scream of the dying.
Again and again the rockets came. Each one a burst of flame and a noise so loud I thought my bones would shatter. After the first two, my ears couldn’t hear anymore except for the thump of new rockets. The longhouse was ripped apart behind me. I saw everyone screaming silently in the firelight. Mama was screaming. Papa was screaming. Fletcher’s wives were screaming. Only Fletcher was not screaming. He stood at the mouth of his hut and looked up at the helicopter. He raised his arms to it and I think he was asking it to come. The hut around him burst into a ball of flame and I saw the old man fly from the door like a broken sheaf of branches.
I ran to him. To him. Not to my mother and father. Not to the longhouse. I did not try to save anyone but him. I ran to the broken body of Fletcher and knelt by him while the helicopter flew off, happy and fat with our deaths.
He was burned on one side and one arm was a broken tree-stump. But one eye was clear and one hand reached out to touch me where Civet’s lifeblood had been put on me. I leaned in and he whispered in my ear to tell me what I am. That’s when I learned I was never to be Fletcher. There would be no more Fletchers for my clan.
Yalai found me there, long after sunrise. She had been calling for help, but no one came. She cursed me. She told me I was worse than an old woman. While I sat there, her little brothers had burned alive, and I had done nothing. Her shouting brought me to motion, but not to life. I helped her to get whoever was left out of the collapsed longhouse. Her mother was alive in there, but her father was not. I found my mother and father as well, but they had died. Sango was gone, too. Half of his face was smiling, the rest was cut away as if with a fine steel knife. I fainted to see this. Yalai kicked me awake again. Then we got everyone together and walked to the village. It took all day.
Coffee is over. I am waiting in the bar, pretending to wash glasses in the small sink there. Boss is with Chelo, speaking the yellow-caps’ language to a Company Man. The Company Man smiles. He looks satisfied and kind, but his eyes are small, black and shiny like Pig’s, and they watch. He says something to them and walks across the room to another Company Man. Chelo and Boss step aside and start to talk quietly.
Without looking at anyone, I step out of the room. But only partway. There is a small dark space near the door where I can stand out of sight at the edge of the room and listen. I listen to Boss.
Boss is speaking the villager’s tongue, because he does not want the Company Men to know what he is saying. I understand most of it. He is happy I served coffee so well. He thanks Chelo for bringing me. Chelo does not say anything.
Boss then says something I never heard before. He says that maybe all the logging camps will soon shut down, and the company men are here to decide if this will be so. They came here today because this mill is better than the others and they want to know why. Boss knows why. He says the Company Men think we are the same tribe as the down-landers, and they don’t understand we are very different.
So he asks Chelo to have dinner with them. He needs Chelo to tell the Company Men that people from our tribe are happy the mill is here. Boss says it’s important that Chelo and I show that we are better than down-landers. Maybe Chelo will go back with the Company-men to their
country, where he can tell everyone how happy our tribe is to have logging jobs. Then, when their countrymen all see we want the logging jobs, they will decide to keep the camps going.
Boss then talks quietly and says maybe Chelo will be boss himself someday, with a mill of his own. But first he must show how happy we are that the Company Men are here. One tree at a time, Boss says. One tree at a time clears the forest, he says.
Chelo says he will help. And he says he will get me to serve at dinner to show we are good workers and how happy we are that the camp is here for us.
He will not run. I will not ask him to.
I walk back into the room and Chelo and Boss stop talking. But they look at me. They are the only ones. I walk through the room and pick up the empty cups and put them on my tray. Nobody sees me, nobody notices I am there. Even in my white shirt and my shiny shoes, I am invisible.
When we got to the village, everyone came out to see us. They stood in their doorways and watched us, eyes wide. There were only twelve of us left, and three were only children. Of these, I carried one, and Yalai carried another and Chelo led the third by the hand.
The big man of the village came out and met us. When we explained what had happened, he did a strange thing. He opened his mouth as big as it could go and bent over like he was going to be sick. Then he wiped tears from his eyes and welcomed us. He went to the main square and told everyone there to make us welcome and to spare us what they could spare, and to take us in if they could.
Then he went back to his house and did not come out for some time. I wondered at that, but by nightfall, I understood from what I heard from the women talking with Yalai. The helicopter had made a mistake and thought the longhouse was the village. They had been spared, and now they owed us a debt that they did not want to pay, but they also could not refuse. For a while, we were given food and we were given shelter, but not happily and not for long, except for the Murphy, who took in the children and made them his own.
Yalai sold her gold bracelets, even the two I gave her, and bought a house for her and her mother to live in. Chelo’s mother left and married a logger only two days after we arrived. She told Chelo not to come. Not to the wedding, not to the logger’s house. Chelo was not to be her son anymore. The logger was jealous and did not want a stepson.
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