Drink the Sky

by Lesley Krueger

  “I warned you I was going to talk to you,” Tânia said.

  Antônio smiled at Holly, shaking his head. “You found a good teacher. That’s a rare privilege.”

  Leaning across to him, Eric said, “So you have something in common.”

  Antônio laughed soundlessly, but with apparent good humour.

  “I don’t like this conversation,” Holly said.

  “Well, my flower,” Tânia answered appeasingly. “We’ll talk more later.”

  No. Holly wanted to leave. She’d been there for an hour, the others much longer, and she signalled to Jay that it was time to go. Yet for once Jay ignored her, looking alert, piqued by what was going on. He waved for the waiter and ordered another round of beer. Holly frowned, although she realized Jay was probably right. Everything remained too ragged and unfinished; she couldn’t leave yet.

  But she also couldn’t help turning her chair away from the others to watch a far happier family nearby. This was a jolly white-haired couple with a coltish teenage daughter, or more likely granddaughter. The couple was sharing a series of jokes over their beer while the girl leaned against her grandmother, who played with her hair. As Holly watched, it struck her that the girl looked petulant, and she was tired of petulant girls. But the grandmother was being jolly with her, coaxing her to smile, to laugh at her grandfather’s jokes, to reach for his outstretched hand. Finally, the girl allowed him to take her small hand in his big one, and the grandparents grew even more jolly. Then the grandfather got up and led the girl away, and as the air fractured, Holly remembered this was Copacabana, where a few dollars could buy you any disease you cared to name.

  “You’re staring,” Jay said quietly.

  “And how long were you fooled?”

  “Fooled, my flower?” He was a deadly mimic.

  “Was that a boy or a girl?”

  “Maybe a virgin?”

  “Tânia’s right. I don’t belong here.”

  “You belong in New York,” he agreed.

  Holly drew in her breath. “I’ve actually been thinking of going to Tierra del Fuego.”

  “What?”

  Holly couldn’t blame him. She’d been thinking about it in the same way she’d been thinking about Charles Darwin, shooting Powell — or moving to New York. But he was pressuring her, and she’d had enough of feeling pressured, seized, secured, God help her, even by the boys. All she really wanted to do was paint. Yet once she’d mentioned Tierra del Fuego, the idea had an odd plausibility.

  “I want to be on my own for a while, think things over, make some sketches. Isn’t that a good idea?”

  Her voice sounded high and childish. Jay crossed his arms, then uncrossed them again.

  “On your own in Tierra del Fuego. I admire your initiative, Holly, but somehow I can’t picture it. Don’t you think of yourself as a little urban for that?”

  She felt flattered that he saw her in those terms. Sophisticated? “I don’t think of myself that way at all.”

  “But penguins, honey? Glaciers?”

  Holly smiled and shook her head, ready to admit it was an offhand idea when she heard Tânia say loudly, “Don’t do that.”

  Looking over, Holly saw Tânia start to get up; saw Eric draw her back down to her chair.

  “He seems to know them,” he told her.

  Distracted, pushing back from the table, Holly could see Antônio heading toward three rough-looking men who were standing around his new motorcycle.

  “You’re not supposed to do that,” Holly said, turning anxiously to Jay. “Let them take it if they want.”

  “Antônio seems to think he knows who they are,” Jay replied.

  “More likely Eric knows who they are. Toughs like that.”

  “Antônio gets around himself,” Jay said. “He wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon, you know.”

  “Is that the problem?” Holly asked. “Is that why they don’t like him?” She watched nervously as Antônio reached the motorcycle, parked along the curb. Tânia tried to get up again, but again Eric restrained her.

  “You’ll only make things worse.”

  Antônio was being back-slapping friendly, apparently talking to the men about the motorcycle, showing them how to adjust the mirrors and saying something about the leather seat, which was shiny under the street lamps. The two youngest men — boys — grew interested despite themselves. One kicked the back tire. Antônio laughed, rubbing the guy’s upper arm and clapping him on the back. But the oldest of them took offence at this and said something sharp. Antônio raised both hands, palms flat out, and started backing away from them, talking gently. But before he’d taken more than three or four steps, the older man said something else, and one of the boys grabbed for Antônio’s wallet, bulging in his front pants pocket. Antônio was thrown off balance, and as he stumbled sideways, into the motorcycle, the first man shot him three times directly in the chest. Antônio threw out his arms and slid from the motorcycle onto the sidewalk as the gunmen fled.

  “Não!” Tânia cried, pounding her fists against Eric until he let her go and she could run to Antônio. A friend ran behind her; a niece was screaming and screaming. Holly stood up and froze there, rigid with shock, while Jay started shouting at their waiter to get a policeman from the posto, call an ambulance, for God’s sake call a doctor.

  “He’s bleeding, all the blood,” Tânia cried. “My God, baby, all your blood.”

  The niece screamed until her sister slapped her. In the momentary silence, Holly heard Tânia’s friend say very clearly, “Gone. Already gone.”

  Eric shook his head. “Over a stupid motorcycle.”

  “The man’s gone,” Jay called angrily. He made a move toward Eric. “The man’s gone, and you say what?”

  Eric gave a ghastly smile. For a moment he reminded Holly of someone. Not Tânia, Eric didn’t look much like Tânia. Tânia said he looked more like his father, although Holly had never met Tânia’s first husband, who had died two years before the Austens had arrived in Brazil.

  Doutor Eduardo, she thought. In that moment, Eric looked like Tânia’s uncle. The same debauched and petulant mouth, the artificial smile: Holly found herself distrusting Eric as much as she disliked him.

  A policeman ran up, waving his gun. Jay calmed him down the way Antônio had tried to calm the motorcycle toughs. Behind them, Tânia’s friends detached her gently from Antônio and brought her to sit at the table. She slumped there, her body old, her face looking raw as a girl’s.

  “Tierra del Fuego?” Jay asked, appearing behind Holly.

  “Are they coming after me next?” Tânia said.

  20

  Todd rubbed his eyes with one hand. Holly’s telephone call was different from anything he’d anticipated. Of course, the scenarios you anticipated were never the ones played out. It had something to do with chaos theory. The predictably unpredictable trajectory of the next shoe to drop.

  “Tierra del Fuego,” he said. “Holly, this is crazy.”

  “Yeah, my work is kind of crazy. But it’s still my work. Why should I take it any less seriously than you take yours?”

  “Who said I take this seriously? I just wrote the world’s most fatuous press release. I’m the first to admit.”

  Todd heard her sigh, and knew she was on the verge of telling him he wanted it both ways. Was there anyone who didn’t? Holly, for instance? Sending him away, then demanding he yo-yo home with only a day’s notice. But she would say he’d always taken off on trips with almost no notice. Why couldn’t he come home just as quickly when she needed him to look after the boys?

  They could conduct entire arguments these days without saying a word.

  “Tierra del Fuego,” he said. “Well, that’s an interesting idea, Holly. But my God, it’s poorly timed. I was just getting somewhere on something I’ve been working on for a lon
g time. I know — so are you.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any leeway on the timing. Summer lasts two minutes down there and I want to stay two weeks. These are the best flights I could get. You know what it’s like trying to coordinate flights to the end of the world. Now it’s my turn.”

  “But why, Holly? Haven’t you had enough time alone? The boys, of course,” he added hastily.

  “You’re the one who said our lives are complicated,” she said. “Maybe they don’t need to be. I suspect that they don’t need to be. I just need to get away from everything, even the boys. Take the final step, I guess, and finally think it through. The idea has been percolating for a while.”

  “So why is this the first time I’ve heard of it? Holly, I can’t just rearrange everything inside of a day. I need more time. Why don’t we peel back the urgency and talk this over?”

  “Didn’t I explain about the flights? Maybe I didn’t, I’m feeling quite frazzled and upset. Tânia’s friend Antônio was killed the other day. I’m just back from the funeral.”

  “Killed? My God, what happened? The poor bugger.”

  “Shot,” Holly said. “God knows why. I’m also exhausted. I was in the studio half the night finishing Darwin’s face. It turns out he has Antônio’s face. So puzzled.”

  “Good Lord, Holly, you’ve had a shock, another shock, a series of shocks. You shouldn’t just go running off like this.”

  “I’m afraid there’s just no leeway. Oh — Cida’s pregnant, but her mother’s in charge. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “What just got thrown at me here?”

  “I don’t know what else to say. Goodbye. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  “Holly, you can’t do this.”

  She hung up.

  She hung up and Todd threw the receiver onto the floor, sending the phone down with it in an absurd crash and jing-a-ling of bells. She expected him to be endlessly understanding; dancing to her erratic tune, making amends for things he frankly didn’t remember doing, biting his tongue, eating his suggestions, prostrating himself the way too damn many people seemed to expect these days.

  Imagine your wife acting like the most demanding and dissatisfied people you met. He’d fly into projects billed as warm and fuzzy exemplars of international cooperation and meet a staff of Hollys, human porcupines whose spines bristled as they smiled and smiled, their dim little eyes watching him for even the faintest hint of wandering attention, exactly the way she watched him play with the boys at home. He tramped through their natural rubber projects, their brazil nut projects, their goddamn acerola projects as gingerly as he did on her polished floors. They smiled and smiled, every bit as polite — even gracious — as Holly tended to be lately, meanwhile suspecting him of hidden motives, Macchiavellian manipulations, and a First World feeling of superiority toward their struggling projects. He could almost hear them say it.

  Yes, we’ll take your money, Mister nice liberal eco-imperialist, but don’t for a solitary optimistic moment think that gives you any right to interfere in what you no doubt believe to be the pitifully backward way we choose to do things, which as a matter of fact has deep cultural roots and suits us just fine.

  “I have no intention of interfering, but I do know a few things that might save you some time and money if you’d let — “

  They’re all the same.

  Todd, that’s just so typical.

  He was sick of it. Sick of her. He was sick of it all.

  Todd groaned, burying his hands in his hair. He sometimes felt he’d spent the past six months on a pilgrimage to expiate every sin of which he’d ever been accused, not to mention those of his fathers that had been visited upon him. Which wasn’t to say he felt the criticisms to be unjust. He’d never claimed to be perfect. Far from it. Holly was right, he was very far from it. He was distracted at home, impatient at work. But at home, weren’t they supposed to understand that your intentions were good, at least?

  Sterling intentions. Unfortunately, his performance rating was dismal all around. Not only had Holly kicked him out, he’d had almost got himself fired. Todd groaned again. Much of the work he’d been doing lately was designed to repair relations with the environmental coalition. He’d been rebuked for what amounted to his stupidity in refusing to stroke the concerned academics he’d taken around the Amazon in April. Even at the time, Todd had known he was being remarkably self-indulgent with the academics. He knew he should have tugged his forelock, held off correcting their wild suppositions and refrained from demolishing their asinine opinions. As far as that goes, he should have jumped in the river and pretended to be some endangered goddamn otter. Because afterwards, hadn’t they written just a poisonous letter to his board of directors? And hadn’t he known they would? Of course he’d known, and everything that had happened since was an ironic gloss on his reiterated message: that hasty, ill-considered decisions taken to achieve a short-term goal led to dreadful complications later on. You paid and paid and paid.

  Todd sighed. There were too many days up here, in this fetid mess, when all he wanted in the world was to sit in a book-lined study and read. Read and inspire students, read and enlighten his colleagues, read and write hair-splittingly arcane papers; treatises he’d manoeuvre through the competitive world of academic publishing by issuing precisely the sort of letter the members of his tour group had written, only better.

  Actually, it wasn’t bad. The coalition had sent him a copy, and he’d had to admit to the justice of many of the complaints, while admiring the subtlety the academics sometimes brought to their task of undermining him. But the letter showed signs of being written by committee, and Todd had spent a gleeful night in some Hotel Insomnia red-pencilling its more awkward constructions, editing out the prudent qualifications and sharpening its adjectives into stilettos. He’d even written an official response, agreeing sadly that he’d been unsuited to be their guide, having failed ignominiously to prevent one of the academics from giving their left-over food one night not to waiting street children but to the restaurant owner’s Great Dane. Nor, he wrote, had he been able to persuade his honourable colleague to revisit the opinion that it wasn’t the dog’s fault there were too many poor children in the world.

  Todd hooted with malice as he re-read his letter. Then he tore it up. By mailing it, he might have salvaged his chance to return to academia some day, his enemies torpedoed, his good name intact. But he tore up the letter, denying himself an out, forcing himself to keep doing what he believed was right. Not that he claimed to have found perfection in the environmental movement. He’d made mistakes. The entire movement had made mistakes. Yet it was also true the movement kept permitting him to grow. Holly may not have believed it, but he still tried, and something in the movement allowed this too; perhaps its youth. Todd wrote a letter to the coalition apologizing for his childish behaviour toward the academics, faxed it north and set off determinedly, making his pilgrimage, making amends, excoriating himself for his hereditary sins.

  All of which would have been more impressive if he’d had anything else to do. His wife had informed him they weren’t separated, but he’d better not come home. As meanwhile Jefferson wasn’t heard from, the Amazon tribe stayed disappeared, and even Ignacio was beginning to fear that nothing would come of this, after all.

  Until recently. This past week, in fact. The timing of Holly’s trip couldn’t have been worse, and Todd wasn’t sure what to do about it. All he could do was hope for a break, even though hoping for another break seemed like tempting the gods. Or was spending so much time with Ignacio making him superstitious?

  Todd had been sitting in Ignacio’s clean-swept quarters behind the church when it happened. It was late, and they’d gone beyond talk to take up their regular game of backgammon. Ignacio was a fanatic player who’d insisted on teaching Todd the game to pass his long, shipwrecked nights. Todd wasn’t sure he should have been
keeping up with Ignacio, given the young priest’s unfortunate evangelism. But if you approached it theoretically, you might also argue that Todd couldn’t afford to isolate himself any further.

  There was nothing theoretical about it. They were both lonely, and simply avoided certain subjects like an old married couple bent on peace.

  “But you’ve left yourself so vulnerable, my friend,” Ignacio was saying, as his unlocked door swung open and Celso slipped into the room.

  Astonished, Todd stood up without extending his hand. He’d seen Celso occasionally over the months, and the agent usually made a point of ignoring him. If Celso was with someone else from the Indian bureau, he might turn to the other person and whisper something that made them both laugh. Now he stood on Ignacio’s plank floor and rubbed his hands together, shrugging his shoulders, shifting from one foot to another; wriggling like a dog caught shredding a cushion. His ugly face was contorted with apology, the desire to please, and the underlying shrewdness and contempt which he could never disguise.

  “So,” Ignacio said pacifically.

  “It is a different tribe, but not uncontacted,” Celso said. “The bureau made contact in the Fifties.”

  “How do you know?” Todd asked, crossing his arms.

  “There was an expedition,” Celso answered, moving restlessly around the room. “Most of the people who went on it are dead, but there’s an old man who kept one of the copies of the records. You know how crazy we are about making copies.”

  He laughed insincerely, desperate now to please, but Todd could see that underneath it all, he was just as desperately resentful.

  “He kept them,” Celso repeated, “and they show the people were deeded the land on the south face of the serra. All the land where the geologist is working, everything down to Jefferson’s rapids. If I get the old man’s copy of the agreement, could you get it out to someone who knows how to use it?” His face worked, and he said with sudden dryness. “The other copies seem to have disappeared from the files.”