Girl in the Water

by Dana Marton

  Girl in the Water

  By Dana Marton

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  Acknowledgements:

  I cannot thank my fabulous team enough: Sarah, Diane, Linda, Toni, and Clarissa. Also, my deepest gratitude to Carmen Falcone, author extraordinaire, who was my consultant on Brazil and kindly gave me feedback on all things Brazilian. Despite all the help, I probably still made mistakes. All mistakes are my own.

  GIRL IN THE WATER - Copyright © 2016 by Dana Marton.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author. http://www.danamarton.com

  First Edition: 2016

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940627-18-2

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Daniela

  A dozen jacundás flopped in a palm frond basket next to the missionary, the small fish unappreciative of their role in the lesson on how Jesus called his disciples to be fishers of men. The basket rattled as the fish fought to return to the river—a hopeless dream. They would be sent to the smoking racks right after the lecture.

  The schoolhouse sat on stilts, at least a hundred yards from the Içana, a small tributary of the great Rio Negro, deep in the Amazon rain forest. During the rainy season the river could swell a kilometer wide. The dark water stretched nearly as far now, after months of rain that never let up more than a few hours. Everyone went about in boats. They hadn’t seen the ground in weeks.

  The sound of water lapping at the stilts under the schoolhouse was as familiar to the children as their mothers’ whisperings. They kept their eyes on the missionary up front who wore long black pants and a short-sleeved black shirt, and never anything else. He was twice as wide as the average villager, and nearly twice as tall. Among the brightly dressed children of the Amazonian jungle, he looked like a great vulture.

  “When God brought the first Jesuits here, they carried the light of our Lord to the savages at a great cost,” he intoned at the head of the one-room schoolhouse that had no walls, just a palm-thatch roof for protection from the worst of the rainy season. “Many of them were martyred. Thus have they earned their eternal place in heaven.”

  Daniela, in the first row, closed her eyes and pictured the village market and how she would be able to pick anything she wanted—not even just one thing, but one for each hand. She could not imagine anything more heavenly.

  She liked when the missionary talked about heaven, but mostly, he talked about punishment, and how the wages of sin were death.

  Someday, when Daniela became a teacher, she would only talk about heaven. She was not going to forever threaten the children with hell. She was going to be as respected as the missionary, but much kinder. The children wouldn’t just sit around scared. She would let them smile and sing and even play.

  She’d spent the past month working up the nerve to tell her mother about her teaching dreams. Today. After school. She would do it.

  As the rain pattered on the roof, Senhor Wintermann sent his heavy gaze around. “Now who can tell me what it means to be martyred?”

  Most of the children tucked their heads into their shoulders like turtles on the riverbank. They tried not to make eye contact.

  Daniela’s hand shot in the air, but when the missionary called on her, instead of the response she knew very well, something else burst out. “Grandmother Pula said that her grandmother told her that when a priest led the first Portuguese soldiers into the forest, they killed half the Baniwa and carried off the other half to be slaves.”

  Warm rain dripped from the sky, and if the humidity became any thicker, it could be woven into a floor mat. Yet a cold wind seemed to blow from the missionary’s flaring nostrils.

  He reached into the basket next to him, grabbed on to the largest jacundá without looking, and—slap!—smacked Daniela across the face so hard, her ears rang.

  He held on to the stunned fish as he bent forward, until the sharpness of his spearing eyes and the dark caves of his nostrils were all Daniela could see. “Does your cheek burn?”

  “Sim, senhor.” She tucked in her head like the others, wishing she had a turtle shell to hide her.

  The missionary bared his precisely straight teeth. “Now imagine a burning a thousand times worse, the fires of hell, melting your heathen flesh off your bones.” He tilted another few centimeters closer, until the air soured with his breath. Then he added in a grave tone, “And no water.”

  Daniela could not imagine no water. The idea squeezed her chest like an anaconda’s embrace. She’d grown up by a river, in the middle of the rain forest. Water was like air, all around, all the time.

  She didn’t say another word for the rest of the lesson.

  The missionary kept his heavy gaze on her anyway.

  Daniela loved school learning, but she suspected she would love it more without the missionary.

  Someday, she was going to travel far away, become a teacher, then return to her village. She would teach the Bible, but she would also teach the jungle. She loved going into the jungle with her mother, Ana, and learning about the plants and the animals.

  She daydreamed a little about that, until the missionary said at long last, “Class dismissed. Go with God’s blessing.” And as the two dozen children clambered into their boats and canoes, he called after them, “And don’t forget, if you take off your clothes, God will strike you dead.”

  He forever fought to keep everyone covered, especially during the rainy season. Wet clothes chafed the skin, so most of the children preferred to go around naked in the rain. A habit of the devil.

  Daniela paddled her small dugout canoe home, dropping off two younger children on the way. The hut she shared with her mother stood on tall stilts at the edge of the jungle—the last hut before the path disappeared in the thick of the rain forest—but now the water nearly reached the threshold. If the Içana rose any higher, they’d have to hang their belongings in bags from the rafters.

  Her mother’s canoe, and no other, bobbed tied to the hut. As Daniela ducked inside, Ana glanced up from cooking rice and beans on the small woodstove in the corner, her long legs, toned from tree climbing, folded gracefully under her.

  “Homework?” Her voice dripped with love and sounded to Daniela as sweet as dark jungle honey.

  Daniela nodded.

  “Best do it, then.” Her mother pushed her heavy braid of hair off her shoulders and gave Daniela a big spoonful of food, a third of what they had.

  Later, when the rice was fully cooked, they’d split the rest. Ana always made sure most of the food went to Daniela, always had a few extra bites for her when she came home from school, unless all their pots sat empty.

  Daniela chewed the half-crunchy rice to make it last longer, but eventually had to swallow. She drew a deep breath. Now.

  I want to be a teacher. Say it.

  She opened her mouth. Then she looked at the thin layer of food at the bottom of the pot her mother stirred. Shame tightened her throat. They had no money for her to go away to learn. If she said something, she’d just make her mother sad.

  So she tucked her dreams of higher learning away with dreams of a full belly. Maybe someday. Maybe we’ll have more money in the dry season.

  She climbed into her hammock with her books, which she was lucky to have, and sank into a story that matched none of Pula’s tales about the Portuguese colonists.

  Daniela’s grandmother hadn’t been a slave, but her great-grandmother, Ona, had been, on a rubber plantation.

  Ona had told the tales to Pula. And Pula had told them all to Daniela. A few of the tales were happy. Other
tales were dark. And some were downright gruesome, the kind of stories that scared her more than the night jungle.

  “Bad things happen. Then good things happen,” Pula once said, not long before fever took her. “They take turns like the rainy season and the dry season.”

  “What do we do?” Daniela had asked, hoping for a trick to escape the bad things. Pula had many tricks—usually jungle cures—to escape all kinds of unpleasantness, like a bad cough or a case of worms.

  But that time, Pula said, “We endure.”

  Memories of her grandmother’s toothless smile filled Daniela’s head. The spicy scent of cooking food comforted her, and the sounds of the popping fire and the rain on the roof lulled her to sleep.

  The sound of whispers woke her. For a moment, she blinked at the entwined couple in her mother’s larger hammock—the missionary’s broad frame on top. His white skin glowed in the dim light of the hut. As much as he preached about clothes and modesty, with Ana he didn’t mind being naked.

  Daniela silently turned the other way and let her thoughts drift.

  Her earliest memories were quiet sighs, muffled grunts, and soft laughter from her mother’s hammock. Men always seemed happy when they were shoving their sticker. And they were mellow afterwards. They often had a kind word for Daniela on their way out, sometimes even a piece of candy from their pockets.

  For as long as Daniela could remember, men visited the bamboo hut she shared with her mother.

  In the dry season, when someone came, Daniela skipped down to the Içana to look for coconuts that sometimes floated down from the jungle. She wished she could do that now, even if sometimes one of the bigger boys took what she found. Of course, at other times, those same boys might give her a fish they caught by hand.

  On lazy days when she had nothing else to do, she could sit by the river for hours and watch the boys fish. If they were in a good mood, they might even let her try for eel. Those were the best days, even if the big river eels were too powerful, and she could rarely wrest them from the water.

  But this was not the season for eels. Yet when she still couldn’t sleep, she quietly slipped from the hut anyway.

  She paddled through the flooded village, each hut a little island. She headed for the largest.

  Many people had stands at the market in the dry season and sold straight from their boats in the rainy season, but only Pedro had a store. He also had the biggest boat in the village. And he had the largest hut, larger than the schoolhouse. He had nine children and three grandchildren, and even the missionary said that Pedro had been blessed.

  Pula used to say Pedro could sell dry land to fish.

  As soon as Daniela scrambled out of her canoe, Pedro popped his head out the open door. “The store needs sweeping.”

  So she swept. And then she arranged all the fruit on the shelves in a pretty pattern as Pedro liked, making sure to put hard fruit on the bottom, soft fruit on top.

  When she finished, Pedro said, “I need you to fix a hole in the roof in the back. Come stand on my shoulders.”

  They went back to where rain dripped down on tin cans of cooking oil. She climbed Pedro’s back, braced her bare feet on his shoulders, and with her small fingers wove the palm fronds back into place as fast as a bird weaving a nest.

  When she slipped back down, Pedro caught a closer look at her. “Why is your cheek red?”

  Daniela hung her head, glad that in the dimmer light of their hut, her mother hadn’t noticed the mark. She didn’t want to add to Ana’s troubles.

  Pedro huffed. “The missionary?”

  Daniela bobbed her head.

  Pedro said no more, but he paid her in sugarcane—a chunk almost as big as the missionary’s fish!

  Daniela smiled all the way home. Unhappiness was impossible when someone had sugarcane.

  She was grateful to have Pedro as her friend. When the missionary talked about the saints on Sundays, Daniela often wondered if Pedro was one of them, but she never dared ask. Nobody ever asked anything during the hillside sermons. When the heavenly father talked, you listened. No back talk, não senhor.

  That night, as a heavy storm cracked lightning, Daniela’s mother let her wiggle into the big hammock. She put her arms around Daniela and kissed her head. She told Daniela some of Pula’s tales about their people, the Baniwa, the people of the forest.

  Higher up the river, the villages had more native Baniwa, but Daniela’s village had been built by soldados da borracha brought from Ceará to a nearby rubber plantation by the government in her grandmother’s time. Most were killed by the jungle. When the plantation shut down, some of the survivors went home. Others stayed and built a tiny village on stilts on the bank of the Içana. The village was a mix of all kinds of people.

  Ana was half Baniwa. She spoke Baniwa almost as well as Pula had. She knew the sacred name of things: u:ni for river and water, kepizeni for bird, a:pi for snake, haiku for tree, dzawi for jaguar, and a great many others.

  Daniela loved rolling the words off her tongue.

  She loved the rain, loved the flood that washed everything clean. But when a particularly loud thunderclap boomed above, she jumped.

  Her mother took her hand. “The storms will be over soon. Then the nights will be quiet.”

  She spoke truth. The following week, the water began receding. And then the week after that, at the start of June, the rainy season ended and the dry season began. Loggers came up the river to go deep into the jungle.

  They didn’t come out again until the beginning of the next rainy season in December. They floated down the Içana with their overburdened barges, hurrying to the city of Manaus, where they’d get their pay, then could drink their cachaça and enjoy the women at the countless puteiros. They rarely stopped at Daniela’s tiny village.

  But that December, a young logger did saunter up the path to Daniela’s hut. She was home alone, cleaning cassava in front of the hut for Pedro, who promised to give her some as payment. She meant to pass half her share to Tereza, the oldest woman in the village, who, without any teeth, liked eating the roots cooked and mashed.

  The logger meandered up to Daniela. “Ana?”

  She brushed the dirt from her hands and scrambled to her feet. “I’ll go find her. She’s not here.”

  “I don’t mind,” the man said.

  He was rangy—just bone and muscle, like most loggers—his dark eyes hungry as he looked her over. He pushed her down, then pushed himself between her legs.

  It hurt very much, but it was over very fast.

  Her mother came just as the man stood and fastened his pants, stepping around Daniela, who sat with her arms hugging her pulled-up knees.

  Ana made the man pay. And when he left, she crouched next to Daniela and put her arms around her. They sat there like that for a long time before her mouth said, “Now you’re a woman.” And her eyes said, We endure.

  She took Daniela to the market. She let Daniela pick two things, one for each hand, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like heaven.

  They went into the jungle next, and Ana pointed out the plants to pick for the tea that would make sure Daniela wouldn’t have a child of her own.

  After that, the men sometimes came for her mother, and sometimes they came for Daniela. She didn’t like it, but it no longer hurt. Most of them managed quickly enough. And even the ones who didn’t weren’t as bad as gnawing hunger.

  A whole year passed like that. But at the end of the rainy season of the second year, at the end of May, the Içana rose higher than ever, the village flooded in the middle of the night, and Daniela’s mother drowned in the churning water.

  Like an anaconda with a tapir, grief swallowed Daniela whole, trapped her and squeezed her in its bottomless dark belly.

  “You can’t bury her in the hillside cemetery, not in hallowed ground.” The missionary’s tone was hard and unforgiving. “Ana was a sinner.”

  He looked very black and very grim, more like a vulture than ever, the villagers
in all their colors pulling back from him like scared macaws.

  Daniela stood in front of him, anger bubbling inside her, rising like floodwater. Her body could not contain it all. So she looked the missionary right in the eye like she’d never dared before. “To slap you with a fish, senhor, would be an insult to the fish!”

  Then she turned on her heels and marched away while the man shouted behind her.

  Pedro helped Daniela bury her mother in the middle of the night, the old way. They hollowed out a log stuck in the mud of the riverbank, placed the body inside, covered it with palm fronds, then pushed the log back into the river, and watched it float away into the darkness.

  After that, the missionary said she was too old for school. And he sat her in the very back in church.

  Daniela had no one to hold her when lightning cracked overhead, and sometimes she cried at night, alone in the big hammock, missing her mother.

  Pedro visited from time to time. She didn’t feel so alone then.

  One day, after Pedro rolled off her, breathing hard, he said. “You’re wasted here, Daniela. Tomorrow, I’m going to take you downriver, to a great big house. You’ll like it there.”

  But Pedro had lied about that.

  * * *

  Ian

  All Ian Slaney wanted was a moment of oblivion.

  He leaned against the cold brick wall in the alley behind Shanahan’s, one of the seediest bars in DC, with a hand on top of the woman’s head as she knelt in front of him.

  Christ, she was like a fricking vacuum cleaner. On turbo setting. No finesse.

  She’d come into his bar with three girlfriends: office girls, wanting a night on the wrong side of the tracks to finish off their year, clearly looking for trouble, and too dumb to know they were out of their depth.

  The first time the blonde had sidled up to Ian, he’d ignored her. He’d already built a close relationship with half the bottle of whiskey on the bar in front of him. All he wanted was some private time with the other half.