The Dream Merchant (26 page)

Garimpeiros
were finding traces of gold, nothing to speak of. But the word was now on everyone's lips. More of these wiry little men showed up every day. Soon they would begin to build Jim's enormous sluice box. Each day, gushing wealth would wash down into his hands. Gold was the drummer's beat. Jim could hear it from the hammock.

*   *   *

After a few weeks the morning sounds had evolved to hammering and chain saws and you could no longer hear the parrots and monkeys. The rudimentary dorm and cantina were going up. The men were nearly finished cutting a landing strip into the tall trees. Ramon Vega's helicopter flew in each morning with a two-thousand-pound load slung beneath its belly. The Caterpillar had arrived in pieces and the mechanic was assembling it in the small clearing. Then two big diesel generators arrived. Soon there would be power. Lights and
musica
were on the way. They were creating a little civilization.

Some days Ramon Vega stayed awhile and looked over the camp while it came together. His own
garimpo
was eighty miles to the east. There was no gold on his land, he sighed audibly, but he had a cantina with six working girls and miners from nearby
garimpos
came to visit. Ramon cleared the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars a month from the cantina. He explained to Jim that once he began to export gold the most beautiful girls in all of Brazil would find their way to this impossibly remote place. They would walk out of the jungle smelling of French perfume. They would gladly give their gifts in the heat, amidst the poisonous frogs, snakes, and disease. Ramon and Jim bantered back and forth. They shared the language of gaudy deals and success.

Ramon explained to his friend, once the tractor had cleared the land and they were flying out the gold, Jim would need to roll heavy logs across his runway unless one of Jim's planes was taking off or landing, because bandits would try to take over the
garimpo.
This was another part of the life here. Gold meant bandits along with beautiful women. Jim should expect armed men to approach through the forest unless they tried to land in planes. There was no law here besides money, no police, no recourse other than fighting it out.

Maybe they'll come to you on a beautiful morning, Ramon said with a playful smile, a perfect blue sky when your men are feeling warm and lazy from a night with the girls. Jim, this is the moment to worry. When the jungle is golden from the sun and you feel relaxed. Ramon stretched like a cat. He relished these little
firefights
in the jungle, full-fledged hostile takeover attempts that were common in the region. In the gold business, camps such as Jim's were often overrun and there were terrible slaughters; but Ramon made treachery sound like manly fun, our guys against their guys. Ramon didn't worry. This was the life we were made for, Jim, and Ramon shook his fist. We'll beat them unless they beat us. Another laugh. So what! We'll live the life until someone takes it away. In the jungle, power was the soul of morality as well as the key to surviving. The two men pledged to help each other like blood brothers.

Jim had enormous appetite for this new flagrant life. It fired him like nothing he had ever known.

*   *   *

Every five or six weeks Jim brought the Indian girl with him. While the camp was still in its construction phase, Angela hauled water and timber like one of the men. She was comfortable here. She had grown up in a tiny village only sixty kilometers from Jim's camp. At night, in front of the fire, she told Jim, Ribamar, and Luis about her life in the small village on the banks of the Igapo-Acu River. She spoke rapidly, while Luis translated with a melancholic or agitated expression that seemed to mirror some internal musing of his own.

Angela's community of forty Indians was a world unto itself. The men fished in the river and did a little hunting. The Indians didn't need anything more than what they could harvest from the river or nearby fields and gardens. There was always enough to eat. The villagers considered themselves blessed to live their lives here. Their children fed fish to pink dolphins that appeared like magic in the brown water. The gentle mammals whirled around the legs of the children and their mothers washing clothes in the river.

On the south end of the village, the natives had cut a clearing where a small plane could land in an emergency, but this rarely happened. Most of them lived and died among their family and friends without ever once visiting Manaus. Angela's migration to the city had been a great surprise to everyone.

Angela had learned about farming from her mom, who grew pineapples in a clearing at the top of a steep hill about two miles from their thatched hut. Sometimes Angela helped her mom plant seedlings or haul the burlap sacks, but on most days she worked by herself. She liked working alone, feeling the cool afternoon rain on her wrinkled face, and when she was in the mood she took a swig from a bottle of whiskey and enjoyed a snooze.

Angela's mom was nearly sixty by the time her daughter left for the city. She was a small old woman with the muscled back of a man. For hours she hauled eighty-pound sacks of pineapples. Every night she walked home by herself along a little path through the forest. She had to be inside before dark or she could be killed by the cats. One evening, the old woman came across a jaguar on the path. She dropped the sack and held her machete in her right hand. She watched the animal while it paced to the left and right, back and forth, eyeing the old woman. There was only one way to save herself. She mustn't drop her guard for an instant. This went on for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the pacing cat, waiting for the moment to defend herself. Almost always, such confrontations turn out badly for a native holding a machete. The tension of watching the swift-moving cat while holding the heavy blade wears a man out and he needs to rest his arm, shake the pain out. Then, he is lost. But Angela's mother was fearless and her arm was powerful from working with the machete her whole life. Eventually the cat drifted back into the jungle and the old woman walked home with her sack of pineapples.

Angela's family and neighbors had learned to navigate the considerable dangers of their neighborhood. Mothers stayed close to their infants so they wouldn't be carried off the riverbank by a Royal Eagle. When one of these tremendous birds swooped down for fish, it casts a shadow like a plane. Mothers kept their kids out of the water during the dry season when thousands of starved red-bellied piranhas gathered in deep pools. Once the rains began in November, the vicious little fish glutted themselves on berries and swimming in the river was fairly safe for the next few months.

The locals stayed inside after dark. Nonetheless, the work of the cats was readily visible. South of Angela's tiny community, there was a narrow walking trail, leading hundreds of kilometers toward Pôrto Velho and the gold mines in the south. Beside the path locals found bodies of
garimpeiros
who had been trying to make it to the mines. The men had been killed by jaguars. Usually the local people would put up a simple marker without a name. Ribamar shook his head and reflected, once more, that
garimpeiros
were valiant but stupid men. They couldn't get it through their heads that a single man cannot survive in the jungle.

Angela and Jim slept together in his hammock. She shook her head, no, and smiled at him, yes. She pretended to be shy at first; it was her endearing affectation. She liked him to take her clothes off like gift wrapping. The night fell quickly and she fed him her youthful breasts and tousled his thinning hair. They made love, though Ribamar was always a few yards away, dozing or listening to the droning insects and jungle shrieks, or suddenly the forest lapsed into inexplicable and daunting silence but for their heavy breathing. Jim was inside her for hours as though humping the moist sultry jungle, her smell suffusing him, into his hair and fingernails. When it wouldn't work anymore he pushed his fingers into her and kissed her neck. Angela, sweet laughing Angela, what did she really know and think about? What was in her mind those rapturous nights? Did she think it would never end? How would it end?

In the morning he felt like a lion and headed off into the jungle with Ribamar. Jim promised that he'd take her to visit her parents and little sisters. Once Jim's runway was complete, they'd fly into her village and taxi up to Angela's tiny shack. She'd step out of Jim's plane like a princess bearing gifts; he promised her, but then he forgot. The camp, this great endeavor of his life, obsessed him.

 

27.

The little house in Florida felt barren, as if the spoiled furniture had already been moved out. Yet Jim and Mara were still lingering in the crestfallen place. Even at this late hour, the most basic questions hung in the air. They didn't have thirty dollars between them.

Why don't you call your rich friend Marvin? she asked with a caustic expression. Jim was jolted by the question, as if she had read his mind. He had been mulling over dialing his old partner and pleading for a few dollars. But what a humiliation after such a history of victories. Marvin knew nothing of Jim's recent life. He shook off her words and rushed back into the jungle.

He described the camp to her. At first, it was so little, hardly anything at all, and all around the clearing there was a virtual wall of trees with flowering trunks and branches that shot back into the ground and tangled with vines and bushes. How could you beat it all back? Jim was running out of time. It was the most passionate section of his life and he told her about it with a building excitement. During the early weeks, when the crew was still sleeping outdoors, Martha, the chubby cook, prepared meals over a big pit. Always there was an enormous pot of rice and beans and the smells of meat cooking on the pit carried into the jungle. Sometimes the miners couldn't resist the smells and walked into the camp to share a meal with Jim and the construction crew. Jim allowed each newly arrived
garimpeiro
one free meal. After that miners needed to pay to eat in the camp with his crew.

All the men enjoyed Martha. Her food was tasty, but eaten in this remote and difficult place it was beyond exquisite. Martha was the only woman in the camp. She had an endearing smile and wore little blouses that showed her cleavage. She was the delight of all the men and she soon had lovers and other suitors lined up. In the jungle camp Martha was irresistible, and it pleased her to no end. She had little interest in returning to Manaus, where she had been homely and ignored.

Months before Jim's cantina was in place, the news had spread to the slums of the city that there was a new mining operation and
garimpeiros
began showing up at the clearing. No one had to tell them what to do or where to go—this hard work was in their ancestry. Their fathers had dug for gold and their grandfathers had lived in the jungle tapping rubber from the trees. The men set up their hammocks and little tents in the jungle. They cooked rice and beans. They began digging in the earth. For all of the physical discomfort and dangers, it was the life they understood and valued.

And so Jim's business came into being. Even in the beginning, when no one knew where to look, the men found small amounts of gold, and they brought it to Jim in little leather pouches; usually it was an ounce or two of dust, but occasionally they found nuggets, even a few large ones, which sent a thrill through the camp. Yes, they all had come to the right place. Jim had discovered a vein of opportunity in the Amazon wilderness. He carefully and honorably weighed the gold and he counted out reals as if he were paying off in a casino. For the
garimpeiros,
gold provided the chance literally to rise from the mud, to move their families from the slums along the fetid slimy riverbanks in Manaus.

Jim was forever working the math in his head, calculating how much he'd pull in each month when he had three hundred men digging and sifting the earth, how much with five hundred men, how many millions he'd clear when the mammoth sluice box was in place; that was his dream, to build a sluice box the size of a lofty downhill ride in an amusement park; such an apparatus could do the work of an additional five hundred workers with shovels. Maybe more. The numbers were staggering.

His mind raced ahead. Jim might open a hotel casino a half mile from the camp, beside the river, a Vegas-styled temple of gold. He'd salt the mud along the riverbank with flecks of ore and let his guests dig a little to get a taste of gold fever.

Mara was subdued at first, while Jim laid out the basics, but soon enough the scope of his dreams and the gold, and the anticipation of gold, went all over her face. So much chance and even the potential for treachery enflamed his young wife. Jim had had his hands right up into the stars. This was what she wanted for herself. Mara had her own bold plans. But now, with her kids shipped out of the house and very close to making her move, she was stirred by him again. Mara no longer knew if she was staying or leaving, which was frustrating. (She was not a woman who tolerated ambivalence, and particularly in herself.) But couples are like this, of course, making meaningful life choices, crossing bold lines, and then reconsidering. Jim's story about the jungle—it was the last story he had to tell her—gave her reason to pause. Mara had known from the start that Jim wasn't a regular old guy. Even now, she would sometimes think that he was ageless and that he could deliver his whole life again; they could do it together.

*   *   *

Jim spent the better part of a week describing the jungle life to Mara. Often he went back to a scene several times because he wanted to taste it over again. He couldn't quite imagine that he had traveled all the way from the jungle to this young woman who was about to break his old heart. Also, Jim was trying to stall for time. But I don't think this was the main thing. The Brazil story had come on like a fever. There was no more guiding or burnishing the story for self-aggrandizement or political correctness. It gushed out of him. I was there for several of these nights. Jim hardly acknowledged me, except once or twice when she stepped out of the room he looked at me with a sickly expression and asked for a couple of hundred. I nodded but felt used and angry.