The Dream Merchant (33 page)

In Brazil, he had been greatly affected by certain people. He loved the girl, and increasingly so. In the passion of traveling from the city to the jungle and back again, while he built his own world with his own hands, Angela had made it possible for him to slow down a little and savor the ride. He would have missed most of the best except for her. Ribamar had become Jim's soul, perhaps his true father. Certainly his good father. Jim was haunted by Luis, pathetic and loveable, brilliant, possessed.

Jim was still engaged with his jungle theater. Florida was dead to him. He didn't want to go back. He was fascinated by the clearing and he yearned to see it again. He felt that it was his, even though Ramon had taken it away. Jim didn't feel outraged so much as perplexed and stopped in place.

Jim had left twenty gunmen in the camp. They knew exactly how to defend the camp. Ribamar was there directing things. Something had gone wrong. Jim had an inkling, but he really didn't know. It wasn't classical revenge that drove him ahead. Even now, Jim could imagine sitting down with Ramon Vega and reflecting about what had happened at the camp. If they did that, Ramon could almost surely make Jim smile, even now. He felt like they were still playing their game, conning each other, posturing, testing.

Jim wanted everything as it was before. He couldn't turn off the switch. He was hearing the voice of Ribamar as though they were walking in the forest together hunting for tapir and monkey for Martha's barbecue pit. He wanted to do that again. Lust was making this key decision for him, as it always had. He couldn't stop thinking about the sluice box. It was a beautiful thing, the way he'd built the dam and directed the flood to strain tons of gravel in a day; buckets of gold fell into the riffles. He couldn't give it up.

*   *   *

The following morning he walked to the tiny shop of the white-haired gun vendor he and Luis had often visited. It was a big chance going in there. The old man could easily have heard about the massacre. Such news from the jungle travels fast. But the gun seller acted normal, not a twitch or tightness on his face. Jim said that he needed two good men for the camp, and the old man nodded and dialed a number. Jim had no idea who he was calling; it might have been Ramon. After a half hour, two men came to the shop wearing fatigues and uncaring faces that Jim knew so well. He left with his new friends.

Even at this late hour, he didn't have a plan so much as a direction. He decided that he needed to go north to get south. If Ramon Vega had learned that Jim was back in Manaus, his men would be checking the traffic on the two-lane road leading south from the city in the direction of the camp; they wouldn't care about the few cars leaving the city on the dirt road north. Jim and the men bumped along in a taxi seventy kilometers to the town of Ayrao, where there was a landing strip. He paid triple the normal price to charter an old four seater for the four-hundred-kilometer flight south to Angela's tiny village on the Igapo-Acu River. The pilot knew of the river but hadn't heard of Angela's village. He wasn't confident there would be any place to land. Jim listened and nodded, but these weren't his concerns.

*   *   *

He fell asleep with the engine roaring close to his head. An hour south of Manaus, the old plane entered a broad, dark storm and was thrown all over and pelted by rain. They were flying in a black pit. For twenty minutes the pilot struggled to hold her, and the gunmen feared they would be thrown from the sky.

Finally, they were into the clear, and the pilot tried to get his bearings. Below there was a vast expanse of burly green jungle, lakes and blue ribbons of rivers and streams. All the green terrain was indistinguishable. It went on like this for an hour, many, many winding rivers, none with defining features, and Jim wondered if the pilot was just conning him, trying to make a show of finding the village before turning the plane back to the north. Jim understood that he couldn't allow the man to land his plane at the Manaus airport even if it meant forcing him to put it down in a field. Then the pilot turned toward a river that was perhaps broader than the others. The little plane headed east, a few hundred feet above the muddy water, for about ten minutes and then Jim began pointing, There, he said, there!

Jim could count five, no, six hovels on the riverbank. Not much. There were a few grazing cattle. Kids were waving up at the plane. Just to the south of the village, if you would call it that, there was a wide dirt swath, a rudimentary landing area just as she had said. The whole place could have been pushed aside with a shovel and a rake.

Jim was suddenly aglow, waving stupidly and trying to catch a glimpse of Angela running out to see the plane. His heart was beating all over his chest and stomach. She'd described the village perfectly. The children were playing by the river, beautiful kids with black curly hair. He'd come just as he'd promised. She'd be amazed.

For a few delirious minutes he forgot about Ribamar, Luis, and the others. He said Angela's name to six or seven kids who now surrounded the plane, and they all pointed to her house only a hundred feet away. Everyone knew Angela. There was her toothless father, Juici, sitting on the porch working on his fishing nets. There were a dozen gray squirrel monkeys watching him or fidgeting or climbing off and on the simple raised porch. Also, there was a beautiful little girl with lustrous black hair and a slightly flattened nose. She was resting her head on a sleeping monkey. She was Angela at three years old. It was her baby niece.

Angela's father was a very nice man, simple and pleasant, happy to meet his daughter's good friend from far away. He clearly knew about Jim and didn't seem to mind that his daughter had an older boyfriend. She had been home visiting for weeks, but a few days before she had left the village with three
garimpeiros
who were passing through. She's gone back to her work, her father said with pride. It was highly unusual for a girl from this tiny place to work in the city.

This news only made Jim happier. Angela had left the village to come back to him. He'd been worried that she wouldn't want to leave her family. Jim was on a roll of good luck. He'd have to find her in the city, but he could do this, easily. Right now he needed to put Angela out of his mind.

The four men slept the night sitting up in the plane. At dawn Jim instructed the pilot to meet them at the village in five days and to wait an extra day if they weren't back. Then, Jim and the two gunmen ate an early fish breakfast with Angela's father and mom and Jim accepted a gift of some dried fish for their trip. The three of them caught a lift across the river with one of the village fishermen.

 

32.

The early morning coolness of the rain forest is precious and a traveler wants to breathe it deeply. The leaves have a fresh, fragrant wetness and the ancient place seems newly spawned. Even while walking fast, a man feels like a lighter person. Seamen have a similar experience when the distant shoreline drifts below the horizon. The heaviness of one's being stays behind.

On the south bank of the Igapo-Acu River, fallen trees from past rainy seasons had miraculous shapes, some of them curled around one another like petrified cobras. Now pushing into the virgin jungle, Jim looked at tall trees,
sumaumeira,
with very thick trunks and huge buttress roots that stood higher than a man. Above the buttress roots, twelve or fifteen feet from the ground, he could see the watermark from past rainy seasons. In a few months the rains would come again and four-hundred-pound fish would swim right here where the three men were walking.

Jim had no map. He navigated through the jungle using a little hand compass. Some months before, when Angela visited his camp, they'd looked together at a map and she pointed to where her village was located on the river, although the map didn't show any village. Jim knew the distance from her community across two rivers to his camp was sixty kilometers and the heading was, more or less, southeast. He hoped Angela had been accurate when she'd pointed to the map. Jim had explored stretches of the Rio Novo and figured that if they crossed the river anywhere within five or six miles east or west of his camp he would be able to find his way.

When they had first started taking walks and hunting together, Jim couldn't keep up with Ribamar. Jim had struggled not to fall on his face or break an ankle, and he couldn't keep air in his lungs. When the brush was nearly impenetrable, the older man seemed to swim through it while Jim's face was whipped by branches and coarse vines. Ribamar had teased and pushed Jim to move faster, trained him to run across logs until he didn't worry about falling and to feel his way through the trees and vines at night because one day that might be important.

Ribamar had prepared Jim for this jungle passage. He knew that to be safe from cats, or fairly safe, he must sleep in a natural clearing, never in dense jungle. He knew where to look for hearts of palm and Brazil nuts to eat on the run. He had learned the habits of many animals from Ribamar. Jim knew to steer clear of coatimundis, fierce thirty-pound creatures that looked like little bears with long snouts. Coatimundis are brilliant animals who kill cobras but understand that they must not take on the deadly snake unless there is a tree root with an anti-venom nearby. When wounded by a hunter, these uncanny creatures play dead and are known to rip a man apart when he approaches incautiously.

Jim could see it like a photograph, Ribamar waiting for him high in the foliage of a tree, maybe sixty feet above the jungle floor. There he'd be safe from the cats and covered over by vegetation where Ramon's men couldn't find him. Ribamar could survive for a month like this and the idea of it made Jim giddy. Ribamar wouldn't try to escape. He wouldn't try to walk out of the jungle. He would survive eating honey from beehives, hearts of palm, and the sticky sap from milk trees that actually tastes like cow's milk. He could heal his wounds with plants and barks. Jim felt sure that Ribamar was alive. He could last for a long time and they'd never find him. Jim would find him.

Ribamar had said that in a twelve-hour day a man could cover forty kilometers in the forest if he kept moving and eating some dried meat or fish every two hours. But in order to keep going at such a pace a man needed to have a goal. Jim was traveling to save Ribamar, that's what he told himself, but sometimes the girl came into his head. He was running to Angela, though she was in Manaus, looking for him. It was a strange thing.

*   *   *

By the middle of the second day, the walk was no longer pleasant. The heat had become oppressive and Jim's light clothing felt leaden. The temperature and humidity wiped out thoughts and daydreams. Jim focused on his breathing and placing one foot in front of the next. There was no excitement or fear about what lay ahead. He just kept walking with his eyes fixed on the ground. Jim's men were twenty years younger, but they couldn't go at his pace. Every half hour he'd sit on a log and wait impatiently, and when they'd caught up and given him a sullen nod he pushed back into the dense forest with branches and fronds and biting insects in his face. He listened to the men's muttering and heavy breathing falling behind. Jim avoided shallow streams and more open stretches where Ramon Vega might have patrols moving about.

They arrived at the north bank of the Rio Novo at about 3:00
P.M.
on the second day. They had to make it across, about eighty feet, without soaking their rifles. This was a very nervous moment. The only way, Jim figured, was to rest the guns on logs and push them across. Once the men were floating in the river, they'd be sitting ducks for Ramon's men. Worse yet, to get the logs across, the men had to kick with all their strength. It was the dry season and the river was teeming with red-bellied piranhas. Any commotion in the water was a dinner call: come feast on flesh. One of the gunmen became sick with fear and was certain piranhas were attacking his legs. But it was all nerves. The men got across to the other side and scampered up the bank with their packs and guns.

*   *   *

Jim figured it was about one mile to the camp from the river's edge. He could do this last part blindfolded. Now he had a plan. Approaching the clearing from the northwest, the men would come to a small bluff at the west end of the landing strip that looked down on the buildings. From this hill they would be about eighty or a hundred yards from the barracks. Jim would take a look and decide. He had no idea how many men Ramon had left guarding the camp. If it was twenty men, the situation was hopeless. Jim would have to crawl back down the hill and hike back to Angela's village. Also, he was concerned about the camp dogs. Were his two dogs still alive? Or had Ramon Vega killed them and brought new dogs that would begin barking the moment Jim and his men approached the ridge or maybe before?

After resting for a while, the men neared the clearing about a half hour before dark, as Jim had planned. Early in Jim's jungle education, Ribamar had reflected that as the forest cools down at the end of day the jaguar come out to hunt, when it is practically invisible approaching through the foliage. It was an appealing idea. Jim hoped that Ramon's men would be relaxed and perhaps hungry after a long, hot day.

Jim poked his head above the ridge. It was perfect, almost too perfect. There were two men cooking meat on Martha's outdoor grill between the cantina and the small building where the girls entertained. Jim's dogs were sitting beside them waiting for food. Suddenly the dogs started wheeling around and wagging their tails, but they weren't barking. The two men must have thought, Such foolish animals. There were three other men drinking beer outside the cantina. Jim couldn't see any more, only five.

Now was the moment, before someone went inside. Jim signaled the other two men to come onto the ridge alongside him. He would kill the two who were cooking. His gunmen would shoot the others who were twenty yards closer. Jim's shot was about a hundred yards, long for a rifle with an open sight, but he felt certain he could hit them. One of the men by the grill was facing Jim and gesturing with his arms as if narrating a story.