The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  She spoke again.

  He was sluggish from the sedatives, a freight-train headache compounding his inability to make any sense of her words. He caught the word cabeça – head. She said it a couple more times. Maybe the bullet hadn’t exited cleanly? Maybe it had ricocheted off bone, lodging somewhere deep in his head? He felt around his face and head. It was a mass of bandage. Why had they bandaged his whole head?

  She told him off, trying to pull his hand away.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said in English, the pain making him wince.

  He heard the man’s voice again. His face appeared. Salt-and-pepper hair, a dog collar and black shirt.

  Jake lost it, oblivious to the pain now. He wasn’t going to lie there while some priest gave him the last rites. He had seen priests standing over beds before. He wasn’t going to let it happen to him. He wasn’t going anywhere until someone told him what had happened.

  He tried to push himself up with his arms. He could feel the IV tubes pulling at his skin.

  The nurse gave an instruction.

  The priest grabbed Jake’s arms and held them down. He was too weak to resist. He felt the prick of a needle.

  “No,” he was trying to shout but only managed a weak croak, “don’t you put me out.”

  He was already sinking through the bottom of the mattress. He couldn’t fight the darkness as it closed over him.

  *

  It was angry voices that started to shift the blank empty darkness. Recriminations. And with them came the colours. The flashes and psychedelic whirls that were woven into nearly every dream. Numbing terror. It clung to Jake, morphing into cold dread as he came up through a fog of sedation into the white room.

  It took him a moment to again confirm that this wasn’t the other white room. The other hospital. The life they had forced him to leave behind. Fury and shame swarmed his insides.

  At least he was still alive. He was a survivor. He had learned that much about himself. He moved his head gingerly to look around. There was pain but no bolt of agony this time. And the chair by his bed was empty. No priest. Maybe he was out of the woods.

  He realised that the angry voices from his dreams hadn’t stopped. There was an argument going on outside the door.

  It burst open and a young woman entered, a classic Brazilian blend of smooth brown skin and blue–green eyes. She looked like she had stepped out of the Brazil of his imagination, even though the curls of her long, dark hair were tied back in a severe, not-so-Brazilian manner.

  She was followed by a nurse. “You cannot come in here.”

  “You can’t stop me,” the young woman said evenly.

  “Do you know this woman?” the exasperated nurse asked Jake.

  “Of course he does.” The young woman spoke in English, with an American lilt. “I was with him the night he was shot, wasn’t I, Joaquim?” She nodded at him, encouraging.

  Dim places within his memory began to flicker unpleasantly, a vague recollection of something ending badly in a bar. But he would never have introduced himself as Joaquim. He was wary; she might be a journalist.

  “We met that night?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t know you,” the nurse cut in. “You’re taking advantage. You must leave now.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Then I’m getting a doctor and he will make trouble for you.”

  The nurse left and the young woman pushed the door shut.

  “My name is Eliane, I’m a lawyer. I’m sorry for coming to see you like this, but I was there on the beach. I need to piece together that night, to build a case against the police – have they been to see you?”

  “I haven’t spoken to anyone.”

  “You mean to anyone official?”

  “I mean I haven’t spoken to anyone.”

  “But your family – they know you’re here, right?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I could contact them for you?”

  “I have no family.”

  She tried to hide her surprise. “Then, is there someone else I could contact for you?”

  “There’s no one.” It took him a moment to realise that he had said it in Portuguese. The words were coming back to him.

  She seemed unsure where to go next. Uncomfortable. “I don’t believe the boy they took was the one who shot you,” she said, switching to Portuguese. “I saw him, he wasn’t armed. Do you remember?”

  The pain was a hot wire threading around his skull. “What are you talking about? Who took who?”

  “Have you been told anything?”

  “All I know is I was shot. I don’t even know how long I’ve been here.”

  “Three days. But I thought Padre Francisco came to speak to you.”

  “The priest?”

  “Yes. He knows the boys who robbed you.”

  “Oh. I thought he was here for – for something else,” Jake said.

  “The police shot one of the boys and took him away – I’m trying to find out what happened to him. The other escaped, Joaquim.”

  “No one calls me that any more.” It was the only thing that came to him. “It’s Jake.”

  The door opened and a young doctor swept in with the nurse in tow. “You have no right be here,” he said to Eliane.

  “Why haven’t you told him what’s happened to him?” she came back, without missing a beat.

  “He has been sedated. We were waiting until he was able to fully understand.”

  “So tell me now,” Jake said.

  The doctor cleared his throat self-consciously and studied Jake for a few moments. “The injuries from the gunshot were mostly superficial,” he said in English, carefully making his way through the words. “Although I must say that you will certainly be disfigured now.”

  Jake hoped that he had just overcooked his vocabulary pick. ‘Disfigured’ didn’t sit well.

  The doctor ploughed on. “Most of the bullet exited but there were some small pieces that were left behind in your jaw and cheekbone. They are not a problem right now so we left them because we needed to deal with something more dangerous. We made a scan of the brain as a normal procedure and there was no injury from the bullet, but I must tell you that we did find an aneurysm. Approximately here.” He touched a forefinger to a point just above and behind his ear. “It was almost as large as…” He searched for a word, gave up and indicated the size of a cherry stone with his thumb and forefinger.

  “We operated. The aneurysm was very bad, very big. It was growing for a long time in your head. You will live now, I think. You know, if that boy had not shot you and we had not made the operation you would die sometime. You are walking along and then one day suddenly,” he popped his lips, “it burst like a balloon, and fuhm.” He tipped his forearm from upright to horizontal. “Quick, like this. Dead.”

  The doctor looked at Jake, seeming to have momentarily forgotten Eliane. She was also looking at Jake. Expectantly.

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. The doctor had spoken in English but Jake was still struggling to process the information. He wanted them to go away, to leave him alone.

  “That boy saved your life,” Eliane prompted. “Do you understand?”

  “He tried to kill me,” Jake said.

  “No, Jake, this boy went to the priest afterwards – it was an accident, he didn’t mean to pull the trigger.”

  “You shove a loaded gun in someone’s face, there’s a good chance it’s going to go off,” Jake said. Take responsibility for what you do. He believed in that. It was carved into him from bitter experience.

  “But you will live because of this,” Eliane said. “These things happen for a reason, Jake. Maybe you can help these boys in return.”

  “I don’t owe anything to anyone.”

  “The shooting was in the news and people are interested. They think it’s like a miracle. The media want to talk to you.”

  “No way.” He had gone to the media once before. It wasn’t a beast you c
ould tame.

  “But the publicity would put pressure on the police,” she said.

  “No,” he said, anger flaring. It was always tucked in there, ready.

  Her eyes dropped.

  The doctor stepped in front of Eliane. “Okay, no more. He should not be made upset like this. You must leave right now.”

  “Okay, but if you remember something – anything – it might make all the difference,” Eliane said to Jake, darting around the doctor and placing a business card on the bedside table before allowing the doctor to usher her out.

  “My number is on the card,” she said. “Just in case.”

  Chapter 6

  Vilson

  Blazing hot days had followed that night on the beach, winter giving way to summer. Everything had changed; it was all connected, Vilson knew it.

  The hard blue sky was beginning to soften as he walked into the late-afternoon shadows cast by the Candelária church. That day, many years ago, was another when everything had changed, a tear in the fabric of the world. When the off-duty cops had killed Gabriel.

  He shivered as he quickened his step. The spirits of his long-dead brother and the other children drifted unhappily around this place.

  Stepping into the cool air of the cavernous interior with its soaring arches, superstitious awe pressed down on him, every molecule of the massive interior leaden with it. He felt almost as tiny and insignificant as he had on his first visit.

  At the font he made a shallow bow and dabbed his fingers in the holy water, crossing himself and touching a finger to his lips, as his mother had taught him.

  He saw Padre Francisco beneath the statue of Nossa Senhora – Our Lady – clearing away dead candles to make room for more amongst the banks of flickering votive flames.

  Padre Francisco finished his task before straightening at Vilson’s approach. Unhurried. In all these years Padre Francisco hadn’t changed. Maybe there was more grey than black in his hair now but, as far as Vilson could remember, he had always had the grey. Strong features and good skin made his age difficult to place.

  “Peace be with you, Vilson.”

  “And with you, Father.” The words came out of Vilson automatically, but he left the pleasantries at that. “Is there any news?”

  “The Englishman will be okay. He knows it was an accident.”

  Vilson had never liked handling the decrepit old pistol. Babão always said it was as likely to blow up in your face as hit a target.

  Padre Francisco continued. “The lawyer is trying to get him onside to help your cause.”

  Vilson wasn’t holding out any hope on that score, he had no faith in the system. It wasn’t made for people like him. “What about Babão?”

  “Vilson, I am praying for him, but you know that the police took him away.”

  They both knew what that usually meant.

  “I know he is alive, I feel it,” Vilson said defiantly. He had repeated this to himself a hundred times or more. He had to make it true. “Can I see my mother’s letters?” he blurted. He needed some comfort. Something to hold onto.

  “Of course.”

  Padre Francisco’s cramped little office was barely more than an alcove, a rickety desk and a metal filing cabinet, the beige and brown paint chipped. Padre Francisco removed his vestments. The sacred words that went with the ritual had a potency that Vilson was unable to resist. An instant spiritual high, unbinding a little of the tension.

  Now in his plain black shirt and dog collar, Padre Francisco rattled open a drawer of the filing cabinet and pushed back the hanging files to retrieve the bundle for Vilson.

  These were the letters that Vilson’s mother had written to him every few months since he was a boy. Since he had last seen her. There were runs of stationery in differing colours and sizes, shades of washed-out pastels. The letters were the only record he had of his mother, and the chunks of colour also reminded him of significant periods and events in his own life. The letters were everything to him.

  He had studied every cheap biro stroke, the welts of uneven ink, the folds and creases and the marks and stains on the paper. Unable to read the words, he understood the patterns, the regularity of the shapes, and they formed a sort of language for him, one that reflected the readings that Padre Francisco gave him.

  Vilson picked out his favourite and unfolded it carefully for Padre Francisco. With so many hours in the pulpit, Padre Francisco’s reading voice had a particular quality, practised and yet somehow natural, the deep tone rising and falling, emphasising in all the right places. As soon as he started reading the letter, his voice flipped a switch in Vilson’s brain. It took him straight there, brought out all the images in vivid detail. It gave him a good feeling that he rarely felt in the outside world. This letter described the humble, broken-down rocinha, the small farm that his mother had found and hoped to turn into a home for Vilson and his brother, Gabriel. They would leave behind the grinding fear of their lives in the city, maybe farm some cattle and a few pigs, grow some maize, maybe even a little coffee or sugar cane. But even broken-down farms cost and Vilson’s mother would dedicate herself to working jobs in the nearby town to make the rental deposit on the patch of land and its abandoned farmhouse.

  The letter was one of the oldest, written not long after Vilson’s mother had left them on the steps of the church.

  Padre Francisco reached the end of the letter and folded it. Even with Padre Francisco falling silent, Vilson was still far away on the farm that inhabited so much of his imagination, a place he could almost smell, working alongside his mother under a hot sun with a sweet stream for them to dip in and cool their skin and quench their thirst. He withdrew slowly and reluctantly from his place. “Father, it’s not just the police who are after me.”

  He couldn’t meet Padre Francisco’s eyes as he told him about Anjo and his gang. “I must have somewhere safe,” he pleaded. “Can I stay with you?”

  Padre Francisco had known Anjo from childhood. Anjo was vicious and unbalanced even then.

  “We’ll have to find a different way,” Padre Francisco said, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry, but that boy is too dangerous. The church takes care of people in the favela, vulnerable people, but we can only do that with his permission. You know what he is capable of if he discovered we were hiding you. But don’t worry, we will think of something.”

  Vilson would have begged if he had thought that it would move Padre Francisco, but his head dropped, beaten. And then something occurred to him and he grabbed at it. “Maybe this is a sign, Father?”

  “Sign?”

  “Yes. Telling me that this is the time to go to my mother.”

  “Vilson, you know what the letters say. She is not ready yet.”

  “But it has been so long. When will she be ready?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that, I’m sorry.”

  The regularity of the letters had dwindled in the last few years. Vilson was starkly aware of that. The hope had leached out of them, until they were little more than logs of the hardships that his mother was enduring, instructing Vilson to stay put, to make a life for himself in the city. The farm was a dream preserved only in his imagination.

  “I will go to her. I have nowhere else,” Vilson said.

  “But we only have a postmark on the letters. We have no idea exactly where she is.”

  Now it was Padre Francisco’s eyes shifting away, unable to meet his. Vilson didn’t understand. “The postmark is from the town though, isn’t it? I could find her if I went there.”

  “Vilson, I think it is a big town. I can make enquiries, but you must wait.”

  “I cannot wait.” It came out in a strangled shout, his desperation tempered by the surroundings and company. “They will kill me if I wait.”

  Chapter 7

  Jake

  He was sitting propped up in bed. He could do that for a few hours at a time. He had even managed to totter down the hospital corridor to the toilet, wheeling the mindless little trolley
that held his saline and morphine drips.

  When he had looked in the bathroom mirror the first time he had almost laughed. He’d have won a Halloween fancy-dress competition hands down. They had only shaved one side of his head for the operation and, with most of the bandaging now removed, he was stuck with a half-baked Mohican. They had pulled a lot of stitches out of his face but, inside and out, it was a puffy mess of livid scar tissue, the remaining dressings and surgical tape stiff with dark scabs of dried blood.

  He was glad when some of the long, empty thinking hours were sponged away with the arrival of a TV on a tall, ungainly stand. Cutting a swathe through prime-time Brazilian TV, novelas – the soaps – dominated his viewing.

  He was hooked on the self-aware humour of the frothier novelas. His favourite was a kind of arch spin on Tarzan, with the primped faux-feral blond hero emerging from the comfort of the jungle into the craziness of the modern world. It was called Uga Uga. He still couldn’t quite believe it when the title came up on the screen. The characters often spoke too fast and the more opaque idioms left him baffled, but the nurses were able to fill him in. They were also fans.

  The evening news had just ended and Uga Uga was next up. The previous evening’s episode had finished with the younger of a pair of hairy, and resolutely shirtless, brothers getting into yet another potentially fatal fight. Before he had a chance to discover the outcome, the police had arrived.

  “Good afternoon, Senhor Jake,” Captain Nogueira greeted him.

  He and his Cabo Palmano had visited a few days earlier when the morphine was turning the inside of Jake’s head to glue and scrambling his perception of time. He could scarcely recall anything from the meeting, other than feeling wary.

  The big captain might be all expansive bonhomie and lame jokes, but he was chest-thumping alpha all the way through, rank or no rank. Jake couldn’t quite figure the cabo – the corporal – though. He could see the marks of a fighter on his face, but there was plenty going on behind his eyes. Jake decided to pay more attention to him than to his captain.