The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  Vilson was stunned. Confused. His thoughts were trying to swim against a torrent that was flooding his brain. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. “There was a sign,” he finally managed to say. “I received a sign, and I knew it was my time to find you.”

  “I cannot go with you. I don’t want to.”

  Vilson swayed and stepped back to steady himself, like a boxer wobbled by a punch. “But the sign, Mãe. It came from God. Even Padre Francisco believed this.”

  “Padre who?”

  “Francisco. He looked after all the letters you wrote. He helped me write replies.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Chapter 32

  Jake

  He had gone along with what Vilson had said. He didn’t want to be a spectator in that conversation anyway. But he didn’t have to stay in the car. He wasn’t a six-year-old. He leaned against the boot, watching the fireflies. The sky was quite something too.

  He caught a sweep of light against a distant hill out in the darkness. Shit.

  Then there was nothing. He kept looking.

  Several minutes passed before another slice of light cut across the gentler slope of a field. It could be one of the neighbouring farmers. There was no need to get overexcited just yet.

  The headlights silhouetted a line of trees on the hillside opposite the farm, sweeping one way and then bouncing the other. He heard the engine for the first time.

  He found his way along the dark veranda and rounded the corner to see the small group in the doorway. “We need to leave,” he said, breaking the awkward silence.

  The headlights tore long shadows along the grubby whitewashed walls of the outbuilding on the other side of the yard. Vilson’s mother looked terrified. “Ai, meu Deus,” she cried, her feet pattering from side to side. “You have to go. For my sake, go,” she pleaded with Vilson.

  “Mãe, I will not leave without you.”

  They heard the vehicle hit the cattle grid and rumble over it.

  Jake drew Eliane to one side. “Talk to him, for Chrissakes,” he whispered to her. “I can’t stick around for another showdown with this guy and he’s not going to take kindly to seeing you two either. I saw him at the rodeo – I couldn’t tell you in front of Vilson.”

  She looked at him sharply, uncertainty in her eyes.

  Jake had no idea how badly Torquato’s son had been injured, or whether he had even survived. He had hoped that they would be able to get Vilson’s mother away from the clutches of Torquato and then tell her what had happened to her younger son. He whispered to Eliane, “Something bad happened at the rodeo – he will be a very upset man. Please trust me.”

  She looked Jake in the eye for a moment, and then nodded before turning to Vilson. “Today is not the day, Vilson,” she said, her voice calm and soothing. “Let’s do this right. Come on.”

  Vilson wasn’t listening. He was still looking at his mother. She was staring at her feet.

  The vehicle pulled up somewhere on the other side of the farmhouse, a door groaning and creaking open, before it was slammed shut.

  Jake turned to the sound and took a couple of steps toward it, back toward Eliane’s car. Eliane put her arm on Vilson’s shoulder and gently tugged him.

  The dark veranda, and that whole side of the farmhouse, was suddenly flooded in harsh white light. Jake squinted at the two floodlights on top of the cattle shed.

  The light finally seemed to rouse Vilson and he allowed Eliane to lead him away. Torquato had parked his pickup in the corner of the field by the cattle shed, ahead of Eliane’s car. He appeared from the side of the cattle shed and came toward them.

  Jake had to walk on by. He had to do that. Get in the car with Eliane and Vilson and drive away. He was going to keep a lid on his temper and his mouth shut.

  Torquato’s eyes looked puffy and bloodshot, sweat shining on his neck and chest, his straw cowboy hat pushed back on his head. He almost staggered back in surprise when he recognised Jake. “You?” he said. Jake could see fear and anger fighting for control in the farmer’s eyes.

  “You’re trespassing, gringo. Again,” Torquato said.

  “You’re breaking an awful lot more laws than that,” Eliane bounced straight back at him.

  “Oh yeah? And who the hell are you?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer? Ha.” Torquato forced a laugh, and then looked at Vilson. “And, let me guess, this must be the prodigal son. So you got yourself a lawyer to try to get your sticky hands on my farm, huh?”

  “I came for my mother, nothing more,” Vilson said thickly.

  Eliane said, “And I just want to find out what the hell you’re up to out here. Which is why I’ve arranged for the ILO to meet us here.”

  “Really? The thing is I smell bullshit, because I don’t see any ILO.” Torquato forced a smile but there was suppressed panic in his face.

  “They’re coming.” Eliane was locked in professional mode and she sounded unshakeable, but Jake just wanted to get in the car and get them out of there. He could see that Torquato was on a knife-edge. There was nothing to be gained from a stand-off.

  “Let’s go,” he said, putting a hand on her back and gently pushing her toward the car. She started walking.

  Torquato caught sight of Vilson’s mother hovering back at the corner to the rear of the house. “You planned this, didn’t you?” he shouted angrily. “And tonight of all nights.” He started toward her and she shrank away. He strode past and went inside the house, and she meekly followed.

  Eliane went to the driver’s side when they got to the car.

  “You okay to drive?” Jake asked.

  She nodded.

  Vilson hesitated a few metres from the car, looking back at the house.

  “Not today, Vilson,” Eliane said to him. “Your mother is frightened of this guy, and we can’t get around him without the ILO.”

  Vilson’s head dropped for a moment and then he walked to the car and got in the back.

  Eliane started the engine, found reverse with the gearstick and turned to look behind.

  “Okay, nice and calm,” Jake said. “But we need to go, fast.”

  Torquato was coming back from the rear of the house. He was carrying a pump-action shotgun.

  Eliane turned to Jake quizzically and then saw Torquato. She stamped on the accelerator and snapped the clutch. Engine howling, the little Polo scudded and bounced across the soft, uneven turf as she turned the wheel and then braked. Torquato broke into a lumbering run, bringing up the shotgun to bear. Eliane wrenched the gearstick into first and put the revs into the red. The car lurched and then rocked back, the wheels spinning uselessly in a patch of soft sand. She didn’t let up, the tyres whining as they slashed sand into the wheel arches and across the turf.

  “Out of the car. All of you,” Torquato shouted. He was less than twenty metres away now.

  The blind fury that Torquato had worked himself into somehow stilled the anger in Jake. And his head was clear. “Lower revs – do it gently,” he said to Eliane.

  She followed his instruction and the car moved forward a few centimetres and then rocked back again. It was useless. They were stuck.

  Torquato stopped five metres short of the car. He aimed and fired from the hip. Muzzle flash and report and punch of pellets into the front tyre and wheel arch. A scream from Eliane and then silence. Stunned silence amongst them all. Torquato had made absolutely sure the car was going nowhere.

  Jake and Eliane and Vilson stared at Torquato and he stared back. Torquato finally stirred himself, pumping the spent shell out with a wisp of smoke and locking another into the chamber. He swung the barrel on to Jake and Eliane. “Turn the engine off and get out.” His voice was shaky.

  Jake could see that the enormity of what was happening was catching up with Torquato. He didn’t look ready for what Jake was guessing he had decided he had to do. “Let’s get out,” Jake said quietly. “It’ll be fine.” It didn’t feel like it. It felt
like as bad a place as he had ever been in. He was scared, and he was scared for Eliane. As for Vilson, he didn’t know how he felt about Vilson.

  Eliane killed the engine and they got out and moved away from the car. Jake put his hands up, palms turned slightly in. Minimise the antagonism. Be ready.

  Torquato gestured at them with the shotgun, getting them to stop in the loose sandy dirt between the farmhouse and Eliane’s Polo. No-man’s-land.

  He brought the shotgun to bear somewhere around Jake’s belly. “You mad, crazy son of a bitch, why did you have to come back here? Why did you have to do this?” He shook his head, almost in despair.

  Jake dragged his eyes away from the pitted barrel of the old shotgun. He needed to concentrate on Torquato. It didn’t matter that it didn’t seem like he wanted to pull the trigger. It was whether he would. And from where Jake was standing it looked like he had convinced himself that he had to.

  Torquato glanced at Eliane. “Toss me your car key,” he demanded.

  It was in Eliane’s hand. She didn’t move.

  “I’ll shoot him,” Torquato said, his eyes fixed back on Jake now.

  It was another second or so before she flung the key at him. Head height. He blocked it with a hand, fumbling it, bending to pick it up. Cursing.

  Jake darted forward, kicking at the soft ground, launching a spray of dusty, sandy dirt in Torquato’s face. He staggered back, the hand flying to his eyes.

  “Run,” Eliane shouted. She and Vilson bolted.

  Torquato still had the wherewithal to keep the shotgun bearing and he brought it up, instinctively, to take Jake’s head off. He fired.

  The deafening spit of white–orange stopped Jake in his tracks, the lead shot whipping the terracotta tiles of the bowed farmhouse roof above his head.

  Torquato pumped the spent shell out, even as he was still blinking the grit from his eyes. Torquato would have another one pumped back in and fired before Jake could make the three strides between them. Jake went for him anyway.

  The shotgun jammed on the return action. But Torquato was quick enough. Stepping to one side, he flicked the butt up at Jake’s jaw. It was only a glancing blow but it clicked Jake’s teeth, the raw injured nerves lighting up right through his head. He was still slow, off the pace. His legs went and he dropped in the sandy dirt. He shook his head, trying to clear the stars, and staggered back to his feet.

  Torquato backed off a few paces, blowing at the grit in the breach of the shotgun and wrenching at the mechanism. Jake lurched toward him unsteadily. Still holding the shotgun in one hand, Torquato stepped back and drew a heavy knife from a sheath tucked into the back of his waistband, the blade polished and keen.

  Jake just didn’t have the speed of thought or action. He knew it. He couldn’t trust his reflexes.

  For once, reckless compulsion didn’t propel him forward. He turned and ran unsteadily for the deep slab of shadow on the other side of the farmhouse. He had heard Eliane running that way. Ducking into a patch of tall maize, he thrashed his way through and into the banana plantation beyond. He stopped for a moment. He couldn’t see any trace of Eliane. The floodlights on the cattle shed went off.

  Jake squinted to pick out shapes in the murk and strained his ears, but there were cicadas everywhere in the surrounding trees, their noise filling the air.

  A flash silhouetted the broad leaves in the plantation, the sharp report coming with it, shot peppering the leaves way off to his right. Torquato had got his shotgun working again.

  Torquato was shouting hoarsely, “You brought this on yourselves. No one is going to take my farm from me.”

  Jake’s heart was going like a runaway train and he was hyperventilating. The feeling panicked him more and he felt light-headed. He had to tap into his training. Deep breaths, slowing it all down.

  He didn’t hear anything more from Torquato for a long minute, and then he saw a long slash of light cutting through the trees away to his left. Torquato had got himself a torch.

  Jake’s head was clearing. He had to flank him, get up behind him and jump him before he found either Eliane or Vilson. He moved off through the darkness of the plantation, away from the torch at first, wincing each time one of the big, dead leaves cracked beneath his feet. When he was beyond where the torchlight was flashing back and forth, he jinked left, groping his way along, hands outstretched, flinching each time a waxy frond brushed his face.

  The crunchy ground beneath his feet gave way. He tumbled down a bank into a stream, cracking his shins and knees on rocks. He sat on his haunches in the cool water, still. The banana plantation extended to the other side of the stream and looked just as dense.

  He could hear Torquato bludgeoning his way through the plantation now, the crackle of dead leaves and the tearing of live fronds. The torchlight momentarily flashed across Jake’s face. Torquato had changed direction. He was coming at Jake. The torchlight flickered, dimmed and then died. Torquato cursed and bashed the torch on something. It came back, but now Torquato was crashing off in the other direction again.

  Jake clambered back up the bank and crept through the plantation in the direction of the farmhouse, following Torquato. He came to the edge, a sagging barbed-wire fence separating the plantation from a thicket of dense bush and trees. He was disoriented. He wasn’t anywhere near the farmhouse. He had no idea where it was. But he could see the sweep of the torch ahead of him, and the occasional flicker, and hear the cursing and bashing from Torquato to get it working again.

  When he reached the other side of the thicket there was no fence this time, just patchy scrub and stands of bamboo, stems as thick as his thigh, as tall as trees.

  Tripping over coarse tufts of grass was infinitely better than the racket of dead leaves. He could move faster.

  The scrub gave way to a copse of stunted trees. He was closer to Torquato now, who was no more than twenty metres ahead through the trees.

  Torquato shouted, “I see where you are. Come out now and I swear I won’t shoot. You just get off my property and you never come back. Deal?” There was a waver in his voice. Being jumpy and fearful didn’t make him any less dangerous. Jake couldn’t know whether he was bluffing or whether he really had found Eliane or Vilson.

  Torquato slowed and Jake came up on him as silently as he could. He could smell the stale tobacco smoke and sweat. Torquato’s torch was shining on a big woodpile of thin logs in a small clearing, the barrel of the shotgun propped on his torch hand. The torchlight was his line of fire. He edged closer to the woodpile. “Come out now.” He was almost cajoling. Almost kindly.

  Eliane’s trembling hands appeared over the other side of the woodpile, followed by her head and pale, frightened face.

  Jake was within five metres of Torquato. Crack, he stepped on a branch. And charged. He went low, Torquato only having time to half turn before Jake’s shoulder connected with his lower ribs. They both went sprawling into the woodpile. The torch spun away from Torquato’s hand and the logs tumbled. Something else moved next to Jake. Not the shift of a log, nor the scuttle of an animal. He had no idea what it was but the bolt of fear was primaeval.

  Amid the cascade of logs, Jake tried to wrench the shotgun from Torquato’s grasp. A yelp of pain and fear came from Torquato and suddenly the fight was gone from him. A branch moved near Jake’s feet, short and thick. But it wasn’t a branch. It slid away in a fluid, rippling motion. A snake.

  Jake ripped the shotgun from Torquato, jumped to his feet and stepped back to cover him. Torquato hardly seemed aware of him. He was sitting up amid the broken pile of logs, nursing his calf, pulling up his trouser leg. Looking around. Looking at the area where the snake had been. Looking at his leg.

  “Find the bastard,” he pleaded. “You have to find it and kill it or I will be dead.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding?” Jake said.

  “I’m bit. It’s hurting and swelling already – that means it’s a bad one. Without knowing which kind they won’t know which serum to give m
e. You’ve got to help. Please.”

  “You were going to shoot her a second ago,” he said. Rage was flooding out the fear now. It was the response he was familiar with, but it felt out of place, unwelcome.

  “I wasn’t going to shoot. I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “You shot at me back there.”

  “You went for me. Scared the crap out of me. What the hell else was I going to do? I just want to protect my family and my place. This is all I have. I am nothing without this farm.” He gasped. “Meu Deus, it hurts. Please.”

  He undid his worn leather belt, took it off and looped it around his thigh, tying it as tightly as he could. A tourniquet.

  Eliane retrieved Torquato’s torch and shone it around in the undergrowth, poking tentatively with a long stick. She had obviously already made up her mind.

  The rage was sucked down a plughole inside Jake and he was just left with the shakes again. Finding himself a stick, he knew it was a waste of time well before his minute of searching was up. The snake was long gone. “Can you hold this?” he said, handing the shotgun to Eliane.

  He squatted to get one of Torquato’s arms around his neck and got him up on his good leg. “Which way to the house?” he asked.

  Torquato pointed about ninety degrees away from where Jake thought the farmhouse lay.

  Chapter 33

  Jake

  Using Jake as his crutch, the farmer hobbled through the trees and then the banana plantation, and then through a sparse orchard pocked with old machinery and sheds and sties. The unlit farmhouse was hunched in the darkness.

  “Woman,” Torquato called out, his voice hollow as they entered the yard, “come and help. I’m bit – a snake.”

  The dim bulb in the doorway came on a moment later, Vilson’s mother beneath it. She beckoned them toward the house.

  “No,” Torquato said, “my pickup. We need to go straight to hospital.”

  “We need to call an ambulance,” Eliane said, pulling her mobile from the pocket of her trousers.