The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  “He took your money?” Toninho asked.

  Jake kicked at the ground, sending a spray of dirt onto the sticky black tarmac of the road. “Yep.”

  He checked his pockets. He had enough cash to cover a light lunch for one. And he was stuck out here again. On another bitching hot day.

  “What are you going to do?” Toninho asked.

  “Not sure, but I’ll be fine.”

  The kid had to perch himself on the edge of the driver’s seat to reach the pedals, his good forearm flat against the steering wheel. He looked at Jake for a moment, reached across with his good left hand to put it in gear and he was away, the pickup creaking and knocking down the farm track.

  It took half the day and two hitches before he got back to the big rodeo town. He had a reasonable amount of thinking time on the way. He remembered Vilson chattering excitedly on the drive to the farm before it had all gone so badly south. He had mentioned the girl he had seen on the poster, the one that he said did the clairvoyant healing show. Jake didn’t believe that Vilson would want to go back to Rio. There was nothing good for him there. It didn’t look like there was anything back on that farm for him either, but maybe he would stick around, hoping that the wind might change. Whichever way he was going, Jake hoped that he might have made the stop to see this girl beforehand. It was all he had to go on.

  Finding the place wasn’t a problem; it seemed most people in town knew about the show. But he had already clocked up some mileage on foot between his hitches, and the last one, in the back of a stinky chicken-shit truck, had dropped him on the wrong side of town. The final stretch in the late afternoon was a slog, walking on baked potatoes for feet.

  He hammered on the wooden doors of the old cinema. The rattling of the doors on rusty hinges and iron bolts was the only response. But he was going to keep on hammering until something happened.

  An old man eventually poked his head out of the barber’s shop next door. “If they were dead in there they’d be awake by now,” he scolded. “You might have better luck if you try the pousada where they’re actually staying.”

  The old man directed him to the guesthouse a couple of blocks away.

  “See?” Jake said to himself. Belligerence wasn’t always the wrong tactic.

  The guesthouse was in the oldest part of town, a colonial-style place in a terraced row of bleached-out yellow-painted houses. He rapped on the door, toning it down a little, but ready to wind it right back up. He needed to catch up to Vilson and his money in a hurry.

  It was the girl who answered the door. For Jake, all that spiritual guff that infected Vilson, and seemingly pretty much every other Brazilian he had met, was just that. Guff. But there was no mistaking that this was The Girl. Standing there in the doorway with her head cocked to one side. Serene.

  “I’m trying to find someone,” Jake said.

  She stepped back to welcome him in. “I know. I have spoken with him. I hoped that you would come.”

  It was more than just her serenity that gave her a look that separated her from anyone else her age. Tell someone enough times that they are something and they’ll probably start believing it, he supposed. And he could see that she most definitely believed. It was no self-conscious act.

  She led him down the dark hallway. Despite himself, Jake was relaxing more with every moment in her presence. He had an image of himself lying on the grassy bank of a beautiful river in England on a summer’s day. He was trying to remember if he’d ever done that. He half smiled his crooked smile and shook his head. Stupid. But any grain of anger was dissolved.

  “You came at the right time,” she said over her shoulder, “my aunt is out shopping.”

  They went through a large reception room and kitchen, and out to a yard surrounded by high whitewashed walls. A couple of mango trees were throwing loose shadows over the balding dusty lawn. Beneath the covered barbeque area there was a long table with a bench on one side and chairs on the other.

  On the table there was a tall jug and two glasses.

  “It’s lemonade. I made it this morning,” she said, reaching over to pour. “I’m Yara, by the way.”

  She gulped hers down and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The only childlike gesture she had made. “Maybe you already knew my name?” she asked.

  “I was told who you were.”

  “But you don’t believe what you’ve been told.” She said it lightly, her grey eyes deep and clear.

  There was no need to offend her. “What do I know?” he said, shrugging and looking at his glass.

  “I knew you were coming. That’s why I put the lemonade out.”

  “You saw me coming?”

  “I saw you both, walking down a dusty road, going in the same direction but not together. I see stuff and hear stuff – it happens all the time. I don’t always know whether it is something that has already happened, or is happening now, or whether it is something that is going to happen,” she said. “It doesn’t always make sense. My aunt says that only she has the experience to guide the spirits that come through me. She says I don’t have the maturity to handle them on my own – spirits can be cunning, they don’t always reveal themselves truly or exactly as they are. She says messages have to be interpreted. People want certainty. They want to be told what to do.”

  Yara’s eyes were fixed on her glass of lemonade. It didn’t look like she believed her aunt and it seemed the lack of belief wasn’t giving her a good feeling. Then the guilty look went and her grey eyes came back up to Jake, steady. “I see your anger. I can see places where it has exploded and done you harm, but I can’t see where it comes from.”

  That scraped at the inside of him. Vilson must have really spouted some crap. And just as quickly, it went away. “The boy that came to see you, he took all my money. I really need to find him.”

  “The distance between you is less than he thinks,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her. And then her brow furrowed. “But I don’t know if he will ever understand that.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  She looked distracted now. “Home.”

  “Home where?”

  “The city. Rio,” she said, staring at the lemonade jug.

  “He told you that?”

  “He has nowhere else, but I saw something terrible for him there.” Her words were almost a whisper as she wrapped her arms protectively, fearfully. “I saw a darkness around him. I’ve never seen anything like that before. A terrible darkness. And he was falling. Hands were grabbing at him to save him, but they couldn’t hold on and he kept dropping away in the darkness. His body was limp, his eyes unseeing. Like the dead. I was trying to get him to reach out. He had to do it. But he kept on falling, and as he fell his eyes turned to me. And somewhere in the blankness there something shifted.”

  She shivered and dropped her head to blink away tears. “It scared me. There is a poison seeping in, but you can help him draw that poison if he lets you. The future isn’t always set – he can take a different path.”

  She stood then. Coming round to Jake’s side of the table, she reached out, touching her palm to the scarred side of his face. “I see shadows in people sometimes,” she said. “That’s how I know they are ill. But my aunt only likes to pick out the ones who already know they are ill. They come looking for a cure. They come with hope, and faith. My aunt says that miracles make for a steep road if hope and faith are not already at work.”

  She traced gentle lines around his scars with her fingers as she spoke. “There is no shadow in you, by the way. How does it feel?”

  Almost without noticing, he realised that something had passed from him. There was a lightness. “Uh, better,” he said, surprised.

  She nodded. “Your policeman friend will be in a fight in a ring. You must stop him if you can.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “You must try.”

  He nodded.

  She looked at him for a few moments. “That anger in you,
it is part of you, but you can only cheat death so many times.”

  Chapter 40

  Vilson

  Climbing the hill up to his shack, the journey to get there was almost forgotten. There was just one thing filling his head. There was no room for anything else.

  Not even fear. The thing that had stalked him all his life had gone, just disappeared. And he had scarcely noticed.

  It was the sleepy time of the hot afternoon, few people about. He hadn’t seen any of Anjo’s sentries, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to avoid them. He didn’t care.

  Kids had pulled the door away from the shack, everything useful inside gone. At least they hadn’t taken the time to kick the whole thing down yet. Only the old sacks that he and Babão had slept on were left. Babão, his only friend. He looked around in the undergrowth and trash at the back of the shack, hoping to find some of his things that might have been discarded when whichever kid had taken them had got bored. But he found none of his stuff.

  He followed a skinny trail up the forested hill behind the shacks, turning off the track when he got to a tree that had the thick, muscular limbs of a strangler fig twisted around it. He pushed through tangled brush, having to zigzag a few times, until he found a sapling with a knife mark on the spindly stem.

  Beneath a nearby shrub there was an area of disturbed earth. He used a fallen branch to dig. He uncovered the edges of a polythene sheet. He pulled it from the loose, soft earth and it came up with a heavy lump wrapped inside. Shaking the dirt off, he looked around. Nothing but the insects, lizards and birds. He unwrapped the old revolver and checked it over. It had stayed dry and didn’t look any more grimy or pitted than he remembered. He pulled the extractor rod beneath the barrel and pushed the cylinder out – one empty chamber, five loaded. It was all he had. It would be enough.

  He tucked the revolver in the back of his shorts and made his way back down the hill. Emerging from the rear of his shack he heard a sharp intake of breath, “Meu Deus.” It was a woman’s voice. Shaky.

  It was a neighbour, with her daily food shopping in a thin plastic carrier bag. The old lady lived in a shack little better than his. She had lost her sons to the gangs and her husband to alcohol. She didn’t have much to live for but she had kept on living. She stumbled back and crossed herself. And then she fled, the carrier bag of groceries flapping. Even in her terror she kept an instinctive grip on the little that she had.

  It wasn’t until she was out of sight that Vilson understood. He was dead.

  He had died that night on the Burning Hill when Anjo had fired at him. Anjo had missed, but everyone in the favela believed he was dead. His corpse had been on the TV news.

  He was a ghost.

  Chapter 41

  Jake

  In the state he was in, with his filthy shirt and torn-up face, he wouldn’t have picked himself up. Luckily for him, there was the odd trucker out on the endless highways of Brazil who was less fussy. But in the grand scheme of things that was the vastness of the country, each hitch didn’t really move him very far along the road.

  When he had said goodbye to Yara, she had reached into a little purse covered in brightly coloured plastic beads and emptied it for him. It was her pocket money, only a few Reais, but it almost doubled what he already had. Whether or not she could tap into any higher power, or whether she just had an uncanny ability to read people and get them to volunteer information outside awareness, she was certainly a better kid than he had ever been. He managed to eke the money out on food and water rations to the end of the second day.

  Four days in and he was outside a roadside café, waving the heaving layer of flies off a half-eaten pastry sitting amongst paper cups, cans and wrappers in a waste bin. He was amazed at how quickly his groaning belly had overwhelmed shame and revulsion. Retrieving the pastry, he gave it a wipe with his fingers, even though, with blackened fingernails, they were probably dirtier than the litter on which it had been sitting. Give him another day and he reckoned he would be reduced to rooting right through the bins down to cockroach-and-rat level. After the first day no one would let him into the café or garage toilets to wash.

  At night, trying to sleep in lit car parks or outside roadside restaurants and garages, the only people who had bothered him were those telling him to move on. He looked like a vagrant, and apparently a crazy one at that. Not worth robbing.

  He had no chance of hitching a lift from passing traffic. He had to buttonhole truck drivers in garage and café car parks and give them a potted version of who he was and why he needed to get to Rio. And he had to do it quick before they had a chance to back away. Most of the drivers were willing to accept that he wasn’t just some stinky hobo, but his hit rate was still only about one in every ten that he approached. And there was no way that the ten percent would let someone as stinky as him in their cab. He was travelling freight-only. And only then if he wasn’t dirtying up the produce.

  Finishing off the pastry, he looked at his dirty fingers, giving their infectious potential only half a thought before he started licking them. The greasy sugar was mixed up with all sorts of other tastes. He had stopped retching at those kinds of thoughts the day before.

  He saw a driver walk out of the café, an older guy, stretching his legs as he went round his fruit truck, kicking at the tyres to check them. The truck was a flatbed with wooden slats running around it to hold in the stacked plastic crates of mangos and papaya. Jake had learned that fruit trucks were usually headed for towns or cities. He had finally got to a point where at least some of the goods trucks were Rio-bound.

  He got the guy up against the side of the truck and launched. With practice, he had scrubbed it down to a thirty-second assault with the choicest elements, a smidge of desperate pleading and a dollop of spirituality. It seemed that no one could get too much of the spirituality but pouring on too much pleading or, worse, veering toward sentimentality, could easily tip them from workable Catholic guilt to running-for-the-hills discomfort.

  The driver was backing away from Jake now, pulling a face. But he wasn’t breaking eye contact. Jake was okay, it was just the smell putting him off. “I see there’s a gap in the crates back there, I’d fit in that. Senhor, I am trying to save a life here. Please.”

  The driver looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded and gestured to the tailgate of the truck. “You can eat one piece of fruit. No more. Understand?”

  Jake was in.

  And it turned out this guy was going to Rio, and to near enough the centre of the city. It was just a long, hot walk from there to Ipanema.

  Jake wedged himself between the rattling stacks of crates as the truck rolled out onto the road, belching oily diesel fumes, the engine and gearbox sounding like they weren’t the best of friends. For just a moment he felt something close to joy. Begging for lifts and scavenging for food was a leveller that he had never known, and travelling in the back of a fruit truck that would take him almost to the doorstep was cause for celebration. He picked himself a nice soft papaya from a crate, flaying strips of skin with his furred teeth and dirty nails, and letting the rich flesh soak into him. Living like a king. He couldn’t remember many moments in his life when he had felt better.

  He wasn’t even angry with Vilson any more. The kid had nicked his wallet and phone and left him up shit creek, but the place that Vilson was in was far worse, Jake was sure of that. He was enveloped by a sense of calm that he hadn’t felt for a very long time. Maybe he’d never felt it. Maybe hunger did that, concentrated the mind on the task ahead without burning unnecessary energy. He was on the way back to the city to do a job. The kid had been done wrong. A lot of wrong. And Jake hadn’t given up on him yet.

  *

  When the truck got to its final stop at a warehouse in Rio, Jake had trouble getting down off the back. It was painful straightening a body that had spent the previous five hours scrunched up and bounced between crates and the splintered plywood bed of the truck.

  He walked off the stiffn
ess inside thirty minutes, but he had to keep going for another hour and a half to get to Ipanema. The name of Eliane’s street had stuck when she had mentioned it in one of their less tense conversations because he had viewed two apartments on the same street when first looking to rent one. He knew at which end of the street she lived but not the apartment number, nor which side of the street. He was going to have to ask at every apartment block.

  He got through the insults and threats of nine security guards before he leaned on the button on a high, spiked gate. He could hear the buzzer going inside the lobby. The security guy eventually came a few steps out of the lobby, every bit as reluctantly as all the others on the street had.

  “Get lost, vagabundo,” he said, waving Jake away.

  Jake gave him a machine-gun spiel, including Eliane’s part in the story.

  The security guard eyed him suspiciously, but Jake could see that he recognised her name.

  Jake gripped the spikes on the gate and pressed his face up to it. “Please, Senhor, can you buzz up to them for me? I’m a friend of hers – the gringo, tell her.”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  For maybe the first time in Jake’s life, the buzz of anger felt alien. The surprise of it knocked him and he just let silence fill in.

  The security guy shifted on his feet, uncomfortable. “She doesn’t live here any more. The family moved out yesterday.”

  “Do you have a forwarding address?”

  The security guard shook his head.

  Chapter 42

  Vilson

  He was hungry. Even ghosts had to eat. Vilson had hidden out in the forest behind his shack all day. He made his way down the hill in the early evening through the maze of narrow alleyways. There was a kiosk outside the bottom of the favela that sold meat pastels and chicken coxinhas. He could afford something fancy: he still had a little of the gringo’s money left.