by Dan Smith
‘What are you talking about?’ Costa leaned away from me and his words came with quick, sharps breaths.
Those men are out of control.’ I straightened and picked up the pistol. ‘They’re ... out of control.’
‘You can’t do anything to me Zico ... People will—’
I’m not going to do anything to you.’ I removed the magazine from the pistol and tossed it back on the desk. ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ I wanted to, though. I wanted to shoot him dead and, if not for Daniella and the old man, I might have done it.
‘What’s going on?’ Costa pushed his chair away from the table, trying to put as much distance as possible between us. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Your men Luis and Wilson,’ I said. ‘They murdered Antonio. He tried to help me so they followed him home and stuck a knife in his throat.’
‘Antonio? Who is that? Is he a friend of yours?’
‘Yes.’ But I hadn’t even known his last name or where he was from. He wasn’t my friend, he was just a man who had tried to help me and been swept away by the shadow.
‘I’m sorry, Zico, I don’t know who he is or why they—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Just tell them to clear it up.’
‘What?’
‘He’s lying up there in his room with his throat cut. Tell them to clear it up. He deserves better than that. And so does Juliana.’
‘Who the hell is Juliana?’
‘My landlady,’ I said. ‘How do you think she’s going to feel when she goes up there to clean his room and finds him like that? Or what if her niece goes in there? She’s just eleven years old; what will that do to her?’
Costa stood and held his hands in front of him. ‘Calm down, Zico.’
‘Calm down? You’re lucky I am this calm. You’re lucky I am calm.’ I turned and walked to the door, stopping with my fingers on the handle. I paused and looked back at him. ‘Clean it up,’ I told him. ‘They’re your men. Control them.’
Costa nodded and I pulled open the door.
‘Zico,’ he called, making me look back at him once more. ‘You’re right about them.’ He watched me for a long moment, our eyes locked together. ‘If you do this job right for me,’ he said, ‘they’re yours.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Do this right, and those two are yours.’
7
I weighed my options for the rest of the day, but they felt light, so I headed down to Ernesto’s on the waterfront, keeping in the shade as much as possible. The sun was reaching its highest point now and it was unbearable to be under its angry glare for longer than a few minutes. Even the stray cats and dogs had left the street.
The bar smelled of stale beer and tobacco, with a hint of fresh lime lying over it, and there was only a handful of people in there. Three or four of the boatmen drinking beer straight from the bottle, or sipping sweet caipirinha. They said Ernesto made the best caipirinha in town.
Ernesto was leaning across the counter, laughing with another customer, but broke off his conversation and came over, taking a beer from the fridge.
‘Zico,’ he said, snatching the cap from the bottle in one movement. He clinked it down on the tiled surface of the bar, beside the wooden board he used to cut limes. There was a single fruit on the board, sliced in half to expose the soft flesh. Looking at the knife, though, the steel shining in the sun, I couldn’t help thinking about Antonio.
I fished the fold of small notes from my pocket and counted a couple from the top. ‘Let me know when this runs out.’ I pushed them towards him and poured the beer into a glass that was mostly clean.
‘How’s things?’ he asked, looking at the cash sitting on the warm white tiles.
‘Not good,’ I replied and raised the bottle. ‘Saúde.’
Ernesto wiped his hands on the cotton towel that hung from his pocket and watched me take my drink to one of the plastic tables on the small terrace outside. It wasn’t anything special; faded terracotta tiles that were loose and broken, rusted metal railings that were tired of the constant sun and rain, the paint bubbled and split.
The old man was at the table, under an umbrella advertising Brahma beer. Raul Perreira had the tranquil look of a labourer at rest after a hard day. Everything about him was weathered and seasoned like the bark of a savannah tree, as if he were part of the land. He had skin that was dark and furrowed, with deep lines running around the back of his sun-beaten neck; thick, strong hands, armoured by dry and cracked calluses. Grey hair was cropped right down, almost to his scalp, and there were heavy creases at the corners of his eyes from a lifetime of squinting against the sun. A slight upturn to his mouth suggested he was always on the verge of breaking into either a smile or a growl.
He was leaning back, dusty feet up on an empty chair, hand around his glass, brown eyes staring out at the road. There was nothing in the street of any interest, though. There wasn’t much of a beach here, no shops to speak of, so there wasn’t any reason to come here unless you had a boat moored on the river, or were looking for someone who did. Further up, there were white sands and bigger, more comfortable bars. There would be people drinking, sitting in the sun, but here it was calm so this was where the old man liked to come. It was a second home to him and the other boatmen.
I watched him for a while, thinking he looked as if he’d crashed right there at the table, his brain shutting down, but then he blinked. A long, tight blink, and when he opened his eyes again, he was looking right at me. ‘Zico,’ he said. ‘Arthurzico Alves.’
The dog lying in the shade at the next table lifted her head and thumped her tail on the concrete terrace before snapping to her feet and coming over. She was about knee height to me, with dirty brown fur and a white patch on her chest. The scar across her muzzle made her look tough, but it wasn’t a war wound; it was the result of getting it stuck in an old tin when she was a pup.
The old man was drunk when he found her like that; just a ball of skin and bone, whining because her nose was trapped in a half-crushed can of chickpeas. He took her home and called her Rocky, and it wasn’t until he sobered up the next morning that he realised she was female. It didn’t matter, though, he liked the name so it stuck.
They made a good pair.
‘Rocky,’ I crouched as she came over and turned in an excited circle in front of me, lifting her face to mine. ‘You been looking after the old man?’ I rubbed her head and looked up at her owner.
‘You’ve been to see that snake Costa.’ The old man’s voice was raw, deep and raspy from a lifetime of heavy smoking. But there was a different quality to it today. He sounded more tired than usual.
‘Nothing escapes you, does it?’
The old man nodded. ‘He has work for you?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘Is that right?’ he said, glass of beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, sitting so that the street was to his left and if he turned to look over his right shoulder he would see the river and the boats that were waiting for their owners. He put the cigarette in his mouth and squinted against the thin smoke which rose to his eyes and made them water. ‘Anything for me to do?’
‘No. I mean, it’s not really your kind of work, but I might need the boat, who knows?’
The old man took his feet off the empty chair and pushed it away from him, the legs scraping on the bare concrete.
‘You look tired,’ I said, coming to sit down. ‘You feeling all right?’ Rocky put her chin on my knee and I reached down to scratch her ear.
‘I have a job for tomorrow.’ The old man ignored my question. ‘To collect something from upriver, you want to come?’
‘Maybe.’
‘If this other thing doesn’t get in the way, you mean? The thing for Costa.’ The old man leaned forward on the table, sitting up as if he was making himself ready for an important conversation. ‘What’s the pay like for this other thing? This new job you might or might not have?’
I took a deep breat
h and met his eyes. ‘Good. Very good.’
‘Ah, but what’s the price, I wonder?’ He shook his head in disapproval. ‘I remember the day you first came in here. You remember that? What was it? Two years ago?’
‘Two.’
‘Just a kid, and now look at you. It’s like you became a man without me ever noticing.’ He coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand. The tip of the smallest finger was missing above the first knuckle – a fishing accident that had stripped the flesh right off. The local doctor had clipped the bone for him, sewn the end up and waited for it to heal.
‘Took you under my wing,’ he said, telling it the way he always did. ‘I could see it in your eyes, the kind of shit you had in your past.’ He raised his hand, pointing the crooked index finger and using his thumb, bringing it down like a pistol hammer. ‘You smelled of violence – still do from time to time – but you told me you wanted something different, you remember that?’
‘I don’t think you’ll ever let me forget it.’
The old man drained his beer and called to Ernesto for another, holding up two fingers and throwing a questioning look at me. Ernesto didn’t wait for me to nod, he just went to the fridge for the bottles.
‘“That’s not the kind of thing I’m looking for”, isn’t that what you said, Zico? You wanted something honest.’
I liked his direct nature, the way he saw straight through me. It made me feel like I was confessing my sins without having to speak them aloud. ‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘But that’s the road you took. Someone pointed you in Costa’s direction and—’
‘I needed to live.’
‘You worked for me.’
‘I worked with you, old man, and the pay was crap.’
‘At least my money was clean, Zico.’
‘Not exactly. Your work’s not always the honest kind.’ I made a show of thinking hard. ‘In fact, not ever.’
‘But not as dirty as the Branquinos and their snake Costa. He saw what you were the same as I saw it, only he nurtured it. And once you’d done that first job for him, he had his hooks in you.’
But his grip was tighter than ever now, and one of the reasons was sitting right in front of me. I knew the old man better than I had known my own father; I wasn’t going to let Costa hurt him.
‘You don’t know what I did for him,’ I said.
‘I know the kind of thing. And how many times did you do it?’
I sighed and nodded, wafting away a fly that was taking too much interest in Rocky. ‘I changed, old man. I’m a farmer now.’
‘At Batista’s place? You lost that job like you lost all the others.’
‘You know about that, too?’
‘I know everything.’ The old man watched me with red-ringed, watery eyes. ‘And now?’
‘Now?’
‘What are you looking for now? Going back to Costa? What you going to do for him that pays so well, huh? Blood money again? You’re better than that, Zico.’
Blood money. For killing a nun. It gave me an ugly feeling that made me hate Costa and his people more than ever. Sure, I wanted the money, but for this?
Raul stopped talking as Ernesto approached, bringing the smell of limes with him as he placed another two bottles on the table. Rocky had grown bored with my attention, so she went back to her spot in the shade at the next table and collapsed with a grunt.
‘Talk about something else,’ I told him and he nodded his understanding, crushing his cigarette into a misshapen foil ashtray before refilling his glass. He pushed the other bottle towards me and when both glasses were replenished, we touched them together. Old friends.
‘Saúde.’
Two beers became three, three became four, and we spent the afternoon talking, neither of us drunk because the sun was so hot it sweated the alcohol out of us before it had a chance to make us woozy. We just drained our glasses, called to Ernesto each time they needed refreshing.
Ernesto was pleased for the business and put a samba tape in the player behind the bar and let us get on with drinking.
‘You never did move on,’ Raul said.
‘I never made enough money. When I have enough, maybe I’ll move on. Just like you keep saying you’re going to do.’ But that wasn’t why I had stayed in this town. It wasn’t just about the money. It was him. I liked him. And now there was Daniella, too.
Before coming here, I’d been through Belo Horizonte, Uberlândia, Goiânia, Brasilia ... so many cities, so many jobs. And after those places, there hadn’t been much more than small towns and villages for me to wander through, and not one of them had anything that made me want to stay. Piratinga was the last town on the road. Small and quiet, sitting in the dust by the river.
‘You decide where you want to go?’ the old man asked. ‘Maybe back to Rio?’
‘No. Not there. Maybe I should go to Imperatriz with you.’
Raul sniffed and took a sip of his beer, a wistful look falling across his face. ‘You know, I once heard about a man in Imperatriz who was killed by a Brazil nut. You ever seen one of those things fall from the tree? Tallest tree in the forest, and that great thing like a rock coming down onto you? Split his head right in two, is what I heard. Must’ve been something to see.’
I smiled. ‘If I come to Imperatriz, then, I’ll remember to keep away from Brazil nut trees.’
We sat in silence for a while before the old man sighed and shook his head. ‘Don’t do it.’
‘Hm?’
‘Whatever it is Costa wants you to do. Don’t do it. It feels like ... like something bad is coming.’
I looked out at the river, narrow here, at just five hundred metres from one bank to the other. The brown water was flowing past, always moving, always going somewhere. I wondered where it would end up; whether it would be better or worse than this particular stretch of the Araguaia.
It felt like a lifetime ago that my sister and I had talked about moving on. We had sat on the hillside in Rio and watched the sea and thought about the things lying beyond our weary favela, Sofia saying there was something better out there.
The old man, he dreamed too – about more money, moving on, a new life. I wondered if Antonio had dreamed about that; if he had come to Piratinga on his search for a better life but ended up lying dead in a rented apartment with his throat cut. Sofia’s dreams never came to anything either.
I couldn’t let the same thing happen to the old man, or to Daniella. I didn’t want to be alone again. I would have to do what Costa wanted.
8
Late afternoon, the sky grumbled somewhere over the open savanah that lay beyond the forest on the other side of the river. Rocky sensed the oncoming storm and took refuge inside the bar, but the old man and I shifted our seats and watched the dark grey thunderheads rolling in across the trees and water.
It was like the end of the world unfolding before us as the sky grew blacker and blacker and the gloom reached across Piratinga.
When the rain finally broke, it came down as hard as I had ever known it, soaking into the dry land, releasing a warm earthy smell. It churned the river into a murky froth and battered the umbrella over our heads. It pummelled the tiles and the concrete and the road with such violence that the world was filled with white noise. It came at us from all directions but we stayed as we were, enjoying its ferocity.
The cool air and the rain washed away my frustration and I tried to find something positive in everything that had happened that morning. Daniella was disappointed I’d lost my job at the farm, but mucking out pigs for Batista wasn’t ever going to give me the life I wanted for us. And I thought about what Costa was doing right now, who he was talking to, and what kind of deal he would bring back to me. I had to take something good from this.
When the rain had passed, we went to the old man’s place, further along the river, at the edge of town. Rocky trotted ahead, moving from shade to shade now that the clouds had gone. There was still a touch of lingering freshn
ess brought by the storm, but the sun was uncompromising and had started its work. The rainwater was already evaporating and the misty air was growing hot again.
‘Look.’ Raul stopped and pointed. ‘See?’
Ahead, his small house stood close to the beach. Now the rains were here, though, the river would start to rise and soon the water would be almost at his doorstep.
The house was made of brick, most of it built by the old man himself, and painted a bright green because that’s the colour his wife chose. The roof was tiled rather than covered with tin, so it didn’t rattle in the hard rain.
Four vultures were hunched over a large dead fish at the water’s edge, squabbling and screaming at one another, jostling for the best place at the banquet. A fifth was sitting on the roof of the old man’s house, back curved and wings folded.
Rocky ignored them and made for the shade of the porch.
‘That’s bad,’ the old man said as he bent to pick up a stone. ‘Not on the house. Not on my roof.’ He took aim and threw the rock as hard as he could. It sailed up and up, a black speck against the blue sky, before it clattered down on the tiles, startling the scrawny bird.
The vulture hopped on one foot and screeched.
‘Get off, you devil!’ The old man threw another rock, and this time the bird spread its wings and took to the sky, sailing out over the water, before turning back and settling with the others over the carcass of the fish.
‘Calm down, old man, you’ll crack your tiles,’ I said as Carolina came out from the house and looked up at the roof before spotting us.
‘It’s bad luck,’ he told me. ‘Especially there. A vulture on my house? You know what that means?’
‘You’re too superstitious,’ I said, raising a hand to his wife. ‘It means the bird wanted somewhere to rest, that’s all. Come on – I think all this heat and beer is going to your head.’
