The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  The second time was three years ago, in Brazil. That time, he could not control it. He’d been there for five seasons, a popular star, leading his team to titles. Kids rushed to him after games for hugs and autographs. Girls waited at every exit of the gym. Everybody loved Tony Harris. But on February 11, 2005, soon after returning to the country after being in America for a few months, he said he had food poisoning and refused to play or go to the hospital or even leave the locker room until the game was over. Bad shrimp, he said. The next day, at 6 a.m., he called the team’s general manager and asked for a ride to the airport. He had to get home immediately. Tony paid for his own ticket.

  This time, different people got different stories. Tony told the team his son from a prior relationship had been in a horrific car accident. He described the accident, and the hospital procedures, in great detail and would continue the elaborate lie when he returned in 2007. The general manager was very worried about his friend, not knowing there had been no car accident. Tony told two basketball friends he just didn’t have it anymore. But the story he told his pastor was more frightening: After a dispute with the team over money, some men took him way out into the wilderness and left him, wanting to send a message. Message received. Only this time, he brought the fear home with him. “When Tony came back from Brazil last time, something was not right with him,” family friend Glynis Harps says. “Something heavy was on his mind, and he was preoccupied. I don’t know what happened. Tony was scared.”

  He believed people were following him. Once, he yelled “duck” to a friend. There was no one there. Once, he saw a man he’d fought with as a preteen walk into a gym. He ran from the gym, leaving his gear behind, explaining later that the guy was going to hurt him. A friend says the long-lost “enemy” never knew Tony was in the gym. He stopped going to gyms entirely, giving up basketball for the first time in his life.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, GOINIA TO BEZERRA

  Tony Harris stands outside the green gate, next door to the motorcycle repair shop, waiting on a cabdriver to let him in. Jose Lindomar Jesus, called Baiano by his friends, steps into the light, eyeing the tall man before him. He’s carrying a backpack and seems scared, looking around as if he’s expecting someone. It’s Sunday morning, and there is no one else on the street.

  Baiano shows Tony a place against the turquoise walls of the house where he can sit. Baiano goes into the house. Tony slumps down. It had been a long night. He arrived at the bus station in Goiânia at around 2 a.m. He called Erika and tried to get Daniela’s number; they were all friends in Uberlândia. Erika didn’t have it. The plan was not working. He asked how to get to Natal from Goiânia. She told him to take a bus. No, he explained, that bus went through Brasilia, and he could not have that. Finally, they came up with a solution—a cab to Salvador, where he’d get a friend of Erika’s to meet him and accompany him to Natal. OK. Good. Tony walked a few blocks to find a cab parked in front of a local hospital. That guy wouldn’t do it, but he thought his friend might. Now it is 8:30 a.m., and Tony is still here.

  Soon, Baiano comes outside, dressed and cleaned up. Sliding across the black leather seats, Tony gets into the front of the white Chevy cab. Baiano takes a right out of his driveway, past the motorcycle repair shop, winds through the gears as they climb the hill toward the center of town. Tony wants to go to the Bank of Brazil, which accepts American ATM cards. The machine is in the far back-right corner, and Tony slides his card, enters his PIN, and . . . is declined. The cabdriver tries to read the screen over his shoulder. Tony is at his daily withdrawal limit. He’d taken out money already at the bus station. What to do? Harris gives the cabdriver about $340, most of the money he has on him, and promises to pay the remaining $1,100 in Salvador. This means altering the plan yet again. Tony finds an Internet café, a dark, narrow shotgun building with low ceilings and green walls, buys a half hour of Web time and a phone card, sits down at Terminal 3, a stark white cubicle, and sends an email. Back home in Seattle, Lori’s computer is set to ding when she gets mail. It’s before dawn in Seattle, which doesn’t matter to Tony.

  He sends the first email at 9:34 a.m.

  Babe what are you doing this it tony i need to talk to you cause i have to put some money in some ones account so that i can get to erikas city please respond

  Less than a minute later, he writes again, virtually the same message. Ding! This time, Lori hears and answers. Tony gives her Baiano’s cell phone number and license number, tells her the plan, and then logs off. Soon, Baiano’s phone rings. It’s Lori. She and Tony talk. It’s a short call, just a few details. This is the last time they will ever hear each other’s voices.

  “Love you,” Tony says.

  “Love you too,” Lori says.

  The errands finished, Tony and Baiano leave Goiânia. Tony chain smokes, getting through three cigarettes until the rain comes and Baiano rolls up the window. After an hour and a half, they cross the border between the state of Goiás and the Federal District. A big sign above the road marks the boundary. It also reads: BRASÍLIA 54 KM.

  Without a word, Tony dives over the passenger seat, legs in the air, clawing for the back seat until he’s lying down, curled up, and all that’s visible from the window is the rainy-season sky overhead, clouds so big and nasty they seem to swallow you whole. When it’s clear, the sky above Brazil looks like the front porch of heaven, all impossible blues and pillowy clouds. But when rainy season comes, and the storms roll in, the sky seems angry.

  Baiano asks Tony what he’s doing.

  “I have a headache,” Tony says.

  They drive through Brasília, past the television tower and the Carlton Hotel. Tony cowers, out of sight. Finally, Tony is coaxed back up front and the journey continues toward Salvador, until about 2 p.m., when Baiano gets hungry.

  A town appears on the horizon, a badlands outpost named Bezerra. The car rolls past a barren savanna, the road lined with concrete poles and barbed wire protecting a military artillery range. There is an opening in the wire just before the village, near a small shantytown hugging the road. The centerpiece of Bezerra is a Texaco station, with a little diner attached called Sabor Gaucho. Long-haul truckers fill the sprawling parking lot, fueling up on the run to the coast. Baiano parks. Tony refuses to go inside for lunch, so he waits in the car. After lunch, they pull up to the pump a few yards away. Tony hands Baiano his debit card and agrees to wait some more.

  Something changes his mind. Tony gets out of the car, leaving his backpack inside. He walks into the small convenience store, which is in between the diner and the office where you pay for gas. A young man named Warley Dyone is behind the register. Everything seems normal. Tony asks the price of a bottle of orange juice and a small package of cookies. Warley tells him.

  Out of nowhere, a troubled expression crosses Tony’s face.

  “Where’s the taxi driver?” he asks.

  “He’s in the office paying for the gas,” Warley says.

  Tony does not reply. Is the neon sign in his head flashing again? RUN! RUN! RUN! He wheels around, out the glass doors, past the pumps, running, making a hard left at the highway, past the restaurant next door, out of sight. Warley chases after him. So does Baiano, who was going to ask for the PIN. Without it, the charge will be declined, later showing up on Tony’s credit card statement as a failed attempt.

  When Warley and Baiano reach the street, they see nothing. Tony has left behind a past, a future, a city of fans, a 14-year-old son, a pregnant wife, a change of clothes, a backpack, and the laptop computer that has kept him tethered these past few days.

  He has disappeared into the woods.

  WHY DID HE RETURN TO BRAZIL?

  Two weeks after the shocking details finally became public, Estevam Ferreira walks off the basketball court following a Universo practice. He knows how afraid Tony had been the last time he was here. Like everyone else, he has a question: “Why did he come back?”

&nb
sp; You tell him the story. Life was hard for Tony after Brazil. He tried to do the right thing—whatever scared him also made him grow up. He married Lori, joined a church, volunteered at a local homeless shelter. For a while, he worked with children at a juvenile detention center named Echo Glen. His past followed him, though. When his job was about to become full-time, a background check found a report about child abuse. Years before, a teacher found Tony had spanked his son, leaving a mark, just before dropping him off for school. Never mind that the report absolved Tony of abuse. Almost two years to the day since he had left Brazil, he lost his job. That was nine months ago. Then Lori got pregnant, and he felt emasculated by his inability to support his family. Tony tried, applying for work at more than 50 places. But without a bachelor’s degree, his fleeting fame did him no good. No one seemed to remember, or care, that he’d taken Washington State to the NCAA Tournament. He withdrew into himself, fighting with Lori, even briefly moving out. But he kept trying, moving back in the house, taking correspondence courses, applying for more jobs, even one at a grocery store, anything to feed his family. Then the phone rang. It was his old general manager from Brazil, desperately in need of a replacement player for an upcoming tournament. Tony was desperate too. For his family, he would try to keep it together.

  You look Estevam in the eyes. “He needed the money,” you say.

  This lays Estevam low. He turns away, crosses his arms, sighs, cannot speak. He thinks of his friend, a man terrified of this place but willing to risk it all to provide for his wife and child. The courage that must have taken. He thinks about his friend, and when the words don’t come, he touches his chest with his fist.

  You live in my heart.

  NOVEMBER 4–7, BEZERRA

  Tony Harris is hiding. What must he be thinking, crouching in the woods, counting the minutes and hours until it’s safe to come out? Baiano drives up and down the street for a while, but after an hour and a half heads home, with Tony’s backpack in his car. Sometime Sunday evening, Tony comes out of the wilderness. He begs for food. Migrant workers and hobos frequent this road, stopping for work when they can find it, so people don’t think this is strange.

  No one sees Tony on Monday. There are no reports of him walking the road. But Monday afternoon, about 4:30, he finds a phone, according to team trainer Mario Saraiva. He dials a familiar number: Mario’s. He was once a friend, but is now someone who Tony thinks might be part of the plot to kill him.

  Tony says hello.

  “Where are you?” Mario says. “I’m gonna pick you up.”

  Tony must make a decision. There is a struggle inside of him, these competing urges. Is Mario a friend? Is he an enemy? Tony shakes off the doubt. The sign is telling him to Run!

  “No,” Tony says. “I won’t tell you. You’ll tell the others, and they’ll come to kill me.”

  Tony hangs up. He disappears again, and no one sees him Monday or Tuesday. Police will later assume he was hiding in the bush, burning up during the day, freezing at night. The U.S. embassy will say it had no more confirmed sightings, but the Brazilian police, along with a resident in the town, say he made one more walk into the light.

  On Wednesday morning, according to police records, a man looking like Tony knocked on a woman’s door, begging for coffee and bread. On Wednesday afternoon, a few wandering hobos talked to him briefly. He was covered in dirt and grime and asked them for a clean shirt. They would say later they gave him one, but it was never found.

  That night, around 7 o’clock, Harris stumbled toward the gas station, where this all began, past the pumps, back through the glass doors. Maria Paula Gonçalves, wearing her red uniform, stood behind the counter. The man was nervous, she would say later, barely looking at her, looking over his shoulders instead. He asked for a pack of Derby cigarettes and paid in the Brazilian equivalent of dimes.

  Three and a half hours later, he returned. Maria had finished giving her husband his nightly medicine and making a plate of leftovers for a beggar when Tony appeared in the diner. For a moment, she thought he was the same person she just fed.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “I already gave you food,” she said.

  Then she looked down. The other man wore flip-flops. This man was wearing gigantic basketball shoes. It was the same guy who bought cigarettes. A few days later, after seeing his picture on television, she would say it was Tony Harris. Right now, he was just a man who needed food. She fixed him a plate, some leftover meat, rice, and beans, wrapped it up to go. This time he was calm, not looking over his shoulder. He took the food and headed back out into the night. It’s about four miles to where he would complete this final walk. Maybe he went down the highway a quarter of a mile, left through the gap in the barbed wire near the mini shantytown. Poor people often fish at a lake through there, which is why the fence was down. Was that where he went? No one knows for sure.

  No known person would ever again see Tony Harris alive.

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED OUT THERE?

  Pedromar Augusto de Souza is the chief of police in the nearest city. The Formosa station house has six bullet holes in the door; police work is serious business here in Brazil, where cops and gangsters have running gun battles. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, and, as if to prove it, Pedromar pulls a big hog-leg .45 automatic from his waistband, ejects the magazine from the butt, jacks the chambered round, which bounces three times and settles. He hands over the shiny gun for inspection. The bullet? A hollow point. Goes in little, comes out big.

  He has been working hard investigating the bizarre death of Tony Lee Harris, American citizen. It’s the only case assigned directly to him. From afar, he has heard the conspiracy theories from the folks back in the States: that Universo lured Tony down to Brazil to kill him; that the police are covering up a crime, or worse; or even that the Brazilian army killed him. Most of the theories are rooted in misinformation: Some media reports in Seattle included errors, which aroused suspicion; the cremation of the body was viewed as suspicious, though family members back home didn’t know there was really nothing left but skin, bones, and worms. He knows people think he’s not being thorough. “It would be easy to say it’s a suicide and close the case,” he says. “I want to make really sure it was not homicide. To be 100 percent sure.”

  There are a few questions left. The decomposition of the body prohibited an accurate toxicology report. The cause of death is still officially undetermined, and lab officials cannot say with complete certainty that it was a death by hanging. They are virtually certain, but the state of the corpse has hindered the detective work. And there are other stray facts: Two cigarette butts were found near the body. Lab technicians are working to determine whether these were smoked by Tony, though no lighter was found near his body. Tony’s wedding ring was missing. His wallet was missing. His sweatpants were missing. There was likely money missing, though how much is unknown.

  And then there’s the biggest mystery of all: the curious extra shoelace.

  De Souza needs answers before closing the case. Right now, there is a sliver of doubt. A heartbreaking possibility exists: Could Tony Harris have been losing his mind, running from people who were not chasing him, only to end up surrounded by actual danger? “The most likely [cause] is suicide,” de Souza says. “But some people walking around the street asking for money, maybe they saw him and thought this guy has money and they killed him. That’s another question.”

  Will it ever be possible to conclusively prove what happened?

  De Souza considers the question. The body had no bullet holes or stab wounds, no broken bones or tissue under the fingernails. But the rain and the wilderness erased any other forensic clues.

  “No,” he says.

  THE FINAL DAYS, OUTSIDE BEZERRA

  The walk to the monkey pepper tree is long and difficult, no matter the route. Tony Harris leaves the gas station and disappears into the cerrado, a sprawl
ing Brazilian savanna that surrounds the town. Cerrado means “inaccessible” in Portuguese.

  The land is frightening and foreign, quilts of open field dotted with termite mounds and tall, tropical trees. There are long runs of covered forest. The greens are psychedelic. Jaguars roam the forests and grasslands, their roar like a loud cough. Water flows, maybe a stream, maybe runoff from a recent shower. Large birds circle the tops of the trees, their shrieks breaking the peaceful gurgle of the water. Songbirds sing a sweet melody in the background. During the day, the sun bakes down, steaming all living things with alternating flurries of sun, rain, then more sun. At night, the chill comes and with it a darkness unlike anything a man from a civilized world has ever seen. At night, it’s like God himself forgot the cerrado.

  How long was Tony lost out here? A day? Two? Three? The soldiers say you could live for a month, if you knew what you were doing. The place is covered with edible fruit and fresh water. No one knows where Tony Harris walked or what he thought or felt as he wove deeper and deeper into the mazelike wilderness. Was he scared? Did he stop running? Did someone stop him from running? Somehow he ended up at the monkey pepper tree. It’s clearly visible, atop the crown of a small mound, in a clearing, a few smaller trees setting a perimeter. Though there is deeper forest around it, from the tree, a man can look up and see heaven.

  No one knows exactly what happened to Tony Harris in his last minutes, but they do know where he was found. Police estimate he died on or about Friday, November 9. An anonymous call came in on Sunday, November 18, his birthday. About 20 feet from the monkey pepper tree is a fishing hole, though you can’t see it without crawling through dense vegetation. A walking path to it, if you know where to dip into the forest, goes past the tree. Police believe the tipster is an illegal fisherman without permission to be on military property. That’s yet another heartbreaking detail: Tony Harris loved to fish, and some investigators believe he might have been out of his mind from dehydration. But if he had walked more or less straight here from town, he ended up only 20 yards shy of life-saving water and more fish than he could have eaten in a month.