by Jeremy Brown
“No,” she said. “Give me some choices, I will pick instead.”
I said, “Marcela.”
She told me to shut up.
Carrasco said, “You have had your choices for a long while now, Pomba Gira. This or that. You chose this.”
She blinked hard, slamming the tears of rage down. “Okay. I will go with him. We will both leave Brazil and not come back.”
“No no, Pomba Gira.” The scars on his scalp writhed in the candlelight when he shook his head. “This is your home, here in Brazil. Here with Exu. If you go, Exu will be angry. I think your family will suffer, sure.”
“I will do it,” Jairo said. He was panting, his voice shaking. “She is my family, I will do this for her.”
Carrasco leaned back, impressed. “I can feel your fear, blood of Pomba Gira. It is strong of you to make this offering to Exu. But Exu does not accept. It must be him.”
Jairo’s jaw muscles boiled. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “She is my cousin, he is my brother. I will do it for both of them.”
“Exu already refused.”
Jairo paused, wavered, spat. “I don’t care. I am doing it.”
Carrasco took a deep breath, let his head tip forward, droop until his chin was on his chest. He mumbled in a language that wasn’t Portuguese, full of clicks and growls.
The candle flames danced, just once.
Carrasco lifted his head and faced Jairo. “I am sorry, my friend. But it was Exu’s wish.”
Jairo blinked. “What was?”
Carrasco just smiled.
“I choose the second one,” I said. “The Coluna . . . whatever.” I needed to speak up before Marcela and Jairo offered up kidneys and lungs to cover my ass.
“Coluna da Cobra,” Carrasco said. “Exu is happy with this.”
From the way Malhar was panting against my arm, he was too.
“You going to tell me what it is?”
Carrasco’s face pulled to the side in a smile. It slid to a grimace as he pushed to his feet. “We walk through the door together, man. Then I show you.”
Eye Patch pulled a straight black cane from behind the chair and handed it to Carrasco. He braced it next to his right leg and took his time getting to the door. Malhar stood behind me, Marcela, and Jairo and grunted while he breathed, tapping his fingers against the wooden handle of his hammer.
We followed Carrasco through the door.
This room was much smaller, fifteen feet square. The window on the left was boarded from the inside and a single bare light bulb hung from a cord in the center of the drooping ceiling. Someone had painted a mural of the mountainside on the wall across from the door. It showed the narrow road snaking up through the trees, some of the buildings in splashes of white and color in the dark green. It even showed the Dumpsters at the bottom, blobs of rusty blue. No sign of the pickups full of gunmen.
Eye Patch stood in the corner with his arms crossed. Malhar filled the doorway behind us. All told, the room set a record for the most Brazilians per square inch.
“My Axila da Serpente,” Carrasco said. He spent a full minute leaning on his cane, staring at the mural.
Marcela and Jairo said he’d been shot, stabbed, hung, and set on fire. It all showed. I suspected he’d been run over a few times as well, but I didn’t ask about it.
Carrasco drew a ragged breath. “See it, Pomba Gira. This is all mine. It could be ours. Maybe it does not look like much to you, but there are great things here. Some on the surface, some underneath.”
“You’re talking to me now,” I said.
He pointed the blank sunglasses at me for a while. “The Coluna da Cobra. You know what it means?”
“No.”
“Spine of the Snake.”
“Do I have to eat it?”
He coughed a laugh. “More like it eats you, sure. Anyone who wants to follow Exu—to kill and die for him, to enjoy his victories—runs the Coluna da Cobra.”
He tapped the Dumpsters with the tip of his cane.
“They start here.”
He traced the road through its twists, turns, switchbacks, all the way to the top. A large black house with red windows arranged like a skull squatted at the peak. Carrasco underlined it with his cane.
“They try to get here. If they don’t make it, maybe it’s because they died, or got hurt too bad to keep going.”
“Died how?” I said.
“Oh, from Exu’s soldiers hunting them, finding them, beating them. Sometimes stabbing, but only when Exu knows they are not worthy. Never shooting—Exu’s people live here. He protects them. And if the runners don’t get to the top but Exu knows they tried very hard, sometimes they get to steal for him, or beg on the streets. Or cook. But if they make it, man, they are Exu’s soldiers. Like Malhar. Like Nuncio.”
“Who is Nuncio?”
Eye Patch frowned. “I am.”
“Huh. I’m gonna call you Eye Patch.” I turned to Carrasco. “And I don’t want to be your soldier. Why would I do the Coluna?”
“No, you don’t see it. You run the Coluna da Cobra so Exu gives you what you really want. Those who run it to become Exu’s soldiers, it is what they want, so badly. But you, you want Exu’s Pomba Gira. So you gonna run the Coluna da Cobra and see if Exu will give her to you.”
“No,” Marcela said.
“It’s the only way, Pomba Gira. Otherwise, like I say, Exu will be angry.”
“You’re going to kill him.”
Carrasco shrugged. “Many have survived the Coluna.”
“Because you let them.” She grabbed my hands. “This is just a way for him to murder you.”
Carrasco put a hand on his caved-in chest. “Pomba Gira, you hurt my heart.”
I asked him, “No shooting?”
“Please, there are children. Only the police shoot here, until we kill them.”
Marcela said, “Woody, no.”
“I make it all the way to the top and you leave Marcela and her family alone. Forever.”
“Yes, sure,” he said.
“Okay.”
Marcela fell against Jairo. He put his arm around her and stared at me, his eyes frantic.
Carrasco’s face twitched with a smile. He cocked his head, listening.
“Hmm.”
He considered the mural.
“Exu knows this is something different. You don’t want to be his soldier. You want to be away from him, to have Exu out of your life.”
“Damn right.”
He touched a finger to the skull house, black with red windows. “So you will begin here, at the top. Not at the bottom. You will run the Coluna da Cobra head to tail.”
I rolled my neck and shook my hands out. My breathing was picking up.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
Carrasco frowned. “No, it happens when Exu wishes.”
I stopped in mid-arm circle. “When is that?”
He shrugged. “Only Exu knows.”
8
The pickup trucks were gone when Eye Patch walked us to the Dumpsters and said goodbye. Empty black windows leered down at us from both sides of the silent street.
I opened the van’s side door for Marcela. She got in the front passenger seat and closed her own door. I sat by myself in the middle row, hands out on the worn leather bench to keep from tipping over. Jairo got us rolling and nobody said anything until we were under streetlights and surrounded by other moving cars.
Marcela turned in her seat. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Me? What the hell is wrong with Jairo? He stood there like a statue the whole time, didn’t say a damn thing.”
Jairo shook his head. “That is a bad place. We should not have gone there.”
“See?” I said. “He’s all spooked out.”
“So am I!” Marcela said. “And you should be too, but you’re too stupid to know it.”
“What, because of the candles? Exu? Come on, the guy’s a thug. I’ve gone through gang initiations before. Only thing I’m
worried about is breaking a hand on that Malhar thing’s head. Shit, or getting cut. I’m banged up, the doc won’t let me fight Aviso on Saturday.”
Marcela covered her face, growled some Portuguese into her hands. She pulled them down and turned on me again. “They aren’t going to bang you up, they’re going to kill you. You can’t go. I’m telling you no.”
“If it gets him to leave you alone, I’m going.”
“You can’t go back there,” Jairo said. He stared through the windshield and sounded like he was talking in his sleep. “You go back, you never come out. I won’t let you go. Gil won’t let you.”
“Gil doesn’t know about this.”
“I will tell him,” Jairo said.
Marcela nodded. “We will. Maybe he puts you on a plane first thing in the morning.”
“With you sitting next to me?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m not leaving. I have a fight. Two of them, now. And you’re in danger.”
“You’re suicidal,” she said.
“Nah. Carrasco is.”
I thought it was a good line until Jairo said, “He has already died. I smelled it on him.”
He shuddered, and I felt the van shake.
Jairo parked the van in front of Antonio’s house, got his bag and walked off along a trail without a word. Marcela and I watched him go. I tried to think of something smart to say. She helped me by walking away.
She turned back. “You don’t leave this house. You stay inside until it is time for you to leave.”
“Marcela, I have a fight on Saturday. I have to train tomorrow at the academy for Eddie’s stupid video. Then the weigh-ins and all that nonsense on Friday.”
“Okay, so flip it. What if someone was coming for me, who knows when, to take me away and kill me? What would you do?”
“I’d ask you to come live with me in Vegas. Wait, I already did that. I guess I’d find the people coming for you and put myself between them and you. Shit, I did that too.”
“I won’t let you go with them.”
I reached for her hand. She didn’t pull it away.
“I think they’re all talk,” I said. “I don’t think they’re ever going to come.”
“They will come,” she said.
Antonio and Gil were the only ones awake inside. They sat at a large wooden table near the windows overlooking the courtyard. Scrapbooks were stacked up and spread everywhere. They both looked like they’d been crying in a good way.
“See some good stuff?” Gil said.
“Oh yes,” Marcela said. To me: “Anything you want to tell them?”
“Rio is lovely at night.”
“That’s it?”
“They don’t need to know anything else.”
Antonio and Gil frowned at us. Gil lifted a huge white mug to his face, sipped some of the Brazilian coffee he hadn’t shut up about for weeks leading up to the trip. He smacked his lips and waited. “Hold on. Did you two really get engaged?”
Marcela laughed. A chuckle would have sufficed, but she looked me in the eye and brayed it out. She turned to the table with a tight smile. “We went to see Carrasco tonight.”
Antonio stood up.
“What’s Carrasco?” Gil said. “A band?”
Marcela said, “I’m done talking about it.”
She pointed down the hall along the south wing of the long house.
“Your room is that way. Good night.”
She turned and went down the hallway to the north.
Antonio and Gil stared at me.
“You got any more of that coffee?”
I told them about Eye Patch and his grenades. The visit to the Axila da Serpente. Carrasco and Malhar. Exu and Pomba Gira. The Coluna da Cobra.
Gil put his head in his hands. He kept it there and made sounds like someone was letting the air out of him.
Antonio’s expression didn’t change through any of it, but he seemed to be vibrating. Bristling.
When I finished he said, “You took Jairo into that place?”
“Yeah. Like I said, he didn’t do much.”
“Days before his first fight for Warrior, when he shows the world what the Arcoverdes do, you take him to a favela to be shot, stabbed, killed, cursed.”
“None of that happened.”
“None? You are sure?”
“We all made it back. Nobody’s bleeding.”
“Ah,” he said. “You all made it back. Did you bring anything with you, I wonder.”
“I have my gear bag . . .”
Gil popped up. “He’s talking about a curse, jackass. This Exu thing. You said it had Jairo spooked, so now he’s thinking about that instead of fighting Preston on Saturday.”
“Got it.”
“And you’re supposed to be sleeping and dreaming about shit-stomping Aviso, but instead you’re challenging entire slums to a battle to the death.”
“I didn’t challenge them.”
Gil looked into his coffee cup. If there had been any left, I would have worn it. “Warrior fights aside, you took Marcela and Jairo into a place where you all could have been killed. Are you out of your mind?”
“They both wanted to go. Demanded to.”
“Not until you arrived,” Antonio said. He sat with his back straight and his hands on his thighs, elbows flared. Like an emperor.
Gil asked him, “Will you please call the police about this?”
“There are men I can talk to. What Marcela told him is correct, though. It may do no good.”
“But it can’t hurt,” Gil said.
Antonio gave a slow blink of acknowledgement.
Gil turned to me. “You don’t leave my sight until we land in Vegas on Sunday. You hear me?”
“Hey, they come for me and I don’t go, they—”
He grabbed my forearm. Though short and stocky, he had hands that could palm manhole covers. When he squeezed, I paid attention.
“You don’t go anywhere. You don’t fight anybody except Aviso. You don’t nod your thick fucking head right now, you’re going to fight me.”
“And me,” Antonio said.
I nodded.
And I lied.
My room was small and square. White walls with teak trim and a sliding glass door to the courtyard. The bed was narrow with soft clean sheets.
I considered sneaking to Marcela’s room but figured everybody needed a good night’s sleep. That, and I’d probably end up fighting the whole house.
I got my head down and listened for her footsteps or her knock on the glass door.
Or Carrasco’s.
Neither one came, and I dreamt of waiting at an intersection while a giant snake filled the cross street in front of me, its sides pulsing as it squeezed between the buildings. I could hear Marcela calling for me from inside its belly and see her little hands pressing against the scales from within.
9
It was still dark outside when Jairo woke me up with a glass of fresh juice made from blended oranges, limes, butter, and coffee beans. I squinted at him as I chugged it to see if I’d fallen for some Arcoverde hazing ritual, but he was already heading for the door.
“Put your running shoes on,” he said.
Good news: The drink wasn’t hazing.
Bad news: The running was.
We walked to the end of the driveway, leaving the estate’s dim yellow landscape lights behind. There were no streetlights on the mountain road and no other houses that I could see. The sky was just starting to bruise in the east. The stars faded one by one, sidling away from what was about to happen.
The road went uphill to the right, down to the left.
Jairo faced right and lifted one knee to his chest, tugged it, then the other.
I wiggled my hands and said, “Hey, about Carrasco.”
“We’re not talking about it. Fighting only.”
“I am talking about fighting.”
“Warrior fights,” Jairo said. “Preston. Aviso. That’s it. Ready? G
o.”
The bastard started running uphill. I jammed my earbuds in, hit Play, and kept up with him until I lost the juice five minutes in.
Jairo slapped my back and laughed. “You don’t get the nutrients like that.”
He took off again.
The road varied between long uphill stretches and short uphill ramps. My calves sucked all the blood from my face and turned it into cement. The calm phrases in my ears made me furious with their lack of panting.
Jairo turned around a few times and ran backward to hit his quads. I followed suit, mostly so he wouldn’t see me drooling. My quads said: Fuck your ego, turn back around.
I’d done hill sprints before. The two key words there are hill and sprints.
This was turning into a 5K up a mountain.
And it worked.
I forgot about Carrasco and Exu, Pomba Gira and snakes. It was one foot in front of the other and intense concentration on not shitting my shorts.
Jairo slowed his pace until he was next to me. “Aviso runs a mountain like this every day.”
I yanked the earbuds out, let them dangle, and formed an exhale into a word: “Liar.”
“It’s true. He says it keeps him in shape for his modeling, and his fighting. He doesn’t lift weights. He does jiu jitsu, and he runs up a mountain. Sometimes with sandbags or a heavy pack.”
I risked a deep breath. “How can you talk so much right now?”
“I don’t want you to think he’s going to lie down easy. Or break in his mind. If he runs up a mountain like this every day—no, bigger than this—what is fifteen minutes of fighting? It’s nothing.”
“Won’t go three rounds.” I gasped like a man coming up from a deep-sea free dive.
“I think it will if he wants it to.”
“Don’t care what he wants.”
“He wants to not get hit, and to break your arm. It’s what he’s done to everyone he’s fought already.”
“Not everyone.”
“Close enough,” Jairo said.
I let the lolling of my head turn into a nod. “That’s it. Right there. Close enough. He grabs my arm, he’s close enough to hit.”
“You won’t have the time, man. The way he works, he calls it trap-snap-tap. You see?”
