by John Grisham
Stretched the length of the deck was a comfortable-looking hammock, which immediately caught Nate’s attention.
“This is yours,” Jevy said with a smile. “You will have lots of time to read and sleep.”
“How nice,” Nate said.
“This boat is sometimes used for tourists, usually Germans, who want to see the Pantanal.”
“Have you worked as the captain on this boat?”
“Yes, a couple of times. Several years ago. The owner is not a pleasant man.”
Nate carefully sat on the hammock, then swung his damaged legs around until he was fully fitted into it. Jevy gave him a push, then left to have another chat with the mechanic.
FIFTEEN
_____________
LILLIAN PHELAN’S dreams of a cozy Christmas dinner were shattered when Troy Junior arrived late and drunk and in the midst of a nasty fight with Biff. They came in separate cars, each driving new Porsches of different colors. The shouting spread as Rex, who’d also had a few drinks, chastised his older brother for ruining their mother’s Christmas. The house was full. Lillian’s four children—Troy Junior, Rex, Libbigail, and Mary Ross—were there, as well as all eleven grandchildren, along with an assortment of their friends, most of whom had not been specifically invited by Lillian.
The Phelan grandchildren, like their parents, had attracted new pals and confidants since Troy’s passing.
Until Troy Junior’s arrival, it had been a delightful celebration of Christmas. Never had so many fabulous gifts been exchanged. The Phelan heirs bought for each other and for Lillian without regard to cost—designer clothing, jewelry, electronic gadgets, even art. For a few hours, the money brought out the best in them. Their generosity knew no bounds.
In only two days the will would be read.
Libbigail’s husband Spike, the ex-biker she’d met in rehab, attempted to intervene in the rift between Troy Junior and Rex, and in the process got himself cursed by Troy Junior, who reminded him that he was a “fat hippie whose brain had been fried by LSD.” This offended Libbigail, who called Biff a slut. Lillian ran to her bedroom and locked the door. The grandchildren and their entourages drifted to the basement, where someone had stashed a cooler of beer.
Mary Ross, arguably the most reasonable and certainly the least volatile of the four, convinced her brothers and Libbigail to stop yelling and find separate corners between rounds. They drifted off into little groups; some in the den, some in the living room. An uneasy ceasefire settled in.
The lawyers hadn’t helped matters. They now worked in teams as they represented what they claimed to be the best interests of each Phelan heir. And they also spent hours conniving and figuring ways to get a larger piece of the pie. Four very distinct little armies of lawyers—six if you counted Geena’s and Ramble’s—all working feverishly. The more time the Phelan heirs spent with their lawyers, the more they distrusted each other.
After an hour of peace, Lillian emerged and surveyed the truce. Saying nothing, she went to the kitchen and finished preparing dinner. A buffet now made sense. They could eat in shifts, come in groups and fill their plates and retire to the safety of their corners.
And so the first Phelan family enjoyed a quiet Christmas dinner after all. Troy Junior ate ham and sweet potatoes by himself at the bar near the rear patio. Biff ate with Lillian in the kitchen. Rex and his wife Amber, the stripper, enjoyed turkey in the bedroom with a football game on. Libbigail, Mary Ross, and their husbands ate on TV trays in the den.
And the grandchildren and their groupies took frozen pizza to the basement, where the beer was flowing.
________
THE SECOND family had no Christmas at all, at least not together. Janie had never been fond of the holiday, and so she fled the country, to Klosters in Switzerland, where the pretty people from Europe gathered to be seen and ski. She took with her a bodybuilder named Lance, who at twenty-eight was half her age, but happy to be along for the ride.
Her daughter Geena was forced to spend Christmas with in-laws in Connecticut, normally a bleak and gloomy prospect, but things had changed dramatically. For Geena’s husband Cody, it was a triumphant return to the family’s aging country estate near Waterbury.
The Strong family once had a fortune built in shipping, but after centuries of mismanagement and inbreeding the money had practically dried up. The name and the pedigree still guaranteed acceptance to the right schools and the proper clubs, and a Strong wedding still received a lengthy announcement. But the trough was only so wide and long, and too many generations had been eating from it.
They were an arrogant bunch, proud of their name and accent and bloodlines, and on the surface unconcerned about the dwindling family money. They had careers in New York and Boston. They spent what they earned because the family fortune had always been their safety net.
The last Strong with any vision had evidently seen the end and established trusts for education, thick trusts written by squads of lawyers, impenetrable trusts clad with iron and able to withstand the desperate assaults from future Strongs. The assaults came; the trusts held firm, and any young Strong was still guaranteed a fine education. Cody boarded at Taft, was an average student at Dartmouth, then received an MBA from Columbia.
His marriage to Geena Phelan had not been well received by the family, primarily because it was her second. The fact that her estranged father was worth, at the time of the wedding, six billion dollars helped ease her entry into the clan. But she would always be looked down on because she was a divorcée and poorly educated at non–Ivy League schools, and also because Cody was a bit odd.
But they were all there to greet her on Christmas Day. She had never seen so many smiles from people she detested; so many stiff little hugs and awkward pecks on the cheeks and pats on the shoulder. She hated them even more for their phoniness.
A couple of drinks, and Cody began talking. The men grouped around him in the den and it wasn’t long before someone asked, “How much?”
He frowned as if the money was already a burden. “Probably half a billion,” he said, the perfect delivery of a line he’d rehearsed in front of his bathroom mirror.
Some of the men gasped. Others grimaced because they knew Cody, and they were all Strongs, and they knew they would never see a dime of it. They all quietly seethed with envy. Word filtered out from the group and before long the women scattered around the house were whispering about the half a billion. Cody’s mother, a prim and shriveled little woman whose wrinkles cracked when she smiled, was appalled by the obscenity of the fortune. “It’s new money,” she said to a daughter. New money earned by a scandalous old goat with three wives and a string of bad children, not a one of whom had attended an Ivy League school.
New or old, the money was much envied by the younger women. They could see the jets and beach houses and fabulous family gatherings on distant islands, and trust funds for nieces and nephews, and perhaps even outright gifts of cash.
The money thawed the Strongs, thawed them to a warmness they had never shown to an outsider, thawed them to the point of melting. It taught them openness and love, and made for a warm, cozy Christmas.
Late in the afternoon, as the family gathered around the table for the traditional dinner, it began to snow. What a perfect Christmas, all the Strongs said. Geena hated them more than ever.
________
RAMBLE SPENT the holiday with his lawyer, at six hundred dollars an hour, though the billing would be hidden as only lawyers can hide such things.
Tira likewise had left the country with a young gigolo. She was on a beach somewhere, topless and probably bottomless too, and completely unconcerned with what her fourteen-year-old son might be doing.
The lawyer, Yancy, was single, twice divorced, and had twin eleven-year-old sons from his second marriage. The boys were exceptionally bright for their age; Ramble was painfully slow for his, so they had a great time playing video games in the bedroom while Yancy watched football alone.
Hi
s client was set to receive the obligatory five million dollars on his twenty-first birthday, and given the client’s level of maturity and direction at home, the money wouldn’t even last as long as it had for the other Phelan offspring. But Yancy wasn’t concerned with a meager five million; hell, he’d make that much in fees off Ramble’s cut from the will.
Yancy had other worries. Tira had hired a new law firm, an aggressive one near the Capitol, one with all the right connections. She was only an ex-wife, not an offspring, and her portion would be much smaller than anything Ramble received. The new lawyers of course realized this. They were pressuring Tira to ditch Yancy and steer young Ramble into their corner. Fortunately, the mother didn’t care much for the child, and Yancy was doing a splendid job of manipulating child away from mother.
The laughter of the boys was music to his ears.
SIXTEEN
_____________
LATE IN the afternoon, he stopped at a small deli a few blocks from the hotel. He was roaming the sidewalks, saw that the deli was open, and walked into it with the hope of finding a beer. Nothing but a beer, maybe two. He was alone on the far side of the world. It was Christmas and he had no one to share it with. A wave of loneliness and depression fell hard upon Nate, and he began to slide. Self-pity seized him.
He saw the rows of bottles of liquor, all full and unopened, whiskeys and gins and vodkas, lined up like pretty little soldiers in bright uniforms. His mouth was instantly dry, even parched. His jaw dropped and his eyes closed. He grabbed the counter so he wouldn’t waver, and his entire face contorted with pain as he thought about Sergio back at Walnut Hill and Josh and the ex-wives and the ones he’d hurt so many times when he crashed. Thoughts spun wildly and he was about to faint when the little man said something. Nate glowered at him, bit his lip, and pointed at the vodka. Two bottles, eight reais.
Every crash had been different. Some were slow in building, a drink here, a snort there, a crack in the dam followed by more. Once he’d actually driven himself to a detox center. Another time he’d awakened strapped to a bed with an IV in his wrist. With the last crash, a maid had found him in a cheap motel room, thirty bucks a day, comatose.
He clutched the paper sack and walked with a purpose to his hotel, stepping around a group of sweaty little boys dribbling a soccer ball on the sidewalk. So lucky are the children, he thought. No burdens, no baggage. Tomorrow’s just another game.
It would be dark in an hour, and Corumbá was gently coming to life. The sidewalk cafés and bars were opening, a few cars moved about. At the hotel, live music from the pool drifted through the lobby, and for a second Nate was tempted to get a table for one last song.
But he didn’t. He went to his room, where he locked the door and filled a tall plastic cup with ice. He placed the bottles side by side, opened one, slowly poured the vodka over the ice, and vowed not to stop until both were empty.
________
JEVY WAS waiting for the parts merchant when he arrived at eight. The sun was up and unfiltered by clouds. The sidewalks were hot to the touch.
There was no oil pump, at least not one for a diesel engine. The merchant made two calls, and Jevy roared away in his pickup. He drove to the edge of Corumbá where a boat dealer ran a salvage yard cluttered with the remains of dozens of scrapped vessels. In the engine shop a parts boy produced a well-used oil pump, covered with oil and grease and wrapped in a dirty shop rag. Jevy gladly paid twenty reais for it.
He drove to the river and parked near the water’s edge. The Santa Loura hadn’t moved. He was pleased to see that Welly had arrived. Welly was a novice deckhand, not yet eighteen, who claimed he could cook, pilot, guide, clean, navigate, and perform any and all other services required. Jevy knew he was lying, but such bravado was not uncommon among boys looking for work on the river.
“Have you seen Mr. O’Riley?” Jevy asked.
“The American?” asked Welly.
“Yes, the American.”
“No. No sign of him.”
A fisherman in a wooden boat yelled something at Jevy, but he was preoccupied with other matters. He bounced across the plywood onto the boat, where the banging had started again in the rear. The same grimy mechanic was wrestling with the engine. He hovered over it in a half-crouch, shirtless and dripping with sweat. The engine room was suffocating. Jevy handed him the oil pump and he inspected it with his short stubby fingers.
The engine was a five-cylinder in-line diesel, with the pump at the bottom of the crankcase, just below the edge of the grated floor. The mechanic shrugged as if Jevy’s purchase might indeed do the trick, then he maneuvered his belly around the manifold, dropped slowly to his knees, and bent low with the top of his head resting on the exhaust.
He grunted something, and Jevy handed him a wrench. The replacement pump was slowly fitted into place. Jevy’s shirt and shorts were soaked within minutes.
With both men wedged tightly into the engine room, Welly decided to appear and ask if he was needed. No, in fact he was not. “Just watch for the American,” Jevy said, wiping sweat from his forehead.
The mechanic cursed and flung wrenches for half an hour, then declared the pump ready for use. He started the engine, and spent a few minutes monitoring the oil pressure. He finally smiled, then gathered his tools.
Jevy drove downtown to the hotel to find Nate.
The shy girl at the front desk had not seen Mr. O’Riley. She phoned his room and no one answered. A maid walked by the desk and got herself quizzed. No, to her knowledge, he had not left the room. Reluctantly, the girl gave Jevy a key.
The door was locked but unchained, and Jevy entered slowly. The first odd thing he noticed was the empty bed with its disheveled sheets. Then he saw the bottles. One was empty and lying on its side on the floor; the other was half-filled. The room was very cool, the air conditioner running at full speed. He saw a bare foot, then stepped closer to see Nate, lying naked, wedged between the bed and the wall with a sheet pulled down and wrapped around his knees. Jevy gently kicked his foot, and the leg jerked.
At least he wasn’t dead.
Jevy spoke to him and jabbed his shoulder, and after a few seconds a grunt was heard. A low, painful emission. Squatting on the bed, Jevy carefully clasped his hands under the nearest armpit and pulled Nate up from the floor, away from the wall, and managed to roll him onto the bed, where he quickly covered his privates with a sheet.
Another painful groan. Nate was on his back with one foot hanging off the bed, eyes swollen and still closed, hair wild, his breathing slow and labored. Jevy stood at the end of the bed and stared at him.
The maid and the girl from the front desk appeared at the crack in the door, and Jevy waved them away. He locked it, and picked up the empty bottle.
“It’s time to go,” he said, and received no response whatsoever. Perhaps he should call Valdir, who in turn would report to the Americans who’d sent this poor drunk to Brazil. Maybe later.
“Nate!” he said loudly. “Speak to me!”
No response. If he didn’t rally soon, Jevy would call a doctor. A bottle and a half of vodka in one night could kill a man. Maybe his system was poisoned and he needed a hospital.
In the bathroom he soaked a towel with cold water, then wrapped it around Nate’s neck. Nate began to squirm, and he opened his mouth in an effort to speak. “Where am I?” he grunted, his tongue thick and sticky.
“In Brazil. In your hotel room.”
“I’m alive.”
“More or less.”
Jevy took an edge of the towel and wiped Nate’s face and eyes. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“I want to die,” Nate said, reaching for the towel. He took it, eased it into his mouth, and began sucking on it.
“I’ll get some water,” Jevy said. He opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of water. “Can you lift your head?” he asked.
“No,” Nate grunted.
Jevy dripped water onto Nate’s lips and tongue. Some of it rolled down his
cheeks and into the towel. He didn’t care. His head was splitting and pounding and his first thought was exactly how in hell did he wake up.
An eye opened, the right one, barely. The lids on the left were still matted together. Light scalded his brain and a wave of nausea rolled from his knees to his throat. With surprising suddenness, he flipped to one side, then rocked on all fours as the vomit shot forth.
Jevy jumped back, then went for another towel. He lingered in the bathroom, listening to the gagging and coughing. The sight of a naked man on his hands and knees in the middle of a bed puking his guts out was something he could do without. He turned on the shower and adjusted the water.
His deal with Valdir paid him a thousand reais to take Mr. O’Riley into the Pantanal, find the person he was searching for, then deliver him back to Corumbá. It was good money, but he wasn’t a nurse and he wasn’t a baby-sitter. The boat was ready. If Nate couldn’t answer the bell without an escort, then Jevy would move along to the next job.
There was a break in the nausea, and Jevy manhandled Nate into the bathroom, into the shower, where he crumpled onto the plastic floor. “I’m sorry,” he said over and over. Jevy left him there, to drown for all he cared. He folded the sheets and tried to clean the mess, then he went downstairs for a pot of strong coffee.
________
IT WAS almost two when Welly heard them coming. Jevy parked on the bank, his huge truck scattering rocks and waking fishermen as it roared to a stop. There was no sign of the American.
Then a head slowly lifted itself from somewhere in the cab. The eyes were covered with thick shades, and a cap was pulled as low as possible. Jevy opened the passenger door and helped Mr. O’Riley onto the rocks. Welly walked to the truck and grabbed Nate’s bag and briefcase from the back. He wanted to meet Mr. O’Riley, but the timing was bad. He was quite ill, with bleached skin that was soaked with sweat, and he was too weak to walk on his own. Welly followed them to the edge of the water and helped guide them along the rickety plywood walkway onto the boat. Jevy practically carried Mr. O’Riley up the steps to the bridge, then along the catwalk to the small deck, where the hammock was waiting. He shoveled him into it.
When they returned to the deck, Jevy started the engine and Welly pulled the ropes. “What’s wrong with him?” Welly asked.
“He’s drunk.”
“But it’s only two o’clock.”
“He’s been drunk for a long time.”
The Santa Loura eased away from the shore, and, moving upriver, slowly made its way past Corumbá.
________
NATE WATCHED the city go by. The roof above him was a thick, green worn canvas stretched over a metal frame anchored to the deck by four poles. Two of these supported his hammock, which had rocked a bit just after the launch. The nausea crept back. He tried not to move. He wanted everything to be perfectly still. The boat moved gently upstream. The river was smooth. There was no wind at the moment, so Nate was able to lie deep in his hammock and stare at the dark green canvas above him and try to ponder things. The pondering was difficult, though, because his head spun and ached. Concentration was a challenge.
He had called Josh from his room just before checking out. With ice packs on his neck and a wastebasket between his feet he had dialed the number and tried mightily to sound normal. Jevy hadn’t told Valdir. Valdir hadn’t told Josh. No one knew but Nate and Jevy, and they had agreed to keep it that way. There was no alcohol on the boat, and Nate had promised sobriety until they returned. How was he supposed to find a drink in the Pantanal?
If Josh was worried, his voice didn’t convey it. The firm was still closed for Christmas, et cetera, but he was busy as hell. The usual.
Nate said that he was doing just fine. The boat was adequate and now properly repaired. They were anxious to set sail. When he hung up he vomited again. And then he showered again. Then Jevy helped him to the elevator and through the lobby.
The river bent slightly and turned again, and Corumbá disappeared. The boat traffic around the city thinned as their journey gained momentum. Nate’s vantage point gave him a view of the wake and of the muddy brown water bubbling behind them. The Paraguay was less than a hundred yards wide and narrowed quickly around the bends. They passed a rickety boat laden with green bananas, and two small boys waved.
The steady knock of the diesel failed to stop, as Nate had hoped, but it became a low hum, a constant vibration throughout the entire vessel. There was no choice but to accept it. He tried swinging in the hammock, a gentle swing as a breeze crept through. The nausea was gone.
Don’t think about Christmas, and home and children and broken memories, and don’t think about your addictions. The crash is over, he told himself. The boat was his treatment center. Jevy was his counselor. Welly was his nurse. He’d dry out in the Pantanal, then never drink again.
How many times could he lie to himself?
The aspirin Jevy had given him wore off, and his head pounded again. He lapsed into a near-sleep, and awoke when Welly appeared with a bottle of water and a bowl of rice. He ate it with a spoon, his hands shaking so badly he spilled the rice on his shirt and in the hammock. It was warm and salty, and he ate every grain.
“Mais?” Welly asked.
Nate shook his head no, then sipped the water. He sank into the hammock and tried to nap.
