The Darkest Heart (20 page)

This particular
jacaré
had decided to punch well above its own weight, because although it was strong, it was too small to be much threat to a human. Anyone with enough experience of the river would have known that, but to Leonardo it must have been terrifying. This creature had slipped out of the water while he was asleep and clamped its jaws around his calf. Its teeth were big enough to cause considerable pain, and it would take a hard man not to be alarmed when he woke to find a
jacaré
trying to drag him into the river. Perhaps if it had been a little bigger, or had another to help it, it might have succeeded.

‘Get it off me!' Leonardo yelled as he continued to writhe and hit at the animal with one hand, while stretching for his pistol with the other. His weapon was just beyond reach, his fingertips brushing the grip.

‘Do something!' The pitch of his voice heightened in panic as
the
jacaré
tugged at him in jerking movements, trying to pull him towards the water. ‘Kill it!'

There was something fascinating about seeing Leonardo battling the
jacaré
, struggling in a storm of limbs and sand. It was almost mesmerising, like some bizarre dream come to life, and as I watched, I considered turning away and leaving them to it. Perhaps it would solve my problems if the animal dragged him into the water and drowned him. Maybe he deserved such a death. I even found myself wishing the creature were larger, or wondering if I should just kill Leonardo myself.

‘Help him.' Daniella woke me from the trance. It was she who spurred me into action. She was a better person than I, and she saw only that we should help Leonardo. We couldn't allow him to die like this.

And we had come a long way – the old man needed his money.

I took a step closer, raised my revolver, and shot the creature through the eye.

‘You hesitated,' Leonardo said. ‘You thought about letting it have me.' He was sitting on the sand, with his left leg extended in front of him and his foot up on his backpack.

‘It wasn't big enough,' I said, wrapping his calf with a bandage. ‘And these aren't much more than puncture wounds.' I glanced back at the dead
jacaré
lying a few feet away. There was more than just one hole in it now.

Leonardo's rage had overcome him once he had recovered from the shock of waking up to find a
jacaré
attached to his leg, and though he had lost his grip on his pistol during the attack, he made up for it afterwards. He had emptied his pistol's magazine into the dead creature before reloading.

I might have done the same thing. The thought of being in the water was still fresh in my mind; the fear I had felt when I was under the boat, trying to free what remained of the
boto.
All kinds of thoughts had come to me then; of being dragged down into the darkness.

‘Well they hurt like fuck,' he said.

‘You'll live. Just be thankful the
jacaré
wasn't any bigger. Some of them are as big as four metres long. If it had been one of those, you'd be wishing you were dead.'

I used my teeth to tear the bandage, then ripped it a short way down the middle and tied it off before putting everything back into the first aid box I'd taken from the
Deus.
'You going to say thank you?' I asked, standing and looking down at him.

Leonardo scowled. ‘All right. Thank you.'

The sun was peering over the top of the trees in the distance, and the morning was still fresh. On the bank behind us, the cicadas creaked in the molasses grass and a pair of magpie tanagers played in the closest
buriti
palm. The black and white birds hopped from frond to frond, their heads turning in jerky movements as they picked insects from the leaves. They were undisturbed by our presence.

‘How about you?' I asked the old man. ‘Any better?'

He was sitting up now, drinking water from a plastic bottle, and tried to smile in reply to me, but it hurt his head too much, so he let it go halfway. He saw the worry on my face before I could disguise it. ‘It'll pass,' he said. ‘It's nothing. Flu, maybe, something like that.'

‘There's been dengue in Piratinga; you know that.'

‘Dengue passes, Zico. I've seen it before.'

‘So have I. But it doesn't always pass. Sometimes it gets worse.'

‘I don't want to talk about it.'

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Sure.'

Raul stood up and stretched his back, pretending not to feel the pain in his joints, then walked to the river and put his toes into it. They disappeared under the silt-laden water.

‘Be careful,' I told him, thinking about what had happened to Leonardo, but he made a dismissive sound and waved a hand.

‘On Tocantins, the water is much clearer than this,' he said without looking back at me.

‘Then your job will be easier when you get to Imperatriz.'

‘I like it muddy,' he replied. ‘I like it that you can't see what's down there. It's like we're not supposed to know. There are things
down there we shouldn't see.' He paused, worn out from the effort of talking, and I watched him, thinking about what we'd left beneath the surface yesterday, and what had crawled out of the river and attacked Leonardo this morning.

‘You know,' Raul went on, ‘I heard about some
gringos
came down this way, brought some fancy gear so they could get a good look at all our fish. Scientists, they were, coming down here with diving suits and cameras, spending all their
gringo
dollars on equipment to study our river. And you know what they saw?'

‘What?' asked Daniella, her voice lazy, the increasing heat sapping her strength. ‘What did they see?'

‘They saw
shit
, that's what they saw. It was too damn dark and dirty for them to see anything. Went home with pictures of sand and mud and dark.' He waved one foot from side to side in the water, feeling the gritty sand settling between his toes, then he stopped and turned to me, saying, ‘How long have we been doing this, Zico, you and me? Up and down this river?'

‘Two years?'

Raul nodded. ‘Two. And before that I was doing it alone, sometimes with Carolina, for fifteen. Things have changed a lot since then. For one thing, I feel old.'

‘You
are
old. You can rest when you get to Imperatriz. Take it easy on your new boat.' I knew that Raul would never have enough money to do it, that maybe he didn't even really want it, but I allowed him his dream of escaping Piratinga. ‘You got something else lined up after this?' I asked, saying it for no other reason than to make conversation, but the old man just grunted and waved a hand, making me want to say something else. ‘I'll get us work,' I said, knowing it might not be that easy.

‘You want to hear something funny?' he said.

‘Sure.'

‘I don't want to go to Imperatriz. I couldn't give a shit for that place or for its river.'

‘What about joining Francisco?' Daniella said. ‘What about being with your son?'

‘And buying a boat,' I added. ‘Tourists ... that whole thing. You've been talking about it all the time I've known you.'

‘Talk,' he said. ‘Talk is just talk. I never wanted to go there. We make dreams to pass the time, and we pretend that we want to be somewhere else; it's what men do. Maybe we do it for our women or maybe we do it because it's expected of us, I don't know, but we're all supposed to have dreams, Zico, we're not supposed to be content.'

I waited for him to go on.

‘I mean, my son ... sure, it would be good to see him from time to time, but time to time would be enough. I don't need to live in his pocket.' Raul reached for a cigarette, looked at it for a moment and put it back into the packet. ‘And what do I want another boat for? I got one already.'

‘So you can do the tourist thing on Tocantins,' said Daniella. ‘That's what you always said you wanted. You want to work there, you'll need a bigger boat, one with beds, a kitchen.'

‘Beds and a kitchen.' Raul let the words fall from his lips like they had numbed his mouth and left a bad taste. ‘Who needs beds and a kitchen on a boat when you've got the shore right alongside you? You want to eat, you make a fire. You want to sleep, you make a bed. What's wrong with eating under the open sky? What's wrong with sleeping in a hammock? Or on the beach?'

‘A hammock's OK for you and me to sleep on, maybe even Daniella,' I winked at her, ‘but these tourists, they want something different. They're soft. They're used to beds.'

‘Then let them stay in their beds. What do they want to come here for anyway? Why do they want to live like us when they're nothing like us? They have no idea how we live.'

I smiled at my friend. A sad, understanding smile. I knew him better than I had known my own father and probably loved him more. I would do almost anything for him, including help him lie to himself, it seemed, because now that I thought about it in light of what he had just said, I knew he didn't want a better life. He already had it. And, in my heart, maybe I knew the same was
true for me too. ‘You belong here,' I said. This is your river, it's where you need to be.'

Raul removed his hat and ran a hand across his head. The cropped grey hair as rough as the bristles on his chin. ‘Yeah.' He shivered again, the fever rooting itself deep in his body.

‘I don't know why you pretend it's what you want,' I said.

Raul closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun. ‘It's Carolina who wants to go to Imperatriz. I lie to myself for her.'

28

Daniella waded back to the
Deus e o Diabo
with me and we unfastened the smaller boat from the back, returning to the shore to collect Leonardo and the old man. Raul insisted on wading out to her as usual, but he looked frail and was already sweating. Leonardo, on the other hand, refused to enter the water. He said he didn't want to ruin the dressing on his leg, but the pistol never left his grip, and he scanned the water as we rowed out. I didn't blame him for being afraid. When Daniella and I had returned to collect the smaller boat from the
Deus
, we had moved quickly, fearful of whatever might be lurking below the surface.

Usually the old man would have gripped the gunwale and hauled himself up, but now his muscles were racked with pain. His fingers were weak and I had to help him, taking his hands and dragging him up onto the boat.

For a few moments, Raul's pride was gone and he stayed on his knees, dripping onto the deck, catching his breath. Rocky circled him, licking at his face, trying to encourage him to pet her. It was as if she knew he was sick.

In the time between losing Sofia and coming to Piratinga, I'd had nothing to care about other than myself, and seeing the old man on his knees, his breath coming in sharp gasps, was like a weight on my heart. The old man and I had been up and down this river many times, and our lives had both been threatened more than once, but I had never considered his mortality so much as I had these past two days. He seemed to be dying before my eyes, wasting away, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Everything in my life had slipped beyond my control.

Eventually the old man looked up and forced a smile. ‘Can't even climb onto my own damn boat,' he said, but the effort of those words was so great that he immediately lowered his head and went back to breathing in wheezing gasps.

‘We need to go,' Leonardo said, hauling himself up onto the boat. He limped past us and dumped his pack on the deck. ‘Or do you three want to waste some more of my time?' He winced and lowered himself onto the box seat he had been using yesterday.

‘What's the matter with you?' Daniella turned on him. ‘Can't you see he's sick?'

‘And I just got bitten by a fucking monster,' Leonardo snapped. ‘All I care about is making this delivery on time.'

‘We'll make your delivery,' I told him. ‘Just give him a minute.' I crouched beside my friend, waiting for him to look up, but he remained that way, forehead pressed to the deck, eyes closed, sweat beading on his face, running along the bridge of his nose.

I put my arm around his shoulders and brought my face close to his, so I could feel his bristles against my own skin. The heat was coming off him like he was burning up, the smell of sweat and sickness heavy on him. ‘Stay strong,' I whispered. ‘We'll get you home soon.'

Raul nodded and started to stand up. I helped him, gave him something to push against as he found his way to his feet.

‘Do you want me to take the wheel?' I kept my voice low.

‘No, Zico. You just watch him.'

‘You sure?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Daniella.' I raised my voice. ‘Help him to the wheel. Stay with him.'

I watched them go, then took a spanner from the housing at the back and reached down into the hatch to reconnect the fuel lines. Rocky stayed with me for a moment, pushing her nose into the compartment, then went back to the old man.

‘You stay here,' I told Leonardo as I threw the spanner back into the toolbox.

Leonardo reached for his backpack and pulled it up onto his
lap. He laid the pistol on the bench beside him and started to open the pack. He took out a scrap of folded newspaper and, for a moment, my heart lurched. It reminded me of the scrap in my shirt pocket, and my hand went to my chest, feeling for it. Had Leonardo somehow taken it from me?

I felt the familiar stiffness of it against the cotton of my shirt, though, and it crossed my mind that Leonardo and I might be going to Mina dos Santos for the same reason. Perhaps he too was looking for Sister Dolores Beckett. But when he unfolded the paper on his lap, I saw a different kind of problem arise for me.

Leonardo took a pinch of the fine white powder and, blocking one nostril, snorted the drug hard into his other.

‘Cocaína?'
This explained his behaviour yesterday. The wild look in his eyes. The eagerness to use his weapon.