The Last Match (20 page)

He was preoccupied with working the ship out of the channel into the river before the light faded— night comes down like a quick curtain that close to the equator—and more than willing to leave the prisoner’s feeding to me. She ate a bowl of canned soup and some crackers later that evening. By proxy, in a manner of speaking. I reported her dinner to the captain, and that she’d asked for a cup of tea. Tea I had among my supplies, but I had to go to the galley for hot water. Carefully and conspicuously locking the cabin door behind me each time I left it.

We talked for a long time after she’d had her tea, with the door barred from the inside so we wouldn’t be interrupted. I suppose my voice was more audible than hers from outside the cabin, and I did most of the talking anyway. We spoke English, of course. When it was dark enough and the generator seemed to have pooped out for the evening, I reported to the captain that I’d just taken her back to the
excusado
before locking her in for the night. I didn’t think she’d be needing anything more that night.

When I gave him back the key, he suggested— hesitantly—that maybe I ought to keep it in case she
did
want something during the night.

“No, sir, captain,” I said firmly. “Thank you for the gesture, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. If anything comes up, I’ll ask you for it.”

It just goes to show how dumb you can be if you work at it.

He wanted to look in on her himself the next morning. It was a bad moment. I was keeping watch on the door, and I stepped in front of it before he could unlock it. Her plane wasn’t due to take off from Obidos for another two hours, and wouldn’t get to Belem for at least another couple of hours after that. The
jaula
had no radio communication, of course, but I didn’t know how close we might be to some dump of a river port where there might be a telegraph or phone, or even radio. If he went into the cabin prematurely, we were both cooked.

I said earnestly, “Captain, I don’t think you should try to talk to her. I’ve calmed her down, encouraged her, lied to her about her chances of getting off with a short prison term. I know she has no such chance, but I did it to give her peace of mind. You can’t lie to her as I have. You are a man of honor. If she asks you questions, you’ll have to tell her the truth. Let her have peace and hope for the few hours left to her. I ask it of you as a personal favor to me.”

He looked at me for a long moment without speaking. I squeezed
every-
drop of chicanery in my whole being into the man-to-man look I gave him back. After a moment he said, “Señor, it is a privilege to know such a
caballero,”
and went away. I went into the cabin and had a quick jolt of the lubricator to quiet my jangling nerves.

By one trick or another I kept the hoax going until the following morning. It came to an end when we had only hours to go to Santarem.

My plan had been to fix it to look as if she had jumped ship at our last fueling stop before Santarem. How she might have managed it was someone else’s job to figure. I meant to help the someone else to a conclusion by leaving her discarded clothes in the cabin. It shouldn’t be too hard to reason that she had gone down the gangplank disguised as one of the wood-loaders. Her escape from the cabin would almost certainly be blamed to my carelessness, which I would freely confess. I might pull a couple of weeks in the bin for that, but a couple of weeks in the bin never hurt anybody. I could do a couple of weeks standing on my head.

I had it all figured, as smooth as silk, when I got the key from the captain for the last time. As usual, I opened the cabin door just enough to slip through, and barred it behind me immediately. Also as usual, I went into my spiel immediately, with, “Good morning, my, you’re looking well this morning, I’m going to bring you your tea in just a minute—”

That’s as far as I got. Turning around from the door-barring, I looked Buchisapo in the eye. Without a word he brushed past me to unbar the door. The captain came in.

Neither of them seemed to want to say anything. The stricken look on their faces made me think of a couple of kids who’d just seen someone murder Santa Claus. I said, as brightly as I could, “Why, she doesn’t seem to be here, does she? I wonder what could have happened to her?”

It was no good. They had me with
los pantalones bajados.
The captain, good guy that he was, hadn’t been able not to say a private goodbye and apologize again for having to do his duty in turning her over to the cops. He’d entered the cabin while I wasn’t watching it, guessed the true situation immediately, planted Buchisapo as a witness when I gave myself away. The possible two-week holiday I had planned to spend standing on my head began to look like something more than a holiday.

Magro and the other passengers lined the
jaula’s
rail when the cops took me away wearing that old wrist-jewelry they lend you without charge. Nobody said goodbye, although Magro and Buchisapo did come to see me in jail before the
jaula
went on its way downstream. Buchisapo brought what was left of my stuff from the cabin, Magro his guitar. I thought jail was an odd place for us to have a final songfest, but that wasn’t what Magro had in mind. He gave me the guitar as a present.

“It will keep you company,” he said, and when I tried to decline the gift, pushed it at me. “Take it. I will get another.”

“I don’t know how to play it,” I said.

“You will have plenty of time to learn. Take it.”

I took it, together with what Buchisapo had brought. Things were a little awkward after that, but they didn’t stay long. They had to get back to the
jaula,
which the captain was holding for them. I asked them to thank him for the gesture. Magro and I shook hands, my hand disappearing to the wrist in his great black mitt. We gave each other an
abrazo,
the Latin embrace exchanged between male friends like a handshake. Then I went through the same routine with Buchisapo.

Nothing at all was said about the deception I had brought off or its consequences until just before they left. I should say until just before Buchisapo, who lingered for a moment after Magro, followed him.

“Why did you do it?” he asked. “To satisfy my curiosity and the captain’s. Had you known the woman before? Did she mean something to you?”

I had asked myself the first question at intervals since learning that what I had thought would be an easy short-term fall for carelessness could well turn out to be a stiff five years for accessory after the fact. I hadn’t been able to arrive at a satisfactory answer for myself, so I couldn’t very well supply him with one. Not an honest one, anyway. I gave him a dishonest one that he and the captain would understand.

I said, “The man did me an injustice, years ago. I had planned to kill him myself. When she took my crime upon herself, I had no choice but to help her escape the consequences. It was a matter of honor.”

His troubled face cleared immediately.

“Of course,” he said. “It is easy to understand as a matter of honor. Thank you.”

People will even con themselves, if you give them the right mouthful of words to do it with. The words don’t have to mean anything in particular. Just so long as they sound good.

I pulled eighteen months. It was a lot more than I had thought I’d be risking when I gave Miserable a hand in escaping from the
jaula,
but then again it wasn’t as bad a fall as I’d been afraid of since my foot slipped.

The cause of my drawing such a relatively easy pop was the
jaulas
captain. Talk about Christian forgiveness, turning the other cheek and so forth. He couldn’t wait around for the trial, but he filed a sworn statement with the court that his own failure to take proper precautions for the prisoner’s security had been contributing negligence, without which she could not have got away even with my help. In a way it hurt my professional pride. Contributory negligence my eye; he’d been conned, and conned good. But I was grateful for the three-and-a-half year discount. Five years in stir can be less than exciting, from what I’ve heard.

The eighteen months weren’t too bad, all in all. Day for day they were a lot better than a freighter’s fire-room, in many ways better than the U.S. Army. You didn’t have to salute every time a piece of brass went by, or take daily
scheisse
from a hard top-sergeant. I served my time not in prison but in a prison camp; a work camp. The Brazilian government operated an experimental rubber plantation near Belterra, on the Tapajoz tributary south of Santarem, and the labor was done by convicts because the local river-people,
caboclos,
wouldn’t work for what the government wanted to pay them. Us lags they got for free.

The camp was known to its house-guests as O Caldeirão; The Cauldron. The name was appropriate. Almost on the equator, hemmed in all around by rain forest or river, the place was hot, steamy and sticky. It had more than its share of insect life, too, and they weren’t all big beautiful butterflies. Bolts, bars, barbed wire and similar restraints on voluntary leave-taking were few. To get away from the camp all you had to overcome were a couple of million square miles of jungle surrounding it on three sides, with the huge river (populated by flesh-eating
piranhas,
among other finny friends) on the fourth. Nobody had been known to get beyond those barriers alive, although some had tried it.

I had not thought of becoming one of the volunteers. Working as we did surrounded by jungle, much of the time slashing away at it with machetes to keep it from overrunning the plantation, we frequently saw anacondas, boa constrictors and other interesting reptiles large enough to swallow a lousy convict like a grape. Also out there were those Indians you’ve read about; the ones who shrink your head to the size of an orange and mount it over their mantelpieces. A year and a half of my youthful existence weren’t important enough for me to gamble it against what might be left over afterward.

Camp discipline, like bolts and bars, was negligible. No time off was allowed for good behavior, only time added on for bad behavior. But it you gave no trouble and did your work without too much goofing off on the job, the guards left you alone. It was always too hot and steamy at O Caldeirão, for guards and prisoners alike, to get charged up over inconsequentialities. As a result, there was little of the constant brawling that goes on in some other prison camps. Arguments now and then, of course; a few fights, occasional stabbings with home-made pig-stickers the men whacked out of bamboo. Two slashes of a machete at a half-inch cane would do it; a diagonal chop to give the cane a point and edge, a horizontal chop to lop off the length you wanted to hide in your shirt. If a guard took one away from you, you made another just as easily, and you could kill a man just by sticking him in the throat.

I saw it happen a couple of times. The proper technique for killing with a pig-sticker, although I never tried it myself, appears to be to go in from the side of the throat rather than directly from the front. That way you cut the arteries and major veins at the same time you get the guy through the windpipe so he can’t yell for help before he bleeds to death. It didn’t happen as often as you might have expected in a camp as tough as O Caldeirão. The heat and the overwhelming humidity were good peace-keepers. Even when a fight started it was an even bet that it would run out of energy before anybody got hurt enough to count.

Anther thing that helped to keep trouble to a minimum among the lags was their once-a-week marital privileges. Their “wives” were
cabocla
women who came into the camp every Sunday afternoon to do the prisoners’ laundry and take care of their other needs for a few extra
cruzeiros.
Anybody with the money to pay for the merchandise could buy a weekly wife, cigarettes,
cachaça
,
special food, whatever he wanted that was available in Belterra. The problem was whom to trust with your cash to take into Belterra to spend for you, and how to get up the cash to give him in the first place.

I asked an old-timer around camp about these things. He was a
colombiano
in for murder, and he spoke Spanish. About twenty-five percent of the lags were Spanish-speakers, so I had no trouble communicating while I was learning jailhouse Portuguese.

He said, “Don’t worry about the first part, friend. We’ve got a tame guard who does the shopping for us. He gets a cut but he knows he’ll get another kind of cut if he pulls any
portuárias
with the money. It keeps him reasonably honest.”

I said, “Where and how would I get some money to give him?”

“Where and how did you get it when you were Outside?”

I told him. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t try that kind of thing here. Too dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t try it anywhere I couldn’t run faster and farther than the guy coming after me,” I said. “What else is there to do—gainfully, and without too much physical effort?”

As it turned out, there were a number of small money-making industries around camp. Six days a week we were worked pretty much from sunup to sundown; chopping at the jungle, planting new trees, taking out old trees, bringing in the latex in buckets slung from both ends of a carrying pole, loosening the duff that was allowed to collect around the trees to hold water at their roots (and breed big fat mosquitoes), other chores. They kept us busy enough. But we got a one-hour break in the middle of the day for
o matabicho,
the midday meal—the word means ‘bug-killer’—and a lot of the lags used some of this time as well as some of their Sunday time (to the extent it was not taken up by mass, confession, gambling or weekend wives) to make things; baskets, palm-fiber mats, string hammocks, carved and decorated gourds, carved wood, small carpentries,
cabocla
dolls, other handicrafts. Another tame guard took them into Santarem and sold them for a cut.

Other prisoners worked as house-servants for the camp governor and guards; no pay, but many opportunities for negotiable loot from the kitchen and pantry. Others hired themselves out as
maric
õ
es,
although homosexuality in the camp was minimal because of the availability of the
caboclas.
Still others had other ways of making money.