The Last Match Page 14

  I didn’t have to whittle my own dugout. Although there were no ships on the river and none scheduled, there were a few riverboats. Jaulas, they were called collectively; birdcages. So named because they were built with an open-work superstructure to allow the river-breeze to flow freely through them while they were in motion. They carried freight and a few passengers. Most of the passengers slept in hammocks slung inside the birdcage so they would get the breeze but were protected from sudden rainsqualls.

  The jaula I took passage on, a seventy-year-old woodburner with Parkinson’s disease, had a few cabins as well; four in all, each just big enough to hold two cramped bunks, a chair and a small table. I paid extra to have a cabin to myself because its single porthole was screened against mosquitoes, also because the captain said I could put a padlock on the door to protect the supplies I shipped for my own consumption. I had been tipped off that the only drinkable on the boat was filtered river-water, and that meals consisted exclusively of beans, dried fish, fried bananas and manioc-flour tortillas. I took steps to cure the situation on my own behalf, including the installation of the padlock, before the jaula pushed off. The padlock is important in view of what came later, or I wouldn’t make a point of it.

  The trip wasn’t at all as bad as I expected it to be. Most of the jaulas passengers seemed to be Peruvians or Brazilians on legitimate business. All in all, captain, crew and passengers, we numbered about twenty. That’s not counting monkeys, marmosets and parrots, passengers’ pets in cages or tied to a stanchion or roaming free, and a four-foot pet alligator belonging to the sobrecargo; purser, I guess you’d call him. His name, or nickname, was Buchisapo, meaning a fat river frog. That’s what he looked like in a genial way. The captain was a quiet, pleasant man who didn’t talk much. The práctico or mate was a young fellow who handled the helm most of the way and had little time for anything else but sleeping and eating.

  The engineer we saw hardly at all. His engines were so decrepit he had to stay with them night and day giving them transfusions. The jaula had no radio, no refrigeration, no running water other than what was available in two washbowls, two showers and two toilets on the after deck; port for ladies, starboard for gents. The water for these came out of the river, when the pumps were working. We drank the same water after it had been passed through a filter to remove the mud, or boiled up as black coffee to go with the delicious beans, dried fish and the rest.

  I of course did better than the other passengers in this respect, with a case of canned goods and two cases of beer in my cabin. Even warm beer is better than warm river water, with or without mud. I figured the supply would carry me as far as Belém. What I didn’t figure on was Buchisapo and a fellow passenger who went by the name of Magro. It means ‘slim’ or ‘skinny,’ in Portuguese. Magro was a large, round, good-natured Brazilian, very dark-skinned; not fat but formidably large. His hands looked like fielders’ mitts. How he managed to place his great black fingers on the frets of a guitar I never could make out, but he was a fine guitarist. He had a high, clear tenor voice that was a pleasure to listen to, and a large repertory of ballads in Spanish and Portuguese. He and I and Buchisapo discovered a mutual interest and a fair capability for singing barbershop. Neither Buchisapo nor I had anything like Magro’s repertoire of songs, but his fine tenor was so clear and his enunciation so good that we could pick up the words just by listening to him sing a piece solo a few times. The chords fell into place by themselves. We had a lot of fun with Noche de Ronda, Mono a Mano, Amor de Mis Amores, La Llorona, Uma

  Casa Portuguesa, Coimbra, others, and we gave a small pleasure to the rest of the passengers, who used to gather on the foredeck in the evenings to listen to us sing. There was nothing much else to do after dark. The jaula did have an electrical system, but the generator was no better than the rest of the machinery and rarely worked. You couldn’t have read much even if there had been anything aboard to read.

  The forward deck was the most comfortable place to be when the jaula was under way, because of the river-breeze that blew away the mosquitoes and other bloodsuckers that sneaked aboard as stowaways every time we tied up to the riverbank to load firewood. That was usually at least once a day. Everybody who could manage it stayed up forward, except when a rainsquall chased them under cover, with the exception of an odd, withdrawn, non-communicative couple who had one of the other cabins. They kept pretty much to themselves, a difficult thing to do on a boat designed for overall togetherness extending to monkeys, marmosets, parrots and a four-foot alligator.

  He—the man, not the alligator—looked like a wrongo. I do not mean to assert that you can tell a wrongo by his looks, because a lot of wrongos look like investment bankers and a lot of people who look like wrongos are not. But this guy had the—aura, I guess you’d say. He was a little better than medium size, well built, about forty maybe, with a hard tight mouth that never smiled or relaxed and as cold a pair of gray-blue eyes as I have ever looked into. He smoked cheap native cigarettes a lot, and the way he smoked was wrong, it seemed to me. He’d hold the cigarette by the butt between his thumb and forefinger so that it stood up like a stick of incense in a holder, and he’d look at it with those freezing fish eyes, staring at the glowing coal as the ash and smoke were whipped off by the river-breeze, more than he’d puff on it. Just letting it burn away while he watched it. It was as if—I don’t know what it was as if. After what came later, it’s hard to separate what I observed from what I imagine I observed. But he gave me the creeps, and not only because of the cigarette trick. He was a creepy character.

  His woman, according to my first impression, was about his age although she moved like someone older. As if she had rheumatism or arthritis or a bad back. (In time I learned that she was in her early twenties.) She tended to sit down carefully, too, as if she creaked. She was American, from her accent the few times I heard her speak. He spoke English, when he spoke at all, with a Germanic accent; Spanish the same way. During the first days of the voyage the only time anyone saw them at all was at meals, which were served at a big wooden table bolted to the after-deck under an awning, or when they went aft to use a toilet or washbowl. They never said Hello, Good Morning, or The hell with you. Just pass the beans, or pass the tortillas. Not even por favor or gracias. They ate, patronized the excusados and washbowls, disappeared into their cabin.

  Because I was the only other person aboard the jaula who spoke English, I tried to engage them in conversation a couple of times. The guy left me cold, but I felt sorry for the woman. She was such a drab, dispirited beaten-down thing, obviously afraid of and dominated by her man. I couldn’t get any further with her than I could with him. She wasn’t having any, at least while he was around, and he was always around. So I gave up. It must have been pretty rough on them, spending all their time in that cramped little hotbox of a cabin while the rest of us were out on deck in the breeze, but it was their choice. Nothing to do about it.

  After the sing-fests, which made us thirsty, Magro, Buchisapo and I used to squeeze into my cabin to drink beer. Not because we liked it there but because it was the only thing to do out of consideration for the other passengers. I didn’t have enough beer for the whole boatload. As a matter of fact with two cases I could only keep the three of us lubricated for about a week before we ran dry.

  There is no beer to be found in obscure little hamlets along the middle reaches of the Amazon, but there’s often a store where you can buy demijohns of a ferocious high-test spirit called cachaça. It’s distilled from sugarcane mixed with old rubber tires, and it tastes like gasoline. In the same store, however, you can frequently buy another drink, guaraná, that is probably the best soft drink in the world. Actually it’s a kind of low-proof ferment, one or two percent at most, brewed from a native Brazilian berry that grows along the river. It has a refreshing sour-sweet taste, not too much of one or the other, and a slight head that fizzes into life when you uncork the jug, like a good Portuguese vinho verde. Both of these drinks, one terrible and
strong, the other very good but weak, are cheap, and when mixed together the good taste of one hides the bad taste of the other without diminishing its firepower. Since I still had money I loaded up with enough cachaça and guaraná to keep not only the trio in good voice for the rest of the trip but the rest of the passenger list tuned up, too. We all got enjoyably varnished on the guaraná-cachaça combination every night. All of us, that is, but the oddball couple, who stuck to their hotbox of a cabin while the rest of us were making a cruise out of it.

  Then—surprise! One night the wrongo and his woman were there, listening to the evening concert. I can’t say they joined our appreciative audience. They sat by themselves, away from the others, and they didn’t applaud when the others did. But they were there. On an impulse during a moment when the generator was working and I could see to move around, I filled a couple of glasses with cachaça-guaraná and took them over to where they were sitting.

  “Have one on the house,” I said.

  She looked up quickly, looked down again just as quickly, shook her head. No words. He said to her, “Take it.”

  She took the glass obediently. As an afterthought, as if she was remembering words long forgotten, she said, “Thank you.” He said nothing at all when he took his glass, nor as much as nodded to show his heartfelt gratitude for the gesture. But he knocked the whole big glass back in about three swallows and had exchanged his empty for her full glass, still untouched, before the generator pooped out and the lights blinked off. I saw that much, and his face briefly afterward in the flare of a match as he lit one of those incense-stick cigarettes. It was the last look I ever had of him. Alive, that is. Dead, he was a lot prettier.

  “Yes, I think so.” “What was his name?”

  “He didn’t use his right name. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Mary Smith.”

  “Are you North American?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  It was that kind of question-and-answer; pointless. She was passively cooperative. She’d give some kind of an answer to each question, but there was no information in it. Neither one of them had any papers, any money to amount to anything, any ascertainable identity or much in the way of personal possessions. She had murdered the guy because she hated him, and that was the end of it. She didn’t give a damn what came next. I mean she really didn’t give a damn.

  The captain was essentially a gentleman. After the pointless hearing, which got nobody anyplace, he said, “I regret it, señora, but I must turn you over to the authorities. I have no choice. However, if you will permit me to confine you to your cabin, I will wait until we reach Santarem before doing so. You will receive better treatment and—accommodation—there than elsewhere. Are you agreeable?”

  She shrugged. She still didn’t give a damn one way or another.

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe I should have warned him about cachaça’s high octane content. I don’t suppose he’d ever had any experience with it before, or with the smooth decep-tiveness of guaraná as a mixer. I can’t say that my conscience ever bothered me because I didn’t explain that I made the mix real strong so it could be taken slow and stretched out, to preclude the need of anybody stumbling around in the dark for refills. With his drink and his woman’s, which I hadn’t intended for him, he put down in about five minutes the best part of a pint of high-test booze. I didn’t see him go to his cabin, which I assume he somehow managed to reach under his own power or with his woman’s help before passing out. I did see him leave it feet first some time later. They found him face down on his bunk in the morning, a butcher-knife from the galley sticking out from between his shoulder-blades. His woman sat there looking at the body, as expressionless as ever.

  She gave no trouble. “Yes, I killed him,” she said, at a kind of semi-formal hearing around the table under the awning on the after-deck where meals were served. The captain presided, Buchisapo took notes, Magro and I were witnesses to the proceedings. Coroner’s jury, kind of.

  “Why did you kill him?” the captain asked.

  “I hated him.”

  “Was he your husband?”

  My cabin, to return now to the padlock, had the only door on the boat that could be locked from the outside. I gave the cabin up to the woman, along with the jug of throat-lubricator mix and what was left of the groceries. If she wanted any of them, she was welcome to help herself. Then I persuaded the captain to let me talk to her in the cabin. I was, after all, her countryman—probably—and spoke her native language. Maybe I could get something out of her that he hadn’t been able to. I’d like to try, anyway. He said it was all right, giving me the key I had turned over to him (neglecting to mention the existence of a second key in my pants pocket) but warning me not to indulge in any tontería with the process of justice like helping her sneak ashore when we put in to Obidos to unload the body for burial. That had to be done quickly, because of the jungle heat.

  “She has my sympathy, as she has yours,” he said. “I regret that I must do what I must do. But I am responsible for what happens aboard my command, and she does not deny the fact of the murder. I must ask for your word of honor as a gentleman that you will do nothing to help her escape justice.”

  “You have my word of honor,” I said, not bothering to cross my fingers. A confidence man, by definition, has no honor. He is a cheat, a fake and a thief of other people’s worldly goods. I couldn’t give the captain what I didn’t have, but he didn’t know that. He thought I was a gentleman, like himself.

  If I’d had any compunction at all about breaking my word to begin with, I would have lost it after hearing the woman’s story. I got it out of her by getting her drunk. Not as drunk as the wrongo had got before she pushed him off, but drunk enough to talk. It was hot in the little cabin; hot and close and sticky. She was dehydrated and thirsty. She asked me to bring her a pitcher or bottle of water. I said I had something a lot better than river water right there in the cabin, a jug of cool refreshing guaraná, and slipped her a good shot of the mix without telling her there was anything in it besides guaraná. Two or three of those and she began to come unraveled. She hadn’t had anybody to talk to for a long time. After a while, little by little, she let her hair down.

  It took quite a while, so I’ll condense it. Part of it is guesswork, hers or my own, but logical guesswork. She came from California, where she had been recruited as a missionary by some crackpot religious order that wanted to convert Peru to its own brand of Christianity. The wrongo had stumbled across her at a forlorn little outpost of a missionary school on the high altiplano near Lake Titicaca. In the years after World War II a lot of Nazi war criminals got away to South America, where they surfaced later as Austrians, Lichtensteiners, Swiss, Sudeten Czechs, anything Germanic that wasn’t German. He was one of them. He claimed to be German-Swiss, although of course he had no papers to prove it. What he wanted was to acquire American citizenship, which he figured he could safely hide behind for the rest of his life. Somehow he heard about a law just passed in the U.S.—this was early in ‘59—that made it quite easy for the alien spouses of American missionaries stationed abroad to obtain citizenship. He had persuaded the girl to marry him, but he couldn’t persuade her to go back to the States with him, as she had to do if he was to get his papers. She had a vocation to bring the Lord’s word to the altiplano, and she meant to follow it come what may. She was a real dedicated Christian, just as he was a real dedicated son of a bitch.

  To force her hand, he had burned the mission one night. It wasn’t much of a building, but it had a schoolroom, a little chapel, living quarters of a kind for the missionary and, in this case, the missionary’s husband. She had been letting some of her pupils, illiterate Indian kids, many of them homeless, use the schoolroom as a place to sleep—uno
fficially. It had no beds or anything, but it was a lot better dormitory for the kids than out there on the altiplano at twelve or thirteen thousand feet. The kids didn’t get out of the place when it burned. She was convinced, and I agreed with her conviction, that the wrongo had deliberately trapped them inside. I never saw a bunch of active kids that wouldn’t boil out of a burning building like water coming through a sieve unless they were restrained from it somehow. He wanted to destroy her in Peru. He destroyed more than he had figured on. She escaped the fire, because he saw to that. But everything that was her life went up in the flames; her papers, money, personal possessions, accomplishments, hopes, her reason for being, everything. When she tried to get the kids out, he prevented her. To keep her from sacrificing herself uselessly, he said later. He held her while she listened to the noises that came out of the schoolroom as the kids burned.

  The mission had never been more than grudgingly tolerated by the Peruvian church and authorities, all strongly Catholic. The fire finished it as it finished her. The wrongo persuaded her that the only way she could escape prison for arson, murder and several other charges was to break and run with him. Stunned, unthinking, numbed by the horror of the tragedy, she had done it. They had got away and out of the country, as I had, by its Amazonian back door.

  “I shouldn’t have gone with him,” she said dully, dopey with the sticky heat of the cabin and the booze I had poured into her. “I should have stayed and faced whatever I had to face. But I couldn’t seem to think straight, those first few days. I thought God had punished me for something I had done or failed to do. Then, when I began to think, I knew it was not the Lord’s work but the devil’s. No merciful God would have permitted those children to burn. The devil himself had burned them.”

  She was sitting on my bunk, her face shiny with sweat. I was sweating heavily myself, only partly from the heat. Her eyes closed and her head drooped.