The Last Match Read online

  “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.

  Chapter Ten

  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 maricões, although homosexuality in the camp was minimal because of the availability of the caboclas. Still others had other ways of making money.

  There was very little thievery or double-dealing among the crooks in camp. This was true for the same reason the tame guards refrained from porquerías with the funds entrusted to them. O Caldeirão offered nowhere to run, no place to hide from justice. If you cheated the man who habitually swun
g a three-foot machete at your side from day to day, and he found out about it, he just might come after you with a pigsticker on his own time.

  I saw that happen too, once. I think the guy must have crossed up a lot of his pals, because his execution had an air of community effort. Like a quilting bee, or a roof-raising. One minute he was working along with the rest of us, the next his head was bouncing at his feet. It was a real well-honed machete. The body kind of teetered there for a moment, half bent over in the position in which it had been working, jets of blood pumping out of the severed arteries of the neck, before it toppled.

  No guard was around to see it when it happened. Four men took the body, still spouting, by its arms and legs and ran it off into the jungle. Another, the man who had done the chopping, followed along carrying the head by an ear. (None of us had any hair to amount to anything. They treated us to the old billiard-ball bob regularly once a week, for hygienic reasons.) Other men began methodically scraping up dirt and duff to hide the blood. Ants or anacondas or some other jungle scavenger would have taken care of the remains in a short time, and that was officially the end of it except for a nose missing at the evening count. Nobody got excited about it. He was written off as another would-be escapee who would never make it.

  Unofficially, I made inquiries. Not for the purpose of bringing the miscreants to justice or anything stupid like that, but for my own protection. I figured that if there were rules and regulations in the camp that I didn’t know about, I’d better learn them. I asked what the guy had done to lose his head like that. Tactfully, of course.

  The lag who had swung the chopper, a chocolate-colored man from Para who had learned his swing cutting bananas, said, “Why do you want to know?”

  I said, “I don’t want to make any mistakes by mistake.”

  “You haven’t made any mistake that I’ve heard about.”

  “Would you hear about it if I did?” “Probably.”

  “Will you tell me about it if you do?” “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re afraid of a machetaço, verdade?” “You’re damn right I’m afraid of a machetaço.” “Good.” He nodded. “Stay that way. You’ll be careful not to make mistakes, and we’ll have no trouble with

  you.”

  He had something there. You never saw such an honest bunch of crooks as we were after the chopping. We hardly even liberated each other’s cigarettes except now and then. When I established my own cottage industry, a standing blackjack game, it was strictly on the up and up. All I had working for me was the house percentage, small but useful.

  I had to sell Magro’s guitar to get the money for cards and to start a bank, but it was no loss. The lag who bought it was a much better player than I could ever hope to be. It was a real pleasure to listen to him. Another pleasure, for me, was the same lag’s habit of standing on a short count, twelve or thirteen or fourteen, hoping the dealer would go bust. Sometimes I did, of course, but more often not. On the whole, the inhabitants of O Caldeirarão were not good blackjack players. They had hunches, they believed in lucky days and unlucky days, they thought that if you cursed loudly enough and filthily enough at bad cards they would come to heel. Blackjack was a very popular game at O Caldeirão after I had introduced it and explained the rules as it was played in the U.S. Army (although in the U.S. Army I would have had a fat chance of keeping the deal permanently in my own hands). Until I joined the prison population the principal amusements had been a weird kind of poker with a stripped deck, and Sunday afternoon cabocla screwing with stripped caboclas.

  The house limit, which I had to impose both because of the anemia of the bank with which I started and to restrain the doublers and re-doublers of losing bets, was twenty cruzeiros. It kept the game toned down so that it remained a game instead of turning into a blood, guts and feathers operation that could have resulted in bruised feelings. Once, only, I had real trouble.

  There was a guy in camp, an ugly plug from Santos, another murderer, on whom sweet reasonableness was wasted. He didn’t get along with anybody very well, but with me he didn’t get along twice as well. He was a lousy loser. A lousy winner, too, as far as that goes, but worse when he was in a bad streak. Three or four bad hands in a row, not uncommon in any game against a bank, would drive him into a black fury. Another on top of the three or four and he’d curse, crumple the cards, accuse me of cheating, raise hell generally. I ran an honest game, as everyone in camp knew, so irresponsible accusations didn’t bother me. What did bother me was the way he balled up my cards. Sometimes I could straighten them out well enough to play again, sometimes not. When I couldn’t, the deck was ruined and the game closed down until I could get the tame guard to buy me a new deck. Both the interruption and the expenditure cut into profits. But I didn’t want any more trouble with him than I wanted with anyone else, so I put up with him, his cursing and his card-crumpling until the afternoon when, after a run of hard luck, he tore his cards in half.

  The game stopped of its own accord, in the middle of a deal. The other players sat there looking at me, waiting.

  I said, “All right, you ugly mistake of a diseased whore, that does it. You’re going to buy me a new deck, and you’re out of the game for good. Beat it.”

  “Do you say so?” He reached inside his shirt and took out a pig-sticker about ten inches long, baring his dirty teeth like a dog. “Say it again. I don’t hear so good.”

  Nobody moved. We were seated, five or six of us, around the crate we used as a card table. It wasn’t a very big crate, and I had my back to the wall of the cookhouse. I always sat that way so no one could stand behind me and maybe see the corner of my down card when I lifted it for a peek, enough for a signal to a buddy. The way this one held his pig-sticker, its point was only about a foot from my eyeballs. With my back, as they say, against the wall.

  Cut bamboo, mature bamboo, holds a point and an edge like a knife. All this thug had to do was jab and I’d lose an eyeball. If nothing worse came of it. Kicking the crate over was out of the question. He was leaning his weight on it ready to lunge if I took up his challenge. I had the deck I’d been dealing from in my left hand. I squeezed the cards until they were well bowed, then let the spring of the bow shoot them in a stream at his face. They didn’t hit as accurately as I had hoped but they startled him, put him off balance long enough for me to scramble out from behind the crate. After that it was only a question of letting him chase me with his pig-sticker long enough for me to find a stick with which to knock the thing out of his hand.

  I beat him up good, with prisoners and guards looking on. He wasn’t difficult to do it to. I was bigger than he was, and knew more about what I was doing. Knife-carriers and gun-carriers, by and large, tend to come apart when deprived of their weapons. They rely on them so much that their loss is crippling. I marked this guy up in part as an object lesson, in part because he’d scared the living hell out of me, in part because I wanted him to know I’d meant what I’d said about his buying me a new deck of cards, in part because I wanted him to be afraid of me instead of my being afraid of him, in part because I plain didn’t like him— all this ex post facto, of course; in afterthought. While I was doing it I was just doing it.

  Equally mechanical were occasional weekend workouts I had with one or the other of the cabocla women. I was young, in good health with normal appetites. They fed us plainly but well; plenty of river fish for protein, pork or beef now and then, manioc flour and rice, quantities of fruits like pineapple, mango, chiri-moya, bananas, melons, oranges, avocados teeming with vitamins; all the Brazil nuts we wanted to crack for ourselves, horrible Brazilian coffee as black and bitter as printer’s ink with lots of unrefined sugar in it to make it taste worse. We were also allowed to brew our own chicha, a fermented drink made—at O Caldeirão; there were other varieties—of pineapple pulp and peelings. It came out of the tub about as strong as beer. By common consent it was saved for Sundays.

  I drank my share, and reacted to it as a m
an does when there are grass-skirted, bare-to-the-waist women who are ready, willing and able. When the itch got too strong, I’d pay a cabocla to scratch it. But they were ugly women, squat, dark and dirty, and many of them had skin infections ranging from fungus to yaws, a disease far too similar to syphilis to play around with. Some had other diseases as well. Every time I took a chance I’d swear to myself it would be the last, fiercely scrubbing myself all over with the jungle root-bulb we used for soap. It always was the last time until the itch got too strong again.

  Skin infections and venereal disease weren’t the only things you had to look out for in our garden spot. So many men had lived, defecated and sometimes died there that the ground was infected; with hookworm, liver flukes, elephantiasis, other worm-borne diseases. After our shoes wore out we worked in chinelos, a kind of loose rubber boot-slipper made by wrapping a square of cloth around your foot, fastening it there with a thorn for a pin, then dipping foot, cloth and all, into liquid latex enough times to give it body and sole while you wiggled your foot to keep it loose. Chinelos didn’t last long, what with the barbs, hooks, spines, thorns and stickers in the muck we worked in and around, but they were easy to make. Their worst drawback was their impermeability. Because they were of rubber and seamless, they didn’t breathe. The result was that our feet sweated heavily. Most of the lags would kick off their chinelos as soon as they got into camp and go around barefoot for the relief it gave them. The least they ever caught were foot fungi that attacked not only their skin but their toenails. A few of us, the smart ones, kept an extra pair of chinelos, holed for ventilation, in camp for what might be called leisure wear. A simple, easy precaution, you’d say? Ninety percent of the lags never bothered with it. Too much trouble. Ninety percent of the lags had something wrong with them before they’d been in O Caldeirão for a year. I came out of it, after serving eighteen months to the day, with nothing worse than a normal quota of mosquito bites, tick-bites, chigger-bites, fly-bites, spider-bites, leech-bites and other nibblings.