The Last Match (21 page)

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 swung 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
macheta
ç
o.”
“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 man 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.

Also on the credit side, I had nearly a hundred and fifty dollars worth of
cruzeiros
that I had saved from my blackjack winnings. This was very close to the amount that had been in the money-belt strapped around Miserable’s skinny waist when she walked off the
jaula.
Looking at it philosophically and from the bright side, my year and a half in camp had repaid me for my unwise investment in her escape. I had also put on about fifteen pounds, after first sweating off almost the same amount. The additional weight was all solid meat, no fat.

In Santarem I took passage on another
jaula
going downstream. I figured a big seaport like Belem would hold promising opportunities as soon as I’d acquired some decent clothes and grown enough hair to hide the fact that I had just matriculated from college. Arriving in Belem, a pretty city with wide streets and avenues shaded by mango trees, I walked, just for the pleasure of a
passeio
of my own choosing, from the docks to the Praça do República in the center of town; a mile or more.

It was late afternoon, the mangos were ripe, many had fallen to smash on the pavement beneath the trees. Bees buzzed happily around the pulp of the fruit. They left me alone, I left them alone. But while I was walking I heard a rattling sound in the branches over my head and looked up in time to see a big mango coming my way. I caught it, my supper, straight from heaven.

It was a good sign, I thought. At least it showed that my reflexes were still quick. I could probably still shift into getaway gear as quickly as ever, although if I couldn’t sell the simple citizenry of Belem a gold brick or two without repercussions I wasn’t half the slicker I thought I was. All in all I was feeling quite euphoric that afternoon when I sat down on a shaded bench in the Praça, kicked my
chinelos
off so I could scratch the bites on my feet and ankles with my toenails, and began to eat my mango. Life was worth living, even in Belem’s heat and humidity.

A mango is a messy meal to cope with manually. That job is best attempted while you are stark naked in a bathtub, because then if the slippery fruit pops out of your grip, as it most often does, no real harm is done either to you or it. In whatever circumstances you take a mango on hand to hand, however, you are going to get the fruit on your face. It’s impossible not to. You have to burrow into it and gnaw the pulp off the pit. I was well burrowed in and gnawing when a pair of attractive female legs passing my bench came to an abrupt stop, in front of me. Dead, as if their owner had run into something impassable.

I went on gnawing. The legs, their shoes and the bottom part of a short white skirt spelled Class loud and clear. They did not belong within the ken of an unshaven scabby bum sitting on a park bench eating a gratis mango. Whatever they stopped for, it wasn’t me. But then a voice I had heard before—although never with the same timid, uncertain, questioning, shocked, incredulous, almost frightened, tone to it— said, whispered rather, “Curly!” and I looked up from my supper into the startled, unbelieving face of Nemesis. The Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones.

“Curly!” she said again, in the same choked incredulous whisper. “Curly!”

My first thought, so help me, was of the warrant she had sworn out for my arrest in France. I guess it’s true that the guilty flee where no man pursueth, or however it goes. Quite spontaneously, without reflection, myself as startled as she was, I said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Reggie. Halfway across the world for a lousy suit of clothes? You’re crazy!”