'Rotted,' said Tetelman, as though the word explained the atrocity they had just witnessed. He had a crucifix in his hand, large and crudely carved. It looked like Indian handiwork, Locke thought. The Messiah impaled on the tree was sloe-eyed and indecently naked. He smiled, despite nail and thorn.
Dancy touched Cherrick's body, letting the blood come with his touch, and turned the man over, then leaned in towards Cherrick's jittering face. The dying man's lips were moving, oh so slightly.
'What are you saying?' Dancy asked; he leaned closer still to catch the man's words. Cherrick's mouth trailed bloody spittle, but no sound came.
Locke stepped in, pushing Dancy aside. Flies were already flitting around Cherrick's face. Locke thrust his bull-necked head into Cherrick's view. 'You hear me?' he said.
The body grunted.
'You know me?'
Again, a grunt.
'You want to give me your share of the land?'
The grunt was lighter this time; almost a sigh.
There's witnesses here,' Locke said. 'Just say yes. They'll hear you. Just say yes.'
The body was trying its best. It opened its mourh a little wider.
'Dancy -' said Locke. 'You hear what he said?'
Dancy could not disguise his horror at Locke's insistence, but he nodded.
'You're a witness.'
'If you must,' said the Englishman.
Deep in his body Cherrick felt the fish-bone he'd first choked on in the village twist itself about one final time, and extinguish him.
'Did he say yes, Dancy?' Tetelman asked.
Dancy felt the physical proximity of the brute kneeling beside him. He didn't know what the dead man had said, but what did it matter? Locke would have the land anyway, wouldn't he?
'He said yes.'
Locke stood up, and went in search of a fresh cup of coffee.
Without thinking, Dancy put his fingers on Cherrick's lids to seal his empty gaze. Under that lightest of touches the lids broke open and blood tainted the tears that had swelled where Cherrick's sight had been.
They had buried him towards evening. The corpse, though it had lain through the noon-heat in the coolest part of the store, amongst the dried goods, had begun to putrefy by the time it was sewn up in canvas for the burial. The night following, Stumpf had come to Locke and offered him the last third of the territory to add to Cherrick's share, and Locke, ever the realist, had accepted. The terms, which were punitive, had been worked out the next day. In the evening of that day, as Stumpf had hoped, the supply plane came in. Locke, bored with Tetelman's contemptuous looks, had also elected to fly back to Santarem, there to drink the jungle out of his system for a few days, and return refreshed. He intended to buy up fresh supplies, and, if possible, hire a reliable driver and gunman.
The flight was noisy, cramped and tedious; the two men exchanged no words for its full duration. Stumpf just kept his eyes on the tracts of unfelled wilderness they passed over, though from one hour to the next the scene scarcely changed. A panorama of sable green, broken on occasion by a glint of water; perhaps a column of blue smoke rising here and there, where land was being cleared; little else.
At Santarem they parted with a single handshake which left every nerve in Stumpf s hand scourged, and an open cut in the tender flesh between index finger and thumb. Santarem wasn't Rio, Locke mused as he made his way down to a bar at the south end of the town, run by a veteran of Vietnam who had a taste for ad hoc animal shows. It was one of Locke's few certain pleasures, and one he never tired of, to watch a local woman, face dead as a cold manioc cake, submit to a dog or a donkey fora few grubby dollar bills. The women of Santarem were, on the whole, as unpalatable as the beer, but Locke had no eye for beauty in the opposite sex: it mattered only that their bodies be in reasonable working order, and not diseased. He found the bar, and settled down for an evening exchanging dirt with the American. When he tired of that - some time after midnight - he bought a bottle of whisky and went out looking for a face to press his heat upon.
The woman with the squint was about to accede to a particular peccadillo of Locke's - one which she had resolutely refused until drunkenness persuaded ner to abandon what little hope of dignity she had - when there came a rap on the door.
'Fuck,' said Locke.
'Si,' said the woman. 'Fook. Fook.' It seemed to be the only word she knew in anything resembling English. Locke ignored her and crawled drunkenly to the edge of the stained mattress. Again, the rap on the door.
'Who is it?' he said.
'Senhor Locke?' The voice from the hallway was that of a young boy.
'Yes?' said Locke. His trousers had become lost in the tangle of sheets. 'Yes? What do you want?'
'Mensagem,' the boy said. 'Urgente. Urgente.'
'For me?' He had found his trousers, and was pulling them on. The woman, not at all disgruntled by this desertion, watched him from the head of the bed, toying with an empty bottle. Buttoning up, Locke crossed from bed to door, a matter of three steps. He unlocked it. The boy in the darkened hallway was of Indian extraction to judge by the blackness of his eyes, and that peculiar lustre his skin owned. He was dressed in a T-shirt bearing the Coca-Cola motif.
'Mensagem, Senhor Locke,' he said again, '... do hospital.'
The boy was staring past Locke at the woman on the bed. He grinned from ear to ear at her cavortings.
'Hospital?' said Locke.
''Sim. Hospital "Sacrado Coraqa de Maria".'
It could only be Stumpf, Locke thought. Who else did he know in this corner of Hell who'd call upon him? Nobody. He looked down at the leering child.
'Vem comigo,' the boy said, 'vem comigo. Urgente.'
'No,' said Locke. 'I'm not coming. Not now. You understand? Later. Later.'
The boy shrugged. '... Ta morrendo,' he said.
'Dying?' said Locke.
'Sim. Ta morrendo.'
'Well, let him. Understand me? You go back, and tell him, I won't come until I'm ready.'
Again, the boy shrugged. 'E meu dinheiro? he said, as Locke went to close the door.
'You go to Hell,' Locke replied, and slammed it in the child's face.
When, two hours and one ungainly act of passionless sex later, Locke unlocked the door, he discovered that the child, by way of revenge, had defecated on the threshold.
The hospital 'Sacrado Coraqa de Maria' was no place to fall ill; better, thought Locke, as he made his way down the dingy corridors, to die in your own bed with your own sweat for company than come here. The stench of disinfectant could not entirely mask the odour of human pain. The walls were ingrained with it; it formed a grease on the lamps, it slickened the unwashed floors. What had happened to Stumpf to bring him here? a bar-room brawl, an argument with a pimp about the price of a woman? The German was just damn fool enough to get himself stuck in the gut over something so petty. 'Senhor Stumpf?' he asked of a woman in white he accosted in the corridor. 'I'm looking for Senhor Stumpf.'
The woman shook her head, and pointed towards a harried-looking man further down the corridor, who was taking a moment to light a small cigar. He let go the nurse's arm and approached the fellow. He was enveloped in a stinking cloud of smoke.
'I'm looking for Senhor Stumpf,' he said.
The man peered at him quizzically.
'You are Locke?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'Ah.' He drew on the cigar. The pungency of the expelled smoke would surely have brought on a relapse in the hardiest patient. Tm Doctor Edson Costa,' the man said, offering his clammy hand to Locke. 'Your friend has been waiting for you to come all night.'
'What's wrong with him?'
'He's hurt his eye,' Edson Costa replied, clearly indifferent to Stumpf s condition. 'And he has some minor abrasions on his hands and face. But he won't have anyone go near him. He doctored himself.'
'Why?' Locke asked.
The doctor looked flummoxed. 'He pays to go in a clean room. Pays plenty. So I put him in. You want to see him? Maybe take him away?'