Eva, moving like Time, went down to them.
Finally, Orlando was sitting on Tito and giving him pink-belly, pounding Tito’s belly hard repeatedly with his fists. Tito was laughing so hard his stomach muscles were fully flexed and no harm was being done.
Standing over them, behind Orlando, Eva laced her fingers across Orlando’s forehead and pulled him backward, and down.
Kneeling over Tito as he was, sitting on him, bent backward now so that his own back was on the ground, or on Tito’s legs, Orlando looked up Eva’s thighs. He rolled his eyes.
He jumped up and grabbed Eva by the hand.
Together Orlando and Eva ran down the grassy slope from the swimming pool and disappeared.
“You see?” Toninho said. “Uncomplicated.”
After resting a moment on the ground, breathing hard, Tito rolled over and over and on into the pool of water.
“Your Moby Dick” Toninho said abruptly. “By Herman Melville?”
Fletch looked at Toninho, wondering what new surpise was coming. “Yes,” Fletch said. “I read it while waiting for a bus.”
“‘Call me Ishmael,’” Toninho quoted.
“Not a bad beginning,” Fletch said. “Simple.”
“Is it?” Toninho finished his cachaça. At the long side of the pool, Norival was finishing his fourth. “Is that Ishmael meant to be some spirit of the United States? Some guardian?”
“Almost anything can be said,” Fletch said. “And has been.”
“In a way, Ismael is the guiding spirit of Brazil.”
Fletch said nothing. Necrophilia, slant-six car engines, the nature of arigó, robotics, capoeira, now a discussion regarding American literature.
“I’m quite certain Melville stopped in Brazil on his voyages. Have you even thought of that interpretation of Moby Dick?”
“Melville meant Brazil is the guiding spirit of the United States?”
“Maybe of the hemisphere.”
“Toninho …” Tito’s forearms were flat on the edge of the swimming pool, holding his head up. Water streamed down his face from his hair. His right ear was red from Orlando’s kick. “I think we should do Norival a favor.”
Toninho looked over at Norival stretched out in the sunlight. Norival bubble-belched. “Yes.”
Toninho stood up.
Together Toninho and Tito tipped the slow-reacting Norival out of the long chair.
Fletch went to watch what new trick they would play.
Each taking an arm, they dragged Norival, belly down, to the bushes. The towel dragged off him in the dirt. Then, methodically, standing behind him, Toninho and Tito each picked up one of Norival’s feet. They raised him so that his shins were on their shoulders.
Not all that gently, somewhat from the sides, they kicked Norival’s soft, upside-down belly with the insteps of their feet, once, twice, some more.
“Arigó” Toninho said, kicking Norival’s upside-down stomach.
“Empty out the sack,” Tito said. “Very practical.”
It didn’t take too many kicks for Norival to begin vomiting his four cachaças, his numerous chopinhos, whatever was still in him from the night before.
Once he began vomiting, they dropped his legs on the ground.
Tito grinned at Fletch. “Very efficient, yes?”
“It seems to be working.”
The other side of the swimming pool, Orlando and Eva were climbing back up the slope.
“Ah,” Toninho said, watching them. “Five minutes is a long time in the life of such a mulata.”
Norival now was on his hands and knees, emptying himself into the bushes.
Bleary, drooling vomit, he looked up at them.
“Obrigado.” In Portuguese, he said to them, “Thanks, guys.”
Thirteen
After lunch, it rained.
The five young men sat in their muddy towels at a round table on the back porch of the old plantation house playing poker.
The humidity was complete, and even in the rain Fletch and Orlando and Tito had been in and out of the pool between hands. They would be either wet with sweat or wet with water, and the rain water, the pool water, seemed cooler. The only reason they sat under the roof to play was to keep the cards reasonably dry. Near them, their shorts were still piled on a small table, but the pile was messed up, as Norival had gone to his shorts and swallowed two pills from its pockets. They drank beer. There were many crushed cans near Norival’s feet.
From under the porch roof, as he played, Fletch watched the rain fall on the pool and make mud puddles in the dead garden. He watched the flower-kissing birds sustain themselves with wings which beat so fast they were almost invisible, like auras on either side of their bodies, as they sucked sugar water from small vessels in the rafters.
Kick-dancing and flower-kissing birds.
After two or three hours of poker playing, it was clear who the winner was. Norival was careless, concerned more with his next chope than the cards. He seemed keyed-up anyway—for someone who had had so much to drink, even though properly evacuated before lunch. Fletch yawned. Tito, Orlando, and Toninho played cards in a way odd to Fletch. They did not seem to see the cards as they were, but as something else, something more. Always they believed in the next card too much. They believed in what the cards might be instead of what they were.
Fletch was collecting all the chips.
At one point, Toninho said, “of course you cannot understand Brazil, Fletch. Three of us—all but Norival—have been to school in the United States. We cannot say we understand the United States, either. Everyone there is so anxious.”
“Very nervous,” Orlando said.
“Worried,” Tito said. “Do I drink too much, smoke too much, make love too much, too little? Is my hair all right? Might someone see that my ankles are fat?”
“Does everyone like me?” Orlando guffawed.
“I’m so pretty!” Toninho said in falsetto. “Don’t touch me!”
Fletch strummed the table with his fingers. “Bum, bum, paticum bum, prugurundum.”
The noise of the rain pounding on the tin roof increased.
Eva came through the back door and stood, watching them.
She stood behind Norival and watched his last chips disappear in careless play.
She took his feverish head in her hands and turned it sideways, and leaned his cheek against her bare stomach. “Ah, Norival,” she said in Portuguese. “You are getting drunk again.”
“Arigó,” Toninho said, clearly hoping for a picture card and playing as if he had one.
Eva rotated Norival’s head so that he was slipping off the chair. The front of his face was against her stomach. He breathed deeply a few times through his nose.
In a moment, Eva led Norival indoors.
Tito, Orlando, Fletch, and Toninho played silently.
Occasionally, concentrating, Toninho’s lips would move as if he were talking, but no sound came out.
When Orlando won anything, no matter how much he had lost, his face would break into a marvelous grin. He would be ready to lose more.
At one point, when Fletch was raking in chips again, Tito murmured, “Your peri-spirit is with you.”
“Is he telling you what cards we have?” Toninho asked.
“Doesn’t need to,” Fletch said. “I play with what I see I have against what I see you have.”
From inside there was a short scream.
Toninho chuckled. “I guess Norival has a few surprises in him yet.”