Dirty brown water squirts between dock slats. Some of the crew are white, some tan, some red-brown. Some are painted and pierced. All lug wet crates across a plank that dramatically dips with the weight. Strickland follows and reaches a hull stenciled Josefina. Small portholes suggest the most perfunctory of lower decks, just big enough for a captain. The very word captain rankles him. Hoyt’s the only captain here, and Strickland is Hoyt’s proxy. He’s in no mood for fatuous ship-steerers who think they’re in charge.
He finds the captain, a bespectacled Mexican with a white beard, white shirt, white pants, and white straw hat signing manifests with excessive flourishes. He shouts “Mr. Strickland!” and Strickland feels like he’s been transported inside one of his son’s Looney Tunes: Meester Streekland! He’d committed the captain’s name to memory somewhere above Haiti: Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez. It fits, starting off well enough before ballooning into pomposity.
“Look! Escoces and puros cubanos, my friend, all for you.” Henríquez hands over a cigar, fires up one of his own, and pours two glasses. Strickland was trained not to drink on the job but permits Henríquez his toast. “¡To la aventura magnífico!” They drink, and Strickland admits to himself that it feels good. Anything to ignore, just for a while, the looming shadow of General Hoyt, what it might mean for Strickland’s future if he fails to properly “motivate” Henríquez. For the duration of the scotch, the heat of his innards equalizes with that of the jungle.
Henríquez is a man who has spent too much time blowing smoke rings: They are perfect.
“Smoke, drink, enjoy! It is all you will know of luxury for much time. It is good you came no later, Mr. Strickland. Josefina is impatient to depart. Like Amazonia, it waits for no man.” Strickland doesn’t like the implication. He sets down his glass and stares. Henríquez laughs, claps his hands. “Quite right. Men like us, pioneers of the Sertão, it is not necessary we express excitement. Los brasileños honor us with a word: sertanista. It has a fine sound, sí? It stirs the blood?”
Henríquez recounts in dull detail his trip to an outpost of the Instituto de Biologia Maritima. He claims that he has handled—with his own dos manos!—limestone fossils said to resemble descriptions of Deus Brânquia. Scientists date the fossils to the Devonian Period, which, did you know, Meester Streekland, is part of the Paleozoic Era? This, Henríquez intones, is what attracts men like them to Amazonia. Where primitive life yet thrives. Where man might page back the calendar and touch the untouchable.
Strickland holds his question for an hour. “Did you get the charter?”
Henríquez stubs his cigar and frowns out the porthole. There he finds something to grin about and gestures imperiously.
“You see the face tattoos? The nose dowels? These are not Indians like your Tonto. These are índios bravos. Every kilometer of the Amazon, from Negro-Branco to Xingu, they know in their blood. From four different tribes they come. And I have secured them as guides! It is impossible, Mr. Strickland, for our expedition to become lost.”
Strickland repeats: “Did you get the charter?”
Henríquez fans himself with his hat. “Your Americans mailed me mimeographs. Very well. Our expedição científica will follow their wiggly lines for as long as we can. Then, Mr. Strickland, we move on foot! We locate the vestigios, the remains of original tribes. These people have suffered from industry more than you can imagine. The jungle swallows their screams. We, however, will come in peace. We will offer gifts. If Deus Brânquia exists, they will be the ones to tell us where to find it.”
In General Hoyt’s parlance, the captain is motivated. Strickland gives him that. But there are warning signs, too. If Strickland knows anything about untamed territory, it is that it stains you, inside and out. You do not wear white clothing unless you do not know what the hell you are doing.
4
ELISA AVOIDS THE western wall of her bedroom until the last moment, so that the sight might strike with inspiration. It isn’t a big room, so it is not a big wall: eight feet by eight feet, and every inch covered in shoes bought over the years in budget or secondhand stores. Featherlite spectator pumps in cherry and spice. Two-tone Customcraft with toes like garden spades. Champagne satin peep-toe heels, like a pile of fallen wedding chiffon. Three-inch Town & Countrys, brilliant red: wearing them looks like your feet are softly layered with rose petals. Relegated to the margins are the dirtied strapless mules, sling-back sandals, plastic penny loafers, and ugly nubucks of nostalgic value only.
Each shoe hangs upon a tiny nail that she, common renter, had no right to insert. Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the only insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night. Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.
She sits on the bed to put them on. It is like a knight shoving his hands into a pair of steel gauntlets. As she wiggles the toe for fit, she lets her eyes stray across the slag heap of old LPs. Most of them were bought used years ago, and nearly all carry memories of joy pressed, right along with the music, into the polymer plastic.
The Voice of Frank Sinatra: the morning she helped a school crossing guard free downy brown chicks from under a sewage grate. Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump: the day she saw a clobbered baseball, rare as a red-footed falcon, pop out of Memorial Stadium and ricochet off a fire hydrant. Bing Crosby’s Stardust: the afternoon she and Giles saw Stanwyck and MacMurray in Remember the Night at the theater below, and Elisa lay on her bed the rest of the day, dropping the needle on Bing and wondering if she, like Stanwyck’s good-hearted thief, was serving a sentence in this harsh life, and if anyone, like MacMurray, would be waiting for her the day she was freed.
Enough: It’s pointless. No one’s waiting for her and no one ever has, least of all the punch clock at work. She puts on her coat, grabs the plate of eggs. The curious smell of cocoa is undeniable as she exits into a short hallway cluttered with dusty film cans holding who knows what celluloid treasures. To the right, the sole other apartment. She knuckles it twice before entering.
5
WITHIN THE HOUR, they depart. Delight, say the guides, is the dry season; it is called verão. Tragedy is the wet season; no one will even tell Strickland what it’s called. The legacy of the previous wet season are furos, flooded shortcuts across the river’s bends, and Josefina takes them while she can. These oxbow switchbacks transform the Amazon into an animal. It dashes. It hides. It pounces. Henríquez hoots with joy and throttles the engine, and the green, peaty jungle fills with toxic black smoke. Strickland grips the rail, gazes into the water. It is milk-chocolate brown with marshmallow froth. Fifteen-foot elephant grass bristles along the banks like the back of a colossal, wakening bear.
Henríquez likes to hand the controls to the first mate so he can take notes in his logbook. He boasts that he writes for publication and fame. Everyone will know the name of the great explorer Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez. He caresses the logbook’s leather, likely dreaming of an author photo of appropriate smugness. Strickland smothers his hate, disgust, and fear. All three get in the way. All three give you away. Hoyt taught him that in Korea. Just do your job. The most advantageous feeling is to feel nothing at all.