"Dreaming," Cherrick told himself, but he knew better.
And now, the voice. He was getting his wish; here were the words he had dreamt spoken. Few of them made sense. Cherrick lay like a newborn baby, listening to its parents talk but unable to make any significance of their exchanges. He was ignorant, wasn't he? He tasted the sourness of his stupidity for the first time since childhood. The voice made him fearful of ambiguities he had ridden roughshod over, of whispers his shouting life had rendered inaudible. He fumbled for comprehension, and was not entirely frustrated. The man was speaking of the world, and of exile from the world; of being broken always by what one seeks to possess. Cherrick struggled, wishing he could stop the voice and ask for explanation. But it was already fading, ushered away by the wild address of parrots in the trees, raucous and gaudy voices erupting suddenly on every side. Through the mesh of Cherrick's mosquito net he could see the sky flaring through the branches. He sat up. Hands and voice had gone; and with them all but an irritating murmur of what he had almost understood. He had thrown off in sleep his single sheet; now he looked down at his body with distaste. His back and buttocks, and the underside of his thighs, felt sore. Too much sweating on coarse sheets, he thought. Not for the first time in recent days he remembered a small house in Bristol which he had once known as home.
The noise of birds was filling his head. He hauled himself to the edge of the bed and pulled back the mosquito net. The crude weave of the net seemed to scour the palm of his hand as he gripped it. He disengaged his hold, and cursed to himself. There was again today an itch of tenderness in his skin that he'd suffered since coming to the post. Even the soles of his feet, pressed on to the floor by the weight of his body, seemed to suffer each knot and splinter. He wanted to be away from this place, and badly.
A warm trickle across his wrist caught his attention, and he was startled to see a rivulet of blood moving down his arm from his hand. There was a cut in the cushion of his thumb, where the mosquito net had apparently nicked his flesh. It was bleeding, though not copiously. He sucked at the cut, feeling again that peculiar sensitivity to touch that only drink, and that in abundance, dulled. Spitting out blood, he began to dress.
The clothes he put on were a scourge to his back. His sweat-stiffened shirt rubbed against his shoulders and neck; he seemed to feel every thread chafing his nerve-endings. The shirt might have been sackcloth, the way it abraded him. Next door, he heard Locke moving around. Gingerly finishing his dressing, Cherrick went through to join him. Locke was sitting at the table by the window. He was poring over a map of Tetelman's, and drinking a cup of the bitter coffee Dancy was so fond of brewing, which he drank with a dollop of condensed milk. The two men had little to say to each other. Since the incident in the village all pretence to respect or friendship had disappeared. Locke now showed undisguised contempt for his sometime companion. The only fact that kept them together was the contract they and Stumpf had signed. Rather than breakfast on whisky, which he knew Locke would take as a further sign of his decay, Cherrick poured himself a slug of Dancy's emetic and went out to look at the morning. He felt strange. There was something about this dawning day which made him profoundly uneasy. He knew the dangers of courting unfounded fears, and he tried to forbid them, but they were incontestable. Was it simply exhaustion that made him so painfully conscious of his many discomforts this morning? Why else did he feel the pressure of his stinking clothes so acutely? The rasp of his boot collar against the jutting bone of his ankle, the rhythmical chafing of his trousers against his inside leg as he walked, even the grazing air that eddied around his exposed face and arms. The world was pressing on him – at least that was the sensation – pressing as though it wanted him out.
A large dragonfly, whining towards him on iridescent wings, collided with his arm. The pain of the collision caused him to drop his mug. It didn't break, but rolled off the verandah and was lost in the undergrowth. Angered, Cherrick slapped the insect off, leaving a smear of blood on his tattooed forearm to mark the dragonfly's demise. He wiped it off. It welled up again on the same spot, full and dark.
It wasn't the blood of the insect, he realised, but his own. The dragonfly had cut him somehow, though he had felt nothing. Irritated, he peered more closely at his punctured skin. The wound was not significant, but it was painful. From inside he could hear Locke talking. He was loudly describing the inadequacy of his fellow adventures to Tetelman.
"Stumpf s not fit for this kind of work," he was saying.
"And Cherrick -”
"What about me?"
Cherrick stepped into the shabby interior, wiping a new flow of blood from his arm.
Locke didn't even bother to look up at him.
"You're paranoid," he said plainly. "Paranoid and unreliable."
Cherrick was in no mood for taking Locke's foul- mouthing. "Just because I killed some Indian brat," he said. The more he brushed blood from his bitten arm, the more the place stung. "You just didn't have the balls to do it yourself."
Locke still didn't bother to look up from his perusal of the map. Cherrick moved across to the table. "Are you listening to me?" he demanded, and added force to his question by slamming his fist down on to the table. On impact his hand simply burst open. Blood spurted out in every direction, spattering the map. Cherrick howled, and reeled backwards from the table with blood pouring from a yawning split in the side of his hand. The bone showed. Through the din of pain in his head he could hear a quiet voice. The words were inaudible, but he knew whose they were.
"I won't hear!" he said, shaking his head like a dog with a flea in its ear. He staggered back against the wall, but the briefest of contacts was another agony. "I won't hear, damn you!"
"What the hell's he talking about?" Dancy had appeared in the doorway, woken by the cries, still clutching the Complete Works of Shelley Tetelman had said he could not sleep without.
Locke re-addressed the question to Cherrick, who was standing, wild-eyed, in the corner of the room, blood spitting from between his fingers as he attempted to staunch his wounded hand. "What are you saying?" "He spoke to me," Cherrick replied. "The old man."
"What old man?" Tetelman asked.
"He means at the village," Locke said. Then, to Cherrick, "Is that what you mean?"
"He wants us out. Exiles. Like them. Like them!"
Cherrick's panic was rapidly rising out of anyone's control, least of all his own.
"The man's got heat-stroke," Dancy said, ever the diagnostician. Locke knew better.
"Your hand needs bandaging…" he said, slowly approaching Cherrick.
"I heard him…" Cherrick muttered.
"I believe you. Just slow down. We can sort it out."
"No," the other man replied. "It's pushing us out. Everything we touch. Everything we touch."
He looked as though he was about to topple over, and Locke reached for him. As his hands made contact with Cherrick's shoulders the flesh beneath the shirt split, and Locke's hands were instantly soaked in scarlet. He withdrew them, appalled. Cherrick fell to his knees, which in their turn became new wounds. He stared down as his shirt and trousers darkened. "What's happening to me?" he wept.
Dancy moved towards him. "Let me help."
"No! Don't touch me!" Cherrick pleaded, but Dancy wasn't to be denied his nursing.
"It's all right," he said in his best bedside manner.
It wasn't. Dancy's grip, intended only to lift the man from his bleeding knees, opened new cuts wherever he took hold. Dancy felt the blood sprout beneath his hand, felt the flesh slip away from the bone. The sensation bested even his taste for agony. Like Locke, he forsook the lost man.
"He's rotting," he murmured.
Cherrick's body had split now in a dozen or more places. He tried to stand, half staggering to his feet only to collapse again, his flesh breaking open whenever he touched wall or chair or floor. There was no help for him. All the others could do was stand around like spectators at an execution, awaiting the fina
l throes. Even Stumpf had roused himself from his bed and come through to see what all the shouting was about. He stood leaning against the door-lintel, his disease-thinned face all disbelief.
Another minute, and blood-loss defeated Cherrick.
He keeled over and sprawled, face down, across the floor. Dancy crossed back to him and crouched on his haunches beside his head.
"Is he dead?" Locke asked.
"Almost," Dancy replied.
"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 mouth 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 for a 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 – sometime 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 her 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 luster 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. W ho 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. "I'm 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?"
"Maybe," said Locke, unenthusiastically.
"His head…" said the doctor. "He has delusions."
Without offering further explanation, the man led off at a considerable rate, trailing tobacco-smoke as he went. The route, that wound out of the main building and across a small internal courtyard, ended at a room with a glass partition in the door.
"Here," said the doctor. "Your friend. You tell him," he said as a parting snipe, “he pay more, or tomorrow he leaves."
Locke peered through the glass partition. The grubby- white room was empty, but for a bed and a small table, lit by the same dingy light that cursed every wretched inch of this establishment. Stumpf was not on the bed, but squatting on the floor in the corner of the room. His left eye was covered with a bulbous padding, held in place by a bandage ineptly wrapped around his head. Locke was looking at the man for a good time before Stumpf sensed that he was watched. He looked up slowly. His good eye, as if in compensation for the loss of its companion, seemed to have swelled to twice its natural size. It held enough fear for both it and its twin; indeed enough for a dozen eyes. Cautiously, like a man whose bones are so brittle he fears an injudicious breath will shatter them, Stumpf edged up the wall, and crossed to the door. He did not open it, but addressed Locke through the glass.