The Testament Read online

  the noise from the river. Seven deer, two of which were spotted fawns.

  “There is a small trading post a few hours away,” Jevy said, getting to his feet. “We should be there before dark.”

  “What are we shopping for?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Fernando is the owner, and he hears everything on the river. Maybe he will know something about missionaries.”

  Jevy emptied his cup into the river and stretched his arms. “Sometimes he has beer for sale. Cerveja.”

  Nate kept his eyes on the water.

  “I think we should not buy any,” Jevy said, and walked away.

  Fine with me, thought Nate. He drained his cup, sucking down the grounds and grains of sugar.

  A cold brown bottle, perhaps Antarctica or Brahma, the two brands he’d already sampled in Brazil. Excellent beer. A favorite haunt had been a college bar near Georgetown with 120 foreign beers on the menu. He’d tried them all. They served roasted peanuts by the basket and expected you to throw the hulls on the floor. When his pals from law school were in town they always met at the bar and reminisced about the old days. The beer was ice cold, the peanuts hot and salty, the floor cracked with hulls when you walked, and the girls were young and loose. The place had been there forever, and during each trip through rehab and sobriety it was the bar Nate missed most.

  He began to sweat, though the sun was hidden and there was a cool breeze. He buried himself in the hammock and prayed for sleep, a deep hard coma that would take him past their little stop and into the night. The sweating worsened until his shirt was soaked. He started a book about the demise of the Brazilian Indians, then tried to sleep again.

  He was wide awake when the engine was throttled down and the boat moved close to the bank. There were voices, then a gentle bump as they docked at the trading post. Nate slowly removed himself from the hammock and returned to the bench, where he sat.

  It was a country store of sorts, built on stilts—a tiny building, made of unpainted boards with a tin roof and a narrow porch where, not surprisingly, a couple of locals were lounging with cigarettes and tea. A smaller river circled behind it and disappeared into the Pantanal. A large fuel tank was braced to the side of the building.

  A flimsy pier jutted into the river to dock the boats. Jevy and Welly eased along the pier carefully, because the currents were strong. They chatted with the pantaneiros on the porch, then went through the open door.

  Nate had vowed to remain on the boat. He went to the other side of the deck, sat on the opposite bench, stuck his arms and legs through the rail, and watched the full width of the river go by. He would stay up on the deck, on the bench, with his arms and legs locked in the rail. The coldest beer in the world couldn’t pull him away.

  As he had learned, there was no such thing as a short visit in Brazil. Especially on the river, where visits were rare. Jevy bought thirty gallons of diesel fuel to replace what had been lost in the storm. The engine started.

  “Fernando says there is a woman missionary. She works with the Indians.” Jevy handed him a bottle of cold water. They were moving again.

  “Where?”

  “He’s not sure. There are some settlements to the north, near Bolivia. But the Indians don’t move on the river, so he doesn’t know much about them.”

  “How far is the nearest settlement?”

  “We should be close by morning. But we can’t take this boat. We must use the little one.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “You remember Marco, the farmer whose cow was killed by our plane?”

  “Sure I do. He had three little boys.”

  “Yes. He was there yesterday,” Jevy said, pointing to the store, which was disappearing around a bend. “He comes once a month.”

  “Were the boys with him?”

  “No. It’s too dangerous.”

  What a small world. Nate hoped the boys had spent the money he’d given them for Christmas. He watched the store until it was out of sight.

  Perhaps on the return leg he’d be well enough to stop and have a cool one. Just a couple, to celebrate their successful journey. He crawled back into the safety of his hammock, and cursed himself for his weakness. In the wilderness of a gigantic swamp he had had a near brush with alcohol, and for hours his thoughts had been consumed with nothing else. The anticipation, the fear, the sweating, and the scheming of ways to get a drink. Then the near miss, the escape through no strength of his own, and now in the aftermath the fantasy of renewing his romance with alcohol. A few drinks would be fine because then he could stop. That was his favorite lie.

  He was just a drunk. Run him through a designer rehab clinic at a thousand bucks a day, and he was still an addict. Run him through AA in the basement of a church on Tuesday nights, and he was still a drunk.

  His addictions gripped him, and desperation settled around Nate. He was paying for the damned boat; Jevy worked for him. If he insisted that they turn around and go straight to the store, they would do so. He could buy all the beer Fernando owned, load it on ice below the deck, and sip Brahma all the way to Bolivia. And there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

  Like a mirage, Welly appeared with a smile and a cup of fresh coffee. “Vou cozinhar,” he said. I’m going to cook.

  Food would help, Nate thought. Even another platter of beans, rice, and boiled chicken. Food would satisfy his tastes, or at least divert his attention from other cravings.

  He ate slowly, on the upper deck, alone and in the dark, swatting thick mosquitoes away from his face. When he was finished, he sprayed repellent from his neck to his bare feet. The seizure was over, only slight aftershocks gripped him. He could no longer taste beer or smell the peanuts from his favorite bar.

  He retreated to his sanctuary. It was raining again, a quiet rain with no wind or thunder. Josh had sent along four books for his reading pleasure. All the briefs and memos had been read and reread. Nothing remained but the books. He’d already read half of the thinnest one.

  He burrowed deep in the hammock and went back to reading the sad history of the native people of Brazil.

  ________

  WHEN THE Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral first stepped on Brazilian soil, on the coast of Bahia, in April of 1500, the country had five million Indians, scattered among nine hundred tribes. They spoke 1,175 languages, and except for the usual tribal skirmish they were peaceful people.

  After five centuries of getting themselves “civilized” by Europeans, the Indian population had been decimated. Only 270,000 survived, in 206 tribes using 170 languages. War, murder, slavery, territorial losses, diseases—no method of exterminating Indians had been neglected by those from civilized cultures.

  It was a sick and violent history. If the Indians were peaceful and tried to cooperate with the colonists, they were subject to strange diseases—smallpox, measles, yellow fever, influenza, tuberculosis—for which they had no natural defenses. If they did not cooperate, they were slaughtered by men using weapons more sophisticated than arrows and poison darts. When they fought back and killed their attackers, they were branded as savages.

  They were enslaved by miners, ranchers, and rubber barons. They were driven from their ancestral homes by any group with enough guns. They were burned at the stake by priests, hunted by armies and gangs of bandits, raped at will by any able-bodied man with the desire, and slaughtered with impunity. At every point in history, whether crucial or insignificant, when the interests of native Brazilians conflicted with those of white people, the Indians had lost.

  You lose for five hundred years, and you expect little from life. The biggest problem facing some modern-day tribes was the suicide of its young people.

  After centuries of genocide, the Brazilian government finally decided it was time to protect its “noble savages.” Modern-day massacres had brought international condemnation, so bureaucracies were established and laws were passed. With self-righteous fanfare, some tribal lands were returned to the natives and
lines were drawn on government maps declaring them to be safe zones.

  But the government was also the enemy. In 1967, an investigation into the agency in charge of Indian affairs shocked most Brazilians. The report revealed that agents, land speculators, and ranchers—thugs who either worked for the agency or had the agency working for them—had been systematically using chemical and bacteriological weapons to wipe out Indians. They issued clothing to the Indians that was infected with smallpox and tuberculosis germs. With airplanes and helicopters, they bombed Indian villages and land with deadly bacteria.

  And in the Amazon Basin and other frontiers, ranchers and miners cared little for lines on maps.

  In 1986, a rancher in Rondônia used crop dusters to spray nearby Indian land with deadly chemicals. He wanted to farm the land, but first had to eliminate the inhabitants. Thirty Indians died, and the rancher was never prosecuted. In 1989, a rancher in Mato Grosso offered rewards to bounty hunters for the ears of murdered Indians. In 1993, gold miners in Manaus attacked a peaceful tribe because they would not leave their land. Thirteen Indians were murdered, and no one was ever arrested.

  In the 1990s, the government had aggressively sought to open up the Amazon Basin, a land of vast natural resources to the north of the Pantanal. But the Indians were still in the way. The majority of those surviving inhabited the Basin; in fact, it was estimated that as many as fifty jungle tribes had been lucky enough to escape contact with civilization.

  Now civilization was on the attack again. The abuse of Indians was growing as miners and loggers and ranchers pushed deep into the Amazon, with the support of the government.

  ________

  THE HISTORY was fascinating, if depressing. Nate read for four hours nonstop and finished the book.

  He walked to the wheelhouse and drank coffee with Jevy. The rain had stopped.

  “Will we be there by morning?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  The lights from the boat rocked gently up and down with the current. It seemed as though they were hardly moving.

  “Do you have any Indian blood?” Nate asked, after some hesitation. It was a personal matter, one that in the United States no one would dare ask.

  Jevy smiled without taking his gaze from the river. “All of us have Indian blood. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been reading the history of Indians in Brazil.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “It’s pretty tragic.”

  “It is. Do you think the Indians have been treated badly here?”

  “Of course they have.”

  “What about in your country?”

  For some reason, General Custer was the first thought. At least the Indians had won something. And we didn’t burn them at the stake, or spray them with chemicals, or sell them into slavery. Did we? What about all those reservations? Land everywhere.

  “Not much better, I’m afraid,” he said in defeat. It was not a discussion he wanted.

  After a long silence, Nate eased down to the toilet. When he finished his work there, he pulled the chain above it and left the small room. Light brown river water ran into the toilet bowl and flushed the waste through a tube and sent it directly into the river.

  TWENTY-THREE

  _____________

  IT WAS still dark when the engine stopped and woke Nate. He touched his left wrist and remembered he wasn’t wearing a watch. He listened as Welly and Jevy moved below him. They were at the rear of the boat, talking quietly.

  He was proud of himself for another sober morning, another clean day for the books. Six months earlier, every wake-up had been a blur of swollen eyes, cobwebbed thoughts, seared mouth, arid tongue, bitter breath, and the great daily question of “Why did I do it?” He often vomited in the shower, sometimes inducing it himself to get it over with. After the shower, there was always the dilemma of what to have for breakfast. Something warm and oily to settle the stomach, or perhaps a bloody mary to settle the nerves? Then he was off to work, always at his desk by eight to begin another brutal day as a litigator.

  Every morning. No exceptions. In the final days of his last crash he had gone weeks without a clear morning. Out of desperation he’d seen a counselor, and when asked if he could recall the last day he’d stayed sober, he admitted he could not.

  He missed the drinking, but not the hangovers.

  Welly pulled the johnboat to the port side of the Santa Loura, and tied it closely. They were loading it when Nate crept down the steps. The adventure was moving into a new phase. Nate was ready for a change of scenery.

  It was overcast and threatening more rain. The sun finally broke through at about six. Nate knew because he’d rearmed himself with a watch.

  A rooster crowed. They were docked near a small farmhouse, their bow tied to a timber that once held a pier. Westward, to their left, a much smaller river met the Paraguay.

  The challenge was to pack the boat without overloading it. The smaller tributaries they were about to encounter were flooded; banks would not always be visible. If the boat sat too low in the water, they might run aground, or worse, damage the prop of the outboard. There was only one motor on the johnboat, no backup, just a couple of paddles that Nate studied from the deck as he drank his coffee. The paddles would work, he decided, especially if wild Indians or hungry animals were in pursuit.

  Three five-gallon gas tanks were arranged neatly in the center of the boat. “These should give us fifteen hours,” Jevy explained.

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I’d rather be safe.”

  “How far away is the settlement?”

  “I’m not sure.” He pointed to the house. “The farmer there said four hours.”

  “Does he know the Indians?”

  “No. He doesn’t like Indians. Says he never sees them on the river.”

  Jevy packed a small tent, two blankets, two mosquito nets, a rain fly for the tent, two buckets to dip out rainfall, and his poncho. Welly added a box of food and a case of bottled water.

  Seated on his bunk in the cabin, Nate took the copy of the will, the acknowledgment, and the waiver from his briefcase, folded them together, and placed them in a letter-sized envelope. An official Stafford Law Firm envelope. Since there were no Ziploc bags or garbage liners on board, he wrapped the envelope in a twelve-inch square section he cut from the hem of his poncho. He taped the seams with duct tape, and after examining his handiwork declared his package to be waterproof. Then he taped it to his tee shirt, across his chest, and covered it with a light denim pullover.

  There were copies of the papers in his briefcase, which he would leave behind. And since the Santa Loura seemed much more secure than the johnboat, he decided to leave the SatFone too. He double-checked the papers and the phone, then locked the briefcase and left it on his bunk. Today could be the day, he thought to himself. There was a nervous excitement in finally meeting Rachel Lane.

  Breakfast was a quick roll with butter on the deck, standing above the johnboat and watching the clouds. Four hours meant six or eight in Brazil, and Nate was anxious to cast off. The last item Jevy loaded into the boat was a clean shiny machete with a long handle. “This is for the anacondas,” he said, laughing. Nate tried to ignore it. He waved good-bye to Welly, then huddled over his last cup of coffee as they floated with the river until Jevy started the outboard.

  Mist settled just above the water, and it was cool. Since leaving Corumbá Nate had observed the river from the safety of the top deck; now he was practically sitting on it. He glanced around and saw no life jackets. The river slapped the hull. Nate kept a wary eye on the mist, watching for debris; a nice fat tree trunk with a jagged end and the johnboat was history.

  They went crosscurrent until they entered the mouth of the tributary that would take them to the Indians. The water there was much calmer. The outboard whined and left a boiling wake. The Paraguay disappeared quickly.

  On Jevy’s river map the tributary was officially labeled as the Cabixa
. Jevy had never navigated it before, because there had been no need. It coiled like string out of Brazil and into Bolivia, and apparently went nowhere. At its mouth it was eighty feet wide at most, and narrowed to about fifty as they followed it. It had flooded in some places; in others the brush along the banks was thicker than the Paraguay.

  Fifteen minutes in, Nate checked his watch. He would time everything. Jevy slowed the boat as they approached the first fork, the first of a thousand. A river of the same size branched to the left, and the captain was faced with the decision of which route would keep them on the Cabixa. They kept to the right, but somewhat slower, and soon entered a lake. Jevy stopped the motor. “Hold on,” he said, and stood on the gas tanks, gazing at the floodwaters that encircled them. The boat was perfectly still. A ragged row of scrub trees caught his attention. He pointed and said something to himself.

  Exactly how much guesswork was involved Nate couldn’t tell. Jevy had studied his maps and had lived on these rivers. They all led back to the Paraguay. If they took a wrong turn and got lost, surely the currents would eventually lead them back to Welly.

  They followed the scrub trees and flooded thickets that, in the dry season, made up the riverbank, and soon they were in the middle of a shallow stream with limbs overhead. It didn’t look like the Cabixa, but a quick glance at the captain’s face revealed nothing but confidence.

  An hour into the journey they approached the first dwelling—a mud-splattered little hut with a red-tiled roof. Three feet of water covered the bottom of it, and there was no sign of humans or animals. Jevy slowed so they could talk.

  “In the flood season, many people in the Pantanal move to higher ground. They load up their cows and kids and leave for three months.”

  “I haven’t seen higher ground.”

  “There’s not much of it. But every pantaneiro has a place to go this time of the year.”

  “What about the Indians?”

  “They move around too.”

  “Wonderful. We don’t know where they are, and they like to move around.”

  Jevy chuckled and said, “We’ll find them.”

  They floated by the hut. It had no doors or windows. Not much to come home to.

  Ninety minutes, and Nate had completely forgotten about being eaten, when they rounded a bend and came close to a pack of alligators sleeping in a pile in six inches of water. The boat startled them and upset their nap. Tails slapped and water splashed. Nate glanced at the machete, just in case, then laughed at his own foolishness.

  The reptiles did not attack. They watched the boat ease past.

  No animals for the next twenty minutes. The river narrowed again. The banks squeezed together so close that trees from both sides touched each other above the water. It was suddenly dark. They were floating through a tunnel. Nate checked his watch. The Santa Loura was two hours away.

  As they zigzagged through the marshes, they caught glimpses of the horizon. The mountains of Bolivia were looming, getting closer, it seemed. The water widened, the trees cleared, and they entered a large lake with more than a dozen little rivers twisting into it. They circled slowly the first time, then even slower the second. All the tributaries looked the same. The Cabixa was one of a dozen, and the captain had not a clue.

  Jevy stood on the gas tanks and surveyed the flood while Nate sat motionless. A fisherman was in the weeds on the other side of the lake. Finding him would be their only luck of the day.

  He was sitting patiently in a small, handmade canoe, one carved from a tree a very long time ago. He wore a ragged straw hat that hid most of his face. When they were only a few feet away, close enough to inspect him, Nate noticed that he was fishing without the benefit of a pole or a rod. No stick of any sort. The line was wrapped around his hand.

  Jevy said all the right things in Portuguese, and handed him a bottle of water. Nate just smiled and listened to the soft slurring sounds of the strange language. It was slower than Spanish, almost as nasal as French.

  If the fisherman was happy to see another human in the middle of nowhere, he certainly didn’t show it. Where could the poor man live?

  Then they started pointing, in the general direction of the mountains, though by the time they finished the little man had encompassed the entire lake with his bearings. They chatted some more, and Nate got the impression Jevy was extracting every scrap of information. It could be hours before they saw another face. With the swamps and rivers swollen, navigation was proving difficult. Two and a half hours in, and they were already lost.

  A cloud of small black mosquitoes swept over them, and Nate scrambled for the repellent. The fisherman watched him with curiosity.

  They said good-bye and paddled away, drifting with the slight wind. “His mother was an Indian,” Jevy said.

  “That’s nice,” Nate replied, hammering mosquitoes.

  “There’s a settlement a few hours from here.”

  “A few hours?”

  “Three maybe.”

  They had fifteen hours of fuel, and Nate planned to count every minute of it. The Cabixa began again near an inlet where another, very identical river also left the lake. It widened, and they were off, at full throttle.

  Nate moved lower in the boat, and found a spot on the bottom between the box of food and the buckets, with his back to the bench. From there the mist couldn’t