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 Rondonia 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.
Chapter 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.