There was relief in the escape, from Walnut Hill and Sergio, from the city and its grind, from the past troubles with the last wife and the bankruptcy, and from the current mess with the IRS. At thirty thousand feet, Nate had almost decided he would never return.
But every reentry was nerve-racking. The fear of another slide was always there, just beneath the surface. The frightening part now was that there had been so many reentries he felt like a veteran. Like wives and big verdicts, he could now compare them. Would there always be another one?
During dinner, he realized Josh had been working behind the scenes. Wine was never offered. He picked through the food with the caution of one who’d just spent nearly four months enjoying the great lettuces of the world; until a few days ago, no fat, butter, grease, or sugar. The last thing he wanted was a queasy stomach.
He napped briefly, but he was tired of sleeping. As a busy lawyer and late-night prowler, he’d learned to live with little sleep. The first month at Walnut Hill they’d drugged him with pills and he’d slept ten hours a day. He couldn’t fight them if he were in a coma.
He assembled his toys in the empty seat next to him, and began reading his collection of owner’s manuals. The satellite phone intrigued him, though it was difficult to believe he would actually be forced to use it.
Another phone caught his attention. It was the latest technical gadget in air travel, a sleek little device practically hidden in the wall next to his seat. He grabbed it and called Sergio at home. Sergio was having a late dinner, but happy to hear from him nonetheless.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“In a bar,” Nate replied, his voice low because the lights in the cabin were down.
“Very funny.”
“I’m probably over Miami, with eight hours to go. Just found this phone on board and wanted to check in.”
“So you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. Do you miss me?”
“Not yet. You miss me?”
“Are you kidding? I’m a free man, flying off to the jungle for a marvelous adventure. I’ll miss you later, okay?”
“Okay. And you’ll call if you get in trouble.”
“No trouble, Serge. Not this time.”
“Atta boy, Nate.”
“Thanks, Serge.”
“Don’t mention it. Just call me.”
A movie started, but no one was watching. The flight attendant brought more coffee. Nate’s secretary was a long-suffering woman named Alice, who’d cleaned up after him for almost ten years. She lived with her sister in an old house in Arlington. He called her next. They’d spoken once in the past four months.
The conversation lasted for half an hour. She was delighted to hear his voice, and learn that he’d been released. She knew nothing about his trip to South America, which was a bit odd because
she normally knew everything. But she was reserved on the phone, even cautious. Nate, the trial lawyer, smelled a rat, and attacked as if on cross-examination.
She was still in litigation, still at the same desk, doing pretty much the same thing but for a different lawyer. “Who?” Nate demanded.
A new guy. A new litigator. Her words were deliberate, and Nate knew that she had been fully briefed by Josh himself. Of course Nate would call her as soon as he was released.
Which office was the new guy in? Who was his paralegal? Where did he come from? How much medical malpractice had he done? Was her assignment with him just temporary?
Alice was sufficiently vague.
“Who’s in my office?” he asked.
“No one. It hasn’t been touched. Still has little stacks of files in every corner.”
“What’s Kerry doing?”
“Staying busy. Waiting for you.” Kerry was Nate’s favorite paralegal.
Alice had all the right answers, while revealing little. She was especially mum about the new litigator.
“Get ready,” he said as the conversation ran out of steam. “It’s time for a comeback.”
“It’s been dull, Nate.”
He hung up slowly, and played back her words. Something was different. Josh was quietly rearranging his firm. Would Nate get lost in the shuffle? Probably not, but his courtroom days were over.
He would worry about it later, he decided. There were so many people to call, and so many phones to do it with. He knew a judge who’d kicked booze ten years earlier, and he wanted to check in with his wonderful report from rehab. His first ex-wife deserved a blistering call, but he wasn’t in the mood. And he
wanted to phone all four of his children and ask why they hadn’t called or written.
Instead he took a folder from his case and began reading about Mr. Troy Phelan and the business at hand. At midnight, somewhere over the Caribbean, Nate drifted away.
ELEVEN
_____________
A
n hour before dawn, the plane began its descent. He had slept through breakfast, and when he awoke a flight attendant hurriedly brought coffee.
The city of São Paulo appeared, an enormous sprawl that covered almost eight hundred square miles. Nate watched the sea of lights below and wondered how one city could hold twenty million people.
In a rush of Portuguese, the pilot said good morning and then several paragraphs of greetings that Nate missed entirely. The English translation that followed was not much better. Surely he wouldn’t be forced to point and grunt his way across the country. The language barrier caused a short bout of anxiety, but it ended when a pretty Brazilian flight attendant asked him to buckle his seat belt.
The airport was hot and swarming with people. He collected his new duffel bag, walked it through customs without so much as a glance from anyone, and rechecked it on Varig to Campo Grande.
Then he found a coffee bar with the menu on the wall. He pointed and said, “Espresso,” and the cashier rang him up. She frowned at his American money, but changed it anyway. One Brazilian real equaled one American dollar. Nate now owned a few reals.
He sipped the coffee while standing shoulder to shoulder with some rowdy Japanese tourists. Other languages flew around him; German and Spanish mixing with the Portuguese coming over the loudspeakers. He wished he’d bought a phrase book so he could at least understand a word or two.
Isolation settled in, slowly at first. In the midst of multitudes, he was a lonely man. He didn’t know a soul. Almost no one knew where he was at that moment, and damned few people cared. Cigarette smoke from the tourists boiled around him, and he walked quickly away, into the main concourse, where he could see the ceiling two levels above and the ground floor below. He began walking through the crowds, aimlessly, carrying the heavy briefcase, cursing Josh for filling it with so much junk.
He heard loud English, and drifted toward it. Some businessmen were waiting near the United counter, and he found a seat near them. It was snowing in Detroit, and they were anxious to get home for Christmas. A pipeline had brought them to Brazil, and before long Nate tired of their drivel. They cured whatever homesickness he felt.
He missed Sergio. After the last rehab, the clinic had placed Nate in a halfway house for a week to ease the reentry. He hated the place and the routine, but with hindsight the idea had merit. You needed a few days to get reoriented. Maybe Sergio was right. He called him from a pay phone, and woke him up. It was six-thirty in São Paulo, but only four-thirty in Virginia.
Sergio didn’t mind. It went with the territory.
________
THERE WERE no first-class seats on the flight to Campo Grande, nor any empty ones. Nate was pleasantly surprised to observe
that every face was behind the morning news, and a wide variety of papers at that. The dailies were as slick and modern as any in the States, and they were being read by people who had a thirst for the news. Perhaps Brazil wasn’t as backward as he thought. These people could read! The airliner, a 727, was clean and newly refurbished. Coca-Cola and Sprite were on the drink cart; he almost felt at home.
Sitting by the window twenty rows back, he ignored the memo on Indians in his lap, and admired the countryside below. It was vast and lush and green, rolling with hills, dotted with cattle farms and crisscrossed with red dirt roads. The soil was a vivid burnt orange, and the roads ran haphazardly from one small settlement to the next. Highways were virtually nonexistent.
A paved road appeared, and there was traffic. The plane descended and the pilot welcomed them to Campo Grande. There were tall buildings, a crowded downtown, the obligatory soccer field, lots of streets and cars, and every residence had a red-tiled roof. Thanks to the typical big-firm efficiency, he possessed a memo, one no doubt prepared by the greenest of associates working at three hundred dollars an hour, in which Campo Grande was analyzed as if its presence were crucial to the matters at hand. Six hundred thousand people. A center for cattle trade. Lots of cowboys. Rapid growth. Modern conveniences. Nice to know, but why bother? Nate would not sleep there.
The airport seemed remarkably small for a city its size, and he realized he was comparing everything to the United States. This had to stop. When he stepped from the plane, he was hit with the heat. It was at least ninety degrees. Two days before Christmas, and it was sweltering in the southern hemisphere. He squinted in the brilliance of the sun, and descended the steps with a firm hand on the guardrail.
He managed to order lunch in the airport restaurant, and when it was brought to his table he was pleased to see that it was something he could eat. A grilled chicken sandwich in a bun he’d
never seen before, with fries as crisp as those in any fast food joint in the States. He ate slowly while watching the runway in the distance. Halfway through lunch, a twin-engine turbo-prop of Air Pantanal landed and taxied to the terminal. Six people got off.
He stopped chewing as he wrestled with a sudden attack of fear. Commuter flights were the ones you read about and saw on CNN, except that no one back home would ever hear about this one if it went down.
But the plane looked sturdy and clean, even somewhat modern, and the pilots were well-dressed professionals. Nate continued eating. Think positive, he told himself.
He roamed the small terminal for an hour. In a news shop he bought a Portuguese phrase book and began memorizing words. He read travel ads for adventures into the Pantanal—ecotourism, it was called in English. There were cars for rent. A money exchange booth, a bar with beer signs and whiskey bottles lined on a shelf. And near the front entrance was a slender, artificial Christmas tree with a solitary string of lights. He watched them blink to the tune of some Brazilian carol, and despite his efforts not to, Nate thought of his children.
It was the day before Christmas Eve. Not all memories were painful.
He boarded the plane with teeth clenched and spine stiffened, then slept for most of the hour it took to reach Corumbá. The small airport there was humid and packed with Bolivians waiting for a flight to Santa Cruz. They were laden with boxes and bags of Christmas gifts.
He found a cabdriver who spoke not a word of English, but it didn’t matter. Nate showed him the words “Palace Hotel” on his travel itinerary, and they sped away in an old, dirty Mazda.
Corumbá had ninety thousand people, according to yet another memo prepared by Josh’s staff. Situated on the Paraguay River, on the Bolivian border, it had long since declared itself to
be the capital of the Pantanal. River traffic and trade had built the city, and kept it going.
Through the heat and swelter of the back of the taxi, Corumbá appeared to be a lazy, pleasant little town. The streets were paved and wide and lined with trees. Merchants sat in the shade of their storefronts, waiting for customers and chatting with each other. Teenagers darted through traffic on scooters. Barefoot children ate ice cream at sidewalk tables.
As they approached the business district, cars bunched together and stopped in the heat. The driver mumbled something, but was not particularly disturbed. The same driver in New York or D.C. would’ve been near the point of violence.
But it was Brazil, and Brazil was in South America. The clocks ran slower. Nothing was urgent. Time was not as crucial. Take off your watch, Nate told himself. Instead, he closed his eyes and breathed the heavy air.
The Palace Hotel was in the center of downtown, on a street that descended slightly toward the Paraguay River sitting majestically in the distance. He gave the cabbie a handful of reais, and waited patiently for his change. He thanked him in Portuguese, a feeble “
Obrigado.
” The cabbie smiled and said something he didn’t understand. The doors to the lobby were open, as were all doors facing the sidewalks of Corumbá.
The first words he heard upon entering were being yelled by someone from Texas. A band of roughnecks was in the process of checking out. They had been drinking and were in a festive mood, anxious to get home for the holidays. Nate took a seat near a television and waited for them to clear.
His room was on the eighth floor. For eighteen dollars a day he got a twelve-by-twelve with a narrow bed very close to the floor. If it had a mattress, it was quite thin. No box spring to speak of. There was a desk with a chair, a window unit of AC, a small refrigerator with bottled water, colas, and beer, and a clean
bathroom with soap and plenty of towels. Not bad, he told himself. This was an adventure. Not the Four Seasons, but certainly livable.
For half an hour, he tried to call Josh. But the language barrier stopped him. The clerk at the front desk knew enough English to find an outside operator, but from there the Portuguese took over. He tried his new cell phone, but the local service had not been activated.
Nate stretched his tired body the length of his flimsy little bed, and went to sleep.
________
VALDIR RUIZ was a short man with a tiny waist, light brown skin, a small slick head missing most of the hair except for a few strands he kept oiled and combed back. His eyes were black and bunched with wrinkles, the result of thirty years of heavy smoking. He was fifty-two, and at the age of seventeen he’d left home to spend a year with a family in Iowa as a Rotary exchange student. He was proud of his English, though he didn’t use it much in Corumbá. He watched CNN and American television most nights in an effort to stay sharp.