“Ah! You like men!”
“It’s not that. I have a disease.”
“Show me the sore.”
“No, when I piss, it hurts. I don’t want you to get sick also.” I pulled out my wallet. I gave her money. I asked her to tell Anasasio that I’d gotten over excited and finished early, grown angry, and stormed out.
“I understand. You like men,” she repeated knowingly, then winked and folded away the money.
“Just tell him what I said, okay?”
“You are not alone. You would be surprised. Do you want the address of the place for sex with men?”
I took it from her and tried to look more embarrassed. If she told Anasasio this part, he would go off on a wild goose chase to the place where the male prostitutes were.
I left.
Midnight. Too late. If he was ever here, he’s gone.
But I tried the last building anyway, ducked across the grounds and reached the mansion, stairs, and dining veranda. It was a churrascaria, I realized, a restaurant serving meat, lots of it, endless platters offered by circulating waiters until patrons were too stuffed to eat more. The waiters carved meat strips off the bone at your table. Serrated knives flashed to the right and left. Rooster had lied, or never shown up, or had misled me or—
I saw him!
He was at a table for four, with big plates, a candle, a bottle of wine, and a pale, soft-faced woman and another man who had a barrel chest, long, straight, rib cage — length hair, and Asiatic features of an Indian. Rooster was cleaned up, in a tennis shirt. His hair was brushed sideways, and he and the woman held hands. The Indian had a round face with a sharp nose. He was finishing a pork chop. I arrived at the table at the same time one of the circulating waiters did, offering a wooden platter heaped with charred sausages. The Indian took two. He was clearly more interested in the meal than in talking.
“I did not think you were coming,” Rooster said.
“You didn’t tell me which building in your note.”
He grinned. “Yes, I thought of that after, but I had to write the note fast. You looked for me with the whores, yes? Because I am a miner, yes? This is Elizabe, my wife, who would kill me if I went there. She moved to Porto Velho with me from São Paulo. She makes sure I don’t waste the money that we are saving for a little farm. And this is Cizinio Karitiana. He doesn’t speak English.”
Rooster’s easygoing mood turned urgent when I told him that Anasasio was here. He spoke rapidly to Cizinio, who turned his impassive face to me and began to speak. Clearly, he’d been prepped. Rooster translated as quickly as any pro at the UN. Apparently, the name Anasasio got everyone moving around here. Everyone feared the union.
“The old doctor lived on the island when I was a boy,” Cizinio said. “He treated us and he was kind. He asked many questions about illness. Then a year ago a different doctor came. And other foreigners, with guns. They told Indians not to come anymore. The old doctor now won’t talk to us.”
I asked, “How do you know the guards are foreigners?”
“They speak another language.”
“My language?”
“No, but some are white, like you.”
“Where did the old doctor come from?”
A shrug. “My grandfather told me there was a big war in Europe and he came after that, under the water, in a boat.”
Waiters offered more sausages, steak cuts, lamb. It was a meat paradise. There was a long salad bar in a corner and a finely stocked liquor bar and a line of people waiting for tables, the men wearing cowboy hats and boots and billowy shirts; women in tight jeans, Texas-style clothing. Elizabe was in a print dress and had a pile of sliced onions and red tomatoes on her plate. Cizinio was the only Indian present that I could see.
“Cizinio, you said the old doctor used to ask many questions. About what?”
“Malaria.”
“Did he say why he was interested?”
“He walked in the forest and collected mosquitoes, too.”
“What questions did he ask about malaria?”
Cizinio chewed, thought, looked impassive. “Oh, where the worst places were to catch it, which stretches of river were most dangerous.”
“And now you say sick people are being kidnapped?”
“I don’t say it. It is happening. Why don’t you people ever believe Indians?”
Suddenly I felt a familiar sensation on the left side of my neck, as if an insect had landed there. Any Marine who has ever been on patrol knows the feeling. You are being watched. I turned and saw only diners at first, but then, at a far table, as a waiter passed, someone looked away. There sat a small woman with coppery wavy hair, and a larger man. They had a wine bottle before them, and plates. But their posture was not the easy kind employed by a relaxing couple, or the rigid kind when a couple is arguing. They stared into each other’s eyes. The posture was almost right. But almost isn’t right.
“Are you listening to Cizinio?” Rooster said.
“Say again, please.”
Cizinio finished his sausage. A waiter was approaching with another platter. “The boats bringing sick people come in the night. One time I was fishing nearby and heard screaming. The guards shot into the water, chased me away.”
“What kind of screaming? Like someone was angry? Or like someone was hurt?”
“Hurt.”
“Is there a way for me to get on the island?”
Cizinio thought that was funny. “Yes. Get sick. And men will kidnap you.”
“Can you take us there?”
“No. I must get back to my draga,” Cizinio said. “And get more gold.”
I started to protest that a man’s life could be at stake, but Rooster placed a restraining hand on my arm. “It is not what you think,” Rooster said. “His son is sick, at the hospital. He runs a terrible fever. He is only ten years old. Cizinio needs gold to pay doctors. He’s already lost one child to tuberculosis. The doctors work harder for gold.” Rooster rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal language for bribes.
I’d been here long enough to know about local health care — public for slum dwellers, private for the rest. I asked, “Is his son at the poor people’s hospital or the rich one?”
“You must pay even at the poor one if you want real care. You must pay nurses, too. This is not the law but the practice. The more you pay, the more the doctors work. Don’t doctors have the gold fever in your country?”
“In a way.”
Despite my fear for Eddie I felt a stab of guilt and regarded the Indian in a new light. I’d come to a foreign place and made assumptions. Rooster just wanted a nice dinner with his wife. Cizinio was torn with fear over a child. “Rooster, please tell Cizinio that I am a doctor and I will see his son if he wants. I don’t want gold for it. I don’t want information for it either.”
This time when Rooster translated the chewing stopped and the face swung up, and the brown eyes regarded me like I was a person, not a wall. Cizinio’s thoughts moved beneath the surface like a fish swims out of sight. I knew that even in the early twenty-first century, there were more than fifty uncontacted tribes — spotted from the air — left in the Brazilian Amazon. The second they were contacted, they started falling sick.
Cizinio put down the fork. He had a speck of red sausage on the corner of his lip. At last I saw emotion, just a spark, in the eyes. It was confusion.
“Cizinio asks why you would do this?”
“I know what it is to worry about someone you love.”
“Cizinio says that the doctors at the hospital always ask for money. As soon as he gives it, they want more. Sometimes they say, like you, that they don’t want it, but when they get to his son, they change their mind.”