“Professor Miguel taught math at the university. Here he earns one hundred times what he made in a month,” Anasasio said.
Was Eddie here earlier?
The mud sprayed out behind us onto a floor-to-ceiling wooden sluice box, its ramplike surface covered by a thick synthetic carpet. “The carpet traps gold and allows lighter water to run back into the river,” Anasasio translated, as delighted as a boy at an ice cream factory, all thoughts of Eddie wiped away by proximity to gold. “They do this twenty-four hours a day. But now we will see what they have found.”
Questions multiplied in my head as two twentysomething crew members stepped up to the sluice box. The engine stopped. The black water ceased pouring onto the carpet.
Is Anasasio eager to go back to town because he’s tired, or involved? What if Eddie was taken because he asked questions about the wrong thing? What if there’s really a training camp in the jungle, and he is a prisoner there?
“Two dragas can be next to each other,” Anasasio explained as the deck rocked from a drill smacking into rock far below. “One brings up three kilos, worth one hundred twenty thousand U.S. dollars. The other… nothing. It is a miracle.”
From the stories I heard, it’s probable that Eddie caught malaria. He and I are taking different preventatives because he’s allergic to one. He must have contracted a resistant strain.
A chubby, intent-looking redheaded man in a soiled floral print shirt — unbuttoned to fat — waddled up with a glass jar, “filled with liquid mercury,” Anasasio said. “This man is named Rooster.” Rooster poured the silvery stuff into a cut-off oil drum as diesel smoke from the pump blew into our faces. “The mercury fuses with the gold,” Anasasio said excitedly, over the roar.
Shoulders jerking like a pneumatic drill operator’s, Rooster used a long-handled electric mixer to churn up the mercury, silt, and gold. The sense of movement never stopped. The deck rocked as the drill operator below punched into river bottom. The river rushed into rapids eighty yards away. The anchor cable quivered from the current as more “flying boats,” as Anasasio called them, brought crewmen from the bars or whorehouses onshore to other dragas.
“Anasasio, ask the captain if…”
The captain snarled at me in Portuguese. I didn’t need translation. “Wait for the gold!”
The redheaded crewman, Rooster, inserted a garden hose into the bucket. The water washed excess sand onto the deck and, through gaps in the planking, into the river. The crew stood transfixed. Anasasio had grown unnaturally still.
Gold fever was the paramount disease here for ten thousand miners. Rooster poured the gold/mercury mix onto an old T-shirt and used the fabric as a strainer. He squeezed out the T-shirt, and silvery mercury ran out, into a flat pan. Anasasio said, “They will reuse the mercury.”
When Rooster opened the shirt, an irregular ball, the size of a large marble, lay inside. It looked like clay, not like anything worth money.
“Now the best part,” Anasasio breathed.
Get this over with so I can ask about Eddie.
The pudgy crewman carried the ball into a closet on deck and waddled out carrying a small portable oven on a tripod, with a spigot jutting out the top. He put the mud ball in a tin pan and the pan in the oven, and shut the door. He lit a fire with a match beneath the tripod. After two minutes steam oozed from the spigot.
“Mercury flies away,” said Anasasio. “It will come back as rain.”
Rooster opened the oven and, hands protected by thick mitts, pulled out the pan. The mud ball was gone. In the pan lay a pool of molten gold, with rainbow colors: crimson and emerald and cobalt rippling across the surface in the seconds it took to dry. The hardened mass was the diameter of a coffee cup and as thick and pitted as a potato pancake. Sunlight brightened the surface. It looked pure and clean. Rooster placed it in my palm. It was cool to the touch, heavier than it looked.
Anasasio told me, “Okay, Joe. Ask about Eddie now!”
Three minutes later — after the captain finished his story — Anasasio turned to me, looking stricken. He said too softly, “I think we have the answer.”
His expression filled me with an agony of fear.
“The captain says that Dr. Nakamura was here. He was shivering, but working, asking about malaria. He left to go to another draga, the Santa Catarina. Many men were sick there. But, Joe…” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “The Santa Catarina is no more. Its anchor cable snapped. It went into the rapids. All aboard died.”
I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. The heat filled my head and my vision shrank. I gazed toward the turgid foam marking the narrow rapids. There, on muddy shore, lay wooden debris left by smashed, destroyed dragas, pieces of boat, clothing, and cutlery that had washed up.
I’m going to have to phone Eddie’s family.
The captain pulled at Anasasio’s arm and began another explanation, pointing at the gold ball. The gold that could not bring back Eddie. We’ll walk along the river. We’ll look for his body. I felt a nudge at my side and found myself looking into the dirty green eyes of the miner named Rooster. But what I saw wasn’t sympathy. It was something more urgent. The eyes slid left, toward the sluice boxes. Then Rooster moved that way—come with me—as the captain and Anasasio grew more animated in their talk. Eddie was forgotten. To them he was one more casualty of the rapids. The men would be on their favorite subject… gold.
Wait a minute! He knows I don’t speak Portuguese. Does Rooster speak English?
My pulse fluttered to life. Anasasio’s back was to us as we moved to the smoke-spewing pump. It looked about a hundred years old, its pistons chugging like some factory engine in the year 1900. The whole contraption seemed to be straining so hard it might tear the ship apart. Water rushed from the hose again, gushed down the screens and into the sluice boxes in the perpetual hunt for gold. Rooster pretended to adjust the hose. His English, when it came, was so nasal that there was a lag time between my hearing and understanding. He seemed to be talking through his nose.
“Your translator is lying to you.”
I felt a surge of hope. “How do you speak English?”
“I worked as a tour guide in Bahia and came here when I lost my job. Those union people are thieves and liars. They take our dues and do nothing. They sell cocaine. That man is not telling you what the captain really says.”
“Which is what?”
“Your friend did not go to the Santa Catarina. He boarded a flying boat to go to the hospital. He was very ill, like the other men who have disappeared.”
“What other men?” Now my pulse sped up as I realized that the captain saw us talking. But the captain laid a hand on Anasasio’s shoulder to keep him from turning. The captain wanted my conversation with Rooster to continue.
But why? Because Anasasio lied to me? Or because these miners are the liars and want to steer me away?
Rooster said, “The sickest men have been disappearing. They leave their dragas for the hospital but do not reach Porto Velho. They are being taken. This happened to my brother. I think your friend went north.”
“Taken?” I stared into the chubby, earnest face and recognized fear and self-blame and saw that once again, retired or not, I had returned to my old haunt, the land of liars.
“Where are the missing people being taken?” I asked.