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his belly.
He had come to her a minor murderer, and was going
from her as Death writ large. She laughed, seeing the
self-fulfilling prophecy she had unwittingly engineered.
For an instant his pace slowed, as if he might have heard
her. But no; it was the drummer he was listening for,
beating louder than ever in his ear and demanding, as
he went, a new and deadly vigour in his every step.
121
HOW SPOILERS
BLEED
LOCKE RAISED HIS eyes to the trees. The wind was
moving in them, and the commotion of their laden
branches sounded like the river in full spate. One imper-
sonation of many. When he had first come to the jungle
he had been awed by the sheer multiplicity of beast and
blossom, the relentless parade of life here. But he had
learned better. This burgeoning diversity was a sham;
the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not.
Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show
of natural splendours, Locke now recognised a subtle
conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some
other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird.
In a moth's wing, a monkey's eye; on a lizard's back,
sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle
of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded
the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether.
See us now, he thought drunkenly as they stood around
Cherrick's grave, look at how we play the game too.
We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than
the dead themselves.
122
The corpse had been one scab by the time they'd
hoisted it into a sack and carried it outside to this
miserable plot behind Tetelman's house to bury. There
were half a dozen other graves here. All Europeans, to
judge by the names crudely burned into the wooden
crosses; killed by snakes, or heat, or longing.
Tetelman attempted to say a brief prayer in Spanish,
but the roar of the trees, and the din of birds making
their way home to their roosts before night came down,
all but drowned him out. He gave up eventually, and
they made their way back into the cooler interior
of the house, where Stumpf was sitting, drinking
brandy and staring inanely at the darkening stain on
the floorboards.
Outside, two of Tetelman's tamed Indians were
shovelling the rank jungle earth on top of Cherrick's
sack, eager to be done with the work and away
before nightfall. Locke watched from the window.
Tiie grave-diggers didn't talk as they laboured, but
filled the shallow grave up, then flattened the earth
as best they could with the leather-tough soles of
their feet. As they did so the stamping of the ground
took on a rhythm. It occurred to Locke that the
men were probably the worse for bad whisky; he
knew few Indians who didn't drink like fishes. Now,
staggering a little, they began to dance on Cherrick's
grave.
'Locke?'
Locke woke. In the darkness, a cigarette glowed.
As the smoker drew on it, and the tip burned more
intensely, Stumpf s wasted features swam up out of the
night.
'Locke? Are you awake?'
'What do you want?'
123
'I can't sleep,' the mask replied, 'I've been thinking.
The supply plane comes in from Santarem the day after
tomorrow. We could be back there in a few hours. Out
of all this.'
'Sure.'
'I mean permanently,' Stumpf said. 'Away.'
'Permanently?'
Stumpf lit another cigarette from the embers of his last
before saying, 'I don't believe in curses. Don't think I
do.'
'Who said anything about curses?'
'You saw Cherrick's body. What happened to
him . . .'
'There's a disease,' said Locke, 'what's it called? -
when the blood doesn't set properly?'
'Haemophilia,' Stumpf replied. 'He didn't have
haemophilia and we both know it. I've seen him
scratched and cut dozens of times. He mended like
you or I.'
Locke snatched at a mosquito that had alighted on his
chest and ground it out between thumb and forefinger.
'All right. Then what killed him?'
'You saw the wounds better than I did, but it seemed
to me his skin just broke open as soon as he was
touched.'
Locke nodded. 'That's the way it looked.'
'Maybe it's something he caught off the Indians.'
Locke took the point.'/ didn't touch any of them,' he
said.
'Neither did I. But he did, remember?'
Locke remembered; scenes like that weren't easy to
forget, try as he might. 'Christ,' he said, his voice
hushed. 'What a fucking situation.'
'I'm going back to Santarem. I don't want them
coming looking for me.'
124
'They're not going to.'
'How do you know? We screwed up back there. We
could have bribed them. Got them off the land some
other way.'
'I doubt it. You heard what Tetelman said. Ancestral
territories.'
'You can have my share of the land,' Stumpf said, 'I
want no part of it.'
'You mean it then? You're getting out?'
'I feel dirty. We're spoilers, Locke.'
'It's your funeral.'
'I mean it. I'm not like you. Never really had the
stomach for this kind of thing. Will you buy my third
off me?'
'Depends on your price.'
'Whatever you want to give. It's yours.'
Confessional over, Stumpf returned to his bed, and lay
down in the darkness to finish off his cigarette. It would
soon be light. Another jungle dawn: a precious interval,
all too short, before the world began to sweat. How
he hated the place. At least he hadn't touched any
of the Indians; hadn't even been within breathing
distance of them. Whatever infection they'd passed
on to Cherrick he could surely not be tainted. In less
than forty-eight hours he would be away to Santarem,
and then on to some city, any city, where the tribe
could never follow. He'd already done his penance,
hadn't he? Paid for his greed and his arrogance with
the rot in his abdomen and the terrors he knew
he would never quite shake off again. Let that be
punishment enough, he prayed, and slipped, before
the monkeys began to call up the day, into a spoiler's
sleep.
A gem-backed beetle, trapped beneath Stumpfs
125
mosquito net, hummed around in diminishing circles,
looking for some way out. It could find none. Eventually,
exhausted by the search, it hovered over the sleeping
man, then landed on his forehead. There it wandered,
drinking at the pores. Beneath its imperceptible tread,
Stumpf s skin opened and broke into a trail of tiny
wounds.
They had come into the Indian hamlet at noon; the sun
a basilisk's eye. At first they had thought the place
deserted. Locke and Cherrick had advanced into the
compound, leaving the dysentery-ridden Stumpf in the
jeep, out of the worst of the heat. It was Cherrick who
first noticed the child. A pot-bellied boy of perhaps four
or five, his face painted with thick bands of the scarlet
vegetable dye urucu, had slipped out from his hiding
place and come to peer at the trespassers, fearless in his
curiosity. Cherrick stood still; Locke did the same. One
by one, from the huts and from the shelter of the trees
around the compound, the tribe appeared and stared,
like the boy, at the newcomers. If there was a flicker
of feeling on their broad, flat-nosed faces, Locke could
not read it. These people - he thought of every Indian as
part of one wretched tribe - were impossible to decipher;
deceit was their only skill.
'What are you doing here?' he said. The sun was
baking the back of his neck. 'This is our land.'
The boy still looked up at him. His almond eyes
refused to fear.
'They don't understand you,' Cherrick said.
'Get the Kraut out here. Let him explain it to
them.'
'He can't move.'
'Get him out here,' Locke said. 'I don't care if he's shat
his pants.'
126
Cherrick backed away down the track, leaving Locke
standing in the ring of huts. He looked from doorway
to doorway, from tree to tree, trying to estimate the
numbers. There were at most three dozen Indians, two-
thirds of them women and children; descendants of the
great peoples that had once roamed the Amazon Basin
in their tens of thousands. Now those tribes were all but
decimated. The forest in which they had prospered for
generations was being levelled and burned; eight-lane
highways were speeding through their hunting grounds.
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