The Last Place God Made

TWELVE

We were three days in the hold of an old stern-wheeler that worked its way up-river once a week, calling at every village on the way with a jetty large enough to lay alongside. Most people travelled on deck, sleeping in hammocks because of the heat. The guards let us up once a day for air, usually in the evening, but in spite of that two of the older men died.

One of the prisoners, a small man with skin like dried-up leather and hair that was prematurely white, had already served seven months at Machados while awaiting trial. He painted a harrowing picture of a kind of hell on earth, a charnel house where the whip was the order of the day and men died like flies from ill-treatment and disease.

But for me the present was enough. A nightmare, no reality to it at all. I found myself a dark little corner of my own and crouched there for two days in a kind of stupor, unable to believe that this was really happening to me. It was real enough, God knows and the pain and the squalor and the hunger of it could not be evaded. It existed in every cruel detail and it was Hannah who had put me here.

Munro had done his best with me during this period, patiently continuing to talk, even when I refused to answer, feeding me cigarettes until the packet I'd given him was empty. In the end, he gave up the struggle in a kind of disgust and I recalled his final words clearly as he got up and shuffled away.

‘Forgive me, senhor, I can see I've been talking to a man who is already dead.’

It took a dead man to bring me back to life. On the evening of the third day I was awakened by the sound of the hatch being opened. There was a general movement instantly, everyone eager to be the first out into the clean air. The man next to me still slept on, leaning heavily against me, his head on my shoulder. I shoved him away and he went over in slow motion and lay still.

Munro pushed his way through the press and went down on his knees. After a while he shrugged and scrambled to his feet. ‘He's been dead for two or three hours.’

My flesh crawled, I felt in some indefinable way unclean for it was as if death in taking this man had touched me also. Someone called out and a guard came down the ladder. He checked the body casually then nodded to Munro and me. ‘You two — get him on deck.’

Munro said, ‘I'll get on my knees and you put him over my shoulder. It's the easiest way.’

He got down and I stood there, trapped by the horror of it all, filled with unutterable loathing at the idea of even touching that body.

The guard belted me across the shoulder blades with his club, the usual careless brutality. ‘Get moving, we haven't got all day.’

Somehow I got the body across Munro's shoulders, followed him up the ladder, chains rattling against the wooden bars. There were only half a dozen passengers and they were all comfortably settled under an awning in the prow where they caught what breezes were going. The rest of the prisoners already squatted in the stern and a couple of guards lounged on a hatch-cover, smoking and playing cards.

One of them glanced up as we approached. ‘Over with him,’ he said. ‘And throw him well out. We don't want him getting into the paddle wheels.’

I took him by the ankles, Munro by the shoulders. We swung him between us in an arc out over the rail. There was a splash, ibis rose in a dark cloud, black against the sky, the beating of their wings filling the air.

Munro crossed himself. I said, ‘You can still believe in God?’

He seemed surprised. ‘But what has God to do with this, senhor? This is Man and Man only.’

‘I've got a friend I'd like you to meet some time,’ I told him. ‘I think you'd get on famously.’

He had one cigarette left, begged a light from the guard and we went to the rail to share it. He started to crouch. I said, ‘No, let's stand. I've been down there long enough.’

He peered at my face in the half-darkness, leaning close. ‘I think you are yourself again, my friend.’

‘I think so, too.’

We stood there at the rail looking out across the river at the jungle, black against the evening sky as the sun set. It was extraordinarily beautiful and everything was still. No bird called and the only sound was the steady swish of the paddles. Munro left me for a while and went and crouched beside Ramis, the man who had already spent some time at Machados.

When he returned he said quietly, ‘According to Ramis we'll be there in the morning. He says we leave the Negro about twenty miles from here. There's a river called the Seco which cuts into the heart of the swamp. Machados is on some kind of island about ten miles inside.’

It was as if the gate was already swinging shut and I was filled with a sudden dangerous excitement. ‘Can you swim?’

‘In these?’ he said, raising his hands.

I stretched the chain between my wrists. There was about two and a half feet of it and the same between the ankles. ‘Enough for some sort of dog paddle. I think I could keep afloat long enough to reach the bank.’

‘You'd never make it, my friend,’ he said. ‘Look there by the stern.’

I peered over the rail. Alligators’ eyes glow red at night. Down there, tiny pin-pricks gleamed balefully in the darkness as they followed the boat like gulls at sea, waiting for the leavings.

‘I have as great a desire for freedom as you,’ Munro said softly, ‘but suicide is another matter.’

And suicide was the only word for it, he was right enough there. In any event, the moment had passed for the guards put their cards away, formed us into a line and put us back in the hold.

It was Ramis who saved me by cutting his throat just after dawn with a razor blade he had presumably secreted on his person, since Manaus. He took several minutes to die and it wasn't pleasant listening to him gurgle his life away there in the semi-darkness.

We were perhaps two or three miles into the Seco at the time and it had an explosive effect on the rest of the prisoners. One man cracked completely, screaming like a woman, trampling his way through the others in an attempt to reach the ladder.

Panic swept through the group then, men kicking and cursing at each other, struggling wildly. The hatch went back with a crash, there was a warning shot into the air and everyone froze. A guard came halfway down the ladder, a pistol in his hand. Ramis sprawled face-down and everyone stood back from the body. The guard dropped in and turned him over with a foot. He was a ghastly sight, his throat gaping, the razor still firmly grasped in his right hand.

‘All right,’ the guard said. ‘Let's have him up.’

I moved before anyone else and got a hand to the body and Munro, by a kind of telepathy, was with me. He took the razor from the clenched hand and I heaved Ramis over his shoulder.

There was blood everywhere. My hands were smeared with it and it splashed down on my head and face and I followed Munro up on deck.

The river was only thirty or forty yards wide and mangrove swamp stretched away on either side, mist curling up from the surface of the water in the cold morning air. Even then, at that fixed point in time, I was not certain of what I intended to do. Things happened, I think, because they happened and very much by chance.

A miserable village, half a dozen huts constructed on sticks above a mudbank, drifted by. There were a couple of fishing nets stretched out on poles to dry and three canoes drawn up out of the water.

It was enough. I glanced at Munro. He nodded. As the village disappeared into the curling mist, we moved past the guards with our bloody burden and went to the rail.

‘Go on, over with him,’ the sergeant in charge said. ‘Then get this deck cleaned up.’

He was standing by the hatch smoking. Another guard sat beside him, a carbine across his knees. They were the only two on view although there had to be others around. I took Ramis by the ankles, Munro took his arms. We swung him once, then twice. The third time we simply threw him at the sergeant and the guard on the hatch. I didn't even wait to see what happened, but flung myself awkwardly over the rail.

I started to kick wildly the moment the water closed over my head, aware of the constriction of the chains, aware also of the danger from the paddle wheel at the stern. Kicking with my feet was easy enough and I simply clawed both hands forward in a frenzy, the turbulence all around me in the water as the boat slid past.

It would be some time before they could get it to stop, that would be one point in our favour, but they had already started firing. A bullet kicked water into the air a yard in front of me. I glanced over my shoulder, saw Munro some little way behind, the sergeant and three guards at the rail.

They all seemed to fire at once and Munro threw up his hands and disappeared. I took a deep breath and went under, clawing my way forward for all I was worth. When I surfaced I was into the first line of mangroves and in any case, the stern-wheeler had already faded into the mist.

I hung on to a root for a moment to get my breath, spitting out brackish, foul-tasting water. The general smell at that level was terrible and a snake glided by, reminding me unpleasantly of the hazards I was likely to meet if I stayed in the water too long. But anything was better than Machados.

I slid into the water again, struck out into the stream and allowed the current to take me along with it. I could already see the roofs of the huts above the trees for the mist at that point lay close to the surface of the water.

I grounded in the mud below the pilings a few moments later and floundered out of the water, tripping over my leg chains at one point and falling on my face. When I struggled up I found an old man staring at me from the platform of one of the huts, a wretched creature who wore only a tattered cotton shirt.

When I got hold of the nearest canoe and shoved it towards the water, he gave vent to some sort of cry. I suppose I was taking an essential part of his livelihood or some other poor wretch's. God knows what misery my action was leaving behind, but that was life. Somehow, in spite of the awkwardness of the chains I managed to get into the frail craft, picked up a paddle and pushed out into the current.

I didn't really think they would turn the stern-wheeler around and come down-river looking for me, but some sort of search would obviously be mounted as soon as possible. It would be when they discovered a canoe had been taken from the village that the fun would start.

It seemed essential that I got as much distance under me as possible. Whatever happened afterwards would have to be left to chance. Once into the Negro I would find plenty of riverside villages where people lived a primitive day-to-day life which didn't even recognise the existence of such trappings of civilisation as the police and the government. If I was lucky I'd find help and a little luck was something for which I was long overdue.

A couple of miles and I was obviously close to the confluence of the Negro. I was aware of the currents pulling, the surface turning over on itself. A mistake here and I was finished for I had no hope of keeping afloat for long in such conditions in my chained state.

I turned the canoe towards the left-hand side for I was at least fifty yards from the shore and it certainly looked as if I would be safer there. It seemed to be working and then, when I was a few yards from the mangrove trees, I seemed to slide down into a sudden turbulence.

It was like being seized in a giant hand, the canoe rocked from side to side, almost putting me over, I lost the paddle as I grabbed frantically at the sides to keep my balance and then we spun round twice and turned over.

My feet touched the bottom instantly, but the current was too strong for me to be able to stand. However, the canoe, bottom up, barged into me a moment later and I was able to fling my arms across the keel.

Things slowed down a little after that and we finally drifted into quiet water amongst the mangrove trees farther along and grounded against a mudbank.

I righted the canoe and took stock of the situation. The mouth of the river was about a quarter of a mile away and I didn't fancy my chances in the canoe, with or without a paddle. It seemed obvious that the best, indeed the only thing to do, was to attempt to cut through the mangroves on a diagonal course which would bring me out into the Negro down-river from the Seco.

I managed to get back into the canoe and pushed off, pulling myself along by the great roots of the trees until I came to a clump of bamboo where I managed to break myself off a length. From then on it wasn't too bad. Henley, the Thames on a Sunday afternoon in summer. All I needed was a gramophone and a pretty girl. For a moment, I seemed to see Joanna Martin leaning back and laughing at me from under her parasol. But it was entirely the wrong kind of laughter. Some measure of the condition I was in by then, I suppose. I took a deep breath to brace myself up to what lay ahead and started to pole my way out of there.