Indígena

Photo by Jose Roberto V Moraes

It wasn’t the guns that bothered her but rather the heat, which was the true killing machine. Guns had always been with her; they figured in her earliest memories. Her father dismantling a revolver on the kitchen table as she picked at her greasy Ulster fry. The RUC boys armed to the teeth outside the greengrocer’s smashed door, outfitted for war in a dank city street. High-powered rifles with sniper scopes laid out in the boot like firewood or cradled like infants as her uncles stalked through the muddy darkness along the right-of-way. Guns were cityscape. By the age of twelve she could identify make and model from a ten-yard remove and judge ammunition by the results it fetched: peering down from the second floor of the grammar school as boys shot pigeons off ledges, she could guess the calibre by the damage done. When she turned fourteen, her brother Roddy made sure she had her own pistol, a battered Webley, and knew when to use it.

Despite himself, Moore had been impressed with her expertise when they met. It was in the first days after the flood, when men were still sandbagging the riverbank and women tracked red mud from house to house, the rainforest floor roiling with steam. The humidity was absolute.

“Classic Widowmaker there,” she’d said from the adjacent table, a grilled tamuatá untouched before her. An AR-18 was slung over the guest chair opposite him. It was not uncommon for local men to carry hunting rifles, whether to shoot marauding strays or take boar, but an automatic weapon in the possession of a gringo was another matter. “Japanese or American?”

Moore regarded her without emotion, as was his way even with close associates and lovers, his pitted face a perfect mask. He waited for her as if he’d been the one to pose the question. But men no longer intimidated her, and she stared at him with clean concentration, refusing to back down. After a methodical sip of beer he said: “American. Seventy-two.”

“Brilliant. Gas ring holding up?”

She saw a calculation ripple across Moore’s forehead, where you could sometimes read his thoughts. She’d got his attention. Possibly he’d never met a woman who could talk weaponry with such composure and mastery. “Thing is,” she said, “over time that ring’ll fail you and you’ll short-stroke. You won’t get one bloody round off.” She saw him straighten in his cane chair, shift his stocky shoulders awkwardly. He would prefer it if she left, perhaps—or failing that, stepped over to dine with him. “I’m Maeve, by the way. And your own good self?”

By way of reply he turned his chair half away from her, which at the same time left it half facing her.

She knew the evening mosquitoes would soon roam in from the river, moving across the open-air patio in ragged death squads. Tontons Macoutes, she called them, but the joke was lost on everyone. The locals knew almost nothing of Manaus, much less of Haiti. What still shocked her was that the American ecotourists didn’t follow her, either—her guests might have the wherewithal to travel from Chicago or Kansas City to the Brazilian interior, but they had no more knowledge of history than a backcountry indígena. They knew nothing of the Troubles, nothing of the Duvalier bloodbath—nothing of her world. Disgraceful, but their ignorance protected her.

She could see the lolling river from where she sat, the water brown as shoe leather, foul-smelling and noxious since the rains had washed the shantytown away. The makeshift hovels had been well upstream, far out of town, but day by day one saw more evidence of them as the river continued to lick at the remains. Corpses had been spotted drifting past, the odd sling chair or Styrofoam cooler, bloated dogs and feral pigs, a buoyant crucifix swirling in an eddy as if possessed by...