Chapter 1
'Some great memories there', said the man, pointing his chin to a dirt soccer field. 'That gets my juices moving.'
'What's this place?'
'It's called Amelia Rodrigues. Some famous Brazilian, I guess. We played a state championship here once. Cesar and me.'
The bus swerved and whacked dead ahead into a pot-hole. 'Mother of God' a lady in the back shrieked, 'You hurt my hip on that one.' The driver shifted down a gear and started churning up a long, straight grade.
'If this breaks down again we should get right off', Angelica told the man sitting next to her. 'Just leave it and try some other way. Start all over again. Start from Amelia Rodrigues.' They were almost four hours on the road out of Salvador. It was supposed to be a two hour trip.
The view out the window was changing. When they first left Salvador it was a lush tropical green. Giant coconut-palms nodded and trailed their ragged hair in the sea-breeze. Erosion from road construction slashed through sandy hills. Now they saw the state of Bahia unfurling into seas of sugar cane. Pedro had worked here for a few months when he was a kid. This was one of his harvest-time stops. Dark-red clay, richer than anyplace in the Northeast. They even had a special name for it, 'massape'. It sucked at your bare feet and made a thuck sound when you yanked loose. The people spoke the word carefully, with reverence: 'massape'. It never let the crop fail. The workers' huts perched above the roadside, dirty white walls stuck together in rows of eight or ten, quietly meditating on their long histories. Maybe descendants of plantation slaves, Pedro thought, and still living in the same shacks. In about half an hour the country would change again, more slowly this time, and they would enter a vast, dry savannah, bigger than France and Germany together, the Brazilian sertao.
'The Jesuit Fathers owned all of this', someone behind them explained to his companion, as if he heard Pedro thinking. 'Three hundred years ago. The sugar refineries and the Africans.' Pedro never knew that. And he'd ridden back and forth along this road many times.
'He sounds like he's pretty smart.'
'Just don't start up a conversation with him, OK? Please.'
He stood up to give her a little room to stretch. He reached to the overhead handrail and swung with the roll of the bus. He'd snipped off half of his right index finger cutting cane in one of those fields out there. A nurse's aide stitched it up for him, and it was twisted and livid at the end, like make-up in a movie. He sometimes used it to make his point.
'Take it easy now' he told the girl. 'Just cool off.' He took off his leather hat and rolled his head around to loosen up his neck.
Most of the land was changing to pastures. Dairy Holsteins grazed alongside hump-backed Zebu steers, shank-deep in greenish brown timothy. Dirt roads from farms and huts off in the hills streamed straight down to the highway.
'You listening to him, Angelica? The Jesuits maybe owned your ancestors.'
She was staring at the back of the seat in front of her. Almond eyes. She's prettier than her mother, Pedro suddenly thought. She leaned forward to stretch her shoulders, and a mass of blackest hair tumbled down in front of her. A tiny silver crucifix swung from her neck.
'If only hair were money,' he told her once again. 'We'd be filthy rich.'
'Right. And if shit were money, poor people would be born without ass-holes.'
He raised a bushy eyebrow at her language. Then turned to gaze out the front window and scratch his jaw.
'I suppose.'
A red convertible Mustang exploded past them on the way up a hill. A beefy farmer sunk in white leather upholstery. He peered up at them through dark glasses, the tiny calf-skin hat of the sertanejo fastened under his chin.
'Do you smell the gas, Father? Let's get off this, before it breaks down again. We'll get a ride. Somebody will stop.'
Hang tough just a little longer. It's been a long trip. We don't want to quit. We're OK. If our driver doesn't make a wrong turn and get us lost.'
The young man standing next to Pedro stunk of body odor. He was clean-shaven and neatly dressed in new Levi's and a cotton sleeveless shirt. His shoes were polished to a shine.
'You know, sometimes I think you like it here. You look like you're having fun. Like you'd rather be on this filthy bus, instead of in a car.'
'Maybe so. In a way you're right.' But he was watching the unwashed boy, ready to leg-check him away from the seat next to Angelica. He put his hand on the seat railing and leaned down close to her. 'When I look around I guess you're right.'
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