Any Deadly Thing Read online

  –Don’t think so.

  His daughter’s up close, and the dog’s alongside, its fur in her fists, and it watches the man like it knows him but not too well.

  –Could you ask him at least?

  –I’ll ask. But you know how kids are.

  Jay looks at his daughter, shrugs, and she goes tight. He nods, finishes his coffee, heads back up. He’s almost done when the rain starts and the roof goes slick. He hammers a little faster. Cranley comes out, asks how much longer.

  –Ten minutes.

  –Got to get started.

  –Ten minutes.

  Cranley stands there, watches, gets rained on the whole ten minutes, no hat or coat, just stands there getting wet. Then it’s done. Jay looks things over. Cranley waves him down. Jay hangs his hammer on his belt, takes a step and his feet go out from under him. He’s sliding fast, twists and reaches, misses the gutter, slams into the ground beside the pump house and there’s hard hot white in his gut.

  Piece of fucking rebar. He fights at the air, settles back. It’s gone clear through, pokes out his stomach, pulls at him inside.

  Rain on his face and Cranley’s there telling him to stay quiet, they’ll call an ambulance, get him taken care of, it’ll all be all right. Jay can barely breathe and it’s hard to tell what’s still whole. He holds the rebar. Cranley’s talking slower. There’s others, and they lift him.

  He breathes as shallow as he can, closes his eyes as they carry him in and lay him on his side. It hurts but maybe not enough. There’s talk of the rebar and they leave it in place to keep the bleeding down, get a pillow under his head and they’re talking again, something, Cranley trying to get them settled and they won’t have it and nothing matters but how much it hurts.

  His daughter’s scream, though, he opens his eyes and he’s lying on the little stage up front, everybody else close around and she’s fighting her way toward him but the preacher’s wife catches her up, bears her off toward the back. Her screams fade a bit and it’s best this way, exactly how he wants it. The air catches and twists inside him. Music starts, tambourines, all kinds of singing and something else, dancing and hopping and spinning, and Cranley comes forward with a big cloth bag.

  Voices wild, the music faster. Cranley looks at Jay, and Jay nods. Cranley opens the bag, brings out the snake, asks if he’s sure. Jay nods again, would tell them if he could, he believed as he fell and before all that and believes now, but there’s no words for it except whatever these people are saying as they jump and sway.

  There’s wet coming out his mouth and he wonders if the rebar hit a lung. Cranley’s voice again, says the ambulance is coming but he needs to hold on and this will help. Jay smiles, says he knows. Cranley leans in close, sets the snake around Jay’s neck and it curls heavy around the rebar and maybe it’s not the right thing, the snake buzzes and the voices go louder and there’s something behind it, a siren maybe but he can’t quite tell. Around him are other men with snakes and they lift them and shout and pray, the snakes knotting up and then loosening, going still, the music rises and spins and something releases, the music drops off and the dancing stops, nothing now but quiet and the smell of sweat.

  Jay hears his daughter again and she’s screaming or singing, no way to know, and she’ll be okay with them either way. His vision blurs, and he blinks hard. Things go mostly clear. The others talk, pray, something. The snake on his chest tightens and lifts, its skin rasping the side of his neck. The music starts again but slower, and the others are putting their snakes away, the light goes thick and bright, Cranley steps to him and reaches and Jay turns, Cranley smiles and the snake strikes, hits Jay right below the eye, snaps his head back, holds on, more heat and oh it hurts and Cranley’s pulling it away slipping it into the bag says it will all still be all right, the pain curls Jay up around the rebar and there’s lights and faces in close, his wife his daughter and hands on his shoulders his neck his face, voices and something singing and at last this yes this pain is exactly right.

  Bloodwood

  I WALK OUT onto my stoop as the sun starts to blur, and watch a bunch of the neighbor kids playing jaguars in the mud below. They bare their fangs and brandish their claws and run in and out through the posts that hold up the houses in our part of Belén. The bigger kids hunt down the smaller ones, pin them to the ground and pretend to rip out their jugulars.

  I finish my coffee and toss the dregs over the side. Under a house not far away there’s an odd-shaped shadow that wasn’t there a minute ago. It slips from post to post, and now I get a good look—it’s Lorenzo, who used to be a really nice kid. Then one night a couple of years ago his oldest brother drowned in the lake at the zoo where they both worked, and after that Lorenzo took a nosedive.

  I happen to know a little about high-speed descents. I got him a job sweeping up at the radio station where I do my show, but he stole an equalizer and Beto canned him. These days Lorenzo only comes over to ask for money, which I never give him, or food, which I usually do.

  English Hour is nothing special—daily news, local history, pop gossip. Most weeks it’s the worst-rated show on the station, which is just as well since I make it all up on the spot. The pay is about what you’d think but it covers me for propane and beer, and now there’s a knock on the rail at the bottom of my stairs, some guy I’ve never seen before.

  He asks if I’m the gringo carpenter. I tell him I am, and wave him on up. Like most of the men in Iquitos he’s five feet tall and bad teeth. The women, though, are sex on a stick, and go figure.

  I ask the guy what he wants and he asks if I can build him a bloodwood credenza with hand-cut French dovetail joints on the drawers. That kind of thing is bigger money than I usually see, and I tell him I wouldn’t have the joints any other way. I ask when he needs it, and he says two weeks, so I’ll have time to find out about French dovetails—I’ve seen plenty on antiques but never done them myself, let alone by hand. He gives me a sketch, we talk detailing and finishes, and agree on a price so fat you just know he’s running coke. He counts out a ten percent deposit, and I tell him that’s less than I usually want; he asks if I really want to quibble on a job this big, then shakes my hand, walks down the stairs and away.

  The hardwoods here are spectacular—cumaru rich as oak and grained even prettier, redheart and andiroba, Santos mahogany. I don’t have a real workshop, just a bench and a tool rack in the back room. Word-of-mouth brings a little business in though lately things have been slow, slow as in all my shirts are see-through but they didn’t start out that way, and maybe this credenza will help turn things around.

  Belén is the part of Iquitos that the tourist brochures call the Amazonian Venice. I doubt they’re fooling anyone. Five months a year the river comes right to your stoop, and it’s canoes or peque-peques to work or school or market, but the rest of the time it’s trash and mud to your ankles, the floating houses sunk in the muck and the stilted ones stuck fifteen feet in the air.

  How I got here in the first place, well, when even the fake gunfighters at the Calico Ghost Town Regional Park won’t have you—when the manager tells you not to come back until you’ve learned how to fall down dead—Iquitos is the kind of place you end up. It’s the biggest city in the world that can’t be reached by road, so if you want in, you come by boat or by airplane, and I still remember the end of that last flight. I couldn’t believe the clouds down below, dense as forest, bright white.

  Now the sun’s down and the mosquitoes are starting to swarm. I go inside, and hunched on the kitchen counter is a capuchin named Assface. When he first started hanging out at my house, I called him Silvio, but one night I brought a bargirl home from Arandú, and he took a dump on my bed. If he wasn’t so good at letting me know about snakes in the house, I’d long ago have borrowed a shotgun and sold him for scrap meat at the market.

  There’s a little chicken left in the fridge. I start a pot of rice for juanes, use about half of it, scoop the rest onto a plate for the monkey. Without even tast
ing it he throws it on the floor.

  To which I say: Assface, Assface, Assface. He looks at me, and eats a single grain, and comes over to search my hair for nits, but it’s almost time for my show. I tell him we’re cool, put on a cleaner shirt and head for the station.

  In the Plaza de Armas there’s a bunch of tourists climbing out of vans, and half of them have hats that say Quistococha Zoo. That’s a place I used to go fairly often. It’s smack in the middle of the jungle, not even a fence around the outside, just kind of an edge where they decided to stop slashing vines. The first time I went, standing barefoot at the entrance was this skinny ten-year-old. He said that his name was Lorenzo, and for a small fee he would tell me about the animals. I waved my guidebook at him and said I had those bases covered. He pretended he hadn’t heard, started playing out his memorized spiel with this singsong accent that I thought was something he’d been taught, but in fact that’s just how they talk in this part of Peru.

  We headed down the walkway, and the first thing you see is a bunch of murals about local legends—there’s a mermaid and a demon, a donkey and some kind of ghost boat. He kept talking, and from what I could tell he knew almost nothing about the animals, who were as sad and beautiful as zoo animals anywhere. There were kinkajous and spider monkeys, ocelots and tapirs and a jaguar, toucans and otters and a pond full of paiche, which are these armored fish maybe seven feet long, and I’ve since run into them in restaurants, and I’m sorry but you’ve never in your life had fish this good.

  The only point where Lorenzo came in handy was in the Snake House, which is just this open-air ring of glass cages under thatch. I was looking at a boa when he yelled, Snake! And I thought, No shit, but then he yelled again and I looked and sure enough, not in a cage but on the ground, thin and black and mean-looking. I asked if it was poisonous, and he said it was, and kicked it clear over to the peccary pen where it got caught in the fence and the peccaries tore it apart and ate it.

  He led me down to a little restaurant beside the lake where his brother ended up drowning a couple of months later. I bought him a Fanta and told him he should invest in some footwear if he was going to be kicking venomous reptiles. He said he would if he had the cash. He ended up being my official guide to everywhere, so I bought him a nice pair of leather sneakers.

  He wore them constantly until the night his brother stole them and snuck out of the house to meet some friends. When they pulled the body from the water the shoes were gone. By the time I got around to buying Lorenzo new ones, all I could afford were canvas tennies. He wore them for a year and handed them down through the brothers he had left. His baby brother Alonso still wears them, shreds held together with duct tape and twine.

  I get to the station, and Beto tells me I’ve got a special guest. I tell him I don’t particularly need one. He says he knows, but she came by around lunchtime asking to be on English Hour, and he’s hoping to get in her pants.

  She’s waiting for me in the studio, five-foot-ten and sweet in all directions, won’t tell me her name, says she’s the Poetess. Her English is spotty, and she hasn’t bothered to translate the poems she reads, but I’m not caring much at this point, even if she’s obviously one of those women who wants everything to mean something. She talks about her new feline series, how the jaguar is dark and bejeweled, which isn’t exactly how I’d put it but what do I know from poetry. When the hour’s done I ask if she wants to go get some coffee, and she says she thinks maybe not, so I head home.

  Belén is Spanish for Bethlehem, and Quistococha means Christ of the Lake, but knowing Peru it’s just a coincidence that the two are so close together. I’m scrubbing yams when Lorenzo shows up. He says he’s got this plan he can’t tell me about and all he needs is a little capital. I ask how much and he says five dollars. His eyes are shot red and he’s slurring his words and what he really wants is for me to go look for my wallet so he can steal a can of glue off my workbench.

  I tell him I can spot him the money in an hour. He says okay and takes off. I start locking up my tools, and wouldn’t it be nice if he was still some stupid kid punting snakes in the Snake House.

  In the morning I head into town to pick up materials and chat with Mateo, who used to be a carpenter but now does good business running jungle tours. He’s got three wives in three houses and one son by each: Mateo Junior, Mateo Segundo, and Mateo Tercero, his three assistant guides. In Spanish the word for wives is the same as the word for handcuffs, and you’d think there’d be a lesson there, but somehow there isn’t at all.

  A bunch of Danes are standing in the doorway trying on rubber boots, and Mateo Segundo is telling them about piranhas, how the movies have it backwards, that people eat piranhas instead of the other way around, but I’ve sat by the fire at his base camp and belted back his cañazo and heard the truth about his cousin who’s missing a leg from the knee down. Turns out you do need to make sure you don’t get drunk and go swimming in one of those little oxbow lakes that form when a river dries up in both directions—the piranhas stranded in there have already eaten everything else.

  I ask Mateo Segundo where his dad is, and he says he’s in back getting provisions ready. I find him stretched out on a bunch of canvas bags that are spilling dried lentils. It looks like he’s sound asleep but as I sit down he opens one eye.

  –What time is it?

  –Maybe nine.

  –Okay. You need any lentils?

  –What I need is to find out about hand-cut French dovetails.

  –They’re like hand-cut French pigeontails, only fancier.

  It takes me a second to get that this is a joke. He stands up, dusts himself off, takes a look at the sketch. He doodles a little in the margins, layout and chiseling and dry-fitting. He asks what I’m making it from, says that I’ll need to practice first on scrap, but that even if the joints are bad they’ll be fine since the client has no idea either, probably.

  I thank him, push through the Danes and head for the lumberyards. Halfway there, though, there’s this restaurant, and sitting at a sidewalk table is the Poetess. She looks even better in the sunlight. I ask if I can sit down, and she says sure as long as we don’t talk about her poems, so I’m guessing the muse is on vacation.

  I order aguaje juice, which I don’t even like but at least it’s something to talk about—the fruit are these little brown golf balls, almost all seed with a thin layer of sour yellow flesh covered by scales you have to strain with your teeth. The Poetess leans back, says I have interesting hands. I say that I sure do, and here comes Lorenzo up the street, a dirty plastic bag sticking out of his pocket.

  He sees me, stumbles up to our table, tells me exactly the same story as last night except now it’s twenty dollars he needs. I give him the aguaje juice and tell him what he really needs is a shower. He asks the Poetess for spare change, and she hands him what she’s got in her pocket. When he walks away she asks how I know him. I tell her and she nods.

  –You should do something to help him, she says.

  –I tried. It didn’t work out.

  –I thought he was your friend.

  –He’s this kid I know.

  –Still.

  –How about you go help him yourself?

  She apologizes, and I wave it away. I pay for the juice, and thank her for the conversation. Then I head off to find somebody who’s got dry bloodwood and still thinks my credit is good.

  I wake up to find Assface sitting on my chest. He’s tugging softly on my eyebrows, which is one of the ways he lets me know he’s hungry. I shrug him off, tell him to keep his pants on, and search around for my own pants. The fridge and cupboards are empty so it’s time for a run to the market.

  This is the first time I’ve left the house in ten days except to do English Hour, which itself has been a mess because Beto’s pissed that I tried to cut in line with the Poetess—he keeps fooling with the soundboard while I’m making stuff up about Madonna being Elvis’ daughter and a sixty-foot anaconda discovered in Pucallpa and
how the jaguar just escaped from the zoo. The morning’s as nice as they come, rich blue sky and not too hot. I decide to take my time just a little, and if Assface feels in danger of starving to death he can always pick his own damn fruit from actual trees.

  I walk slow all the way up the waterfront. Half the rubber baron mansions are falling apart, and half are still as beautiful as they were a hundred years ago. Near the plaza there’s a bunch of Brazilians running back and forth in front of the Eiffel House like they just won something, and for all I know they did.

  I loop back around, and the market’s got all your basic market stuff, kitchenware and candy and socks, plus a whole other section for the kind of things you’d expect from the Amazon, herbs and roots and vines, fish from other planets and meats you’d rather not know about. Even I sometimes get a little queasy walking past the turtle shells full of monster grubs writhing in thick red aguaje sap. The way it works is, you have to cut down the trees and let them rot—it’s the only way to get the grubs to show up in a place where you can find them. They’re three inches long and two inches thick. If you grill them just right they taste like chestnuts, and if you don’t they taste just like they look.

  I duck in and out through the awnings, push down to the fish section. Paco is cheap today, and I pick up a string for lunch. Then the usual things, as much coffee and veggies and meat as I can afford. On my way out I stop by to say hello to Gloria, who’s maybe seventy and is here all day every day selling little bits of charcoal.

  There’s a tourist trying to take her picture. I’m betting he thinks the cuts on her feet are picturesque. Just as he clicks the shutter I smack the back of his neck with the string of fish.

  He turns and says something angry in probably German, and I take a paco in each hand, squeeze them so their teeth show, and do this puppet thing where the fish talk about how much I’d like to kick the German’s ass. It takes him a while but he gets it. Gloria thanks me and tries to give me some charcoal, but I tell her I’m doing good in that department and to have a nice day.