The Sword of Candomblé

Sofía stood beside Tom on the Altamira promenade, with its spacious view across the Xingu River. He looked tired after the 24 hour trip from the States. Hot, too, with sweat showing through his T-shirt in dark patches. It was still early, 10:00AM, but the Amazonian sun had already burned off the morning mists, and a gray sky promised rain. The stillness of the air intensified the heat, and even Sofia, a native, felt moisture in the small of her back.

“Which boat is ours,” Tom asked, doffing his baseball cap to push fingers through his red hair.

“There, the San Francisco.” Sofia pointed to a boat that looked like a shoe box whose front end had been lopped off, then covered with a blue tarp. Another twenty vessels floated nearby, all of them of simple construction and half of them listing. Mule-drawn carts moved slowly on the muddy sands that edged the brown waters of the river, and troops of boys loaded and off-loaded merchandise to the accompaniment of barking dogs.

“That’s going to get us to Jackie?” Tom asked.

“The skipper knows the river like the back of his hand.”

“Don’t the Federal Police have a plane?” Tom asked.

“No one knows where it is.”

“Juan’s using it to impress his girlfriends.”

“Probably,” Sofia said. Juan, chief of the Federal Police in Altamira, was nowhere to be found. Five days had passed since Jackie’s radio report of illegal logging in the indigenous territories of the Kayapó Indians. Five days since Sofía had called Tom, at Jackie’s request. Tom, an anthropology professor, had cancelled his classes claiming a family emergency, and flown to Altamira so they could go find her.

“There’re other pilots.” Tom said.

“No one’s available.”

“That’s right, Machado’s involved.”

“People can’t change their schedules at the last minute.”

“You’re still defending him?”

“No. It’s just he gets blamed for things because he’s successful,” Sofia said. Sofía, who worked for an environmental NGO with her boss and good friend Jackie, took it personally when Americans demonized Machado. He was just a local guy who’d come up the hard way.

“That’s right. Poor Machado. All those nasty newspaper stories.”

Yes, for some reason the Americans, the Europeans, always assumed that if you were a Brazilian who’d managed to make a few bucks, you had to be breaking the law. Sofia had been born and bred in Altamira, and knew from firsthand experience it wasn’t so easy to find success on the Amazonian frontier. But rather than argue, she reached down for her backpack to get going. As Tom bent over to help, their arms brushed, and Tom pulled away as if touching something hot.

“I won’t bite,” Sofia said.

“I know.”

“The boto only strikes at night.”

“You don’t believe all that,” Tom said. No, she didn’t really believe in the boto, the magical dolphin that could change into a human form for the express purpose of sensuous enchantment. It was perhaps the most durable Amazonian legend, and still functioned as an acceptable excuse for a surprise pregnancy or infidelity. Tom knew from personal experience of Sofia’s seductive powers, of the coppery skin as smooth as silk, of the supple body as pliable as a mango. But now he was with Jackie, who’d reclaimed him as hers during his last visit to the Amazon a month before.
“How do you know?” Sofia asked, setting off down the trail for the San Francisco, ruing the day she’d let herself be duped by this gringo’s careless smile. And for what?

…….so Tom could go running to Jackie the instant she snapped her fingers? Sofia bit back her anger as she walked onto the muddy beach of the port of Altamira. For all she cared, the two Americans could go home now and start making baby gringos.

***

Once they’d left the still waters of the port of Altamira, Sofia walked to the aft cabin, where she changed into the black thong bikini and turquoise sarong she’d bought the day before. Opening her compact, she brightened her lipstick and thickened her lashes, then held the mirror at arm’s length to make sure the sarong knot gave just the right accent to the curve of her hips. Done, she swept the waves of her jet-black hair so it fell abundantly over her shoulders. Not bad for “about thirty,” although Sofia preferred not to think in such terms, with age as a number. Petite but voluptuous, Sofia had started turning heads at fourteen, and took it for granted that men would always play the fool for her, which was the prerogative of a beautiful, Brazilian woman. But something had gone wrong with Tom.

Grabbing drinks from an ice-chest, Sofia returned to where Tom was sitting against a sack of rice on the bow of the boat. On handing a beer to Tom, she sat beside him in the shade of the tarp and opened her bottle of mineral water. It was noon. They’d been underway for a little over an hour, and had long since passed the slums of stilted shacks that sprawled at riverside just outside of town. The Xingu now flowed through a valley with forested hillsides, a half mile away to either side of the San Francisco. The diesel engine groaned as it shook the deck, and pushed them at five knots across the blue-brown water that glittered from sunlight where the breeze rippled. The wind from their modest speed was cooling in the shade of the tarp. '

After a couple sips of beer, Tom said, “I was surprised when Jackie met me up at the airport. Last month.”

Surprised about what, Sofia wondered, curious that Tom wasn’t on a rant to go save Jackie from Machado, the boogey-man. Yes, Jackie had gone to pick him up, something Sofia had been doing for the past year. In fact, she’d grown to look forward his arrival, to the clinging hug as he stepped through the gate, to the first of his caresses in the hotel where they’d stay, to the thoughtful gifts he always brought, even knick-knacks for her mother. Jackie had decided to put her relationship with Tom on hold, for reasons Sofia had never been able to fathom. And then, all of a sudden, she wanted him back. “There wasn’t much to it.” Sofia said. “We were eating breakfast one morning, and she said she was ready to see you again. She wanted to know your flight schedule.”

“I never understood that part,” Tom said.

“That part being…..?”

“You two as room-mates.”

Room-mates. Friends. Jackie’d broken up with Tom because she wasn’t ready for the “next step.” Jackie’s words exactly, as if expecting a favor from her, which was the way Sofia interpreted it. Give Tom something to do when he came down with all his new computers. For her part, Sofia’d been curious about Tom, who helped the NGO financially by funneling grant dollars its way. Sofia had come to find the men of Altamira somewhat repetitive. Small town with limited prospects, once you subtracted out the con-men and the “easy come, easy go types,” with thick wads of cash from short-lived gold strikes. Tom travelled to the Amazon often and one thing led to another. Sofia said, “When I told her the date, she said she’d meet you.”

“That’s all?”

“You mean did I tear my hair out and cry?” Sofia glanced at Tom, then to their course ahead before he could see her frown. Tom was nothing like a Brazilian “pretty boy,” with a gold necklace and mousse in his hair, about the best you could hope for in a place like Altamira. But the pretty boys weren’t like Tom, either. They didn’t have his faraway look, his love for the raw wilderness of the forest, the wilderness that also drew Sofia, a native woman who’d grown up on in a shack on the Xingu. And as much as Sofia longed to escape Altamira, the water of the river was the blood of her veins.

“Why didn’t you let me know what was going on?” Tom asked.

“What for?” Tom surely knew the answer to this. How many times had they assured each other that their “relationship” wasn’t a relationship. And Sofia hadn’t wanted commitments. At least she’d started out that way.

“I don’t know. If I’d known,” Tom said.

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“I feel bad how it happened.”

“Just stop. I don’t want to talk about the airport.”

A heavy thump on deck surprised them from behind, and they turned to see the skipper, Benét, who’d just hopped down from the pilot house above. He looked about fifty, wore an Aussie-style campaign cap, and had the wiry build of a coiled spring. Sofia introduced the two men, and after some idle chit-chat, he asked Tom, “You’re Jackie’s homem, man?”

“Yes. Very much so,” Sofía said before Tom could answer.

Benét looked off to study their course, ahead to the gentle U the hills made in shaping the valley. Between them, low clouds showed purple edges that reached almost to the water in a ragged curtain. Done with his reconnaissance, he turned his attention back on Tom. “I’d a thought a man should handle the trouble part.”

Tom hesitated. “Trouble?”

“Cut-off out there like that. Machado, Indians.”
“It’s not easy to get down here from the States.”

“I see.”

“She doesn’t always keep me in the loop.”

“I see.”

Tom started to say something else but stopped, and instead jiggled his beer can, taking a sip as a breeze gusted across the bow. Benét grabbed his hat and leaned forward to brace himself. Once the gust had passed, he nodded at them and hurried back up to the pilot house, not waiting for Tom to continue.

Sofia’d promised herself not to give Tom a hard time about what had happened, but she couldn’t resist the opening Benét had given her. “The excuses are very nice.”

Tom fiddled with his beer can.

Yes, she should let it go, think about the future, not the past. But she couldn’t. “You were curious about the airport?”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about the airport.”

Sofia had known the outcome in advance, which was that there wasn’t a future with Tom, because it was the way they wanted it. The way she wanted it! But Tom could’ve handled it better. He could’ve at least called, which he didn’t. He’d slinked away without a word, after she’d wasted a year of her life trying to help him through the doldrums with Jackie. For what? “I don’t. I want to hear your excuses.”

Tom crushed his beer can. “You knew what was going on.”

“So that’s your excuse? That I already knew?”

“I tried calling….”

“How considerate.”

“I don’t remember you wanting to get all cozy and committed.”

“That’s not the point,” Sofia said, unable to keep her voice from quavering.

“Then what’s the point?” Tom asked.

“The point is…..” Sofia looked at the white-out of the rain closing in from their course ahead, blurring the surface of the river with a smoky mist. The breeze piped up in cool, wet blasts, carrying smells from the forest that lay before them in the hidden recesses of the Xingu, the scent of its blooms and the stink of its rotting vegetation. She was going to get soaked, but it didn’t matter. Her thoughts on full boil, she snapped, “The point is….you got to have your cake and eat it too. Brazilian babe for sex, and white-girl for the “getting serious” stuff.

“What?”

Sofia saw the shock in his eyes but couldn’t stop. “So did you brag about it?”

“Brag?”

Sofia knew he’d never do such a thing. But Tom had hurt her, even if she was just as much to blame. “To your friends? You know…Tom Mercer, Amazonian researcher, Amazonian stud.”

When Tom grabbed her arm, Sofia was ready and jerked away. But not hard enough to come back from the memories. Sofia jumped up as the wind gusted, as the rain slapped her face like cold tears. She scurried aft to the warmth of the cabin, where she tried to forget what had worked its way back into her heart, the way it had been with Tom. She should’ve told him how she really felt. She should’ve told herself.

***

Sofia and Tom walked along the beach, searching for a place to bathe in the calm waters of the Iriri, the tributary of the Xingu that would bring them to the Kayapó territories. Unlike the Xingu, which flowed between the green hills of a wide valley, the Iriri formed a web of streams twisting around tiny islets, all of them with halos of white sand backed by closed-canopy forest. The rain clouds had thinned with the onset of evening, although a lemony glow leaked through with the last of the daylight. But the river channels were rocky, in many places cut by rapids, and it was ill-advised to attempt passage without a high sun. So Benét had moored for the night, on the beach of one of many small islands that floated on river’s fractured stream course. They’d get to the Kayapó village in the morning.

“Good spot for a boto, don’t you think?” Sofia pointed to the shallows behind a spit of sand.
Tom scanned the area and nodded. The beach, about ten yards wide, pushed up to the flotsam of the river and an open hedge of shrubs, behind which the forest rose. Not a good ambush site for jaguars. Ipê trees were blooming with the lateness of the rainy season, and a perfumed breeze wafted to the water, the breath of the forest that had speckled the beach with star-shaped yellow flowers.

Sofia put her toiletries down, unwrapped herself from sarong and towel, and waded in. “You don’t believe in botos, or any of that do you?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts either. I’m the new breed of anthropologist. It’s all computers now.”

“What a shame.” Sofia reached for the shampoo and started on her hair.

Rather than responding, Tom got up to go find sticks for rigging their mosquito nets. He returned, pulled the pocket knife from his pocket, and got to work on one of them, scraping its bark off.

Sofia leaned back to rinse the lather from her hair. She felt Tom’s eyes on her, but barely. By now, the average Brazilian man would be telling her she was driving him crazy with her body.
“So how are things with Jackie?” he asked.

Sofía didn’t want to go back to the conversation that had set her off on the boat. But she couldn’t figure out what he was getting at. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re room-mates, for crissake.”

Sofia squeezed the water from her hair. Yes, they were room-mates. All the easier for Jackie to send Tom her way for intensive therapy. All the easier to ask Sofia to return him, once she was ready to start up again. “Things are fine. Why do you keep asking?”

“I feel bad about putting you in the situation.”

Sofia’d never participated in a conversation like this, in what appeared to be a post-mortem about a relationship that never really existed. She wondered if this was standard fare for break-up with a gringo, and was half glad he seemed to be suffering. She said with a smirk, “This is really bothering you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry. My cell phone’s burning up with calls.”

Sofia heard the woody snap, then the echo of Tom’s curses. He’d broken the stick he was working on. But instead of starting another one he got up, stripped to his underwear and walked past Sofia to the dark waters of the Iriri, dodging beneath the clouds of insects that swarmed near its surface. He jumped in, and swam in a hard crawl fifty yards, then a hundred. Just as Sofia started to worry he might go too far, out to where the current pulled or a caiman lurked, he stopped, his head almost indiscernible in the gathering dusk. At last he turned, swimming back for shore at a more leisurely pace. He came out and sat beside Sofia, saying, “I guess there’s this sense that if it hadn’t been Jackie….”

Sofia waited for him to go on, making tiny water circles with her thumbs. When he failed to continue, she said, “And?”

“Never mind.”

“So if it hadn’t been Jackie, you’d be with me. That I’m OK, but second best.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Then what did you mean?” Sofía asked, doing her best not to let him get under her skin, but offended by what he had said.

“Dammit, you were pretty clear about things.”

“Great, I was clear about things. How nice.”

“That’s the way you wanted it.”

Tom was right. That’s the way she’d wanted it, in the beginning. But at some point, things began to change. At some point, she’d begun to imagine there could be more. “I just want a life. Is that too much to ask?”

“You’ve got an incredible life.”

Sofia laughed. What did he think, that she was some sort of savage “at one” with nature? “A life? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“No.”

Yes, at some point, Sofia had started to imagine there could be something more with Tom. “You call this a life? I’m about thirty, single, stuck in Altamira? You can walk from one end of town to the other in five minutes.”

“I thought you loved all this. The work we do.” Tom touched her shoulder.

Yes, she’d been able to laugh with him, to tell him things about herself even she didn’t know.

“You think I want to live like that, in a shack by the river?”

“I….”

“Ten kids, a drunk for a husband?”

“I…”

“I’ve got dreams, too, you know,” Sofia said. “Things I want out of life.”

“I know.”

“You think just because you hop on a jet, you’re the only one with dreams?”

“Not at all.”

Yes, Sofia had started to imagine that there could be more with Tom. With Tom, she could see time as a fullness of becoming, not as a ticking away to an endpoint of loss. “I want more than Altamira. I want more than having a good time.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I was starting to have hope, that’s all.” Sofia wrapped her arms around her legs as the first tears formed.

“This is news to me.”

“I’ll never be as beautiful as a white woman,” she said, unable to stop it from bubbling up, something she’d felt in the marrow of her bones from the first put-down by a pale-skinned girl.

“Of course you are!”

“As beautiful as Jackie,” she said, feeling her life unravel on the banks of a lonely river, in a brooding wilderness of tall trees, with darkness descending, beside the man she loved but could never have.

“Jackie?”

“Who was there for you?” she asked, the desolation caving in on her. Tom didn’t answer this question, because the answer was clear. Jackie had left him and hurt him. “Do you think Jackie cares about anything but the next headline? The next big grant?”

Still he remained silent, and Sofia continued. “Was it me? Something I did?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why you’re with Jackie now. Was it me?”
Tom hesitated, took a breath. Then, he turned to Sofia, said, “Of course not, you know that. It was beautiful. Every second of every day of it.”

There they were again, those ridiculous words he spoke, so full of feeling, so real, so caring. Damn him! The tears came down now. Why had she fallen for her best friend’s gringo? “I was starting to have hope, that’s all.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I want to be with you.”

Tom’s words came with a jolt, and for a moment Sofia didn’t understand them. She looked across the water, at the swallows flying this way and that, screaming with eerie caws as they attacked the evening insects. But then she knew he’d said it, that he wanted her, just as she knew she shouldn’t turn to Tom, or let him touch her, or hold him close. Even though he’d said what he’d said, it wasn’t right, not like this. Jackie was her friend, had given her a job, a life, a shoulder to cry on, which was all for naught because the call had come, the boto’s call, the yearning of the water. So she wrapped herself around him to suck his breath away, to claw down on him. It wasn’t right but she had to do it, to return Tom’s fire with the hungers of her boto body, to burn his hands with her lush papaya breasts, with the moist sparking of her lubricious thighs. It wasn’t right, but the water had spoken, compelling her to quench Tom’s thirst, to drink his final spasm with her own hot fluids, to lay him to rest on the bottom of the river.
Finished, they lay beneath a withered star, the swallows still zinging about, their wings slicing the air with faint whistles. It was then that Sofia heard the echo of her moans, released from the mucks of the river she’d just irradiated with her wayward lover.

“What now?” she asked.

“I’ll talk to Jackie.”

***

Sofia got up and gathered her things, walking off in a hurry, leaving Tom behind. It had worked. Sofia didn’t believe in any magic beyond the miracles of the Catholic Church, but she’d gone to the market anyway and sought out the old woman skilled in candomblé magic, the voodoo arts of Brazil. The woman had sold her a necklace with a dolphin’s tooth designed for her specific problem, a rival in “affairs of the heart.” Sofia had given it to Jackie the day before she’d headed for the Kayapó Territories. Sofia didn’t pay much heed to what the woman had said, namely that candomblé could work like a two-edged sword if you weren’t careful, if you let desire give way to anger. What did she mean?

Wading around shrubs that crawled to the water’s edge, Sofia came to a view of the San Francisco at the end of a crescent of beach. It was then she heard the squawking, and looked up at the macaws in silhouette a few feet above the treetops. Sofia marveled at the precision of their flight, and it was only after they’d passed she realized they’d flown in formation, as a crucifix aimed at the setting sun.

***

The San Francisco motored past the village landing strip cut through the forest, and a minute later Benét turned into a switchback channel. Açai palms rose on the left, their narrow stems as smooth as a snake’s skin; on the right, pale green cassava bushes crawled down from the forest. Benét pulled the throttle back. “I’ve never seen the fields empty. This is some bad stuff.”

Sofia grabbed his arm, said, “These people are friends.”

“Indians don’t have friends when they’re em pé de guerra, on a war footing.”

“Em pé de guerra’s more a declaration than anything.” Tom said.

“How many times have you heard of the Indians hurting anyone?” Sofia asked.

“The people who might have something to say are probably dead,” Benét said.

“You can’t just leave her,” Sofia said.

Benét gripped the wheel. But instead of turning the boat around, he nudged the throttle forward.
Now the cassava field opened to the village, a collection of twenty or so palm thatch dwellings miniaturized before a dark encirclement of forest. Benét aimed for shore, killing the engine at fifty yards, and the San Francisco glided to the sand beside several canoes. The village was empty. Benét said, “I leave in one hour.”

“It’s not going to take that long,” Sofia said, just as movement rippled through the cassava bushes. Two guerreiros emerged, warriors, heading straight for the boat. Both wore battered gym shorts and had black hair that looked cut with a bowl. Both held shot-guns up across muscular chests. Sofia and Tom went forward to greet them, and listened to their brief accounting of events in a rough mixture of Portuguese and Gê, their mother tongue. They finished and walked off fast. Sofia hopped from the boat to follow, and signaled for Tom, who hadn’t completely understood what they were saying.

“Is she OK?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

There wasn’t time for idle chatter, but Sofia told him, “The landing strip.”

“What happened?” Tom asked as they came to the first dwelling, an open wood frame beneath a V of palm thatch. Empty hammocks.

The morning air was humid and hard to breath, but Sofía told him, “Guerreiros captured some men dragging logs to the river. The Cacique, the chief, decided to tie them down for the ants.”

“Jesus, that’s a death sentence.”

As they came out behind the village, spider monkeys screamed from wooden cages, and past the cages, where the forest loomed, the guerreiros waited. Tom asked, “So how does Jackie fit into the picture?”

“She talked Cacique Itá out it. She convinced him to radio the Federal Police.”

“Damn. She actually did Machado a favor.”

Sofia spoke briefly with the guerreiros, who pointed to a trail through the forest. Although Machado certainly had his own side to the story, she told Tom what the Indians had told her. “He’s mad because he can’t sell the logs, now the Federal Police are involved.”

Sofia and Tom entered the forest, taking care not to trip on the roots crossing the path. In a minute, the trees thinned and the trail opened to shrubs, then grass as they emerged on the landing strip. There was a group at the other end and two planes, one in the middle of the runway ready for take-off, the other to the side.

Tom started walking, fast, and then he was running. Sofia let him go and studied Jackie in the distance, her lithe, blond rival in an “affair of the heart.” Her friend, who was a little bit older but not by much, and with the all the pale-skinned charms of a white woman from a rich country. Jackie’d shown her a world much bigger than Altamira, made her see that she, Sofia, could be someone.

Halfway to Jackie, Tom stopped to look back. But Sofia had set off fast too, and in a moment the three of them stood reunited on the landing strip.

“What in god’s name are you doing?” Tom asked.

“Jackie.” Sofia hugged her friend. She looked gaunt and had dark circles under her eyes.

Two men approached from the plane about to take off. One had a narrow face with a black moustache, and wore a polo shirt, designer jeans, and penny loafers. Machado. The other man, the one with the belly, was Juan.

“Luis Machado.” Machado introduced himself.

“You’re the NGO people, right? I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Really?” Sofia said, surprised.

“Brazil has to grow-up,” Machado continued. “I’m tired of all this nonsense that gringos are taking over the rainforest.”

Juan changed the subject. “You know the Federal Police take these matters seriously.”

“You’re not getting away with it this time,” Jackie said.

“This was just a big misunderstanding,” Machado said.

“This was no misunderstanding. You know where the boundaries are,” Jackie said.

“My dear….”

Jackie cut Machado off. “You’ve been stealing from the Indians for years.”

“This was a simple case of loading the wrong coordinates into a GPS.” Machado shrugged, then glanced at the planes, where several men stood about, including one on a ladder near the single prop of the plane to the side.

“Cacique Itá was put in an impossible position.” Jackie said, refusing to back down.

Machado ignored her. “Juan came at the first hint of a problem. He’s a brave man, flying that government piece of crap.”

Machado looked to the man on the ladder and shouted ready? The man shouted yes, then shut the engine hood and hopped down.

“My mechanic’s giving you government guys some private sector loving. You’ll be able to fly that claptrap now.” Machado slapped Juan’s shoulder, and the group headed for Cacique Itá and his band of guerreiros. Once there, Machado reached for Cacique Itá’s hand. “We deeply regret these incidents.”

The Cacique, an old man with still powerful shoulders and skin so wizened it looked like it might crack, accepted Machado’s hand.

“It’s very easy to get lost out here,” Sofia said. Machado was being reasonable, as she knew he would.

“So we’ll reconvene in Altamira and work things out.” Machado slapped the Cacique on the back and headed for his plane with Juan, who was joining him to leave space on the other plane for the Cacique. In short order, Machado and his entourage taxied to the end of the runaway. They turned and blasted down the strip, then lifted in a steep ascent across the Iriri River.

Jackie reached for her backpack, ready to board the other plane. Sofia said, “Come on the boat. It’ll be just like old times out on the river.”

“The Cacique asked me to go. He’s never flown before.” Jackie said, leaning against Tom.

“Come on, no martyrdom today,” Sofia said, even though she felt a pang on seeing them close.
The plane revved to life with the whine of a buzz saw, and crept forward ten feet. The Cacique walked towards it with two guerreiros, and all three boarded.

Sofia knew what she had to do. She was the Brazilian, and the Indians, the forest, were ultimately her responsibility. “I’ll go.”

Jackie said, “I’m the logical one to go. There’s paperwork with the Federal Police.”

“Go on the boat with Tom,” Sofia said, this time insistent, her eyes watering. She turned for the plane, but Jackie grabbed her. Now the tears came, and she folded herself into Jackie. “Just go on the boat, I….Tom…. let me do this one thing.”

Jackie stroked her hair. “It’s safer this way.”

“Safer?” Sofia asked.

“If you fly, you’re the target. And you can’t leave, being Brazilian.”

Sofia pulled away from Jackie. There it was again, the hint of evil intentions on part of the official boogey-man of the hour, Machado. “That’s nonsense. This isn’t a combat zone.”

“It’s nothing, really. I’m moving back to the US with Tom.” Jackie said, and as she did so she reached for Tom, pulled him close, and put her hand to his cheek.

The familiarity of the caress rankled Sofia. She tried to brush it off, but the more she tried the more obvious it became that yes, this was what was going to happen, that yes, Tom was heading back to the US with Jackie, after the booty call on the banks of the Iriri. Sofia felt the anger spreading down her neck, then, with the beating of her heart, through every pore of her body. She and Tom had talked before getting to the Kayapó village, and all was supposed to be set. Sofia searched Tom and his face came into focus through the rush of her emotions. Jackie still held him, but there was distance between them, the distance of Tom ever so slightly standing away, of ever so slightly diverting the affection. Sofia knew for certain, then, that Tom wouldn’t be getting back together with Jackie. Not today, not tomorrow, not a year from now. Let Jackie play the hero, impress the Cacique, get mentioned in all the papers for having saved the day. Meanwhile, Sofia’d take the slow boat to China, make love to Tom until he begged for mercy. Candomblé was on her side

Now the engine fired up again and the pilot signaled.

“You guys take my backpack.” Jackie said, putting her strong face on, then heading for the plane. She climbed in.

The aircraft taxied to the end of the runway and pivoted. The pilot revved the engine and waved as the plane lumbered forward. It accelerated slowly but finally gained enough speed to jump into the air and begin its climb over the Iriri, on route to Altamira. Sofia reached for Tom’s hand and was relieved when he eagerly clutched hers and their fingers twined. It was really over, or just beginning, depending on your perspective. Her future was an open book, with a story about a world much bigger than Altamira. Tom was hers, and after a float down the river “Tom and Jackie” would be a thing of the past. In fact, why not take a few days getting home? There were many hideaways on route, all with lonesome beaches perfect for the sensual work of a boto.

Sofía squeezed Tom’s hand, anxious to return to the San Francisco. But as she watched the plane making its way to Altamira, a light flashed. For the duration of a heartbeat it hung suspended in the sky, until the nose turned down and the aircraft plunged, its fuselage streaming flames from front to back. The explosion boomed through the stillness of the morning, then fire balls gushed up from the point of impact. Sofia had no idea how she got to the riverbank, how she came to be watching the treetop flames, the columns of black smoke rising above from where the plane was burning. With Tom beside her, she listened to the crackling of the fire from across the river, where Jackie had just been struck by the sword of candomblé.

***

The old woman immediately recognized the young woman coming through the crowds in the market-place, and tried to look away. She wasn’t the copper skinned beauty she remembered, for the pasty complexion and unkempt hair. But it was the same one who’d bought the dolphin-tooth necklace, to gain the advantage in an “affair of the heart.”

“Why’d you do it?” the young woman asked, coming up fast, her dark eyes brimming with tears.

The old woman spit out a wad of tobacco and said half-heartedly, “You won, didn’t you?”

“You call that winning?”

“I warned you. That it could cut both ways. The sword of candomblé.”

“I never imagined….” The young woman choked on her words.

Yes, it was terrible, but the old woman couldn’t tell her the truth she’d learned from years of experience, which was that candomblé magic often counteracted the positive with the negative, and undid the miracles it had made, with prejudice.