Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

The girl on layaway was standing in the middle of the room, facing us.

I wondered if I should say something to Ronnie. I decided not to. If she were ready to alert him to her presence, she would do it herself. Instead, she stared at him with narrowed eyes, training her sadness on him.

Ronnie didn’t notice and kept entertaining Saul.

She turned to go. I watched her move toward the exit, taking her sadness with her.

said as much about what would happen, according to the Brazilian overseer Valera hired. The overseer said you could not predict. You would not know, by guessing, which of the tappers would come in at quota, which of them would come in under quota, and which of them would die.

Yellow fever, the patrão said, they die of yellow fever.

A rubber worker with a.22-caliber hole in his head:

Yellow fever, it’s written in the booklet.

Another with a hole in his back:

Yellow fever.

A third with an ice pick pushed through his neck, because the patrão’s flimsy muzzle-loader, with its cheap wire-wound barrel, unraveled:

Y.f.

The Valera Company guns the patrão was given were good for fifty shots and then they fell apart. He wrote to the company’s contact in São Paulo about the faulty equipment but was told there was nothing to be done about it.

It was important to keep these Indians on edge, so the patrão had to find ways. The Indians needed threats. They needed to be afraid. They might run away. Or sell the rubber to rubber pirates who roamed the edges of the encampment, and then the patrão would lose his profit share. You could hear these bandits, their cracks and rustlings in the jungle. The patrão’s job was to keep the Indians in line. His tools were the cheap muzzle-loaders, mock drownings with water poured over a facecloth, and various further entrenchments of the Indians’ peon status. They owed a fee for having been brought to the Amazon. They owed for their purchase on credit of goods at the company store. They were forbidden subsistence activities. No collecting Brazil nuts. No growing of crops (anyone caught farming: y.f. ).

* * *

This life, the tapper’s, rushing, sweating, exhaustion, waiting. Rushing, sweating, exhaustion. You wait while the patrão inspects your taps to be sure they’re clean, inspects your trunk incisions to be sure they’re correct (not too shallow and not too deep, in order not to damage the tree’s soft part, the cambium, and not circular — rather, you make a half spiral in the trunk, from lower right to upper left, tracing with your gouge the latex tunnels inside the tree). If the patrão is busy, you set down the milk-loaded pails while you wait. If you run with pails full of latex and spill some, you are said to skedaddle it. If you carry the latex pails uphill and because of the titubation of your gait, you slop some from the pails, you are said to skedaddle it. Slop it from your pail and the day’s work, so unmatched to the scale of the body and its limits, is wasted. It isn’t just a loss down to zero but below it. You didn’t know how low a person could get below zero, down under the roots of it, until you found this life, or it found you.

It is one hour’s walk with the heavy slop-promising pails, sloppossible, back to the man with the scale. Twice a day you go to the scale, at noon and then again at sunset. At noon, a whole day, a day’s life, a reality, has already been lived. Waking at dark, deep down under daylight, hurriedly preparing lunch to eat in the jungle, running to the taps, opening them as quickly as you can. The closer to daybreak the more likely you’ll make quota because the trees flow better at dawn. You have to know which trees to return to (you can’t tap the same tree two days in a row), running from tree to tree to get the taps open and by the time every one of them is flowing you race back to the first tap of the morning, the one you opened in total darkness, by feel alone, and you return to get your yield, pour it from the cup at the bottom of the tree into your pail, clean the tap, and get to the next tree. That’s how it goes, this zigzagging from tree to tree, coated in sweat and jungle damp, zigzagging until noon, when you are ready to collapse, feeling like your head is in a cloud of ammonia, dizzy, confused, pain shooting up your spine, your muscles twisted into torn rags.

The man who puts your pails on the scale is against you like he was born to hate you in a natural way that won’t be corrected with fuller pails, less slopped on their way to the scales. He was lured by good money, easy money. He’d been told proper housing, electricity, hot meals. You carry his water — sloppossible but not measured like the latex is, just eyeballed, and so less calamitous if slopped. He isn’t so bad off, not at all, in fact, compared to your life, heat and pain and exhaustion, little sleep on dirt floors under canvas tarps, eating cold food when it rains, because the cooking is all outdoor. He is there to mind you. That is his job, and it is your fault. He frowns with hate, weighs the pails of latex, and puts down a number in the booklet. You don’t get paid for the pails. You get a number in his booklet. If the number is under quota you get no credit. If your pail is at quota they say you’re breaking even, and you get another number, for the credit, the amount owed against the amount collected, resulting in a handful of stale manioc flour, for which you must have your own bag, or the flour goes straight in your pockets, or, if you have no bag and no pockets, you run toward camp with your fingers sealed together in a bowl, like a hungry, desperate fool, leaving a trail of powdered manioc behind you. If your pail is over quota, you get the flour, and they say you’ll get something when the job is finished. Rumor has spread that the booklet is a lie. The job is not going to finish in the sense of an accounting and a payment. Someone says, Let’s burn it. But then you really won’t get paid.

You and the others had made a four-month journey to a living hell and the patrãos knew it. All the way from Belém, where you enlisted. They kept their guns pointed so you would not escape. But you tried. The patrão who stood with the man working the scale was distracted, drinking from his canteen and trying not to look at the long line of men holding their pails, waiting. He sat on a cut log. His muzzle-loader hung from a strap on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. The man who weighed the pails was writing in the booklet. Because the jungle made the pages damp, he had to draw out each pencil line slowly. The pencil didn’t like damp. Or the page didn’t like it. You, almost at the end of the line, set down your pails and dove into the brush, off the path that led to the scales. Not sticking to your line, off the page like a pencil that would not write.

And then you were running and looking up through the green fringe of tree ferns. Panting and huffing and feeling your throat go cold with shortness of breath, the green fringe pounding above you as you ran.

How was it, the thought entered your mind as you ran, that God could love you and the patrão and the man who weighed the pails, at one time? How was that possible? Your bare feet had gone numb with running. It was important to try to run lightly to keep quiet, but you could not feel your feet, like you were bobbing on two rubber bounce balls instead of feet, deep in a jungle four months’ journey from your village. Running on feet you could not feel. Bounce balls. And working with the numbness, pulling your legs up to step lightly, because small cracks and rustlings echo in the jungle. Sound travels cleanly, is made louder as it relays through the spaces among the trees, like through those bullhorns they put on the trucks on Sundays to get everyone herded into church, back in your village, which seems not so bad a life now, drought and God and stomachaches from unripe fruit. There was nothing to do but at least there was time. Now you are short on time and running. Weaving among the trees. The trees, thick and strong and sturdy, blocking out the sunlight, but themselves reaching up to it. If you step on a branch by accident the trees give away your secrets. Crack- crack, the sound of you sent back through the jungle to the patrão. The trees, reaching up to the light they blocked, were not part of God’s matrix. They went from their roots to the sky without any part in heavens and hells. The trees just were, and they relayed your secrets if you stepped on a dry branch while trying to escape. Not because they wanted you caught, but because of sound, and the way it traveled. They were no part in God’s matrix. They were the wood His Son was nailed to. That was all. They would not suffer like you did, wondering if God loved you and the patrão at one time. You and the man who weighed the pails. Wondering if God could hate. If He could love. If He could not hate, like the priest said, well, then. He couldn’t love, either. And what help could He offer now? He was as good as the trees (no help at all).