Carioca Fletch

“Perform for the gods,” Toninho said.

Orlando looked into his glass. “I’ve had a drink.”

“You won’t hurt each other,” Toninho said.

“You and Orlando,” Tito said from the grass.

“It is important Janio sees capoeira from close up,” Toninho said. “So he will remember.”

Glass still in hand, Orlando went to Tito and with his bare feet stood on Tito’s ass. Standing thus, he drained his glass, leaned over, and put it on the grass. Then he began to walk slowly up Tito’s back.

“I can’t breathe!” Tito said.

“And you can’t talk?” Toninho asked.

“I can’t talk, either.”

Then he wriggled free, spilling Orlando to the side, and jumped to his feet.

In a wide arc, he swung his right foot, aiming for Orlando’s head.

Orlando ducked successfully, turned sideways and slammed his instep into Tito’s side, against his rib cage. Orlando’s towel dropped.

“Wake up,” Orlando said.

In a short moment, Tito and Orlando had the rhythm of it, had each other’s rhythm. Gracefully, viciously, rhythmically, as if to the beating of drums, with fantastic speed they were aiming kicks at each other’s heads, shoulders, stomachs, crotches, knees, each kick coming within a hair’s breadth of connecting, narrowly ducking, sidestepping each other, turning and swirling, their legs straight and their legs bent, their muscles tight and their muscles loose, their fronts and their backs flashing in the sunlight, the hair on their heads seeming to have to hurry to keep up with this frantic movement. With this fast, graceful dance, easily they could have killed each other.

Eva had come onto the porch to watch. Her eyes flashed. A few faces of other women appeared in the upper windows of the plantation house. Everyone loves the Tap Dancers…. They’re sleek.

“Remember …” Toninho was saying. “A skill developed by the young male slaves, in defense against their masters. They would practice at night, to drums, so if their masters came down from the big house, to look for a woman, they could pretend to be dancing. Thanks to—what is the word in English?—miscegenation, such skills ultimately were not needed….”

There was a loud Thwack! and Tito began to fall sideways. He had taken a hard blow to the head from the instep of Orlando’s foot. The blow could have been much, much harder. Tito did not fall completely.

“I told you to wake up,” Orlando said regretfully.

Recovering, Tito charged Orlando like a bull, right into his midriff. Orlando fell backwards, Tito on top of him. Laughing, sweating, panting, they wrestled on the grass. At one point their bodies, their arms and legs, were in such a tight ball perhaps even they could not tell which was whose.

Eva, moving like Time, went down to them.

Finally, Orlando was sitting on Tito and giving him pink-belly, pounding Tito’s belly hard repeatedly with his fists. Tito was laughing so hard his stomach muscles were fully flexed and no harm was being done.

Standing over them, behind Orlando, Eva laced her fingers across Orlando’s forehead and pulled him backward, and down.

Kneeling over Tito as he was, sitting on him, bent backward now so that his own back was on the ground, or on Tito’s legs, Orlando looked up Eva’s thighs. He rolled his eyes.

He jumped up and grabbed Eva by the hand.

Together Orlando and Eva ran down the grassy slope from the swimming pool and disappeared.

“You see?” Toninho said. “Uncomplicated.”

After resting a moment on the ground, breathing hard, Tito rolled over and over and on into the pool of water.

“Your Moby Dick” Toninho said abruptly. “By Herman Melville?”

Fletch looked at Toninho, wondering what new surpise was coming. “Yes,” Fletch said. “I read it while waiting for a bus.”

“‘Call me Ishmael,’” Toninho quoted.

“Not a bad beginning,” Fletch said. “Simple.”

“Is it?” Toninho finished his cachaca. At the long side of the pool, Norival was finishing his fourth. “Is that Ishmael meant to be some spirit of the United States? Some guardian?”

“Almost anything can be said,” Fletch said. “And has been.”

“In a way, Ismael is the guiding spirit of Brazil.”

Fletch said nothing. Necrophilia, slant-six car engines, the nature of arigo, robotics, capoeira, now a discussion regarding American literature.

“I’m quite certain Melville stopped in Brazil on his voyages. Have you even thought of that interpretation of Moby Dick?”

“Melville meant Brazil is the guiding spirit of the United States?”

“Maybe of the hemisphere.”

“Toninho …” Tito’s forearms were flat on the edge of the swimming pool, holding his head up. Water streamed down his face from his hair. His right ear was red from Orlando’s kick. “I think we should do Norival a favor.”

Toninho looked over at Norival stretched out in the sunlight. Norival bubble-belched. “Yes.”

Toninho stood up.

Together Toninho and Tito tipped the slow-reacting Norival out of the long chair.

Fletch went to watch what new trick they would play.

Each taking an arm, they dragged Norival, belly down, to the bushes. The towel dragged off him in the dirt. Then, methodically, standing behind him, Toninho and Tito each picked up one of Norival’s feet. They raised him so that his shins were on their shoulders.

Not all that gently, somewhat from the sides, they kicked Norival’s soft, upside-down belly with the insteps of their feet, once, twice, some more.

“Arigo” Toninho said, kicking Norival’s upside-down stomach.

“Empty out the sack,” Tito said. “Very practical.”

It didn’t take too many kicks for Norival to begin vomiting his four cachacas, his numerous chopinhos, whatever was still in him from the night before.

Once he began vomiting, they dropped his legs on the ground.

Tito grinned at Fletch. “Very efficient, yes?”

“It seems to be working.”

The other side of the swimming pool, Orlando and Eva were climbing back up the slope.

“Ah,” Toninho said, watching them. “Five minutes is a long time in the life of such a mulata.”

Norival now was on his hands and knees, emptying himself into the bushes.

Bleary, drooling vomit, he looked up at them.

“Obrigado.” In Portuguese, he said to them, “Thanks, guys.”

Thirteen

After lunch, it rained.

The five young men sat in their muddy towels at a round table on the back porch of the old plantation house playing poker.

The humidity was complete, and even in the rain Fletch and Orlando and Tito had been in and out of the pool between hands. They would be either wet with sweat or wet with water, and the rain water, the pool water, seemed cooler. The only reason they sat under the roof to play was to keep the cards reasonably dry. Near them, their shorts were still piled on a small table, but the pile was messed up, as Norival had gone to his shorts and swallowed two pills from its pockets. They drank beer. There were many crushed cans near Norival’s feet.

From under the porch roof, as he played, Fletch watched the rain fall on the pool and make mud puddles in