Free The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel by Rahul Bhattacharya Page B

us forward, asking me to mind the whiplash of the branches. I received the vines he left behind and pulled us on. Sometimes the bottom of the boat would scrape against the roots and you had to push out again. We took several breaks, in which we turned to the only snap of rum we had, chasing it down with river water. Though Baby warned against stopping too often, I needed the breaks. He talked incessantly through them. One time, monkeyjumping just like this, he saw a camoudi looking at him. He stretched out the paddle to frighten him away, but the camoudi leapt on the paddle and landed in the boat. He said it was twenty feet. He stamped on its neck and flipped it over with the paddle. He added wistfully that he would like to be a male camoudi cause the ooman be four times more heavy and that is a nice thing to have pon you.
    We paddled on, looking for turbulence, crissing, crossing, monkeyjumping, the efforts diminishing me towards a standstill. Even the breeze was against us. The trees were thin and tall and the water so high that it felt like they were floating. Two or three hours into the ride a hard rain began to fall. It was so fucking beautiful. The tall dark forest shook and swayed, hundred-foot timber trees flailing about like dandelions. Winds of forest fragrance whooshed out in wet gusts. Brown ripples swept across the river and stung the skin. We rowed hard and sometimes shouted and rowed. We stopped occasionally to bail out water and tighten the polin over the supplies, and thereafter shouted and laughed and rowed. ‘If you en pulling hard you en pulling at all,’ hollered Baby. ‘Pull, bai, pull. You cyan be saaf, bai, you cyan be fockin saaf. Pull it now, Gooroo, pull yuh fockin skunthole.’
    We had entered a fifth hour when Baby began to make halts to check. Several false stops later he was convinced he’d found the
spot. We took a minute. We’d done seven miles, he said. Alone in a smaller boat with a good paddle he could lick it down inside two hours.
    He went out to find the trail. I waited in the boat.
    I couldn’t feel my shoulders and arms. I chewed on a piece of cane and watched and smelt and got pinged by the rain. I thought of how it might be to surrender to the torrent and let it take you all the way like old Kaie of legend.
    Baby was soon back. He tethered the boat and concealed it behind bushes. The paddles and the polin he hid inside the hollow of a trunk. We put on shoes and gathered our things and began walking. The trail was fresh squelch and the trees were still swaying apocalyptically though the rain was now beating slower. The immense wetness of the rainforest made one feel submerged, but for the smells. The smells were many, mud and leaves, heart of trunk and rotten fruit; the rustle of small animals, the slither of lizards, they all came scented. It was soggy underfoot, thick squelch or big drenched leaves, brown, red and green, twenty or thirty deep. It was walking on marshmallow. My shoes were heavy with water and mud and the backpack was eating into my shoulders. I had two stalks of cane in one hand with my slippers looped through them, and a cutlass in the other. I was tripping over roots and branches.
    After thirty minutes we reached a clearing which looked like it had been hit by a great storm. There were ditches and deep furrows and enormous fallen trees. We walked along a palm trunk that ran over ditches and pools of slush, and then through a tunnel of head-high bush we walked into another little clearing. Here a creek gathered briefly into a small pond, and beyond it a thin path led to two raised shacks.
    The shack we took had a blissful front veranda. In one corner a tilting table was carefully placed an inch away from the wall with its legs in plastic bowls of water, measures to keep out the white ants that had eaten much of the country. In another corner stood an iron barrel with its top taken off and a slot bust open in its
side, the fireplace. On the front door was