Free Carioca Fletch by Gregory McDonald Page A

four
cachaças
, 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 the dead garden. He watched the flower-kissing birds sustain themselves with wings which beat so fast they were almost invisible, like auras on either side of their bodies, as they sucked sugar water from small vessels in the rafters.
    Kick-dancing and flower-kissing birds.
    After two or three hours of poker playing, it was clear who the winner was. Norival was careless, concerned more with hisnext
chope
than the cards. He seemed keyed-up anyway—for someone who had had so much to drink, even though properly evacuated before lunch. Fletch yawned. Tito, Orlando, and Toninho played cards in a way odd to Fletch. They did not seem to see the cards as they were, but as something else, something more. Always they believed in the next card too much. They believed in what the cards might be instead of what they were.
    Fletch was collecting all the chips.
    At one point, Toninho said, “of course you cannot understand Brazil, Fletch. Three of us—all but Norival—have been to school in the United States. We cannot say we understand the United States, either. Everyone there is so anxious.”
    “Very nervous,” Orlando said.
    “Worried,” Tito said. “Do I drink too much, smoke too much, make love too much, too little? Is my hair all right? Might someone see that my ankles are fat?”
    “Does everyone
like
me?” Orlando guffawed.
    “I’m so pretty!” Toninho said in falsetto. “Don’t touch me!”
    Fletch strummed the table with his fingers. “
Bum, bum, paticum bum, prugurundum
.”
    The noise of the rain pounding on the tin roof increased.
    Eva came through the back door and stood, watching them.
    She stood behind Norival and watched his last chips disappear in careless play.
    She took his feverish head in her hands and turned it sideways, and leaned his cheek against her bare stomach. “Ah, Norival,” she said in Portuguese. “You are getting drunk again.”
    “
Arigó
,” Toninho said, clearly hoping for a picture card and playing as if he had one.
    Eva rotated Norival’s head so that he was slipping off the chair. The front of his face was against her stomach. He breathed deeply a few times through his nose.
    In a moment, Eva led Norival indoors.
    Tito, Orlando, Fletch, and Toninho played silently.
    Occasionally, concentrating, Toninho’s lips would move as ifhe were talking, but no sound came out.
    When Orlando won anything, no matter how much he had lost, his face would break into a marvelous grin. He would be ready to lose more.
    At one point, when Fletch was raking in chips again, Tito murmured,