I Found Fresh MARKS Carved Into the Posts Beneath My Rented Room.

The water came up to my chest and it was warm, which was the worst part. Cold would have kept me awake. This just held me up and made me want to close my eyes.

My left wrist was tied to a trunk about as thick as a man's waist. The cord was wet and had swollen tight, and I'd already worked at it with my right hand until I felt the skin go. I tried the knot with my teeth too, leaning out as far as the cord let me. It only gave me a mouth full of river and a split lip. Whoever tied it knew what he was doing. He'd checked it twice while I watched.

The frogs had been loud all night. They'd gone on for hours, a whole forest of them, and I'd stopped hearing them the way you stop hearing a fridge. Now they quit. All at once, and the quiet was so complete that I could hear water dripping off leaves somewhere behind me.

Then the paddle. A dip, a pull, a drip. A long gap and then again. No knock of wood against a trunk. He'd been doing this long enough that the canoe never touched anything.

I turned my head, and there was the lantern, small and yellow, coming between the trees. It lit the trunks one at a time as it passed them and left the water black. Moths were around it. I couldn't see the man holding it yet, but I didn't need to. Nobody else was out here. Nobody else was ever going to be out here.

I'd known what he meant to do since yesterday morning. I'd stood at a window and watched him take someone else out this same way, and then I'd sat on the edge of a bed pretending I hadn't understood. That's what I do. I look at a thing just long enough to see its outline, and then I find something else to look at. I was good at it. I'd been good at it for eleven years.

So I wasn't surprised. I'd have liked to be. Surprise would have meant I hadn't seen it coming, and I had. Every step of it.

I pulled the cord again anyway. Just once. The trunk didn't move. The bark was rough under my forearm, and when I felt along it with my fingers I found a place just above the cord where it had been rubbed smooth. Not by me. Something had been worn there before I was. I took my hand away from it fast, like that would help.

My legs were slow and thick. I'd tried to get my feet under me earlier, to find some root or ledge to stand on, and there was nothing but soft mud that took my heels and kept them. A mosquito was working on my ear. I couldn't slap it with my left hand and I didn't want to move my right. I stood there and let it feed.

The lantern got closer. I could hear him now, breathing, easy and even. He wasn't in any hurry. He was never in any hurry. Three days in his house and I'd never once seen that man rush anything, not the coffee, not the rain, not me.

What I kept coming back to was how stupid it was. Nobody had dragged me here. Nobody had lied to me on the road or sent me a letter. I'd taken a bus and then another bus and then a boat, and then I'd waded up a flooded lane in my own shoes. I'd carried the thing that was going to get me killed across half of Brazil on my own shoulder, and I'd been pleased with myself for doing it. I thought I was doing something decent. For once, I thought. Finally.

I tried to say something. I'd been working out words for an hour, some way to start. What came out was a croak, and I coughed and tried again, and nothing useful was there. My mouth was dry even with the whole river around me. The best I had was his name. I didn't say it.

The canoe came around the last trunk and slowed. The bow turned, a small turn, the kind you make when you know exactly where you're going. Edvaldo sat at the back with the lantern held out on his left arm and the paddle across his knees. Gray in his hair, wet sandals on the planks, the same plain shirt he'd had on at supper. He looked like a man coming to check on a pot.

The light reached my face. It was warm on my skin, and I had to shut my eyes against it. The moths found me.

I thought about the lane, and the rain, and how it had all started three days back.

Three days before the lantern, I was walking up that lane with a paddle on my shoulder and rain coming down warm enough to bathe in.

The water was over my knees at the start of it. It was brown and flat and had grass floating in it, and I couldn't see my feet. I kept my sandals on and shuffled, the way you do when you don't want to find out what's down there. My bag was strapped across my chest. The paddle kept sliding on my wet shirt. It was long, nearly as tall as me, dark hard wood with a grip worn pale by hands that weren't mine. Raimundo had told me the name of the wood eleven years ago and I'd lost it.

I was forty-two. I'd never had a job. Not a bad one, not a good one, nothing I could put on a form. My family's money had paid for my school, my flat, my trips, and for a long time I didn't think about where it came from, because it was always there. Then it started not being there. That year I'd been selling things. Three watches first, my father's two and the one I bought myself, to a man in São Paulo who wrote back politely and paid late. Then the books, my father's books, a box at a time, photographed on my kitchen floor and listed online. I hadn't told anyone. Who would I have told? My sister would have driven over with a folder.

So I told people I was taking a trip. That was almost true.

I'd come to give the paddle back. That's how I put it to myself on the second bus, and again on the boat. Eleven years I'd had it, borrowed from Seu Raimundo Barros, the old canoe-maker who let me stay in his house for one wet season when I had nowhere I wanted to be. I'd left in a hurry. I'd taken the paddle with me and never sent it back, and every time I moved flats it came along and I stood it in a corner. It was embarrassing. A man my age, with a stolen paddle.

And the tin was there. My mother's letters, maybe thirty of them, in an old biscuit tin with a picture of a lighthouse on the lid. I'd left it in Raimundo's house that season and never went back for it. She died the year after. I hadn't understood until I was selling my father's books what I'd let sit there in the dark.

The house was where I remembered, at the end of the lane on the river side, up on its stilts, grey and swollen. The wood looked like it had been wet so long it had stopped drying. Nobody was on the porch. The shutters were closed. I climbed the steps with water running off the paddle and knocked.

Nothing. I knocked again and stood there, and I could hear the rain on the tin roof and the river under the boards.

"He's not there."

A man was standing on the next walkway over, under the eave of the neighbouring house, with a plastic sheet over his head. Gray in his hair, wet sandals, a plain shirt buttoned to the neck. He smiled slowly, like he had all day and was glad of the company.

"I'm looking for Seu Raimundo," I said. My Portuguese comes out quiet when I'm nervous. It trails. "I stayed here once. A long time ago. I've got something of his."

"Seu Raimundo went to his daughter's. In Manaus. Two years now, nearly three." He said it kindly, the way you give someone bad news about a dog. "His knees. He couldn't do the stairs."

I stood there. I'd thought of a lot of things on the bus. A locked door, a stranger living there, even Raimundo himself, older, looking at me. I hadn't thought of Manaus.

"I'm Edvaldo," the man said. "Edvaldo Souza. I look after the place. I've got the key." He came along the plank walkway, unhurried, and stopped at the top of my steps. He looked at the paddle. "Ah," he said.

"It's his. I borrowed it. I should have brought it back years ago." I held it out, handle first. I felt foolish and it came out fast. "I know it's late."

Edvaldo took it. He took it in both hands and held it level against his chest, slow and careful, keeping it from knocking the rail. His thumb moved once over the grip. He didn't say anything for a bit, and I looked at the rain instead of at him.

"That's good of you," he said finally. "To carry it all this way."

"There's a tin, too. My mother's letters. I left it in the house. A biscuit tin."

"It's inside. I've kept everything as it was." He nodded, still looking at the paddle. "You came by the lane?"

"The ferry stopped at the end of the road. I walked."

"Then you saw it." He looked past me at the water. It had risen up the steps while we talked, one step, maybe two. "It's been like this four days. The road's under at the low part. The ferry won't run till it drops, and nobody knows when that is. The river decides."

"How long?"

"A week. Could be less." He shrugged, a small one. "Could be more."

I did the sum without wanting to. I had about enough in my account for the way back and not much else, and a week of anything cost money. I thought about wading back down the lane and sitting in the ferry shelter, and then I thought about the dark under that water, and the bus fare, and nowhere to put my bag.

"Can I get the tin now?" I said. "I'd just take it and go. Wait at the landing."

"The key's at my place. And the light's going." He said it mildly. "In the morning I'll find it for you. You can't wait at the landing, there's no roof. You'd be wet through." He tipped his head toward his own house, bigger than Raimundo's, with a lamp already lit in a window. "I have rooms. Two, for people who get stuck. The front one's better. The back one is cheaper."

"How much is the back one?"

"Twenty reais."

"That one," I said.

"It's over the water," Edvaldo said. "You'll hear it all night."

"That's fine."

He smiled again, slow, and shifted the paddle to one arm. He held out his free hand for my bag. I gave it to him and followed him along the walkway, the boards wet and giving a little under my feet, rain running off the back of my neck.

Edvaldo made coffee in an enamel pot and poured it through a cloth into two chipped cups. He put sugar in mine without asking, which was how I took it. He asked if the bed was all right and whether I'd eaten. That was about it. He didn't ask what I'd been doing for eleven years or why Raimundo's paddle had taken so long to come back. I sat at his table with the rain coming off the eave in a sheet and thought, good, here's a man who minds his own business. I thought it was kind of him.

Nobody at home knew which village I'd gone to. I'd told my sister I was taking a trip up north for a few weeks and left it there. She'd have asked questions if I'd said Alter do Chão, and then I'd have had to explain the paddle.

The back room was over the water, like he'd said. It had a foam mattress, a net with a hole mended in white thread, and a nail in the wall for my shirt. The rain on the tin roof was so loud I had to lie there and let it be loud. Under the floor the river moved against the posts. I looked at the ceiling long enough to know it was a ceiling. I didn't look at the net, or the dark in the corners, or anything I'd have to think about. I'm good at that. I was asleep before I'd finished not thinking.

The rain stopped before light. By the time I got up, the heat was already coming off the boards and the whole walkway was steaming. Edvaldo gave me bread and more coffee and said the key wasn't where he'd thought it would be. His wife had moved things before she died, years back, and he'd never put them right. He'd go through the sheds.

"I can help look."

"Rest. You walked a long way." He smiled, slow, and went off along the planks with his sandals slapping.

I rested for about twenty minutes. Then I couldn't stand the room. I took the ladder at the end of the walkway down to where the stilts stood in the water, because that's where a man keeps a key, or a box of keys, or a shed. I don't know. I wanted to be doing something about the tin.

It was dim under the house and smelled of mud and wet rope. The water was waist-deep around the posts, brown and slow, with a skin of leaves on it. A plank path ran along the posts on short legs, just above the surface. There was no shed. There were the posts, thick as my thigh, grey with river slime, and a line of floats along one side.

The posts had been cut. Not once, a lot of times. Someone had hit each one with the edge of a paddle blade, and the cuts were fresh enough that the wood showed pale under the grey, damp and clean. They were stacked one above another, like marks on a doorframe where you measure kids. I put my thumb in one. The edge was sharp. It hadn't had time to go soft.

Two canoes were tied at the far end, nose to tail. One was long, with a high bow, and had a rag tied to the thwart. The other was shorter and dark with age, bailed out, the paint worn off the gunwales where hands went.

I knew Raimundo's boat. Green, once, with a split in the bow he'd mended with a strip of tin. It wasn't there. I looked down the whole line of posts anyway, all the way to the end of the path.

So that left two canoes for a man who lived alone. Maybe one was his wife's. Maybe one was a neighbour's he kept for him. People keep things. I stood there with the water going by my knees and told myself it was nothing, the way I'd told myself plenty of things. It worked fine. I climbed back up the ladder with mud to my thighs and washed my legs from a bucket on the walkway.

Edvaldo came back near the end of the afternoon. I was on the bench outside my door, and I heard him before I saw him, the sandals, then the boards giving. He had the tin in both hands.

"Found it," he said. "Not the key. I went in through the back. There's a window that doesn't lock."

It was the same tin. Lighthouse on the lid, the paint gone off one side of the tower, a dent in the corner where it had hit a table once. I'd carried it across three flats in my head for eleven years and never touched it.

I took it and sat. The lid came off easy. Too easy. It was a tight lid; my mother had had to wedge it with a knife. I looked at the letters. They were in a pile, flat, and the corners didn't line up. She dated every one top right, in blue pen, and I'd kept them in order when I was thirty-one. These went from fourteen to three to twenty-two. I started to count.

Edvaldo stood at the rail with his hands behind him. He didn't say anything. I counted twice with my lips moving, and I got thirty, same as I remembered. All there. Just not how I'd left them.

"You opened it," I said. It came out quiet, and I wasn't sure I'd said it loud enough.

"I did." He didn't look away, and he didn't look sorry. His voice was as soft as when he'd offered me sugar. "I only wanted to know what kind of man keeps such things."

I woke to wood knocking on wood, and rope sliding over a post. It wasn't a sound the house made. I looked at my watch on the nail and it said twenty to twelve.

The rain had gone light. I got off the mattress and crawled to the window, because standing up felt like announcing myself. The shutter was open a hand's width. Below me was the jetty, wet and black, and a canoe being pushed off it with the flat of a paddle.

Edvaldo was in the back. In front of him sat a man I'd had supper with. Gilson Ferraz, a trucker, forty-seven, stocky, in a work shirt that hadn't been washed in days. His truck was stuck behind the ferry landing. He'd told us about it twice, and that he had a delivery waiting in Santarém, and Edvaldo had said, "The river doesn't care about deliveries," and Gilson had laughed.

He wasn't laughing now. He sat with his hands together in his lap and his back straight, the way you sit in a waiting room. He didn't look around or say anything. He yawned once, I think. Edvaldo lit the lantern and hung it from his left arm, and the canoe went out between the first trunks. The light got small. Moths went with it. Then I only had the dip of the paddle, and then I didn't have that either.

I sat on the edge of the mattress with my feet on the floor. I could have gone out and shouted. I thought about that, and I'm saying so plainly because I did think about it. Instead I sat there and told myself a man can take a friend out fishing at night. I didn't believe it, and I kept saying it anyway.

He came back about an hour later. I'd gone back to the window without deciding to. The canoe came out of the trees with no lantern, only Edvaldo, and the bow rode high and light. He tied it up. He didn't come up the steps. He sat down on the end of the jetty with his sandals in the water and let the rain fall on him. He sat there a long time. His head was down. I watched the back of his neck until my own neck hurt, and then I lay down and listened to the river under the floor until the window went grey.

In the morning there was bread and coffee on the table, same as before. Two cups, though. I looked at the front room as I passed. The door was open, the bed made tight. Gilson's bag sat on the blanket and his boots were by the door, side by side, still muddy.

"Where's Gilson?" I said.

Edvaldo poured. "He's gone to sit with the river a while. It settles a man." He pushed sugar toward me. "That's all it is. Letting the river settle."

"When's he back?"

He smiled the slow way, and that was my answer. Then he said, "They don't come back to complain, Lucas. Eat something."

I ate something. I don't know what it tasted like. I thought about the posts under the house, the pale cuts stacked one above the other, and I stopped thinking about them, because I'd counted nine and didn't want to know what ten was. Men washed up here when the road went under. Edvaldo took them in, fed them, put them out in the trees. Nobody knew where they'd gone, because nobody was supposed to be here. Same as me. I'd told my sister I was going north for a few weeks. Not which village. I'd been proud of that.

After breakfast he said he was going to look at the sheds again for Raimundo's key, though I had the tin already, and he took the ladder down instead of the walkway. I listened to his sandals go. When they stopped, I put the tin inside my shirt, against my stomach, and tucked the shirt into my belt. I left the bag. I left my second pair of trousers and a cheap steel watch, the only one I hadn't sold. I took the money in my pocket and walked out along the planks as slow as I could make myself. Running makes noise.

It was noon, and the heat was already on my neck. Steam came off the boards. I didn't see him anywhere. At the end of the walkway the planks stopped and the lane began, brown and flat and wide, with the tops of fence posts sticking out of it.

I went in. Knees first. The water was warm as a bath. I kept my sandals on and shuffled, the way I had coming in, one foot feeling for the road before the other. I kept the tin high with my forearm.

Thighs. Then my belt, and the water pushed on my stomach and soaked the shirt. The tin was wet through. I held my arm tighter and kept going, because I could see the bend ahead where the lane met the road, and past that the ferry shelter, a roof and a bench. A quarter mile. Maybe less.

Ribs. I breathed shallow. Something floated past my chest, a plastic bottle, then a mat of grass, moving faster than I was. That bothered me. The surface had been flat at the house. Here it had a pull, a steady one, from my right to my left.

Then the road dropped. I didn't see it. My front foot went down and found nothing, and the rest of me followed. Water closed over my mouth. I kicked, and my sandals were gone, and the current had my legs and swung them out sideways. I grabbed for the tin and lost my footing again. I swallowed river. It tasted like mud and leaves.

I got an arm around a fence post. It was slimy and I slid down it, and the water went past my ears, and I kicked at it until my knee hit the road. The road was back under me, a long slope up. I dug in with my toes and hauled on the post, and let go of it, and went back the way I'd come on my hands and knees, with the water shoving me from behind.

When it was only at my waist I couldn't stand. I lay down in it and crawled. I threw up brown water next to a gate that was only a gate again. The tin was still under my shirt. I could feel the corner of it against my ribs.

I stayed there on my hands, coughing, and I looked back up the lane toward the house. The walkway was empty.

Edvaldo was on the walkway when I got there. He had a towel over his arm and he didn't ask where I'd been. I came up the last of the lane on my knees, barefoot, with the tin still in my shirt, and he held the towel out and waited until I took it.

"Nobody can pass until the water goes down," he said. He said it gently, the way you'd tell a child the shop was shut. "I'm sorry, Lucas. I should've told you about the low part."

I didn't say anything. My teeth were going. It was hot and I was shaking anyway, and I couldn't make it stop. I stood there dripping on his boards and tried to think of something else to do, and there wasn't anything. The road was gone. The ferry wasn't running. I had no sandals and about forty reais in a wet pocket.

He walked me back to the table. He took the tin out of my shirt himself, wiped the lid with his sleeve, and set it on the shelf where I could see it. Then he made coffee. I watched him strain it through the cloth into the chipped cup and put sugar in without asking. He put in more than he had the first night. I noticed that and let it go.

"Drink," he said. "It'll settle you."

I drank it. It was sweet and hot and it had a bitter bottom to it, and I figured that was the river still in my mouth. I drank all of it because he was standing there and because my hands needed something to hold. He took the cup back and told me to lie down.

I don't remember getting to the room.

When I woke it was dusk. The window was gray and the shutter was open. My head was thick and slow, and I couldn't get my thoughts to stay in one place. I tried to lift my arm and it came up late, like it had to be told twice. The mattress was soaked through on one side where my clothes were still wet. Somebody had taken the tin off the shelf and put it on the floor by my head. The lid was shut.

Edvaldo was sitting on the stool beside the bed. I hadn't heard him come in. He had his hands on his knees and his sandals together on the floor, and he was looking at me with the same mild face he'd had at the door three days ago.

"You slept a long time," he said.

"What time is it?"

"Late enough." He smiled, slow. "Do you want water?"

I said no. My mouth was dry as paper and I said no anyway.

The frogs had started. They always started at dusk, a few at first and then all of them, from under the floor and out in the trees, so loud the room hummed with it. The air in there didn't move. I could feel sweat running into my ears.

"I want to tell you about my nephew," Edvaldo said. "You don't have to say anything. I just think you should know who lived here."

I should have said I was tired. I should have shut my eyes. I've gone over it since, and I know I could have. I didn't.

"Joãozinho," he said. "My sister's boy. Sixteen. He worked for Seu Raimundo, sanding hulls, carrying planks, whatever the old man wanted. He slept in the lean-to behind the house because Raimundo's knees were bad even then and he liked having somebody close. He was a good boy. Not clever. Brave, which is worse, at that age."

He stopped and looked at the window. The gray had gone darker.

"It was the wet season. Raimundo had a guest. A man from the south, from the city, who paid by the week and drank at night. You know how some men are when they've been drinking by themselves. They want everybody to be having a good time."

I didn't move. I could feel my pulse in my wrist.

"One night this guest went down to the water with a bottle. And Raimundo's boat was tied there, the green one. He untied it. As a joke, I think. Somebody told me later he was laughing. He pushed it out and watched it go and went back up to bed."

"Edvaldo," I said. It came out as nothing.

He didn't stop. He wasn't being cruel. That was what I couldn't get past. He talked like he was reading me something that had happened to other people.

"Joãozinho heard it from the lean-to. He ran down in the dark, and he saw the boat out there turning in the current, and he knew what it meant to the old man. That boat was how Raimundo ate. So he went in after it. No light. No rope. The river was high, same as now." He turned his hand over on his knee. "In the morning they found the boat in the trees. They didn't find him for four days. By then the river had kept him a long time."

The frogs went on. Someone moved on the walkway outside and I felt the planks give, and then it was quiet except for the frogs.

"Raimundo never learned the guest's name," Edvaldo said. "He'd only ever written it on a list he lost. All he had was the paddle that man borrowed, the week before, and never gave back. That's all he had. A paddle."

I had never said it out loud. Not to my sister, not to a priest, not to myself in the dark in any of the three flats. Eleven years. I'd had it worked down to a few plain facts, the bottle, the rope, the boat, the dark, and I'd kept them in a row and never let them touch the rest. I remembered the knot. It was a plain loop. I'd pulled it with two fingers.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

Edvaldo waited. He gave me a long time, longer than anybody would have. The room was hot and my shirt was stuck to my back and the frogs filled up everything. I looked at his face because there was nowhere else I could look. The lamp on the table wasn't lit and there was hardly any light left, but I could see the gray in his hair and the slow patience in his eyes, and I couldn't turn my head away from it.

Edvaldo smiled. It was the slow one, the one he'd given me at the door.

"Would you do something for me?" he said. "The paddle's by the door. Take it and turn the handle over."

I don't know why I did it. He stood and fetched it himself and put it across my knees, and my hands were slow and thick, but they went to it. The grip was worn pale, like I remembered. I turned it. Under the grip, on the underside where a palm never goes, the wood was cut. One short notch. Then another beside it. Then a few more, close and neat, and at the end a long line, deeper than the rest, running down the shaft.

I'd carried that thing on my shoulder for three days. Slept next to it in the bus station in Santarém. Never once turned it over.

"Raimundo lent it to you," Edvaldo said. "He hung it on the wall and you took it down, and he let you. Eleven years he waited for it to come back. He cut one for every man I was to bring him." He touched the long line with one finger. "That's the last. He cut it after you went. He said that one wasn't for a stranger."

He took the paddle off my knees. He said thank you for it, the way you'd thank someone for passing the salt.

That was the worst of it, if I'm honest. The softness. If he'd shouted or hit me, I could have stood somewhere inside myself and been wronged. He gave me nothing to stand on. He said he'd let me rest a little more and went out. I heard his sandals go along the planks and then not.

The room was almost dark. My legs didn't want to take me and I made them. I got my feet under me and the floor tilted and I held the wall until it stopped. The tin was by the bed. I looked at it. I left it. Thirty letters, and I left them on the floor like a bag of laundry.

The door wasn't locked. I'd never seen him lock anything. Why would he?

The walkway was black and steaming. Frogs everywhere, so loud I couldn't hear my own feet. I went left, away from the jetty, away from his house, toward the lane, and I knew about the lane. I knew about the drop and the current and I went anyway, because it was a direction. My hand slid along the rail. The planks gave a little under each step. I got maybe forty yards. I counted the posts, the way I'd counted notches.

The sandals didn't slap. That's what I think about. He must have taken them off.

A hand came over my mouth from behind, wet and cold and smelling of river, and an arm went around my chest and pinned my elbows. I tried to throw my head back. My head went back a little, slow, and bumped his collarbone. I tried to bite. My jaw wouldn't close right. My arms were there, I could see them, I could feel them hanging, but they weren't doing what I told them. He held me against him without any strain.

"Shh," he said, right by my ear. "You'll wake the whole village." Nobody lived near enough to wake. "You've been through enough."

He lowered me to sit on the planks. I remember that, how carefully he did it. Then he had my left wrist, and there was cord, wet cord, going around and around, and I watched him do it because I couldn't do anything else. He pulled it tight. He pulled it again. I tried to say Joãozinho and it came out as a long noise with no word in it.

"I know," he said.

The jetty was a long way. I think he walked me, partly, with my feet dragging, and then I was in the canoe on my back with my head on a coil of rope and the sky over me, no stars, just heavy low cloud lit a little from underneath by the water. The canoe rocked once as he stepped in. I heard a match. Then the lantern, yellow, hung off his left arm, and the moths arrived right away, before we'd even left the dock.

He pushed off with the flat of the paddle. The posts went by over my head, then the last of the walkway, then nothing. Trees. The trunks came up out of the water one after the other, pale where the lantern touched them, and between them the black. He never hit one. Not once did I hear wood on wood. He steered through that forest at night, in a flood, with a man lying in the bottom of the boat, like he was going to the shop.

I counted turns for a while. Left, left, right. Then I lost it.

The water, when he stopped, was just there. He put the lantern on the thwart, got out of the canoe, and stood in it, and that was how I learned it was only up to his waist and would be higher on me. He took me under the arms and stood me up. My knees went and he held me, and then my feet were in mud, soft and warm, and it closed around my heels. The water climbed my legs, my belly. Chest. It was warm as a bath, and I remember being grateful for that, and then ashamed of being grateful.

He picked a trunk as thick as he was. He passed the cord around it, the other end of the cord, because he'd left it long, and I felt him knot it above my hand. He pulled. He let go, looked at it, and tested it again with both hands, putting his weight back against it. Twice. The same way he'd tasted the coffee, the same way he'd shaken out the net before I slept under it.

"The river's patient," he said. "You'll see."

He climbed back into the canoe without a sound, took up the lantern, and sat. I tried to ask him something. I don't know what. My mouth had water in it.

He nodded to me, polite, like leaving a neighbour's porch, and pushed off.

The light went from tree to tree, and each trunk it touched went dark behind it. The paddle dipped, pulled, dripped. Dipped, pulled, dripped. I listened until the gaps between got longer than I could count them, and then it was frogs, and the water on my chin.

The light came through the last few trunks and stopped. The canoe turned broadside to me and Edvaldo stood up in it, easy on his feet, and laid the paddle across the gunwales. The moths went around his face. He didn't look angry, or sad, or anything. He looked like he'd come to ask if I wanted more coffee.

"Lucas," he said. "Is there anything you'd like to say to the river?"

I'd spent an hour working out how to start. I had nothing. My mouth was dry and my tongue was thick from whatever he'd put in the sugar, and the first thing that came out was a croak.

"Joãozinho."

It was the first time I'd said it out loud. It sounded small. The water slapped my chin when I breathed.

"I was drunk," I said. "I untied it. I thought it was funny. I stood there and watched it go and I thought it was funny, and then I went to bed."

Edvaldo didn't move.

"I never asked what happened to the boat. Seu Raimundo never said and I never asked. I knew. I knew the next morning. I knew in the bus." My jaw was shaking and I couldn't stop it. "I just didn't look at it. That's all I did for eleven years. I didn't look."

The frogs had stayed quiet the whole time. Somewhere behind me a drop fell off a leaf.

I said the name again. Louder. "Joãozinho." Then again, and my voice went on the second half of it and cracked open, and I kept going with what was left, which was mostly breath. I said it until there wasn't anything in it. I didn't ask him to let me go. I thought about asking. I had it ready, and then it seemed like the kind of thing a man says to get out of something, and I'd been getting out of this one long enough.

Edvaldo bowed his head. He stood that way a long time, with the lantern hanging off his arm and the light swaying on the water, and I couldn't see his face. My legs were going. The mud had hold of my heels and my knees kept trying to fold, and the cord pulled my left arm up whenever I sagged.

"It heard you," he said, to the water or to me.

He sat down on the thwart. He took something from his pocket and I heard it open, a short folding knife, the kind a man keeps for line. He leaned out of the canoe and reached past me for the trunk. I felt him put his hand flat on the knot, the one he'd checked twice, and then the cord jerked, and jerked again, and went slack.

I didn't understand. I just stood there with my arm hanging, the cord still around my wrist, and then my knees finished folding and I went under.

Warm and brown and no up. My heels were stuck and I had to wrench them, and one foot came out of the mud and the other stayed a moment and then came too. I came up spitting. The lantern was a few yards off. Edvaldo had pushed away from me and was sitting with the paddle across his knees, watching. He didn't say anything else.

I swam. It wasn't good swimming. I did it one-armed at first, then both, with the cord trailing off my left wrist and dragging, away from the light, because that was the dark and the dark was the only direction I had. I hit a trunk with my head and went around it. I hit another with my shoulder. Behind me I heard the paddle dip, and pull, and drip, and it was going the other way. I kept going until I couldn't hear it. After that I just kept going.

The water went to my chest, then my ribs, then my belt. I fell twice before I understood I could stand. There was a bank, sloped and slick with leaves, and I got my knees on it and then my belly, and I dug my right hand into the dirt and pulled. The forest was thinning. The sky behind the trees had gone from black to the grey it goes before the rain, and there was a flat pale strip ahead that turned out to be a road. Gravel, wet and packed. I crawled onto it and lay down.

The sun came up on my face. It was already hot, and steam started off the road and off my shirt. I held my left arm up and looked at it for the first time. The cord had cut a ring around my wrist and the ring was open, raw, and brown with river, and the rest of the skin below it was white and puckered. I got the cord off with my teeth. It took a while. My hand didn't close right after.

I thought about Gilson Ferraz then. I'd been trying not to, and it came all at once. He was out in those trees, still, tied to one of them, with his hands folded in his lap, being polite. He'd had a delivery in Santarém. He'd said so twice at supper.

I sat up. I opened my mouth and tried to shout his name, and what came out was a cough and then a wet scrape, nothing a man could hear past ten yards. I tried again. My legs wouldn't take me up. I looked at the line of trees and the black water between them and thought about going back in, and what I thought about was the lantern. Whether it would be there. Whether Edvaldo had meant it, or whether he'd only meant it for me, and what he'd do with a second man who came back.

I stayed on the road.

I'd like to say it was only that I was too weak, and part of it was. The rest was that I was afraid, and I knew it while I was sitting there. I knew it, and I stayed anyway, with the sun coming up and my wrist leaking into the gravel.

I said his name once more, quietly, Gilson's. Nobody was there to hear it.

Edvaldo had let me go. I'd said the boy's name until it broke, and he'd heard it, and that was enough for him. It wasn't enough for me, and I understood by the time the road was dry that it never would be. I couldn't take any of it back. Not what I'd done at the water, and not what I'd said, and not the man I'd left in the trees.

I'd been at the ferry shelter since the day before, under the tin roof with the bench and the dead wasps on the sill. A woman who sold tapioca cakes off a cart had given me a pair of rubber sandals two sizes too big, and she'd wrapped my wrist in a strip of an old pillowcase without asking me anything. She looked at the wrist, then at my face, then at the strip, and tied it off. I didn't tell her. I opened my mouth twice and it wouldn't come out in any order.

The water had dropped a hand's width on the fence posts since I'd crawled out of it. The ferry still wasn't running. A man at the landing said maybe Thursday, and then said maybe not.

At midday the heat sat on the road so hard that the gravel steamed. I was standing at the edge of the shelter's shade with my right hand on a post, because I'd found I couldn't stay sitting. Each time I sat I heard the paddle. Dip, pull, drip. So I stood and watched the road, and the lane where it started, and the brown water going flat and slow between the fence posts.

I hadn't gone back to the house. I'd thought about the tin. My mother's handwriting, thirty dates in blue, out of order on a floor. I found I could think about it and still not go.

A man came down the road from the bus stop.

He was young, twenty-four or twenty-five, slim, with neat short hair and a clean shirt. It was a pale blue shirt, ironed, with the creases still in the sleeves. He had a backpack on both shoulders, a good one with the tags still hanging off a zipper, and he was walking the way people walk when they've been told the place is nice. He stopped by the woman with the cart. I couldn't hear him from there, but I saw her shake her head and point at the water. He nodded and thanked her and kept walking.

He passed the shelter. He looked at me and gave a small polite nod, the kind you give a man on a bench, and then he asked me, in careful Portuguese, slow, each word set down by itself, whether I knew where a person could find a room.

"There's a place at the end of the lane," he said. "A woman at the bus said. For people waiting for the ferry. Do you know it?"

His accent wasn't from here. It wasn't from anywhere I could name. He'd practiced the sentence. I could hear that he'd practiced it on the bus.

"A room," I said.

"Just a few nights. Until the water."

"Yes," I said. It came out as a croak. I didn't know what I was agreeing to.

He smiled and said thank you, and he turned toward the lane. He took four steps. His shoes were clean, white canvas, and the first of them was already on the wet edge where the gravel went under.

I let go of the post and went after him.

My legs weren't right yet. The sandals slapped, too big, and I almost lost one. I caught his arm above the elbow with my right hand, the good one, and he stopped and turned around fast. He was startled and then he wasn't. He looked at my hand on his sleeve, and then at my face. I hadn't shaved in four days. I knew what I looked like.

"Sorry," he said. "Did I— is something wrong?"

"Don't go down there."

"The lane?"

"Don't." I tightened my hand. I felt the sleeve crease give under my thumb. "Not to the house. Don't go to the house at the end."

"The woman at the bus said it's cheap." He said it gently, like he was explaining it to me. "She said a man there takes people in. Edvaldo?"

He said the name the way you say the name of someone who's been kind. That was what did it, more than the shirt or the shoes. I'd said it that way myself, three days before the lantern, standing at a door with a paddle on my shoulder. I'd been pleased with myself.

"He takes people in," I said. "Yes. He does. He makes coffee. He puts sugar in it for you, he doesn't ask, and you think—"

My voice cracked and I stopped. A wet sound, nothing a man could use. Rafael didn't pull away. He looked down at the pillowcase on my wrist, where it had gone brown at the edge, and then up again. His face had changed. He wasn't afraid yet. He was working out how polite to be.

"Are you hurt?" he said. "Do you need someone? There's a clinic in the—"

"No. Listen." I got my left hand up between us, the torn one, the one that still didn't close. I don't know what I meant by it. I held it there. "I was there. I stayed in the back room. I'm telling you I was there, and you don't—you can't—"

The frogs weren't going yet. It was too bright for them, only the heat ticking in the shelter roof and a motor somewhere out on the river. Behind him the lane ran flat and brown to the first of the stilt houses, quiet in the sun, with the walkway going on past it. Nobody was on it. There was nothing to see.

That was the trouble. It looked like a place where you could get a room.

"Please," I said. I didn't let go of his arm. "I'm trying to tell you. Don't go."