The Dream Merchant Read online

  What the hell are you doing, man? I said, and Jim cut me off with a hand slammed against my mouth.

  What are you doing, man? I repeated to myself. I was beginning to shake.

  Not a sound, he ordered.

  He didn’t want to hear from me, not when the speedboat was only a hundred yards off and edging closer in the dark calm water. Now I could make out its narrow sleek hull. It was sliding right up to our stern.

  Then a voice called from the boat in a heavy Spanish accent, Do you know where we are? What a preposterous question to ask in the middle of nowhere. How were we supposed to answer? The sleek boat kept edging forward and Jim motioned for me to get down on the deck. Once again, Do you know where we are? The man’s voice was cloying with sweet innocence. It was disgusting.

  Jim seemed to see something. He raised the gun fast, hesitated a beat, and he squeezed off three rounds.

  Holy shit.

  In a second, two thousand horsepower was roaring and the speedboat wheeled on its haunches, throwing white water on us, and for a moment I saw the alarmed face of the man at the wheel staring back as the boat shot off into the darkness.

  Did you see the other guy pointing a rifle from the companionway? Jim asked, lowering his own gun. I hadn’t seen a second man. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. I was trying to pull my heart back into my chest.

  Were they gonna kill us?

  What do you think?

  Are they coming back? What’s gonna happen?

  He shrugged. I still didn’t get it. Was this for real or a paranoid fantasy that Jim was filling up with life? I had no idea if he’d hit the men or shot to scare them. I hadn’t seen any rifles except our own.

  We’ll have to stand guard through the night, Jim said as though situations like these were normal in life. I tried to imagine how we’d hold them off. Where I fit in. I was a writer from New York, not the right guy to go into a gunfight. The rifle felt clammy and too heavy for me to hold up. Honestly, I wanted to hide down below.

  He led me up the companionway and positioned us on opposite ends of a Boston Whaler on the top deck. He took my rifle and clicked off the safety so that I was ready to shoot.

  Don’t pull the trigger by accident, he said. I’ve seen that before.

  I nodded, pulling my right hand away from the stock. Looking across the taut canvas cover, I could see two lights in the distance moving back and forth. No, three lights. What the hell was going on out there? I couldn’t tell if they were coming closer or moving off. How could we defend ourselves against an armada of drug smugglers? But why were they coming for us?

  Jim had stopped answering my questions. The waiting was too much. After a half hour like this, clutching the gun against my knee, I was simply going crazy. To break the tension, I asked, What’d you do in Brazil?

  I didn’t expect an answer, but Jim coughed two or three times and put his rifle down on the deck.

  I spent three years in the jungle mining for gold.

  Tell me, I said, still trying to breathe normally.

  * * *

  It takes over your life, he said while keeping his eyes focused on the boats that now seemed to be moving a little farther away. Everything changed for me the first day I walked into that camp. The smell of pig shit was everywhere. Jim shook his head slowly, remembering.

  I had a friend in Canada who had signed a lease with the Brazilian government—they call it an alvará—to work twenty thousand acres in the deep jungle south of Manaus. He made a proposal for the two of us to go into business together. Why not? I was fifty-two years old and my life was in ruins. I found out that my partner didn’t know anything about surviving in the jungle. His first visit to the camp the guy got scared, and he never came back in. I ended up doing it myself.

  Jim took the cigar out of his pocket and put it in his mouth, but he didn’t light up.

  Now just imagine a few Brazilian Indians sifting dirt and gravel at the edge of a riverbank in the middle of the Amazon, he continued. On this first trip, I brought along four men from the city. I didn’t know them at all, but they were supposed to have experience finding gold.

  I was exhausted and hungry. I trekked through the jungle with the men for four days to get there. One of them spoke ten English words, but mostly I was guessing about things I’d never seen before. My partner had said there would be some basic house where we would live. I figured bunks and even a shower. There wasn’t any house. There was an old pigpen made from tree trunks rotten with termites. It was all that was left from a mining operation ten years earlier. The jungle had grown over everything. The hovel was filled with shit. I guessed some wild pigs still used it. I couldn’t imagine sleeping a night there. For lunch we ate a large anteater that one of the natives shot beside the river; it was a big animal with claws the size of a man’s hands. My guys considered anteater great eating, but the animal had a terrible smell from ants. They cooked the meat with a sweet guava paste to kill the smell, but it was just awful. They cut up the rest of the anteater and tossed it in an old rusty barrel for later.

  It was hot, a hundred degrees or more, with humidity worse than anything I had ever felt. I needed to get cool, but I was frightened to swim in the river because of snakes and who knew what was in there. I was thirsty and bitten raw by mosquitoes and ants. Worst of all, after walking sixty miles in the heat I was dead tired; maybe I was sick. I needed to sleep for a week in a cool room. There aren’t any cool rooms in the jungle. But these little men I hired, they had such energy and patience. Hour after hour they sifted the dirt with large sieves called batillas. I was sweating and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? Maybe I was sick with malaria. I had no idea. I looked into one of those sieves and I saw a few clumps of hard, shiny metal. It was gold.

  Jim paused a minute and lit his fat Cuban cigar, which seemed preposterous given our circumstances, but it calmed me a little. He wasn’t thinking any more about the boats. He was remembering and barely nodding his head to some interior music.

  Just seeing it, my God, what runs through your mind. The lust. What I could do with this! I mean, there was so much more money in this dirt than I had ever made in business. More than I had ever dreamed of. To hell with everything else. It starts exploding in you, that I could do anything, I could have anything on earth. I could be a billionaire like De Beers. This goes through your mind. Why the hell not? It’s all around me on this property, tons and tons of gold; just look at the clumps rolling around in the batilla. I’m calculating the money, all the things I’m going to buy, when all of a sudden I’m looking around to make sure that no one sees what we’ve got here, this fortune that’s just a half a foot beneath the ground. We’ve got to protect this property, because someone could take it. Maybe someone is watching right now from the trees across the river. How can we protect it? We’ll need guns. People would kill us to get this gold. And it was mine. All mine.

  Jim looked at me squarely. Are you getting this? Do you understand?

  Looking at the shiny chunks of metal in the batilla brought on some wild ideas, he went on. I could build a resort, a casino in the Amazon. Anything at all. I would have my own Learjet, like before I went broke. All I could think about was this gold. I’m going to become rich. I’m going to show everybody in the world that I made it again after what happened to me. I made it back on top, but much bigger.

  One of the Indians was trying to gesture to me, no, no, Jim—he was shaking his head at my excitement—the clumps of metal aren’t real gold. They haven’t found it yet. This is false gold. He is pointing up the river. We have to search other parts of the property until we find the real thing and begin our mining operation.

  It’s not real gold, but I can’t turn off the faucet.

  I don’t give a shit about anything. I’ll eat anteater, heated-over anteater with maggots stirred in—that’s what we ate for the next three days from the barrel. Only someone completely mad could eat such vomit. I would sleep on the ground with bugs crawling
up my legs. I’m going to make it, whatever it takes. We’ll cut an airfield into the jungle with machetes and our bare hands. We’re going to bring in heavy equipment. Whatever happens, I’m going to find the gold, because other guys in the jungle are finding it. In Manaus, all I would hear about was gold, gold; men were putting together expeditions with every dollar they could muster.

  It was something more than just getting excited. A force was running through me. On that first day the rules changed.

  After a few days on the property we started to find the real thing, small amounts, but it was gold for sure. And I knew nothing was going to get in my way. All the things that I went through in my life prepared me for this. I had no fear. Nobody’s going to take anything away from me. If you get in my way, I’m going to trample you. You could put a gun to my head. That happened to me, and I didn’t give a shit. I was one son of a bitch. I had to deal with my people and some of them were brutal. I did bad things. People died. So what?

  Jim looked at me a beat and then back toward the moving lights. So what! I thought.

  I loved it, he said. I loved it. One time I was speeding along a rutted street outside Manaus and this euphoria built up in me and I just started screaming into the night like I was on something. Because I was.

  People can see it in you. You could see it in me. They called me gringo maluco, the crazy American. I was another person. As if you had a dream about wanting to be a certain type of guy—a real tough guy, you see them in the movies. And these guys can do things you could barely imagine. Well, these guys are for real, a lot of them, because they have something inside. A lot of CIA agents, or people who are killers—well, they have this drive. It’s a fever. Some people who kill a lot of people—these multiple killers—what do you think they have inside of them? Something’s driving them. Nothing’s stopping them. Nothing was stopping me.

  Now Jim was quiet for a time, looking out at the dark ocean.

  Are they coming any closer? I asked for the third or fourth time, unable to get my mind off the gunmen in the boats.

  Hard to say, he answered.

  Jim was returning from the jungle and didn’t seem concerned about the boats. I imagined that he was thinking where this experience had left him—whether a man can come all the way back and be normal, live again with his wife in a neat little house in the suburbs as if he never left.

  The plan was for us to keep our vigil, behind the Boston Whaler where the Colombians couldn’t see us if they came back. That way, surprise would be on our side. Jim told me that he was a good shot, and I didn’t doubt it. We would have a fighting chance, if we stayed up the night and remained alert. That was the key. He’d learned about such things in Brazil. He had a plan and I believed him.

  In the morning, when I woke up, I was still clutching the rifle. It was a calm, picture-postcard day in the Bahamas with no Colombian speedboats anywhere that I could see. Jim was sleeping beside me on the deck, snoring like a bull.

  2.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA

  Jim raises his bare thigh a little and Mara, in shorts and T-shirt, settles on him, her body moving smoothly against his dry white skin. The petite, shapely twenty-six-year-old spreads her legs a little and raises herself, rubs her sex back and forth against my friend’s thigh. I am sitting to the side of them in his old La-Z-Boy recliner, moved hastily, two weeks earlier, from his apartment with Phyllis. Jim is grinning, his left eye tearing as it has for the past eight or nine years.

  I’ve just met this girl who now turns back toward me, strikes a pose, and smiles as though to ask, Do you like this? I feel aroused watching them and confused about why she is performing like this on my first visit to their tiny dark house. This pose, this angle, staring at her small raised behind, legs spread, is about the same view as the snapshot Jim had showed me five weeks earlier on my last trip to Florida, before Mara arrived from Israel, where they’d met. In the picture, her head is turned to the side on a pillow after they had had sex. She is spent, entirely pleased. Jim had made a show of snatching the photo from my hand, but first he’d wanted me to relish her youthful ass and bushy dark hair with their wetness spilling onto her inner thigh. And now he is grinning at me. Do you like her? They are both selling me even while they sell each other.

  Jim is now rounding the bend to eighty. He and I have been best friends for twenty years, although it feels like a puff of time since the night vigil alongside Jim’s Boston Whaler. And yet there have been so many lavish dinners with Phyllis in their condominium, fishing trips to the Bahamas, fervent promises and plans for the future, money schemes, so much history flashing past, it is hard for me to take her in, this brand-new leading lady. Or maybe it’s that I can’t quite see where I fit in.

  Jim and Mara are flat broke, but he doesn’t seem worried. Jim has been a moneymaking machine his whole life, but now his boundless energy and ambition have narrowed to this twenty-six-year-old who has been a shock to his family, friends, to a virtual army of customers and salesmen, to everyone who knows him. How could he leave Phyllis, his faithful devoted wife, his home, his business (though it wasn’t doing very well)?

  Here they are in a worn-out bungalow with aged matching appliances. Two children are sleeping in a closet-sized bedroom, her kids. Empty pizza boxes are strewn in a corner—not a trace of gracious living anywhere to be seen. For most of his adult life Jim has lived in gorgeous, spacious homes. This? This would have been a tragic place for my friend, banishment.

  Mara brought a few thousand from Israel, just enough for them to scrape by for eight or ten weeks. Then what? He cannot move back to Canada, where he is still a fugitive. Returning to Phyllis would be humiliating and bewildering, though she would take him back.

  I could never have concocted this late chapter. I know him so well. I can often anticipate his words, practically read his mind as I could my own father’s, particularly in the last years of his life when he was very sick and no longer on top in his business life. When he needed me I traveled to his shabby rooms in Cambridge, Massachusetts (rank smelling, and fashioned in nearly the same torn-and-crumbling endgame style as Jim and Mara’s). I became my father’s source of energy and hope. He no longer had vocal cords, so I became his voice. A few times I drove his Buick to the office of an electrical distributor he knew in Boston, held Dad’s arm as we walked inside. I made his audacious pitch while my father grinned and tapped on the desk with a pencil. I was going to do the same service for Jim, help him make his way as an old man. His wife, Phyllis, never minded our scheming and intimacy—in fact, she found us amusing. I looked forward to our afternoons together on his spacious, breezy terrace over the Intracoastal, replaying our greatest fishing days or listening to him tell stories of his life in the jungle.

  But this? This?

  * * *

  Mara is beautiful in the half-light of the small living room, a kid with smooth milky skin, without a wrinkle or a bulge. She could be his granddaughter. For an old man, what a miracle she is. She is wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, no bra. She wants me to look at her. No, she dares me to look.

  She begins to kiss Jim on the mouth, hungry kisses; her tongue is working like a puppy—perhaps for my benefit—while she moves steadily against his leg. He’s getting aroused and beginning to giggle. She won’t stop. Mara’s quite a salesman herself, plays us both smoothly. She has decided that to make this sale she needs to seduce both of us. She’s amused by his stiff cock, turns back toward me. She is entirely comfortable speaking this language. Speaking English is more of a strain. Although her English isn’t bad.

  Don’t you trust me? she asks. This is our new life together, she seems to say with her smile.

  Their new life together. She waits for my answer. I nod my head, as if to affirm, Of course I trust you, even while I am not sure.

  She is soft with me, and seductive, but underneath, a fierce woman. What does she want from Jim? Love? I don’t get it.

  Jim watches us, amused. He is so proud
of her selling. She has become his everything.

  Mara wears too much rouge on her cheeks, which makes her look trashy. I wonder, with time, if she will wear less. Except, how is it possible that for these two time can move ahead in unhurried, evolving years? He is an old man.

  Jim and I could spend our life in bed. But our bed is too soft, she continues. We need a good bed.

  He could die there, I say.

  Not a bad way to die.

  I can’t shock or even jostle her. She is very sure-footed.

  We’ll buy a good one tomorrow, baby, he coos.

  What will they use for money? He has no more credit cards.

  She attaches herself to his neck, burrows into him, making a mark. She won’t let go. She is digging into his life. Jim has promised to marry her. Soon they will market the Wow Card together. They will be business partners, fifty-fifty. Phyllis is out. Jim and Mara will have a new home by the water and a yacht in the backyard. There won’t be any regrets. She wants a little white BMW convertible. Jim will be a millionaire once again. His whole life he has made it and lost it. Who is winning, making the sale? I fear she is winning. Jim is hooked very deep.

  * * *

  I am resolved to confront him about this precipitous course change, but the words that pop into my head are too miserable: Jim, what about all of the adventures, the promises you made? What we were going to do? I would pester him with questions about Brazil—a hundred times we had vowed to go back there together.

  Instead, I ask him, Jim, what will you do when there’s no more money?

  In six weeks we’ll be ready to put the Wow Card in stores, he answers smartly. There is nothing in the world like the Wow Card. Did I explain the marketing plan? We’ll sell millions of cards; actually, we’ll give them away. That’s the beauty of it. Hold one in your hand and it looks like any other debit card, but it throws off a hefty residual income for the rest of your life. Let me show you some numbers—he still has ardor for the hunt despite a run of failed deals and the specter of oblivion, which he greets as a new and beguiling acquaintance. Jim has never been reluctant to experience new tastes, to walk new paths, even now while he walks the plank. This seems like the final chapter for my friend, but who knows? Jim has crashed before.