Backlands by Victoria Shorr

Author:Victoria Shorr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

IX

“If they catch me in Alagoas, they might not kill me,” Zé Sereno overheard Dulce saying. She and Cila were already out, sitting on some flat rocks, taking turns with the sewing machine, working to finish Lampião’s nephew’s uniform.

“Same for me in Sergipe,” Sereno’s girlfriend, Cila, had answered. “I’ve got cousins on the force there, I don’t think they’d kill me. They’ve known me ever since I was a little kid.”

And Sereno backed away, so as not to have to explain to his own true love that it had been a long time since she was a little kid in Sergipe, as opposed to one of the most-wanted bandits in all Brazil, worth her deadweight in gold to every policeman out there, including distant cousins on the Sergipe force.

Who might not kill her, but how much better would it be for her to be taken alive anyway? Gangbang on the way to prison, where they’d lock her in the deepest cell they had and lose the key till her teeth fell out.

And why was he even listening to this kind of talk, when what he should be doing was folding his tent and leaving, now, today? Everything he’d ever learned as a bandit, everything Lampião had taught him, was telling him to get out of there—yesterday, but since they hadn’t, then today.

He told Maria that he’d go over and try once more to get Lampião to come, too, but if he still wasn’t moving, then Sereno would leave anyway with Cila and his own group of boys. They wouldn’t have to go far, just off the river, where he wouldn’t have to listen to his woman wondering which police would or wouldn’t kill her.

He didn’t blame her. It was the place, this river—too many police around, and too many players. Too many tongues to wag, or even half-wag. Even if someone told only a little, it could be too much.

And there was something else wrong, too, that no one was talking about, which was Lampião himself.

Sereno figured he was up there praying, on the Morro dos Perdidos, Hill of the Damned, or Lost—some said one, some the other, but either way, it wasn’t good. Sereno even knew the prayer: With the light of day, I see my Lord, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Maria. I walk with the Lord and nothing can touch me.

And it used to be true. Every morning for Sereno’s whole life in the band, Lampião would open his one eye and “see the Lord,” one way or another, in the clouds, the birds, even in the blazing sun. And it was nothing but that, that clear vision, that they’d lived on for all these years, but it turned out to be enough.

But if he didn’t have it, and Sereno was thinking maybe he didn’t, and so were the boys—he’d seen it on all those worried faces around the fire this morning, everyone shifting around, standing, sitting, and no one looking anyone else in the eye. Christ, someone had forgotten to put the sugar in the coffee, and no one even noticed it at first.

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