Devour by Kurt Anderson

Author:Kurt Anderson [Anderson, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

It was supposed to be their first real family vacation.

He was on a salvage job outside Baia de Todos os Santos harbor in Salvador, Brazil, working on a faltering BP oil tanker that had run aground after a monstrous storm. A big job, three weeks, but the tanker was wedged fast into the mud and the work was not nearly as dangerous or technical as most of his gigs. The money on the big corporate salvage jobs was fantastic, even for a welder, and he had flown Sienna and Mason down as soon as his son’s preschool graduation was over. Brian had missed the graduation, but he wouldn’t miss his son’s first days of summer vacation. He could still remember his old man picking him up after he’d finished kindergarten, down at the end of that long gravel road on a warm late spring day. No kindergarten graduation back in those days, but his father had let him know he’d done well, shaking his hand and then offering him a bottle of Coca-Cola, dripping ice water from the old green Igloo cooler in the box of the GMC farm truck.

Mason slept soundly the first night in the apartment the company had rented for him, a nice place on the western edge of Salvador’s Barra neighborhood, Mason’s room adjoining theirs so they had a bit of privacy. He and Sienna did not sleep, not until the morning light began to trickle in through their open windows. The city normally carried with it the faint odor common to most South American cities on the Atlantic, a combination of sewage and slaughterhouse reek, mingled with the fetid odor of the overfertilized fields outside town, but this morning the winds blew in off the ocean and it smelled of salt and the rosewood trees planted in the garden and along the causeway. And lodged in his mind was the sweet realization the job was done, money was in the bank, and he had nine days to spend with his family before the next job.

“It’s beautiful,” Sienna had said. She was standing at the window with a light robe around her, watching the ship traffic in the bay. “What’s the harbor called? In English, I mean.”

“The Bay of All Saints.” He and his coworkers in Borealis Salvage had come up with all sorts of alternate names in the past few weeks. The Bay of All Shit. The Bay of Ball Sweat. It had once been beautiful, no doubt, but the untreated sewage and effluents gave the water a brown, frothy appearance, especially at low tide. The Barra neighborhood had also undoubtedly once been beautiful, at least conceptually, with its whitewashed Portuguese buildings with clay tile roofs, but the streets were dirty and turned vicious at night. So he’d heard. The streets were dirty, certainly, but he ate and drank and traveled with the other welders, surly-looking men with slag burns tattooed on their forearms. Nobody bothered them.

But this morning it was beautiful, the wind

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