Discards (2 page)

“Thanks, man,” Tiago said. He pulled the bills off his fingers—they came away easily—and stuffed them into his pocket without looking.

As he trudged away toward the bus, Tiago wondered what the hell had just happened. Probably it was just a breeze that had moved the bills, and as for the sticking to his fingers … Well, what was there here at the dump that
wasn't
sticky? Anyway, he was still feverish. Maybe he'd imagined the whole thing.

*   *   *

The few other people at the bus stop kept their distance, muttering and casting glances, and the driver eyed him warily. But he accepted Tiago's fare—it was almost all of what he'd gotten from Vitor—and Tiago found a seat way at the back of the nearly empty bus.

Hours passed in diesel-scented, lurching motion. People got on, people got off; no one sat near Tiago. From the occasional muttered
“Curinga!”
he knew that it wasn't just the stink of the landfill on him.

The last time he had traveled this route had been a couple of months after his mother had disappeared. He'd spent the first month in a series of wretched little homes, handed from one to the next; there was no government assistance for abandoned children, he had no relatives that he knew of, and none of his mother's friends had the space or the money to house a hungry teenaged boy for more than a few days. But then the boyfriend of a woman who'd taken him in had tried to take Tiago's clothes off. He'd kicked the man in the nuts and fled with only the clothes on his back.

After that he had lived on the street, becoming increasingly hungry and filthy, until one of the other street kids had let him in on a scheme: she had heard that the landfill at Jardim Gramacho was a place where you could make money by picking through the garbage for recyclable metals and plastics. It was smelly, difficult work, she said, but an honest living, and she knew someone who would give them a ride …

Weak, skinny, and ignorant, he'd barely survived his first few weeks as a
catador.
But eventually he had learned the ropes: where to go for a vest and a ride, how to be the first to a fresh load without getting run over, how to identify the plastics that paid the most per kilo, which of the buyers would cheat you. Eventually he had gotten good at it, even begun to take pride in his work—taking people's discards and helping to recycle them into something useful. He'd stayed alive, if not prosperous, for two years; he'd even made a few friends.

Now all that was gone—taken by the virus.

He leaned his head against the chill darkness of the bus window and wept.

*   *   *

“Bairro dos Curingas!” called the driver. Tiago roused himself, shook his head to clear it, collected his bundle of belongings, and stumbled out the back door just before the bus roared off.

He stood, blinking and shivering, on the black-and-white pavement. He was sick and weak and hungry, and with three changes of bus he had barely slept; it must be past midnight. But now he stood at the gate of Rio's Jokertown.

It was not what he had expected.

Curingas
there were, to be sure. A man with writhing snakes for hair stood on a corner handing out leaflets. A grossly fat woman, wider than she was tall and with warty red skin, sat at the entrance of a club, calling out to passersby in multiple languages. Two scantily clad women, both with attractive bodies but hideous faces, danced on a balcony illuminated by spotlights.

But it was not what Tiago would consider a
bairro
—a neighborhood—at all. It was a commercial district, bright with neon and brash with music and chatter even at this late hour. People thronged the sidewalks, most of them normal looking and almost all of them white or light skinned. Tiago supposed that many of them were
turistas
rather than
cariocas
—Rio natives.

A man bumped into Tiago from behind, making him drop his bundle. As Tiago bent to pick it up, the man slurred a drunken apology and stooped to assist him.

The man stank of alcohol, with shabby clothes and gray hair. His eyes were red and bleary … and extended on stalks from his face.

Tiago swallowed, but he would need to learn to accept
curingas
if he was to be accepted himself. “Hey,” he said. “I'm new here. I'm looking for something to eat, and a place to stay.”

“Plenty to eat here,” said the eye-stalk man, waving down the street. Doorway after doorway gleamed brightly, and enticing smells mingled in the air.

But every one of those brightly illuminated doorways had a sentinel. Some of them were guarded by large, no-nonsense men in tuxedoes; others had only a friendly-looking attractive woman in evening dress, but Tiago suspected that those women had burly men backing them up. And although a few of them had mild deformities, none were frightening or disgusting.

The whole place stank of money. And Tiago … simply stank. “I don't have a lot of cash,” he told the eye-stalk man. The few remaining reais in his pocket probably wouldn't buy a packet of peanuts at a fancy restaurant like these.

The man's eyes wavered and literally crossed, making Tiago slightly queasy. “Santa Teresa's gone to hell anyway,” he muttered. “Just a tourist trap, anymore. The real
curingas
have gotten pushed out to the
favelas.
” To some people,
favela
meant neighborhood or community; others sneered it to mean slum. The difference depended on where you stood: on the
morros,
or hills, with the poor, or on the
asfalto,
or pavement, with the rich.

The black-and-white pavement of this place was hard beneath Tiago's jelly shoes.

One of the burly tuxedo-clad men—his skin was black as night and white ram's horns curled from his forehead—was keeping a wary eye on Tiago. Tiago knew that look; he'd seen it plenty of times while he was living on the street, before he'd gone to the landfill. It was a look that said
I know you're just waiting for an opportunity to zip in here and take some of those hot
empadas
off the bar, but I've got my eye on you.

Above the neighborhood gateway, a huge neon sign of a burly man in priest's garb, with tentacles where his mouth should be, waved a welcome to the crowd below. The shadows shifted in the moving light from his waving arm, but the neon
curinga
's welcome was not for Tiago.

“Where do the real
curingas
live?” he asked the eye-stalk man.

“Up there,” he replied, gesturing vaguely toward the hills.

Tiago shouldered his bundle and began to walk.

*   *   *

He walked for hours, asking directions of passersby as he went. Most gave him a cold glance, or even less acknowledgment than that, and breezed past without stopping. Some spat at or threatened him. One or two threw coins, and though he had not asked for money he was not too proud to scramble after them. And a few, a very few, tried to help. The consensus was that the
curingas
were mostly to be found in Complexo do Alemão, a large complex of
favelas
in the hills of the city's North Zone—three hours' walk or more away. Even if he had had enough money for the bus, none were running at that hour. Finally, too tired to go any farther, he hid himself beneath a heap of trash bags, arms and legs wrapped around his small bundle of possessions, and slept.

He woke at dawn to the sniffing noses of rats, and breakfasted on stale
pão de queijo
rolls rescued from the garbage behind a café just setting up for the day.

He knew he was approaching the
complexo
as the graffiti got denser and more elaborate. The ones that were executed entirely in black paint, he knew, were gang tags—they indicated which group of drug
bandidos
controlled this territory, though he did not understand their code. A further, more definitive sign was the rising terrain, as the wide, straight, paved streets of the
asfalto
gave way to the steep, curving, narrow streets of the
morro.
Eventually he found himself at a high concrete wall, plastered with graffiti and topped with an iron fence: the boundary of Nova Brasília. Of all the
complexo
's
favelas,
this was—or so he'd been told—the largest, poorest, most dangerous, and densest with
curingas.

He followed the wall until he came to a gateway, where two muscular young men lounged on folding chairs. One had bat-like wings, too small to be functional; the other had a shaven head crowned by a circle of white lumps—molar teeth—and was drinking a Coke.

Both men carried machine guns.

The man with the teeth wiped his mouth and tossed the can, rattling, into the gutter. That made Tiago wince—back at the landfill, aluminum cans fetched almost two reais per kilo. “Welcome to Nova Brasília,” he said. “What's your business?”

“I'm a
curinga,
” Tiago replied, gesturing to his face. “I need a place to stay.”

“He's a
curinga,
” the man replied, smiling at his partner, who smiled back. The man with the teeth dropped the smile and glared at Tiago. “We don't care what you look like, you don't come into this
favela
unless you're on approved business.”

“Approved by who?” Tiago replied. These men wore civilian clothes and carried no identification.

“Comando Curinga,” the man with the teeth replied—Joker Command. It was a name Tiago hadn't heard before, but it echoed the names of the drug gangs Comando Vermelho and Terceiro Comando—Red Command and Third Command—which were all over the radio. “We took over this
favela
from the Amigos dos Amigos back in March. And no one goes in or out without our say-so.”

The bat-winged man shrugged. “Nothing personal, kid.”

By reflex, Tiago snagged the Coke can from the gutter as he walked away. But half a block later he stopped.

He had walked all night. His belly rumbled. He had no money and nowhere else to go.

The man with the wings was, at least, not actively hostile.

He looked at the can in his hand.

Then he sat on the curb and took out his Swiss Army knife. Using the can opener, small blade, and corkscrew, he cut and carved and shaped the can's soft aluminum until it was a bird—a stupid-looking cartoon bird with big round eyes and a spray of shredded aluminum feathers on its head. It was ugly, fragile, and covered with dangerous edges, but kind of adorable.

He went back to the gateway and presented the thing to the bat-winged man. “Here,” he said, “I made this for you.”

“Did you now?” said the bat-winged man, with no visible emotion, but he put out his hand and took it. The one with the teeth frowned at him, but said nothing.

The man turned the stupid little bird over, poked at its beak, and considered it at arm's length while Tiago's heart stood still. He expected the man to crush it in his fist and toss it away.

But instead he just grunted, “It's cute. My girlfriend will like it.”

“So … can I come in?”

“All right,” the bat-winged man said, ignoring his partner's glare. “And did you say you needed a place to stay?”

Tiago swallowed. “I did.”

The man eyed Tiago for a moment, considering, then scribbled on a scrap of paper. “This is my cousin Luiza's address. Tell her Felipe sent you.”

Tiago tucked the paper in his pocket. “I don't know my way around. Can you tell me how to find it?”

*   *   *

Luiza lived at the top of a “street” so steep, narrow, and twisty that not even a bicycle could traverse it. Tiago's heart pounded from the climb as much as his nervousness as he rapped on the rusted metal door.

The door was pocked with bullet holes.

“Yeah?” came a voice from within, over the thumping funk music.

“I'm looking for Luiza.”

The door creaked open a finger's width. One eye peered through the gap. “I'm Luiza.”

“My name's Tiago. Your cousin Felipe sent me.” He briefly described the circumstances.

The eye regarded him for a moment, then the door closed. There was an extended rattling sound, then it reopened more fully, letting out a blast of music and a sweet whiff of
maconha.

Luiza was a girl not much older than Tiago. Thin, with the black hair, medium-dark skin, and prominent cheekbones of one with a lot of indigenous heritage, she looked nearly normal except that her eyebrows were made of feathers—long, black, and shiny like a raven's. They made her dark eyes look fierce and predatory. She wore a white sleeveless top and camouflage pants, and her belt and pockets were heavy with cell phones, pagers, beepers, and media players.

“That's a lot of gadgets,” Tiago said.

“Cool, huh?” Luiza uncrossed her arms and looked admiringly down at her array of devices.

“Why do you need three cell phones?”

Luiza smirked. “This one works.” She pointed to the oldest and most scarred of them. “The rest are for show. But pretty soon I'll be able to afford all this for real. So will you. Everybody wins in this business … except for the losers.” She pointed a finger at the side of her head and mimed a gun going off. “Bang, you lose.”

She ushered Tiago inside, closing and locking the door behind him. The room was dark, the window covered with old newspaper. Boxes and bags of Tiago didn't know what, but could guess, were piled in corners. Most of the rest of the floor was covered with mattresses; a giant sound system pounded the air. “You know the drill?” Luiza said, raising her voice above the music.

“Drill?”

Luiza rolled her eyes. “What we
do
here?”

“Uh … no.”

Theatrically she cradled her forehead in her hand and shook her head. “Nossa…” She looked up. “Okay. You'll be an
avião,
right?”