The Green grave

Drops of his sweat fell on the still-warm locomotive frame, vanishing into the oily film with a barely audible hiss.

“You can’t stop this downpour, Rick,” Catarina spoke more quietly, her intonations cracking to let the encroaching fear through. The veneer of sophistication had been completely washed away by the water. “You can only try not to drown. And we’re already sinking, Rick. The earth is flowing. What held our steps yesterday is now pulling us down.”

Rick jerked his head up sharply. The whites of his bloodshot eyes had turned crimson from burst vessels. In that look, Cat caught what she feared most: his fanatical faith in blueprints, I-beam strength, and steam power had just cracked in the face of the sucking bog. He looked at his wife — at the wet rags of faded silk, at the gray streaks of grease on her pale cheeks.

“I know,” his rasp turned into an angry, clipped whisper. “I know, Cat! But I won’t sit and watch the bog swallow… take the boiler. It’s our only ticket out of here. The only one. Lose the Black Maria — we rot in this dead end like the Portuguese day laborers. I won’t leave you to die… to die in this mud. Not in the hell Blackwood built on his burst notes.”

He bent over the frame again, frantically, blindly turning the wrench.

Catarina sank into the red mire beside him, completely forgetting her squeamishness. In her chest, her heart pounded heavily, in jolts — a fierce, selfish closeness to this man mixed with panic. Cat laid her hand on his shoulder blade. Through the soaked fabric clinging to his back, she felt his muscles trembling violently, convulsively from the cold and the extreme, animal tension.

“Hold the cable,” Catarina breathed out, her voice cracking into a hoarse, choked whisper. “Pull, Rick.”

The engineer raised his head. Through the coal grime on his face, a dull despair showed through. He caught her fingers, yanking them toward him with such force that Cat’s joints cracked with a dry, bony sound.

“Pulling,” he cut off. Steel had returned to his rasp.

The wall of rain closed in completely. Drops fell in a solid, heavy torrent, pounding out a deafening, staccato roar from the depot’s rusty roof. The solid ground under Catarina’s boots had finally turned into a shifting bog. The mire released her footwear reluctantly, with a sucking sound, pulling her feet deeper with every movement. The rails they had just walked on were slowly disappearing under the murky brown water. It seemed as if the railway ended in nothingness, and the way back no longer physically existed. The muddy flood was already creeping up to the tires of the Black Maria’s wheel sets, lazily licking the grease-coated metal. Iron seems eternal only where its rusted flanks are protected by the laws and walls of cities. Here, under the heavy drops of the Amazon, thirty tons of steel vanished into the brown mire as easily as a drop of wax on a hot plate.

“The brace to the post!” Rick shouted over the roar of the water wall. His voice cracked into a barking, hoarse falsetto. “Cat, keep the tension! Hale, where the hell is the winch?! She’ll sink like a stone!”

Doctor Hale emerged from the hangar’s darkness, dragging an oily loop of steel cable through the mud. Fever had stained his whites a dirty yellow; his pianist’s fingers trembled finely from the cold and lack of rum. The old man stopped under the very edge of the sagging awning, where water gushed in streams. Completely ignoring the engineer’s shout, he struck a match against the sole of his holey left boot with a habitual motion. The sulfur head hissed, threw out a sickly yellow flame, and was instantly drowned by the damp steam.

Hale swore under his breath, spat a brown tobacco wad at his feet, and tossed the wet splinter into the puddle.

“Over here, quick!” Rick caught the greasy cable, his fingers digging into the rusty steel strands. Under his grip, red scale crumbled with a dry crack. “Around the post! Three turns! If that post is rotten — we’re done.”

In the pitch darkness, under the vertical wall of the downpour, the three survivors blindly tore at their own sinews against thirty tons of dead iron. Hot water flooded their nostrils, making it hard to breathe; it washed sweat and grease into their eyes. The wet rags of clothing clung to Catarina’s body, turning into a heavy shell. Her boots sank into the bog up to her shins; the clay sucked her footwear down with a whistle, robbing her of any foothold.

“Heave!” Rick’s barking roar cracked into a hoarse falsetto. “Cat, hold! She’s going over!”

Catarina caught the steel cable. The wet metal instantly slid through her palms, stripping the delicate skin to the raw flesh and leaving deep, bleeding grooves on her fingers. The muscles of her forearms cramped. Cat tore at her collar, drawing in the dense, muddy-smelling steam deeply and convulsively through her nostrils, and pulled with all her strength, throwing her whole thin body’s weight into it.

The steel cable rang, stretching taut like a string, water dripping from it in drops. The Black Maria shuddered. Its left axle boxes gave way with a screech, and at that same moment, the embankment subsided under the right wheels with a dull, guttural sound. Brown mire gushed from under the sleepers of the rusty track with a squelch. The rails had finally disappeared under the murky water of Porto Velho, severing the only road back. A lightning flash briefly illuminated the top of the swaying locomotive: dozens of large, acid-green tree frogs, fleeing the flood, darted madly across the red-hot casing of the steam dome.

“She’s going down!” Cat’s voice broke into an angry, biting whisper, her breath giving out. “Rick! The wheels are sinking! The bog is swallowing her!”

From exhaustion, Rick’s fingers slipped off the manual winch lever. The stop mechanism spun back with a screech, knocking the steel handle right out of his hands.

The winch handle struck Rick’s wrist with a dull crack. The cable tore from his bloody fingers, sliding along the metal frame like a slick, living snake.

The engineer lunged after it, blindly grabbing at the torn steel strands. His palms slipped on the thick grease; his fingers cramped, refusing to bend. He wheezed, spitting out rainwater mixed with curses at Blackwood, the Amazon, and his own worthless hands. Rick crashed to his knees in the red mire, and his right fist clenched convulsively, until his knuckles went white with a bony crack. But the greasy nut was no longer in his pocket — the talisman had sunk to the bottom of the puddle a second earlier. The calculator in his head had finally stalled.

“Can’t tighten…” Rick’s hoarse falsetto cracked into a whistling, broken whisper. “Cat, my fingers… I can’t feel my fingers. The metal is slipping. Strength of materials doesn’t hold water. Everything’s flowing. Everything’s flowing, Cat…”

Catarina fell into the mud beside him. Losing her aristocratic composure, she unconsciously jerked her hand, trying to adjust the non-existent collar of her luxurious silk dress, but her fingers caught only wet, grease-smeared rags. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her wet cheek to his ice-cold forehead. Cat drew in the dense air — smelling of ozone and dead river silt — convulsively and deeply through her nostrils, exhaling noisily through her mouth directly into his lips:

“Breathe, Rick. Breathe. I’m here. Do you hear me? Look at me. Give me the shovel… I’ll throw that damn gravel myself.”

From the darkness of the depot came a lazy, drawn-out scrape. Doctor Hale, swaying with feverish chills, monotonously tapped a funeral march on the side of his empty silver flask with his fingers. Tap-tap-tap.

“End your Boston drama, my children,” his lazy, chilling sarcasm drifted through the wall of rain. “You’re not on the stage of the Kitredge Theater. Better look at your feet.”

They grabbed the cable again. Catarina yanked the metal toward her, feeling the muscles in her forearms tear, every cell in her body responding with a dull, aching pain. From the other end, Hale seized the cable strands. The ship’s surgeon worked in silence, his teeth clenched; his thin, wiry face had become an immobile gray mask. The caustic metaphors were gone, the sarcasm vanished — the old man only wheezed, spitting out rainwater and sinking his boots deeper into the mire.

But the flood was faster. Brown foam had completely covered the rails, risen above the hubs, and poured into the Black Maria, turning thirty tons of hardened steel into a dead, immobile anchor. The locomotive lurched noticeably to the left. From the half-open dampers of the flooded firebox, dense white steam burst forth with a furious, whistling roar, enveloping the hangar in a suffocating cloud.

“That’s it,” Hale released the cable. His long pianist’s fingers trembled finely, convulsively from exhaustion. He spat brown tobacco tar directly into the onrushing wave. “Fall back, Rick. The embankment has burst. The bog is taking her.”

Rick slowly rose to his knees. His face, covered with gray coal dust, had turned pale as ash. His bloodshot eyes were fixed on the tilting boiler. In that emptiness, there was no longer any fear — only a dull, chilling indifference of a man who knew he had lost.

“She’s going to the bottom,” his voice was flat, lifeless, stripped of all human inflection. “Drown. And we’ll stay in this dead end.”

The pressure gauges, the levers, the blueprints, the precise laws of mechanics — all were crumbling into nothing under the heavy blows of the Amazon. Water was flooding over the cylinders, steam hissing from the cracked pipes. The locomotive, which in Boston had seemed a tamed titan, now looked like nothing but a ridiculous toy, forgotten by a capricious child in the middle of a bog.

“Funny,” Rick let out a dry, barking laugh that made Catarina flinch. The engineer didn’t even notice the blood dripping from the scraped knuckles of his right fist onto his dirty shirt. “I designed bridge spans in Massachusetts. Calculated material strength under tons of load. Down to the last bolt, Cat. Down to the last seam… And now I stand in the mud and watch iron sink in a puddle. And the math says nothing.”

The right sleeper support split into splinters with a guttural crack. The thirty-ton hull of the Black Maria tilted sharply to the left with a terrible metallic screech. The steel cable snapped with a cannon-like sound, lashing the water an inch from Hale’s boots. The locomotive slowly, like a whale struck in the belly, sank its wheel sets into the shifting mire, bending the rusty rails with a screech. The metal groaned and cracked under its own weight as the swamp mud filled its cooling steel innards.

And at that moment, amid the squelching chaos, Catarina caught an alien gaze.

Directly above them, on a thick branch of the old mango tree at the edge of the awning, a tiny marmoset monkey froze. In its huge, dark, river-water eyes was only a serene, chilling observation. The living creature of the selva watched the grease-stained humans with the same indifference with which it watched a falling dry leaf. Almost at the little creature’s muzzle, on the damp bark, the neon-blue wing of a Morpho butterfly opened for an instant — a flawless, pure azure amid the brown morass and human impotence. The selva had existed long before Boston bank accounts, and would remain just as perfect when the last word of the engineers drowned in the cry of wild birds.

Catarina drew in the damp air convulsively through her nostrils. Civilization, factory gauges, oysters in Massachusetts restaurants — all of it had been a backdrop. Only this branch was real, the lashing water, and the indifferent eyes of a wild creature.

“Rick,” Catarina spoke in an angry, biting whisper, her intonations breaking sharply. “Look up. She’s not afraid. She doesn’t care that we’re dying… that we’re staying here.”

The engineer slowly raised his head. His palms, cut by the steel cable, hung limp at his sides.

“She’s home, Cat,” Rick’s hoarse voice lost its former firmness; an ancient, deep longing appeared in it. “We brought our pride here. The scariest thing in these jungles is their absolute indifference. The train may fall apart, our bones may rot in the mud, but that creature on the branch won’t even interrupt its breakfast.”

He turned back to the tracks. The Black Maria had finally fallen on its side, resembling a harpooned whale. The murky brown current had completely covered the axle boxes and the left side of the cab. The last jet of steam dissolved in the wall of rain with a hiss.

“It’s over,” Rick spat flatly, lifelessly. “The Black Maria is in the swamp. Blackwood has locked us in this grave.”

Catarina stepped toward him, knee-deep in the red mire. She dug her fingers into his wet shoulder with a death grip, her nails boring into his tensed muscles. This man was her cage, her suffocating dependence, but also her only ticket back to the crystal and silk sheets of Boston.

“Don’t you dare, Rick,” her whisper was sharp, haughty, with a slight crack from the encroaching fear. “The train is down, but the boiler is intact. Do you hear me? We won’t stay in this grave. The brilliant mind of Boston cannot be broken by a swamp puddle. You will make this machine breathe, even if we have to scoop the mud out of the firebox with our bare hands. We’ll get out of here. You and me. Get up and gather the tools.”

They stood under the vertical wall of rain at the edge of the washed-out track bed. The murky brown current of Porto Velho was already lapping over the tops of their boots, reluctantly and heavily pulling their legs down into the insatiable red mire. “Man is stronger than death,” Catarina thought, looking at her husband’s stooped, coal-grimed back. “The madness is to keep fighting when the ground under your feet is flowing. But that is our curse. We will breathe and cling to rusty wrenches even when the emerald selva closes over our heads, leaving not a single flower on the grave.”