Thieves
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. Image sources: Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. There were two of them, pssting at me from the murk beneath a palm tree, along the jungly trail that twisted off to the shantytown. In grubby board shorts, shirtless, the slim one sat with a towel around his shoulders. The burly one stood behind, brandishing cordless clippers, and buzzed his friend’s blackish hair with tender brutality. Even from thirty feet away, out on the white-sand lane, I could sense the fresh crew cut’s effect: his head looked newborn, true. A blank slate.
“Oi,” he beckoned. “Oi, brother!” He used the English word but Brazilianified: broa-der.
I glimpsed his waving arm, its skinny animation, but not his face, not in any detail. The sky was starting to blur with dusk, and of the scarce streetlamps along this shortcut between the kombi stop and our surfside guesthouse, only one gave out any light. I’d watched boys all over the island using such lamps as targets, pelting them with beer bottles and rotting coconuts; when the bulbs burst, the hooligans cheered “Gol!” But this kid and his roughneck pal were older—eighteen? Nineteen?
“Brother,” the slim one called again, his voice sharp with nerve. Then he added, in Portuguese: “Please? We just want to use your cell phone.”
This was my third trip to Bahia, after projects in São Tome and Mozambique, and I could handle basic conversations in the language. “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t have one.” I didn’t break my stride.
“Liar!” yelled the tough with the clippers, squaring his brawny shoulders. “How stupid do you think we are? Liar!”
A stunted mutt, scared by the shout, bolted from the bushes, but just as soon forgot its fear and fervently stole some fish bones from an overflowing wire cage of trash.
“Sure, I have a phone,” I said. “Not with me.”
“Seriously?” said the lean kid, goadingly rubbing his crew cut. “I thought a gringo always has his smartphone.”
Another two hundred yards and I’d be safe at the folksy guesthouse, with its hammock, its icy caipirinhas. I’d suffered a sticky, mosquito-addled day in a boondocks village, dickering with farmers about a loan for their heart-of-palm plantation. No matter that the interest rate was already close to nil, and that my services and the environmental adviser’s were pro bono, the farmers wouldn’t let up on their haggling. Forget it, then, I wanted to say. Stick with your current pittance. Instead, I grinned my do-gooder grin and told them yes, I understood. Yes, of course, I’d see what I could do.
But now this cheeky, crew-cut punk, his brazen heckle (gringo!), had severed the last thread of my politeness. “Carry my phone here?” I said. “Where I might meet a thief?” Thief was one of the first words my Portuguese coach had taught me, a satisfying nasal sneer: ladrão.
He stood up slowly, smiling, shaking out his towel. Theatrically he snapped it, and the world at once was weaponized: towel, clippers, fists. (Vagner, the guesthouse owner, had warned me about the shantytown; “crack” was all he’d said, all he’d had to.)
“Why are you alone?” said the kid, sauntering halfway toward me. He swept clipped hairs from the hollow of his scrawny, meatless chest. Just this easily, he seemed to say, I could dispense with you.
I looked ahead, behind: no one on the lane. The only building, a shuttered vacation home from the island’s boom days, sat dark behind its wall of concrete studded with jagged glass.
“Why?” he repeated. “Where is your sexy wife?”
“You don’t know me,” I said, ready to sprint. “Leave me alone.”
“No, no, your wife,” he said, and staged a vulgar pantomime, swinging his hips, hefting imagined tits. “Where is she today? Where is Marisa?”
I stopped short. Were they stalking her? “How do you know her name?” I said. I took a hard step closer. “Tell me. How?”
He didn’t flinch; he laughed. “Now you defend her? Good!” he said. “Not like yesterday: ‘Stop, Marisa. Marisa, stop, please.’” He sang the words in lilting, malformed English.
The gossipy little tune sapped some of his menace. What had Marisa and
