Chapter One
The Boy in a Hole
The boy was stuck at the bottom of a hole. It was raining, and his body had sunk so deep into the mud that it was lodged there. It would have been hard for him to move even if he had the energy to do so—which he didn’t. He didn’t have the energy to do much of anything besides breathe, hurt, and think.
He had been thrown down here after his foreman had tried to rape him, and he had made the unfortunate decision to fight back. Fighting back had done him no good. It had only resulted in him being beaten to the point of death, and then raped. Still, unlike other slaves brought into the Amazon to harvest latex, he refused to accept his situation and work himself to death, if only because that’s what his captors wanted. Of course, if he was honest, it was more than stubbornness that kept him alive. His almost paralyzing fear of death probably played a part as well.
Fate must have a dark sense of humor because now, as he lay in the hole, he didn’t seem to be able to die. At first, he had been afraid of death and then, as the cold, pain and gnawing hunger set in, he finally became resigned to it. As the days went on, as the pain grew, he began to wish for death and eventually to pray for it. And now he was beginning to believe the only hope of ending his suffering was for the daily rain to become a downpour so that there would be enough water in bottom of the hole for him to drown himself. If he could make himself do that—because despite the pain, cold, hunger, and his desire for this torture to end, he was still afraid of death. Even as he prayed for it, as worms were going in and out of his body, even when he could see large white ones exploring his exposed abdomen and burrowing into his flesh, even now he was still afraid of death. Maybe this was why he couldn’t die.
Sometimes his brain would give him relief, and he would drift out of consciousness. In these moments, images of people he didn’t know flickered like old movies onto the backs of his eyelids. The image he saw most often was the face of a laughing woman. She was no one he had ever
seen. She was pale as the moon, with dots on her face. When she laughed, she opened her mouth wide enough to see her back teeth, and they were beautiful, clean and straight. He would try to speak to her, but he couldn’t. Then he would wake up, still in his hole, with the mud and the water and the white worms and the pain.
Eventually his vision began to dim around the edges. Shortly after that, he heard voices above him. By then he couldn’t see anything through the haze of his vision, so he wondered if this was a hallucination or the final pathway to death. Some of his fear finally began to abate.
Then, suddenly, he felt a jolt as the earth around him was shifted.
Miracle of miracles, he felt the agony of someone’s strong arms pulling him from the hole
