📸 Photo

MARCHING POWDER

The Brazilian later thanked me and told me how Rusty had stood in the hospital ward arguing loudly until the police gave in.

It seemed that Rusty wasn't afraid of the police. He would have made a good drug trafficker. For that matter, he wasn't afraid of the Bolivian inmates either. As soon as I told him that tourists used to sleep the night in San Pedro, he insisted on staying. That evening I took him to the inside sections to see the conditions of the poorer prisoners. He appeared to get along well with everyone, including the base addicts and the dangerous prisoners. Even Crack Cat purred when he picked him up.

The next time Rusty came into San Pedro, he had photocopied a colouring-in book and bought some marker pens. He organised a drawing competition for the little children in Alamos and handed out small prizes to the winners and made hot chocolate for all the entrants. I knew by then that he was the one who should help me with the book I had decided to write about San Pedro. He agreed to stay with me in the prison to conduct recorded interviews so that he could understand how the inmates lived.

I bribed the governor to get a permission slip that allowed Rusty to go in and out of the prison whenever he wanted. To avoid suspicion, I told everyone that he was my cousin who was here to visit because I had medical problems. I also explained to Rusty that you had to make the guards laugh in order to keep them happy. When the guards asked how he could possibly be my cousin, if I was black and he was white, he repeated to them exactly what I had told him to say: 'Thomas was born at night and I was born during the day.'

The only trouble with Rusty was that he didn't take things seriously enough. He thought it was fun to bribe the police, and he didn't seem to realise that I would be the one who would get into trouble if something went wrong. If anyone found out what we were doing, it wouldn't be hard for the police to get to me.

I didn't tell Rusty about my new charges, because I was sure the police didn't have a good case and I didn't want him to worry about me. However, maybe I should have told him in order to stop him from treating everything like a game. Rusty rented an apartment near the prison and I knew that he was partying a lot on the nights he stayed outside San Pedro. One time a whole bunch of tourists he must have met in a nightclub came to the main gate asking for 'el australiano'.