Her left hand checked, tucked the curl back in place. Silently.
He chuckled; pain from the wound in his side made him draw breath sharply. At that sound she spun around.
He smoothed down his mustache; the beads of sweat that had formed under it were tickling him. “I am sorry, madam. I seem to have forgotten my manners.”
“You’re sick?”
He leaned against the smooth wood of the counter. “Hurt,” he said, “not sick.”
He had tea with her that day, in the small sitting room behind the drugstore. An ancient Chinese woman brought the cups. Sara Chapman said something softly to her, and the old woman went into the front of the store.
“You speak Chinese?”
“My parents were missionaries.” Her husband, a druggist, had died two years before. She ran the shop in his place. “It’s very nice, really,” she said, “the only thing I don’t like is handling the leeches.”
Oliver returned the next day, and the next, month after month. His mother wrote, asking him to come to Edwardsville. “I am very busy with work here,” he wrote in precise schoolboy script. “I trust you are well.” He had almost forgotten what Edwardsville looked like.
He stayed on, hating the foggy cold winter after so many years in the tropics. He found a place to live close to Sara Chapman’s store. He had offers; his contacts found him completely uninterested. The rooms behind the drugstore were very comfortable, the occasional customer was hardly, enough to disturb their silence. Oliver always sat in the big plush chair, the yellow-and-white cat always sat on the window sill, the coal fire always burned in the grate. He learned to smoke, and he spent hour after hour staring from his cigar’s white ash to the white ash on the coal in the grate. His bottle of whiskey stood on a small Chinese tray in the corner—she did not drink. Usually he brought food for dinner; occasionally he brought the old woman opium for her pipe. At Christmas he got Sara a piano. She played quite well, he thought. He liked the sound in the small snug room, mixed with the little hissing of the grate.
They were friends. That was all. He had kissed her once; her lips tasted vaguely of cinnamon. She pushed him gently away.
“Something wrong with me?”
Her face was absolutely serious. “It is very hard to be respectable. …”
The way she said the word, Oliver thought, made it the highest compliment.
“A young widow, I was only married two years, did you know? And people, well, assume things that aren’t true.”
“I don’t think anything.”
“I loved and respected my first husband; I will love and respect my second, if the Lord sends one to me.”
Oliver left in a very few minutes, angry and resentful. He did not go back the next day, nor the one after that. When, a week later, he walked through the shop door, between the big glass containers filled with colored water, red and green, port and starboard, she smiled at him with warmth and friendliness, as if he had never been gone.
His wound healed. He moved without pain, and he felt fine. He heard of a good deal in Singapore, but he was in no hurry to go back to work. While he waited, he put a little money into a whaling ship, one of the last to work the Arctic. It was foolish, he thought; I won’t even be here when they come back. Or will I?
One April day, while he idly watched the gulls wheel and flutter over the docks, he saw his thoughts as plain as if the words were printed in the sky: You want to marry her. You are going to marry her.
He turned and walked rapidly back up the street.
He hardly slept that night. Two thoughts hung before his eyes: She would be a good wife. You want her.
Very early the next morning, he packed his two big Gladstone bags and took the ferry across the bay. He did not stop to ask the schedule. He simply took the next train. He left no messages for Sara at all.
HE SENT THE LAST of his money to his mother, telling her to use it for the farms. He went to sea again, as a cook on a small German freighter that plowed up and down the eastern coast of South America: Buenos Aires, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio, Santos, Montevideo, and dozens of small ports. For three years he smuggled and prospered, joylessly. He found himself longing for the west coast—Chile and Peru—the incredible mountains, and the people, squat and immobile as rocks. He could see their flat black hats and bright wool coats, he could smell the dazzle of the bright clear air, he could hear a particular wind sound, he could see the great black condors riding thermals over the high slopes.
God, he thought, what is wrong with me? Why have I started dreaming?
He was in Bahia then—dusty streets, naked children playing in garbage-filled gutters, dogs scratching their infected scaly bodies, fly maggots crusting everything. For years he’d been seeing these things, in one town or another. Once he’d rather enjoyed the dirt and garbage smells that lifted with the morning sun. He felt powerful and clean and unbearably healthy with his tall blondness among these short dark people. By being different, he felt more alive.
Not this time. He slapped a large green-backed beetle from his shirt sleeve, heard it whirr away on metallic wings. And he thought: I have had enough.
A week later, while they were caught on a sandbar off some river, after trying to make port at low tide, he studied the little town (unnamed; he did not care enough to ask). It was so careful, so neat: the square, the church, the houses of different colors rising up the slopes. So ordered. He found himself staring at the cafe directly opposite the church and he found himself wishing that he were sitting at a table there, talking about the price of sugar and of coffee. …
This is my last trip, he promised himself. Whichever port in the United States we come to first, that will be the place I live.
He was so happy with his decision that he was not even annoyed to find that his ship would return to Bahia. He liked their rum, made from local sugar cane. There was also a whore he’d find for one last time.
She was a big woman, big as he was, black skin, black hair, black eyes, thighs thick as tree trunks, wide hips, and motions so slow it was like swimming underwater. He noticed the rash on her arms and hands and under her breasts. “What’s that?”
She pulled aside her sagging breast and looked. “Flea-bites. Don’t be scared, sailor boy.” Because he didn’t remember any disease starting like that—not one he’d be likely to get anyway, and because the house was dirty and a dog slept in a corner of the room and thumped his leg on the bare floor with his scratching—Oliver forgot about it. He was too drunk to be particular.
They were two weeks out, heading for New Orleans, plodding across the open Gulf, sprinkling the water with flecks of rust from their crumbling plates, when one of the greasers, a middle-aged Englishman, simply passed out. The second officer, who doubled as ship’s doctor, looked at him, and shouted for the messboy to drag him into an empty cabin. He locked the door himself and went off quickly to tell the captain, while the messboy whispered frantically: “Smallpox.”
They left the Englishman in that cabin, to live or die by himself. No one passed that way, no one went in, except for the Brazilian messboy who had had the pox when he was a child and bore the marks all over his face to prove it. Even he wrapped three or four cloths around his head, not trusting the stories that you only got it once. He brought food and water once a day, peeped in for a second before slamming the door again and stuffing wadding tightly around the edges. He brought out news too: “The pox are all over him, he’s torn his clothes off.” Or “He’s calling for more water.” But most often the messboy would just shake his scarred head and say: “The smell; Mother of God, the smell.”
Oliver remembered that the greaser had been to the same whorehouse on the same night in Bahia. And he remembered the woman and the fleabites under her black breasts. He cursed in every language he knew, throwing the words across the heat-shimmering Gulf. Then he went below and found a corner to himself where he stripped and searched his own body carefully for signs. He even used his little shaving mirror to scan hi
s back inch by inch. Because his body was covered by thick hair, it took hours. And the very next day he was nagged by new fear, and he had to find another place to make the inspection all over again.
Less than a week away from New Orleans the carpenter caught it. He’d kept it secret for days, in spite of the fever and the itch, but eventually the pox spread out on his hands and up to his face. And the delirium drove him to wander on the cool open well deck. Oliver and the bosun and the trimmer saw him and fled, shouting alarm. The carpenter, a short squat Mexican with the long almond eyes of Yucatan, called after them, his voice strangled and muffled by the pox inside his throat. The first officer, who was on the bridge, yelled at him in German but the Mexican stayed where he was, next to the center cargo hatch, swaying a little on his feet. He saw invisible things, talked to people who weren’t there, and he bent now and then to pet an invisible dog at his knee.
The captain took the bridge, hastily, his shirt flapping open all across his chest. The second officer disappeared. The messboy, his head partially wrapped, scurried across the deck to talk to the Mexican. “Get on with it,” the captain shouted. The messboy pulled at his shoulder. The Mexican knocked him aside with a backward sweep of his arm. Still holding the rags to his face, the messboy skidded across the deck, relieved to be out of the whole thing. The captain shouted again: “I’m warning you!”
The Mexican gave the dog a pat while his wobbly head swung around, searching. His shiny eyes found the captain, fixed, held. He straightened up, pushing the dog away with his knee. He began walking toward the bridge, slowly, deliberately. “Stop,” the captain yelled. “Stop, you god damn fool!” He didn’t. No one had expected him to. “Stop,” the captain shouted again. And then with a lift of his arm, a rigid overhead gesture: “Fire.”
The shot came from the side, near the charthouse, out of sight of the crew. The Mexican fell against the rail, his body hardly moving when the two other shots hit him.
The messboy got up wearily, head still covered, and pushed and tugged and finally tumbled the body overboard.
No one went back to quarters after that. The officers did not try to make them except for the chief engineer and his assistant who used guns to drive each watch to the engine room. The weather was mild, the crew slept on deck, clinging to the edges of the ship, hardly eating, each searching the other for small red spots.
They anchored in the Mississippi, just inside the pass, pestilence flag flying. How long? Oliver wondered. For a last trip, this was certainly a beauty. He stared at the green marsh a quarter-mile away, the green he wouldn’t reach for weeks. And he decided that he’d had enough waiting. To hell with his cook’s pay, let them keep it. He’d traded quite a bit this last trip: quinine, high quality and unadulterated (people who knew him were willing to pay his price); rhinoceros horn for wealthy old men; blessed relics straight from the Pope in Rome. He’d converted most of his profits into gold—he preferred that—and fitted the gold inside his special belt. He’d made it himself, an ordinary old leather belt. He also had a few coins sewed into his coat, but they were more for luck than anything else.
That night, he slipped over the side and took his chances in the dark swift-running river.
HE KNEW THE OHIO River at Edwardsville, had swum in it since he was a boy. This wasn’t like it at all. For one thing the Mississippi was warmer. He thought: It’s like a bath. Who would have thought it would be this easy? And then he began to see that it wasn’t. That he was going to have the swim of his life. Briefly he thought of yelling for the watch. No, he told himself, swim, you god damn fool.
The water felt strange—heavy and oily—and smelled strange—sweet and decaying.
He swam with his head high, to keep the water away from his face. Like fish nibbling, the river tugged at the belt strapped to his waist, at his clothes, at the shoes tied around his neck, at the machete on his thigh. He could see very little in the dark but he kept swimming slowly toward where he knew the land must be. Occasionally he glanced over his shoulder to check his position against the freighter’s lights.
The currents were strange too. There seemed to be one on the surface and another one just underneath. Very confusing—without the ship’s lights he would have lost all direction. He floated for an instant and let his body rise to the surface. If he swam high, there would be less pull—but that forced his face down into the water, and he wasn’t quite ready for that.
The dark river slipped past his arms, across his shoulders. Like fingers running over him. He found himself keeping his legs firmly outstretched, not letting them relax downward. He was vaguely afraid of touching something beneath him, though the river here must be very deep.
He saw a floating branch, watched while it passed him. He hadn’t thought the current was that swift. He took another bearing on the ship’s lights, and methodically began swinging arm over arm again. The smell of the water changed abruptly. There must be pools of different things, he thought, each carried by a current. He was puzzling over this when he swam into the whirlpool. He acted instinctively, even before he knew what it was. He flung himself violently backward, out of the water, arching his back for distance, arms spinning like frantic paddle wheels. Something grabbed his feet. He yanked them up, fetus-like. He flipped to his stomach, put his face down in the water and swam, hard. He felt himself released; he took a few more strokes for safety. Then he paused, resting. His neck hurt from the pressure of his shoes and clothes. The money belt was still around his waist. The water changed again, became quiet, so that he moved through a surface smooth as a mirror.
It occurred to him that here was the end of the journey for all those unidentified Negroes the boatmen of Edwardsville towed out into the current. This was where the drowned came. …
WHEN HE reached the grass, he found it wasn’t solid ground at all, but a kind of soft marsh, a shifting sinking slime. He would have to go farther upriver. He worked his way along, half swimming, half wading, keeping close to the shore, out of the current. He could hear little animals splash away from his coming. Must be muskrat, he thought.
He would be out of sight of his ship before daylight, he was sure of that. But how far would he have to slosh like this? And how long could he keep it up?
A hell of a long time, he answered himself. One hell of a long time.
The sun came up, hazy and white, and he could see all the things he’d guessed at in the dark. There was a swift current flowing some thirty feet away from him, a streak of moving yellow, while inshore the water was perfectly quiet. He looked up and saw on the horizon a clump of oaks, a chênière. That would be high land, oaks couldn’t grow in water. He decided to push directly through the marsh. He put on his jacket, but even so the saw grass cut and tore at his exposed hands. Curiously he did not feel the cuts—his skin was wrinkled and dried from hours in the water. He looked at the blood, oozing slowly in small red drops. He licked at it and tasted only river mud.
He stared straight up into the sky. The gray hazy distance seemed to recede, the sky seemed to be running from his eyes, running into a long narrow bright tunnel, infinite tunnel.
He began testing the marsh. He found a kind of grass—reminded him of duck grass on the Ohio—a yellow-brown tangled mass of roots and leaves that could support his weight for a while. If he moved quickly from shaking crust to shaking crust, he would not sink too deeply.
Like a game of hopscotch. Hop hop hop, miss and you’re out. Rest on the matted yellow reeds. If you can’t find them, keep jumping. And if you got too tired to jump, and if there were no more yellow reeds to give you a resting place, what then?
Don’t stop, he told himself. Just keep working toward those oak trees. He couldn’t actually see them from within the tall grasses; he would have to guess his direction.
A flash of white and he leaped away, suspecting a nameless danger. After two panic hops he remembered something familiar in the color and turned back. It was a small solid mound, white with sun-bleached shells, rising from the
marsh. He stamped flat the few grasses—in case of snakes—and sat down. Even this early the shells were warm. He dropped his arms between his legs and crouched over, resting. He’d seen people crouched like this in Bahia, on street corners, only they wore hats. He wished he had a hat, the sun was stinging the back of his neck. There would be shade in the oaks when he got there.
He rocked back and forth, arms swinging between his bent knees, chin not quite touching his chest, head dangling comfortably from its neck.
Like an apple, like a god damn apple. Hanging from a stem.
He scrambled to his feet. From the slight elevation of the shell mound he could see across the grasses to the chênière, shimmering with heat haze a half mile away. He was sure of his direction now. Time to move on.
The chênière, when he reached it, was much larger than he expected. He climbed one of the wind-burned oaks to look: the solid ground twisted away, like an alligator’s back in the marsh, for a quarter of a mile. There was little underbrush, only some fallen leaves and a few long-dead branches.
It wasn’t too bad.
He found a tree for his back and wrapped his coat around his head against mosquitoes. If they are this bad, he thought, in broad daylight with a little wind blowing, what will they be like by dusk? And by night? He would need a smudge fire. He had not brought matches, had not thought about them. That, he told himself, could mean his bones bleaching here on these shells. … But he didn’t really believe it. He was barely thirty, he could feel the strength in the band of muscles across his shoulders and back, he could feel the thrust and steadiness of his legs, he would think of something.
A mosquito got inside his cover and sat on the tip of his nose, drinking the salt sweat there. He moved his fingers slowly and smashed it.
HE COULDN’T rest. Mosquitoes bit through his clothes, his whole body burned and itched. He would have to see about a smudge fire at once.
The Condor Passes Page 5