“Of course,” the American Consul stared at me, reached and pulled a brown leaf from the potted plant set atop the piles of folders on his desk. The office was surrounded by framed photographs of past American presidents, of Teddy with the American Consul, Teddy with the American singer Jessica Simpson, Teddy in uniform on stage at the Bameritan Bijou Theater. “It’s all a misunderstanding really,” he became suddenly serious. “It’s gone on long enough, don’t you think? What you want to achieve, what the General wants to achieve, is it all so different?”
I answered honestly, a bit uneasily, told him “It’s very different, yes.” From there, I went ahead and asked Dukette for his help in arbitrating our dispute with Teddy.
“You know, I’m sure, the General’s arranged for an American director to visit Bamerita,” he said this as if not hearing my request at all, and letting go of the leaf, he placed his hands behind him and breathed out through the flat of his turtle nose. “It’s a bit embarrassing to find things as they are now, what with the General eager to make an impression and your strike leaving him with nothing to film.”
“I’m sorry, ” I told him. “We’re looking forward to sitting down and working things out in negotiation.”
“You misunderstand,” Dukette ran a finger back and forth above his left eye. “The General’s not interested in negotiating. This is, how shall I say, a courtesy. The General is giving you notice of his plans to film. That’s why you’re here now. Filming will go back to the way it was before.”now. “But our strike won’t allow.”
“Be that as it may,” the American Consul leaned for ward and touched my knee. “Your strike, I’m afraid, exists only because the General has not I’m afraid, exists only because the General has not yet attempted to end it.”
I got up and went to stand behind the chair. Dukette gave me a moment, then smiled and said, “You have to know. If you’re waiting for concessions, the General has no need. Why should he negotiate? Your strike is like hyenas trying to starve the lion. At the end of the day who suffers worst?” He shifted back, avuncular, and asked me next, “Why make things hard on yourself? Tell me what you want. We’re both reasonable men. Let’s deal in reality here. I’m in a position to get you anything. This is the way things are done. How’s that old car of yours running? Have you seen the new Fords? Built like a rock. I can get you one, if you like. Riding a bike is no way for a man your age to travel.” He made an effort to sit atop his desk, tried to hop high enough on his stiff legs but failed. “What about gas?” he slid down and stood again. “Do you need any? We have reserves you know. If there’s something you want for your children, tell me. You’re in a position to make a real difference here. All you have to do is say the word. This strike of yours can’t go on. You won’t win. If you came here thinking I might help you, that America might,” he shook his head. “Business is politics and politics is business. I’m sure you understand. A bird in the hand,” he said of Teddy. “The devil you know,” he winked again. “Cut your loses. Give up the strike. Cooperate. Come on now, André, let me get you a sandwich. These opportunities aren’t going to last forever. Once your strike is over, all your leverage will be gone.”
I lifted my hands from the back of the chair, smoothed down my sleeves and thanked Dukette for his time. The American Consul sighed as if our conversation exhausted him. He followed after me as I got ready to leave, his fingers gripping my arm. “It isn’t that we don’t know who the General is,” he said, “it’s that none of it matters. If you want my advice, I would tell you again to abandon the strike.”
“This is your expert opinion?”
“Sound counsel.”
“As a neutral party?”
“No,” he removed his hand, paused a moment before titling his head to the side and opening the door.
CHAPTER 5
Leo Covings lay in the large feather bed, inside the Rudy Vali Suite at the Bameritan Hyatt, looking nothing like the famous man Teddy Lamb had so gladly brought to Bamerita. At nine in the morning, he was only half awake and would have slept well past noon if the phone hadn’t rung twice already and disturbed him. Each time, the soldier manning the front desk - the regular hotel staff being still on strike - informed Leo that he was due for br unch and an afternoon of filming. “Fine, yes, right.” Leo used the heel of his hand to rub at his eyes, thought briefly of making an excuse and skipping the morning altogether, but knowing he was being paid a good sum of money, he hung down the phone and reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand.
From across the room he could see his reflection in the dresser mirror. His face had aged awkwardly, with lines and creases in places he could not have imagined just a few years ago. He cleared his throat, flicked his lighter and set his feet on the floor. His head ached from overdrinking. He tugged the sheet back onto his knees, and as an exercise, tested his memory by trying to recall as many details as he could from last night.
Even before he arrived, the American Consul had sent several cartons of Camel cigarettes, six bottles of Kentucky whiskey, four containers of sun screen and a large box of Hershey chocolates to Leo’s room. A quick survey of the floor found three of the bottles A empty. Leo finished his cigarette, moved his toes through the carpet, worked his way toward getting dressed. Today Teddy planned on filming by the sea and Leo promised himself not to lose patience. Eleven years after his masterpiece - ‘Portello’s Confession’ - he’d done little more than dabble at directing. Lacking the nerve to compete against himself, he’d lived well for some time off his reputation. “Old birds don’t fly as high,” Leo convinced himself. As long as studios were willing to pay him to serve as an advisor on their films, and colleges, conferences and conventions compensated him for speaking, he couldn’t complain. He accepted the course of his career, was philosophical about his place in the pantheon, gave no further thought toward reconnecting, and then came the call from Teddy.
He sat on the edge of the bed and waited to get his bearings. For several minutes he debated a sip from the hair of the dog but didn’t feel as yet like moving. What fascinated him initially about Teddy’s film was the idea of turning an entire country into a movieland adventure. Teddy had pitched an idea to shoot a scene where all of Bamerita was dressed in coordinated costumes and gathered along the main roads, walking clockwise - perhaps dancing, perhaps singing - the footage recorded from overhead, creating the largest choreographed sequence ever captured on film. The vagueness of the story notwithstanding, Leo was intrigued enough to make the trip, then frustrated once he arrived as he could not get a handle on what Teddy was doing.
The scenes already filmed - several thousand hours worth - were a meandering montage, loosely narrated and unrelated. “I don’t know what you’r e hoping to accomplish,” Leo said after a fifth day of shooting, “but I suggest you take a look around.” He referred then to the strike, encouraged the General to, “Work with what you have. Here’s your story. Here’s your drama. You can build a whole movie out of what’s taking place on your streets right now and not bother with all this other heehaw.”
Teddy disagreed. “With all due respect, what you see on the streets isn’t drama. It’s dirty dishwater and will be washed away tomorrow. This strike is nothing. We will not film it.” He puffed out his narrow chest covered in colorful medals, and insisted again, “We will ignore it.”
Leo changed his undershorts, pulled on a fresh pair of slacks, brushed his teeth and combed his hair. He smoked a second cigarette while looking for his shoes. Suddenly hungry, he decided to say nothing more about the film, to finish his commitment and be done. If the General couldn’t see what was right in front of his nose, “To hell with him.” He slipped on his shirt, blew smoke toward the window, was in the process of scooping up his wallet from the dresser when the phone rang again and a woman named Casmola said she was calling from the lobby.
Emilo woke and rolled onto his hip, relieved his bladder into a bucket. On the opposite side of the bed was his old guitar, two graphite canes,
a tray with crumbs from a lettuce and jam sandwich, some juice and pills Paul Bernarr brought over. The clock on the nightstand said 10:17 p.m. Emilo shifted, fixed his shorts and turned on his lamp. He slept in fits and starts, napping now at odd hours. His feet in white plaster casts rested on pillows, his bones set with screws constantly aching. He sat up, slid his legs off the side of the bed, settled them carefully away from the bucket.
The pounding in his feet intensified, the pain worse when he moved. He placed his hands behind him on the edge of the bed, dropped slowly onto the seat of his pants and scooted around the floor where he took two more pills. The scars on his face were pink, the stitches removed, the slits healed in knotted lumps against the darker shade of his skin. His eyelids sagged halfway, his lips unevenly mended, looked like bits of half-moist clay torn apart and pinched back together. He crawled like a sea crab out to the front room where he sat with his back against the chair.
A few hours earlier André came by with lettuce and bread, a banana and two baked potatoes. Emilo listened to the news about the American Consul, rubbed at his lips and said, “What did you expect? You’re standing in shit and surprised when your clothes start to stink. Think about it.” He asked André to empty the bucket, said of Dukette, “The man’s an ass but pay attention to what he’s telling you. Why should we wait for them to fuck us? We can do better. A couple old warriors like you and me. You rode this pony as far as she’ll go, André, now let’s get serious.”
After André left, Emilo ate and slept. Out in the front room, he used the flat end of a screwdriver to pry up three wooden slats in the floor, removed the cardboard box with the ammonium nitrate and nitro cellulose, potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur and attached the wires to the travel clock, the battery and fuse running to the tube set inside. He waited until just after midnight, when Kart Jabber used his key to enter the apartment through the rear of the store.
Teddy Lamb lay beneath green-yellow sheets, naked and cozy as hot ham laid between buttered toast. “You Americans,” he mocked. “Why is it you work all day and sleep all night? Where’s the sense in that? A good nap is what you need. Don’t you ever want to howl at the moon?”
The American Consul stood at the end of the bed, acknowledged the ribbing with a slight nod. “If you prefer I wait downstairs, General.”
“No, no. You’re my alarm. Punctual as always,” he slipped his legs from beneath the sheets, pressed the remote for the television, then pulled on his socks and boots, stood and walked across the floor to the bathroom where he emptied his bladder in full view. Dukette turned to look at the TV screen which showed the daily rushes from the filming conducted a few hours ago at the sea. “Leo has a remarkable eye, don’t you think?” Teddy noted the colors and camera angles. On the screen some two dozen Bameritans, rounded up that morning and forced back into costumes, were wearing the clothes of fishermen, the women in long farm girl dresses, the style early 1900’s. Dukette watched several of the men digging deep holes in the sand near the tide. Two men and a woman were then placed in the holes, buried up to their shoulders. As the water rolled in, the tide darkened the sands and covered their faces.
“It’s pretty dramatic,” Teddy moved to his dresser where he stepped into a fresh pair of undershorts.
The American Consul cleared his throat, watched the three heads disappear beneath the water, the camera shifting to a shot further out at sea, while in the background a Dukette could hear an unedited Leo Covings shouting, “Cut! Cut! Cut!” before the film went dark.
Father Piote appeared in the door, a half-eaten corned beef sandwich in his left hand. Dukette continued to stare at the suddenly black TV while Father Piote went and whispered something in Teddy’s ear. Teddy patted the priest on the shoulder, finished buttoning his uniform, adjusted his medals, rewound the video and began watching again. “Look at that, will you?” he pointed to the three heads in their holes screaming. “Amazing, isn’t it. Tell me, Erik, what possibly is better than making movies?”
Kart Jabber lay with Kara atop the bed. Angeline was on the far side of the room, naked in the red-backed chair, smoking, her legs crossed and pumping at the knee like the handle to a well. In their different shapes, Kart saw them as opposite ends of a funhouse mirror; Angeline tall and thin, her hair so blond it appeared almost white, her features sharp as the angelfish her father named her for, while Kara was short and round, like dark dough set on a flat wood surface, ready and waiting to be kneaded. Hungry, Kart sat up and began to dress. Kara rolled over and also started rooting around for her clothes. “I’ll go with you.”
“No. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” He hadn’t slept since leaving Emilo’s, but was restless and knew if he wanted to get out at all today he had to go early or wait again until dark. He found his pants and pulled on his socks. The girls’ apartment was one large room, the furniture secondhand, a bed and chairs, six pastel cushions, a half moon table and cedar trunk. Kart used his connections to get them bread and fruit, eggs and cheese. Unable to go to his place anymore, or to his parents, he shared the girls’ bed, the arrangement creating a trinity of possibilities.
He left the apartment watching for soldiers, headed toward Weivre Avenue where Avus Keerl kept his truck. The last blast had taken out power lines near the capital’s main police station. Kart walked now in the opposite direction, remembered the one time he agreed to take Angeline with him as he set a charge outside the Ministry of Transport. Angeline clung to his arm the whole way, dancing with the same anticipation and release as when her body shook beneath him during sex. Later, the scent of the bomb mixed on his skin with Angeline’s own smell, his arms beneath hers, his hands sliding up to the front of her shoulders from behind. He could barely bring himself to touch Kara at all that night, had kept his head buried inside the ridge of Angeline’s hip and against her back, trying not to show too much of how he was feeling. He laughed at this later, the way he felt and how soon enough he changed his mind and was completely in love with Kara.
The sun was just coming up, the color of ocher, the streets empty as he hurried back to the apartment with eggs and bread. He was thinking about the strike, how he needed to get his parents and the girls out of the capital before things collapsed and the fighting started. Once Teddy was gone and the war won he’d open a place of his own, a club where all his friends could come and drink and eat and Kara and Angeline would be his partners. They’d live together in a house he’d build and carry on the same as now, and if one of them should fall in love with someone else and wish to marry that would be fine, as there would be room for all and their children. This he thought while coming back, approaching the rear of the apartment, looking between the buildings a second before the soldiers pulled up in front and stor med inside. Two blackbirds cawed from overhead and flew toward the rooftops. Kara and Angeline shouted and tried getting away but the soldiers were too strong and wouldn’t let them.
Ali and Feona lay on an old cloth tarp folded over in the center of the gym. With the strike in its second month and the schools closed for summer, the hallways and classrooms of All Kings smelled of soiled clothes, vegetables and smoke, sand and loam and trash gone sour. Windows were left open, the warm breeze through poplar branches mixing the scents together. Still dark, the children sleeping nearby filled the gym with sounds of hushed and shallow breathing, snores and sighs, the occasional soft whimpers and whisperings. Ali dressed and went outside to check on the day’s water. Feona came barefoot a few minutes later, in khaki slacks and black t-shirt, her hair tied away from her face with a strip of yellow cloth.
“Phenom,” Ali tried as always first thing in the morning to sound upbeat. “How did you sleep?”
“Alright,” she touched her neck.
“Me, too. Like a rock,” he reached out. “I woke up hard.”
Feona pretended to be shocked and pulled away. They laughed at this, held their smiles as long as they could. For a week now they’d heard rumors about the strike losing ground. Friends spoke n
ervously of how it was but a matter of time before everything fell apart. The threat of the capital dissolving into violence, of Teddy sending soldiers into All Kings and ambushing the children as they gathered at the school forced Ali and Feona to begin making other plans.
Together they carried the water stored in several containers back into the cafeteria, the regular taps shut off by Teddy for some time. Three large pots were filled and placed on the stove to boil. The gas was also disconnected. Ali rigged propane tanks through the burners and started a flame. Sacks of oats and smaller bags of powdered eggs were bought and stored in the rear of the cafeteria. An open bag of oats was dragged into the cooking area and left beside the stove until the water boiled. Feona set out what bowls and spoons they had for serving, while the first of the children woke and headed outside to pee. Ali thought about the things he had to do that afternoon, the prospects and possibilities, and as Feona seemed to be thinking the same, he told her, “ Not to worry, it’s going to work. It will all be fine.”
One of the younger boys in sandals too large, a blue t-shirt torn near the collar, with ginger dun skin and eyes wide and black, stopped in the doorway to the cafeteria and called out, “Waffles and syrup?”
Ali smiled and answered, “With whipped butter and fresh orange juice, Teo.” The boy laughed and ran off. Ali glanced again at Feona, then back toward the cooking area. The sounds of others came from the gym, the water in the large pots starting to boil, the air already warm and filling with a harvest of steam.
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