Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  Moses said, “If I were a general in a foreign war, I’d recruit soldiers locally.”

  No one dared to ask what he would do if they refused to obey, yet he answered the question anyway.

  “In every man there is something—a sentiment—that you can tap into to make him take orders. It is often an anxiety. It’s sometimes sacrificial.”

  Moses applied the traveling circus principle to his development contracts. A country secured a loan for a new road or a bridge or a clinic, and it hired his company to build it.

  “Wars are fought with private companies, doing security detail, providing meals, putting up barracks,” he said. “Someday all soldiers will be mercenaries, as they’ve been in history. Even now, money is a motivator—for scholarships, or the big payout at the end of the tour. This is the era of the private sector helping governments achieve their goals with somebody else’s money.”

  In another age Moses would have been the captain of a clipper ship, or a general, as he said, or an explorer in the pay of a king who wanted gold from a far-off jungle.

  We were in Amazonas, in a jungle now, oil depot work, on a river, the Oriente province of Ecuador, in the mess container. Moses sat at the head of the table like a chief, with a glow of satisfaction on his face. If he had said to any of us, “Stick your hand in that candle flame,” we would have done it. But he was too practical for that. His rule, “Get up before dawn and be at my door at four-thirty, ready to work,” was one we obeyed.

  Five of us at the table, still saying grace, Moses, Chivers, Silsbee, Tafel, and me. The cook boy, Hong, was still outside with the Secoya servants. I was struck by how pious Silsbee and Tafel were in their prayers, murmuring along with Moses, sitting far apart tonight for a change.

  Silsbee and Tafel had been the problem from the beginning. First time I saw them I knew it wouldn’t work. Tafel had been with Moses for a year, Silsbee was a new hire. He’d been overseas on jobs before, an expert welder. Moses wanted him to teach locals this skill so that Silsbee would have a team. It worked at first, when we refitted a floating dock on the river, but when we got to rebuilding the bridge, two problems arose.

  The friendship between Silsbee and Tafel was one—their instant liking for each other, talking, laughing, lollygagging. The average person thinks, Great, harmony. But harmony wasn’t Moses’ way. Friendliness and good humor relaxed the locals (was how Moses put it). Instead of working to a deadline, we were working as the locals did. “It’s why nothing got done before. It’s why we’re here.”

  Work was social in places like this, Moses said; work was a party. “People love going to work, to meet their friends, to have a coffee break, to share meals. It’s nothing to do with finishing a job. The job exists to support a social framework—they want to get out of the house and talk.”

  He did not say the easy relations between Silsbee and Tafel set a bad example. He could convey this with looks. He watched the two of them with a trace of astonishment.

  Moses said, “I can take insolence from the work gangs, but not from my own men.”

  The other problem was Silsbee’s dog, Gaucho. It was a Lab mix, big and sleepy. The idea that this dog did nothing infuriated Moses, who saw it as no better than a three-legged village mutt. It didn’t earn its keep.

  Silsbee had a way of blinking that showed a thought was passing through his mind. He said, “My dog makes me happy.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Why isn’t it doing something useful?” And in a kindly way Moses asked, “What is the insufficiency inside you that is satisfied by a dog?”

  When, one day, some propane tanks were stolen by locals from the depot, Moses said, “Didn’t even bark!” and held the dog and Silsbee partly responsible for the theft.

  “Labs aren’t like that,” Silsbee said, and looked at Tafel for approval.

  Tafel was a darkly handsome man who could have been Arab, with a sharp indicating nose, thin lips, close-cut hair, a narrow chin, and slender fingers, like a superior type of stern-faced Gypsy woman. He had been a foreign hire who’d stayed on with Moses. His specialty was supervising the work gangs, organizing the way they gathered material—posts, planks, struts, trusses, the usable fittings like window units, or if we were doing a steel frame, the plates and pipes.

  “We are creating something,” Moses said. “We are leaving something behind. Our names will be forgotten but these structures will be here long after we’re gone.”

  We were leaving monuments, was his view.

  Chivers drew the plans at Moses’ direction, and did the paperwork and the accounts too, paying the men every two weeks. That Moses paid in dollars was another reason he was sought out by the local labor, since dollars were spendable anywhere.

  But this job was going slowly, and the concern that showed as a knot in Moses’ forehead was Tafel and Silsbee. Tafel had been one of the most loyal of Moses’ men. I knew that because I prided myself on having Moses’ trust, and I was competitive in this. Staging was my responsibility. In the Oriente province the scaffolding was fist-wide bamboo poles lashed together with split cane or hemp rope to make skeletal towers of frames and ladders.

  Silsbee’s welders set one of the scaffolds blazing. Moses told Tafel to reprimand him, which he did, but not long after that the two men were seen together laughing. The Lab killed some chickens. “We can’t eat them now!” The local Indians sometimes seen laughing with Silsbee infuriated Moses. He asked, “Is this a social occasion?” in his jaw-twisting lisp and slipping tongue. The dog intimidated the locals but otherwise just slept in the shade. “That Wab.”

  A month into the job we were already behind schedule. Moses knew that he had no power over Silsbee, that he was losing Tafel, and that the laxity of these two men was undermining the project.

  Moses gave a talk after dinner about the role of the private contractor, how essential it was, how it was accountable to the institution paying the bills.

  “It is government work for money—not patriotism or justice. No abstractions. We aim for results. I have spent my whole working life as a contractor, in Kuwait, in Uganda, in Brazil.”

  Our core group was small and efficient, but the hundreds of local laborers became our teams. In western Uganda we had Mbuti pygmies sealing the insides of three-foot casings. A whole flotilla of Malay fishermen were signed on for the barging of cement for an offshore fuel dock. In Kuwait we extended the frontier fence—no Kuwaitis on the payroll but plenty of Filipinos and Bangladeshis, who had nothing in common but hunger. In Iraq we worked inside a great enclosure of twelve-foot blast walls to put up modular housing, and after that it was boreholes in Sudan.

  “The type of government doesn’t matter as long as we are paid in dollars. Most of the world is in the hands of megalomaniacs. We were hired to complete this job and by God we’ll accomplish it. Think of us as commandos.”

  You would have thought in all that laborious lisping that we’d gotten the point. But the next day a tap was left running on a fuel drum, and two hundred gallons of stinking diesel oil drained into the sand. We had to use all our solvent to neutralize it—a mess. And there were more thefts.

  Chivers, who was English, said to me, “He should sack them.”

  We never used Moses’ name.

  I said, “If he does, there’s no way we can finish this. We’ll have to find a master welder to replace Silsbee, and a wrangler like Tafel who also knows how to operate the backhoe.”

  Moses, working on tight margins because of the lost time, had invested all the money he’d been advanced. He needed Tafel back as a loyal worker. He needed Silsbee to take orders. He had to find a way of dividing these two men. Tafel might listen, but Moses had no control over Silsbee, who was too new to his command to care. And we were miles up the Aguarico River, on a deadline with the oil drillers.

  Chivers said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he just beat them unmercifully about the head and shoulders.”

  I had known Max Moses for many years. I had no idea what
he would do, only that he would have a better answer than that. In his mental leadership manual there was a different answer for every problem. Each situation was unique; each person was. Had Moses said, “Everybody’s the same,” that would have meant he was afraid or contemptuous. Everyone is different, was his philosophy.

  “He’s going to flog Silsbee,” Chivers said.

  “He never touches his people,” I said.

  “Then he’ll read the riot act to Tafel.”

  “He doesn’t raise his voice, but even if he did, Silsbee would still be a friend to Tafel, and the problem won’t go away.”

  Seeing us talking together, Moses frowned, and from that moment on I ignored Chivers. At breakfast, Moses said to Tafel, “A needy person is someone you’re always meeting for the first time,” which enraged Tafel and made Silsbee sulk.

  That same day he laid out the schedule, the deadlines, the inspections. He said, “At this rate we won’t make it. We’re going to work faster.”

  “It’s the locals,” Tafel said.

  “It’s us,” Moses said. “It’s you.” There was conviction and even eloquence in the slushy suck-sound of his lisp.

  Nothing else happened until later in the morning. Tafel was summoned to Moses’ container. He wasn’t long. He was soon striding out, nose forward, carrying a rifle.

  The work site was over a little hill, past the shade trees where Silsbee usually sat chatting with the Indians, among the welding torches and the masks and tanks.

  Chivers said, “Crunch time.”

  Within minutes we heard a gunshot, and after that, “No!” Back came Tafel, not angry but frightened and looking friendless and paler. Moses, at the entrance to his container, took the rifle from him and must have given an order, because Tafel said, “Yes, sir.”

  When Silsbee appeared with hatred and sorrow on his face, carrying his dead dog in his arms, Tafel walked past him without a look. Moses called out to the cook boy, and Hong took the dog by the hind legs, the way you hold a dead chicken.

  Without any orders, we completed our day’s objective long before the bell sounded at five. In the evening we assembled in the mess container as usual, Moses leading the grace, and at the end of it saying how confident he was that we would finish ahead of schedule and there might be bonuses. But we’d have to be quicker in taking orders. He let this sink in, then he signaled to Hong.

  “Let’s eat.”

  In the silence that followed, the stew was served. We ate without speaking, though a village dog began to bark. I wished it would stop, because it sounded triumphant, like mockery. I chewed the meat gratefully, and I smiled at Max Moses to show I wasn’t paying attention to the barking. I was not surprised when he didn’t smile back at me.

  Rip It Up

  WATCHING THE BLACK locomotive come chattering out of the tunnel, one-eyed, trailing smoke, its sharp chin forward, worrying back and forth on its seesawing side cranks, and looking lethal as it bore down on the solitary figure standing on the tracks at the level crossing, I turned the music up and said, “So long, dead ass.”

  John Burkell was biting his necktie in fear. He murmured, “No,” into the wet stripes, as though I had asked a question.

  Walter Herkis lifted his uncertain eyes to me, and now the music was so loud I just shrugged and made a face, meaning, “So what?”

  “Okay, die,” Walter said, turning back to the train.

  As Burkell chewed his tie, the train shoved the little figure along, toppling it sideways and off the table. And I felt a kind of joy, watching Walter’s big confident hand on the transformer, now slowing the train.

  “So long, dead ass!” Walter screeched. The other screech in the room was the phonograph, a 45 of Little Richard singing “Rip It Up.”

  Walter’s mother called out, “What’s all that racket down there?”

  “Nothing!” Walter looked at me for approval as he put another figure on the track, one of the toy pedestrians from the scale-model station. I was energized by the brainless clacking train and Little Richard, by Walter’s high spirits, thrilled too by John Burkell’s fear.

  “Vito Quaglia would shit a brick if he knew you just killed him,” John said. “Even in fooling. He’s psycho.”

  “He’s a banana man,” I said. “Who’s next?”

  “I hosey Ed Hankey,” Walter said.

  “Hankey’s a pissah. He can rotate on this.”

  John stuffed his tie back into his mouth and looked around as though expecting to see big lisping Ed Hankey bulking at the back of Walter’s basement behind the model train layout, the toy hill, the toy town, the level crossing, where the train was bearing down on the image of Ed Hankey. Walter pushed the transformer handle to Full Speed and the front wheels jumped, almost derailing the shivering train, until the plastic figure spun on its back into the plastic trees.

  “‘And ball tonight,’” Walter said, with the song. “That bastard. Let’s do the jocks.”

  “I have to go home,” John said. His eyes, crusted with what he said was conjunctivitis, made him look sleepless and even more fearful. He slung his green book bag over his shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

  When he was gone, Walter smiled at me. “He’s having conniptions.”

  “Candy ass,” I said. “He’s wicked scared.”

  But even so, I knew that we were much the same, anxious pimply fourteen-year-olds gathered after school, taking refuge from the ball field and the bullies, safe in Walter Herkis’s basement. Burkell chewed his tie, Walter bit his fingernails, I wore glasses and tried to rub the nearsightedness out of my eyes—my first year of glasses. We were miserable in much the same way, and misery made us friends. We hated school, every bit of it, the tough boys, the coy girls, the sarcastic teachers, the terror of the older students. The smell of the oiled wooden floors, the varnished desks, the urinal candy in the toilets. And the schoolwork itself—hated it most of all, because we were so good at it and made ourselves so conspicuous we pretended to have lapses of memory when we knew the right answers, Burkell in history, Walter in science, me in English, though I loved cooking chemicals in science, too. This infuriated the teachers, who seemed to know we were playing stupid. But it was dangerous to look bright.

  “And here’s the rest of the jocks,” Walter said, dropping six small figures onto the tracks as he pushed the handle of the transformer once again, and the speeding train plowed into them, scattering them.

  The music had stopped. I swung the arm of the phonograph and set the needle onto the edge of the record.

  “Burkell’s chickenshit,” Walter said, picking up another figure. “Here’s Evelyn. Your girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  But the music and the sound of the train drowned out my words as the locomotive sent Evelyn Frisch off the tracks.

  “Don’t make me come down there,” Walter’s mother yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing!” Walter called out. “Did you finish the book?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was the homework, The Human Comedy by William Saroyan.

  “I don’t get it,” Walter said.

  “It’s junk,” I said, and Walter looked shocked. “Homer’s a banana man.”

  We were eighth-graders at Miller Baldwin Junior High. Walter was new to the school, someone the others had never seen before, a Seventh-day Adventist. He was depantsed the first day at recess, and cried. Then they knuckle-punched his arm with noogies. He was mocked for being tall and, his first day, for knowing the answers in science. He liked me because I didn’t mock him. He wore his pants so high you could see the tops of his white ankle socks. I was his only friend. We hiked in the Fells most Saturdays, we built fires at the Sheepfold. I liked him because he had more comic books than Burkell, and Elvis records, and a ham radio. And a whole big table of model trains that he ran with a transformer lever he worked with his thumb.

  After he knocked some more figures down, he played “Rip It Up” again. I sat on his stool and touched
the transformer.

  “It’s hot.”

  “Because it’s a transformer, shit-for-brains,” he said. “It’s the coil. The coil heats up from the molecules that are backed up by the wire density.”

  I squinted at his precise explanation.

  “It’s the resistance of the eddy current in the coil, because it’s stepping down from AC to DC at a lower current. Ask Hoolie.”

  Mr. Hoolie was our science teacher, someone we exasperated by pretending not to know the right answers. I was impressed that Walter used the terms so easily: “voltage,” “molecules,” and “wire density.” The idea that electricity was reduced by flowing through tight coils of hot wires was something new to me.

  We were unhappy, restless, lonely boys, and this wet afternoon in October was typical, taking refuge in the stinks and sparks of science. Walter was hunched over the transformer. He then disconnected the wires from the side of the track and lifted them, making a bright arc.

  “Spark gap,” he said, smiling at the thread of smoke. “Now there’s no one else left. Just us.”

  “You wish.”

  Almost the first person I saw the next day was Vito Quaglia, and remembering how we had run him over with Walter’s train, I began to smile.

  “The fuck you lookin’ at, four eyes, you fucken pineapple.”

  “Nothing,” I said, and tried not to show my fear.

  Quaglia was a skinny yellow-faced boy given to casual violence—not strong but reckless and slow-witted, usually open-mouthed, with a chipped front tooth that gave him a fang. He wore his shirt unbuttoned, a dirty T-shirt under it. His wild hair made him look fierce. He was always in trouble and had nothing to lose by more trouble. Though he was failing in most classes, Quaglia excelled as a soccer player—fast, a ruthless kicker—and as a result was popular with some of the teachers. His friends were either almost as tough as he was or else his fearful flatterers.

  “Pineapple was making a face at you,” Angie Frezza said.

  “You make one more face at me and I’ll put my foot so far up your culo you’ll have to open your mouth for me to take my shoe off.”