“If I could be rich doing perverted things and be poor doing normal things, I would be poor.”
“I know. What about the sandwich?”
“I’m not hungry just yet.”
“Do you want another drink?”
“Yes. Please, Tom. Tell me. Willie said there was a cat in love with you. That isn’t true, is it?”
“Yes. It’s true.”
“I think it’s dreadful.”
“No. It’s not. I’m in love with the cat, too.”
“That’s terrible to say. Don’t tease me, Tom, please, Willie teased me and made me cry.”
“I love the cat,” Thomas Hudson said.
“I don’t want to hear about it. Tom, when will you take me out to the bar of the crazies?”
“One of these days.”
“Do the crazies really come there just like ordinary people come here to meet and have drinks?”
“That’s right. The only difference is they wear shirts and trousers made out of sugar sacks.”
“Did you really play on the ball team of the crazies against the lepers?”
“Sure. I was the best knuckle-ball pitcher the crazies ever had.”
“How did you get to know them?”
“I just stopped there one time on the way back from Rancho Boyeros and liked the place.”
“Will you really take me out to the bar of the crazies?”
“Sure. If you won’t be scared.”
“I’ll be scared. But I won’t be too scared if I’m with you. That’s why I want to go out there. To be scared.”
“There’s some wonderful crazies out there. You’ll like them.”
“My first husband was a crazy. But he was the difficult kind.”
“Do you think Willie is crazy?”
“Oh no. He just has a difficult character.”
“He’s suffered very much.”
“Who hasn’t? Willie presumes on his suffering.”
“I don’t think so. I know about it. I promise you.”
“Let’s talk about something else, then. Do you see that man down there at the bar talking to Henry?”
“Yes.”
“All he likes in bed are piglike things.”
“Poor man.”
“He’s not poor. He’s rich. But all he cares for is porquerías.”
“Didn’t you ever like porquerías?”
“Never. You can ask anyone. And I’ve never done anything with girls in my life.”
“Honest Lil,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Wouldn’t you rather have me that way? You don’t like porquerías. You like to make love and be happy and go to sleep. I know you.”
“Todo el mundo me conoce.”
“No, they don’t. They have all sorts of different ideas about you. But I know you.”
He was drinking another of the frozen daiquiris with no sugar in it and as he lifted it, heavy and the glass frost-rimmed, he looked at the clear part below the trapped top and it reminded him of the sea. The frappéd part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over marl bottom. That was almost the exact color.
“I wish they had a drink the color of sea water when you have a depth of eight hundred fathoms and there is a dead calm with the sun straight up and down and the sea full of plankton,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s drink this shallow water drink.”
“Tom, what’s the matter? Do you have some problem?”
“No.”
“You’re awfully sad and you’re a little bit old today.”
“It’s the norther.”
“But you always used to say a norther gave you pep and cheered you up. How many times have we made love because there was a norther?”
“Plenty.”
“You always liked a norther and you bought me this coat to wear when we have them.”
“It’s a pretty coat, too.”
“I could have sold it half a dozen times,” Honest Lil said. “More people were crazy for this coat than you can imagine.”
“This is a fine norther for it.”
“Be happy, Tom. You always get happy when you drink. Drink that drink and have another one.”
“If I drink it too fast it hurts across the front of my forehead.”
“Well just drink slow and steady, then. I’m going to have another highbalito.”
She made it herself from the bottle Serafín had left in front of her on the bar and Thomas Hudson looked at it and said, “That’s a fresh water drink. That is the color of the water in the Firehole River before it joins the Gibbon to become the Madison. If you put a little more whisky in it you could make it the color of a stream that comes out of a cedar swamp to flow into the Bear River at a place called Wab-Me-Me.”
“Wab-Me-Me is funny,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It is an Indian place-name. I ought to know what it means but I’ve forgotten. It’s Ojibway.”
“Tell me about Indians,” Honest Lil said. “I like to hear about the Indians even more than about the crazies.”
“There are quite a few Indians down the coast. They are sea Indians and they fish and dry the fish and are charcoal burners.”
“I don’t want to hear about Cuban Indians. They’re all mulatos.”
“No, they’re not. Some are real Indians. But they may have captured them in the early days and brought them over from Yucatan.”
“I don’t like yucatecos.”
“I do. Very much.”
“Tell me about Wabmimi. Is it in the Far West?”
“No, it’s up north. In the part that’s near Canada.”
“I know Canada. I came into Montreal up the river once on a Princess ship. But it was raining and we could see nothing and we left that same evening for New York on the train.”
“Did it rain all the time on the river?”
“All the time. And outside, before we came into the river there was fog and part of the time it snowed. You can have Canada. Tell me about Wabmimi.”
“It was just a village where there was a sawmill on the river and the train ran through it. There were always great piles of sawdust beside the railroad tracks. They had booms across the river to hold the logs and they were almost solid across the river. The river was covered with logs a long way above the town. One time I had been fishing and I wanted to cross the river and I crawled across on the logs. One rolled with me and I went into the water.
When I came up it was all logs above me and I could not get through between them. It was dark under them and all I could feel with my hands was their bark. I could not spread two of them apart to get up to the air.”
“What did you do?”
“I drowned.”
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t say it. Tell me quick what you did?”
“I thought very hard and I knew I had to get through very quickly. I felt carefully around the bottom of a log until I came to where it was pushed against another log. Then I put my two hands together and pushed up and the logs spread apart just a little. Then I got my hands through and then my forearms and elbows through and then I spread the two logs apart with my elbows until I got my head up and I had an arm over each log. I loved each log very much and I lay there like that a long time between them. That water was brown from the logs in it. The water that’s like your drink was in a little stream that flowed into that river.”
“I don’t think I could ever have come up between the logs.”
“I didn’t think I could for a long time.”
“How long were you underwater?”
“I don’t know. I know I rested a long time with my arms on the logs before I tried to do anything else.”
“I like that story. But it will make me have bad dreams. Tell me something happy, Tom.”
“All right,” he said. “Let me think.”
“No. Tell one right away without th
inking.”
“All right,” Thomas Hudson said. “When young Tom was a little baby—”
“¡Qué muchacho más guapo!” Honest Lil interrupted. “¿Qué noticias tienes de él?”
“Muy buenas.”
“Me alegro,” said Honest Lil, tears coming into her eyes at the thought of young Tom the flyer. “Siempre tengo su fotografía en uniforme con el sagrado corazón de Jesús arriba de la fotografía y al lado la virgen del Cobre.”
“You have great faith in the Virgen del Cobre?”
“Absolutely blind faith.”
“You must keep it.”
“And she is looking after Tom day and night.”
“Good,” said Thomas Hudson. “Serafín, another of these big ones, please. Do you want the happy story?”
“Yes, please,” Honest Lil said. “Please tell me the happy story. I feel sad again.”
“Pues el happy story es muy sencillo,” Thomas Hudson said. “The first time we ever took Tom to Europe, he was only three months old and it was a very old, small, and slow liner and the sea was rough most of the time. The ship smelled of bilge and oil and the grease on the brass of portholes and of the lavabos and the disinfectant they used that was in big pink cakes in the pissoirs—”
“Pues, this isn’t a very happy story.”
“Sí, mujer. You’re wrong as hell. This is a happy story, muy happy. I go on. The ship also smelled of baths you had to take at regular hours or be looked down on by the bath steward and of the smell of hot salt water coming out of the brass nozzles of the bath fixtures and of the wet wooden grate on the floor and of the starched jacket of the bath steward. It also smelled of cheap English ship cooking which is a discouraging smell and of the dead butts of Woodbines, Players, and Gold Flakes in the smoking room and wherever they were dropped. It did not have one good smell, and as you know the English, both men and women, all have a peculiar odor, even to themselves, much as we have to Negroes, and so they have to bathe very often. An Englishman never smells sweet as a cow’s breath does and a pipe-smoking Englishman does not conceal his odor. He only adds something to it. Their tweeds smell good and so does the leather of their boots and all their saddlery smells good. But there is no saddlery on a ship and the tweeds are impregnated with the dead pipe smell. The only way you could get a good smell on that ship was when your nose was deep in a tall glass of dry sparkling cider from Devon. This smelled wonderful and I kept my nose in it as much as I could afford. Maybe more.”
“Pues, it is a little more happy now.”
“Here is the happy part. Our cabin was so low, just above the water line, that the port had to be kept closed all the time and you saw the sea racing by and then you saw it solid green as the sea went past the porthole. We had built a barricade with trunks and suitcases roped together so that Tom could not fall out of the berth and when his mother and I would come down to see how he was, every time we ever came, if he was awake, he was laughing.”
“Did he really laugh when he was three months old?”
“He laughed all the time. I never heard him cry when he was a baby.”
“¡Qué muchacho más lindo más guapo!”
“Yes,” Thomas Hudson said. “Very high-class muchacho. Want me to tell you another happy story about him?”
“Why did you leave his lovely mother?”
“A very strange combination of circumstances Do you want another happy story?”
“Yes. But without so many smells In it.”
“This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots. How do you think frozen daiquiris would be if they were phosphorescent?”
“You could put phosphorus in them. But I don’t think it would be healthy. Sometimes people in Cuba commit suicide by eating phosphorus from the heads of matches.”
“And drinking tinte rápido. What is rapid ink?”
“It is a dye to make shoes black. But most often girls who have been crossed in love or when their fiancés have not kept their promises and done the things to them and then gone away without marrying, commit suicide by pouring alcohol on themselves and setting themselves on fire. That is the classic way.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “Auto da fé.”
“It’s very certain,” Honest Lil said, “They nearly always die. The burns are on the head first and usually all over the body. Rapid ink is more of a gesture. Iodine is au fond a gesture, too.”
“What are you two ghouls talking about?” Serafín the barman asked.
“Suicides.”
“Hay mucho,” Serafín said “Especially among the poor, I don’t remember a rich Cuban committing suicide Do you?”
“Yes,” Honest Lil said. “I know of several cases—good people, too.”
“You would,” Serafín said,
“Señor Tomás, do you want something to eat with those drinks? ¿Un poco de pescado? ¿Puerco frito? Any cold meats?”
“Sí,” Thomas Hudson said. “Whatever there is.”
Serafín put a plate of bits of pork, fried brown and crisped, and a plate of red snapper fried in batter so that it wore a yellow crust over the pink-red skin and the white sweet fish inside. He was a tall boy, naturally rough spoken, and he walked roughly from the wooden shoes he wore against the wet and the spillage behind the bar.
“Do you want cold meats?”
“No. This is enough.”
“Take anything they will give you, Tom,” Honest Lil said. “You know this place.”
The bar had a reputation for never buying a drink. But actually it gave an uncounted number of plates of hot free lunch each day; not only the fried fish and pork, but plates of little hot meat fritters and sandwiches of French-fried bread with toasted cheese and ham. The bartenders also mixed the daiquiris in a huge shaker and there was always at least a drink and a half left in the shaker after the drinks were poured.
“Are you less sad now?” Honest Lil asked
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Tom. What are you sad about?”
“El mundo entero.”
“Who isn’t sad about the whole world? It goes worse all the time. But you can’t spend your time being sad about that.”
“There isn’t any law against it.”
“There doesn’t have to be a law against things for them to be wrong.”
Ethical discussions with Honest Lil are not what I need, Thomas Hudson thought. What do you need, you bastard? You needed to get drunk which you are probably doing even though it does not seem so to you. There is no way for you to get what you need and you will never have what you want again. But there are various palliative measures you should take. Go ahead. Take one.
“Voy a tomar otro de estos grandes sin azúcar,” he said to Serafín.
“En seguida, Don Tomás,” Serafín said. “Are you going to try to beat the record?”
“No. I’m just drinking with calmness.”
“You were drinking with calmness when you set the record,” Serafín said. “With calmness and fortitude from morning until night. And you walked out on your own feet.”
“The hell with the record.”
“You’ve got a chance to break it,” Serafín told him. “Drinking as you are now and eating a little as you go along, you have an excellent chance.”
“Tom, try to break the record,” Honest Lil said. “I’m here as a witness.”
“He doesn’t need any witness,” Serafín said. “I’m the witness. When I go off I’ll give the count to Constante. You’re further along right now than you were the day you set the record.”
“The hell with the record.”
“You’re in good form. You’re drinking well and steady and they’re not having any effect on you.”
“Fuck the record.”
“All right. Como usted quiere. I’m keeping count just in case you change your mind.”
“He’ll keep count all right,” Honest Lil said. “He has t
he duplicate tickets.”
“What do you want, woman? Do you want a real record or a phony record?”
“Neither. I want a highbalito with agua mineral.”
“Como siempre,” Serafín said.
“I drink brandy, too.”
“I don’t want to be here when you drink brandy.”
“Tom, did you know I fell down trying to get onto a streetcar and was nearly killed?”
“Poor Honest Lil,” Serafín said. “A dangerous and adventurous life.”
“Better than yours standing all day in wooden shoes behind a bar and serving rummies.”
“That’s my trade,” Serafín said. “It’s a privilege to serve such distinguished rummies as you.”
Henry Wood came over. He stood, tall and sweating and newly excited by a change of plans. There was nothing that pleased him, Thomas Hudson thought, like a sudden change of plans.
“We’re going over to Alfred’s Sin House,” he said. “Do you want to come, Tom?”
“Willie’s waiting for you at the Bar Basque.”
“I don’t believe we really want Willie on this one.”
“You ought to tell him, then.”
“I’ll call him up. Don’t you want to come? This is going to be very good.”
“You ought to eat something.”
“I’ll eat a good big dinner. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine,” Thomas Hudson said. “Really fine.”
“Are you going to try for the record?”
“No.”
“Will I see you tonight?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll come out and sleep at the house if you like.”
“No. Have fun. But eat something.”
“I’ll eat an excellent dinner. Word of honor.”
“Be sure and call Willie.”
“I’ll call Willie. You can be quite sure.”
“Where’s Alfred’s Sin House?”
“It’s an absolutely beautiful place. It overlooks the harbor and it’s well furnished and really delightful.”
“I mean what is the address.”
“I don’t know but I’ll tell Willie.”
“You don’t think Willie will be hurt?”
“I can’t help it if he is, Tom. I really can’t ask Willie on this. You know how fond I am of Willie. But there are things I simply can’t ask him on. You know that as well as I do.”
Islands in the Stream Page 28