Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  “Let’s walk the town,” Doyle said. “Let’s find a hotel and get the ferry schedule. Let’s make sure that in the morning we’ll be alive and ready to go. Then we can take care of everything else we might need.”

  Ethan watched his eyes as he spoke, watched how they dulled at the end of the sentence, glazed for a moment like a snake’s. It was an expression not unlike the one he’d witnessed at the discothèque where Doyle danced his creepy dawn shuffle with the club girls and the dead chicken. Doyle was in one of his quickening phases, his staring phases; he seemed tense with what most people would take for anger. He glared at every woman they passed. The first time Ethan visited him, when he was still doing AIDS work, Doyle insisted on going out every night to the discos on the north shore, finding new girlfriends, dancing and grinding and flirting in Spanish. Ethan spent most of those nights sitting at Doyle’s kitchen table drinking rum and electrolyte drinks while Doyle and his night’s conquest moaned at each other in simpleton Spanish. Ethan couldn’t comprehend Doyle’s lusts—maybe it was loneliness or fear, or maybe it was just some new blossoming of whatever impulse drove him down here in the first place. Either way, the impulse was easily expressed but never satisfied. Doyle loved and loved and his love seemed no different than rage. So it’s going to be one of those nights, Ethan thought.

  “How’s that sound to you, Mirabelle?” Ethan asked. “Want to walk the town?”

  She had never been this far from home before, and Roycetown, by anyone’s measuring, was a wild sight to see. But her eyes were downcast; she worried her hair with her fingers and mumbled silently to herself. Like something governed by the physics of fairy tale, she turned strange with the sunset.

  She stopped a moment and looked up, the carnival world opening around her, going on without her inspection.

  “I do not feel well,” she said. “Maybe you can drink yourselves to death without me?”

  It was true, Ethan thought, she didn’t look good. It was hot and they all were sweating, but her skin seemed wan and greasy, shellfish out of the shell. Besides, it would be best to get her in the room and out of sight. Soto might not be far behind them, and there was no reason to take unnecessary chances.

  They were nearing the end of the way, the place where the boulevard and the city and the river and jungle around it ran up against the Caribbean. Roycetown finished in a sort of rounded peninsula, and at the end of the lane a grove of widely spaced coconut palms stood pressed in silhouette against the moving green sea. Before the palms there was the usual land’s-end entertainment: a block of waterfront bars thatched and tied tiki-style from cut bamboo. Ethan smelled the air as they walked and hoped for the fresh salt and eucalyptus smell that accompanied so many of these ports. The scents he knew as those of paradise: flowers, St. Augustine grass, southern wind. But here there was just the rot of the stricken river sloshing up against the sea, sewer waste and fry oil piped out of the restaurants, and from everywhere the raw alcohol reek of guaro.

  Ethan knew you could find many such ports littered about the Central American Caribbean. More than most, though, Roycetown did little to disguise its decaying grandeur. It was busy, vibrant, definitively sinister—it seemed to traffic in its own colorful despair. Like all of Copal, it was not home to tourists but instead a harbor for every manner of lost man. A pirate port where emeralds and cocaine and small arms were often currency enough and nationality was measured by your boat’s registry.

  They reached the end of the point, turned around and began to walk back the way they had come. Music rose like heat from the streets, where bloated white expatriates and bearded surfers who had pawned their surfboards for any number of immeasurable losses slumped outside the bamboo bars in the trembling play of dusking shadows and green electric light. It was not so different from Boystown. Soon, when the darkness had risen farther, come in with the current, those who could stand would stand and step inside, where the women waited at tables or behind bead curtains or out on thatched verandahs that faced the dark, beachless sea.

  LATER ON, after they’d found Mirabelle a hotel room, Ethan sat at the bamboo counter at one of the awful tiki bars and ate fish soup, even though he knew that the coconut-water base would probably hit his bowels pretty hard since he was already feeling a low, deepening, burn in his gut. He ordered a rum and a bottle of Coke and poured some of the rum into his soup. It wasn’t bad that way, sweet and creamy, and the fish fell apart in his mouth, though he didn’t know, really, what that meant.

  Doyle stood by the jukebox in the far corner where the lounge opened onto a canopied sea deck. He leaned against one of the bamboo support stakes, drank Honduran beer, and flirted with an olive-skinned woman in khaki cargo pants and a wide-necked t-shirt with white and green horizontal stripes. Ethan watched them in the bar mirror. He didn’t like horizontal stripes of any ilk, especially not in a town like this, where they seemed particularly out of place, somehow jaunty, performed—the sailor girl outfit for a yacht club gala. Around here, he thought, as he raised his hand for another rum, an outfit like that either meant you were a mark or someone too dangerous to touch. Either way, it didn’t seem like the best company for Doyle to keep—but neither was he, and Doyle wasn’t prone to keeping good company. She smiled and gestured widely; she looked Greek; she didn’t appear, anyway, to be a prostitute.

  The bartender poured Ethan another rum. It wasn’t very good. Some thin and astringent homemade rotgut that tasted of burnt molasses and cheap grain alcohol. Already Ethan was feeling the heavy heat of it in his face. He turned his head from side to side and watched as his reflection blurred in the mirror. A bad sign. He ordered a Port Royal, the best of the rancid Honduran beers, to cut the weight of the rum. It would be best if he went back to the hotel now to sleep or watch over Mirabelle. She wasn’t looking good, she could probably use some help, but he knew that Doyle would be out all night, and the idea of facing her weirdness alone was distressing. I’ve been there, he thought. I’ve been there and been there. The sea flings you from one ill shore to the next.

  Or he could stay in the other room. When they checked in, they reserved two rooms, one that they put in the ledger—and left empty—and the other, next door, to stay in. It was a simple precaution, probably unnecessary. What was Soto going to do? Check every ledger in town? Break into every occupied room? Well, maybe. It occurred to Ethan that he had no idea what Soto might do.

  In the mirror, Ethan watched Doyle and the woman walk outside and onto the verandah. Doyle was pointing to something on the water and Ethan could not imagine what it might be. The sea moved empty and black against a pitch horizon. The stars, so bright on the river, looked distant and small, flecks of broken glass, and Doyle didn’t know stars, anyway. Outside there was a noise in the street, something drunken, laughing or yelling. A speedboat fired down the river thoroughfare to the sea. Ethan raised his hand for another rum.

  The dim lights in the bar flickered and went out and when they came on again a moment later the bar was full of people. Ethan was surrounded by men: Copalan fishermen, Merchant Marines, a red-faced sailor with a Boston accent and a peach-colored shirt. Someone was laughing very loudly and saying, no day to die. Another voice answered, high-pitched, certain: At least it’s not Rio. Ethan turned in his seat. No day to die. A gecko perched for a moment on his fingers, scrambled across his wedding ring. A woman touched his shoulder and he shrugged her away. “You want another rum, buddy?” the bartender said.

  Ethan nodded. “You know,” he said, “this wouldn’t be such a bad bar if it weren’t filled with degenerates.”

  He thought he saw the bartender smile as he turned away, but it was hard to tell through the curtain of his hanging dreadlocks. It might have been a grimace of rage.

  Some trouble was brewing in the corner. There was a sailor sitting on a stool with a leashed mongoose curled at his feet. Not far from him, three stools over by the bar, stood a shirtless Garifuna man with a green python wrapped around his neck.

  “Do
n’t you let him come over here, him!” he shouted. “I cut dat mongoose throat, no shit.”

  “I’d put my money on the mongoose,” Ethan found himself saying to no one in particular.

  “At least it’s not Rio!”

  The mongoose was up now, tail outstretched, baring teeth like the barman’s smile.

  Ethan finished his Port Royal.

  “A mongoose is like a weasel with purpose,” he added.

  There was a hand, heavy, on his shoulder. A hand and the ripe stink of stale cologne and dried sweat. Ethan turned against the pressure. The man was wearing a white linen sports jacket over a yellow Hawaiian shirt. The wrinkles in the linen seemed as deep and permanent as scars. He had a broad, jowled face, thin blond hair, and a wide frog’s nose. Gin blossoms radiated across his cheeks like fireworks.

  “Hey, partner,” the man said. “Haven’t we met before? In Suez?”

  What was this? Ethan thought. Some kind of code word? Some kind of gimpy come-on?

  “Not me,” he said. “Got the wrong contractor.”

  “Everybody’s contracted something wrong around here,” the man said.

  It must have been a joke, because he was laughing. His accent was New England, Newport or Boston Brahmin. But it didn’t fit the diction—partner, and all that. He was still laughing, he was reaching out and shaking Ethan’s hand.

  “Barry Cunningham,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, Barry.”

  Doyle was nowhere to be seen. The tiki deck thronged with dancing people, though there didn’t seem to be any music. A circle was beginning to form around the mongoose man. The snake was gone, but someone had produced a Mona iguana.

  “Some sport, eh?” Cunningham said.

  “Sure. A real clam bake. A veritable World Series.”

  “What?” Cunningham said. “You’re not a betting man? Not a risk man?” He raised his hand to the bartender, and when he did Ethan saw an anchor tattooed on his forearm. “Dos rons,” Cunningham said. “Dobles.”

  The sound of Cunningham speaking Spanish irritated Ethan—it was as out of place as the drawled partner. Now the old anger, flaming. Something bellowed.

  “He speaks English,” Ethan said.

  “Hey, partner, I’m just making conversation here. I’m just making some small talk.”

  The evening, Ethan felt, was starting to take a sinister turn. The rums arrived. Cunningham smelled his like wine, he held it up to the indigo lights. He looked at it like it had somehow betrayed him.

  “It’s hard to find any first-rate conversation in these climes. You run into some real creeps,” he said.

  Ethan lifted his rum. “Sure. Creeps everywhere. Lurking. Creeping. As is their wont.”

  “Exactly.” Cunningham drank and raised his hand for another. “It’s a filthy sort you find here. Nasty little inditos looking for someone to blame. The cheapest putas. Foreign operators. Israelis, mostly. Hot dogs.”

  “Hot dogs?”

  “Hebrew Nationals.”

  Where was Doyle? Ethan was not in the mood for rummy antisemitism, or anti-Zionism, or anything. He should get back to the room. It was time for that and that’s what he would do.

  “So why stay here?” he asked.

  “One world is as bad as the next. Except some are worse than others,” Cunningham said.

  The bartender started to pour two more rums. Ethan covered his glass with his hand.

  “I go where my work takes me, and often it takes me here,” Cunningham said. He stared at Ethan as he said it; he tried, Ethan could tell, to hold his gaze. His pupils lolled. Ethan looked over his shoulder. On the boardwalk in the street, a couple kissed under the lanterns.

  “And what’s work?”

  “Post-colonialism. Trade. Seething and burgeoning. All sorts of things, really, but mostly American post-partum depression.”

  Cunningham sputtered as he spoke. His words were all a little too wet, and the accent, the faux–New England, was falling away into something else, some sloppy parody of itself as fancy and soiled as his jacket. Cunningham had turned in his stool so that he was facing Ethan directly. He propped himself on the bar with his left arm and his knuckles were whitening around the glass. His hair stuck to his head with sweat.

  “We’ve given birth to this place,” he said. “It’s our child and we feel pretty bad about it. We have certain tendencies. We lean toward self-pity and self-indulgence. We lean toward despair.”

  In the corner, the crowd began to hoot and wave money. Something yelped and Cunningham leaned closer, shouted over the fray.

  “But what are you going to do? Are you going to let it rot? Grow up a fledgling? Fall into the hands of nasty foster parents?”

  “God, I thought Communism was dead,” Ethan said.

  “I have to tell you,” Cunningham said. “I don’t like that kind of cynicism. I don’t find it very appealing. Not from an American. Not from a fellow who should know better.”

  Ethan lifted his empty glass to his mouth and took some comfort, anyway, in the action. He knew he should not have another drink, he knew he should be back with Mirabelle in the hotel room, but he didn’t feel this was a conversation that he could get up and walk away from, and he didn’t want Cunningham following him into the street.

  “How am I the cynical one here?” Ethan said. “Didn’t we legit-imate El Lobo?”

  “Precisely. So it’s a question of obligation. Don’t you think that the son should take after the mother? Otherwise, it could go the other way.”

  Ethan wished he had accepted the rum. It seemed from the shouts and the scuffle of claws on wood that the iguana, improbably, was winning.

  “Consider,” Cunningham said, “a world where our spastic children are allowed out to play with the others. Consider Copal an idiot savant. Great particular merits coupled with general retardation. Infinite beauty and total rot. Imagine America like this. Imagine—” His eyes narrowed as much as they could, he reached out and touched Ethan’s hand. “—folks meddling in affairs of state.”

  The fight was over. The iguana won and a lot of people had lost money. Now the bar had settled into drunken quiet. Something was happening in the street but Ethan could not see what it was, and Cunningham, he was certain, was threatening him. He had one hand wrapped around his glass and the other on Ethan’s shoulder.

  “Imagine it,” he was saying. “Folks meddling in affairs of state. Of kings and dukes and generals. Folks who don’t know their place. Who were waiting to die. You’ve got to admit—it’s pretty goddamn silly.”

  Ethan did consider the situation. He was less drunk than Cunningham and so maybe he had the drop on him. Probably not. If it wasn’t clear already, if it hadn’t been clear from the first impossible moment in Boystown, it was clear now. He had been lied to.

  “I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding here,” Ethan said. “I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “Oh, come off it. I saw you ride in. I saw you get off a boat with Camillo Campo’s daughter. Let’s say that those are verified facts.”

  Whatever was happening in the street was over. The party, it seemed, had moved downriver, away from the sea. Outside, the Japanese lanterns and hung lights rocked and swayed and cast shadows over the empty road, the river beyond it.

  “I’m very tired,” Ethan said. “In fact, I may even be drunk. I’m afraid this has all gone a bit over my head.”

  “Well, that’s obvious, partner,” Cunningham said. “I’m not asking anything from you. I don’t really care why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s a foolish thing to do, but that’s not my problem. That’s not to say that other people won’t care, but I just go where I’m asked to. Where the zephyrs blow me.”

  Once, on a spring day sitting in the garden outside the Cloisters, Mallory kissed Ethan’s jawbone and whispered the opening of the Canterbury Tales into his ear. He heard her voice now, rising out of fear or fever or both. When Zephyrus eek with hi
s swete brethe…

  “What I would like you to do,” Cunningham continued, “and this is certainly for your own good, is to tell me where you’re taking her.”

  Ethan considered the distance to the door, if he could make it at a half-drunken run. He thought so, but Cunningham still had his hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Ethan said, “but there’s been some mistake. This girl is mentally ill. All I’m doing is escorting her to her family.”

  Cunningham pursed his thick red lips as if to spit. Slowly, he exhaled a spray of rummy air. He began to nod his head.

  “Right. Of course. Her family. I forgot about them. A lovely bunch. Do you have any idea how many people her daddy killed when he was with FARC?”

  Ethan signaled the bartender for another rum.

  “No one said anything about FARC.”

  Cunningham’s heavy face seemed to collapse in on itself in a mess of red wrinkles. He cast the same look of disgust on Ethan as he had on his rum.

  “You lefties are all the same. Who do you think you’re helping? I mean, look around—is anyone being helped?”

  He gestured at the mellow despair of the bar: the drunk couples on the tiki deck, the mongoose man, dead mongoose at his feet, slumped in drink over his table.

  “What good are Campo’s guerrillas doing here? Who do you think arms them? Campo lets the cartels massacre whole villages of Indians along their muling routes in the cloud forest. He kidnaps oil prospectors. He bombs markets. He undermines commerce and order. Now chaos is the rule, and the rule of chaos is that it spreads. Guatemala, Mexico, and points north. That, comrade, is not philosophy—it’s science. And science requires an absolute perspective. I hate to say it, but there is no law but the law imposed by men like me.”

  He banged his fist down on the bar and rum splashed from his glass onto his hand. He licked it from his skin. His shoulders slouched under his terrible jacket. He pointed at Ethan.

  “You don’t know it, but you’re peering at the end of your world here. At deviants and dogs and murderers. It’ll be a war on your borders soon enough. Arizona, Texas, California. There’ll be plague on your streets and in your hospitals. Consider the refugees into Mexico. Consider the trade problems. I suppose you think you could live without bananas?”