by Mary Morris
Clara stopped, leaned back in her chair, but the typewriter kept going. It told her things she didn’t remember. About a Sunday afternoon when she was a girl and her parents were barbecuing in the backyard. While Clara set the picnic table, her father, spatula in hand, said, “Don’t put the napkin on the right. It goes on the left.” Her mother, carrying the potato salad, came outside. She let the screen door slam as she glared at Clara’s father. “Let her do it the way she wants.” Her mother plunked the potato salad down. “You think your way is the only way.” The typewriter said it was the beginning of the end.
It went on. It reminded her that her mother had moved into the spare room not long after that picnic. That her father used to stand in her room in the middle of the night, just shaking his head.
When Clara tried to stop, it kept on. Her nightgown clung to her damp breasts. Her arms ached. Her hands felt as if they could drop from her wrists. Into the night she typed, and whenever she paused, the typewriter kept on. Bill put the pillow over his head, assuming Clara was working on another script that would never get made into a film.
In the morning a doctor drained the infection and removed the spines from Bill’s foot. In the afternoon they sailed for Epheus, one of the tiniest of the Greek isles. They found a hotel and decided to go look for Madame Estella right away. They’d been told by Bill’s mother that they just had to ask and they’d find her. Bill carried the typewriter. Clara said, “Maybe we could keep it. Maybe we could just buy her another one.”
Bill shook his head. “I thought you were dying to get rid of this thing.”
“I’m working well on it,” Clara said.
“I don’t think this island has a typewriter store,” Bill said.
“I’d like to keep it,” she said a bit more firmly.
They found the main street in town and followed the directions they’d been given. The town was stark white and bright blue, and the glare hurt their eyes. They asked a boy if he knew where Madame Estella lived, and the boy led them over broken slate and down narrow staircases. Sweat ran down Clara’s neck and she tried to shade her eyes from the glare. She touched Bill’s arm. “I think we should be apart for a while,” she said to him simply. “I’m going on my own when we get to Athens.”
Bill nodded solemnly. He too was sweating. The light hurt his eyes. “I think it’s a good idea.” He looked at Clara. Her hair, her eyes, her body. At that moment he thought she was very beautiful.
He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her. He wanted to tell her how glad he’d been to go home with her that first night. How much he liked lying in bed with her, just listening to the sound of the ocean outside. How that night with Patti had been an accident and he hadn’t been able to be straight with her since then, but the words wouldn’t come. Clara twisted her hair up off her neck. The back of her neck was soaking wet, as if they’d just finished making love. He ran his hand through the sweat and rubbed it away. She leaned against him and he pulled her close.
The boy stopped and pointed to a door. He smiled and left them. Bill fumbled for a coin but the boy shook his head, motioning no, and he was gone. “I’ll go back to Italy,” Clara said, finishing their talk. “We can meet up in Spain.”
“We’re on the same flight back,” Bill said.
They stared at the door where the boy had led them, glad to have finally reached their destination. It gave them something else to think about now. The door seemed to lead to a basement. They walked down two steps. Inside, it was dark and one of the panes of glass in the door was missing. They knocked several times, each time knocking louder and louder, and finally a voice called out in English, from somewhere inside, “It’s open.”
Bill pushed the door hesitantly and they walked in. The room was cold and very dim. The cement floor felt moist and slick under their sandals, and there was the smell of filth and decay. There was also the odor of sewage. In a corner, under a heap of covers, they could make out a form that seemed to be stirring. “Wait,” they heard the voice say, “let me put on a robe.”
“It’s Bill Jefferies. Did you get my cable? My mom asked me to look you up,” Bill called toward the bed.
“Oh, I expected you last week. Didn’t you say the seventeenth?” In the darkness they saw the shape, large, white, and naked, rising up. Bill and Clara looked away. “I thought you’d be on the ferry then.” They heard the shuffling of feet. “My eyes aren’t very good,” she mumbled. “I can’t see you. What time is it?”
Out of the shadows the woman appeared. She was tall and old and she moved toward them in a bathrobe that was partly open, revealing her sagging breasts. “No, I wasn’t expecting you. I don’t even know what day it is.”
Madame Estella reached out, groping for them. Into the light her two hands emerged. The fingers were gnarled, the knuckles swollen, the hands turned inward like birds’ feet. “I should have written back when you wrote me. But I couldn’t, you see.” She held up her hands. “My hands, they’re useless to me.”
Bill nodded. “Oh,” he said.
“From the cold,” she explained, dropping her hands back to her side. “I couldn’t write.”
Bill nodded again. Clara could not bring herself to look at him. He put the typewriter down behind him and stepped forward so that his body concealed it. Clara stood back and felt the cold enter her toes.
When they reached their guest house, she lay down for a moment. Clara made the decision in her mind to keep the typewriter. She knew it had to mean something, that the old woman couldn’t use it. She knew she was supposed to keep it. She didn’t mean to, but she fell asleep. When she woke up, Bill was gone. So was the typewriter. Clara ran around the room, frantically looking for it, but it wasn’t anywhere.
A little later Bill came back, waving money in his hand. He’d sold the typewriter for fifty dollars to a man on his way to Turkey.
“You sold it?” Clara asked, dismayed.
Bill kissed her. “You didn’t really want it, did you? I thought you’d be pleased.”
They walked back to Madame Estella’s to give her the money. “Poor thing,” Bill said. “I’m sure she can use it.” Clara moved closer to him, slipping her arm through his. “I think that’s a very nice thing to do.” She squeezed his arm. She thought he really was a kind man. That it was his kindness she’d loved in the first place. Bill put his arm around her and they walked in silence, both thinking it best to say nothing for a while.
The Watermelon People
MANGO JACK has been living in Honduras too long. You can see that right away. You can tell by the way the sweat clings like a crystal fixture to his receding brow and by the way he walks in the heat in his Panama shirt, lugging a suitcase, slumped like a chimpanzee. You can tell he hasn’t been anywhere else in a while and that he’s hungry to see Americans, because he appears on the dock in La Ceiba, where we’re standing, as soon as the bus drops us off.
The dock is deserted and looks as if it hasn’t been used for years. Its wood is rotting, planks missing. The smell of bananas and sewage fills the air. Two other Americans stand at the dock, a man and a woman with backpacks. She has long brown hair and pasty skin. He seems to match her. They look bewildered and smile sickly at us. We all have the same guidebook, open to the same page, to the passage that tells us that regular ferries sail to the Bay Islands from here.
Melanie tugs at my arm. “Let’s look at that guidebook again,” she says. Melanie is a very trusting person. What she reads in books, she believes. She’s kept this page of the guidebook dog-eared across Mexico, through Guatemala. It kept her going through Honduras. It took a lot to get her to agree to take this trip with me. She’d wanted to see the Grand Canyon, but I said, “You can always see the Grand Canyon.” She reads the words of the guidebook out loud, as if she’s just learning the language. “Ferries leave regularly from the dock at La Ceiba . . .” She cannot finish the passage. She looks at the dock and just shakes her head.
That’s when Ma
ngo Jack arrives. He seems to come out of nowhere, as if he were waiting for us behind one of the wooden posts. Even though he’s carrying a large suitcase, I’m sure he wasn’t on the bus. He’s an odd-looking man, and I have no sense of his age. His face is round and pale and he seems to have no facial hair. There’s a grimness to his features, and I immediately feel sorry for him, though I don’t know why.
“I bet you’re trying to get to the Bay Islands,” he says with a short, huffy laugh, as if he’s run a long way. He wipes the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, but the sweat reappears as soon as the handkerchief goes back into his pocket. “Somebody should write to those people in England and tell them. Ferry hasn’t run in years.” We nod, as if we should have known this all along. “Not many tourists come across Honduras these days. People who go to the Bay Islands, they fly down from San Juan.”
Melanie looks at me. This isn’t what she’d had in mind. She mumbles, “You mean, we can’t get to Roatán?” The news is also starting to sink in to me. What had gotten us through the Guatemalan jungle and the Honduran countryside was the thought of a beach.
“Oh, you can get there, all right.” The couple is standing close to us now, and we all introduce ourselves. We form a kind of football huddle around Mango Jack. He says his real name is Teddy Jackson, but the islanders have called him Mango Jack for as long as he can remember. Then he winks at us and says, “Just stick with me.”
Mango Jack has a pilot friend, and he says that for twenty dollars each we can charter his plane. He fumbles in his pocket for money and comes up with none. “Damn it,” he says. “Left my checkbook on Roatán and I’m out of cash.”
He tells us as he lugs his suitcase to a taxi that he’ll get us to the beach resort at Roatán, where his checkbook is waiting. If we front him the money, he’ll be glad to help us out.
Melanie and I are happy to have someone watch over us. For a while we haven’t been feeling safe. When we crossed into Guatemala, everything changed. Soldiers stopped our buses. Women hid their faces in hand-woven shawls while the men pretended to look away. Sometimes a soldier pulled a man off the bus and told the driver to drive away. The soldiers said they were looking for tax evaders and illegals, but when the soldiers left, the women wailed. From Guatemala we wanted to go into El Salvador, but the man who sold us bus tickets said the border was bad and we should stick to the tourist trail.
We headed to Copan. Near Copan we stayed in a jungle town in hammocks and at night heard the distant thumping of drums. At five in the morning a pickup truck took us to the border, and in Honduras everything changed again. The heat was terrible and we could see the air. At the border we drank Cokes and a radio played “Stayin’ Alive.” But there were no more checkpoints. No more soldiers to contend with.
A man got on our first bus in Honduras with his daughter. They sat in the front of the bus and after a while the father got off and waved good-bye to his daughter. She was about thirteen, and she waved to him. Then the girl began to sob. She sobbed uncontrollably, and the driver stopped the bus. Women flocked to the girl’s side, then shook their heads. The driver shook his head, then drove on, with the girl sobbing. She was an idiot and her father had abandoned her on the bus. Melanie and I looked helplessly around. The man behind us said, “Too expensive to keep. Too expensive to feed.”
When we got on the bus to La Ceiba, the driver asked if we were watermelon people, and everyone laughed. Melanie and I didn’t understand. So he asked again, “Are you watermelon people?” We replied that we were tourists from New York. So the bus driver announced that we were tourists, and everyone on the bus smiled.
The plane glides low over the Caribbean Sea, and Mango Jack sleeps, droplets of sweat still on his brow. Douglas and Natalie, the people from the dock, who have now become our traveling companions, snuggle in their seats. Melanie studies the guidebook, and I keep watching out the window, looking for the island where we’ll rest.
After we land, Jack drops us off at a beach bar in Roatán. He asks us to keep an eye on his suitcase and tells us to wait while he looks for Charlie. The beach resort he wants to take us to is accessible only by speedboat, and Charlie has the only speedboat he’ll sit down in.
Douglas tries to pick up the suitcase and says it feels as if Jack is carrying a ton of bricks. Natalie, his “spiritual companion,” orders a fruit salad, which arrives with dead gnats in it. Douglas picks the gnats out while Natalie looks away. “They’re God’s creatures, too,” Douglas says, and Natalie smiles weakly.
The town is covered with mud, and the houses stand on stilts to protect them from hurricanes and rising seas. On the beach three boys are having a knife fight, and we watch them impassively in the heat. Vultures sit in the trees, gazing down like spectators at a sporting event. Melanie asks our companions how long they’ve been in El Salvador. Douglas says they got “the calling” a few years back. Their mission, he tells us, is to save some small “chunk of the world.”
Douglas and Natalie tell us that they’ve just been legally married by a priest in El Salvador, but they’d been spiritually married long before. They work in agricultural reform and are taking their honeymoon. They take a honeymoon every year to “renew their vows to one another.” Natalie has heard that there are redheaded woodpeckers indigenous only to the Bay Islands of the Caribbean, and she’s anxious to see the woodpeckers. Douglas says he can already feel the energy of the islands infusing his veins.
“So how long have you guys been together?” Douglas asks. We say we’ve been on the road for two months and that this is the last leg of our journey. We can tell they think we are a couple, and we do nothing to change their minds.
Mango Jack wanders back. “Can’t find Charlie anywhere,” he tells us. “Might be on a binge, so I made a reservation for us for the night at a guest house up the road.”
We follow him, wading through mud and swatting sand fleas. We approach a battered house with unpainted clapboards and windows with torn screens. It has a wraparound porch on the top floor and on that porch sit four men in open khaki shirts. Drinking beer, they gaze down at us. They purse their lips and seem to nod as we reach the steps. One of them, with a dark mustache, spits on the porch.
The Creole woman who runs the place puts us in three rooms on the top floor. Melanie’s and mine is dark and dingy, with no screens on the windows and no lock on the door, which is a screen with a large rip in the side. The room is across from the bathroom and smells of the toilet. The sea smells of dead fish, and no breeze comes in. “This isn’t what I had in mind.” Melanie sighs. “That guy, Mango Jack, he looks to me like he’s had a sex-change operation” are Melanie’s last words to me as she heads for the shower, a towel across her arm.
She comes back in a few moments. There is no shower. We have to wash in a sink that’s on the porch near where the four men stay. I’ve known Melanie for seven years; there are two essential things for her sense of well-being. She must be clean and she must have someone to flirt with. Melanie asks me to go with her and I grab my towel.
The men sit on the porch near the sink. They have a large pile of beer bottles, shaped like a fortress. We slowly fill the sink with water and begin to wash our faces. Melanie runs a wet brush through her long blond hair. The men smile and ask in a rough Spanish where we are from. I say New York. One has a brother in New York, and he goes into his room and returns with a T-shirt of the Empire State Building which we admire.
We ask where they’re from, and they grin. From far away, they tell us. From another world. A distant planet. Melanie puts her hands on her hips a little coyly. She asks if they are watermelon people, and the man who spit before shakes his head and spits again.
Mango Jack still doesn’t have money, but he says as soon as we get to the beach resort he’ll cash a check with the owner and pay us back. He says he tried to get cash in town, but he’d been foolish enough to forget his checkbook. He knows a nice “restaurant” up the beach, so we follow him there. The restaurant is a thatch
ed hut on the beach that serves rice and beans and the catch of the day. Jack seems to know everybody in town. He orders for us, telling the waiter in his Spanish, spoken with a Texas accent, to bring us shrimp in their special garlic sauce and to fry some plantains.
He seems to know so much that Melanie decides to ask him what watermelon people are. “What are gente de la sandía?” she says. He smiles and pushes back slightly from the table. He explains that it is a joke on the Sandinistas. Sandía sounds like Sandino. He says some people in this part of the world think the Sandinistas are puffed up but empty inside. Douglas asks Mango Jack what he thinks, and he replies, “Me, I’ve got no opinion. Except they’re all rotten down here.”
“Can you imagine?” Melanie says to me with a laugh. “A bus driver thought we were Sandinistas.”
“I think he was just teasing you,” Mango Jack says, looking us over with a playful grin. “Believe me,” he goes on, “I know the ropes in this neck of the woods. There’s not a gringo who’s been through Central America like I have.” He tells us he prefers the coast of Honduras. It’s more peaceful. Costa Rica’s nice but dull. He spent time in Panajachel till things got bad there. He goes, he tells us, wherever trouble isn’t. “So,” he says, “if I’m here now, consider yourselves safe.”