Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  So here they are, rolling along in Land Rovers on the way to the railhead that will carry them deeper into the territory, deepest, deep where the fruit of the wise grows best. If I had my sight, if I still had my lipstick, and a piece of paper, I could draw you a map. Here, the road from the airport in the capital which they left at once, and into the suburbs and then east through the scraggly jungle, and then the only road through deeper growth, toward the western end of the railhead built by the company nearly a hundred years before when it slashed the country in two in order to roll fruit both east toward the port and west toward the capital. If I could still draw I would make arrows for directions, north, south, west, east, but I can’t do it no more.

  She wanted to remember the route, Sadie did. She marked it all down in a book. “Take good notes,” the Jews for Justice boy—Alan, Mitch, James, whoever—had said to her the night before she flew down with her father, my Manny.

  “Take notes, notes upon notes, note everything, and if you can, take pictures.”

  “I don’t know how,” she said.

  “Get a Brownie, you don’t have to be a genius.”

  “I can ask him for pictures, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Oh right. If you can, do it that way.”

  “Of course I can. He’ll give me pictures. He’ll give me anything I want.”

  “Is that it?” the boy had asked. “Is that the problem?”

  “What problem?”

  “That he always gave you everything? And so you never had to prove . . .”

  “Fuck you, asshole,” she said, getting up to leave.

  New Brunswick, an old dilapidated apartment, something that had gone from Hungarian mill workers to undergraduates, time immemorial. Roaches, stink of stale food. Our apartment on Second Street all over again—you’d think she wouldn’t want to spend a minute there. But to a girl who has everything—except dirt—maybe it was somehow appealing.

  “Take it easy,” the boy said. This Rutgers boy. This Rutgers Jewish boy for Justice—Norman, Alan, Mitch, James—he believes what he believes, though ten years from now he’ll be lucky to remember what he believed back then—and he’s like the taxi or the horse towing the milk truck, a part of the scheme, and he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. What could he know? You could tell him a life and a lifetime was depending on him shutting up, and he would go on talking. And it’s not just today’s children—thinking about all this, watching Sadie selling out her father, and the family, so that she could feel a little better for a few minutes in a run-down apartment in New Brunswick, you begin to see that it’s not just today, it’s yesterday, it’s a long line of children going back to the first children, the little stinkers of Adam and Eve. They disobeyed—one of them, anyway, yes? And what kind of an example did they get from their parents? They, too, disobeyed their Father—and did God Himself have a Father against whom He rebelled? And His Father, did He have a Father He fought with? I don’t know where it all began—but I’m afraid I have a good idea how it ends.

  “So what do you think so far, darling?” Manny asked her, meaning all of the land through which they had passed, these endless trees, the fruit, fruit, fruit, the barracks where the workers lived, the rail lines, the hospital—they took a tour—the mess halls, which were not such a mess, which were in fact very clean and the food very tasty, they were eating when he asked, “What do you think?” freshly fried fish from the nearby sea, fruit cocktail of mango and papaya and pineapple and, of course, the famous banana.

  “I can’t believe that you own all this,” Sarah said, touching a spoonful of pulpy fruit to her lips.

  “Own?” Manny said. “Nobody in this world owns, darling. But I have a good lease, a very good lease.” He touched a hand to the back of his neck where the sweat was dripping from the roots of his silver hair. “Are you hot? We can go to the guesthouse and turn on the air-conditioning.”

  “Do the workers have that too, Father?”

  He shook his silver head.

  “They are used to this, visitors are not.”

  “They could get used to it, couldn’t they?”

  He squinted at her, salt sweat biting at his eyes.

  “I’ll look into it. It seems to be quite an exorbitant idea, but we’ll look into it. How would you put it? Air-conditioning for all the people?”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “But the food is delicious, don’t you think? Fresh fish? Fruit?”

  “Do they get fresh milk here, Father?”

  “What makes you ask about that? I’m not sure. I’ll inquire.”

  “Inquire,” she said. “Fresh milk.”

  “Could a cow survive here without air-conditioning?” he said, hoping to make her laugh.

  But she pretended not to hear.

  “Have you looked at the infant mortality figures for the company hospital?” she asked.

  Right then and there he should have taken her by the shoulders and said, where did you get that question? What made you think of that question? Are you my daughter or an investigating committee? Are you my daughter or some avenging angel? Where, where? If I had been there I would have said, ask her that, Manny. Ask her where she thought of it. Ask her, who prompts you? Some critic? Some reporter? Who? Who? And I would have taken my Manny by the shoulders and given him a shake—do you think you’re dreaming all this? Are you standing in front of your congregation lost in some daydream of a jungle company? Are you making all this up? Don’t you feel the heat, you’re sweating like a tapir, the jungle pig, the one with the dark brown body, the broad white stripes, there goes one, off into the brush, two small barefoot boys chasing after . . . Manny, my Manny, I would have said, if I had been there, if I had known, I would have said, take off your white shirt, your dark trousers—he had already removed his dark coat, a big concession to the skin of heat that clung to everyone, everything in this jungle world—and strip off your underdrawers, and chase into the bush after those boys, that beast, and never return and you will be safe, alive and well and happy, too, probably, if a bit dirty and maybe even on some nights hungry too, unless you learn to eat the meat and fruit of these parts exclusively and like it—because he was lying about liking the food, he had become a snob about food, I’ll admit that much negative about him, he had become a fiend for French cooking and merely tolerated all of the good things I put on the table before him—strip off, Manny, and run and hide and you’ll be safe from all that otherwise will follow!

  But, oh, he turned and looked again at her, his daughter, his—he was convinced—dutiful daughter, whose antagonism toward him—he was convinced—had burned away like the light morning fog that had dogged their heels on the train ride through the jungle, where palm fronds brushed against the windows of the plush car in which they rode sipping limonada from colorful pottery. He was convinced that she was learning about him, his new life, and that she could only but admire him for his vision and his values. Who did she know who had changed his life in this way? who had leaped from the mundane round of suburban Jersey to a deep-green jungle empire—yes, well, that was how he was thinking of it—who did she know like him? And could she be anything but worshipful? Couldn’t she see what he had wrought? Only her opinion he cared about now. Mine, he knew he had in the palm of his hand. Maby’s? She had none—she was lost in the world of her wayward mind. And yours? What did you know except that you wanted him for comfort in those hours when you were not painting? In those dark nightmare times when you awoke screaming of the awful past in the old country and needed someone to help fend off the ghosts. Whether he ruled a congregation or an empire, you didn’t care. But as for Sarah-Sadie, he wanted her attention and her mind and her devotion and her admiration—and he was wooing her in a way he had never felt he needed to before.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that I have never put aside the values that I carried with me to my first meeting with the congregation.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said with a grunt, picking up a glass of iced tea
and stirring endless spoonfuls of sugar into its swirling dark whorl of liquid and mint.

  “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. And furthermore,” he said, “I am showing all of these businesspeople the way.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Don’t doubt your own father. That is correct, I have the knack, and I do things well, but beyond that I show them how to impart certain values into their dealings. I show them how to make their operations humane and decent.”

  “And you bring potassium to breakfast tables all over America.”

  “That, too.”

  “You ship the fruit of the wise on the Great Seabird Fleet.”

  “That I do. From your grandfather’s barges to the Great Seabird Fleet—that is quite a distance I have come.”

  She stopped stirring her drink and looked him in the eye.

  “And what next?”

  She really wants to know, he was thinking to himself. She cares, this offspring of mine, my only issue, and she cares about my plans.

  “I was thinking perhaps politics.”

  “Politics?” She raised the glass to her lips and sipped the cool sweet mint-tinted liquid. “Ahhh . . .”

  “Politics. But before that, or possibly instead, maybe diplomacy.”

  “Diplomacy?”

  “An ambassadorship somewhere. After this, after I make clear how well I am going to handle this arrangement here . . . who knows?”

  “Father,” she said. In her heart she felt a bit stunned by this confession of his. She hadn’t been aware . . . she had never imagined . . . that he could think so big, so far, so high up, far ahead, so . . . grandly. Here she was just a college girl, trying to spy on him, taking notes and more notes. And at this moment she almost faltered in her loyalty to her plan, because she was sure as he said this last thing that there was a good possibility that he was not evil, but merely crazy. And yet, she thought, he had come this far, and you don’t come this far if you are crazy, but only if you have trampled on the hearts of others, kicked and flailed them and left them lying bloody and crushed in the dust of your passage—first your family and then the world.

  “Father.”

  Or perhaps she had not spoken until now but only imagined that she had.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What, my darling?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You had something on your mind. Tell me.”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  “So, nothing. But now I’ll tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  He got up from the table and motioned for her to follow. Several young men in white shirts and khaki trousers trailed after as they left the building for the thick world of heat and light as green as that beneath the ocean. A Land Rover stood waiting, the brother-in-law in the back seat, the driver alert and attentive.

  “Hello, Sarah,” her uncle said to her, running a hand across his hairless sweat-beaded skull. “Did you have a nice lunch?”

  “Hello, Uncle Mord. Yes, we did. Very good.” And, oddly, she embraced him, as if she had only just now suddenly recognized their kinship.

  “Good, I’m glad,” Mord said as they rolled off toward the gate.

  “You know where we’re going,” Mord said to my Manny in a quieter voice.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, it’s going to be one big happy family.” He handed a sealed oversize envelope to my Manny and sat back to watch the green flow past. In a few minutes they reached the dockside, the place where workers loaded the fruit from the jungle into crates and loaded the crates onto the ships. A large white yacht lay at anchor in the deep harbor. From its mast flew, among other flags, one that showed the insignia of the curled and sleeping anaconda, a snake that grew more and more sharply defined as they roared closer and closer to the ship in a motor launch.

  “The national emblem,” Mord said to his companions.

  “Should we trust somebody who flies a snake? Can we?” my Manny inquired, half in jest.

  “It’s out in the open at least,” Mord said, wiping sea spray from his broad bald forehead.

  My Manny had one hand on, not so surprising, the shard in his pocket, with the other holding on to the rail.

  “You’re all right?” he asked Sarah.

  “Just fine,” she said, licking salty lips with a dry tongue. She couldn’t keep her legs still—they quivered as though her kneecaps were made of rubber. It had to be the sea, she decided, but here in the harbor there was no pitch and roll, only the steady thrumming as the prow of the launch split the water in a direct lunge toward the yacht. A girl shouldn’t feel like wetting her pants over that, should she? Oi, she was nervous, and well she should have been. She knew only one thing that was about to happen—she didn’t know it would be more than one.

  Could I have stopped all this if I had been there? Could I have asked for a wave from the east to roll the ship on its side? Could I have called up from the sleeping depths where it lay for a long time, thousands of years, coiled and waiting, the green-scaled, red-eyed anaconda? Could I have forced it to wind itself around the yacht and crush the hull with its tangles? And if I could have done that, and I would have, would that have stopped the progress of this tragedy, my Manny’s story, my Manny’s end of life? There are some things the mamas cannot do—and one of them is stop a stone that’s been rolling downhill when it’s picked up the force of a subway train.

  “Bienvenidos . . . welcome,” a tall man with a crinkled brow and dark thin mustache says to father and daughter as they climb over the side of the yacht. Behind him on a chaise lounge a raven-haired girl with long thin legs lies stretched out sipping a drink through a straw. She blinks at the new arrivals. The sun behind her etches her into the deck.

  Mord makes some introductions. A boyish waiter appears with glasses on a tray.

  “Orange juice, please,” says my Manny while Sarah agrees to something fixed with rum. Minutes go by. Sarah’s wondering who they’re all waiting for to appear before she realizes that this is the meeting that everything has pointed toward, and it is already almost over, a flurry of polite exchanges on the hot deck in fierce sunlight.

  “Swim?” says the girl approaching her on coltish legs. The sun wings in and out of focus, like a photograph from positive to negative to positive. Sarah feels the light spinning out from her insides, singeing her thighs. Who says these things can’t happen the way they do? a shift of the ocean surface, the spinning sun like a pinwheel whirling, some strong chemical eating through thick cloth, seething, powdery smoke rising, acrid to the nostrils, thick as stone. Meeting the painter had showed her how to recognize such heart rumblings and squirts of gall, gush of sex-syrup into the main arteries, you know, you know, what you felt when my Manny first appeared before you, high on his dais, yes? a feeling in the veins, not an idea in the head—the news tingling at every joint and pore, saying, here it is, this is what you need. You might ask how a grandma knows this feeling, but don’t inquire. Think instead to when you’re old and nearly sightless, and how what you’ll have left will be nothing but the ghosts of encounters you make for yourself each day when young. You’ll wish that you’d done more when you have nothing but less. My darling, my daughter, granddaughter, she felt this power of the other standing before her, as though the general’s daughter—this is who she is, isn’t it? this is her father on the deck, isn’t it?—had drawn the marrow from her bones. She follows the girl below. In a forward cabin, she undresses. The other girl undresses.

  Collapse a year or more into a minute or ten—close the door to the state room—find the key to your sister’s strengths and desires, the fusing of alternate organs, heart to heart becoming twin appendages of a single chest, breast to breast, double image of a passion now one, and deeper and deeper it goes, so that kidney and bladder and womb and liver, labia and eyebrow, toe and lip, nose and knee and tip of pelvis, apertures and roundings, breath and secretion, c
elebrate the occasion of the quest.

  If I had been there would I have said what is this that you’re doing? where are you putting your hands? your lips? your tongue? Ahoy, above on decks it passes between hands, the soon-to-be famous envelope, and later she’ll learn of this, but now, smoking a doper, about to become the object in the arms of another, one sandal on, one sandal off, swimming in the perfumes of her own lust and the new friend’s, she knows no father, mother, grandma, or even the children she might yet conceive if ever a man could educe in her the swinging wild wind of yes-I-want-it, that this dark and coltish sister inspires.

  Let me tell you, these things don’t happen every day. Such a locking, a joining, a what-do-the-goyim-call-it? this girl and her Catholic family? communion? Slip off the other sandal and settle on the cushions upon the bed. She’s undoing the—that’s right—and now—see—put your—ahh, the way she . . .

  And they talk, say many things important to each of them, say things that will change everything for their fathers—but only in passing, two girls of a particular persuasion, like two redheads or two left-handed girls, swimming in a sea of burning weed, disposing of empires . . .

  “A million is what he’s giving him right now up on deck,” the coltish girl says. Her voice has the most delicate Latin shading, something that her studies at Wellesley rubbed at but never rubbed off.

  “A million?” Sadie sits up.

  “That’s the agreement. So my father won’t raise the tariff.”

  “I see,” Sadie says, and sinks down again into the sea of pillows.