The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  I held the spade handle so tightly my hands ached with the strain. It was my impulse to start spading that dirt into the hole as fast as I could, working from the feet toward the head, fill it in and stamp it down and spread the shell over the raw place. The weeping noises were almost as small as the sounds of the tree toads.

  I stretched out and leaned into the hole and sliced the few layers of filament tape that held his arms snugged together. I picked the Coolite stick out of the water, retrieved the other one, and used their light as I walked back to the car. So intense had been the desire to kill him and so narrow the escape, I walked like a gawky marionette with an amateur working the strings. I could not remember which arm was supposed to swing out first when walking. It was like those supreme attacks of insomnia that are so bad you cannot remember where you put your hands and arms when you sleep. I couldn’t even find the lights on Miss Agnes. As I backed out, my coordination came back, and then I began to shiver with reaction. I turned around by the locked wire gate and hurried back along the canal bank, turned over his bridge and hit the highway toward home.

  When the shivering went away, I began to take some relish in thinking of the jolly host returning to his party. I’m back, girls! Here I am in my sodden jump suit. My hairpiece is full of mud. My wallet is empty and I’ve got these shoulder cramps and this sore jaw. And I’ve been crying a lot.

  I knew what he would probably do, after he found his way home and got cleaned up. He would shut himself in a room and phone Hisp’s home. And when Lawton Hisp answered, Tom Collier would wish him, after a long pause, a very happy New Year. And then Tom would hang up and sit there and think about it. He would think of all the things he would like to do to me. In the end he would realize why there was not one damned thing he could do.

  There were two hours left in the old year. I did not want to spend them with anybody. Not even Meyer.

  At Bahia Mar, I threaded my way past some parties I wanted to escape, and when I was aboard the Busted Flush, I was chary about turning on too many lights. There were some residual shivers from time to time. I quelled them with a chill flagon of Plymouth gin. It cheered me enough to warrant my digging out a personal steak and preparing it for broiling when I was ready. I leafed through the cassette stacks and put Mr. Julian Bream on, wanting something expert, mannered and complicated.

  I showered and changed to an old blue robe, rebuilt my drink and sat and picked tenderly at the new blister on the heel of my left hand. Meyer says that somewhere between aphorisms and sophistry there is, or should be, a form of expression called sophorisms. These express the mood of emotional sophomorism. If the wish is the deed, then I killed him. If I hadn’t killed him, somebody else would have. If Howie hasn’t killed her yet, he isn’t really trying.

  I got up and got the big atlas and opened it on my lap and pulled the lamp closer. I found the big double-page spread of the Pacific and slowly ran the edge of my thumbnail down the shades of blue which showed the great depths, the rare shallows.

  They were out there, a microspeck moving down the flat blue, as invisible to the naked eye as a microbe on an agar dish. Now they would be coming up on the Line Islands. A five- or six-hour difference. The sun had wheezed its hot, tired way westward, and the girl to be known henceforth as Lou Ellen was under its late-afternoon glare, lifting and falling to those big bland rollers, with six or seven hours before her New Year’s Eve.

  I studied the good names out there printed on the blue dye, Christmas Island Ridge, Tokelau Trough, Pacific Basin, and tried to think about those names, tried to wonder how they had measured the shocking depths out there. The mind is a child that keeps turning back, reaching for the WET PAINT sign. I kept seeing, superimposed upon the blue, Meyer’s image of her, with the slightly negative buoyance of the newly drowned, going down and down, through the lambent layers of undersea light, through the blues, greens, turquoise.

  Tom Collier was right. Bugs like Howie have this terrible, incurable optimism. If nobody sees you do it, nobody can prove you did it. And people have always believed you. Howie is a nice little boy. He’s so helpful and willing and happy. Fat people are jolly people.

  Next step, McGee. If, through some miracle of timing and coincidence, you should achieve radio contact, what would you say? Hello, there! By what law of the high seas can you send Captain Horn-blower aboard his frigate to wrest the legal wife from her legal husband? How do you get yourself air-dropped onto the deck, assuming the Trepid could be located at all?

  The next step is wait. Wait here, or fly out and wait there. But wait, no matter what. It would be ironic indeed if the one Howie flipped out of the tree would be McGee. I sweetened the drink, changed the music, put the steak in. I had a slight and somber buzz from the astringent gin. Whee. Whoopee. Happy New Something.

  Sixteen

  My jet flight from Honolulu arrived at Pago Pago International Airport at three in the afternoon on Saturday the fifth of January. The airport is at Tafuna, about seven miles from town. The airstrips are on crushed coral rock, extended out into the sea. It is the only way one is going to find any flat land on those islands.

  We were supposed to come in a little earlier, but it was the rainy season and a black, heavy tropical storm was moving across the big island, covering most of its fifty or so square miles. There are tricky winds in those storms, so we strolled around in a big circle on high, waiting for it to move away from the field.

  We came down into a scrubbed, shiny, dripping world, full of a smell of flowers, rain freshness and jet fuel. I had learned that there is an n in the name when it is pronounced, that the first vowel sound had about the same value as the o in mom, and the g was halfway between hard and soft. Hence Pahng-o Pahng-o. When you say things correctly, you become an instant world traveler. Because of the rains, it was off season, and about eight of us got off. I had only carry-on, an unusual event at Tafuna, apparently, when the visitor is not reserved back out.

  It is known as American Samoa. The U.S. dollar is accepted. The taxi driver accepted an impressive number of them to drive me into town to the Intercontinental Hotel. I had heard that the place was hot. It had seemed very hot to me when I came off the bird. But that had been the coolness after the rain. The driver said he would take me everywhere during my wonderful stay on the incredibly beautiful island of Tutuila. In his shiny elderly Plymouth with its square wheels and its ineffectual little fan buzzing directly into his sweat-shiny face, he would take me up and down all these perpendicular green mountains for a very nice price.

  As we came around a corner of the coast road, I saw Pago Pago Harbor. I had seen it from the air, but height flattens things out. I’d been told it was the most beautiful harbor in the world. It is the most beautiful harbor in the world. Once, uncounted centuries ago, it was the fiery, bubbling pit of a volcano. The crater ate at its own walls, consuming itself, growing larger, until finally a whole side of it fell into the sea, and the sea came smashing into the red, boiling crater. That must have been a day. That must have been something to see and hear. We don’t know how long it took the sea to win. Now, inside the steep green hills, it is tranquil in victory.

  He turned into the hotel drive. The first half-ounce of raindrops from the next cloud began to splat as I paid him. It was a very handsome hotel—low buildings, rounded thatched roofs, in the turtle-fale island style. But the thatch, of course, was covered ferroconcrete, and there were a hundred and one rooms, all air-conditioned, and a lower level with free-form pool, umbrellas over the tables, an outside bar and a view across the harbor of Mount Pioa, the Rainmaker. The Rainmaker was on the job. The day deepened from bright sunlight to deep dusk as the rain thundered down.

  It does not take very long to make your appraisal as you walk across a lobby. A gift shop on the left full of bright overpriced instant artifacts. Little scraps of this and that on the floor. Bleared windows. A man in a uniform yawning and scratching his behind. Some overflowing ashtrays.

  Three girls were in busy conve
rsation behind the counter, with giggles that made them bend double and stagger around. One of them kept glancing at me. I waited placidly until she came over to the desk. The girls were three shades of brown. She was the shade in the middle, chocolate fudgicle.

  “You want something, ah?” No inflection. No expression.

  “A room.”

  “You got a reservation?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t got a reservation.”

  “No, I haven’t got a reservation.”

  “And you want a room.”

  “I want a room. A nice room. Big. With a view. I want a nice big bed in the room. I want somebody to come on the run with ice and booze once I am in my nice room. I want it for maybe five days, six days, maybe more. I will eat my meals here. If you have no serious objection, give me something to sign. You have lots of empty rooms. Here is a five-hundred-dollar bill which I happened to come across the other day. Give me a receipt for it, please. It is an advance on the room and the service.”

  “You’re pretty funny. You knock me out,” she said, unsmiling.

  “I can see that.” I filled out the registration card, while she scowled at the key rack. I knew the first one she gave me would be the worst in the house. I expected to come back for another key, and did. I didn’t expect another bad room, but I got one, and finally on the third try, she decided she’d gotten even. The room was very nice. It was even reasonably clean.

  The whole hotel has a disease called The Only Game in Town. If you don’t like it, too bad. It has a secondary infection called No Ownership. In other words, management has a contract without a piece of the action.

  But hotels, no matter how slovenly, are staffed by humans, and with a little care and some useful observation, you can usually manage to find a bartender who will not slop half your drink on the back of your hand, a waiter who will tell you what the kitchen does best, a maid who will change both sheets. We are all at the mercy of the hostility of the service industry. And I had begun to sense that most of these gentle, brown, warm, charming, simple children of nature, as it said in the brochures, would in fact enjoy splitting, cleaning, and deep-frying every Yankee they could reach. They tell me that in free Samoa, this feeling is even more apparent.

  In the relative cool of the evening, I walked slowly from the hotel past the docks to the village green and found some stores beyond it, up a dirt road. I found something called the Pacific Trading Company. Samoans selling clothes from Japan, India and Taiwan to Samoans. I found two thin white shirts of Indian cotton which fitted well enough, two pairs of walking shorts in a cool weave, a pair of madras swim pants, a pair of crude leather sandals and a straw hat from Uruguay with a big brim and a high crown, nicely woven. Every price ended in 99¢. No tax. I put the hat on. A small boy wanted to carry my bundle. I had to give him a dime to let me carry it. He understood the logic behind our arrangement and said that every day I bought anything, he would be glad to make the same deal again.

  I got back to the hotel in the last of the beautiful golden light. I ordered a rum drink in the air-conditioned bar on the upper level and finally picked out a useful type. The bartender did not have to ask him what he wanted and seemed very quick to serve it. The customer was a tall, hunched man with dusty black hair, a nicely tailored bush jacket of bleached lightweight denim, an air of weary authority.

  After an initial hesitancy, he was glad to chat. His name was Revere. Wendell Revere, some sort of under-secretary of the Department of the Interior, who had been sent over to do a survey on education which was supposed to last a month and had lasted three. I found out that the Department of Interior administers American Samoa, and the Secretary appoints the Governor.

  I explained that I had flown down to meet friends who were coming down by small boat from Hawaii. This astonished him. He said it was one hell of a long trek. He said that, no offense meant, it seemed that of late more and more damned fools were roaming the oceans in small boats, apparently to get their names in the papers and their faces on television.

  I said that my friends, the Brindles, were actually delivering the boat to a man who had seen it in Hawaii and said he would buy it if they could deliver it. A man named Dawson. A recent arrival. He was in the land-development business.

  Revere scowled at me. “A recent arrival? How can that be? No one can come in here, not to work and compete. In our infinite paternalistic wisdom, we decided that it should be Samoa-for-Samoans. Of course, there have been some exceptions made, like the Japanese fishermen.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You saw the cannery across the harbor, didn’t you? That warehouse-looking thing on the waterfront with those damned rust-bucket fishing vessels rusting and rotting away at the docks in front of it. Tuna fish. Management decided that Samoans were too lazy and undependable to use as a work force, so they pulled the strings to permit the importation of fishermen from Japan, a great horde of squat, dim little subhuman robots who are managing to kill all the porpoise in the Pacific along with their damned tuna fish.”

  “Mr. Revere,” the barman said in a warning tone.

  “I know, Henry. I talk too much. Talking too much is what gets me assignments like this one. I was a marine on Guadalcanal a long time ago, many wars ago, Mr. McGee, and I am afraid I have not yet learned to love and treasure my little yellow neighbors. Two more please, Henry. I’ll try to behave, after I tell Mr. McGee about one of the sights. Tomorrow, sir, take that cable car and keep a careful eye on the harbor in front of the canneries. You will see clouds of nauseous guck flowing directly into the harbor. Here they are permitted eighty times the pollution permissible stateside. The harbor is the sewer of the tuna business here. But if you can get inside them, which is unlikely, then you can really test the strength of your gag reflex as you—”

  “Mr. Revere!”

  “You’re right, Henry. I must behave. I should not become exercised at one of the facts of life, that industry resists controls which cost money, and a setup like this, an unincorporated territory with a toothless constitution, makes for very low operating costs. And that is the obligation to the shareholders, right? Management’s prime responsibility. How did this start? Oh, a man named …”

  “Dawson. In land development.”

  “He would be Samoan, sir,” Henry said. “One of the ASDC scholarships. They go to the University of Hawaii usually.”

  Revere saw my look of puzzlement. “ASDC,” he said, “means American Samoan Development Corporation. All Samoan. They own this hotel and they have some big tourist plans. You can come here and stay, provided you can prove a continuing income, post bond, and so on. I think the ASDC wants to get some of the red tape cut so they can open up some beach land for well-to-do retired people. There are some here now, of course.”

  “How would I find this Mr. Dawson?” I asked.

  “Please, Henry?” Revere asked. Henry nodded and went off backstage somewhere.

  Revere had talked himself out. After Henry came back and told me that Luther Dawson would be along in about ten minutes, Revere excused himself and left. Henry polished a glass and said shyly, “Everything is not as bad as he says.”

  “I know.”

  “He is a good man. He thinks it should be better here. It should be. I guess it should be better everywhere than it is.”

  “That is a very wise observation.”

  “And sometimes it is a little better than it is other times.”

  I looked around the area bar. “This seems to be a very quiet Saturday night, Henry.”

  “Oh yes, sir. Very very restful. Many people go away this time of year.”

  “Where is the action?”

  “It is very nice to ride the tramway across the harbor, sir. It goes from Solo Hill every seven minutes all the way up to the top of Mount Alava, which is sixteen hundred and ten feet high.”

  “Thank you, Henry.”

  “On top of Mount Alava, sir, you will find the educational television station KVZK,
which is famed for broadcasting into every schoolroom in American Samoa. You can walk through and see all the programs which are going out to the schoolchildren.”

  “You are very kind, Henry.”

  “Also, many people buy laufala mats to take home. They are the very best in the world because they are dried in the sun in a secret way which retains the natural oils. Also …”

  “You are telling me that if I get restless, I should go out and buy a mat.”

  “Or perhaps some tortoise-shell jewelry. Very nice here.”

  Luther Dawson arrived before Henry could further inflame me with his inventory of mad delights. He was a sturdy, handsome and agreeable young man. The Samoans are attractive people. I offered a drink and he said that he would appreciate a Coca-Cola, please. He and Henry exchanged some brief phrases in an incomprehensible island lilt, and I took Luther over to a table. Luther wore one of those shirts which, about five thousand years ago, looked very jazzy on Harry Truman in Key West. On Luther it looked apt, even conservative.

  He was baffled, in a humble way, that anyone would want to seek him out. And there was some concealed suspicion there too. The four years at the University of Hawaii had given him speech patterns which were strangely at odds with the sternness and impassivity of his expression.

  “Oh, sure. Of course. Howie and Pidge. Right! That is some kind of boat there, believe it.”

  “I know the Trepid. I lived on her for a while when Pidge’s father was alive.”

  “It has absolutely everything. You could hack it anywhere in the world on that.”

  “You’re really making one hell of a buy. At a hundred and thirty thousand, you’re stealing that boat, Mr. Dawson.”

  I looked, but there was nothing to read. Dark eyes looked out of a beautifully carved head. “It seemed fair, Mr. McGee.”

  “I flew here from Honolulu to ask you what you’ll take for your option to buy the Trepid. I represent a very interested party.”