Thompson, Hunter S

by The Rum Diary

  Suddenly I was next to Chenault. I shrugged helplessly and kept up the stomp. She laughed and bumped me with her hips. Then she danced back to her partner, leaving me with my pig.

  Finally I shook my head and quit, making gestures to indicate I was too tired to go on. I went back to the bar for a fresh drink. Yeamon was nowhere in sight and I presumed he'd been sucked into the dance. I made my way through the bodies and out to the terrace, hoping for a place to sit down. Yeamon was sitting on the railing, talking to a teenage girl. He looked up with a smile. “This is Ginny,” he said. “She's going to teach me the dance.”

  I nodded and said hello. Behind us the music was growing wilder, and at times it was almost drowned out by the screaming of the crowd. I tried to ignore it, looking out over the town, seeing the peace below us and wanting to be down there.

  But the music from the house was getting crazier. There was a new urgency about it, and the shouts of the mob took on a different tone. Yeamon and Ginny went in to see what was happening. The crowd was moving back to make room for something, and I walked over to see what it was.

  They had made a big circle, and in the middle of it. Chenault and the small, spade-bearded man were doing the dance. Chenault had dropped her skirt and was dancing in her panties and her white sleeveless blouse. Her partner had taken off his shirt exposing his glistening black chest. He wore nothing but a pair of tight, red toreador pants. Both of them were barefoot.

  I looked at Yeamon. His face was tense as he stood on tiptoe to watch. Suddenly he called her name. “Chenault!” But the crowd was making so much noise that I could barely hear him three feet away. She seemed oblivious to everything but the music and the freak who led her around the floor. Yeamon called again, but nobody heard.

  Now, as if in some kind of trance, Chenault began to unbutton her blouse. She popped the buttons slowly, like a practiced stripper, then flung the blouse aside and pranced there in nothing but her bra and panties. I thought the crowd would go crazy. They howled and pounded on furniture, shoving and climbing on each other to get a better view. The whole house shook and I thought the floor might cave in. Somewhere across the room I heard glass breaking.

  I looked again at Yeamon. He was waving his hands in the air now, trying to get Chenault's attention. But he looked like just another witness, carried away with the spectacle.

  Now they were close together and I saw the brute reach around Chenault and unhook the strap of her bra. He undid it quickly, expertly, and she seemed unaware that now she wore nothing but her thin silk panties. The bra slid down her arms and fell to the floor. Her breasts bounced violently with the jerk and thrust of the dance. Full, pink-nippled halls of flesh, suddenly cut loose from the cotton modesty of a New York bra.

  I watched, fascinated and terrified, and then I heard Yeamon beside me as he lunged toward the dance floor. There was a commotion and then I saw the big bartender move up behind him and grab his arms. Several others pushed him back, treating him like a harmless drunk as they made room for the dance to go on.

  Yeamon was screaming hysterically, struggling to keep his balance. “Chenault!” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing?” He sounded desperate, but I felt paralyzed.

  They were coming together again, weaving slowly toward the middle of the circle. The noise was an overpowering roar from two hundred wild throats. Chenault still wore that dazed, ecstatic expression as the man reached out and eased her panties over her hips and down to her knees. She let them drop silently on the floor, then stepped away, breaking into the dance again, moving against him, freezing there for a moment -- even the music paused -- then dancing away, opening her eyes and flinging her hair from side to side.

  Suddenly Yeamon broke loose. He leaped into the circle and they were on him immediately, but this time he was harder to pin. I saw him smack the bartender in the face, using his arms and elbows to keep them off, screaming with such a fury that the sound of it sent chills up my spine, and finally going down under a wave of bodies.

  The melee stopped the dance. For an instant I saw Chenault standing alone; she looked surprised and bewildered, with that little muff of brown hair standing out against the white skin, and her blonde hair falling around her shoulders. She looked small and naked and helpless, and then I saw the man grab her arm and start pulling her toward the door.

  I staggered through the crowd, cursing, shoving, trying to get to the hall before they disappeared. Behind me I could hear Yeamon, still yelling, but I knew they had him now and my only thought was to find Chenault. Several people whacked me before I got to the door, but I paid no attention. Once I thought I heard her scream, but it could have been anyone.

  When I finally got outside I saw a crowd at the bottom of the stairs. I hurried down and found Yeamon lying there on the ground bleeding from the mouth and groaning. Apparently they had dragged him out a back door. The bartender was leaning over him and wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

  I forgot about Chenault and shoved through the ring of people, mumbling apologies as I made my way to where Yeamon was stretched out. When I got there the bartender looked up and said, “Is this your friend?”

  I nodded, bending down to see if he was hurt.

  “He's okay,” somebody said. “We tried to be easy with him, but he kept swinging.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Yeamon was sitting up now, holding his head in his hands. “Chenault,” he mumbled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Okay,” I said. “Take it easy.”

  “That filthy sonofabitch,” he said loudly.

  The bartender tapped me on the arm. “You better get him out of here,” he said. “He's not hurt now, but he will be if he stays around.”

  “Can we get a cab?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I'll get you a car.” He stepped back and yelled across the crowd. Somebody answered and he pointed at me.

  “Chenault!” Yeamon shouted, trying to get up off the ground.

  I shoved him back down, knowing that the moment he got up we'd have another fight. I looked up at the bartender. “Where's the girl?” I said. “What happened to her?”

  He smiled faintly. “She enjoyed herself?”

  I realized then that we were going to be sent off without Chenault. “Where is she?” I said too loudly, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  A stranger stepped up to me and snarled, “Man, you better get out.”

  I shuffled nervously in the dirt, looking back at the bartender, who seemed to be in charge. He smiled maliciously, pointing behind me. I turned and saw a car coming slowly through the crowd. “Here's your cab,” he said. “I'll get your friend.” He stepped over to Yeamon and jerked him to his feet. “Big man go to town,” he said with a grin. “Leave little girl here.”

  Yeamon stiffened and began to shout “You bastards!” He swung savagely at the bartender, who dodged easily and laughed while four men shoved Yeamon into the car. They shoved me in after him, and I leaned out the window to yell at the bartender: “I'll be back with the police -- that girl better be all right.” Suddenly I felt an awful jolt on the side of my face, and I drew back just in time to let the second punch go flying past my nose. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I rolled up the window and fell back on the seat I heard them all laughing as we started down the hill.

  The Rum Diary

  Sixteen

  All I could think about was getting the police, but the driver of the car refused to take us to the station or even tell us where it was. “Better forget it,” he said quietly. “Everybody mind his own business.” He let us out in the middle of town and said it would be all right if we gave him two dollars to pay for the gas. I grumbled bitterly and gave it to him, but Yeamon refused to get out of the car. He kept insisting that we were going back up the hill to get Chenault.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging at his arm. “We'll get the cops. They'll take us up.” Finally I got him out and the car pulled away.
/>   We found the police station, but there was nobody in it. The lights were on and we went in to wait. Yeamon passed out on a bench and I was so groggy that I could barely keep my eyes open. After about an hour I decided we'd be better off looking for a cop in the streets. I woke Yeamon up and we started down toward the bars. The carnival was dissipating now and the streets were full of drunks, mostly tourists and Puerto Ricans. Little knots of people wandered from bar to bar, passing bodies in doorways, and a few just sprawled on the sidewalk. It was almost four, but the bars were still full of people. It looked like the town had been bombed. There was no sign of a cop anywhere, and by this time we were both ready to fall down from exhaustion. Finally we gave up and took a cab out to Lindbergh Beach, where we dragged ourselves over the fence and fell down in the sand to sleep.

  Sometime during the night it started raining and when I woke up I was soaking wet I thought it was dawn, but when I looked at my watch it said nine o'clock. My head felt swollen to twice its normal size and there was a big, painful bump in front of my right ear. I took off my clothes and went into the bay for a swim, but it made me feel worse instead of better. The morning was cold and dreary, and a light rain peppered the water. I sat on the raft for a while and thought about the night before. The more I remembered, the more depressed I became, and I dreaded the idea of going back into town to look for Chenault. At that point I didn't really care if she lived or died. All I wanted was to walk across the road and get on a plane for San Juan, leaving Yeamon asleep on the beach and hoping I'd never see either one of them again.

  After a while I swam in and woke him up. He looked sick. We went to the airport for breakfast, then got a bus to town. After getting our clothes off the boat at Yacht Haven, we went to the police station, where the gendarme on duty was playing solitaire with a deck of cards that showed naked women in various lustful poses.

  He grinned and looked up when Yeamon finished talking. “Man,” he said slowly, “what can I do about your girl if she likes somebody else?”

  “Likes, hell!” Yeamon shouted. “She was dragged off!”

  “Okay,” he said, still smiling. “I live here all my life an' I know how girls get dragged off at carnivals.” He laughed softly. “You tell me she had all her clothes off, dancin' for all those people -- and then you say she was raped?”

  The cop made several more remarks of the same kind, and finally Yeamon's eyes got wild and he began to shout in a voice that was angry and desperate. “Listen!” he yelled. “If you don't do something about this I'm going up to that house with a goddamn butcher knife and kill everybody I see!”

  The cop looked startled. “Take it easy, mon. You heading for real trouble if you keep runnin' your mouth.”

  “Look,” I said. “All we want you to do is go up there with us and find the girl -- is that too much to ask?”

  He looked down at his cards for a moment, as if by consulting them he could divine the meaning of our appearance, and what to do about it. Finally he shook his head sadly and looked up. “Ah, you troublesome people,” he said quietly. “You jus' can't learn.”

  Before we could say anything, he stood up and put on his pith helmet. “Okay,” he said. “Let's go take a look.”

  We followed him into the street. His attitude made me nervous, almost embarrassed for the trouble we were causing.

  By the time we pulled up in front of the house I wanted to jump out and run away. Whatever we found was going to be bad. Maybe they had taken her somewhere else, to some other party, and staked her out on a bed, a white, pink-nippled nightcap to wind up the carnival. I shuddered as we went up the stairs, then I glanced over at Yeamon. He looked like a man on his way to the guillotine. The cop rang the bell and it was answered by a meek-looking black woman who stuttered nervously and swore she had seen nothing of a white girl and knew nothing about a party the night before.

  “Balls!” Yeamon snapped. “You had a hell of a party here last night and I paid six dollars to get into it.”

  The woman denied having knowledge of any party. She said there were people sleeping inside, but no white girl.

  The cop asked if he could come in and take a look. She shrugged and let him in, but when Yeamon tried to follow she got excited and shut the door in his face.

  In a few minutes the cop reappeared. “No sign of a white girl,” he said, looking Yeamon straight in the eye.

  I didn't want to believe him because I didn't want to face the other possibilities. This should have been simple -- find her, wake her up, and take her away. But now nothing was simple. She might be anywhere, behind any door on the island. I looked at Yeamon, expecting him to run amok and start swinging at any moment. But he was slumped against the porch railing and he looked ready to cry. “Oh jesus lord,” he muttered, staring down at his shoes. It was such a genuine despair that the cop put his hand on Yeamon's shoulder.

  “Sorry, mon,” he said quietly. “Come on now. Let's go.”

  We drove back down the hill to the station and the cop promised to look for a girl of Chenault's description. “I'll tell the others,” he said. “She'll turn up.” He smiled kindly at Yeamon. “You got no business lettin' a woman run you 'round in circles like this anyhow.”

  “Yeah,” Yeamon replied. Then he put Chenault's raincoat and her small suitcase on the desk. “Give this to her when she turns up,” he said. “I don't feel like lugging it around.”

  The cop nodded and put her clothes on a shelf in the hack of the room. Then he wrote down my address in San Juan so he could send a message if they found her. We said goodbye and walked down the street to the Grand Hotel for breakfast.

  We ordered rum and ice with hamburgers and ate them in silence while we read the newspapers. Finally, Yeamon looked up and said casually, “She's just a whore. I don't know why this should bother me.”

  “Don't worry about it,” I said. “She went crazy -- totally crazy.”

  “You're right,” he said. “She's a whore. I knew it the first time I saw her.” He leaned back in the booth. “I met her at a party on Staten Island about a week before I came down here; the minute I saw her I said to myself, now this girl is a rattling fine whore -- not the money type, but the type that just wants to hump.” He nodded. “She came back to my place with me and I fell on her like a bull. She stayed there all week, didn't even go to work. At the time I was staying with a friend of my brother's and I made him sleep on a cot in the kitchen -- pretty much ran him out of his own place.” He smiled sadly. “Then when I left for San Juan she wanted to come with me -- it was all I could do to make her wait a few weeks.”

  I had several Chenaults on my mind right then: a chic little girl in New York with a secret lust and a Lord & Taylor wardrobe; a tan little girl with long blonde hair, walking on the beach in a white bikini; a yelling, drunken hellion in a loud St. Thomas bar; and then the girl I had seen last night -- dancing in those flimsy panties and bouncing those pink-nippled breasts, weaving her hips while a crazy thug pulled the panties down her legs. . . and then that last glimpse, standing in the middle of the room, alone for just an instant, that little muff of brown hair standing out like a beacon against the white flesh of her belly and thighs. . . that sacred little muff, carefully nurtured by parents who knew all too well its power and its value, sent off to Smith College for cultivation and slight exposure to the wind and weather of life, tended for twenty years by a legion of parents and teachers and friends and advisers, then farmed out to New York on a wing and a prayer.

  We finished breakfast and took a bus to the airport. The lobby was jammed with pitiful drunkards: men dragging each other into bathrooms, women sick on the floor in front of benches, tourists babbling with fear. I took one look at the scene and knew that we might wait all day and all night before we got a seat on a plane. Without tickets, we might be here for three days. It looked hopeless. Then we had a wild piece of luck. We had gone to the coffee shop and were looking around for a seat when I saw the pilot who had flown me over to Vieques on Thursday.
He seemed to recognize me as I approached. “Ho,” I said. “Remember me? Kemp -- New York Times .”

  He smiled and held out his hand. “That's right,” he said. “You were with Zimburger.”

  “Pure coincidence,” I said with a grin. “Say, can I hire you to take us back to San Juan? We're desperate.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I'm going back at four. I have two passengers and two empty seats.” He nodded. “You're lucky you found me this early -- I wouldn't have had them long.”

  “Christ,” I said. “You've saved our lives. Charge me anything you want -- I'll bill it to Zimburger.”

  He grinned broadly. “Well, glad to hear that. I can't think of anybody I'd rather ram it to.” He finished his coffee and put the cup on the counter. “Got to run now,” he said. “Be on the runway at four -- it's the same red Apache.”

  “Don't worry,” I said. “We'll be there.”

  The mob was piling up now. A plane left for San Juan every half hour, but all the seats were reserved. The people waiting for vacancies were beginning to get drunk again, hauling out bottles of scotch and passing them around.

  It was impossible to think. I wanted peace, the privacy of my own apartment, a glass instead of a paper cup, four walls between me and this stinking mob of drunks that pressed on us from all sides.

  At four we went out to the runway and found the Apache warming up. The flight back took about thirty minutes. With us was a young couple from Atlanta; they had come over from San Juan earlier in the day and now they couldn't get back soon enough. They were absolutely appalled by the wild and uppity nigras.