Men Die

by H. L. Humes

  “I had no business asking the question.”

  “Forget it. I had no business answering it.”

  As long as he lived Sulgrave would never forget his first sight of the Garden of Nothing Doing. The name was a corruption of “North Dune” or “Norther Dane,” which were variant names for the long, off-lying shoal and its terminating sand island. According to Dolfus, who had it from Mr. Sung, the bar got its name from a Danish privateer who, after a daring raid, used it to escape a pursuing French man-o'-war by luring the deeper-draft vessel aground on it. The first white inhabitants of Manacle Rock were the marooned survivors of the French wreck, which explained some of the French names for local landmarks. But whatever the real origin of the northernmost point of Manacle Rock, in the quick appreciation of the new arrivals, “Nawtha Doan”— which is how the local fishermen pronounced it—became, inevitably, “Nuthin' Doin'.”

  The Garden of Nothing Doing was a group of tombstonelike rocks on a flat acre that was cut like a giant foothold into the steep side of Manacle Rock halfway up from the boiling sea. Time, weather and earthquakes had shaken loose the great shards of rock from above, and had plunged their slivered ends into the hard ledge soil where they had remained, upright and mysterious, stony sentries looking out to sea. Some were just slivers, thinner than a man and not much taller; others progressively larger and squatter. But the largest, a huge brute of a rock that stood behind the others, towered to the height of a two-story house. This monster had apparently once been the brow of the overhang from which its smaller brethren had earlier fallen. Centuries of vegetation had built up the earth around them so that now they looked as though they grew from it, like weird cacti or burnt tree trunks, and though some of them leaned drunk-enly askew the largest among them were perfectly vertical. Any that had toppled over were long since buried beneath the ageless manufacture of goatweed and guinea grass that carpeted the eerie garden.

  Wild goats, possibly descended from the live larder of the outwitted French man-o'-war, still roamed the island; it was these who had discovered the easiest route to the place. All the bulldozer had done was to widen and level their track; thus a very passable road followed a gradual rise around the sides of the island until it came to an impassable halt a few yards before and slightly above the “garden.” Here the road was widened into a turnaround, and it was here that Dolfus and Sulgrave found the unattended compressor already chugging away as they arrived.

  Dolfus led the way, following the air hose, to the top of a rocky rise where the hose disappeared over the edge. It had still been light when they left the base, but the rapid deepening of sundown sea so drained the sky of its remaining light that it was dusk as Dolfus started down the fixed iron ladder that curved down out of sight over the rock.

  The ladder was ingeniously made out of scrap ends of concrete-reinforcing rods, welded together and fastened into holes drilled in the rock. Sulgrave was so intent on examining the ladder as it went up through his hands that he wasn't aware of the activity around him until he felt sod beneath his feet and turned around. The jackhammer suddenly ceased. It was the first time he'd ever seen the place, but the first impression was enough to make itself indelible.

  Since the place was shadowed from the west, it seemed already night down here and a scattered dozen Coleman lanterns hissed out a brilliant greenish-white light that cast a-dozen crisscrossed sets of angled shadows through the jutting grove of rocks. Because of the rockdust that hung illumined in the still air, the shadows seemed like a labyrinth of black solids, ghostly intersecting walls through which men seemed to emerge as they came to greet Dolfus.

  As they walked past the lanterns, their own shadows turned like black beacons in the luminous dust, bounding over the dreamlike ground and up the walls in a wild ballet to the hissing silence. The unreal shapes were matched by the denizens of the place—Sulgrave saw that they were wearing snout-like dust masks and goggles and had ordinary navy hats inside out over their ears. Most of the men were stripped to the waist; they were no longer black but gray with powdered rock. It seemed for one dizzy instant that his sense impressions were dangerously awry; everything seemed amplified to abnormal intensity: the shadows, the glowing air, the extraordinarily loud hissing of the gasoline lanterns …

  Then he realized. It wasn't just the lanterns—it was leakage from the air hose! There was nothing oversensitive about his hearing, the hissing was loud. The split second of unreality passed, and everything returned to normal. He even distinguished the soft chugging of the compressor from the road. Shadows became shadows; rocks, rocks; and as the first man raised his mask and goggles, his grin seemed as human as ever.

  Suddenly, from above his head to the left, the jackhammer resumed its deafening metallic stutter, and Sulgrave looked up to see two men suspended from a bosun's chair working on the face of the largest rock, a lantern hanging seemingly in midair over their head. For a moment it wasn't clear what they were working on, but stepping back for a total view Sulgrave saw that the entire rock had been sculpted into a huge head on narrow shoulders. Everything was finished but the mouth, and that was what they were working on now. The mouth had been roughed in with white paint and was half open and turned down at the corners like a classical mask of tragedy. As the jackhammer cut away the white-painted area of stone, a spew of dust and chips dribbled steadily off the half-formed lower lip like gray spittle onto the ground below.

  Sulgrave felt someone nudging his shoulder and turned to find Dolfus offering him goggles and respirator. Dolfus put his own mask on and showed Sulgrave by gestures how to adjust the dust bag over his nose and mouth. The jack-hammer stopped as the men shifted position, one man holding the hammer, the other playing the block and tackle from which the ponderous tool was suspended. The yammering resumed, working now in short bursts as the yawning maw tapered toward the lower left corner of the mouth. When finished, this oral cavern would be nearly large enough for a man to stand in.

  Dolfus was involved in a discussion of detail with the men working on the great head, when Sulgrave decided to make use of the lull to see what the other men were doing around the place. Each man seemed to be working, sometimes with one or more helpers, all with hand tools, on his own private statue. The variety of fantastic shapes was bewildering: a fish standing on its tail; a rooster head crowing skyward; a fire hydrant that might have come off a New York street; an indefinable shape that looked like a squat totem pole (he learned later that this was the rock which beginners were allowed to practice on); an eight-foot-tall replica of someone's forefinger; and by all odds the favorite idea, the female nude—here the results were not so successful, suffering as they did from a certain bald literalism in details of their anatomy.

  “Would you like to try your hand?” It was Dolfus, come up behind him, his respirator hung around his neck, his goggles up on his forehead; a night breeze was rising from the sea and partially clearing the air of dust. Sulgrave did the same with his mask and goggles.

  “How long did it take to do all this?” Sulgrave asked.

  “The boys have been at it awhile. They used to come up just to help. Now it's their baby. Did you see my fish?”

  “The one standing on its tail? Yes. I thought it was very good.”

  “This rock is fairly soft compared to what we have down below. Makes a good recreation. Some of the boys come up here by themselves when they're off during the day. A couple of them are really good at it. Well probably finish roughing out Laughing Boy by tonight.”

  “Is that what you call him? Laughing Boy?”

  “We flipped a coin to decide whether to turn the mouth up or down. He looks pretty good, don't you think?”

  Sulgrave looked back at the enormous head looming up out of the falling dust and light; the men dangling at its lip looked as though they were being devoured. The airhammer was quiet at that moment and one of the men was leaning into the cavernous mouth, holding the lantern as the other changed the tool bit. Overhead the sky was a rich night blu
e and the first stars were out. In the distance the compressor chugged rhythmically.

  “What do you mean you'll be finished ‘roughing out’? It looks nearly finished to me.”

  “There's always something more we can do. The object is not to finish him, but to give the boys something to do. Next week we'll go to work with hand tools, detailing the eyes and such. After that we can put in wrinkles. And if we're still here after that we can tattoo him, I suppose. The main thing is to have something ahead of us all the time. Finishing is secondary.”

  “How come the Old Man lets you use the tools?”

  Dolfus shrugged. “What does it cost the taxpayer? Nothing. We use old bits, an old hammer, and as for that one-lunger compressor—the boys salvaged it from the junk heap. Some of these boys don't want to spend all their time in the bushes with those inter-island grunts. You want them to sit on their hands till they crack up?”

  “What ever gave you the idea anyway? I mean to make statues.”

  “Did you ever see Easter Island? I saw it once when we were on a hydrographic cruise. When I saw these rocks I thought of those statues on Easter Island.” Dolfus smiled and looked toward the big statue as the jackhammer started again. “Laughing Boy will give them something to think about.”

  “Give who something to think about? ”

  Dolfus gestured toward the sea. “Anybody. Who cares who? But by God they'll wonder when they see him. You haven't seen him in the daytime yet.”

  At that moment the hammer stopped and Sulgrave heard three short beeps of an automobile horn from up on the turnaround. Dolfus looked at his watch. “Orval's here with the beer. He's early.”

  The two men were already halfway up the ladder, and the men on the statue pulled up the jackhammer and began lowering themselves to the ground. A few men continued to chip away, but most of them dropped their tools and gathered expectantly around the foot of the ladder. The compressor wheezed to a stop, and the hissing of the hose ceased as someone opened the blow-off valve on the reservoir. The two men came down the ladder, each with a case of beer on his shoulder. Orval BlueEyes followed them down.

  Orval came directly out to where Dolfus and Sulgrave were standing. He looked uncertainly at Sulgrave before speaking.

  Dolfus said, “It's all right, Orval. What's the matter? The Old Man?”

  Orval nodded. “He was playin' his gramophone when I left.” Orval was a young man with a cook's rating, too young and too concerned to make a secret of his anxiety. Dolfus took the news soberly, thought a moment.

  “How long ago?” Dolfus asked.

  “Jes' a little while ago. That's why I come straight up here.”

  “Did you get Randy?”

  “Yessuh. He keepin' his ear out.”

  Dolfus seemed to relax slightly. “Well, there shouldn't be anything to worry …” Abruptly he halted in mid-sentence, looked narrowly at Orval as though he'd just grasped what Orval was leaving unsaid. “You don't mean that she's up there again …”

  It all came out in a flood. “I told that girl if I caught her hangin' ‘round I'd come down on her with both feet the nex’ time. But I had to go down to the commissary after dinner, and I thought sure he was goin' to sleep. He ain't been to sleep since yesterday morning.”

  “How do you know she's with him?”

  “I don't know for sure, but Randy says one of the boys saw her down by your house a while ago, after you and Lieutenant Sulgrave left.” He dropped his eyes and mumbled, “He playing his gramophone in his bedroom.”

  Dolfus took off his hat and distractedly passed his hand over his bald head, put the hat back on and squared it viciously. “Orval, I don't know whether to throttle you, the old woman, or …”

  “I was only gone for a while, suh. But that child is a very devil, you know that. And I was sure he was goin' to sleep, what with all the liquor that man drunk.”

  “Well, there's going to be hell to pay.”

  “Oh, I know how he gets. You don't have to tell me none. I still have a lump on my head from the last …” Orval stopped and glanced anxiously at Sulgrave.

  Dolfus finished for him. “… from the last time we put him to bed. I know.” He turned resignedly and faced Sulgrave. “You'd find out for yourself sooner or later. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it's a ball breaker.”

  “You coming back with me, suhs?”

  “What for?” Dolfus asked dully. “The trouble won't come till later. No, you go back and do what Randy tells you. He can manage him better than I can. If you can get that little iool out of there, get her out. I'll be up in plenty of time. How much has he drunk already?”

  “He finished a new bottle from this afternoon on. I couldn't get him to eat much, either.”

  “All right. You go on back. And remember if a word of this gets out I'll turn your ass inside out, you hear me, sailor?”

  “I won't say nothing, suh.”

  Dolfus clapped his shoulder, smiled. “And don't let him rile you none. Just pretend you're white, like I do.”

  After Orval left, Dolfus fell into a mood of listless resignation. He and Sulgrave sat drinking beer in a pair of weathered canvas deck chairs at a point overlooking the sea, far out of earshot of the men. A late moon was rising, and they sat silently watching it for a long while. Then Dolfus began to talk, tiredly, without rancor, like a man reconstructing an accident.

  “In the beginning, I'm sure the old woman put her up to it—the only thing she cares about is money and her troubles. She seems to be avenging herself on her children for all the sins of her own miserable life. Children mature faster down in these islands—at twelve there's nothing they don't know— and they have a totally different attitude toward things. Sex is a game children play from the time they're old enough to amuse themselves.”

  “Well, if it's not a violation of local custom, what does it matter? I'll admit that fourteen is …”

  “It matters that he wasn't raised in the same way—it's not a game for him. It's a matter of life and death. As for her being fourteen—that's what she says she is. She's probably younger.”

  “She's a very striking creature all the same.”

  “That coloring comes from her father. From what I can make out, she's a quadroon. If she had half a chance to grow up decently, she'd be a beautiful woman. And she's intelligent. But although she's learned to mimic adult forms, mentally she's still a child. Here, look at this …”

  Dolfus took out his wallet and extracted a folded piece of paper which he spread on his knees. He struck his cigarette lighter and it flared briefly in the light breeze, just long enough for Sulgrave to see a picture of a large doll: GOLDILOCKS DOLL; CRIES REAL TEARS, SAYS “MAMA.” DolfuS closed the lighter and refolded the paper.

  “She tore it out of an old Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Asked me to get it for her.”

  “Are you going to get it?”

  “I ordered it a month ago. It'll be here on the next ship probably.”

  Sulgrave shook his head. “It's a contrast, Fll admit. Playing with dolls, making love …”

  “If it only was that simple. If it was just a simple matter of making love, but he …” Dolfus turned his hands up empty, looking for a way out of the dark knowledge that suddenly enveloped both of them. “He just tortures himself with her.”

  “You mean he can't make it?”

  “Yes, yes. Forget I told you about it. I feel bad enough just knowing, without telling you. But you're not the only one who knows. I had to threaten the old woman with a beating to keep her from telling everyone in creation. She thought it was a huge joke. I'd like to go up there and wring that damned child's neck. I wish I didn't have to keep calling her a child.”