by Robert Stone
“Meester Holawal?” the driver asked.
“Vietnam, no?” Oscar called softly from against the wall.
“Vietnam,” he said again, as Holliwell climbed into the cab.
When they pulled out, Holliwell pronounced the name of his hotel. He felt ashamed of it.
The driver repeated the hotel’s name with respect.
As the car sped away, Holliwell turned to look behind him. Oscar had disappeared. The lighted wall met the street at a hard empty angle and stretched to the edge of vision. Spotlights shone on the spears of broken glass atop it.
Three blocks from the piers in the port of Vizcaya was an American-style farmacia with a green cross over its doorway. Pablo visited it twice to inveigle some speed from the druggist. Twice he was turned away. He concluded that he must be handling it wrong.
At ten o’clock on the morning of his third visit, Pablo found himself aboil with rage and sweat, glaring into the druggist’s thick horn-rimmed spectacles in an attempt to engage the dead bug eyes behind them.
“What the fuck’s the matter?” Pablo demanded, holding up his Stateside prescription bottle. “I got a script for it back home.”
The pharmacist ignored the bottle and gave Pablo not so much as a shrug. Two young female assistants in green smocks watched them over the stacks of medicated shampoo.
“I’m overweight,” Pablo said grimly. He was not in the least overweight and in any case the druggist did not understand him. “I’m fucking depressed, dig? How about it?”
When the druggist extended a hand to urge Pablo toward the door, Pablo prepared to belt him. Only at the last minute did he realize that the man’s attention was focused on the pink bank note he clutched in his left hand.
The druggist was trying to escort Pablo discreetly outside, an urbane effort which Pablo’s nature resisted.
“Tiene que volver a la tarde,” the man said softly, trying to speak beneath the hearing of his assistants. “Más tarde, comprende? Ahorita no.”
By the time they reached the street, Pablo was able to understand that he was being dealt with.
“O.K.,” he said. Passers-by were observing his exchange with the pharmacist. Glancing at his reflection in the drugstore window, Pablo saw that if he did not appear particularly fat and low-spirited, he did look rather like a bad-news gringo who might shortly be in jail.
“Más tarde, right?” Pablo asked the druggist. The professional man turned hurriedly inside.
It was hard to be cool. For one thing, the birdcalls were driving him bananas; they kept sounding like someone making fun of him. Pablo reflected that he had been strung out in some shitty places but that none of them seemed quite so shitty as Vizcaya, where even the birds in the trees weirded you out. He wiped his brow and turned down the Calle Catorce de Mayo, toward the piers and Lana’s.
Lana’s establishment was called the Pensión Miramar, a little stone barracks of a building that gave two rows of barred windows to the street. It centered on a small interior courtyard with a dying jacaranda tree from which ten low wooden doors led to the girls’ apartments. A baby was crying in one of the rooms as Pablo came in; there was always a baby crying somewhere in Miramar. Three dark children, scroungy with gutter dirt, were stalking a cat among the crates and bottles under the tree.
Pablo went to the Coke cooler behind the office and pounded on it with his fist several times. Presently a youth of about fourteen came out, unlocked the cooler and gave him a beer for a fifty-centavo piece. There was no change—there was never any change.
Disgusted and worn, he sat down on a wooden bench near the tree and tried not to let the birdcalls get to him. When I straighten out, he thought, I’ll have a plan. The kids in the courtyard began to throw crates at the cat. Pablo drank his beer and watched them irritably. Everything was a trapeze act.
When one of the children kicked a bottle at the cat and smashed it, Lana came out and yelled at the lot of them. One of the kids was hers. She saw Pablo and sat down beside him on the bench.
“You get somethin’ to make you feel good?”
“I thought you was gonna get me something,” Pablo said. “I can’t deal with these people down here.”
“Thas all right,” Lana assured him. “We take care of you.”
“You ain’t doing much of a job,” Pablo told her.
Lana moved closer to Pablo on the bench and reached over to take a swallow of his beer.
“Don Jorge says you can bring the maricón here. If he’s got a lot of money we help you take care of him. But it got to be at night, Don Jorge says.”
“Who gets his money?”
“Some for everybody,” Lana said.
Pablo put the beer bottle down.
“What am I supposed to do—kill him? Is that what I’m supposed to do?”
Lana shrugged. She had lived for two years in Coney Island, she once told Pablo. Off Surf Avenue, by the projects.
“I don’t know nothing about it, man. I just tellin’ you what Don Jorge says.”
“Don Hor-hay says,” Pablo said bitterly. “I ain’t hustling queers for Don Jorge. And I sure as shit ain’t gonna kill nobody for Don Jorge.”
Don Jorge was the proprietor of the Miramar and of the bar beside it. A big man with gray wavy hair who always wore dark glasses—you saw him all up and down the waterfront streets bullshitting, doing some kind of bad business.
As far as Pablo could tell, they wanted him to bring the queer down there and kill him. Then they could turn him in.
Gotta get out of here, Pablo thought. Time to walk.
“How about you all give me my passport back?” he said to Lana. “I need it. I can’t identify myself without it.”
“Baby, I don’t have your passport. Maybe Don Jorge has it. Maybe you owe him money—something like that.”
“I don’t owe him nothing,” Pablo said. “If anything, you all owe me.”
Lana hastened to say that she knew nothing about it.
“But you can bring that man here tonight,” she reminded Pablo. “Then he can’t cause you no trouble.”
Pablo stood up. “I’m gonna go see him now,” he told Lana.
Trucking back up Catorce de Mayo toward the zócalo, Pablo noticed a young American couple in backpacks; he wondered immediately about how much money they might have on them. He himself was down to seventy dollars—not counting the local money. His clothes and his passport were in the custody of the Miramar, probably lost to him.
Shoeshine boys harried him across the square, right to the door of the tourist hotel, hissing and whistling like the sinister birds. Inside he dried out in the air conditioning, checked the curio stand and the magazine rack, watching the hotel flunkies for bad eyes or wrong signals. No one seemed to notice him.
Tony Bobbick, the rich maricón, was not to be seen. After waiting a few minutes, Pablo sauntered into the poolside restaurant and ordered coffee at the counter.
The question of Tony Bobbick was a difficult one. On the one hand Pablo was a family man; it was degrading to hustle fags and he was a bit old for it. On the other, Tony Bobbick seemed to be Vizcaya’s best-known and most popular mark, famous from one end of town to the other for his wealth and the variety of his credit cards. It was a period when credit cards were a popular novelty in Mesoamerica; the locals had acquired the necessary machines and were dispensing rental cards and plane tickets with Yankee dispatch and Old World courtesy on signatures which they could barely read, let alone verify. Relatively untouristed, they still relied on the rigor of North American commercial procedures and the Code Napoléon. Pablo—strung out on his trapeze, obsessed with birds and incipient gonorrhea—was lamed by indecision and scruple.
But I got to walk, he thought. Get clear of this Vizcaya.
As he sat hunched over his excellent Compostelan coffee, brooding on Tony Bobbick, the man himself appeared. In blue duck trousers, Adidas, and a Triumph tee shirt, Tony settled himself at a table against the window that looked out on the garden
and the pool. He drank greedily of the purified water which the waitress brought and laid out the previous day’s Miami Herald before him.
Tabor sighed, hesitated for a moment to assume what he hoped might be a pleasant or even desirable aspect and approached Tony’s table.
“Hey, guy,” Pablo said cheerily. Although he had dealt with many homosexuals in the course of his career, he remained under the impression that they all addressed each other in this fashion. “How you feeling this morning?”
Bobbick looked up wearily and did not invite him to sit down.
“Good morning,” he said.
Tabor stood over Tony Bobbick’s table with a dreadful smile. Not a grain of good humor was left to him and the very sight of the man’s boyish face, drawn and sagging with toxins, caused him to clench his fists. He found it extremely difficult to begin a conversation.
“Say,” Pablo said after several despairing moments, “you want to go somewhere and have some fun?”
Bobbick looked up from his paper and shuddered visibly.
“It’s been a long time since anybody asked that one,” he said. “I think I must have been eleven.”
Pablo took a deep breath and sat down in the chair opposite Tony’s.
“That’s what you asked me last night, man. Do I look like I’m fucking eleven?”
Tony Bobbick rubbed his eyebrows and took another swallow of water.
“If you say I said it maybe I did. But see, Pablo—I’ve got a friend with me now from the States. We’re leaving for the ruins after breakfast.”
“Aw shit,” Pablo said earnestly.
“You sound really disappointed,” Tony said.
“I am,” Pablo told him. “You better believe it.”
As they spoke, a young American walked into the coffee shop and headed for Tony’s table. The American was tall and muscular with thinning blond hair and a broken nose like a fighter’s. He nodded stiffly to Bobbick and stood awkwardly beside the table since there were only two chairs. Tony stood up and pulled a chair from another table for him to sit in.
“Bill,” Tony said, as the third man sat down, “this is Pablo.”
“Pablo?” the man asked Tony in an amused voice. He did not look at Tabor.
“Hi, there,” Pablo said. He watched the two of them across the plastic tabletop. He felt angry and sick but also faintly relieved. The hustle was off; instead of one maricón, there were two maricones.
“Been having a good time?” Bill asked his friend.
“In a manner of speaking,” Tony said. “We had a little drinking party last night. And now we have Pablo who proposes to go somewhere and have some fun.”
“Really?” Bill said. He turned slowly and looked at Pablo for the first time. “What kind of fun would that be?”
Tabor’s desperate bonhommie was disintegrating like an expended spantial. He blew his last pop on a happy smile.
“Any kind you like.”
Bill did a stylized double take.
“This man is a complete asshole, am I right? A hustler?”
“Well,” Tony said shyly, “I guess so.”
“I guess so,” Bill said. “Take a walk,” he told Pablo.
Pablo swallowed. He stared at Bill for a moment and suddenly the confidence, the assurance in the man’s face struck him as comical. A dry laugh rose in his throat. Bill smiled patiently back at him.
“You know there’s about twenty locals that want a piece of your friend Tony? I already got me a deal to ice him and take his money. That’s how he’s been coming on since he got here.”
Bill gave Tony a quick sidelong glance. Tony sulked in his newspaper.
“Like I don’t want to kill nobody,” Pablo told them. “I’m broke and I need some money.”
“Not from him, good buddy,” Bill said. “And certainly not from me. Take a walk.”
Pablo leaned forward over the table and spoke in a low voice, meeting Bill’s quiet stare.
“This ain’t Coconut Grove, faggot. Where you think you gonna get protection from down here?”
“I know all about down here,” Bill said.
“He’s in the travel business,” Tony informed Pablo earnestly.
“I know all about it,” Bill went on. “I’m down here a lot and I do a lot of business here. So I’ll give you the choice of hitting the street pronto or going straight from that chair to the penal colony. You won’t like it there.”
“You queer son of a bitch,” Pablo said.
Bill raised his eyebrows casually and turned toward the cashier’s counter with his hand in the air. Tony touched his arm gently.
“Wait a minute,” Tony said, “wait a minute, let it go.” Tabor saw that Tony had a bill in his hand. “The poor guy’s all fucked up. I’m going to give him something.” He slid a U.S. twenty along the tabletop. Tabor looked down at it.
“Don’t you give him a thing,” Bill said. “A punk like this?”
“Here,” Tony said kindly, “here you go, Pablo. Take it.”
“No, you don’t, baby,” Bill said. He snatched up the bill from under Pablo’s eyes and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
“Look,” Tony said. “Maybe I did come on to him. The poor guy’s a mess. Let him have it.”
Bill sighed, took the twenty out of his pocket and threw it on the floor.
“This is a hell of a way to start out,” he said to Tony crossly. He watched Pablo start toward the money on the tile floor. “Pick it up and get out, Pablo. We intend to eat here.”
Pablo crouched over the bill.
This is it, he thought. I’m gonna have to kill these fuckers.
Bill crossed his bare legs while Pablo reached for the bill. The tip of his expensive hiking boot swung casually in front of Tabor’s face.
He pocketed the bill and looked up; Bill was looking down at him with an expression of mild disgust.
“You really wouldn’t like the penal colony, Tex.”
“He wouldn’t,” Tony said. “The wind comes howling off the lake and God knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg.”
Tabor stood up and staggered toward the door without turning around.
O.K., he told himself when he was outside, with the shoeshine boys clustered around him. Twenty bills is twenty bills. If I’d have killed them I’d be sorry.
Cursing his way through the beggars and shoeshine boys, he decided on a drink. There was a place by the docks called the Paris where he sometimes stopped by in the vague hope of finding a billet. Wearily he took his hard-earned twenty down there and settled himself at the bar. The place was empty except for a few Compostelan Navy sailors crowded about the new pinball machine. Freddy Fender was on the jukebox, singing “El Rancho Grande.” Pablo was on conversational terms with the bartender, a big Belizean, who liked Hawaiian shirts and platform shoes and wore a crucifix around his neck.
“How you doin’, mon?” the Belizean asked him.
“I think I’m on a trapeze,” Pablo said.
“De darin’ young mon,” the Belizean said. Pablo ordered a margarita, the one he got came in a little ready-mix bottle, appropriated from the national airline.
“How you mate today? Mister Tony?”
“He ain’t my mate. He was buyin’ drinks is all. I was drinkin’ em.
“Nothin’ wrong wi’ dat. But now he fren’ come.”
“Yeah,” Tabor said. “His friend come. A couple of cocksuckers.”
“Dat put it harshly,” the Belizean said. “But he’s a bounder, dat Tony. Pretty boys all de time. Mon got no shame.”
“He’s a fool,” Tabor said.
“Dass true, dass true. But he fren’ look out for him now.”
“How the hell do you know all this?” Tabor demanded. “Everybody knows everything in this fucking place.”
“Well,” the Belizean said, “das de entertainment, you know. Got to take it like you fin’ it, bruddah.”
“Shit,” Pablo said.
“Hey, bruddah—you a sailin’ mon?”
“I do a little of everything,” Pablo said cautiously.
“I know where you get a billet, if you de right fella. Mon wid a boat lookin’ for crew.”
“Yeah?”
Cecil brought him another bottled margarita.
“But he nobody’s mark, dis chap. He in business.”
“Shit,” Tabor said, “send him my way.”
“Lemme ask you somethin’ di-rectly, bruddah. You a black or a white mon?”
Tabor nearly fell off his stool. He had been asked the same question once before and it had gone badly for everyone.
“What do I look like?”
Cecil kept his easygoing smile.
“I ain’t no Yankee, mon. People all de same to me. But dis boat chap, he might see somethin’ I wouldn’t notice.”
“I’m a white man,” Pablo said evenly. “Anybody can see that.”
“Den you be O.K. wid dis man. Because I suspect he don’t want colored for his crew.”
He’s just sensible, Tabor thought.
“Lemme put dis to you, bruddah. You lay ten bills on me I make arrangements wi’ dis chap. I tell him you my old times fren’. Squared away sailin’ mon.”
“How come he goes to you looking for crew?”
“Because I know everybody, mon. I help him out in de past.”
“Ten bills,” Tabor said, “that’s a hell of a lot. What if he turns me down?”
“Take it or leave it, mon.”
Pablo leafed through the bills in his wallet, covering the top with his palm, glancing over his shoulder suspiciously. Cecil watched him with amusement. Pablo found a U.S. ten and handed it over.
“This better not be a rip-off,” he told Cecil.
“Put you mind at rest, my fren’,” Cecil said with a contemptuous smile. “Come roun’ after three o’clock and you be talkin’ to de commander.”
He went out and sat in the little square across from the navy base where there was a statue of Morazón. Cecil’s words stayed in his mind; they savored to him of treachery and double cross.
I already talked to enough commanders, he thought. He suspected Cecil of betraying him to American body snatchers.
They were turning Pablo around again. Within the same hour, he had been humiliated by cocksuckers and practically called a nigger to his face. He doubled up on the bench and ran his hands through his hair. The crazy birds in the trees along the Malecón hooted down at him.