by Robert Stone
People liked to get you thinking you were small-time. That way, they made out and you got fucked. It was that way now, he thought, they were in the cabin talking big-time scores and he was hauling groceries for them. They might pay him or they might not; he was a yo-yo to them. One of life’s little yo-yos.
But the fact was, they were old and soft. They were making it big, they had made their move, but they were soft. Callahan was a rummy. What were Negus and Callahan together compared to him? Surely, he thought, their day was over. It was someone else’s turn now, someone smarter and tougher. And it was all in your mind; if you let weak people buffalo you, they would keep you down. He had been letting them do it all his life and it was time to call them on it. He was young, he was strong, a soldier of fortune. He had seen them up close, they were nothing much.
Naftali with the room full of money, he had not seen. But Naftali was an old man, was losing his grip. Was he as bad as all that? He, Pablo, might see about that; you had to take risks, there was nothing for free. It was a new ball game on this ocean. He began to suspect that things were going his way.
Then Tino came up and yelled at him—the black son of a bitch actually cursed him out in front of the other niggers on the dock; he was put back to his loading. As he labored under the bales of netting and the boxes full of spare parts, a chain of recall ground against his memory and every insult and humiliation he had ever been forced to bear flashed before him, as bright and hurtful as though he were enduring each again.
When the last of the stores were aboard, he took another Benzedrine and shortly thereafter made up his mind. They would never pay him, he realized. They took him for a fool. It was time for another move. A man doesn’t live forever, he thought. You don’t make out playing it safe. He had tried being Joe Citizen and he had ended up sharing a trailer with an ignorant whore and a kid he couldn’t support. No more. If you let yourself be anybody’s man you ended up like everybody.
In the afternoon, Tino sent him to the port captain’s office to get the Cloud’s papers stamped and the fishing permit renewed. By the time he got back aboard, the conference was over. The cabin shutters were lifted and Naftali had departed unseen. The Callahans were in bathing suits.
Pablo asked if he could take a shower.
“Go ahead,” Callahan told him. “We’re finished here.”
Callahan looked pretty good, Pablo thought, harder and trimmer than he ought considering his age and the amount he seemed to drink. The sight of Mrs. Callahan in her bikini stirred Pablo’s resentment and strengthened his resolve. He noticed that Negus had started in drinking beer.
“We’re going to the beach,” Deedee said. “Up at the new hotel. Anybody else want to come?”
Pablo shook his head.
“Tino,” she said, “you come. I want to see if you’ll show your legs.”
“Oh no,” Tino said. “Not me.”
“I don’t think he can swim,” she said to her husband.
“I de bes’ swimmer,” Tino told her with a sad smile.
“You’ll find Naftali at the Hollandia if you need him,” Callahan told Negus. “He’ll probably sack out, I don’t think he’s feeling well.” He looked over his men with an air of good-natured proprietorship. “Think you boys can stay out of trouble until we get back?” As he asked the question, Pablo noticed that a gear locker beside the galley was swinging open. Its upper drawer was piled with tubes and radio parts—various things that might be worth keeping under lock and key in port. His automatic pistol was in the lower drawer still in its leather holster. On the locker handle hung an open padlock.
“Guess I’ll wash up now,” Pablo said. He went back to the lazaret to get his towel and clogs and some clean underwear. The space was close and airless without a seaborne wind to cool it; the boards enclosed each hour of the day’s heat.
When he had finished showering, the locker still hung open. He changed clothes on deck, leaving his boots beside the hatch with his wallet and passport under his socks, and put on his sunglasses and his Macklin Chain Saw hat. With the cap down over his eyes, he sat down in one of the cockpit chairs, turning it round on its swivel so that he could face the main cabin and see the open locker.
In the cabin, Negus reclined on a wooden bench, his feet up on the table and his back against the bulkhead. He had been up all night and had started drinking in the morning. There was a glass of neat rum on the table, a few inches from where his legs rested.
Tino was in the engine space with another St. Joostian, working on the Lister. Through the planking, Pablo could hear the rattle of their tools and their soft curses.
In his swivel chair, Pablo felt clean, cool and ready. He was waiting for Negus to fall asleep. As he willed Freddy Negus into slumber, he had a look at the publications stacked beside the Modar. He found two U.S. Coast Guard code books, laminated and stamped “Secret,” and the Coast Guard frequency chart, all current. Along with these were code books of the Tecanecan and Compostelan navies, so similar in typeface and binding to the U.S. books that it was apparent they had been printed by the same outfit. The Spanish in these was obscure to Pablo, but the military frequencies and codes were listed.
When he heard Negus begin to snore, he put the books down quietly and stood up and walked barefoot into the galley. Negus was asleep down in the main cabin, not ten feet away from him, his head resting on a lintel in the paneling, his mouth open. Pablo waited a moment with his eyes on Negus’ drawn face and listened to Tino and his mate work in the engine space. The quiet rhythm of their labor went on unbroken. Still watching Negus, he reached into the lower drawer of the open locker and drew out his holstered pistol. Pistol and holster in hand, he backed off silently to the cockpit and furiously set about getting himself in harness. Negus was still snoring when he finished, Tino still tapping away on the Lister with his assistant. With shirttails over his trouser tops, Pablo walked out on deck, picked up his boots and sat down on the edge of the after hatch. He put his passport and wallet in his pocket and casually put on his socks and cowboy boots. He made himself wait for a moment, then climbed over the rail and walked slowly along the cement dock toward town. There was still no one in sight aboard the Cloud. On his way to the market square, he could not resist touching the pistol under his arm.
When the slant of the sun lit the cockpit windows to a green-tinted blaze and the sunlight crept across the galley and the cabin below it, Negus woke up and held his head in his hands. After a while he stood up, shuddered and went out on deck shielding his eyes. He found the water hose beside the after hatch, turned the pressure on and held it over his head and drank from it. Tino, in a grease-spattered purple tank-top shirt, came up and took the hose from him.
“Where’s the kid?” Negus asked him as he drank.
Tino rolled the water in his mouth and spat it out on the deck.
“He not with you?”
They looked at each other and stalked around the boat in search of Pablo. Negus called his name. They checked the lazaret and looked through his gear.
“The fucker flew,” Negus said.
“Lef’ his gear.”
“I didn’t see his passport there.”
They went into the galley and leaned against the stove. Negus rubbed his eyes.
“Maybe he won’ come back,” Tino said.
“Took his piece out of here,” Negus said, slamming the gear locker shut. He did not bother to lock it.
“I fin’ him,” Tino said. “No place he can go I won’ fin’ him. Not on dis eye-land.”
“O.K.,” Freddy Negus said.
“Wan’ me to bring him back?”
“Find out what the hell he’s up to and let me know. We’ll figure it from there.”
“Ya,” Tino said.
Negus watched him walk briskly down the cement pier. As he went, two young islanders who had been sitting on a piling stood up and fell into step with him.
Holliwell finished his rum, thought about having another and decided on it.
He poured it quickly and guiltily; he was drinking as he had not done for years and still smoking. Propped in a wicker chair on the porch of his Paradise bungalow, his feet on the pastel rail, he looked out over the layered ocean.
Raw rum drained the disease of his mind. His thoughts were focused by an act of will on the pale-eyed woman at the mission beach. He remembered quite clearly the cool sure-handed motion with which she had guided him from the surf. The lightest of touches, a gesture almost, but she had put all her strength behind it. For a few seconds she had supported him. Curious. Indicative of what? Trust. Confidence. An insolent assurance, an unthinking self-superiority that was wonderful to see. A nun.
Thinking of her made him laugh. In his solitary laughter there was admiration, contempt and jealousy.
It was very beguiling, that female arrogance. There were women who could not refrain in their dealings with men from intimating that it was they who were more at home in the world. Who could not forbear, all unprovoked, to run up their mythic pennants. Instrument of Birth. Shroud Weaver. Bent never Broken. It became very primitive very quickly. Talking some commonplace like genocide or the weather they performed a hula, a series of mudras. Your eyes are hot and deluded, they signaled, ours are clear. We have suffered your rantings, your violence, your febrile illusions and endured. We can look on all things the same, we can imagine serenity. Grow up, they said.
The responses were various and complex but all involved equally primitive rage. Snatch! Stuff, cooze, undoing, unclean. Go bathe yourselves and be suitable for our fantasies. And you can’t hear the sound of our Bull Roarer!
He took more rum and filled his glass with warm Popi-Limón. The ice in the bar bucket had melted.
He liked her, it was that simple. He could say anything he liked or nothing at all and the spooks and hirelings could report anything that he said and it would make no difference. He felt sure enough of that.
Was she then at home in the world—the modern world, like the Jew in Nolan’s strange arrested hypothesis? She seemed to think she was. The question would not have occurred to her. He would put it to her; that was in his line, after all. Who do you think you are and what do you think you’re doing?
One way or another it must seem possible to her that the world could be ordered to suit her scruples and inhabited with satisfaction. In the name of God or Humanity or some Larger Notion—a new order of ages with a top and a bottom and sides. Right consequences following right actions. A marvelous view of the world, he thought. If it prevailed it would produce its own art forms, its own architecture, its own diet.
In Saigon, he had once smoked opium with a young officer of airborne troops who had described himself as a winner. “If you oppose me,” the young officer had explained, “I will win. You will lose.”
“Always?” Holliwell had asked.
Every time, the officer had explained. Because the compulsion to lose was universal and only a handful of people could overcome it.
Holliwell had ventured the opinion that it must be very strange to approach every contest with the certainty of success.
The officer was an unimposing man. He wore eyeglasses so thick that one wondered how he had come to be in the Army at all.
“What I think is strange,” he had said, “is approaching them knowing you’re going to lose.”
Saying it, he had fixed Holliwell with a look of unsound satisfaction. The eyes behind the lenses were knowing and tolerant and demented, but the point was well taken and he had scored a success ad hominem in that very moment.
Positive thinkers.
How could they? he wondered. How could they convince themselves that in this whirling tidal pool of existence, providence was sending them a message? Seeing visions, hearing voices, their eyes awash in their own juice—living on their own and borrowed hallucinations, banners, songs, kiddie art posters, phantom worship. The lines of bayonets, the marching rhythms, incense or torches, chanting, flights of doves—it was hypnosis. And they were the vampires. The world paid in blood for their articulate delusions, but it was all right because for a while they felt better. And presently they could put their consciences on automatic. They were beyond good and evil in five easy steps—it had to be O.K. because it was them after all. It was good old us, Those Who Are, Those Who See, the gang. Inevitably they grew bored with being contradicted. Inevitably they discovered the fundamental act of communication, they discovered murder. Murder was salutary, it provided reinforcement when they felt impotent or unworthy. It was something real, it made them folks and the reference to death reminded everyone that time was short and there could be no crapping around. For the less forceful, the acceptance of murder was enough. Unhappy professors, hyperthyroid clerics, and flower children could learn the Gauleiter’s smirk. The acceptance showed that they were realists which showed that they were real.
Rum was making his poisoned leg throb.
There was no reason to get angry. At his age one took things as they were. Despair was also a foolish indulgence, less lethal than vain faith but demeaning. One could not oppose the armies of delusion with petulance.
It was necessary to believe in oneself. Very, very difficult. One was a series of spasms, flashes. Without consistency, protean, infantile—but one would have to do. The loneliness was hard.
In the greening twilight, he thought of the great silence that had settled on the reef. The fear and the muted coral colors hung in his recollection like fragments of collective memory, a primordial dream. Closing his eyes, he could hear again the rhythm of his breathing and feel the panic drugs surging in his blood.
He had no business down there.
Three men carrying firewood came down the road, their bent figures outlined against the aqua and scarlet horizon. Approaching the Paradise grounds they turned off to follow the shore where their passage and their burdens would not worry the nerves of sensitive guests. It was a diorama of toil and poverty, and Holliwell, in his easy chair, felt suitably guilty. B. Traven—but they were all south of cliché, so it was simple reality. Familiar moral frissons qualified as insights. Carrying wood always felt different depending on your health, your state of mind and the time of day; sitting in a resort watching the peons was always the same for people whose education prepared them to do it properly; the final emotion was self-pity.
He had no business under the reef. Nor had he any business where he was, under that perfumed sky.
He reminded himself that he had his business like everyone else. It was as real as anyone else’s and so was he. His business was done in University Park, a perfectly real place though recently constructed. It was to husband and father, to teach, even to inspire, and to endure. These things were not trivial. A monstrous pride might despise them, but honor could not. Because who does one think one is?
At times one has only a slender notion. One is only out here in this, whatever it is.
Whirl. People disappeared and were said to have died, as in war. Or their contexts changed like stage flats leaving them inappropriately costumed, speaking the wrong lines. Some disappeared in place, their skulls hollowed out by corrosive spirits or devoured by parasites.
The world and the stations of men changed ruthlessly; the funhouse barrel turned without slowing. The fall of last week’s airplane sends amazed salesmen down the ledge. The coral polyps and sawfish receive a dry rain. In suburban shopping centers the first chordates walk the pavement, marvels of mimesis. Their exoskeletons exactly duplicate the dominant species. Behind their soft octopus eyes—rudimentary swim bladders and stiletto teeth.
Just out here. Each one alone. The rest is fantasy.
It had been to consider too curiously to consider so. As the stars came out, fear broke over his heart like a dawn of unwholesome colors. Rags in the wind, the taste of a tannery. It was a childhood image.
He drank more but the rum didn’t do it. That’s what you get, he thought.
In the last hours of afternoon, Pablo sat pacing himself in the E Wowo Bar, drinking l
ight rum and doing speed. Well after dark, he hit the street; he felt himself an instrument of stealth and strength. He followed the palm-topped wall of the Governor’s Palace, grim, almost angry.
Naftali’s Hollandia Hotel was two blocks beyond the palace on the far side of the street. Pablo sauntered across, strung tight and trying to loosen it down. Trying to ease it, cool it.
The Hollandia was no more than a two-story stone house with a little garden behind its pastel gate. Four tiled steps led up to its veranda. Pablo mounted them quickly and went inside. The foyer was deserted, the cubicle-sized desk unattended. In a curtained room behind it, someone was watching television, a comedy with music, in Spanish from the Caracas station. No one came out when Pablo went upstairs.
The second-floor corridor smelled of varnish and insecticide. At the far end of it a loosely fitted shutter creaked in the gentle wind and lightly battered the window casing. The sound covered Pablo’s soft steps as he went along the hall.
There was only one transom showing light and it was at the windowed end of the passage, above the room numbered eight. Across the hall was a water cooler with a plastic glass resting on it. As he passed the cooler, Pablo glanced back over his shoulder toward the stairs, then placed himself beside the door to room eight. He was disturbed to hear voices sounding from inside, speaking some foreign language he had never heard before. Dutch maybe. But after he had listened for a while, he determined that there was only one voice, a single speaker. The voice sounded vacant and slurred, like that of a drunk man talking to himself.
Well, well, thought Pablo. You put yourself away a little early, my friend.
He went to the cooler and silently filled the plastic glass. Then he crouched down outside the door and began to pour the contents of the glass underneath it. The door opened at the first spout.
Standing above Pablo was a hawk-faced man in a blue bathrobe and carpet slippers who was pointing what appeared to be an automatic pistol down Pablo’s throat. The hand holding the gun was unsteady but purposeful. Pablo set his plastic glass down and rested on one knee, a genuflection.