by Robert Stone
He turned his head to one side and between the legs of the men who guarded him saw the boat people working on the crates with their crowbars, checking their contents. A woman in a bandana knelt with them, holding a checklist, reading off contents.
“Galil. Seventy-five. Fifty-round clips. Three boxes.” She read on, hesitating, as though the words must be unfamiliar to her. “TRW. Seventy-five. Five point fifty-six. Thirty-round clips. Three boxes.”
They had the crates out on deck and were working on the second hold.
“You’re shot,” the man who was the leader said to Pablo.
“Did you figure I didn’t know that?”
“I have to know what happened.”
Pablo laughed. “I wish I knew,” he said.
“Tell it as best you can,” the man said. “We are at war here. Were you attacked?”
“Naw,” Pablo said. “It was just paranoia.”
The man who was questioning him laughed. None of the others did.
“In other words, you fought. And the others?”
“You figure it out.”
“They were killed by you. That’s how I figure it out. And their bodies thrown to the sharks. How’s that, Yanqui?” the man asked him. “How’s that for figuring it out?”
“I don’t care what you do to me,” Pablo said. “None of this was my idea.”
From the forward hatchway came indiscreet cries of joy. It seemed, to Pablo’s understanding, that they had discovered rockets there. The leader, the man who had been questioning Pablo, got to his feet and quieted his troops. They formed passing lines and commenced to offload the cases onto their whalers.
When he returned to question Pablo, the leader directed all but one of his men to a loading station.
“Can you walk?” the head man asked Pablo.
As they were helping him to his feet they discovered the diver’s knife against his calf. Shaking their heads, they helped him into the cockpit. The boat leader and Pablo sat down in Negus and Callahan’s cockpit chairs. The leader’s number two stood in the hatchway, his weapon leveled at Pablo’s chest.
“If our business is betrayed,” the head man said, “if anyone ratted here … you die first.”
“If I didn’t think the meet was O.K., I wouldn’t be here,” Pablo said. Although he had no idea where it was that he might be, regardless of what he thought.
“The fight was about the money, no? Or about the guns? Maybe someone tried to stop our operation?”
Pablo was at a loss to make them understand.
“It was part personal. It was part about the money.” He looked at the leader and at the man with the rifle. “Things happen that way.”
“Yes, truly,” the leader said. “Often in this world. And you are the winner. You must be very strong.”
“What’s that get me, chief? You’re the boss now.”
The leader wore a yellow oilskin and underneath it he carried a hand briefcase of cheap plastic. So full was it that the cloth beside its zipper bulged. Holding it under his arm, the leader went toward the Cloud’s CB receiver.
“I don’t think I like to be your boss,” he said.
He lifted the receiver off its cradle for a moment, then set it back down again.
“This isn’t good,” he told Pablo. “We thought we dealt with responsible people, you understand. This is trouble for us and we don’t need it.”
Pablo looked at the folder and said nothing. One by one he had heard the small boats taking off; the last boat was alongside now and the people in it were calling for their chief in low hisses. The armed man in the hatchway looked from Pablo to the last boat.
“Hay que matarlo,” he said to his chief. “We have to kill him.”
“Y la barca?” the chief asked, watching Pablo. “What about the boat.”
“Sink it.”
The leader looked as though he were about to smile. From the envelope in his hand he took a roll of bills and threw it on the chart table. Pablo saw that there were hundreds. On the top at least.
“It’s enough for one man. Two men in this country make less in a year. Now get yourself and your boat away from us.”
Pablo’s outrage made him speak without thinking.
“You see what he’s doin’?” he demanded of the second-in-command. “He’s grabbing money that’s mine. He aims to keep it himself.”
“Hay que matarlo,” the man with the rifle said.
“No,” the leader said. “Now,” he told Pablo, “go while you can.”
The two men went out of the cockpit and began climbing into the last waiting whaler. Pablo hobbled out after them. The whaleboat was floating free now. Pablo leaned down over the rail.
“I can’t make it,” he called to them. “I’m hurting and I don’t know my way out there.”
Someone started up the outboard.
“Look,” Pablo shouted, “that bread’s no good to me now. I got no place to go. Let me join up with you guys. I’m trained, you understand. I swear to Christ, compadre, I’m your man!”
“Some other time, eh,” the leader in the boat said. “You’re tough.” And the outboard disappeared into the darkness, its throttle held low.
“You stole my money, you fuck!” Pablo screamed. Probably no one heard him. There was no point trying to shoot at them; they were out of sight and shots would bring the law.
Thinking of the law, Pablo looked around quickly. The pier lights had gone out and the only light in view was the aircraft beacon on the mountaintop over the little harbor. Seaward, the breeze was as gentle as ever but a quarter moon was rising now, to show the lines of the Cloud against it. He looked at the ocean, lightly moonlit, and a wave of pain and exhaustion passed over him. The sight of it filled him with dread. He was afraid. He could not go back to it now.
Then the thought came to him that the town they had passed during the afternoon could not be far. A seaport—with great freighters loading up at cement piers. City lights had been going on there. He might find a billet on one of the ships. There might be buses, even an airport.
He wiped his brow, counted the money on the chart table and discovered that he had something less than fifteen hundred dollars in American bills. Fifteen hundred and a diamond—he would take his chances at sea no longer, in a boat full of blood, among reefs. He decided to set out for shore.
There was a tiny, self-righting aluminum dinghy set in davits just behind the lazaret housing. Pablo went aft for a look and found the davits and the lowering windlass wire rusted and corroded; the only piece of bad maintenance he had encountered aboard the Cloud. It took him the better part of an hour, using engine wrenches and even chain cutters, to get the dinghy over. When it was afloat, he secured it by a painter to the rail. For an outboard and an oil can, he forced himself to go down into the lazaret again but he found none there, nor anywhere else aboard. The lazaret had oarlocks and a set of mismated aluminum oars. Pablo put them in the dinghy.
In the cockpit chair now, he went over Callahan’s Loran charts, trying to find out where he was. The aerial beacon was on all the charts and the town to the north was called Puerto Alvarado. Even on the detailed charts it didn’t look like much but it would have to do. Around his boards it was Reef City. If he put the Cloud on almost any southerly bearing it would hit marbles; a course between two-ten and three hundred would send it into the outer reef and if it went fast and far enough it would strike hard enough to break up and sink in deep water. He saw now that he had made it to the marker buoy by sheer miracle. He would never, he was sure, have made it out.
He spent a few minutes going through the vessel, opening every hatch and porthole and watertight door that he could find. He supposed there might be sea cocks down in shaft alley—but he had no time to find them now. In the saloon he found a life jacket and a laundry bag. He put the life jacket on and tightened the Dacor knife about his good leg. He would leave the guns where they were. They were only incrimination now and excess weight. The diamond, the pills, and
the fifteen hundred he wrapped in the laundry bag to stash it in the dinghy.
Pablo gave the Cloud just enough power to set her heading for the outer reefs and took up the anchor. The anchor came up clean, to his relief and gratitude. With the course set he untied the painter that secured his lifeboat, and as the little boat drifted shoreward, he shoved the diesel throttle forward for flank speed.
When he hit the water, he found it warm, although cool enough to make his leg hurt. His wound made him think of sharks, and he paddled breathlessly for his floating dinghy, hauling himself aboard by the strength of his arms and his one good leg.
He was into his second rowing stroke when the shrimper struck. There was a double wall of coral there and it must have been just below the surface because the Cloud barreled over the first barrier as though she had turned amphibian, plowing over it, hardly seeming to slow, but ripping her seams fore and aft. Yet the rudder shaft and the engines had come through and not until she took the second ridge did there sound, together with the tearing of wood, the crash of suffering metal, the hopeless hissing rattle of a smashed machine.
Her guts on the reef, the Cloud raised her forepeak in the moonlight. Pablo, resting for a moment on his oars, watched the bow gradually sink as the weight of water billowing into the after compartments shifted forward on the fulcrum of the coral and commenced to take her down. A few small fires were burning in the after sections, there was a silent explosion, a fiery puffball burst itself to cast a moment’s glow on the bland easy ocean. Then another crash, another little firestorm, and she turned completely over on her bow and settled, upside down, beneath the surface. Pablo, still watching as he rowed, could not be sure whether the white water he saw in the faint moonlight marked the tip of the reef or some exposed part of the vessel. If she had not cleared the second wall altogether she might be settled on a slope, in shallow water, easily visible. He put the thought out of his mind. In time, he hoped, all thoughts of her would pass. Things would be different.
He rested on his oars again, breathing in the sweet smell of land, and checked the bag for his diamond, his money, his pills. They were all in place. So, gritting his teeth, he pulled on for the black shore behind him.
Holliwell found the restaurant hangar of the Paradise aswarm with the people who called themselves contractors. The crowd and the noise surprised him; he had not brought a watch and he had supposed it was the middle of the night.
For a while he stood under the palms outside, looking in at the party. Someone called his name and he turned to see Mr. Soyer smiling at him. Mr. Heath was sitting beside him and across the table from them were Olga and Buddy. They all found him in some way amusing.
“What are you doing out in the dark, Holliwell?” the Cuban asked good-naturedly. “Come in and have a drink.”
He thought it an oddly promiscuous grouping.
Holliwell stood in the darkness where he had thought himself concealed and stared at them.
“Come and tell us how things are,” Mr. Heath said. “Nun-wise.”
He walked away from them and into the bar. It was two-deep there. A man next to Holliwell said: “That fucker needs his hat rung.” He was talking to someone else, of someone else.
Holliwell wanted a telephone and they did not want to give him one. The bartender was unhelpful. There were no representatives of management in view.
He persisted; the bartender led him to an office near the kitchen where a young Spaniard was doing accounts. From the depths of his zombie state, Holliwell summoned up the energy to represent a pain in the ass. He shouted, he could hear himself at it, bullied, threatened and begged for a phone. It developed that the Paradise possessed a radio-telephone hookup; the young Spaniard observed that he could not rely on a connection and that it would be very expensive. He was trying to call the capital and Captain Zecca.
In the end a line was brought him. He stood with his back to the clamor of the bar beyond and listened to the undersea sounds in the receiver.
To his own surprise and relief, he got through. There was a Marine guard on the other end; the connection was adequate. It was fine.
He asked the guard who answered for Captain Zecca’s home telephone number and the guard asked him politely to wait. Then a young woman came on, the embassy duty officer. When he asked for the number, there was a long pause and she said she would see if it was available.
“Captain Zecca speaking,” said the next voice on the line.
“Tom,” Holliwell exclaimed, “you’re there! It’s Frank Holliwell.”
“Yes, sir,” Zecca said. “Yes indeed.”
“I’m down on the coast near Alvarado,” Holliwell said.
“I know where you are, sir.”
“I need your help,” Holliwell said. “There are people here who need protection. Because there’s going to be trouble here.”
“Would you speak carefully, Mr. Holliwell? If you don’t speak carefully I won’t be able to hear you.”
“What?”
“Speak carefully, Holliwell.”
“I have to tell you the situation here,” Holliwell said. “How can I?”
“We know the situation there. This office isn’t handling that.”
“What do you mean, Zecca?”
“I mean we’re not handling it. You’ll have to talk to them. There.”
“Them there? Who where?”
“Holliwell, we can’t have this conversation if you won’t speak carefully. I mean the people who are handling it. Surely you know whom I’m referring to.”
“I don’t think … I don’t think … I know them.”
“You know them, Holliwell. They know you.”
“Oh,” Holliwell said. “Yes. I know.”
“You should. I’m sure you do.”
“They have it wrong,” Holliwell said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. If you think they’ve got it wrong, man—tell them.”
“I don’t think they’ll want to hear my side of it.”
“Look, old friend—it’s theirs. It’s not mine. It’s yours and theirs.”
“Can’t you do anything?”
“Afterwards. Possibly.”
“After what?”
“Hey, Holliwell,” Captain Zecca said. “Go away, will you, pal?”
“I don’t know what to do, see.”
Zecca sighed at long distance. “Use your judgment. It’s all going down. Talk to them.”
“I understand,” Holliwell said.
“Do you? I don’t. I’m going to hang up.”
“Yes,” Holliwell said.
“See you, schemer. Hang loose.” And he hung up.
When Holliwell went out to the bar, he saw that the Cuban was not at his table beside Heath. He ordered a whiskey and in a moment the man appeared from the direction of the bungalows. He wore a look of concern. Holliwell saw him look at the table where his drinking companions were and then scan the bar. When their eyes met he was waiting. When he saw Holliwell, the Cuban’s worried look turned into a smile that was bright and false and layered with contempt. Holliwell gulped his drink to ease the chill of it. Then he walked past the man and into the darkness outside.
Ashore, Pablo gathered up an oilcloth and an anchor bag and left his aluminum dinghy adrift on the light surf. There was a dirt road beyond the mangrove and he crossed it into a thick wood where treetops closed out the stars and the air was heavy and still. After a while, he found a lean-to at the edge of a burnt-over clearing where melons rotted on the ground and the night’s rats fled from him. He tried to sleep on a ledge of crossed sticks, wrapped in a cloth, a canvas bag under his head for a pillow. There were animals outside.
He dreamt of morning light, fiery columns that blinded. The light was of dreams only. After a while he got himself up and took some of the blue pills to contain his pain. He slipped the bottle and the folded bills in his jeans and put the diamond back in his pocket. He was hearing voices, Deedee
’s voice and the old Jew’s. Sometimes he heard his mother’s voice.
He began to feel his way through the forest. The wounded leg was steady under him; the bone was sound and that was good enough for picking it up and putting it down again. His body was functioning well enough but his mind was febrile, ablaze in the rank darkness.
Somehow he found a trail to walk along and true light to follow. Most of the time it was not the distant firelight he saw, but a succession of past darknesses, filled with doings that were lit with their own light. The light of things happening in the dark.
He felt night-sighted like a creature. Before long, it seemed his whole being would be in darkness and he would run from light. His numbed fingers sought the diamond in his shirt pocket, a tiny lamp to think by. He thought of his knife, of bullets, fists and teeth. The voices inside sang and conspired.
The path took him to another clearing where there were fires burning and people gathered around them. Hammocks were strung between boughs. The sight of humankind made him angry.
Gooks, he thought, and then he saw it was Stateside people. There were twenty, there were twice that. The place looked like the bo jungles he had seen as a child. But the people all looked young and tender.
He hung back for a moment and then stepped out among them. One by one, they took notice of him. He was the Darkness King, it was his party.
An older man at one of the campfires addressed him: “Oye, señor.”
A fat Anglo.
“Oye, oye, señor,” Pablo said in his softest voice, “chinga su madre—hijo de la siete leches.”
He laughed at the man’s fleshy face.
“Where’s your prez, fat?” The fat man’s mouth fell shut, his teeth clicked. “Where’s the main person here?”
The man shrugged and turned partly away. Pablo took a step to face him, tilting his head to one side, staring, his brows knit.
“There’s an old fellow who lives here,” a girl at the same fireside said. Pablo turned to her. “He’s over there somewhere.” She pointed across the clearing, to the far side of three stone slabs that stood in the center.