Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

  1965

  Author's Note

  There is no island of Amerigo, or "Kinja," in the Caribbean Sea. In this tale of imaginary people on an imaginary island, fictional freedoms are taken with calendar dates, political and theatrical events, astronomic occurrences, and the like. The book contains no intended portraits of, or references to, actual individuals living or dead; any such resemblance that may be discerned is a coincidence, and without intent on the author's part. Where celebrated public personages are mentioned or seen, no historic accuracy concerning them is intended. Finally, regarding the native dialects in this story: Calypso accents vary from island to island, and even from one part of an island to another. The intent here is only a general indication of the West Indian patois.

  Part One

  THE SMARTEST MAN IN NEW YORK

  Chapter One

  Lester Atlas

  1

  Kinja was the name of the island when it was British. Now the name on the maps and in the Caribbean guidebooks is Amerigo, but everybody who lives there still calls it Kinja.

  The Union Jack flew over this enchanting green hump in the blue ocean for almost two hundred years. Before that the island was Danish; before that, French; before that, cannibal. Smoky gun battles between sailing ships and the old stone fort went with these flag changes; whizzing cannon balls, raiding parties, skirmishes, and an occasional death. But the fort guns have been silent for more than a century. The United States acquired the island peaceably in 1940, as part of the shuffling of old destroyers and Caribbean real estate that went on between Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill. The Americans ended up in this instance not only with the submarine base in Shark Bay-now gone back to tall guinea grass and catch-and-keep, the piers sagging and rotting, the rusty Quonset huts all askew-but with the whole island. The details of the transaction were and are vague to the inhabitants. They were not much interested.

  Keen-ja was the short, musical native version of the actual British name, King George the Third Island. Obviously this was a bit awkward for an American possession, so somebody in the Department of the Interior thought of Amerigo. The new name is used mainly on official stationery and in the school classrooms. There the pupils docilely scrawl themes and recite facts about Amerigo, but in the streets and playgrounds they call the place Kinja, and themselves Kinjans. All through the Caribbean they still say of a native of this island, "He fum Kinja."

  The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

  Long ago they came in their white-winged ships, swarmed over the islands, slaughtered the innocent cannibals, chopped down magnificent groves of mahogany that had stood since the Flood, and planted sugar cane. Sugar was money then, and it grew only in warm places. They used the felled mahogany to boil molasses. Those were the days of the great stone plantation houses and sugar mills; of seasick slaves hauled in from Africa, the ancestors of the Kinjans; of wealthy landowners with pink cool wives back in England, and warm black concubines on the premises. Then the sugar beet, which can grow in the north, came in, and black slavery went out. Bankruptcy and insurrection exploded along the island chain. The boom collapsed. The planters left. The plantation houses fell in. Today the natives put tin roofs over one nook or another in the massive broken walls and live there.

  The West Indians do not know what will cause the frantic whites to leave next time. Perhaps a bad earthquake: the entire chain of drowned mountains rests on a shaky spot in the earth's crust. Or a tidal wave; or a very bad hurricane; or an outbreak of some dormant tropical disease; or the final accidental blow-up of the white man's grumbling cauldron in the north, which will send the Caribbean white remnant scurrying to-where next? Tasmania? Tierra del Fuego? Unlike the natives they cannot subsist, if the ships and planes stop coming, on crayfish, mangoes, coconuts, and iguanas.

  Meantime, in a fashion, Amerigo is getting Americanized. The natives like the new holidays-Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Presidents' birthdays, and the rest-added to the old British holidays and the numerous religious days, none of which they have abandoned. The work calendar has become a very light and unburdensome thing. The inflow of cash is making everyone more prosperous. Most Kinjans go along cheerily with this explosion of American energy in the Caribbean. To them it seems a new, harmless, and apparently endless carnival.

  2

  Two men came out of Prince of Wales Street into the white sunshine of the waterfront, on a November morning in 1959. One was a big oyster-pale fellow in a rumpled black silk suit, with a thick bald head like half a bread loaf rising out of fat shoulders. He was bawling, "Trade winds, hey? All right, here's the waterfront and where's your goddamn trade winds? That's what I want to know, Norman. This whole island is one god damned furnace. This island is hell with palm trees. How the Christ can a white man breathe in this hole?" He was holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigar in the other, and he gestured with both, scattering ashes and splashing beer.

  The other man, who kept making pleading, soothing noises, was smaller, slighter, and tanned. He had a well-brushed head of silvering hair, and a lean face of young middle age; he looked perhaps forty-five.

  He wore a navy linen blazer, gray slacks, an open turquoise shirt, and a gray-and-yellow silk scarf tied inside the shirt. The costume was faultless for a color advertisement in Holiday. After a while one learns that in the Caribbean only tourists or homosexuals wear such clothes. The little man was a fastidious dresser, but new to the West Indies.

  The big man yelled, "Okay, okay, I know I'm in a strange place. Strangest goddamn place I've ever been in. Now where the hell is this Gull Reef Club?"

  "They said we could see it from the waterfront-ah, Lester, just look at all this, why don't you? Just look at where you are! It's like landing in another century. Look at that church! It must be two hundred years old. I bet those walls are seven feet thick. That must be for hurricanes."

  "I wish one would start blowing," bellowed Lester. "Cool the place off. This beer! It's piss!" He hurled the can spraying and clattering across the cobbled plaza. "Don't they even have refrigerators here? I bet they don't, you know something? I bet they cool the beer with the goddamn trade winds."

  The smaller man was looking around, with the air of a child just come to a birthday party-at the clumsy old island schooners tied up at the water's edge, with red sails furled; at the native women in bright dresses and the black ragged crewmen, bargaining loudly over bananas, coconuts, strange huge brown roots, bags of charcoal, and strings of rainbow-colored fish; at the great square red fort, and at the antique cannons atop its slanted seaward wall, pointing impotently to sea; at the fenced statue of Amerigo Vespucci, almost hidden in purple, orange, and pink bougainvillea; at the houses of Queen's Row, their ancient arching plaster facades painted in vivid colors sun-bleached to pastels; at the old gray stone church, and the white-washed Georgian brick pile of the Sir Francis Drake Inn.

/>   "It's beautiful," he said with sudden loud firmness. "It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life. If you don't think so, you ought to get your head examined."

  The patio of the Sir Francis Drake Inn, an old brick yard shaded by two gigantic mahogany trees, stretched to the edge of the water along one side of the square. The only people in the patio at the moment were the Tilsons. They had the neat, flushed, freckled, corded, dried-out look of long-time white dwellers in the tropics. The Tilsons usually sat immobile and silent as lizards over their first three white rum-and-tonics, scarcely blinking. But when Tom heard the little man talk, he turned his white-and-pink head heavily toward his wife. "New York," he said. "Both of them."

  She nodded. "And in November. This island has had it." The Tilsons did not speak another word, but they watched the two invaders with vague hostile interest. A tall colored boy in old slacks and a ragged shirt approached the men, taking off a flat broad straw hat with dangling red and yellow ribbons. "Mistuh Papuh?"

  The little man smiled in relief. "Paperman. I'm Norman Paperman."

  "I de Gull Reef boatman." He led them to an odd little vessel with a curving, comb-like prow, and the long rounded shallow black hull of a gondola, abruptly trailing off into a plain shabby rowboat, with a square stern and uncushioned thwarts.

  The big man stared skeptically. "Is this thing safe?"

  "It safe." The boatman took the two suitcases from the boy who sauntered up.

  "Where are we going?" said Paperman, stepping into the boat. "Where's the Club?"

  The boatman flicked a thumb toward the harbor. "Dah." Out in the harbor, beyond the red slanting mass of the fort and separated from it by a couple of hundred yards of green shallows, Paperman saw a small island feathered with palm trees; and through the trees, a rambling white terraced building. The man called Lester stepped into the sawed-off gondola. The boat sank a foot, rocking; Lester cursed and waved his arms, the boatman sprang to him and grabbed his elbow, and down on the seat beside Paperman he dropped with a splintering thud. "Christ, this thing's worse than a canoe. Is that it, that white building?" The boatman nodded, and pushed off with an oar. "Well, if this isn't ridiculous. Why don't they build a bridge?"

  "It's kind of charming," said Paperman. "The little boat ride."

  "Charm, my ass." Lester mopped his fat face and his naked conical head. "It's a way to scare off customers."

  The boatman rowed powerfully toward the cement pier of the little island. A woman emerged from among the palms and hibiscus of the island, a tall, broad-shouldered woman dressed in a yellow shirt and white shorts, with orange hair piled on her head. She came striding like a man across an emerald lawn and down a curved flowery path to the pier, where she stopped and waved. "Hello there! I'm Amy Ball," she called. "Welcome to the Reef."

  "Hi. Can we land without passports?" Paperman shouted back.

  Mrs. Ball's laugh was pleasant, if somewhat baritone. Paperman leaped from the boat to the pier, grasping the strong freckled hand the woman held out to him. The two of them, with the aid of the gondolier, got the fat man safely out of the boat.

  "This is Lester Atlas. I wrote you about him," Paperman said.

  "Ah, yes. How do you do?" She offered Atlas her hand.

  Paperman was afraid that Lester would instantly compromise both of them with a horrible burst of coarseness. Mrs. Ball intimidated him by her negligent assured air, and her strangled British diction. Her lips scarcely writhed when she spoke. It suddenly struck Paperman that the Gull Reef Club was a place where a Jew had perhaps never before set foot.

  Atlas took Mrs. Ball's hand and collected himself, feet together and back straightening. "Are we really welcome?"

  "Of course. Why not?" Mrs. Ball said through her teeth.

  "Well, I just don't know how anybody could actually want to sell such a beautiful place."

  She opened her mouth to laugh, then shut it firmly. "I'm probably crazy. But that's an old story. What'll it be? A nap after the plane ride? Breakfast? A drink? A swim?"

  "A swim sounds perfect," said Paperman. "To begin with."

  "I want to get out of these clothes," said Atlas, "and then I'd like to talk. If," he added with a surprisingly pleasant smile at the woman, "you don't mind getting right down to business."

  "Not at all. American style," she said.

  The white stucco cottage to which she led them was on the other side of the lawn, clear across the narrow island. It was much cooler here; a light flower-scented breeze blew. Over the arching doorway of the cottage a faded scrollwork sign hung, with one word on it: Desire. "This is the White Cottage," Mrs. Ball said, producing a key and opening the door. "The boys who ran the Reef before me were a little mad, I'm afraid. Larry Thompson and Tony Withers, sweet lads but queer as coots. I'm always meaning to take those idiotic signs down." The gondolier arrived just as she was saying goodbye and closing the door. Setting the two suitcases inside, he left before they could tip him.

  "So. This is the Gull Reef Club." Atlas's heavy bloodshot eyes swept the cottage interior, which smelled of mildew and insecticide. There were four large beds covered in red nubbly cotton. The rough white walls were splashed here and there with framed water colors of palms, flowers, and fish. "Sizable cottages. They get two families in here easy, in season." He rattled the red plastic divider collapsed against a wall, then flung his jacket on a bed and took his suitcase into a bathroom. "Got to have a quick shower. I unquestionably stink."

  Dazed by fatigue and excitement, Paperman opened his valise and swigged scotch from a bottle. He did not enjoy doing this, it was not his way of drinking. But nothing eased off palpitations like a little alcohol.

  He was in a shaky state after a bumpy all-night plane trip with Atlas, who had never stopped guzzling bourbon out of paper cups all the way to Amerigo, to calm his nerves; first on the big plane to San Juan, and then on the little island-hopper. From the start Paperman had endured acute spasms of embarrassment. Atlas had bullied the ticket clerks at Idlewild, yelled at the skycap porter to get the lead out of his ass (and calmed the man's rage with a five-dollar tip), and annoyed the stewardess with ribald remarks each time she walked past. He had also made persisting indecent gestures at the poor girl's swaying rear, winking the while at a horrified white-headed lady across the aisle, and shouting, "Con permisso! Haw haw!" Atlas had roamed up and down the aisle when the seat-belt sign was off, talking to the other passengers, offering them whiskey, and every so often roaring out "Con permisso! Con permisso!" with hoarse howls of laughter. The aircraft, which was continuing on to Venezuela, carried many Latin Americans; and this repeated bawling of a Spanish phrase, with an added harsh "s" in permiso, was Atlas's idea of wit.

  Paperman was a sensitive individual, who prided himself on dressing and acting with taste. He was self-made. He had run away at fifteen from middle-class parents who kept a furniture store in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Broadway press agent, with some industrial clients; and the assorted vulgarians, tinhorns, and loudmouths of the show business were types he was at great pains not to resemble. Just as abhorrent to him were crude businessmen of the Atlas variety. Square was the deepest term of anathema in his circle. It was an excruciating discomfort for Norman Paperman to have to travel in public with such a boorish, booming, atrocious square as Lester Atlas.

  Paperman's friends were writers, actors, newspapermen, television people, and the like. Many were real celebrities. In a company of these he spent most of his nights at one Broadway restaurant or another, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking. Paperman's circle worked hard at dressing correctly and at reading the right books. Paperman and his friends, indeed, made a second career, beyond their professional work, of being up to the moment, and of never wearing, saying, or doing the wrong thing. This was not easy. In New York the right thing to wear or to read, to think or to say, to praise or to blame, can change fast. It can be damaging to miss a single issue of one or another clever magazine. Doctors complain of the flood of
periodicals they must read to stay abreast of their profession; but their burden is almost light compared to that of being a New Yorker like Norman Paperman.

  That was one reason Paperman was in the West Indies. He had broken down in the task.

  3

  About half an hour after he arrived Paperman almost drowned.

  He was wearing rubber fins and a face mask for the first time in his life, and he was charmed by the underwater beauty of the reef: by the parrot fish browsing on dusty pink coral, the gently waving purple sea fans, the squid staring with tragic human eyes set in little jelly bodies, and jetting off backwards as he drew near; and by the glowing clean pink color of his own magnified hands and legs. He was pursuing a cloud of little violet fish past a towering brain coral, and having a wonderful time, when he turned his head under water, and the breathing pipe pulled out of its socket. The mask filled. Before he managed to yank it off he had inhaled and swallowed a lot of warm, very salty water. Coughing, gasping, he retrieved the sinking pipe, and tried to put it back in the mask, noting that he had wandered out too far from the beach. He was a good swimmer. The trouble was that since his coronary attack he got out of breath easily, and it was bad for him to exert himself in thrashing, flailing motions. He fixed the mask, clumsily pulled it on, and again was breathing warm water. Again he tore it off, snorting and choking, and now he was scared, because he seemed unable to catch enough breath, and his frantic treading was failing to keep his head above the surface. He went under; he clawed himself up, uttering a feeble "Help!" With his eyes fastened on the beach, which now seemed five miles away, he kicked and splashed and groped in one spot. He thought, "This would be one hell of a stupid way to die," and he thought of his wife and daughter, and wondered what idiocy had brought him to this island three thousand miles from New York to sink and be lost in the sea like a punctured beer can. His heart thundered.