Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  A strong hand grasped his elbow. "Okay, easy."

  He saw a big red fish impaled bleeding on a spear, inches from his face. The person holding the spear gun had thick black hair, twisted in curls and streaming water. The face was a blank skin-diver face, all yellow mask and tube. "Lie on your back and float." The voice was boyish, quiet, good-humored. Some of the knots went out of Paperman's muscles; he obeyed. The hand released his elbow and took a cupping hold on his chin. "Okay?" Paperman managed a nod against the hard hand.

  The skin diver towed him to the beach. He let go while they were still in deep water, so that Paperman could turn over and swim the last dozen strokes. Anxiously glancing toward the hotel veranda, Paperman saw Atlas talking with Mrs. Ball and two Negroes. Nobody had noticed the panic or the rescue. The skin diver stood in the shallow water, pushing his mask up on his forehead. He had a narrow sunburned face, a big hooked nose, shrewd smiling brown eyes, and a masculine grin. He flourished his staring red fish at Paperman. "Think that'll serve two? It's my dinner."

  "I'd say four."

  Nah. Take the head and tail off these brutes and there's not much left. But it's fresh. I guess it'll feed two."

  The soft hot beach sand felt inexpressibly hospitable and good underfoot to Paperman. "You and who else?" he said, making talk to cover his embarrassment.

  The man's grin became ribald. "Oh, you know. This babe." The intonations placed his origins unmistakably in New York or New Jersey.

  "Well, look, thanks for pulling me out of there."

  The skin diver slapped his ribs. He was a skinny sort, no taller than Paperman, and his bones showed in knobs under stringy muscles and coppery skin. "I got chilly out there. I'm going to have a dose of medicinal whiskey. You too?" He signaled toward the veranda.

  "Sure." Paperman was trembling in the aftermath of the scare.

  They fell into wooden lounge chairs on the sand. The coarse red canvas cushions, burning hot in the sun, soothed Paperman like a heating pad. "I'm getting old and stupid," he said. "I was up all night in an airplane. I just got here. I've never snorkeled before. I'm in lousy shape. And there I was roaring out to sea, the boy frogman."

  His rescuer hung the mask on the back of his chair. Black wet ringlets fell on his forehead. "That's me. I'm a frogman."

  Paperman glanced at him uncertainly. He had the New Yorker's usual horror of having his leg pulled. "Is that so? What are you, in the Navy or something?"

  "UDT. Underwater Demolition Team, that is. We train here."

  "Are you a naval officer?"

  "Just a lowly enlisted man."

  The swimmer lit a cigarette from a green shirt hanging on his chair, and told an odd tale of having volunteered in the Israeli navy in 1948 at the age of seventeen, to the dismay of his American parents, who had then been in Palestine for business reasons. He had forfeited his American citizenship. Then he had studied aeronautical engineering in England, with an idea of working for El Al. Now he was in the navy to get his citizenship back. "Israel's a great place. But I was just a kid," he said. "I'm an American. I want that green passport I lost. Luckily the navy needs lots of UDT nowadays."

  The bartender came, a bronzed blond man, barefoot, with ice-blue eyes and huge shoulders. His right hand lacked two fingers. The frogman took the stubby glass full of dark whiskey and ice, and pointed at the dead fish. "How about that, Thor? Can Sheila clean it now?"

  "You be figure eat here tonight? You better ask Amy. The governor having a party, I tink ve full up."

  "Okay. Chuck it on the ice, anyway."

  The bartender nodded, twisted the fish neatly off the spear, and left.

  Paperman sipped the whiskey, feeling better with each passing moment. The main beach of Gull Reef was a curve of clean white sand, bordered with palms and the round-leaved gnarled trees called sea grapes. The sand was warm and silky, trickling in his relaxed hand. Never had Paperman seen such an ocean, so tranquil that it reflected the puffy white clouds. Off to the right rose the hump of Amerigo, the serried green ridge stretching north and south, with red-roofed white buildings of the town climbing from the harbor along three rounded hillsides, and the bold carmine splash of the fort at the water's edge.

  "This is not hard to take," he said, yawning and stretching.

  "Amerigo? It's a dream. I've been in Italy, the south of France, Tangiers, and all that. I think this is maybe the most beautiful place in the world."

  "But peculiar," said Paperman.

  "How so?"

  "Well, take that bartender. I never saw a bartender like that. He looks like the fourth or fifth Tarzan they had in the movies."

  "Thor's not a bartender, really. He crossed the ocean by himself in a sailboat. He's one of those. A Swede."

  "What's he doing tending bar?"

  "Saving money for a new boat. He piled up his yawl on the reef out in Pitt Bay."

  Paperman hesitated, then said, "I'm thinking of buying the Gull Reef Club."

  The frogman cocked his head, crooked teeth flashing in his brown face. "Really? Is it for sale?"

  "There was an ad in the New Yorker three weeks ago."

  "Oh. The New Yorker."

  "Don't you read it?" If I come across it. It takes six or seven weeks to get here."

  This startled Paperman. He was in the habit of pouncing on the New Yorker each week within an hour after it was delivered to his favorite newsstand at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. In the same way he pounced on the New York Times each night as soon as it appeared on the streets, and he bought all the editions of all the evening and morning newspapers one after the other, though nothing changed but one headline, and though he knew well that these changes were made mainly to sell papers. He was an addict of ephemeral print. It had never occurred to him that the New Yorker was not instantly available all over the world-perhaps a day or so late at most, at the far end of the jet routes. He said, "You could have it sent airmail."

  "At about a dollar a copy? Why?"

  Paperman shrugged. Such a question merely betrayed the frogman's mentality: a square. "What do you think of the Club? I mean, as a business proposition?"

  "I don't know anything about business. I'm sort of surprised she's selling it. She seems to go with the place." He sat up in a cross-legged slouch. "Is that what you do in the States? Hotel business?"

  "No."

  Paperman sketched his background, told about his heart attack, about his acute depression afterward and his disenchantment with Manhattan: the climbing prices, the increasing crowds and dirt, the gloomy weather, the slow bad transportation, the growing hoodlumism, the political corruption, the mushrooming of office buildings that were rectilinear atrocities of glass, the hideous jams in the few good restaurants, the collapse of decent service even in the luxury hotels, the extortionist prices of tickets to hit shows and the staleness of those hits, and the unutterably narrow weary repetitiousness of the New York life in general, and above all the life of a minor parasite like a press agent. He was quite as hard on himself as on the city. The long and the short of it was that his brush with death had taught him to make one last try to find a better way of life. Once he had seen the advertisement for the Gull Reef Club he had known no peace, he had been unable to sleep nights thinking of it, and now here he was. "And I'll tell you something," he said, "I didn't realize how disgusted with my life I actually was until I came here this morning. Coming to this island is like being born again. It's like getting a reprieve from a death sentence." He smiled with a tinge of embarrassment. "It's almost like finding out that there's a God."

  The swimmer listened, with a twisted little grin, nodding now and then. "Well, I sure go along with you on New York. But this place is a real big change."

  That's the idea," Paperman said with vehemence. "A real big change. I guess you're like my wife. She thinks I've slipped my trolley."

  Laughing, the frogman got off the chair. "Hell, no. To live here, to be the boss, to have this"-he swept his arm around at
the beach and the hotel-"three hundred and sixty-five days a year? It's heaven, if you can swing it. Our unit goes back up north in March. Right now, I know three guys that aren't going to make the plane." He picked up his mask and spear gun.

  "Thanks for the drink," Paperman said. "Let me buy one for you tonight. And for this babe."

  "Sure thing. My name's Bob Cohn."

  "I'm Norman Paperman."

  "Right. See you in the bar around seven. Look, don't swim alone in deep water, Norm. Water safety rule number one."

  "You were out there alone."

  Cohn was putting on the green shirt, which had a gray parachute emblem over the breast pocket. "Do as I say, not as I do. Navy leadership rule number one." He grinned amiably, and went trotting up the beach with his spear gun.

  4

  Paperman could hear Atlas as he walked up the red concrete steps to the bar.

  "Just an old truth teller," Atlas was saying. "All I do is tell people the truth about their own business."

  Paperman's spirit sank. Yes, there it was, the same old issue of Time with Eisenhower on the cover. Two Negroes in dark blue city suits were sitting forward in low wooden armchairs, glancing at the story. Lester sat sunk in another such chair, a glass of beer in one fat paw, a torpedo-shaped cigar in the other, his hairy white legs spread apart, his paunch resting on his lap, pince-nez glasses perched on his heavy nose. His tropical costume was an orange shirt covered with scarlet-and-green watermelons, creamy linen shorts that were much too brief and looked like nothing but exposed underwear, brown city shoes, and drooping black cotton half socks.

  "Hello there!" Mrs. Ball waved a beer glass from a square lounge chair for two, on which she was curled in a pose too kittenish for a big woman. "We're having our elevenses. Come join us."

  "I'm all sand and salt. I'd better shower first."

  "Nonsense. Give him a beer, Thor. How was your swim? Why didn't you tell us your partner's a celebrity?"

  "Just an old truth teller," beamed Atlas.

  Paperman suspected the woman was being sarcastic. The Time article was an acid attack on corporation raiders. Lester came out almost worst of all the nine men whose brutal shifty faces bordered the story. But all Lester cared about was that his picture had appeared in a national magazine. He had a leather-bound copy of the issue in his office, another in his home, and a reserve pile of them which he was using up one by one in ignorant boasting.

  "Do meet Walter Llewellyn, Mr. Paperman, he's the president of our bank," Mrs. Ball articulated through immobile jaws. "And my accountant, Neville Wills."

  The two Negroes stood, arms at their sides. When Paperman put out his hand they took it, and he experienced the limp hesitant handshake of the West Indian. The banker was a round-faced slight man with gray hair. The accountant was tubby and young, with a couple of gold teeth showing in a shy smile. Both men were quite black; indeed the banker, perhaps because of the gray hair, looked purple-black.

  "Norm, I was telling Amy here, and these gentlemen, that my only stock in trade is truth. Now, to give you an idea, Amy, let's say there's this Corporation X-" Paperman sank into a chair, resigned. Lester was not a man to be diverted.

  On he went with it, the old tiresome fable. Corporation X had been making money on rubber belting and tires, but losing its profits because of a subsidiary that manufactured buggy whips. Lester Atlas became a stockholder. He studied Corporation X, saw the truth, and told it to the board of directors. They could get rid of the buggy-whip plant for a big cash profit, because the building and land were valuable, and thereafter they could stick to making products that were in demand, and earn large dividends. But the directors, a decrepit old family group, ganged up against Atlas, because they were sentimentally attached to making buggy whips. They called him a wolf and a raider, and threw him out of their office. Then, and only then, did Atlas go to the other stockholders, and tell them the truth. The stockholders started a legal fight, threw out the directors, and elected a new board. The new board sold off the buggy-whip building, and turned the corporation into a big money-maker.

  "Now sometimes it happens, Amy, that these people offer to elect me as a director, or even as chairman of the board. Just out of gratitude for telling them the truth. Well, if I can accept, I do. But I'm a busy man. Usually my only reward is the knowledge that once more I've told the truth and saved a sick corporation. That's what I do. That's all I do. If that makes me a raider, I'm proud of it."

  The banker said, "Why, I feel you are performing a genuine public saxviss, Mr. Atlas." He had a gentle, musical voice, and he hit the last syllable of every word, in the manner that had so amused Paper-man for years in records of Calypso songs.

  Paperman wondered how Lester had the gall to go on repeating this simple-minded story of his, when this very issue of Time that he kept flaunting described how he actually operated. Lester had recently bought into a Southern furniture company, which-it was true-had been badly run for years. He had gained control in a vicious stock fight, sold off all the buildings and timberlands, and pulled out with better than a million-dollar capital gain in cash. The family owners had also made money, but the corporation was now a gutted shell. Some four hundred people had lost their jobs. Time quoted Lester as saying, "All I did was wind up the affairs of a company that had to quit anyway. Instead of going bankrupt, those old fuds who were running it retired rich to Palm Beach. I did them a favor, didn't I?" To a question about the four hundred employees, Lester answered, "They were boondoggling. They were making bad furniture on bad machines at a bad price. When you get boondogglers off the government payroll you're a hero. When you do it in industry, you're a raider."

  Time's story of Lester's stock fight depicted an operator who used any means short of crime to win votes: cash, cajolery, girls, threats, financial squeezes, and if necessary, his fists; an opposing lawyer at a rough meeting had called him a dirty name and Lester had knocked him unconscious. There was little trace of this violent brute in Lester now, as he sat beaming in his pince-nez glasses, watermelon shirt, and cream-colored drawers, describing his own modest altruism in the mellifluous manner he could turn on when it suited him. This honeyed craftiness, combined with his physique of a debauched gorilla, gave Lester Atlas in these moments a peculiar crude charm.

  Mrs. Ball said, "Well, it's all utterly fascinating. Perhaps you'll tell us the truth about the Reef, too."

  Paperman cleared his throat. "Isn't the place a money-maker?"

  "Oh yes." Mrs. Ball pointed a long finger with a long orange nail at ledgers and blue-bound balance sheets piled beside her. "But it should make ever so much more. I haven't the foggiest idea why it doesn't."

  Atlas said, "I've looked at those figures. I'd like to ask some questions."

  "By all means. That's why Neville and Walter are here." The woman signaled with her empty glass at the bartender. He brought her more beer, and went back to doze on a bar stool. He wore ragged khaki shorts and a blue frayed shirt laundered almost gray, and he had a gold ring in one ear.

  Paperman decided that if he bought the hotel he would keep this eight-fingered bartender. He was changing his notion that the Gull Reef Club needed smartening up. It was seedy, but-as in some of the best hotels in England and Paris-the idea might be to keep it so. Dowdiness was sometimes chic. This piratical bartender, snoozing on a stool, added to the color. The bar decor was fish nets, great sea fans painted white and gone a little gray, green glass-bubble net floats, dusty conch shells, and bleached coral. One solid wall was painted with amateurish pictures of fish. Nothing screened the corrugated iron roof but a few withered palm branches. A frangipani tree thrust limbs starred with pink flowers under the roof, and each gust of the breeze stirred a wave of perfumed air. It was certainly primitive; yet, Norman thought, authentic and right.

  Atlas was questioning Mrs. Ball and the two Negroes about payrolls, off-season and on-season prices, and taxes. "Amy, tell me one thing," he said abruptly, lighting a fresh cigar, "what are you selling here?"


  The woman looked startled. "Why-we sell drinks, of course, and food -we did try coral jewelry, but-"

  Atlas shook his head. "You're selling sleep."

  "Slee-eep?" Mrs. Ball's voice slithered up two octaves.