Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  After this Lionel was content to swim inside the reef. Cohn gave him a spear gun, and everybody stayed well clear while he made futile shots at the unperturbed groupers. Each time, Cohn retrieved the spear, stretched the rubber sling for Lionel, and got out of his way. A lot of joking went with this; but the stage manager turned the laugh at last by shooting at a parrot fish, and skewering an unfortunate grouper that collided with the spear. All the way back to the hotel, Lionel cuddled the bloody dead fish on his lap in the Land Rover, swearing he was going to pack it in dry ice and eat it that night at Sardi's, if the transportation cost him a hundred dollars.

  4

  ". and so 1 say to you, fellow citizens, that at long last we have now unmasked Governor Alton Aloysius Sanders."

  Norman could hear Senator Pullman's voice booming over the airport loudspeakers, as he drove up with Lionel in the Rover. This was not the only indication of something unusual afoot. There were perhaps fifty cars in the terminal parking space. Norman had noticed that the town streets seemed unusually quiet, but he had assumed it must be one or

  Kinja's many obscure legal holidays-Candlemas, Transfer Day, Guy Fawkes Day, or something.

  ". under Alton Sanders' guise of a disinterested representative of our great President, we now know beyond a doubt there lurks a dictatorial, repressive, reactionary hypocrite who is in cahoots, lock stock and barrel, with the hill crowd!"

  Applause pattered in the loudspeakers.

  The lone porter of the airport, who worked on random days when the spirit moved him, wheeled his little truck to the Land Rover, and with a groan and a flourish unloaded Lionel's one small suitcase. Lionel insisted on hugging to himself the perspiring cardboard box containing his iced fish.

  "What's up?" Norman said to the porter.

  "Senatuh Pullman he goin' Florida."

  "Florida? With the legislature in session?"

  "Dey say de senator be extrydite."

  Incredulous, Norman hurried into the terminal, and saw the senator standing on a bench, holding a round microphone. Clustered in front of him were sixty or seventy laughing, gossiping Kinjans, not paying much heed to his oratory. Most of them were eating ice cream or drinking soda pop. "I pledge to you," the senator shouted, his voice reverberating in the big wooden shed lined with bright advertisements, "that despite my temporary absence, the Elephant Republicans will go on fighting the people's fight, my friends-for honest and frugal government, for lower taxes, for higher wages for underpaid government workers, for jobs for everybody, for elimination of deadwood from government payrolls, for bigger hospitals and schools, for new highways and housing projects, for free medical care and mental therapy. The unholy alliance of Governor Alton Aloysius Sanders and the Eagle Republicans are fighting to keep the hill crowd in luxury up there on Signal Mountain, friends, while the people of Kinja are crowded below in unsanitary huts. But the Elephant Republicans will never falter or procrastinate in their grandiose struggle until the people are living up in the mansions, and the hill crowd are down in the huts!"

  A few listeners-those whose hands were unencumbered by food and drink-interrupted their laughing gossip to give a laggard handclap 0 two. Senator Pullman took the moment to puff his cigar in his usual nursing fashion, and then waved and smiled. He wore his Palm Beach suit and a mainland straw hat with a tiny brim, and his round shrewd face was serene, even gay.

  Norman saw Governor Sanders leaning against the tin newsstand booth, arms folded, listening to the speaker. He appeared so unperturbed by the denunciation, that Norman ventured to walk up and greet him.

  "Oh, hello there," Sanders said, a smile lighting his narrow lemon-colored face for a moment. "Come to see the fun?"

  "Has Pullman really been extradited?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "What for?"

  "Bigamy. We put it off as long as we could, but Florida wouldn't play, and Interior finally got after me. It's just a nuisance action. The woman in Florida is greedy. She wants more money than Evan's been sending her."

  "He's awfully severe on you."

  Sanders grinned. "Yes, that's the style here. Lots of pepper and salt. I'm truly sorry to see Evan go. I came down just to say goodbye. He's very intelligent and reasonable." The governor lit a cigarette with an automatic motion of one hand. "I've always been able to work with him. Orrin Easter and his boys, now, are plain silly about voting pay increases and new jobs as soon as they get in. They never bother to check on what's in the treasury. Evan's very careful about that, and he's wise. Interior does get grouchy about deficits. There'll be a lot of vetoes for a while, and I just hope Evan cleans this mess up and hurries back."

  "This diabolic plot of Alton Aloysius Sanders and the Democratic governor of Florida," thundered Pullman, "is a transparent maneuver to set back the cause of self-government in Amerigo-"

  "Is he a bigamist?" said Norman.

  "Oh, sure. It was a youthful indiscretion, one of those casual things. Evan says the woman's got another husband, too. That's how he expects to lick it. She'll probably fold up once he gets there."

  Norman saw Lionel having some difficulty at the ticket counter, and he went over to help. There was a little line of passengers behind the stage manager; and among them Norman was much taken aback to recognize Lorna. She wore a tailored white linen suit and a triangular little white straw hat, with shoes and purse matched in mauve, and a little mauve nose veil. She looked like a model or a singer. When Lorna saw Paperman, embarrassment clouded her face, yielding to a radiant dimpled smile. "Hello dere," she said, with a wave of one small jeweled hand.

  "Hello," Norman said. "Going somewhere, Lorna?"

  "Well, I does have dis cousin in Miami, and she does be so sick, Mr. Papermon. She send me a cable to come right away. Esm‚ de smartest girl at de Reef. I did show her how to work de switchboard and make out de reservations and all."

  "Esm‚ won't be with us very long."

  "Well, I hope I be back by den."

  Lionel's trouble appeared to involve his fish. The young man at the counter, a Kinjan in a neat pink open shirt, was objecting to the package in garbled island talk, and Lionel was loudly insisting that he had shot this fish, and nobody and nothing would stop him from carrying it on board the plane in his arms. The altercation went on as the arriving plane roared into the field. Senator Pullman came to the counter and said crossly to Lorna, "What's the holdup? -Hello, Mister Paperman."

  "It ain't me. Dis man does have a fish or someting," Lorna said, flipping a wrist at Lionel.

  Lionel said, "Norman, go get the manager of the airport, will you, and the customs inspector? I'll fight this thing to Washington. By golly, I've been fighting stupid regulations for forty years, that's half my job, and I usually don't lose."

  The senator smiled at Norman, and rolled his cigar in the smile. This gentleman a friend of yours?"

  "A good friend, yes."

  The ticket-counter man said, "I don't see no regulation does allow him take a dead fish in no passenger cabin, Senator. It does be unsanitary."

  "Didn't he tell you it's a glass fish?" said Pullman. "It's a Chinese glass fish from Hong Kong. That's why he wants to carry it, Aubrey They're tremenjusly breakable. He got it in Little Constantinople."

  The counterman blinked at Senator Pullman. "I see. A glass fish Well, dey ain't nothin' wrong wid no glass fish." He stamped Lionel's ticket, and the stage manager swept the package off the counter and hugged it. It was covered with a white deposit like hoar frost, and smoking. Lorna stepped up to the counter.

  "Thanks," Norman said to Pullman, "and good luck."

  "Always glad to oblige," smiled the senator.

  Norman shook Lionel's free hand. The stage manager's red-streaked green face was agleam as he patted his package. "Golly, can you picture the boys in Sardi's tonight? See you Christmas, Norm. Keep an eye on Casa Encantada for me."

  Governor Sanders, standing in the sunshine in front of the terminal, gestured toward a long black limousine with two Am
erican flags on its fenders, as Norman came out. "Can I give you a lift?"

  "I have a car, Governor, thank you."

  "Not at all. I wanted to ask you, is it true that Mr. Atlas is coming down to bid on Crab Cove?"

  "So he wrote me."

  "Fine. I'm delighted."

  Norman was emboldened by the governor's mellow manner to say, "Why? What difference does it make to you?"

  The governor raised his grizzled eyebrows. "I'm interested in the island's development. Crab Cove will give things a big lift here."

  "So what? You're not a Kinjan. Chances are you'll be gone before it gets finished."

  Governor Sanders' thin lips twitched. "You think we'll have a Democratic President next?"

  "I don't know about that. You strike me as a man on the way up. You're just touching base in Kinja."

  Sanders chain-lit a cigarette. "Thank you. Right now this is my job, and everything goes on the record, you know." The chauffeur opened the rear door, and the governor gave Paperman a little mock salute and climbed in, saying, "How's Iris? Staying off the booze?"

  "Pretty much. We were swimming out at Cockroach Rock this morning and a shark made a pass at us."

  The governor's face darkened. I'd close Pitt Bay if I thought anybody would pay attention. -Well, here I go for a jolly session with Senator Easter. It you get tired of hotel-keeping, Mr. Paperman, try Caribbean politics."

  Chapter Nine

  The Bayfins

  1

  Virgil came skimming across the water like a scull-racer, ribbons streaming in the breeze. "Forry fuh," he panted, helping Paperman aboard. Norman had waited twenty minutes, and then telephoned the Reef; others on the dock claimed to have been waiting almost an hour. "Feela did fay I fould clean de bayfinth, fuh."

  "What? Hey? Bayfins? What on earth are you talking about?"

  "Bayfinth, fuh. Bayfinth for water."

  "Oh. Basins?"

  "Yeffuh. Bayfinth. Fifty of dem. I did have to crawl in de fellar and pull out all de pailth and de bayfinth. De bayfinth awful rufty. Feela fay fine 'em up."

  Paperman by now could transpose by ear the Old English typography of Virgil's talk. "Bayfins" was a tricky one that had thrown him off. For some reason Sheila had Virgil polishing up sixty basins. Paperman had seen in the crawl space, where the pump stood, enormous cobwebbed stacks of pails, basins, and jugs. Why had Sheila gotten them out at this juncture? He stood up in the bow of the gondola, leaped as it drew near the dock, and ran up to the hotel.

  The soles of his feet told him, as he entered the lobby, that something was amiss. The floor was dead. There was no vibration from the pump. Nor could he hear, from behind the hotel, the groaning and thumping of the generator that drove it. The pregnant Esm‚, perched in her green chambermaid's smock on a stool behind the desk, with headphones awkwardly framing her bashful, pretty, coal-black face, somehow seemed an omen of fresh troubles. Three chambermaids emerged from the passageway to the kitchen, each carrying two full pails, slopping water as they came.

  "Amaranthe! Faith! Where are you going with that water?"

  As usual, the girls averted their eyes. The Nevis chambermaids were all silent, impassive, and shy as wild animals in his presence, though he often heard them giggling and shrieking happily to each other in their West Indian babel-language. Amaranthe, the ugly one with pink patches on her face, muttered, "Sheila she say take dem upstairs," and hurried sloshing past him. Two more chambermaids appeared with four more pails, and the procession marched up the stairs.

  Paperman hastened to the kitchen. The floor over the cistern had been lifted. Millard, dripping sweat under his paper-bag hat, was hauling out of the cistern a brimming five-gallon paint can on a rope. Church caught the can as Millard swung it away from the opening, and began filling a row of pails. Pails stood outside the kitchen door in dusty stacks. Sheila, posted in the doorway in her chef's hat, was making supervisory remarks.

  "Sheila, what's happened? What are you doing?"

  "Dese de only way, suh, till de pump get fix. We puttin' a basin an' full pail in every room."

  "What happened to the pump? Have you called Georgetown Plumbing?"

  "It ain' de pump, suh. It de generator. Dey done take it away."

  "What? Who did? How dare they? I rented it from Anatone for two weeks. I paid him a fortune to get it over here!"

  Church was moving the full pails into the hall, and lining up another row of empty ones along the cistern hole. "Sir, it turns out that the machine was the emergency generator of the East End hospital. I don't know how Anatone got hold of it, but the hospital sent over a gang of workmen and a barge an hour ago and just hauled it away. I tried to argue, but."

  "Senatuh Eastuh he did send dose men for de generatuh," said Sheila, her eyes heavy and sad with old island experience. "Dey ain' nothin' to do suh, but use de pails and de jugs and basins, like we done when de whole island didn' have no powuh. Like after de hurricanes, and de time de powuh plant blow up. De people does wash in de basins and flush wid de pails. Dey get use to it."

  The gravity of his new predicament now hit Norman Paperman with full force. To an extent that he could not yet even guess, the Gull Reef Club had been leaning on the prop of Evan Pullman's influence. It had been a powerful prop, enabling Anatone to perform even this amazing outrage of borrowing and renting to him the emergency generator of a hospital. But Anatone was no more the magician able to solve all problems for a large fee. The prop had been yanked out, and he was just another Kinjan. These thoughts were running through Norman's brain, leaving a red-glowing trail of alarm, when Amaranthe, carrying an empty pail, put her pink-patched face into the kitchen. "Dah does be a telephone call for you, Mr. Papuh."

  The empty headphones were abandoned on the front desk. There was no sign of Esm‚. In the office, the telephone lay off its hook.

  "Hello?"

  "Mistuh Papuh-mon?" The severe official female voice was unmistakable.

  "Yes? Miss Buckley?"

  "Dat right. You better come down here to Immigration right away."

  "I'll be glad to. As it happens I've got some serious problems in the hotel, Miss Buckley. If it can wait till morning, I'll be grateful."

  "You got a serious problem in dis office, Mistuh Papuhmon. You let it go till tomorrow, dass all right wid me, but you be regretful when it too late, I do believe."

  "I'll be right over."

  Paperman rolled a sheet into the old typewriter and rattled away for a minute or so. He dashed to the kitchen and thrust the paper on Church, whose red-white-and-blue shirt was soaked black with sweat. The chambermaids were lined up receiving full pails from Sheila and Millard. Church glanced at the paper and gave Norman a winsome exhausted smile, his perfect teeth gleaming in the oval of neat beard. "Wonderful! That's an inspiration, sir."

  "Can you find a few minutes to letter this on a poster?"

  "I guess so. Certainly, sir."

  "Post it in the lobby as soon as you can. Who's tending bar?"

  Church's eyes rolled in his head, and he grinned wearily again. "Well, I sort of dash back and forth, sir."

  "Good boy. I think it's time we got in a boy to assist you. The busy season's upon us. I'll do it tomorrow. Esm‚ seems to be gone, I don't know where. Put her on the switchboard again, and try to convince her never to leave it untended, will you? I ought to be back in an hour."

  2

  The Immigration Office was on the second floor of an ancient building behind the church, at the top of a very steep, very decaying brick staircase slippery with moss. In the anteroom dejected Negroes, ill-clad but neat, sat around on hard chairs, all with the puzzled, sad, wistful eyes of "garrots"-off-islanders. A Kinjan girl, in a starched blue smock with a saucy bouffant hairdo, took Norman's name and wrote it at the bottom of a long list on her desk. "Miss Buckley said she wanted to see me right away," Norman remarked.

  The girl nodded. "Dat be okay. Just take a seat."

  Norman sat. He sat for a long time. Every now
and then a buzzer sounded, the girl called out a name, and the garrots marched turn by turn through a door crusted with old green paint, emerging after a while with sadder faces than when they went in. To vary the monotony, Nor- man got up and wandered about, reading flyspecked government bulletins on the cracked gray wall about immigration rules, social security and control of aliens. When this palled, he sat again and leafed through the book he had snatched at random from the mildewy lot on the shelves of the hotel lobby. He had dealt in his time with many minor officials. This wait did not surprise him.

  "Mr. Papuh-mon?"

  The girl pointed to the door. A mournful, muscular Negro in ragged shirt and trousers came out looking at a paper and scratching his head, and Norman went in.