Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Dynamite will do it every time,” I said.

  “Of course,” she answered, unabashed. “Dynamite.”

  “They are building a canal here. Dynamite.”

  Nothing about her smile dimmed. “I’m glad you were here to help. Just wait until I tell my friends. A genuine cowboy.” She paused a moment. “You are a genuine cowboy. I can safely conclude that, can’t I?”

  “Take an elbow, if you need it.” I pointed back to the observation deck, turning so my right side was nearest to her. “There might be another blast.”

  I wasn’t really worried anymore about a second blast. Already the workers were resuming their positions. I just wanted to get her back to the observation deck.

  I turned my left wrist and glanced at my watch. The administration building would be opening at any moment.

  “That’s a wrist watch.” Her words held a contrived touch of breathlessness. “Yes? A person doesn’t often see one on a man. Although I understand they are becoming popular with soldiers. Are you a cowboy and a soldier?”

  My watch was of Girard-Perregaux manufacture, the first watch commercially produced when ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm I for his German naval officers. It had become evident that modern warfare would be more efficient if officers could coordinate operations with precision. As a soldier, I had learned it mattered at San Juan too for land-based skirmishes.

  The face of the watch was black, with thick orange numbers, protected by a grill of silver seamlessly soldered to the round rim of silver. The black patent-leather straps had lost some gloss, but the timepiece itself ran with precision. I remembered my father once saying that only women wore wristlet watches. I remembered my father once pulling out his pocket watch and saying he would sooner wear a skirt than a wristlet watch. That was long before San Juan. Long before the blizzards of 1887. When I was young enough to adore my father.

  I also remembered the store in London on a crooked street off Trafalgar Square where this Swiss watch had been purchased and engraved. I remembered why it had been purchased and engraved. And who had purchased and engraved it for me. That had been at the height of my exile years. When it didn’t feel like exile. It had been when I believed I craved crowds and noise and the adrenaline that came when a woman looked at me like this New York woman was looking at me now.

  “Yes, it’s a wrist watch.”

  She took my right elbow and drew closer as I walked her toward the safety of the observation deck.

  “What’s your name, cowboy?”

  “James Holt.”

  “James, I’m Nancy Edwards.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “So you are a cowboy and a soldier?”

  “Just here to see the cut.”

  “As am I. Already I find there is very little to do. But the Zone hotel in Culebra has a wonderful band, and a Sunday night is upon us. While it’s dreary that no alcohol of any kind is available in the Zone for us, I hope you don’t think it’s forward that I ask if you will be here long.”

  She was hugging my right arm to her ribs, with occasional indiscreet contact of her elbow to my body that had enough ambiguity to be construed as accidental. Or encouraging. Yes. A bold, wealthy New York woman, interested in a safe and discreet adventure with someone who didn’t use pomade and cologne and didn’t have soft hands with manicured fingernails.

  “Not long at all, unfortunately,” I said. “Steamship waiting in Colón.”

  “Such a shame that we can’t get together.”

  “Shameful.” I expected each of us meant something different.

  Then I saw a man whom I’d noticed earlier when he had followed me from the steamship wharf onto the train.

  He was my height, a thin man with tiny round spectacles. Some thin men appear wiry, others prissy. This man, despite his height, landed on the prissy side, perhaps because of the disapproving set of his mouth, wrinkles already established despite an age that I estimated to be midthirties. He wore a white shirt and dark pants. His sleeves were not rolled up despite the heat.

  He stood almost at attention. Every hair ordered, in place. No creases in his clothing except where creases belonged. Quite an accomplishment in this humid heat. He adjusted his round eyeglasses with a practiced flick of his right index finger and alternated glances between me and the woman on my arm. Then that bespectacled gaze came to rest firmly on me.

  “Mr. Holt,” he said, “I believe your instructions upon arrival in Colón were to go immediately to the administration building.”

  Cowboy hat in hand, I waited on a bench in the outer office of the administration building. The severe man had escorted me to the door and waited until I stepped inside. Then, because he didn’t follow me any farther, I presumed he had walked away from the building. Or maybe he remained outside the door to ensure I stayed for my meeting.

  I was here because I had received a letter at the ranch before Christmas, instructing me to meet with Colonel George Washington Goethals on the first Sunday morning after my arrival in Panama.

  I did not know why the man who sent train and steamship tickets with the letter chose me. Nor did I know what the colonel wanted or expected of me for the substantial bank note I had been promised simply to meet with Goethals. Naturally, I expected the matter to be of importance, but I was here out of necessity, not adventure, and to be truthful, I had some resentment because of that necessity.

  Still, with the funds I was about to receive, the bank would no longer be in a position to foreclose on my ranch. Which would free me to continue raising cattle among the brown and gray hues of the eroded hills, to savor being at our place, patched white with snow and brown grass in fall and winter, and patched green with new grass after spring and summer rains.

  On the journey here, out on the Atlantic on the steamer, the only mystery that had engaged my curiosity was the requirement to wait until the first Sunday after my arrival. And that mattered to me only because if the ship was late and did not reach Panama until a Monday or Tuesday, I would have been forced to wait six or five days until the following Sunday. Six or five days of impatience before collecting the bank note and returning home. My greatest relief had been a landing at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, exactly as scheduled, allowing me to catch the day’s first train to Culebra.

  Now, on the bench waiting for Goethals, I understood.

  A Sunday meeting ensured anonymity.

  Sunday mornings, as I learned upon entering the administration building, were the mornings anybody in the Canal Zone could speak to the colonel. No appointment necessary.

  Had I been there for a private appointment any other day of the week, a secretary would have made note. Colonel Goethals was one of the most recognizable figures in the United States media, and everything public in the colonel’s life was recorded and scrutinized.

  This told me that whatever the reason I’d been chosen, and whatever the reason the colonel wanted to see me, it had been determined I must be invisible among those who gathered and waited. There would be no record of our meeting.

  This secrecy made sense, I supposed, given who had signed the letter sent to me, and given the scandal surrounding the sender’s situation in regard to the Panama Canal.

  I didn’t speculate beyond this. The answers would arrive soon enough from Goethals himself, and after that I would be gone, carrying the promised bank note back home.

  The administrative building in Culebra was an ugly barn-like structure. Rotating ceiling fans wobbled at the end of long hanging stems and stirred the humid air. I was grateful to get out of the sun. I had not expected this kind of heat here, different on land than at sea. Nor had I expected such a diverse crowd seated on the plain wood benches ringing the walls of the outer office, which was a huge shell of a room.

  Upon my arrival, Goethals’s secretary, a stooped, balding man named Billy May, whose task was to arrange the seating, took my name and directed me to a spot on the benches.

  I was surrounded by a spectrum of those helpin
g to build the canal. On a bench across from me was a coal-black laborer sitting with his wife, both with their heads bowed. There was a Spaniard, midtwenties perhaps, with a pencil-thin mustache and an eyebrow that seemed permanently arched, who glanced at me once and glanced away. He’d slicked his dark hair back over his skull and looked like a banker’s assistant who wanted the world to believe he was a card shark. Around the room were men in suits and in khaki work clothes, women in linen dresses, and a man with a crutch and his pants leg pinned where he was missing his leg from the knee down. Dozens more. Engaged in quiet conversations.

  They all knew the colonel’s rules because Billy May had made it clear when he took their names. No appointments. First come, first served. On Sunday mornings, rank did not bestow privilege.

  At my feet was my travel valise—a bag of worn tan leather with handles. Into it, I had placed my revolver and holster, which I’d rolled into my other pair of trousers. There was also a journal, with a pencil in the spring coiling of the spine and a photo of my daughter glued inside the front cover. I also had two spare shirts, my undergarments, and a toiletry kit with the newfangled safety razor Gillette had invented. Traveling light was easy for a single man. The remainder of the space in the valise was devoted to the reading materials I had chosen for my journey.

  From the train stop in the town of Medora, where I’d been born when it was still the Territory of Dakota, I had set out with an even dozen novels. Upon arrival in New York, I had purchased two more, for a total of fourteen as original stock. I didn’t collect books. I read them to absorb the contents, then jettisoned the weight, so when finished with one, I would give it away to a fellow traveler or leave it on a bench for someone else to take. The original fourteen were down to six, which was about right for the return trip to New York by steamship. I could restock in New York between steamship and train station for the cross-land journey back to the Dakotas.

  When it did not appear I would get special treatment and an early meeting with Goethals, I leaned back and tilted my cowboy hat over my face and napped for the first part of my wait in the outer office, trying to avoid conversation with the middle-aged woman to my left. When I woke fifteen or twenty minutes later, I set my hat on the floor beneath the bench, opened my valise, and pulled out The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.

  On the steamship, I had told myself I would not begin to read this book until I was headed home, for fear that Owen Wister’s descriptions of Wyoming would be a painful reminder of what I was missing. But since my meeting with Colonel Goethals would be over soon, I rationalized that I was as good as headed home. Also, I wanted to lose myself in reading before the woman on my left began to complain again. She was a cigarette smoker, and I could only wonder how hideously high her voice must have been before the years of smoking had coarsened it.

  I opened the cover, enjoying the anticipatory snap that came with first cracking a book’s spine. That caught the attention of the girl on the bench to my right. I knew her name was Saffire, because that’s how she’d spelled it out to Billy May as he took names of those waiting to see the colonel. She’d stressed her name had two f’s instead of a p and an h.

  Saffire was mocha skinned, had cornrow braiding, wore a simple dress of red, and had bare feet. Her worn-out sandals sat tucked under the bench. No one would have called the girl cute or pretty. She had knobby elbows, thin arms, and feet that seemed big in proportion to her body. She seemed not much older than my own daughter, and I couldn’t help but again think of Winona.

  I smiled at the familiar ache of homesickness for my daughter. Until her birth, I’d never experienced homesickness or the fierce protective love behind that homesickness. It wasn’t a homesickness I resented. It was one I cherished.

  “Mister?”

  I looked at Saffire. “Yes?”

  “I love to read.”

  “Me too. It’s one of my favorite things to do. If the reading is a story. Information, not so much.”

  She pointed at the novel in my hands. “What’s the story about?”

  “In general, how can a person know without reading it?” I closed the book and rested it on my thigh, giving the girl my full attention. “That’s the point of starting. To see what the adventure is about.”

  “You must really love to read. You have more books than clothes. I’ll bet most people don’t travel like that.”

  Ah. She had been watching as I opened my valise and wasn’t afraid to let me know she was a curious girl.

  “So,” she said, “if you’re going to carry something as heavy as all those books, you must have had a reason to put them in there, even if you haven’t read them. What’s the reason?”

  “In this case,” I said, “I do happen to know the story, because I wanted to reread it. It came out a few years back, and I first read it then.”

  “Then it’s good?” She seemed pleased that I was taking conversation with her seriously.

  “Very good.”

  “Tell me what it’s about.” Nothing shy about this girl, unlike my daughter.

  “It’s about a place far away from here and a man who has to choose between love for a woman and his quest for justice.”

  She made a face. “Love story. Not something I’d want to read then.”

  I didn’t add it had cowboys in it. I didn’t need any conversation about cowboys, not with the way I had chosen to dress for the meeting with Colonel Goethals, and not with the fascination that people east of the Mississippi had with the notion of cowboys. I’d once made a living based on that fascination but had long ago tired of it.

  “Some people like that kind of story,” I told Saffire. “And a lot of people like this one in particular.”

  “What would you choose?” she asked me. “Love or justice?”

  That was a much easier decision than one between the woman you loved and your unborn daughter.

  “I’d choose the woman over justice each time,” I said. “People spend a lot of time arguing over justice, so it’s difficult to even know what it is sometimes. But when you realize that you love someone and that this someone loves you in return, I believe you should fight against anything that might keep you apart.”

  “Is that why you have a crooked nose?”

  “From love or from fighting?” I couldn’t restrain a smile at her boldness.

  “Either.”

  “Both.” Over the years, doctors had informed me that if I allowed them to break my nose again, they could set it straight.

  The girl cocked her head. “I don’t know much about love. But you are right about justice, that’s certain. I want justice, but I can’t get people to see it my way. Every week I sit here and every week when it’s my turn, Colonel Goethals won’t listen to me. But I’m going to keep coming back until I wear him out or he sends someone to look.”

  Before I could ask who or what needed to be looked at, the woman on the other side interjected.

  “I wouldn’t bother explaining much to the girl.” This was Mrs. Penny. In her screechy voice, she had already complained to me four times about holes in her screens in her apartment and how the ICC—Isthmus Canal Commission—was trying to make her pay for new screens.

  Mrs. Penny was skinny and middle-aged, in a Sunday church dress, wearing a scarf over bleached blond hair. She had her hands on her knees and stains of nicotine on her well-chewed fingernails. She was jittery, as if she needed her next cigarette.

  Mrs. Penny continued. “It’s plain to see the girl is a mulatto. Her mother cleans rooms, I bet. The girl might not even know her father. I’d say she just likes to put on airs in front of strangers, trying to tell people how to spell her name and then talking about books like she can actually read.”

  The girl gave the woman a silent stare. Saffire’s eyes were almost emerald green, a startlingly beautiful genetic aberration in a face with skin color that showed the mix of two races. A face that held a promise of the woman this girl would become. I couldn’t help but think about one of the fai
ry tales that Winona liked for me to read at bedtime, about the duckling that became a swan.

  I raised an eyebrow in Saffire’s direction, then nudged the book on my thigh toward her. I wanted to give her a chance, without putting her in a position of embarrassment, in case the shrew with the irritating voice was correct.

  Saffire immediately caught on.

  “I noticed you asleep for a while right here on the bench,” Saffire said. “You probably still have tired eyes, Mister. Maybe I can help.”

  The girl had street smarts. She didn’t want to dignify Mrs. Penny’s insult by appearing to directly accept the challenge, but she wasn’t going to let it go either.

  She took the book from me and flipped past the title pages until she found her place. Then she began reading aloud at the beginning. “Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was.”

  I’d traveled plenty and was unfamiliar with her type of accent. It had an echo of British formality, but with softened cadence. There was rhythm and poetry in her voice.

  At her pause, I smiled. “I like how you read.”

  Saffire’s disdain of Mrs. Penny was so honest she didn’t even give the woman a look of triumph.

  “And a good beginning, right?” I continued. “Makes you curious as to what was drawing them to the window of the train.”

  She didn’t answer my question about whether the beginning was good, because she was already engrossed in the next paragraphs, silently absorbing the story.

  I understood that kind of rapture. I leaned down and pulled out another novel, this edition used so there wouldn’t be that satisfaction of a spine crack. The Game. Jack London. About a twenty-year-old boxer named Joe. I knew from reviews that it didn’t end well for Joe. I preferred stories with happy endings but was a London fan and was prepared to make an exception. The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Great stories.