Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  “She’s back among the living,” Dr. Grieg observed.

  Sybil hoisted herself onto the consul’s shoulder.

  “Stop laughing, Herman. I’m in pain.”

  

  “How’s Pauline?” Cornelia said to Isabel Whitaker.

  “Oh, her.” Isabel frowned. Pauline was Isabel’s stepdaughter, a pretty girl, Isabel guessed, of seventeen or eighteen. It was rare for Isabel Whitaker and Pauline Whitaker to occupy the same room at the same time. Days went by without Isabel’s laying eyes on her stepdaughter, although there was evidence of the girl in the house: a light wrap tossed on a divan, a whiff of violet in the air, her daft dog, Monroe, whining at the bedroom door like a forsaken lover. Pauline assumed corporeal form long enough to join her father and stepmother at dinner on Thursday nights and to play croquet on Sunday mornings. Sometimes she materialized when the delivery wagon lumbered up from the wharf. She received regular crates of God knew what. Isabel waited out these appearances with grand indifference, and sooner or later Pauline dissolved again into the background of Isabel’s life as the wife of the most powerful man in this tropical…country, she guessed.

  “Pauline’s gone to New Orleans,” Isabel said to Cornelia. “School is starting. You know what pisses me? That girl has an allowance and a trust fund and spends most of the year in the States with people, and Walter won’t even send me to New York for a week. I’m stuck here on this damned barstool. Stuck, Connie. This is not how my life is supposed to be.”

  “Well,” Cornelia said half-heartedly. “We’re glad to have you.”

  

  There is a quaint old theory that man may have two souls, Porter wrote, a peripheral one which serves ordinarily, and a central one which is stirred only at certain times, but then with activity and vigor. While under the domination of the former, a man will shave, vote, pay taxes, give money to his family, buy subscription books and comport himself on the average plan. But let the central soul become dominant, and he may, in the twinkling of an eye, turn upon the partner of his joys with furious execration; he may change his politics while you snap your fingers; he may deal out deadly insult to his dearest friend; he may get him to a monastery or a dance hall; he may elope, or hang himself—or he may write a song or poem, or kiss his wife unasked, or give his funds in the search of a microbe. Then the peripheral soul will return; and we have our safe, sane citizen again. It is the revolt of the Ego against Order; and its effect is to shake up the atoms only that they may settle where they belong.

  Porter could trace the genesis of those words to the exact moment of his exile, a moment when he was transfigured from a small-potatoes printer and bonded loan officer—who had borrowed, more or less permanently, sums of money to keep the creaking little ship of his printing business afloat after a losing streak in the back of Morley’s saloon—to a man who, he was surprised to learn, had both pride and principles worth protecting. It was the moment when a boy from the consulate—or Vesuvius Fruit; it was not clear to him that there was a difference—had delivered a one-line message handwritten on onionskin demanding his attendance at the residence of Mr. Walter Whitaker at five p.m., and he had felt the chill breath of Fate on his neck.

  

  On the narrow street directly behind the Hotel de Los Estranjeros stood a hole-in-the-wall shop. With the shutters removed, it had no front wall and therefore no front door. Green flies swarmed in an idiotic knot around a curl of flypaper hanging in the entrance.

  Porter stepped from street to shop. Inside were the rudiments of tonsorial practice: an ancient barber’s chair; a bucket of scummy water; a shelf holding talc in a can; a razor and a dish for shaving soap; a splayed badger-hair brush, scissors, a comb, bay rum in a bottle, and a little brass service bell. A leather strop hung from a nail on the wall, next to a striped apron and a cotton sheet in the late stages of decomposition.

  Porter picked up the bell and rang it. He put it back beside the soap dish and seated himself in the barber’s chair, which reeked with the sweat of a thousand men, and leaned back so that he was looking at a ceiling covered with a black rash of mildew. An insect the size of a mouse crawled along the edge.

  He heard a light shuffling, the jingle of metal on metal—keys!—and shot bolt upright. Slouching in from the street, a split mango in one hand, was the red rawboned figure of Pierre. The Cajun met his surprise with insolent eyes. “Can I he’p you?”

  “I need a shave.”

  A mule-cart clattered past the shop. The driver said something in Spanish, and Pierre stepped out and hurled the mango after him, shouting, “Que te den por culo, gamberro!”

  Porter called out, “I’m waiting for the barber.”

  “Wait no more.” Pierre sidled back into the shop, wiping his mouth, and plucked the leather strop from its nail. He picked up one of the straight razors and started slapping the blade against the leather, regular as a ticking clock.

  “You’re the barber.”

  “Den’ist, too.”

  “But—.”

  “Could prob’ly do a li’l vet’inary.”

  Pierre put on the striped apron. It hung like a sail on a windless day. He picked up the soap dish and began beating a froth with the badger-hair brush. “Now you jest lean back, Mr.—”

  “Porter!”

  “You say so, sure.” Pierre put his mango-sticky palm flat on Porter’s forehead and pushed him back against the headrest. Humming a swampy tune, Pierre whipped the dirty sheet from its nail and draped it over him, tucking it at the collar, not quite as careful as a butcher preparing to slice bacon. The cloth was littered with whiskers and hair clippings.

  Porter decided not to mention that he needed his nails trimmed.

  “I hear you fixin’ to give us a news-sheet,” Pierre said, leaning over him while he beat the soap again with the brush.

  All Porter could see were the dark blood-like stains on the striped apron and the clump of keys swinging like a hoodoo charm on the leather thong around Pierre’s fire-red neck. “That’s right,” he managed. “As soon as I can gather the material.”

  “I might feed you some tidbits and such. Man’ll say a lotta things in the chair, specially these bank-wreckers. Not bein’ legi’mate criminals, they figger to talk. Brown, Odendahl, Leblanc. Even ol’ Ed Burke, the state treasure’ there in Baton Rouge. They ain’t got nothin’ to do ’round here but finger the loot and drink guaro and chinwag. Y’ever hear of a cig’ret snail?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “They say if it sting you, you have jest ’nough time to smoke a cig’ret before you die. You could put that in your newspaper.”

  Pierre clenched the razor between his teeth and, touching Porter’s chin and throat with his fingertips, began spreading lather. “This won’t take but a minute,” he said around the razor. “Long as you don’t fight it.”

  

  For some reason, Porter had expected an obsequious wizened servant in livery to answer his knock, but instead a tidy fellow of forty—an American with black eyes and a mustache like a segment of yarn—escorted him, Stetson in hand, to a gallery at the back of the house. A clock tinkled in the distance, and then chimed five times. He heard a woman’s scolding voice in the distance.

  The gallery of Walter Whitaker’s house was equipped with rattan couches and chairs upholstered with yellow damask and jaguar skin. There was a pool table made of mahogany and rosewood, with brass ornamentation. Porter thought it might be a Great Northern, although he had never actually seen one. A painted mural depicted banana-laden natives welcoming a spanking-clean ship on a glassy harbor at dawn. An army of snarling jade deities, no doubt ransacked from the local ruins, stood on side tables and consoles with elaborate scrollwork. Slatted wooden shades partially masked the windows and French doors. A brass telescope on a tripod stood by one of the windows. On the floor sprawled forty acres of silk carpet of Turkish
design.

  Across the carpet someone Porter assumed was Walter Whitaker turned now from the open French doors. The tidy fellow with the thin mustache withdrew without having said a word.

  Whitaker wore a buttermilk-colored linen suit and a striped shirt with no collar or necktie. His shoes were polished as only a servant could polish them. He was a colorless sandy-haired fellow with a misshapen jaw and a bristling mustache, which did little to improve his face. There was nothing interesting or memorable about the president of Vesuvius Fruit apart from the cold arrogance of his blue eyes. Porter had never been the object of such an intense stare. In Whitaker’s eyes, men were crushed by the realization of their own insignificance. Porter resisted the urge to smooth his hair. He was glad he had had a shave.

  A pitcher of lemonade and two glasses had been set on a gunmetal tabouret by the French doors. Chunks of ice floated in the lemonade. He wondered by what means that small frozen miracle had been purchased. Whitaker picked up the pitcher and one of the glasses and poured a drink. He put the pitcher back on the tray, taking his time, and raised the glass to his lips. He did not offer his guest a drink, nor did he invite Porter to sit on one of the rattan chairs. Instead, Whitaker turned his back and looked out the window.

  Porter drifted over and stood beside him. They looked out across the manicured lawn, past the gazebo, to three goddesses on plinths; a peacock in full display; a Moroccan fountain with indigo-tinted water; beds of lavender, chamomile, and hyssop edged with furbelows of asters and marigolds; an Airedale bounding through a privet hedge after a terrified capybara, which was not, Porter remembered, native to the region; men wearing loose shirts and sandals and straw hats with rifles on their backs, patroling the margins of the horse-dotted pastures; three rows of thatched huts against the rim of the jungle, all under a clear knife-bright sky.

  “Do you see that wisp of smoke on the horizon, Mr. Porter?”

  Porter squinted. The clip of Whitaker’s Yankee accent prompted him to put an extra drawl in his voice. “I believe I do,” he said lazily.

  “That is the village of San Antonio, where a crew of two-thousand well-muscled Negroes, supervised by my trusted aide—McCoy; you’ve met him; he let you into the house just now—is tearing a path through the jungle for my railroad to the new Canal. Go another forty miles, and you will still be on property conceded by the government to Vesuvius Fruit Company. My company, Mr. Porter. My property. My bananas, my coffee beans, my durable goods, down to the very last tortoise shell.”

  “Extensive,” Porter said.

  “You’re damned right,” Whitaker said. “I point this out so that you will understand the scope of my position in this country: nothing—nothing—happens in Coralio without my say-so. Nothing happens on this coast for a hundred miles, good weather or foul. A trading post is built, land is cleared, a dam is constructed because I say it will be. As long as your interests coincide with mine, we are a happy community. If they do not, then I dig your grave and fill it with your bloody remains. There is no place here for free-lances. Do you understand?”

  Whitaker turned away from the window. The ice clinked in his glass as he sipped his lemonade.

  “You are a model of clarity, sir.” Porter ducked his chin. Still drawling: “I’ll consider the coincidence of our interests in all things.”

  “Good. You won’t publish this gazette I’ve been hearing about.”

  “Well,” said Porter.

  Whitaker’s eyes bored into his. “There is no news in the town of Coralio. That’s the way I want it. I’ll tell you if I change my mind.”

  “Well,” Porter said again. “A man has to make a living.”

  Whitaker looked at him as if he were examining a curious new species of cave-dwelling rodent. “For all I know, back in Texas you were the primary benefactor of the Bug Tussle Home for Cripples and Orphans. A pillar of the community. More likely, since you came here in the stinking hold of a banana boat, you are a worthless slab of mule meat. In either case, you as a person don’t matter to me in the slightest. I have my own worries, most of which require a careful control of information. If you persist in this ill-starred plan to print your own—is it a gazette?”

  “A news weekly, featuring humorous sketches, local notices, and passing observations. Based on my previous experience with Hearst and the Associated Press, I also foresee dispatching notices from here in the tropics.”

  “If you persist in your plan to publish a gazette,” continued Whitaker impatiently, “I will kill you.”

  “You, personally?”

  “Yes.” He took a sip of lemonade.

  Porter fell silent. It was not that he had never been threatened; he had, many times, by suspicious husbands, dancehall dandies, busted card players, commanding officers, and even the father of his dear bride, Athol, who had sworn to flay him if he persisted in gambling with the deacons at All Saints’ Episcopal Church. But no one had ever seemed to mean it. Walter Whitaker, this mid-sized, bent-jawed fellow, who looked as though he had never in his life said anything in whimsy, undoubtedly meant what he said. His bearing was that of a man who delighted in taking wrathful action.

  Porter looked through the open French doors at the imperturbable jungle, the purple clouds banked on distant mountains, and thought that the scene resembled a hand-tinted stereopticon image of imperturbable jungle and distant mountains. So life-like.

  “Did you hear me, Mr. Porter?”

  Porter kept his attention on the landscape.

  “If I have to warn you a second time, I will get out my .38 Colt double-action Army & Navy revolver, given to me by John J. Pershing, and put a bullet through your throat.”

  Porter turned to look at Whitaker. “Those Colts have some cartridge-chambering problems.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  Whitaker produced the weapon from a shoulder-holster. It gleamed in the afternoon light.

  “No qualms?” Porter inquired.

  “None.”

  “I intend to publish.”

  “You wish for death?”

  “Not often, no. Nonetheless.”

  “I will kill you.”

  Whitaker drained his glass and put it on the tabouret. He pointed the revolver at Porter’s forehead and pulled back the hammer with his thumb. It made a sound as loud as a rock dropping into a steel drum.

  “You’re an ungracious host,” Porter said. “And by the way, it was the stinking hold of your banana boat.”

  Whitaker smiled, cold but genuine, and lowered the pistol, his thumb on the hammer. He slipped the gun back inside his coat. “Very good. I was right to peg you as a gambler, Mr. Porter.”

  A rush of relief filled Porter’s body. “Through and through. Name the game and the stakes, and I’m liable to stay until dawn. Fact is, I wouldn’t be at this particular latitude right now if I knew enough to avoid gambling.” He wiped his palms on his trousers and cracked his knuckles.

  “Shall we play?” Whitaker asked. “At least once before you disappear from my life.”

  “Rummy?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “Backgammon?”

  “Billiards, I think.”

  Whitaker went across the expanse of Turkish carpet to his magnificent pool table and selected a cue from the rack on the wall. He eyed its length, pointlessly, since it was a hand-spliced Peradon snooker cue, as true as the day it had left the factory in Liverpool.

  Porter joined him and took down a cue. Ebony butt and a forty-two-inch shaft of kiln-dried ash, a little short for traditional billiards but perfect for anyone who didn’t know better. It felt as familiar in his hand as a scythe in the hand of a barley farmer.

  “Have you played black-ball?” Whitaker inquired. “It’s the rage in the U.K.”

  “Pool’s not up my alley.” Porter turned the cue on his palm. “Especially these new versions.” He met Wh
itaker’s arrogant blue eyes. “What are the stakes?”

  “You can’t afford the stakes I play. We’ll call it a gentlemen’s bet.”

  “Playing with nothing at stake is like hunting pheasants with blanks in the shotgun.” Porter’s drawling reply shaded into a challenge: “Consider what you want from me, sir.”

  Whitaker blinked. He thought for a moment. “Naturally, you will abandon your ill-starred plan.”

  “There you go,” nodded Porter. “Now I wonder what matters to you.”

  “I’ll still kill you if you publish.”

  “Understood.” Porter turned to gaze again through the French doors at the purple shadows lengthening across the neat horse-dotted pastures.

  Ninety minutes later—as the sun sank into a flesh-colored sea and the night insects choired immensely in the trees, the air thick with the smell of frying fish and rotting oranges, parrots yacketing homeward in bickering flocks—Porter, his central soul aroused, descended to town mounted on the handsome bay gelding, Henry.

  

  Isabel had delayed riding down to the hotel until the newcomer had left the house. She wanted to judge what kind of an exit he made. She watched him clip down the hill on Henry and smiled a little sliver of a smile. Any man who could take away something that Walter Whitaker cared about was a man to reckon with, was the kind of man who could produce ways and means if sufficiently motivated. She leaned against the window sill in the evening light and ran her hands up and down her naked body, wondering what his story was.

  

  The scalawags and carpetbaggers had all been driven from Greensboro, North Carolina, by the time William S. Porter was born, so as a young man he had no one to admire but the Ku Klux Klan and no one to despise but, again, the Klan, in the pure manner of the South in defeat. That was no way to grow into manhood. He had made do. He bought dime novels about the Wild West and dime magazines featuring tales of gothic horror. He rode on the roofs of boxcars to the division yards in Raleigh, where he conversed with vagrant veterans of the War Between the States, fallen angels, and ex-slaves who were, as one told him, “too old to work and too damn mad to die.” There was a dentist on East Market Street who had shipped on a whaler out of New Bedford, and, although he was a lackadaisical storyteller for a man who had made a career at sea, he inspired in his young auditor an abiding dissatisfaction with his lot in life. The most interesting men in Greensboro were the gents in shirtsleeves who passed their days in Gantry’s poolroom, chairs tipped back against the rail along the wall, hats pulled low over their eyes, smoking cigars that smelled like cow dung, and discussing in lazy-afternoon tones the likelihood of the Bourbon Democrats defeating the movement for bimetallism or of a comet bringing an end to this blasted world once and for all. They offered odds. He learned what he could of their lingo and lives.