Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  “Are you a religious man, Bill?

  “I used to be,” Porter said. “But I got over it.”

  “Everybody tries to at least once,” Geddie said. He stood up and shouted at the rear of the consulate: “Pierre! Get your indolent butt moving and bring us another chair.”

  “Piece o’ trash,” Dr. Grieg growled.

  “Jackanapes,” Jennings muttered.

  Geddie sat down again with a small oomph of pain.

  “You need something more from me?” inquired the doctor, peering at the consul through his steel-rimmed spectacles.

  “Right now the only thing I need from you, Herman, is your sugar-coated tonsils. Let’s do some singing.”

  “Call it,” said Porter. He held his mandolin up to his ear and twisted a tuning peg.

  Pierre sidled across the lawn, his white Stetson pushed back at a rakish, mocking angle, and placed a chair under the spreading ficus. “Throne for a king,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Get out of here,” Geddie said. The other men muttered.

  Pierre slid back into the darkness.

  Porter settled on the chair and rested the mandolin on his knee. The monkey, Sybil, abandoned her unopened beer bottle and reached up for the consul’s unfastened suspender. She began swinging and talking to him in her wild language. A nightjar called like a lost child from the branches of the ficus.

  The men passed a moment in silence, pondering Porter knew not what.

  The consul produced a box of matches. He struck one, leaving a phosphorescent arc in the shadowed air. Sybil shrieked, let go of the consul’s suspender, and bolted into the night. The consul lit his stogie, drawing on it with a smacking noise until the ember glowed.

  Porter leaned forward and helped himself to a bottle of beer from the galvanized tub. “This ice surprises me,” he said.

  “Everybody in town steals from the Vesuvius plant,” Geddie explained. “It’s one way to keep the population content, I guess. Let them think, with gleams of guile and larcenous raptures, that they’re stealing from their masters. Speaking of masters, I understand that Walter Whitaker intends to kill you.”

  “There are conditions,” Porter said.

  “Naturally,” said the consul. “You seem like a decent fellow. I’d hate to send you back to New Orleans on this here ice.”

  “Well, yeah.” Porter pulled the cork out with his teeth and took a gulp. “Whoa!” It was thick and cold and acrid, terrible and strong, with an odor like raw wool.

  “Squeeze some lime juice in it,” Dr. Grieg said helpfully. “It’ll kill the skunkiness.” He produced a fruit and cut into it with a pocket knife and passed a quarter of lime to Porter, who squeezed the juice into the bottle. The sharp odor of citrus bit into his nostrils. He took a swallow of beer. It tasted like raw wool and lime juice.

  

  They had a run at “Daisy Bell.”

  “Sounded pretty good, didn’t it, gentlemen?”

  Then they tried “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” but could not settle on a key.

  Geddie had stuck his smoldering cigar between the strings at the guitar head. Now he retrieved it and took a puff.

  “This century is ours to make, gentleman,” he said, apparently continuing a conversation he and the other two had been carrying on for some time. “I’m not confident that we are worthy.”

  “If by we you mean those assembled here,” said Jennings, “then I reject your initial assertion, and point out that your superficial commentary is prima facie the case.” He looked sadly at the consul.

  “I’m merely opening another avenue for discussion.”

  “You’re referring to the greater American we,” the train-robber clarified. “‘We the People.’ We ‘the homeless, the tempest-tost’ washed up and reconstituted on the North American continent.”

  “Again, a point for discussion.”

  “Say what you mean, man.”

  The glowing tip of the consul’s cigar traced the contour of his thought in the darkness under the ficus tree:

  “If Walter Whitaker gets his railroad connected to the Canal, he opens up the Pacific market. The problem is this president, Flores, isn’t inclined to give him his concessions, and neither, for instance, is the government of Panama. Flores wants an import duty of a penny on every pound of wood and steel needed to extend the tracks and on every unit of rolling stock. That guts Whitaker’s profits. Whitaker wants every last dang dollar for himself, but every dollar that goes into the Vesuvius coffers frays the social fabric. Soon enough Whitaker and his kind end up as citizens of nowhere, not here, not New York nor New Orleans nor Washington, D.C. They own everything but a place in society.”

  “Getting control of the railroad is not a foregone conclusion,” Jennings said. “Whitaker’s blasting through the jungle like it’s legal. Flores is surely going to put a stop to it.”

  “Walter will get his charters if he has to rig up a whole new government before the first shipments leave for San Diego.”

  “There aren’t a lot of banana-eaters in San Diego,” Dr. Grieg remarked.

  “There will be,” Geddie insisted. “It’s the history of the future, a future that belongs to the fruit companies of the world, in all their manifestations. Our grand experiment in democracy will fizzle and new monarchs arise, men like Walter Whitaker—women, too, no doubt. Plaster faces in the photogravure sections of the Sunday supplements, godless, avaricious, pointless, willfully ignorant, the rulers of vast kingdoms of shadows and smoke. In the end, they will escape the human form altogether.”

  “California.…”

  “No, no! Not downtowns and museums and avocado groves. Not territory! Kingdoms of transactions. Territories beyond the unguarded frontiers of capital deployment, beyond the reach of military might or diplomatic finagling.”

  “But with gunboats in the harbors,” murmured Dr. Grieg.

  “Well, of course,” Geddie said. “It takes too long to kill your enemies with profits. These are impatient men. We, by which I now mean the goverment of the United States, are happy to provide the mercenaries in the guise of manifest destiny. T.R. might be busting the trusts back home, but the rest of the hemisphere runs on the monopoly principle.”

  “That seems contradictory,” Porter said, feeling a little simple.

  “Nobody ever got elected on the all-sense platform.”

  “True,” Porter conceded. “I thought the railroad already belonged to Vesuvius.”

  “As I said, it will. Most of it already does. Everything belongs to those who have the power to rearrange reality.”

  “That’s disheartening,” Porter said.

  “My apologies,” said the consul. “Maybe it’s time for me to go back to Washington. The Potomac in summer is a thing of wonder.”

  The men lapsed into deep silence, thinking of home.

  “The palest green of a prairie morn,” whispered Jennings.

  “Mobile Bay at sunset.”

  “Nights when there’s ice on the windows and you hold your loved one in your arms.”

  “Mmm.”

  The four men embarked on a silent sentimental journey.

  After a while, Dr. Grieg said: “Let’s sing.”

  The consul tossed his cigar into the night, settled his guitar on his knee, and began picking out a familiar tune. Porter stroked the strings of the mandolin.

  On the edge of the circle, Pierre appeared with an accordion strapped on his chest. He began to play a beautiful counterpoint as the men joined their voices in barbershop harmony:

  Oh, give me a home

  Where the buffalo roam

  And the deer and the antelope play,

  Where seldom is heard

  A discouraging word

  And the skies are not cloudy all day.

  (With gusto) Home, ho
me on the range!…

  The night settled thickly on the sleepy town of Coralio. In the distance, a locomotive released a long chuff of steam. Then the lonesome call of the whistle and an answering wail from a newly arrived freighter. The fishermen’s fire died down, and the women could be heard summoning children. A rooster crowed. Someone fired a gun, and someone fired back. Señor Gerardo locked the front door of the schoolhouse and stumbled along the narrow street beside the hotel, where Isabel Whitaker, taking a break from her duties at the bar, leaned from an upstairs window and breathed deeply of the smoke-smudged air. Her ear caught the sweet strains of four-part harmony. With an operatic sigh, she ripped open her shirtwaist to expose her breasts to the moonlight.

  A mule cart rattled by; the driver softly cursed the sour beast. A sparse constellation of gas lamps dotted the plaza and the wharf, and from the farther quarters dim orange lights glowed in the windows. At the New Century, the crew from the tramp fruiter Cormorant, just come ashore, drank aguardiente with some eager women they had met and ate green mango pie and beef-and-potato stew, which was actually armadillo and yuca cooked in a sluice of garlic for two days until it tasted like anything. Two federal soldiers on patrol in the Calle Lempira had stumbled across a Carib who was denouncing Vesuvius Fruit Company outside the dockworkers’ dancehall. Now they were beating him to death with the butts of their Martini-Henry rifles.

  

  He did not notice her under the folds of the mosquito netting.

  He closed the door and in the thin white light filtering through the moonshadowed curtains found the valve of the gas lamp on the wall. He turned the key, and the room leaped into low relief, the flickering gas flame casting shadows in new places each moment, but still he did not see her.

  He crossed to his writing table and laid his Stetson next to the typewriter, loosened his four-in-hand and pulled it off with a flourish, shed his coat and vest. He unfastened his shirt and shrugged it off. He hung the garments on the back of the broken cane chair, sat and pulled off his boots and socks. Stood up again, stretching, and unbuttoned his trousers, pulling them down, stepping out, left foot, right foot, and folding them, all in one fluid movement. He unbuttoned his balbriggan drawers, which had needed laundering two days ago, and repeating the previous deft movement, laid them on the seat of the chair, as neat as merchandise.

  He stood naked in the hot room and raised himself on tiptoe. A puff of breeze rattled the shutter. He glanced over as the curtains ballooned inward and deflated without stirring the air in the room one iota. Only then did he notice the pile of careless clothing under the window.

  He took three steps, peered down at a shirtwaist, white stockings, and silky things, and then spun on his heel toward the bed.

  “Jesus God Almighty!”

  The mosquito netting had been drawn to one side. On top of the chenille coverlet, reclining on the pillows piled up against the iron bedstead, was a naked woman. She watched him with bright eyes. In the gaslight, her skin was flushed and shone with a glaze of perspiration. She had a strong figure and a cascade of auburn hair. Dimpled knees. A thin strip of fuzz running from pudenda to navel, like a wavering column of ants. She wiggled her toes and arched her body in a fine long motion. She had a catty odor, like oregano, an unwashed smell he realized he had inhaled when he entered the room.

  “Howdy, cowboy,” the naked woman said and laughed with wicked delight.

  Porter took a step toward the bed. “How did you get in here?”

  “People have keys.” Her voice was full of thrilling modulation, as if she were acting out the content of her speech.

  Porter recovered himself enough to be irked. He had told Cornelia Anderson that he was a married man, although presented with a naked woman at his fingertips almost, he conceded, in the course of a familiar internal argument between raw need and conscience, that he had not used the words happily married, a point worth considering, particularly at this juncture when he became aware that he, too, was stark naked and that his member had sprung to attention like a soldier caught napping. He suddenly could not remember his wife’s name. And what did that mean—people have keys?

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” he finally managed.

  The naked woman looked at his erect penis.

  “I mean,” taking a step back and turning so that, he hoped, he was shrouded in shadow, “you’ve been directed to the wrong location.”

  “Do you have a gramophone?”

  “What?”

  “A gramophone. A phonograph.”

  “Well, no,” Porter said. He could not help glancing around to make sure that he did not have one, even though he knew for a stone fact that he did not.

  “That’s too bad. I made you a recording for the gramophone.” She spread her legs in a flat V on the bed and leaned forward so that her forearms rested on the coverlet. She looked up from under her eyelashes. “What’s that machine?”

  “That’s an Underwood typewriter, almost new.”

  “I mean,” pointing with her chin, “on top of the trunk.”

  “Oh. A Chandler and Price jobber press.”

  “Are you a printer by trade?”

  “I’m a writer by trade, a printer by necessity.”

  “Like Mr. Whitman?”

  He forgot his exposed condition. “You’re a reader.”

  “So! . . .”

  “I like his poetry. ‘I sing the body electric, the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,’” she quoted, arching back against the pillows. She ran her fingertips in tiny circles around her nipples. “‘They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them.’” Her hazel eyes smoldered with reflected gaslight. “‘And discorrupt them,’” her hand exploring the region between her thighs, “‘and charge them full with the charge of the soul.’” She buried her nose in her armpit and breathed deeply.

  Porter’s virile condition was demonstrating remarkable staying power. He wished he could cover up with the washrag, but he did not want to seem inhospitable. He ground his teeth in a tizzy of discomfort and desire. “You’d better go now, ma’am.”

  She stopped rubbing herself and held out her hand, fingertips crimsoned with her own lunar blood, unfolding as slow and delicate as mimosa petals, inviting him under the mosquito net. “Don’t you want to know my name?”

  “At this point, I really do not.”

  “You haven’t told me yours,” she persisted, wiggling her glistening fingers.

  Porter hesitated. He felt sure she knew it already. He said: “Henry.”

  “Really?” she breathed. “My husband has a horse named Henry. A gelding.”

  Which, coming as a kind of electric shock, caused him to ejaculate in an impressive pulsing arc onto the mosquito netting, where the jism hung like a long string of pearls quivering at the bosom of a bride’s tulle gown.

  

  He typed: She had a knowledge of men and motives that seemed to have come by instinct. Far beyond the common woman was she endowed with intrepid rashness, with a love for the pursuit of adventure to the brink of danger, and with desire for the pleasures of life. Her spirit was one to chafe under any curb; she was Eve after the fall, but before the bitterness of it was felt. She wore life as a rose in her bosom.

  Porter pulled the paper out of the machine and read it over twice. He decided it was time to put his drawers back on and go to bed.

  

  If he wanted to know something—anything—about Isabel, all he had to do was ask her. They were at the morning market near the wharf, searching for edible fruit among the stalls of papayas, aguacates, pineapples, and oranges in varying states of decay. The stench, a combination of sweet fruit, garbage, and low tide, made Porter’s head swim. Under every vendor’s stall lay a yellow cur too defeated to shake off the swarms of flies. Roosters crowed without cease. The sun was already a hammer.


  They stopped to look at a cart stacked with melons, dark stripes on pale dirty green. At the top of the pyramid perched a dusty vulture glowering at the passersby. A Carib boy thrashed at the vulture with a piece of rubber hose. The bird spread its bony ragged wings, issued a raspy threat, and settled back onto its perch.

  “How cute!” Isabel cried.

  Porter looked at her. “Where in the world did you come from?”

  One week after Isabel Falkner Eames was born in 1870, her father, Estes Eames, Jr., accepted a position practicing law with Grincher, Butcher, and Wofford in Shanghai. Her mother was descended from Plymouth Puritans and was as straight as a maple rod. She was so shocked by China—which she had seen depicted in the delicate ink drawings that hung in half the sitting rooms in Boston—that she stayed in bed for the next five years, longing for the brutal deep New England winters, until she died of food poisoning after eating an undercooked duck.

  Eames, Jr., and daughter lingered in their bungalow on Bubbling Well Road for another year. Then wee Isabel came down with pneumonia. Everyone expected her to die. One night she appeared to have given up the ghost when Wing, the Chinese butler, a handsome stud of about twenty, applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In later years, Isabel understood this life-saving gesture to have breathed into her a small part of the Chinese soul. At the time, however, Wing’s actions were taken as improper, impertinent, and impudent, and Eames, Jr., had the studly fellow taken into custody, flogged with a bastinado, and sent to a coal mine in Xi’an or somewhere.

  Then they went home.

  When Estes Eames, Jr., returned with Isabel to the family estate outside Portland, he discovered that he did not know the first thing about raising a daughter in modern America, so he shipped the girl to Boston to live with a female cousin-in-law who was instructed to keep her under tight rein. The cousin kept Isabel in check for the next twelve years. Then overnight Isabel bloomed and began exhibiting embarrassing urges, including a desire to disrobe in the presence of the family minister. To distract her, the cousin granted her permission to take voice lessons from Clara Munger and, on occasion, to provide vocal illustrations for the lectures of John Knowles Paine, the first professor of music at Harvard, where Isabel fell in with a crowd of puerile undergraduates who did things like sacrificing black cats on the full moon and posing for group photos dressed as savages. She also studied the Delsarte System with Miss Annie Payson Call. Miss Call taught singers to move each muscle of the body independently in order to achieve “maximal effect with minimal effort,” a phrase which provided Isabel with a motto for stage and for life and made her popular with the horny boys in the undergrad crowd.