“You’ll have to enlighten me.” Still reading.
“Lice.”
“Then get the hell out of my room.”
“I think I caught them at the barbershop.”
The doctor shot his eyes sideways at him. “My money’s on Isabel. I’ve seen her creeping up the stairs.”
Porter did not wish to engage in this line of conversation. But the doctor had more to say: “You know what she’s after, don’t you? She sees a slick young dude like yourself roll up on the beach, and she figures that maybe she can punch the gold ticket and scheme her way back to New York before her looks are destroyed by the climate.”
“I don’t have any money,” Porter exclaimed, raking his scalp with his fingernails.
“You have brains, and that’s almost as good. You’re young. That’s always attractive. You can find a way.”
“She could reach into Whitaker’s cookie jar and up and leave on any one of these boats.”
“And then what? She can’t go back on stage. She can’t hit a high C to save her life. And it might take time to land a Manhattan moneybags, if anyone would dare cross Walter Whitaker even from a distance of five-thousand miles. Whitaker can make a misery of someone’s life.”
From the distance came the sound of a ship’s siren, and nearer came the shouts of banana workers on the wharf. Life drifting along. He was so involved in scratching that it was almost a minute before Porter realized the quarantine doctor had resumed reading.
“I was hoping you had a bottle of naphthalene in your apothecary,” Porter said and scratched his armpits.
“Nope.”
“Pyrethrum?”
“Don’t know what that is.”
“Mercuric oxide?”
The doctor did not look up. “Why?”
“Because I have lice!”
“Oh, it’s a louse-cure you want.”
“Yes!”
“I don’t recall studying that problem in medical school. Are those substances effective?”
“Where was this medical school?” Porter asked irritably. “The back of some saloon in Pensacola? You spend your days sawing off legs and giving gynecological exams?”
“You mock, and yet you’re the one who apparently hasn’t been living right.”
“All I want is some medicine. I can pay.”
“Bill, I like you, so I’m going to be honest.” Dr. Grieg stopped reading and spat in the Hong Kong spittoon. “I don’t give a shit about every little thing that afflicts folks around here, and even if I did, I can’t do much except slap a body in quarantine.”
“Asclepius in the jungle,” muttered Porter.
“The only doctor you’ve got, I’m afraid.” Dr. Grieg put a thick finger on the bottom of the page and closed the book. Treasure Island, illustrated. “Truth is, nobody knows much about much of anything. With the exception of Harvey and Pasteur, medical science has been stagnant since Galen. But we’re learning. Yessir, every year we’re learning. Heck, we’ve got vaccines now for three or four diseases. Who knows what the future holds?”
Porter got up from the chair. He scratched his crotch.
“By the way,” the doctor said, “I eagerly await your publication date. But you’d better delay until Walter Whitaker’s out of the country. It’s going to be hard to edit your gazette when you’re buried six feet under.”
“Good bye, Doctor.”
“Smallpox,” Dr. Grieg murmured, opening his book. “We have a vaccine for that.”
Porter backed out of the room, leaving the door ajar.
“Rabies, diphtheria. And cholera, if I’m not mistaken. Still no vaccine for stupidity.…”
“He’p you, mister?”
“Where’s Hilario?”
“Who?”
“Hilario. The owner.”
“Of this store?”
“Yes, of this store!”
“I own this store. Name’s Pierre. Hail from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Can I he’p you?”
Porter studied the red-faced Cajun, sans suit and shades, behind the counter. “Give me a half-pint of kerosene and some pyrethrum,” he growled.
“Pyrethrum! What ails you? I got a li’l vet’nary.”
Porter could feel his face tightening. He wished that the store had some customers who could offer moral support. “Well, doctor, what’s your diagnosis? A man asks for kerosene and pyrethrum.”
“If you was a dog, I’d say fleas.” Pierre looked him over. “You don’t look like you got fleas.”
“Lice, you imbecile.”
“Ah, lice. You gotta keep yerself clean. Try some a that pine soap in aisle two.”
Porter stared into Pierre’s mud-colored eyes and saw his own face dimly reflected. It was like looking over the side of a boat into a swamp. “I caught this infernal infestation in your barbershop, you nitwit.”
Pierre rubbed a red hand on his chin. “Barbershops can be like that. Lotta lice.”
“So you admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“That you’re to blame for my getting lice!”
He looked surprised. “It’s nothin’ to do with me. I don’t even know you.”
“It’s your barbershop!”
“Barbershops have a lotta lice. Ever’body knows they’s a public nuisance.” He arranged his face into a crooked half-smile that revealed a canine tooth chipped and stained like an old china cup. “That lot a pyrethrum cost you three dollars Amer’can, Mr.—”
Cornelia Anderson, lounging in the doorway of Porter’s room, cooled herself with a Spanish fan that looked like a peacock’s tail. “The problem ain’t me; it’s the outfield,” she said. “Chicago can’t get no production from McCarthy, and all of a sudden Jimmy Slagle can’t catch a ball if his mama laid it gently in his glove.”
“Maybe your dynamo’s on the fritz,” Porter suggested. He was paying partial attention, standing at the table, setting type in a composing stick. His Underwood had been moved to the floor to clear a space for his California job case with its dozens of neat irregular compartments full of letters and ligatures. He glanced from stick to manuscript page and continued his work.
“McCarthy hit over .300 in ’99,” Porter pointed out. His head was freshly shaven and glistened with kerosene and pyrethrum.
“That was then,” Cornelia scoffed. “All the electromagnetical manipulation in the world can’t fix a bum like him.”
“How do you know he hasn’t been traded? It takes two weeks just to get a box score down here. He could be in Brooklyn by now.”
Cornelia reached into the pocket of her dress and drew out a sheaf of yellow telegrams. “I get the daily wire from that bucket of guts Pierre.”
Porter glanced over at her. “He doesn’t seem like a baseball fan.”
“He’s a fan of cold hard cash, ten cents a shot, is what he is.” She shoved the telegrams back into her pocket. “Anyways, when I crank up the cathode this afternoon, I’m aiming to improve simple on-base percentage. Baby steps.”
“By the way, somebody needs to empty the piss pot.”
“That’s why it stinks in here! For a minute, I thought I smelled Isabel.”
“That’s the kerosene.”
It had been raining for two days, and the dank air amplified every odor.
As he stepped under the dripping eaves of the custom house, Porter shook his umbrella. He tried to fold it, failed, tried again, and gave up and left it outside the door. It looked like a big crumpled bat wing.
The sky was low. Thick yellow ropes of rain smacked on the wharf where the banana crews, their clothes clinging to their bodies, moved as slowly as the damned. Skiffs and bumboats and little cayucos, moved across the rain-obscured lagoon to two ships anchored beyond the reef. Suddenl
y, a popping groan ran along the line of boxcars on the siding. There was a screaming burst of steam, and the train lurched toward the jungle, like a basilisk sliding into its hole.
West of the wharf, between the town and the shoreline, mud-soaked soldiers from the cuartel were digging a trench. The bantam sergeant screamed orders. The soldiers slung shovelfuls of brown glop to the top of the trench, where the rain washed it back. Two barefoot federales in denim trousers and nightshirts were whipping a team of buck-toothed mud-covered mules, trying to get them to drag a sledge loaded with sandbags. A man wearing a hooded poncho and knee-high leather boots watched over the labors. He had a silent authority, an officer’s posture. Porter assumed he was the commandante.
Inside the shed, Elliot Evans sat atop his drafting stool. Rain pounded on the corrugated roof. Wide blades of water came through in several places and clattered into metal tubs.
Porter pulled out his steno pad and pencil. “Why are the men from the garrison digging trenches in the rain?”
“Why do you think?” the customs agent said with an edge of hostility. Porter understood his attitude, given the heat and the hundred-percent humidity.
“It looks like they expect an invasion.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Porter.”
“Brits? Americans?” He flipped back the cover of the steno pad and prepared to write.
Evans ignored him.
“What’s his name—Terencio Flores? I hear he’s raising a regiment of ragtags.”
“Very alliterative. You’re a wordsmith. Don’t you ever read the papers?”
“They lower my spirits,” Porter admitted. “I print stories, but I don’t like to read them. Besides, the news is as stale as bread by the time it gets here.”
“Then you can think whatever you like.”
“Come on, Evans. Just to kill the boredom, huh.”
“I have work to do.”
Porter slapped his steno pad against his palm a couple of times. He watched the customs agent inscribe something in his enormous ledger. Rainwater fell everywhere around his drafting table, hammering in the tubs and gathering in a shallow caldera on the concrete floor, but the fastidious Evans managed to stay as high and dry as a thistle.
“Tell me, if a man ordered you to stop doing something or he would kill you, what would you do? I mean, if a man actually put a pistol to your head and demanded that you stop.”
Evans’s pen scratched to a halt. “I heard about that.” He resumed writing.
“So what would a person like you do? I’m truly curious.”
“My job is to ensure that a fixed percentage of export duties are entailed to repay financial firms that purchased bad British bonds. Doing this discourages the King’s marines from coming ashore whenever they feel like collecting debts for foolishly optimistic investors. I don’t personally handle money. I’m not a bank.”
“How does that shed light on my question?”
The customs agent laid his gold-filigreed fountain pen beside his ledger. He raised his head a degree or two and gave Porter a blank look. “I am not personally involved. British gunboats are not my business. Poor financial plans hatched in the private clubs of London are not my business. You are not my business. I know what my business is. I’m not personally involved.”
Porter eyeballed him. “I suppose you’re necessary, Evans. Though not personally.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Some weather.”
The man who brought the mailbag ashore had skin like parchment, and his eyes were glassy with fever. At the consulate, he vomited black liquid and passed out. Dr. Grieg diagnosed yellow fever. He quarantined the man in Room Four at the hotel, and the next day the man died. Meanwhile, the captain of the ship, a rust-bucket called Misseus, caught wind of what was happening and sailed for Gulfport with only half a cargo before the crew could be detained and the bananas rotted in the hold.
When the consul came to arrange for the body, he brought Porter a letter written on the back of a church program. Porter recognized his wife’s looping, childish handwriting.
August 6, 1905
Dear Wm,
I would send a telegram but I don’t want to spend the money. Am in receipt of your cable of July 9. I have neither the strength nor the desire to uproot myself and Margaret to join you in what must be an indescribable h---. Father is well. My fever reached nearly 104 on Sunday last. Perhaps you can sneak home, for Christmas. As they say down there,
Hasta luego,
Athol Porter
His wife was not a prose stylist. Still and all.
Isabel Eames Whitaker was lost in a fog of nostalgic rapture as she listened to her recent version of Je Veux Vivre. She had debuted as Juliette in 1893, selected by Gounod himself, over the slatternly Nellie Melba, who had never possessed a strong top range. Unfortunately, Gounod had died of a stroke the week before her debut and so had not witnessed her triumph. Her success in Paris led to an engagement at Covent Garden singing Elsa in Lohengrin, and then to a reprise of the role at the Metropolitan. Ah, New York! The Patriarch’s Ball, horse shows, suppers at Delmonico’s, winter nights in the quarters of a succession of Village painters and authors with social consciences. Those were blessed years, made possible by her ability to stretch the tempo from the F to the A natural. The grace notes were sublime.
This particular performance she had recorded only five minutes previous. There had been something wrong with the sun-and-planet gear on the mandrel shaft, but the mechanic from the railyard had fixed it for her, while explaining the process in excruciating detail. Now she sat on the carpet in her bedroom, spraddle-legged, blood-red banana blossoms tucked behind her ears, her clothes puddled on the floor around her, examining her genitalia in a large oval hand mirror on which one minute before had been spread two lines of Dr. Grieg’s Peruvian nose-candy, and feeling the vibratory pleasures of her own voice projected by the scalloped flute of the Edison hand-enameled morning-glory horn. A macaw in the tree outside her window started screaming for attention. It made it hard to hear herself sing.
As the gramophone wound down, she became aware that her husband had entered the room and was looming behind her. She tilted the hand mirror so that she could see him reflected over her left shoulder. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows and his necktie was tucked between the second and third buttons. He looked as calm as a cat about to eat its own vomit.
“Get up,” he said. “It’s time for your bath.”
Isabel adjusted the hand mirror so that it caught the sunlight coming through the window and reflected a quivering bar of rainbow across her husband’s eyes. “Oh, Walter.”
Whitaker moved toward her. “Up.”
“Is this necessary?”
“You are going to bathe.”
He leaned down and thrust his hands under her matted, sweat-moistened armpits, pulling her up in a series of furious jerking motions, while she hammered her heels at his shins and made thrashing animal sounds that she hoped would scare him away but did not. The hand mirror shattered against her dressing table. The banana blossoms flew off and drifted to the carpet. The macaw shrieked in the tree.
Elinora, twisting a tea towel, stood in the doorway. “Sorry, señora, but you really dirty,” she said and crossed herself.
“Get out,” Isabel snarled, jabbing elbows into ribs.
“You such a pretty lady,” Elinora offered.
“Get out of my house, you whore!” She clawed at her husband’s hands, leaving long raw streaks. Then screaming in an operatic register: “Eat shit!”
Whitaker dragged her, writhing and cursing, down the hall. Pauline’s eager Airedale appeared and began leaping on them and barking. Whitaker kicked him aside, but Monroe was not deterred. He tried to lick Isabel’s ankles. He raced down the hallway, knocking the brass planters off their sta
nds, and leaped on an upholstered bench, pouncing on them as Whitaker tried to push Isabel through the doorway to the bathroom. Man, woman, and dog went down in a writhing mass of limbs.
Isabel shot out of the pile, but Whitaker managed to catch her ankle and bring her down, face first onto the decorative floor tiles. Panting, he crawled over and put a knee on her back until he could recover his breath. She cursed and screamed. Her face flamed with anger.
At last, he wrestled her into the bathroom and over the edge of the tub into a froth of soap and scalding water. Grasping her by the back of the neck, Whitaker snatched up a cloth and began to scrub. He stepped into the bathwater, shoes and all, to get a better grip on her shoulders. Then he sat on the porcelain rim and grabbed a handful of auburn hair close to her scalp. “Submit!”
“No!”
“Submit, woman!” he roared, pulling on her hair. “I’m going to scrub you within an inch of your life!”
“You and what army, you damned son of a bitch!”
He shoved her under the surface of the steaming water. Soapy bubbles erupted. She slapped around like a hellacious mermaid.
He yanked her up. The water streamed down her shoulders and breasts.
Isabel gasped and wiped the soap from her stinging eyes. “Oh, daddy!”
With a long moan she settled her buttocks and leaned back, letting Whitaker’s cloth find the sweet spot behind her ears. “A little more right there,” she murmured.
He held her hair bunched in his fist, debating what to do next.
The lagoon was seething with sharks. In every direction fins sliced through the water, circling menacingly, erupting in boiling vortices of teeth, tails, and foam. A ship was anchored in the everlasting haze, but the banana-loading conveyor of stevedores and skiffs was at a standstill. The only boat on the lagoon was a badly caulked dory manned by four unhappy soldiers. Shrieks and pointless gunfire floated across the lagoon to the delighted ears of the crowd on the wharf, none of whom would have been sorry to see a shark lunge out of the water and take a bite out of the boat.
At irregular intervals a soldier tossed a sizzling stick of dynamite into the water. When it exploded, the dynamite sent up bloody, brackish geysers that drenched the soldiers and nearly capsized the dory. Shark carcasses floated on the waves. The crowd on the wharf burst into huzzahs and tossed their hats in the air. The Salcedo Brothers brass band, tuba blatting like a flatulent elephant, trombone jeering, trumpets clashing, kept the crowd stirred up between explosions. It was rare to see so many people gathered in one place—workers, residents, merchants, expatriates, even a clique of tourists representing a Canadian geographical society, who were setting off on a mule ride across the treacherous Cordillera.
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