Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  A schemer from Ohio or Iowa or somewhere far away from any first-hand experience of aquaculture had, a few months before, established a shark farm in the Coralio lagoon. The schemer, whose name was Djikstra—no one was sure of the spelling—planned to extract and bottle shark oil, a panacea with handsome profit margins in the catalogue-medicine market. Djikstra had also discovered a demand for shark fin, which—who knew?—was a local soup ingredient. He had contracted for forty dozen tiger sharks from a commercial fisherman out of Veracruz and had hired some locals to construct a pen in the lagoon. The workers substituted chicken wire for steel mesh and pocketed the difference in cost. Hiring them was only the first mistake he made. Second, the schemer failed to understand how much food an adult tiger shark required to maintain a calm and healthy disposition. For a while, the sharks survived on the fish guts Djikstra bought for a song from the local fishermen. He supplemented the sharks’ diet with garbage from the hotel and some feral cats and dogs that he managed to trap; but at some point the sharks decided they could not survive on leftovers and tore through the chicken wire. All hell broke loose.

  For reasons no one could fathom, the sharks had remained in the lagoon. Either they could not find their way to open water or they had become habituated to the buckets of garbage, thin as it was, and were reluctant to leave. As long as the waters churned with top predators, not a single Jamaican, Sicilian, or Carib man, woman, or child would set foot in a skiff. Nine boxcars stuffed with 115,000 pounds of Big Mike bananas were stranded on the rail stub, each fat, ripening fruit a Vesuvius Fruit Company asset which would have to be dumped into the ocean if those shit-eating sharks weren’t blown out of the water pronto.

  Porter was getting all this from Alphonso Jennings, the train-robber and only professed Christian he knew in Coralio. It was Porter’s kind of story, perfect for the first issue of his new gazette. Licking the tip of his pencil from time to time, he took notes on his steno pad. He was in clover.

  During a lull in the action, he noticed the figure of Pierre, dressed in overalls and a Greek sailor’s cap, a hundred yards down the beach on the dock of the American consulate. He was using a long gaff to drag a dead shark toward the shore. When he had the shark in shallow water, he jumped off the dock and waded it the last few yards ashore. Pierre pulled the shark up onto the pebbled beach and circled back to the foot of the dock. He slunk along the boards and lunged the gaff at another corpse floating in the gray water.

  It was then that Porter, glancing upslope past another long trench the soldiers had started digging, noticed a visitor in a buttermilk-colored suit pull up in front of the consulate: Walter Whitaker in a smart gig drawn by a fine bay horse.

  Henry.

  Porter’s mouth fell open and stayed that way for some time.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said Jennings. “You look like you’re having a stroke.”

  Whitaker stepped down from the gig. He glared at the lagoon as another charge sent a fountain roaring skyward. He turned abruptly and strode to the veranda, a leather portfolio tucked under his arm. The horse dropped his head and began nibbling on a bush.

  

  Geddie knew—with a knowledge born in that long-ago boxing ring in New Haven and confirmed in Scroll & Key and at a dozen points where their paths had crossed, in Washington, in Cuba, in New York, where Geddie, then a mere lawyer, had sat at the table in Hastings House on Madison Square while the banana men hammered out their spheres of influence—that Walter Whitaker would not have descended for anyone else. When he required a conversation with anyone but Geddie, he sent a written command to appear on the hilltop.

  When Whitaker slammed into the parlor, the consul was reading the New York World and drinking a late coffee while he watched over little Sybil, who had had a fainting spell and was now stretched out on the sofa, clutching the brown vial of smelling salts and staring beatifically at the ceiling, as if she could see a band of angels coming to take her home.

  “You’re still keeping that creature,” Whitaker said by way of greeting.

  He pulled off his riding gloves and began pacing around the room.

  “You’re still keeping yours,” responded the consul.

  Whitaker laughed, short and mirthful, and his habitual glare died down for a moment. “My railroad mechanic is helping her tune up her motorcycle. I don’t have the slightest idea how the machine works and I have no desire to ride it, but it keeps her occupied. She gets bored, rather like my daughter, I’m afraid. All my life, I’ve been cursed with bored women. With bored people.”

  “You could go back to New York,” Geddie said. “There’s more to occupy a person’s time.”

  Whitaker snorted. “I live here so I have don’t have to live there.”

  A muffled boom rattled the windows and shook the glassware on the mantel. The roar of the crowd came from the wharf, and the band struck up a lively polka.

  “I suppose you’re here about the sharks.”

  “This is why I need a concession to build out a pier beyond the reef.” Whitaker glared at nothing in particular, at the situation. The tendons of his freckled neck were taut with anger. “I’ve got a trainload of fruit rotting on the tracks.”

  “You didn’t devise this spectacle?”

  Whitaker dismissed the notion with a frown. “Not my method. You know better.”

  Indeed, it was not Whitaker’s method. In a fight, his modus operandi was to feint with the left, deliver with a right hook to the gut; he would never kick sand in his opponent’s eyes. He had imported boa constrictors to the Cuban cane fields in the belief that terrifying the trabajadores would keep them sober on the job. The sharks, however, served no immediate purpose that Geddie could see. If Whitaker had anything to do with their breaking free, it would have been as a diversion, not as a tactic in his crusade for a pier. He told you what he intended to do and then shocked you with how violently and thoroughly he did it. He was effective, but in Geddie’s view he lacked imagination.

  “It will take more than tiger sharks to get a concession for your pier,” Geddie said, though he knew it was a moot point.

  Whitaker stared at him. “Fools like Djikstra evaporate in this tropical air. It’s that other man, that William Porter, I’m concerned with. I want him gone.”

  A muffled explosion shook the house. Cheers, brass band, useless gunfire. A motorcycle roared down the Calle Grande. Geddie cocked an eyebrow at Whitaker.

  “I’m not sure what you expect me to do, Walter.”

  “He’s an American citizen, isn’t he?”

  “Which means nothing unless he sets foot in this building. There’s no extradition. I needn’t explain the finer points of treaty law to you. Which, by the way, brings up a rumor that’s been floated lately. To wit, that Vesuvius is at loggerheads with Francisco Flores over this equipment levy. Some of these jingoes around here are suggesting that a new man, say Terencio Flores, might be more amenable to the expansion of foreign interests, business and otherwise. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Loggerheads? No. I paid honest money to buy Francisco; now he’s refusing to stay bought.”

  “You understand that sponsoring a revolution—”

  “Revolution! Good God, Buck, I’m not a bloody peasant.”

  “Okay, then, a coup.”

  Whitaker snorted.

  “It would violate the Neutrality Act. Again. Philander Knox wouldn’t allow you back in the States without an act of Congress. He’ll protect you as long as you play pretty, but you can’t destabilize the Isthmus.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do! I’m a goddamned American—”

  “You are.”

  “—and I’m sailing for New Orleans, as soon as the Lempira is loaded.”

  An explosion sounded across the lagoon, followed by the holiday jeering, brass band, random gunfire. Whitaker paid it no mind. He paced around the room, slapping
his riding gloves against his leather portfolio. Geddie could not recall seeing him so agitated.

  “When I come back, I want that imbecile gone. Cut off his funds, starve him out. How does the man sustain himself?”

  “I think that’s what this newspaper business is all about.”

  “Pshaw!”

  “Meanwhile, he’s been taking bets. In fact, Porter took me for five dollars wagering on baseball,” Geddie said. “Told me he was trying to give up gambling. Obviously, he has not been successful.”

  Whitaker’s jaw clenched. “Billiards. He cost me Henry playing black-ball. I had to pay three-hundred dollars to get my own horse back from that fig-headed Pierre.”

  “Scoundrel,” Geddie growled.

  “What’s he doing out on your dock with that gaff?”

  “I don’t want to know. In any case, Walter, you can’t go around threatening to kill people, not if you intend to maintain a reputation for good business governance.”

  “I told the man what would happen if he published.”

  “I know you did,” Geddie sighed. “Can’t you just send your hooligans to smash up the press and tar-and-feather the poor bastard?”

  “When I tell a man to do something, I expect him to do it. I don’t resort to mere mayhem. I believe we’ve established that.”

  “He’s ambitious.”

  “Pshaw! He’s perverse is what he is.”

  “You’re going to have to let this one slide, Walter.”

  “He will be shot,” Whitaker stated with vatic certainty. He smacked his hand against the leather portfolio, as if his proclamation were written therein.

  The consul hauled himself up from his chair with a groan. “It’s time for my siesta.”

  “Still dying?” inquired Whitaker.

  “Every day.” He was about to quote Seneca on the brevity of life—how many steps for how short a climb, et cetera—but Whitaker was already slamming out the door. It was wasted on him anyway; he had, as Geddie recalled, failed Junior Rhetoric.

  There were times when the consul questioned the minor practices on which he had constructed his life. For instance, why coffee before his nap? Why pass scuttlebutt to the subject of scuttlebutt? What compelled him? Some mornings, when he looked out his bedroom window and saw the same bald sun burning through the sheets of haze or the same implacable rain chewing away at the palms and the spiny ceiba trees, smelled the rank smell of low tide and kerosene stoves, heard the tick-tick of the rain in the gutters and the clock on the wall, he quaked with terror at the telescoping of his existence into the intervals between needles and the care of the little monkey on the fainting sofa—the only things that made his life bearable.

  

  The typewriter keys clacked in a steady rhythm:

  For there are yet tales of the Spanish Main. That segment of continent washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance. Taken and retaken by sea rovers, by adverse powers and by sudden uprising of rebellious factions, the adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master.

  The game still goes on. Comes the small adventurer, with empty pockets to fill, light of heart, busy-brained. There is a little tale to tell of many things, shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbage-palms and presidents instead of kings. Add to these a little love and counterplotting and scatter everywhere through the maze a trail of tropical dollars—dollars warmed no more by the torrid sun than by the hot palms of the scouts of Fortune—and, after all, here seems to be Life itself, with talk enough to weary the most garrulous.

  As per usual, Porter was not sure what he was driving at, but he was excited to find out.

  

  Isabel Whitaker sat cross-legged on Porter’s sweat-dampened sheets, sculpting her pubic hair with a pair of miniature pruning shears. She informed him, in her offhand way, that Walter Whitaker had sailed on the Lempira.

  The next morning Porter rushed the first issue of The Rolling Stone to press. The timing was not entirely the result of this attenuation of Whitaker’s murderous threats, but Porter could see that the odds of his survival had swung heavily in his favor. By the time Whitaker returned, Porter reasoned, a new organ of civic discourse would have been established, with no harm to the community or its chief executive.

  As he peeled the pages off the press, the smell of fresh ink and lignin, like cherries in the rain, intoxicated him. This, this was how one transformed oneself into an admirable sort of entrepreneur who provided for himself and his loved ones and did something good for the community. He felt buoyant.

  He printed an initial broadsheet edition of five hundred, four pages per. Cornelia allowed him to set up a newsstand at the end of the bar, and he hired a couple of urchins to pedal around on their decrepit bicycles and hawk the sheets at a nickel apiece to anyone who could read English. It sold out before supper.

  As he sat in the hotel dining room over pastelito de carne, he was gratified to know that his instincts had been right. People were hungry for stories of things they already knew about or felt they should know about, stories of the places where they lived and the people they lived with. Gossip inscribed and commodified.

  The pastelito was superb, but he did not send his compliments to Pierre. He might start taking liberties.

  By the time he sold out the second issue of seven hundred, Porter had a cadre of stringers, a.k.a. readers, flocking to him with tips, notices, incidents, sightings, schedules, crimes, and stories of human desire. Everywhere he went someone sidled up with a tale about a British naval officer thrashing some filibuster from Brooklyn. He knew which Castilian Coralians beat their mozos and which Florida land-swindlers had lost their ill-gotten gains in a salvage scheme in the bay isles. He was made privy to the nooks and crannies of secret need, the smugglers’ nests, opium holes, cockfighting pits, and part-time houses of prostitution. He had evidence of murder and corruption at the garrison. The gentleman recently arrived from Seattle was a Methodist minister with sticky fingers, while Father Michael was not a priest but a former carnival barker and trust-deed swindler who had suddenly discovered the sacerdotal value of an Irish brogue when he washed ashore, clinging to a plank from a shipwrecked private yacht whose captain had had a mysterious heart attack. Readers crept to Porter’s room when he was out and slipped under the door all manner of slander in the guise of big scoops. Austin, Texas, had been big enough so that when Porter promulgated an amusing anecdote, the mass of secret knowledge was dispersed throughout the population; Coralio concentrated it.

  He tossed and turned in the muggy night, mosquitoes whining demonically around the gauze canopy, weighted with the terrible responsibility of revealing people to themselves.

  The periodicals that found their way to Coralio from New York, New Orleans, and Tampa were full of stale reports and were good for nothing but wrapping up fish guts or wiping the horseshit off boots. In the New York Tribune he read: President Roosevelt went down in the submarine boat Plunger this afternoon, while a strong northeast wind kicked up a nasty sea, and sent the whitecaps rolling high over Oyster Bay. He was under water fifty minutes and, according to one of the sailors, he was “tickled to death with everything.”

  That, Porter thought, was the kind of pointless filler that could have been written by a machine with a mechanical pencil.

  The Rolling Stone, on the other hand, provided access to matters of immediate importance, such as the notice boards and shipping news. He had to admit, however, that people were more interested in the human angle. He wrote a piece about a maltreated lawyer turned robber, assembled from bits and pieces of Al Jennings’s biography, which Porter had gathered in the foggy guaro dissipation of rosy gaslit nights at the hotel bar. The public loved it.

  Inspired by the multitude of rogues hidin
g in the jungle in plain sight, he tossed off a tale of a swindler with a heart of gold, and then a sentimental valentine about womanhood in foreign lands. Although the swindler with the heart of gold criticized the piece on certain points of fact regarding the salting of mines in New Mexico, Porter’s little tales struck a thrilling chord in the crowd of reprobates that hung around the hotel. By the third issue, he foresaw the need to resupply his stock of newsprint. He wired $80 to Berlin, New Hampshire, for three and a half tons of twenty-two-inch paper, express shipped.

  

  One evening over beer and song behind the consulate, Buck Geddie repeated his warning that the glow of reading about oneself in the newspapers was likely to fade in a hurry. Porter agreed that this might be the case; but he had to pursue the project. The pressure of untold secrets would compromise his health and wellbeing. He had no doubt. And he had to find out if Walter Whitaker was capable of following through on his threat. He was curious, is what he was, and his dander was up. Geddie just shook his head.

  Porter went to the telegraph office at Hilario’s to cable every name on every masthead he could think of. Within a fortnight, he had sold four true-to-fact stories, two to the Picayune, one to the Herald, and the last to the Saturday Evening Post, which, as he had always suspected, would buy anything.

  The Associate Press took him on. He was now a foreign correspondent. Steel workers in Cleveland and housewives in Poughkeepsie, small-town tailors and up-and-coming business types were slavering for entertaining tales of the tropics. William S. Porter was becoming a household name.