“Tell me what happened with the doctor that Walter Whitaker shot in Cuba,” Porter said.
“Are you trying to determine your chances or are you writing a story?” Geddie said.
“That was my reporter’s voice,” Porter said.
“Well. There’s nothing much to tell. As I understand it, a doctor, an educated fellow by the name of Rodrigo Bonilla, went out to the provinces near Guayabal to do what he could to improve the lot of the peasants. You know the type of man: admirable but naïve. I don’t know if it was the Spanish or the Americans he was kicking against, but he stirred up considerable discontent among the Vesuvius cane workers. So one Sunday morning, Walter marches into the church in Alquízar during mass and grabs this fellow Bonilla by the collar and hauls him out to the plaza at gunpoint. So I’m told. In front of God, man, and probably a fair number of beasts, he tells Bonilla to lay off or he’ll put a bullet in his head. Of course, the doctor dismisses this threat—who is this fellow who looks like he belongs behind the desk of a Manhattan brokerage house? Bonilla uses the incident as a rallying point, I suppose. A few days later, they found him out in the cane with a hole in his forehead.”
“That doesn’t mean Whitaker did it,” Porter said. “He could have ordered one of his security men. It could have been the federal police.”
“Maybe.” Geddie paused. “Walter’s inclined to carry out his own threats.”
Porter closed his steno pad. “I’ll need to verify before I write it up.”
“It’s a true story, Bill. But it’s old news.”
“So what’s your husband doing in New Orleans?” Porter asked casually, some pessimistic statistical part of himself calculating the days he had left on earth. He pecked at the Underwood. With his unexpected sales to the North American newspapers, he might afford to cease publication of the Stone before Walter Whitaker noticed it. On the other hand, he had told Whitaker, standing on his greeny hilltop with his glass of lemonade and his .38 Army & Navy revolver given to him by John J. Pershing, that he intended to publish. He might have to keep at it just because he had said he would.
Isabel yawned and stretched out on the sheets. She scratched her belly. “Don’t know, don’t care,” she murmured lazily. “I heard that intolerable shitbird Pierre tell Elinora that Walter intended to buy a new president.”
Porter took a swig from a bottle of reposado and kept tapping. Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem. The bell rang, and he hit the carriage return. He noticed that the printers’ ink had stained his fingers the color of concord grapes.
“You use too many words,” commented Isabel.
“How many is that?”
“Every word you write on your pad turns into six on the typewriter. So six times too many. Your style is artificial and didactic.”
“It’s called humor, my dear.”
“You’re not that funny,” Isabel said honestly.
“Maybe not,” Porter allowed. “But I’m not laughable.”
He sneaked a look in her direction. She was perspiring all over his sheets. The sound of soldiers drilling in the street came through the open window. The sound of a vendor selling mangos! papayas! lichas! It began to rain.
He took a pull from the bottle of reposado and frowned. He had not slept with her nor, aside from the incident with the mosquito netting, had he indicated that he wanted to. Why did she keep showing up in his bed without any clothes, a fragrant invitation to explore all manner of nostalgic desires and rules he had not known he cared about?
Perhaps he had simply assumed the inevitability of Isabel, as she, apparently, had assumed the inevitability of him. With her, he felt as though he had committed to a story; as was the case with Walter Whitaker, he wanted to see it through to The End.
For a moment, Porter felt nothing but gravity; then it dawned on him, with a sharp pang of disappointment, that Isabel had no desire for him at all.
Porter had known that Athol Roach was suffering the early stages of tuberculosis, which might have—probably should have—disqualified her as an object of his affections, but there was a rival from New Braunfels, a handsome fellow named Zimplemann who had a sweet tenor voice and a thriving dental practice, so naturally Porter doubled his efforts to win her heart.
He went to the Roach home one spring evening and found Zimplemann having dinner with the family. After dessert, the two men took a walk around the block. Zimplemann suggested that Porter make himself scarce or he would remove his teeth with fist or pliers. Porter was pretty sure he could take him in a fair fight, but he feared that the dentist might resort to chloroform.
Porter realized that he dared not wait to see how things developed with Athol’s health. They eloped.
“Such plans rarely work out,” Buck Geddie observed, drawing on his cigar so that the tip glowed red in the motionless dark air under the spreading ficus. The other men murmured in agreement.
“It’s easy to get caught up when a challenger comes along,” Porter said.
“That’s true.”
The bride wore a dimity frock of delicate rose and an opal on a thin gold chain around her neck. The ceremony in the licensing office was witnessed by two fixers Porter knew from the capitol who happened to be making a pay off at the county offices. The marriage was vigorously challenged by P.G. Roach, father of the bride, who feared the worst about William Porter’s solvency. P.G.’s new son-in-law appeared to earn his money by shooting straight billiards and playing stud poker. Then he lost it wagering on horse races, boxing matches, and cockfights; if he had anything left, he lost it shooting dice.
To P.G.’s chagrin, the law was on the newlyweds’ side, and Zimplemann was sent packing back to New Braunfels.
“We bought a little house on Fourth Street on the easy payment plan. Since Athol wanted to furnish it, I had to cast about for income. My little daughter was on the way. Athol and the old man decided that I needed a steady job.”
“A father-daughter team is not easily resisted,” Buck Geddie remarked.
“That’s how you ended up working in the bank,” Al Jennings guessed.
“On a ten-thousand dollar fidelity bond.”
“A settled life,” said Geddie.
“Death by a thousand cuts,” muttered Dr. Grieg and spat into the dirt.
Porter picked out “A Heart Bowed Down” on his mandolin. “Gentlemen, I was not satisfied with the conditions of my existence. I had ambitions. Literary ones, I’m ashamed to admit.” He tuned his E-string meditatively.
“Go on,” Geddie said.
A radical intellectual by the name of W.C. Brann had been peddling a rag called the Iconoclast around Austin for a couple of years until he realized that Texas was not fertile ground for raising social consciousness and decided to sell his operation lock, stock, and barrel. Porter discovered $250 lying around in a cash drawer at the bank, and Brann transferred ownership of the paper. A week later he got killed in a street brawl in Waco. The Iconoclast came with its own tramp printer in the friendly form of a man named Dixie Daniels. Porter and his new employee rechristened the paper The Rolling Stone and managed to put together eight pages a week of local color and political reporting.
“I was surprised to discover a talent for composing prose sketches about life in the Southwest. I even sold some stories to the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Tribune. When an Englishman who called himself Henry Harrington-Breeze proposed expanding publication to San Antonio, I fell for it like a goat stumbling into a cistern. He had an accent and a diamond pinky ring. He claimed to have served as a secretary to Charles Dickens. I knew perfectly well that Harry had never in his life read a book, let alone Dickens, but I made the mistake of assuming that the man’s brazenness indicated business acumen.”
“A common error,” interjected Jennings.
“So here you are in paradise,” said Jennings.
“Yep,” said Porter. “Here I am.”
At about the same time that the consul was recommending to Walter Whitaker the tar-and-feathering of an American citizen as an alternative to homicide, it occurred to Porter, in an excess of optimism of the sort experienced by Yukon gold prospectors, that he was going to need more space for his journalistic enterprise. The hotel room was cramped, and the smell of printers’ ink, as sweet as it was, gave him an ache behind the eyes. In Austin he had tenanted a little upstairs office on Congress Avenue, until he blew the rent money wagering on the rodeo. He had to set up shop again in his father-in-law’s carriage house, a humiliation almost as deep as working at the bank. This time, he told himself, everything would be different.
He went downstairs to the bar, empty at this early hour except for Cornelia Anderson, who was checking her liquor supply against a list on a clipboard.
When he asked her where he might find space for his expanding enterprise—space enough for paper stock, composition tables, assembly surfaces, and, of course, the press itself—she suggested the old firehouse. The firehouse had a telephone, should anyone want to call in a hot tip. By “anyone” she did not mean Walter Whitaker or Buck Geddie or Elliot Evans, the men who owned the other phones in town; she meant a party who might crank up the telephone there in the Hotel de los Estranjeros.
“Perfect,” Porter declared. “I’m committing to the long run.”
“Good. There’s entirely too many gamblers in this town.”
“Hopeful men,” Porter submitted. Oh my Lord, he thought, searingly; that one should, as the pilgrim on the road to Mecca knows, know the utter crush of the moment; that one should, when skillfulness fails, find in the abandonment of the self its measure; should outwit failure—mere chance become meaning. That one should believe that. Know that. His eyes clouded, thinking about aces-over-kings full houses.
“Sure, hopeful,” Cornelia said. “But a person has to commit to something regular. Even your pal Jennings kept his gang to robbing on a schedule.”
“Regularize the risk,” Porter supposed.
“That’s the theory. I admire that. That’s the kinda stuff we need.”
“We need more train-robbers?”
“Lord Almighty. Were you born stupid? We need men of destiny, men of vision! How else are we gonna conquer the tropics?”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“It’s inevitable,” she said.
“Destiny,” Porter suggested.
“Exactly.”
“Ordained by God.”
“Pshaw! Ordained by need.”
“For what exactly?”
“Who cares, exactly? What are you, some kinda purist?”
Porter ventured that he was.
She scowled and made a check mark on her inventory list. Suddenly she shouted: “Pierre! Haul your suppurating anus in here.”
Pierre materialized, wearing a battered fireman’s helmet with a long bill at the back and the words Wayside Fire Company emblazoned on the front in red and gold. “I wanna lug all day,” he said, addressing a point on the wall above their heads, “I go backa—”
“Shut up, you miscreant. I want you to take Mr. Porter’s printing gear to the firehouse. He’ll help you carry the printing machine soon as you hop up to Room Five and get him packed. And give Mr. Porter the key to the firehouse.”
And, to Porter’s amazement, Pierre turned on his heel and, without a word or a backward glance, shuffled across the floor and drifted up the stairs, as if reeled by an invisible line.
Having never been astride a motorcycle, Porter was not sure how to behave. Cowboy posture was out. He sat on the camelback fuel tank behind the single seat and flung his arms around Isabel’s waist, a natural reaction to the ungodly roaring of the machine. As the motorcycle shot forward, he clutched her like a bear cub wrapped around a tree, letting fly a long wail and wetting himself. Ordinary manliness was also out.
The red Hendee, its thirteen-cubic-inch engine exhaling a cloud of exhaust, tore down the rutted dirt road out of town. The organdy ribbon around Isabel’s hat whipped in Porter’s face. He clapped a hand on the top of his Stetson. She revved the engine and fishtailed across a muddy creek, flushing a flock of birds which scrambled into the cloudless hot sky. She swerved to miss a dog that had strayed onto the trail but hit it anyway, and they plunged into the jungle, the dog’s howl swallowed in the mechanic roar.
After uncountable minutes of green-blur terror, his head buried in the ripe folds of Isabel’s shirtwaist, he felt her throttle down. They rolled to a stop at the foot of a gigantic mahogany. She killed the engine and pried his fingers off her midriff, and he tumbled onto the spongy undergrowth. A spider the size of his fist scurried across his face.
Isabel dismounted, leaned the cycle against the tree trunk, and stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at him with flashing eyes. “Hell yes! You can drive on the way back.”
Porter pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet, staggering, as wobbly as a foal. His mouth felt like a clay pot. He could feel his hips and knees scraping in their sockets. His ears buzzed with the sound of a thousand angry parrots.
He stamped around for a while, until the world resumed its customary size and shape—massive and tangled, slippery and layered with juicy plantlife in a thousand shades of green. The sky was blotted out by an immense shaggy canopy hung with creepers and stranglers and vines as thick as firehoses. Humongous white flowers sparkled in the dark canopy. The air thrummed with insects. There might have been a snake.
He gasped: “Too much! I’m gonna walk back.”
“We’ll see about that.” Isabel tipped her head and shouted up into the tree: “Donald! Maybelle! Anybody home!”
“Why,” he panted, “are we here?”
She looked at him briefly. “To relieve your frustration, darling, and to bring us closer together.” Then back at the treetops: “Hello! Cyrus! Is anyone home!”
Porter followed her gaze upward and beheld, to his utter amazement, a village in the towering canopy. There were little structures clinging to the branches, laced together with a network of suspended plank walkways. In the tattered vegetal gloom, faces appeared at the windows. Someone was urinating from one of the walkways. The stream rattled through the leaves and splashed on the ground close enough to splatter on his pant leg. A silver mixolydian melody drifted through the greenish dusk. A flute of some kind, Porter guessed, moving away from the splashing piss.
“Donald!” Isabel called, waving wildly.
“Who’s with you?” a voice called.
“This is Bill. He’s on the up and up.”
After a moment, a rope ladder dropped and twisted in front of Porter’s eyes.
“Come on.” Isabel began scrambling up the rope ladder, as agile as a cat. “Welcome to Morning Glory,” she called down.
Porter grabbed the ladder and started after her. He could look straight up her billowing skirts. She was not wearing bloomers.
Morning Glory turned out to be a colony of mind-cure dissidents who had been run out of San Francisco through the combined efforts of the Phelan machine, the Hearst newspaper, and the Theosophical Society. The Theosophists condemned Morning Glory’s unorthodox interest in western
esotericism; the Examiner decided that, along with every resident of Chinatown, the group was reponsible for the bubonic plague outbreak of 1900; and the city government demanded that the dissidents accept vaccination in the interest of the public health or face felony charges. The Morning Glories, mostly Berkeley dropouts or the disaffected offspring of Nob Hill bankers and shipping magnates, rejected secular authority and objected to the invasion of the body by medical practitioners, particularly since the new diphtheria vaccine was delivered by agents of an illegitimate government. Neither they nor their wild-haired underfed children would suffer the needle.
So it was either San Quentin for the men and the work farm for the women or skedaddle. They departed from Frisco on a steamship loaded with farm equipment bound for Puerto Limón, issuing dire prophecies of the city’s inevitable destruction unless the citizens rose up to rid the body politic of corrupt public-health officials and, basically, dismantle the legal structure of California.
Porter gathered that the unvaccinated tribe had wandered around the Isthmus for almost a year before staking a squatters’ claim on the abandoned finca where they had erected their airy redoubt.
Morning Glory was about sixty strong. The men dressed in patched gabardines, like shabby Mennonites, and the women wore denim overalls and gypsy headscarves. They had constructed a village of two-dozen treehouses, each fashioned around the trunk of a mahogany. The treehouses were joined by suspension bridges, along which scurried gaggles of feral freckled children in loin cloths.
Several of the treehouses were filled with flashing masses of parrots beating their bright wings against the barred windows and shrieking with rage. His ears had not been ringing after all. As they emerged onto a large central platform, Porter asked, “What’s the story with the birds?”
“That’s how my friends make their living,” Isabel said.
The colony captured birds in the jungle and sold them to traders for the North American collectors market. The Morning Glories subsisted, apparently, on jungle fruit and canned food which they bought with their parrot profits. Hence, the pyramid of tin cans and rotting garbage on the ground below the kitchen. Flat gray mushrooms were scattered like warts across the trash heap.
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