Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  When he had recovered from the motorcycle ride, Porter was able to admire the Morning Glories’ carpentry skills. The treehouses had been assembled without nails, each plank hand hewn, each joint neatly dovetailed. Unfortunately, climate and termites had already eroded a good deal of the wood. The window frames were crumbling. Collapse seemed inevitable.

  In the main parlor, he and Isabel were invited to take off their shoes and sit on cushions stuffed with shredded palm fronds. A translucent woman with colorless eyes was plucking a lute. Suspended from the ceiling by a ribbon, a large prism cast slowly swirling rainbows on the walls. They were surrounded by the shrieks of upset parrots.

  Isabel was welcomed like an old friend. The Morning Glories wrapped her in a warm collective hug and settled as a single mass onto the cushions on the floor. Their leader, Donald, was of imprecise middle age, with hair like a beaver pelt, meaty moist lips, and the wild eyes of an eremite.

  Isabel looked around. “Where’s Maybelle?”

  “Oh, my,” Donald said. “Passed on to a higher plane. Yellow fever. We had to shut her in her room for safety.”

  Isabel gasped and covered her mouth.

  “No mourning,” soothed Donald. “She’s been released. You know?”

  A murmur ran through the throng of Morning Glories.

  Porter wondered if the quarantine doctor ought to have a look around.

  The sun was going down, and the room grew shadowy.

  “Donald,” Isabel said in a serious voice. The light of the setting sun pierced through an opening in the trees and, slicing through an open window, colored her face a fiery copper. “We’ve come for the glory.”

  What followed was an elastic sequence of crescendos and silhouettes that began with the grinding of seeds of the Convolvulaceae family in a stone mortar and evolved into the measuring of black pepper, condensed milk, seed-powder, and guaro into gourds. Donald told him the beverage was called ololiuqui, and they consumed it in gut-wrenching gulps. Donald read from a mildewed book that was missing its back cover: “Every force, every quality or power of the Universe, has its center, its cycle, and its seasons. It is necessary to put oneself in harmony with this universal regime if one does not wish to succumb. In human life, every fact or event is the result of cause and rules, governing the world for endless time.”

  Porter swayed.

  Then there was flushing, vomiting, groaning, and a long strange night of ciphers and lacunae. It started to rain. It seemed there was an ice pick chipping at his skull. Claps of thunder crashed through his body, and lightning split his consciousness like an ax cleaving a birthday cake. The freckled children came to torment him with accusatory silence, and he could feel Donald’s scaly hands searching through his pockets. At one point, he discovered himself playing the lute. He had not known that he could play the lute. He tore the music out of himself in thin silvery strips and fed them to the birds. His eyes rolled back until he was looking inside his head, a wonderland of words copulating, reproducing, swirling like a dust storm on a west Texas wind. Uh-oh. Here comes Jesus.

  The sun came up, and Porter wept with amazement at the absolute certainty of that event. He looked around the treehouse. Morning Glories were sprawled on the bare floor, snoring promiscuously.

  He understood, perhaps for the first time, that he was a piece of shit on the coattails of the universe, and that it was useless to pretend otherwise and that he had to pretend anyway.

  “I declare,” yawned Isabel. She stretched her arms and shook her tangled auburn hair. “I am a new woman. How are you, darling? Did that send you hurtling toward tomorrow?”

  Porter told her, in all honesty, that he had misplaced his feet.

  

  Butch Higbee, so freshly shaven that talc still dusted his neck, sat reading the Picayune in a joint on Canal Street. It was a respectable place, full of silk-hatted New Orleans businessmen. He was there, for the first time, because he had been invited. On page four, adjacent to an advertisement for Mennen’s Borated Toilet Powder (the very same that dusted his neck), something caught his eye: a story about dynamiting sharks in the lagoon of a tropical town with which he had more than a passing familiarity. It was in that stinking, malarial port that he had joined the military action that deposed the tyrant Terencio Flores and installed Francisco Flores, land-reformer and opera-lover, as president of the two-bit republic. It had been six—no, seven—years ago. He wondered if Cornelia Anderson still ran the hotel. She had been working the front desk at the old Scotsman’s, waiting for an event such as a revolution gone sideways to step in and take over.

  It was old Lusk’s guns that had armed the peasants, but it was, as he recalled, string-ray poison that had dispatched the Scotsman. Higbee was blurry on the details. In fact, he was not sure he wanted them. He had harbored tender feelings for Connie and might have married her if he had not already been thrice married and once divorced. He could imagine retiring someday to the proprietorship of a small hotel-spa, perhaps in a village like Coralio, catering to European tourist yachts; but as things stood, the two remaining Higbee wives, if they could track him down, would have claims on the profits from such a venture. He suspected that he had used up his marriage quota.

  It was not as if he were hiding from his ex-wives. He spent practically every day reading the papers and doing a little Third Ward business in the back of Remy Klock’s saloon. After dark, anyone who asked would be directed to Cook’s, where Higbee maintained a regular stud game. Come to think of it—noticing the byline on the story about the sharks—a slick Texan in a white Stetson had sat in on that game not long ago, during the height of the yellow-fever epidemic (damn Italians), chatting like a rube off the train about how crowded the streets were hereabouts, he could hardly get a breath of air. Higbee had suspected the phony bumpkin of marking cards with his fingernail. He had raised and ruckus and, along with some of the boys, had run the sharp—Porter was his name—out in the alley and given him a few good blows to the groin with his Luger to remind him where he was at. We invented cheating, cowboy. A New Orleans card sharp used daub, secreted behind the ear, to mark a card. Fingernail creases were crude; they were disrespectful.

  Later that evening, as the boys were settling up, Higbee realized that the Texan had meant to be caught. In the tumult, the phony yokel had managed to swipe the bank—almost nine-hundred dollars—as deftly as a magician disappearing a rabbit. By the next day Higbee and a big ex-cop named Roy Hannity had tracked him to a hotel in the French Quarter, then to Lafayette Square, and on to Storyville, where the city was fumigating because of the epidemic. But by that time the cowboy had blown the wad in a crap game on Basin Street and was aboard the Valhalla, just departing from the Erato wharf.

  And now—well, look at this: publishing tall tales in the respectable press. Higbee sighed, as if the reading-public’s bottomless gullibility were too much to endure.

  He folded the newspaper, laid it beside his saucer, took a sip of cold chicory coffee, and began tapping his index finger on the marble tabletop until his companion looked up from his notebook and fixed him with a cold blank blue stare.

  “Something you need, Higbee?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Whitaker.” He stopped tapping. “I see the New York Giants clinched the pennant. They’re fixin’ to win more’n a hunnert games.”

  “What the blazes does that mean to me?”

  “Ain’t thatcher hometown?”

  No reply.

  Higbee said, “I’se readin’ in there about ole Coralio. Seems they suffered a shark infestation. Brought a temporary halt to the banana trade.” He looked at the decorative tin ceiling; it was painted green. “Them soldiers got some practice blowin’ things up.”

  “Give me that!” Whitaker snatched the newspaper and rattled through the pages. He paused to read. The blood crept up his neck and suffused his face like storm clouds gathering over the Gulf.

 
“Goddammit. I warned him.” He crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor. He pounded the table so that the cups rattled on their saucers. “I told that dolt there would be consequences if he published. These fictions! He’s gone too far. I knew he would, and now he has.”

  “That would be William S. Porter, Mr. Whitaker?”

  Whitaker stared at him as if he were empty space. Butch Higbee was not accustomed to being stared through. In fact, his feelings, though toughened by years of hard-drinking, multiple marriages, and Third Ward politicking, were kind of hurt. He considered himself someone to be reckoned with.

  Maybe that was his problem, he mused, trying to ignore Whitaker’s fuming. He could not just nod and say yessir. Always had to needle a guy, engage with a feller in this bullshit roundabout way, unless he was the one in charge. He admitted that his life had had more ups and downs than an elevator, but at this point he felt he had earned a degree of respect.

  For a while he had had it. He had spent a year and a half running the Vesuvius Fruit train out of Coralio, pushing the wheezy narrow-gauge Mogul locomotive and a string of boxcars up into the jungle six days a week. The job was nothing remarkable, but for a colorblind railroad engineer who had been blackballed in the States after he went on a forty-eight-hour bender and crashed an Illinois Central fruit-express because he could not tell a red signal light from a green, it was a godsend. He bossed a mixed crew of Jamaicans and mestizos and an American conductor named Smithson. He had a purpose: the moving of great gleaming green bunches of bananas from jungle to wharf. Maybe the occasional load of indigo or a passenger-extra carrying workers to the coffee plantations. Aside from the Illinois Central disaster, from which no power on earth could redeem him, he was a good engineer, and he was grateful to Walter Whitaker for hiring him on. And Whitaker was grateful for the way he ran the operation.

  When the uprising that installed Francisco Flores sprang, literally, from the weedy beach at Coralio, Higbee was waiting, as he had been waiting his whole inebriated, hard-luck life, to accept his role as a man-in-charge. After the thing was over, he had the story from General Furcal’s senior aide about how nineteen men, including General William Drummond, the American, dropped anchor off Coralio that night in April. The cayucos came into the lagoon at dawn, as they always did, with their loads of papayas and oranges for the market. Furcal’s men seized the boats, jettisoned the cargo, lay down, and covered themselves with banana leaves. The owners of the boats were ordered to paddle on to the wharf.

  General Furcal knew that every morning the garrison soldiers inspected the cargo, levying fees to compensate themselves for their miserable duty. So when the peddlers paddled up, crying “Plátanos! Papayas!” the soldiers appeared, half-dressed, bleary-eyed, and weaponless. Furcal’s filibusters leaped from under the banana leaves. The soldiers, shocked, surrendered. They were marched past the hotel. With minimal prompting with the barrel of a standard-issue Mauser carbine, they opened the barracks, and twenty minutes later General Furcal had himself a company of regular-army deserters, a Hotchkiss machine-gun, two Spanish smooth-bore cannons, Martini-Henry rifles, ammo, and the week’s receipts from the custom house.

  Under General Drummond, the garrison soldiers marched to the railyard and commandeered the train.

  Higbee was sleeping in the cab. The soldiers roused him, more roughly than necessary, and told him he was going to move a trainload of revolutionists inland or be killed, no argument.

  Higbee saw opportunity. He and some of the federal deserters he knew from the Bar Coralio sketched out a plan to armor two flatcars as part of the transport train. There was some rusty three-quarter-inch boiler iron lying around the railyard, but it was not enough to do the job, so Higbee proposed building bulwarks out of thirty-five-pound blocks of ice from the Vesuvius plant. They laid double ice-block walls on the flatcars, sandwiching the scrap iron between, and covered the walls with sawdust. Then they mounted the Hotchkiss gun, put a squad of rifleman on each car, and set off to meet the loyalist troops who were no doubt being deployed from the capital, since none of Furcal’s men had thought to cut the telegraph wire.

  As Higbee fired up the boiler that morning, he recognized his future as a leader of men.

  They puffed inland through the jungle. The train picked up an army of peasant volunteers who clung to the outside of the boxcars. In the first encounter with the loyalists, General Furcal was killed, his jaw blown off. General Drummond took command and promoted Higbee to captain, and Higbee fought like a lion released. At the Battle of Arroyo Seco, he parked his rolling ice-armored barricades on each end of the railroad bridge, and when the federales came pouring down the dry wash, he opened fire.

  At every encounter, he led the charge, a savage joy overwhelming his being.

  Of course, the insurrection ended his job at Vesuvius Fruit. Getting himself hijacked by the rebels was bad enough; helping them at the Battle of Arroyo Seco was unconscionable. The last thing Walter Whitaker needed was an insurrection led by the estranged cousin of a sitting president for whom he had already paid. The new President Flores seemed intent on punishing Whitaker for reasons both obvious and unknown.

  So Higbee had moved on. He marshaled his notoriety into a series of lucrative commands stretching from the Yucatán to Panama, fighting for one side or another for one reason or another, none of which made any difference to him at all. After a few years, the fighting had dried up, and he returned to New Orleans to wait for the next opportunity to come knocking, as it had in the form of—and wasn’t this ironical?—Walter Whitaker, the man who at this very moment was staring a hole through him.

  “Higbee! Are you ignoring me?”

  “What?”

  “I said that we’re pushing the matter up. Immediately.”

  “What about those Treasury dicks?” nodding toward an obvious pair parked at a table near the entrance. They wore topcoats, derby hats, and drooping mustaches, and they were pretending they did not see Walter Whitaker and his associate.

  Whitaker rose. He picked up his panama hat and jammed it onto his head. “Don’t worry about them. You get your revolution kit together. I’ll deal with Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”

  

  Buck Geddie drifted through the haze that follows sleep, awakened from his nap at the urging of his little monkey, Sybil, who was tugging at a clump of his hair and chattering softly in her mysterious language. He felt thirsty. His kidneys were on fire. The last needle was wearing off.

  He groaned and rolled upright and reached for the glass of cloudy water on his bedside table. The human form, this wet vessel of memory and emotion, was not meant to survive in this narcotic limbo, Geddie thought hazily. Yet I endure.

  For the thousandth time he dreamed: he would go down East somewhere, open a practice, give up this imposture. He had enjoyed the law, or at least he had anticipated enjoying it, although when he went to work on Wall Street, the satisfaction of doing well what one wants to do eluded him, his life pulling away like a ferry slipping from the dock without him.

  Sybil jumped into his lap, still talking softly to herself. He patted her head. Of late she had submitted to wearing a diaper that the cook’s daughter had fashioned from a handkerchief. Her diarrhea had worsened to the point that the furniture in the consulate featured new archipelagos of brown blotches and peninsular streaks of an ill shade of green. He had tried to train her to use the toilet, but the little monkey had not been able to reach the john when she felt an attack coming. Thus the diaper, which she wore like royal garb, parading across the dining table and displaying her cocooned rear end to anyone who stopped by for supper. Lately, the consul realized, no one came to supper.

  He set Sybil in the crook of his arm and shuffled downstairs.

  The monk’s-cloth drapes on the windows allowed a numinous dim light into the office, so that everything seemed to glow with an underwater luminance. Geddie stood entranced by the beauty of his des
ktop, the pen and inkwell, the crystal ashtray, the silver-plated scissors, everything aglow, like a Dutch painting. With care, he moved across the carpet in his stockinged feet. He put Sybil on top of the big globe in its walnut stand and dropped into his button-back chair. He lit a cigar and dropped the match into the ashtray. Sybil watched him from her perch atop the North Pole.

  On his desk he found the latest bale of The New York Times and several sealed dispatches he would have to pay attention to. They must have arrived on the last fruiter. He considered cutting the twine around the newspapers but decided against it. Too many facts.

  Tossed on the blotter was a cable from the chargé d’affaires in the capital:

  Flores restless. Protect. Englebart.

  Geddie was puzzled. Protect himself? The consulate? Vesuvius? Francisco Flores?

  He had once had the ability to piece together meaning from fragments.

  He located his letter opener and sliced into the seal of the first official dispatch: a report from Santo Domingo via the British consulate regarding a second German destroyer bound either due west for Puerto Rico or due east for Belize City, neither of which made sense. An image of gunboats anchored in the offing, shelling little Coralio, flashed across his mind. The sub-secretary who had composed this document, a man named Trotter, seemed, in the process of writing, to have recognized this point, concluding that Geddie’s primary concern should be protecting American interests from foreign military aggression. Without calling in the Marines, which was not his decision to make, he had zero chance of protecting anything.

  The next dispatch informed him that Walter Whitaker was active in New Orleans, recruiting what looked like a military expedition in violation of the Neutrality Act and an assortment of other federal statutes. The Secret Service had him under round-the-clock surveillance. Could the consul forward all relevant information on Vesuvius Fruit Company, Francisco Flores, Terencio Flores, Walter Whitaker, suspicious new arrivals in the country, manifests from every ship that dropped anchor in Coralio, customs declarations, and so on and so forth?