Geddie tossed the paper in the wastebasket.
He slit open the last document, which came from Alvey Adee himself. State—meaning the new Secretary, Elihu Root—was unhappy with the (true) annual report. Adee offered a detailed critique and ordered him to run the numbers again to reflect the official position that all parties to the customs-collection arrangement were getting their share of the take, especially the Morgan combine, which believed that unchecked smuggling was cutting into its return on investment.
“If that don’t beat all,” Geddie muttered in Sybil’s direction. “He could have used the first official report. What the hell are they up to?”
He was saved from having to fret about Alvey Adee’s occult machinations by a knock on the front door. He ground out his cigar and lurched to his feet with a groan.
Cornelia Anderson was wearing her Sunday best, if church were held at the county fairgrounds and the Sabbath fell on the Fourth of July. She was red, white, and blue from hat to shoes, more or less in that order. On her shoulder she twirled a parasol decorated with the colors of the American flag. Standing on the veranda, she looked, Geddie thought, as if fireworks should be exploding across the sky behind her, although it was a hard bright afternoon full of piercing lagoon-light.
“Connie, come in. I’ll ask Chanca to make some tea. You look like a marching band.”
“I beg your pardon! This is a national holiday.”
Geddie remembered that the World Series was scheduled to begin in Philadelphia, cradle of the Constitution, home of the Gas Trust and palatalized sibilants, playground of the Durham Republican machine. Also: the site of the Centennial Exposition, where in 1876, young Buck Geddie’s Uncle Albert had treated young him to ten-cent slices of fried banana wrapped in tinfoil. The banana slices had tasted like candy and had given him the runs. He prepared to reminisce, but Cornelia, peeling off her red chamois gloves as she strode across the room, had other things on her mind:
“I don’t want tea. I’m here to talk. What d’ya think of this Rolling Stone?” she demanded. She planted herself on a sofa and tapped the tip of her patriotic parasol on the floor. “Hello, Sybil.”
The little monkey chattered and displayed her diapered rear.
“She looks better,” Cornelia said.
“I have her on a restricted diet. No more beef and no more cocoa at night.”
“I meant to bring some pepitas.”
“It’s better that you didn’t. The salt makes her lightheaded. Hell, it makes me lightheaded.”
Geddie pulled up his galluses and sat gingerly on one of the horsehair armchairs. Sybil leaped from the top of the globe and caught Geddie around the neck, where she clung like a bat hanging from a tree trunk.
“Bill has journalistic talent, no doubt about it,” he said, picking up the earlier conversation. He rearranged the little monkey so that she was sitting on his shoulder. “He can locate a soft spot and skewer a man with a line of type. Send him to a Kansas City stockyard with his steno pad and an expense account, and he might mature into Lincoln Steffens.”
“The tale of Al Jennings recruiting a new gang a robbers went right between the ribs.” Cornelia snorted. “I heard Vesuvius put a guard on the fruit train. Idiots. A joke’s a joke.”
Geddie chuckled, a little uneasily. He liked Porter. He enjoyed their evenings—fewer now that it was raining—under the spreading ficus, playing his guitar and singing “My Pearl Is a Bowery Girl” with the quartet. He did not want Porter to jeopardize their camaraderie by putting him in a position where he failed to contain and simultaneously protect Walter Whitaker and the Vesuvius Fruit Company—a position assigned to him by his own Department of State.
“On the other hand,” Geddie said, “I agree that he can tend toward the trivial.”
“Irritating more than indicting.”
“Exactly.”
“Walter Whitaker ain’t making distinctions.”
“No.”
“Whitaker’s a thin-skinned s.o.b.,” Cornelia declared. “I fear for Mr. Porter. Trouble at the hotel I do not need and never will. I’m hoping you might shed some light on what to expect around here when the boss-man gets back from New Orleans. —And why does he give a shit anyway about some law-runner’s nickel rag? You tell me.”
“Don’t get your back up,” Geddie said. “The U.S. government is satisfied with Francisco Flores—the man speaks English!—and it doesn’t want a bunch of filibusters destabilizing the region. Walter Whitaker, however, is certainly not satisfied with Francisco Flores and his shaky coalition of kleptomaniacs. He wouldn’t mind destabilizing Flores into an unmarked grave. The State Department is not unhappy with Walter Whitaker per se. He’s part and parcel of the ‘larger project,’ fine, but he needs to eat his profits once in a while. These pieces do not fit together.” The consul rubbed a kink in his neck. It was a frustrating situation. “Walter prefers that his business activities stay private. The banana business—hell, any business these days, the way the trustbusters and health crusaders are going—has got to appear as clean as a plate-glass window. No good comes from gossip, especially in a community of marginal citizens such as ours. Things have a way of leaking out of the country and finding their way into the public outrage.”
“No point stirring mud in the water. I get it,” Cornelia said. “But those are your problems, Buck. What do you intend to do about Bill?”
“What would you have me do?”
“Order him to remember where he’s at. He’s gonna hurt the rest of us while he’s getting himself killed.”
“You do it,” Geddie countered.
“Maybe Isabel can persuade him.”
“Maybe,” Geddie said. “But the woman’s not a busybody. She’s too interested in the unfolding drama of her own life to take an interest in others.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Cornelia stood up and pulled on her red chamois gloves. She picked up her parasol. “You coming to the shindy?”
“Hasn’t the failure of your electromagnetical gadget soured you on the game?”
Cornelia Anderson’s lips pressed into a thin line. She glared at him. “Let me tell you something, Buck Geddie. I knew a gypsy woman on Cermak Street who could make a man vomit a hundred miles away if you brought her a lock of his hair. Saw an African woman with scars on her face blow into an empty whiskey bottle and produce the voice of a lady’s dead child. Right there in Hyde Park. Heard Mr. Tesla’s lecture at the Exhibition on October 9, 1893, when Grover Cleveland throwed the switch to illuminate the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. That was AC electricity, mister. So don’t make fun of what you don’t know nothing about. The game goes on,” she said. “The Cubbies’ll get ’er next year.”
Taken aback, Geddie stood up, creaking, holding Sybil on his shoulder with one hand. He said: “I’ll stop by at six to visit the doc. I might sample a bowl of shark-fin soup if that rascal Pierre is cooking.”
“Poor man,” Cornelia murmured as she turned to leave, and Geddie was unsure if she meant him, Pierre, or the quarantine doctor.
You will never understand the banana business unless you understand the banana mule, and you will never understand the banana mule, Porter typed on his Underwood Five. He paused for a gulp of guaro.
He pulled his Essbach concert harmonica from his waistcoat pocket and blew a few notes of “That Old Gray Mare.” Then he ate a piece of what he hoped was beef jerky from a paper bag on his table.
He doubted if anyone understood mules of any stripe. They were one of Nature’s fortunate accidents: smarter than horses, tougher than donkeys—but as obstinate as chiseled granite. Porter’s father, Dr. Algernon, had owned a mule. He was a brownish chap named Pete, who had seen service in the War and spent his final days limping around the countryside with the doctor on his back. One day Pete kicked a rich man
, and the man died. Doctor Algernon knew for certain that the rich man was dying of tetanus after pricking his thumb on a thorn, but the fact that the mule had kicked him before he showed symptoms rendered the point moot, and the sheriff put down Pete posthaste.
Porter sighed at this sad memory. He turned his attention back to the typewriter.
The mules he had seen hauling bananas on the wharf or dragging mud from the trenches the soldiers were digging appeared to have been bred from a stock of appaloosa mares and particularly dyspeptic jack-asses. They had enormous buck teeth, unusually stubby legs, and eyes like shiny black pebbles. Unlike the more sociable mules Porter had known in Greensboro, these gaunt, surly creatures looked as if they’d spit on you before they’d obey an order. Everything about them was contrary, from their sidling gait to the sudden sideways lurches that tossed their loads to the ground. Then they shat on the scattered cargo. Their braying sounded like broken bells. They gobbled up the feed put out for the horses. They obeyed no commands, brooked no attempt at discipline. Refused all limits.
As this reporter was strolling the streets of Coralio of a recent morning, he spied a pair of these cantankerous creatures toiling at the harness, while a hapless factotum of our local fruit-growers association attempted to coerce them into productive service.
Porter paused to read over what he had written and decided that it had no future. He was suddenly tired of words. Bone weary. He had been at the firehouse setting type since dawn, and still the latest issue of the Stone needed more words, more words. The mule piece would be perfect for page one, but he could not squeeze out another syllable.
He took another gulp of guaro, then another. The liquor was like a ribbon of fire down his throat. He had an inspiration. Back at the drugstore in Greensboro when he was not drinking in the alley with Pink Lindsay, he had passed the days doodling caricatures of the customers. He was doggone good. People were offended. Now he thought: What The Rolling Stone needs is illustration.
He pushed the typewriter aside and laid a fresh sheet of paper on the table, bit into another hunk of jerky, and began sketching out his ideas. In twenty minutes he had a bang-up cartoon of a quivering mule named “Vesuvius,” ears flattened willfully against its oblong skull, eyes bulging with greed as it chomped into a bunch of bananas hanging on a tree; from the other end of the beast, beneath an erect tail that looked like a shaving brush, the mule deposited a stream of excrement on the famous henge of Theodore Roosevelt’s teeth, while the President, held at the midriff by the mule’s back hooves, thrashed on the ground and flailed with his Big Stick. Porter called the drawing The Banana Mule.
Tonguing the jerky around in his mouth, he leaned back and admired his work. He thought it might be even better than his writing. Page One would feature the banana mule. He hoped the photographer who took sailors’ portraits near the wharf, a character named Keogh who was wanted in Massachusetts on obscenity charges, would let him use his camera. If he could work up a halftone cut, he might even put this issue of the Stone to bed by suppertime.
The chatter at the Hotel de los Estranjeros was all about the Series. Cornelia Anderson opened at two o’clock to accommodate those who wanted on-the-spot reports from Philly, couriered from the telegraph office by Pierre every twenty minutes and shouted out in Cornelia’s aggrieved baritone. The bar was jammed with the usual mob of crooks, bigamists, and reprobates, along with a ship’s captain and a first mate (also a bigamist), several Vesuvius security thugs, Cornelia’s three chippies (Agnes, Sylvia, and Belle), a couple of questionable women from the New Century, a contingent of beachcombers, layabouts, and hardscrabble planters who had come over from the barrier islands for the afternoon, one Greek whose private yacht was anchored in the lagoon, two spotted dogs (one alive), and even the customs agent, Elliot Evans, looking out of his element with a scorecard in his lap. The air was rank with the odor of bay rum, cigar smoke, hair tonic, and insufficiently laundered clothing. Either the hardscrabble planters or the dogs had brought a swarm of black flies which Cornelia could not get rid of.
The walls were draped with stars-and-stripes bunting, and from the banisters hung flags for both the Giants and the Athletics. The Salcedo Brothers’ brass band had been hired for all the white-eye they could drink. With each new telegraphic report the band struck up “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” merging into other patriotic songs, including “The Marseillaise” and “Guantanamera,” which gave the party an international flavor, until two tough numbers from the Vesuvius security detail made threatening moves in the band’s direction. Between communiqués the Salcedos pounded out waltzes that rattled the bottles on their shelves. The questionable women from the New Century turned out to be amazing, simply amazing, dancers. There was considerable wagering, mostly against the Giants, who had shown poor sportsmanship by skipping the ’04 Series with Boston. But nobody cared which team won or lost. They loved the blow by blow.
At the bottom of the fifth inning, New York held a 2-0 lead. The Giants were stealing bases off Eddie Plank, while Mathewson had limited Philadelphia to a single hit. When Cornelia shouted out the latest update, a roar went through the crowd, the floor quaked, the flies swirled ceilingward, and everyone clinked glasses and tossed a shot of pisco punch down the hatch.
Isabel Whitaker occupied her usual place at the bar. She was radiant. A cumulus of icky flies teemed around her shoulders and the greasy bun of her auburn hair. She knew nothing about sporting events, but she loved a cheering crowd.
Dr. Grieg, in summery seersucker, was ensconced in his corner, dispensing his wares and spitting rhythmically into his Hong Kong porcelain vessel. He adjusted his spectacles, spread his paws on the tabletop, and peered diagnostically at Buck Geddie. “You could have telephoned, you know. Connie can fetch me from my room. I suppose you want a needle.”
“You know I do,” said Geddie, looking up from his soup, spoon suspended halfway between bowl and mouth. He had a napkin tied around his neck. Sybil was resting back at the consulate; she had a light fever. “Slip me a dose of marching powder while you’re at it.”
“You have a report to finish?”
“No,” Geddie snapped. After a pause he said, “Actually, I do have a report.”
The quarantine doctor slid a folded slip of paper across the table and collected a dollar from the consul. He added the bill to the pile on the table. “About the other,” he said.
“Well?”
“Temporarily out of stock.”
“What?”
“No more, Buck.”
“What?”
“No more, Buck. No más. We’re out of morphine.”
“What do you mean? How can that be?” A note of panic crept into the consul’s voice.
“I mean, I’ve run out.”
“Run out! What about my kidneys, you charlatan?”
“Be calm now.”
“You be calm!”
“Ship’s on its way. Maybe in a day or two. Maybe a week.”
“What ship?”
“Portielle.” The doctor aimed a wet one at the cuspidor.
“Portielle’s bound for Havana, you nitwit.” Geddie slammed down his hands, and his soup sloshed out of the bowl, leaving forlorn slivers of shark fin and red peppers on the table top. He ripped the napkin from his throat and flung it to the floor.
“If you’re going to wax histrionic, I’ll invite you to leave,” Dr. Grieg said coldly.
Geddie stared wildly at the quarantine doctor. A shudder passed through his body. His eyeballs had seized up in their sockets.
When Porter came in, rainwater dripping from the flaccid brim of his Stetson, he carried folded under his coat two dozen copies of The Rolling Stone hot off the press. He planned to finish the print run in the morning and send his urchins peddling around town and down the coast to his new subscribers, including the Morning Glories, who had o
rdered six copies per week. As he deposited the papers in the sales rack on the bar, he noted that Cornelia Anderson’s electromagnetical dynamo had been relegated to a dusty corner under the liquor shelves.
Porter had continued drinking guaro throughout the afternoon in the clammy, suffocating confines of the firehouse. Now, as he made his way through the smoke and noise, he was feeling giddy. He hoped to find Isabel at her usual place at the bar, but there was nothing but an angry swirl of flies, like a puff of smoke, above her barstool.
Pierre, who had exchanged his telegrapher’s visor for a chef’s hat, was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, watching the throng of drunken baseball fans with a sly sullen eye.
“Hey, buddy,” he muttered as Porter pushed by. “Want you some shark-fin soup? Near fresh.”
Porter looked at the smirking Cajun. “I bet it tastes like blasting powder.”
“Still good for lovin’. Builds staminer.”
“You have a chance to test your own theory,” Porter said. “Those ladies from the New Century don’t look too choosy.”
“That’s clever, that is,” Pierre murmured as Porter moved on. “You got my number.”
Porter headed for Dr. Grieg’s table under the gaslight. He needed a bump to maintain his giddiness. Buck Geddie, staggered past him. Porter tipped his hat. “Howdy.”
Geddie did not reply. He did not even see him. He staggered on, his left hand on the wall to hold himself upright.
Why, Porter asked himself, had he not waited until the game was over? Here he was, putting himself in a wagering situation, when he had determined to hang onto his boodle until he went home to Austin. Damn! Look at all these suckers! They were a gambler’s dream.
As Porter approached, the quarantine doctor finished wiping the soup from the table top and dropped the rag in his porcelain spittoon. Porter tipped his hat.
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