“I see the hair’s growing back,” Dr. Grieg said.
“Fast as grass. From now on, I’m doing my own barbering. Pierre can’t be trusted.”
“Flea-bit mongrel,” growled the doctor. “You could probably make some money if you bottled that pyrethrum cure. The whole town is lousy.”
“What’s wrong with Buck? He looks like he’s gone blind.”
“Kidneys,” said Dr. Grieg. “Is that the new edition?”
Porter slapped a folded newspaper against his palm. He could hardly contain himself. His excursion into illustration had unleashed the beast of Art in his soul. With more pride than a person generally wants to show, Porter spread the new issue of The Rolling Stone on the table and tipped back in his chair with his hands behind his head, eliciting curses from some barrier-island layabouts who were standing behind him, singing along as the band hammered out “God Save the King.”
Dr. Grieg tilted forward and adjusted his spectacles. He studied the front page for a couple of minutes, shifting his bolus of tobacco from right cheek to left and back again.
“It hits the target,” Porter ventured.
The Salcedo Brothers mangled the crescendo in what sounded like a clashing of factory gears and heavy chains.
“Right on the money,” the doctor said. “Lordy. That’s as fine as anything.”
He folded the paper in half, and in half again, so that the only thing visible was the cartoon of the banana mule. He tapped it with his finger. Resettled his eyeglasses on his nose. Was silent. Thoughtful. The band struck up a lugubrious waltz. The players were pretty liquored up by now. Porter noticed that Pierre had joined them at the piano and was steering the music in a ragtime direction. He had swapped his chef’s hat for a straw boater.
Dr. Grieg reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a Derringer pistol and laid it on the table. With his thick index finger, he pushed it across to Porter.
It was a single-shot Remington .41 rimfire, of utilitarian design, no engravings, just gray metal with a plain black grip. It had the functional appearance of Porter’s C&P printing press.
“What’s that for?”
“For about twenty-four hours, that’s what. Until you haul your harebrained self out of this corner of the world, son.”
“I fled to this corner of the world. I can’t flee from where I’ve fled to. It would never stop.”
“It’s going to stop one way or the other, Bill.” The doctor aimed a jet of tobacco juice at the Hong Kong spittoon. He shifted his bulk on the chair. “A man should have a fighting chance.”
“Forget it. I don’t want it.”
“Take it.”
“I don’t like what it represents.”
“Take it anyway.”
“I stopped playing with pistols before I was married.”
“Don’t think of it as a pistol. Think of it as an inoculation.”
“The smell of gunpowder gives me the vapors.”
“Bullshit. You think you’re immune is what you think.”
“I do not! I’m just a good bluffer.”
“Correction,” said the doctor. “You wish you were.”
And so it went.
The Giants carried the day, 3-0, but nobody cared. Everybody was talking about The Banana Mule.
He recognized her catty oregano odor the moment he opened the door to Room Five. Porter stood in the doorway, dim light oozing around him. Caught a glimpse of movement, like a large cat uncoiling from slumber, under the mosquito netting. There were mysterious sounds. He closed the door, and by the faint light leaking in from the plaza, found his way to the gas lamp and turned the key.
“Not so bright, baby,” Isabel murmured. “Come sit with me.”
He slid the chair from his writing table. It scraped on the wooden floor. He sat down by the bed and crossed his legs.
“Who won?” she said.
“Does it matter?”
“No.”
“Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”
“Darling. Really.”
“Do you want a drink? I’m going to have a glass of reposado.”
“You go ahead.”
Porter got up and found a glass and the bottle of reposado under the writing table and poured himself a double shot.
He took off his hat and put it on top of the Underwood. Tossed down his drink. Looked over at Isabel and tried to collect his thoughts. He thought about the Derringer rimfire pistol. He could picture just how perfectly angry Walter Whitaker was going to be when he found out that his wife kept climbing into his, Porter’s, bed while he, Whitaker, was out of the country.
Isabel read his mind. “Don’t worry. Come over here.”
“Why?”
“I have something to show you.”
“All right.”
Porter moved back toward the bed, not reluctant but not eager either, as if he were taking a shortcut across thin ice—which was not quite right, he thought, since the air in the hotel room was heavy with wet heat regardless of the hour—and sat down on the chair.
Gobbets of rain began to slap against the jalousies. The humidity made him sweat like a fry cook. He slipped off his jacket and loosened his damp collar.
“Pull back the net.”
Porter pulled back the mosquito net and fastened it with the brass clasp so that he could see into the canopied space.
She explored his face with her eyes. They were almost black in the low light, full of tiny galaxies. Her lips formed into a half-smile. She lowered her lashes. He followed her downward gaze and saw that she was grasping a green Big Mike banana, twelve inches long, fat as a python, and glistening with its own oil.
She breathed out hard and with both hands pushed the Big Mike between her legs. A gasp, a shadow of pain passing over her features. She arched her back and settled her buttocks on his pillow, pushing the Big Mike further inside. She began to move it with a slow rhythm. Her nipples were hard. In the dim light her flesh flushed like a flamingo-colored dawn. Her breathing sounded like the bellows of a parlor pump organ.
Porter found it painful to maintain his sitting position.
She lifted her legs straight up, panting, and shouted, “Plough me, you filthy mule!”
“This event confirms the direction of the narrative, don’t it?” said the fugitive train-robber and attorney-at-law Alphonso Jennings, scratching his week-old beard and squinting at the smoke-blackened hulk of the adobe firehouse, a.k.a. the headquarters of The Rolling Stone. One wall and the roof had collapsed, and the other walls stood on the verge. Long tongues of soot licked the front of the building where the fire had chewed out the windows. The firebomb had incinerated the stacks of newsprint and liquefied the lead type in the compositor’s tray, forming blobs and rivulets that had hardened into a relief map of unknown geographies. The telephone had melted like a wax candle. The printing press lay on its side on the dirt floor, a metal skeleton marooned amid the blackened remains of the fire brigade’s little-used equipment—buckets, hoses, pumps, wagons, all destroyed.
Pierre, wearing his Wayside Fire Company helmet and his white rubber boots, poked around with his gaff in the smoking rubble. Crowds of expats, townspeople, dockworkers, rowdy schoolchildren, and silent staring urchins, along with the entire garrison uniformed in their long johns, had knotted into clumps at some distance from the building, as if afraid that it was going to erupt again into flames. The commandante from the cuartel was interviewing, in English and Spanish, anyone who might have witnessed the conflagration. No one had. The firehouse had gone up like a torch before dawn, along with a gorgeous old guanacaste tree. By the time the night patrol had noticed the blaze and raced to the church to ring the bell, the whole thing was over. Not that it would have made any difference had the volunteer brigade responded more promp
tly, since their equipment was engulfed in the inferno.
“I guess it never occurred to anybody what would happen if the fire station itself caught fire,” Jennings continued with relish.
Cornelia Anderson, wrapped in a quilted blue kimono, joined them. Her hair flew around her face in a roiling nimbus. She was angry.
“You fool,” she spat at Porter. “The man warned you, din’t he? He told you what would happen. What’d you come down here for, you just gonna cause trouble? Dang it, man, I like you, and now you’re gonna get yourself killed and I’m gonna have to feel bad.”
Porter did not say anything. He stood with his feet apart, arms akimbo, hat pushed back, squinting at the wreckage as if he were a rancher assessing the damage a tornado had done to his stock of longhorns.
He was wiped out, not a thing he could do about it.
“The man did warn you,” Jennings agreed. “On the other hand, a firebomb seems more like something anarchists might use on a city hall. A firebomb is meant to provoke, not solve. It ain’t business-like.”
Pierre climbed over the charred remains of the double doors, balancing the gaff in one hand, and sidled over to them. His white boots were streaked with filth. He fixed his gaze on Porter’s hat. “Gotcher pitcher,” he said under his breath. He flashed open his coat to reveal a steel plate. It was the half-tone cut of the banana mule. “I take five bucks for it.”
“Give me that,” Porter said sharply. “I’m not paying five dollars for my own property.”
“Ain’cher propitty.”
“Hell it ain’t.” Porter appealed to Jennings. “You’re a lawyer; enlighten him.”
“The man might have a point,” the train-robber said reluctantly. “It’s salvage.”
“Salvage! Two hours ago that plate was fixed to my printing press, ready for inking.”
“Two hours ago this building had not been reduced to rubble. You’re fortunate that the plate’s still viable.”
Pierre stuck his gaff in the ground and leaned on it. He gazed down the street. “So you wannit? ’Cause a common man like me got things to do.”
Porter glowered at the boiled face. He fished out his wallet and counted out five one-dollar bills. He stuffed the money in Pierre’s jacket pocket and grabbed the plate.
Pierre pulled the gaff out of the ground and tucked it under his arm. He peered furtively up and down the street. “Pleasure, Mr.—”
“Get away from me, you damn dirty son of a bitch,” Porter shouted, “before I cut out your guts and string ’em from that tree.”
“Alrighty, partner.” Pierre began to drift away. “Mo chagren.”
“You’re a sneaky bastard,” Cornelia Anderson shouted after him.
“Greasy rat,” Jennings muttered.
“Je suis Haitien,” Pierre said over his shoulder. “I come by later fix your hair, Connie, for the big game number two.”
“Get outta here!”
Jennings turned to Porter and stroked his mustache. He hemmed and hawed.
“Spit it out,” Cornelia commanded. “The man ain’t got all day.”
“I guess—well, I guess this means,” Jennings stammered, “we won’t be getting together for the singalong.”
Porter pursed his lips and looked down the street. Pierre melted around the corner, accompanied by jeers and curses in several languages, on his way to the next thing.
Porter adjusted his Stetson. Brushed the ash off his shoulders. He turned to face Jennings: “I’ll be there, my friend. Right now I’ve got to see a man about a gun.”
Now—now!—it began to rain. The knots of spectators scurried in a dozen directions. The smoldering firehouse hissed and sputtered and sent up stupendous clouds of steam.
In the sticky motionless green air, heavy with the smell of burnt wood, a brood of the consul’s egg-laying chickens scratched in the dirt. Sibyl watched them from a low branch of the ficus. Porter held up a yellow telegram.
He looked around at the circle of friends. “Dead,” he said. “Three days ago.”
“Well, shit,” said Dr. Grieg. Everyone was silent. “What took her?”
“Consumption.”
“Did she linger long?”
“I thought she might hold on until I made it home. They’ve already buried her.”
The men were silent for a long time.
“What was her name?” Alphonso Jennings said.
“Athol.”
They were silent.
“I was a disappointment to her,” Porter said at last. “And she was unkind. That’s the long and the short of it.”
Buck Geddie puffed on his cigar and tried to form words beyond the tried and true but discovered that he could not think. Fire-ants were dancing across his skin, his bones ached, and his joints creaked like rusted hinges. His nose would not stop running. He said, “We’re sorry, Bill. What will happen to your daughter?”
Porter looked gloomily at the telegram and quoted his father-in-law: “‘Am sending Margaret to Cecilia.’ That’s Athol’s married sister. They live in Pittsburgh. First thing I’m going to do when I get back to Austin is punch old P.G.’s clock. Pittsburgh! What kind of life is that?”
“Well, shit,” Dr. Grieg said again and spat on the ground.
The men sat in silence. They could hear the crabs scuttling in the mangroves, and the train getting up a head of steam for a night run to the plantations. The reverberant noise of insects rolled like the surf, keynote of the infernal symphony of the natural world.
Porter stood and walked into the gathering darkness. Some nightbirds skimmed low over the water as if nothing had happened. He looked up at the sky. The constellations in their complex Ptolemaic pinwheeling made him feel terrible and insignificant, but this was not the time to be reduced to insignificance by an indifferent universe. He had already had that experience at Morning Glory. He did not care that he was only one among the suffering millions.
The consul puffed. The quarantine doctor spat. The outlaw tapped the toe of his boot on the damp ground and tugged at his mustache.
“Did you get the box score, by chance?” the consul said softly to his companions.
“Athletics, 3-0, behind Bender,” Dr. Grieg replied under his breath. “Lord singled in runs in the third and the eighth.”
The men gave this news the consideration it deserved.
From the low branch, Sybil toppled into Geddie’s lap with a wheeze. He pulled out the smelling salts and held the vial under her nose until she stirred and sat up and adjusted her diaper.
Finally, Jennings called over to Porter: “I guess the singalong’s best postponed.”
As he scanned the heavens, Porter spotted Venus, pulsing whitely over the lagoon. Aside from the moon, it was the only heavenly body he could identify.
He stuffed the telegram into his jacket pocket and returned to the circle and picked up his mandolin from beside the chair. “Not on your life,” he said as he sat down and struck a chord. “Get that Cajun out here. I’m going to hurt him one of these days, but that fellow plays a helluva squeezebox.”
As Porter was eating a bowl of fish soup so spicy that it tore the flesh from the roof of his mouth, Cornelia Anderson paused at the table. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I was grieved to hear about your wife.”
Porter raised his watering eyes and tried to make his burning tongue form words.
“I found this in Harper’s Magazine. One of the captains left it here.”
She handed him a torn page. It was a poem, “The Epitaph,” by someone named Arthur Stringer.
O Woman-Soul, all flowers, and flame, and dew,
Through your white life I groped once up to God
In happier days: you lie beneath His sod,
And now through Him I grope to you!<
br />
He read it twice, and it still stank, but he was grateful for her concern and tried to tell her so. Tears streamed down his cheeks from the spicy soup. Finally, he managed, “Have you seen Isabel Whitaker?”
Cornelia gave him a peculiar look. “I don’t imagine losing your business helped your cause there, and I don’t suppose she cares much about your departed wife. You men.”
Francisco Aurelio Orqueli Flores, President of the Republic, wiggled his toes in his favorite fluffy slippers. He sat in a Queen Anne slipper chair—which he had fallen in love with at an antique market in Mexico City—in the drape-darkened executive quarters of the Presidential Palace on the Plaza de la Fe, listening to his RCA phonograph. Three-dozen white tapers in cut-glass candlesticks blazed around him, as he cross-stitched scarlet thread into the penelope cloth stretched on his embroidery hoop. The President’s petit point creations were things of wonder. Several hung behind glass on the walls of the executive office: a coy jaguar peering from behind a leaf the size of a boat sail; the portrait of Thomas Hart Benton featured on the 1882-series $100 gold certificate; ruby-throated hummingbirds sipping nectar from a blossom; a stoop-shouldered Don Quixote astride the patient Rocinante, in the Castilian tourist style.
The ugly official carpet on which the Queen Anne chair sat was littered with international newspapers: The New York Times, Le Temps, Berliner Morgenpost, La Voz. The President of the Republic sipped white wine, patted his hairnet, and worked the needle at the cloth, trying not to think about what he had been reading: the hints and innuendoes, the tossed-off lines and the unspoken words between them, the threads of rumor, fact, and vulgar error spun out by the global press, all of it interwoven with poorly written reports from his paid informants to form a thin tapestry of tragedy—his tragedy, his government’s tragedy, his country’s tragedy. His tragedy.
Vesuvius Fruit Company was raising a private army; German—and perhaps Dutch—warships were prowling the coast, looking for something to chew on; American gunboats were tracking the Germans (and perhaps the Dutch); J.P. Morgan’s agents were siphoning off the customs duties he needed to fund the government; the army was underfed, largely unarmed, and unwilling to put lives on the line without at least a meager financial incentive. Congress was a circus—clowns entertaining the people out of their last copper coins. The American chargé d’affaires, Engelbart, lent a sympathetic ear but refused to guarantee his safety. Somewhere out there his cousin Terencio was plotting his downfall, just as he himself had plotted the overthrow of his predecessor, the same Terencio. He should have had him shot. Now there was a strong possibility that Terencio would usher him before a firing squad. His own ministers were busy grabbing what they could before the inevitable occurred. He, Francisco, would be left holding the bag—an empty bag. And no one—no one!—cared. It was college all over again.
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