Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  “How do,” Pierre said. He took a bite out of something that looked like a spiny boiled sea creature but was probably a yellow cactus. He chomped like a mule.

  “I want to rent a horse for a few hours,” Porter said.

  “What kinder horse you got in mind?” Pierre’s gaze kept slipping away like mercury on glass.

  “It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not lame or mean. I don’t need Bucephalus.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “Why is that your concern?” Porter said, annoyance edging his voice.

  “Jest curious is all.”

  “Do you have a horse for rent or not?”

  “Gotter buncha horses.” Pierre slid around him in a wide arc and shuffled sidelong down the length of the stable. “How ’bout this feller?” he called.

  Porter followed him through a side door to a dusty paddock surrounded by mango trees and stunted palms. A pile of fur that was a dog was sleeping under the water trough, which leaked black water onto the dirt by the dog’s head. Pierre tossed what remained of what he was eating toward the dog, and without waking up, the dog gobbled it in a single bite. Next to the water trough, tethered to a rough-hewn fence, flicking flies with his spectacular tail, stood the bay gelding Henry.

  Porter was delighted to see the fine beast again. “Outstanding! How much for a day?”

  “This horse ain’t for rent.”

  “Then why the devil did you bring me out here?”

  “You can borrow ’im.”

  Porter was confused.

  “You can take ’im for the afternoon you want,” Pierre said. “I can’t rent a horse ain’t mine. Thisere’s Walter Whitaker’s horse. Found ’im in the swamp eatin’ berries.

  “Why? I mean, why?”

  Pierre shrugged. “Mebbe he uz hungry. Why else anybody go in a swamp?”

  “I go there to search for medicinal barks.”

  “That horse don’t look like he need medicals. He ain’t a bark-eater.” Pierre fixed his gaze on one of the mango trees. “You wanna borrow ’im or not? Otherwise I gotta return ’im up the hill.”

  “It isn’t like you to be helpful,” Porter protested.

  “Troubled times,” Pierre murmured, shaking his head. “Things changin’. You seen the warship out there?”

  Porter, still suspicious, said: “What do you want?”

  Pierre dropped his eyes and kicked the toe of his boot in the dust like a kid caught in a white lie. “How ’bout you get me one a them needle pitchers I seen in the pres’dent’s quarters? The dude won’t give me one. Won’t sell me one neither, after all I done. Him and me both Masons, too.” He glanced shyly over at Porter. “It’d pretty up my bedroom.”

  Porter was astounded. The man was a sentimentalist! He tried to imagine one of the petit-point portraits hanging on the wall of Pierre’s—

  “Where do you live anyway?” he said.

  “Live right back there, so nobody make off with these horses in the still a the night.”

  

  The road to Morning Glory led through jungle that looked to Porter exactly like all other jungle, strange and beckoning and dangerous, uninhabitable, although he knew the plantations were in there somewhere, villages, clearings, farms. Vesuvius was building the railroad. Opal prospectors were beating each other with pickaxes. He decided that if he ran out of news to report from Coralio, he would start ranging afield.

  He jogged along the corrugated dirt road on Henry, feeling that plans were coalescing, fates were being revealed. An image of Isabel came to his mind. Her face is not a mirror, he thought; she’s so much herself that when she moves, her shadow fails to follow. Pure poetry! He realized he might be in love.

  Long before he arrived at the treetop village, he could hear the far-off blare of opera on a gramophone and the cacophonous screaming parrots in their treehouse enclosures. For the last half-mile, he rode to the sounds of Norma and avian misery. The music died away just as he reached the clearing, and, correspondingly, the volume of parrot lamentation dropped several notches.

  Porter dismounted and hitched Henry to the mahogany tree next to the pyramid of garbage that had collected under the treetop kitchen. The flies swarming around the rotting pile turned their collective attention to the horse, clotting his eyes and nostrils and crawling into his anus. Henry swatted his tail and snorted. Porter unhitched him and led him to another tree, where he found Isabel’s red Hendee motorcycle, speckled with rust from the humidity, leaning against the trunk.

  Tilting his head, he called toward the leafy canopy: “Hello! Anybody home!”

  There was the sound of small feet pattering along the walkways, and children’s faces appeared in the high gloom, peering over the railings. The children were silent. In a minute, more faces appeared. Porter recognized the head honcho and the translucent woman who had played the lute. “Hello, Donald,” he shouted. “Hey, everybody!”

  Isabel leaned from a window and waved. “Hello, Henry!” Porter was not sure if she meant him or the horse.

  “Did you bring any cocaine?” Donald called from the treetops.

  “Sorry,” Porter called back. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Well, dang, man.”

  “I’m coming down,” Isabel called.

  The end of the rope ladder bounced beside his head. He took a step back and looked up Isabel’s skirt as she descended. She dropped to the ground, flushed and happy, and threw her arms around him. Her hair smelled like butter. Her breath was like frog-water. The familiar catty odor of her clothes was so intense that they should have been burned. She looked beautiful.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she said, stepping back to inspect him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, my,” she fretted. “I’m waiting it out.”

  “I thought that might be the case. You brought your gramophone.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re feeling in the pink?”

  “A touch of influenza.” She looked at him intently. “He’s returning soon, you know.”

  “You’ve heard from him.”

  “Not from Walter,” Isabel corrected. “Walter doesn’t write. Some ass named Higgins, I think it was, wrote to apprise me of the ins and outs. The man has the spelling and diction of a fourth-grader.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “Do I need to plan?”

  “Francisco Flores is in Coralio. He thinks you’re going to escape with him to Paris.”

  “That is a problem,” Isabel said.

  “You knew?”

  “Not specifically. No. But the man is obsessed. He sends me letters and bouquets of flowers. By the time they reach the house, they’re dead.”

  “So.…”

  “You’ve spoken with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Frankie’s unique.” Isabel looked off into the jungle, sulkily. “I refuse to spend the rest of my life taking a Big Mike banana to bed. When I leave this lotus-land, I’d much rather leave with you.” She turned her gaze back to him. “Wouldn’t that be glorious?”

  “With me you’d be skull-crazy bored inside a week,” Porter said.

  “Never!”

  “You would. I have no money. None.”

  “But what about the First National Bank? Didn’t you stash the dough?”

  “I only took enough to pay my printing debts. I’m not a dedicated thief.”

  “Oh.”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “Why would you bother if you weren’t going to take everything?” Isabel looked perturbed. “That’s bad practice.”

  Porter felt embarrassed. “For the next two and a half years, until the statute of limitations expires, I can’t go anywhere we might be noticed. Not without money to hide behind. That means New York,
Paris, New Orleans—or any little burg that has a sheriff.”

  “I doubt that you’ll live that long.”

  He said, his heart breaking, “Flores has two-million dollars in an old leather bag. You need to see him. It’s for the best.”

  “You came to tell me that?”

  “I did.”

  “Oh, my.”

  Henry ambled over and started nibbling on his Stetson. It was time for them to leave.

  

  Cornelia Anderson sat behind the bar at the Hotel de los Estranjeros, tinkering with her electromagnetical contraption. She had a spool of copper wire, pliers, and a screwdriver, which despite some arthritis in her fingers she wielded with expertise. The sun sliced through a crack in the drapes and cast an oblong patch of light exactly where she had set up the machine on the finger-smudged mahogany bar. The place was deserted except for a couple of American politicians who were sketching out a currency-manipulation scheme. Their pipesmoke curled in the hot still air.

  Cornelia had thrown a rousing bash to send off Alphonso Jennings, but otherwise business had been slow since the Series. Exceedingly. One of her girls, Sylvia, had died of fever—Dr. Grieg was unsure of the type—and now the other two were afraid of catching infections from the customers, and the customers were afraid of catching infections from the girls. The gunship anchored offshore had dampened the spirits, so to speak, of the liquor smugglers, so her stock was reduced to a couple of dusty cases of counterfeit bourbon and several bottles of guaro, which many of her clientele considered undrinkable. The quarantine doctor’s morphine supply had dried up, and for several weeks his cocaine had proved substandard. Most of the addicts had banded together in the cellar of the church to kick their habits en masse. McCoy, who was in charge until Whitaker returned, had banned the drinking of alcohol by Vesuvius employees. Pierre’s cooking had been lackluster; he seemed moody; she had had to hire the daughter of Buck Geddie’s cook, Chanca, who said she knew how to fix American dishes but did not. To top it off, she herself had been running a low-grade fever, which Dr. Grieg dismissed as the result of excess female energy and suggested, with a leer, that she seek release in male companionship. The situation looked dire.

  One bright spot: the Tribune reported that the Chicago Cubs had hired Frank Chance to take over managerial duties from Selee. Chance would stay on at first base. Evers and Tinker were back. Brown, Pfiester, and Reulbach were predicted twenty-game winners. It was going to be a bang-up season, if she could get this confounded contraption working properly. She made an adjustment with her screwdriver. If the hotel business kept going south, she planned to put her savings on the Cubs for the pennant—hell, for the Series—while she could still get long odds with the New Orleans bookies.

  

  Isabel was on her hands and knees in the bathtub while Elinora scrubbed her back with the stiff-bristled brush the cook used for cleaning pots and pans. Her husband’s man, McCoy, lounged in the doorway, cleaning his teeth with an ivory toothpick.

  “You do something about these, please?” Elinor asked him. She gestured at the pile of clothes on the floor of the bathroom. “You take them, okay?”

  McCoy put his toothpick in his pocket and went out of the bathroom. When he came back, he carried a hand-spliced Peradon snooker cue. He maneuvered the pile of clothes until he could hoist the garments on the end of the cue. They dangled like Spanish moss from a branch.

  He backed out of the room and moved carefully down the stairs to the kitchen. When the cook saw him come in, she gave a little gasp and leaped to the stove and threw open the grate. A lively fire was burning. McCoy stuffed the clothing inside and clanged the door closed with the butt end of the cue.

  “You’d best go outside for a while,” he told her. “Deberías salir por un tiempo.”

  

  Isabel, bathed and ready for travel, whipped down the Calle Grande on her red Hendee motorcycle, past the schoolhouse where two-dozen young faces were plastered against the glass, mouths agape; past the New Century and the Bar Coralio, where the chuckleheads and the old salts and the loose women rushed out to watch; past the plaza; past the Hotel de los Estranjeros. Cornelia Anderson came from behind the bar, and the crooked politicians jumped up. The three of them crowded to the window and drew back the drapes just in time to see Isabel race past, the organdy ribbon on her hat fluttering behind her.

  On she went, past the custom house, past the wharf, the boxcars on the stub, through a cackling updraft of whitish chickens, threading her way along the thin rut of a road into the illimitable jungle.

  After a few bone-jarring minutes, she spotted Pierre leaning against a door in a scabby-looking wall. The adobe was peeling off in large flakes. As she throttled down and killed the motor, Pierre straightened, almost imperceptibly.

  “Well look at you, you bastard,” she shouted. She propped the motorbike against the wall. “This is the Masonic lodge? Shit.”

  “What was you expectin’?” said Pierre.

  “I don’t know. Great carved sphinxes and banners on poles. A vault-like bronze door.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Ain’t no opera house.”

  “Very amusing. You’re a dunderhead and a malingerer.”

  “Ain’t never been sick a day in my life,” Pierre said defiantly. He turned and pushed open the crude, un-vault-like door.

  Isabel gathered up her skirts and hurried after him.

  

  Forty minutes later, Elliot Evans, seated at his drafting table in the custom house, heard the motorcycle returning to town, at first a distant thrum, then a ragged sputter, then a full-throated roar as Isabel banged over the railroad tracks and tore back onto the Calle Grande. He glanced up in time to see her flash past the shack and was reminded of the dust-devils along dirt roads in Nebraska, where he had spent a childhood remarkable only for his parents’ intense and unconcealed dislike of him. He had managed to avoid thinking about both Nebraska and the authors of his being for, he calculated, nearly seven years, since the day he had received news that his father, crippled by polio as a child, had been trampled to death by a street mob in Lincoln following the Nebraska football team’s loss to the Drake Bulldogs.

  

  While he devoted himself to repacking his suitcase, Francisco Flores whistled giddy passages from Carmen. It was getting dark in the room, but his spirits were light. He pranced around, twirling like a ballet dancer and wishing to heaven he had brought a mirror when he fled the palace. The last time he had felt so utterly happy was the night the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had sworn him in as President in a ceremony attended by ragged, heavily-armed Americans and nervous members of Congress who concluded the proceedings by signing a loyalty oath at gunpoint. Several of the Americans had been retained on long-term contracts for the purpose of discouraging hecklers on the occasions when Flores appeared before Congress. They also kept an eye on the vice president, an indigo-planter named Casares who spent his time holed up in the provinces with his many mistresses, drunk and terrified of the firing squad he was certain awaited him at the end of his tenure. The only reason Casares had agreed to the vice presidency was to obtain a waier on the ruinous export tax on indigo that Flores planned to impose.

  That night, in the presidential bed in the Presidential Palace, he had been overwhelmed by the desire to call for a photographer. Now he gazed at the photo of himself holding a glass of champagne as he reclined on sheets of fresh linen. In the photograph he wore a look meant to convey complacent triumph over everyone who had ever hurt his feelings.

  He tucked the photo into a pocket in the suitcase, along with two tortoiseshell combs and several sheets of presidential stationery.

  At that very moment, Pierre was arranging with a fisherman to ferry Isabel and him to a French ocean liner that was due the next afternoon en route from São Paulo to Marseilles. Once on the high seas, he planned to use the preside
ntial stationery to request asylum, which he assumed would be granted at once, since the French and the Americans were fighting over the stalled construction of the Canal, and France would do anything to upset the United States. Flores had considered dashing for the American consulate in Coralio, but he suspected that the U.S. would view his flight from the capital as disloyal, even cowardly, and force him to return the two million dollars in gold certificates he carried in his Gladstone bag. Since his ultimate destination was Paris, the cruise ship seemed, all in all, like a gift from heaven.

  He buckled the suitcase. From the Gladstone bag, he picked out a hundred-dollar note and slipped it under the empty Cuervo bottle on the table. Then he decided that his Masonic brothers had not been all that hospitable and replaced the hundred-dollar note with a fifty-dollar note. He had only joined the Masons in New York in the hope that membership might relieve the loneliness of his student life. The Masonic lodge in Manhattan had turned out to shelter more bigots and bullies than Columbia University had, but he persisted despite the hazing, hoping that one day the worldwide skein of Masonic connections might prove useful. One loudmouth in the New York chapter had broken Flores’ rib when he jabbed it with his elbow—just a joke!

  Flores retrieved the fifty-dollar note from under the Cuervo bottle and replaced it with a twenty-dollar note.

  He wished Pierre would hurry back; it was way past time for supper.

  

  When the necessary funds had changed hands, the necessary drinks had been drunk, the necessary threats unveiled before the fisherman who would transport Francisco Flores and Isabel Whitaker to the steamer, Pierre hurried back along the beach to the dock. He took the path upslope, past the consulate toward the Calle Grande. The night was inky, but as he passed the house, the cook and her daughter, who were sitting on chairs outside the back door, spotted him and began hurling routine insults.

  Pierre paid them no mind and stepped onto the main road to town. The lights were burning on the wharf. He could see the unicyclist circling the custom house and decided to detour across the plaza. On the bare ground beneath the guanacaste tree in the center of the square, he observed that someone had set up two tents. There was a donkey cart in front of the tents, and a placid donkey painted with a pattern of white flowers. Pierre gently slipped the traces and gave the donkey a slap on its rear, and it ambled off into the night.