Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  I come down there with my hat caved in, Doo-dah! Doo-dah!

  I go back home with a pocket full of tin, Oh, doo-dah day!

  The first men into town spotted two federal soldiers who had been posted near the American consulate and shot them in the back as they ran away.

  As the filibusters approached the trench, the federales began to take fire. One of the Americans fell to the ground, shot through the throat. The invaders tossed grenades into the trench, and the shooting stopped.

  Gon’ to run all night!

  Gon’ to run all day!

  Señor Gerardo, standing on the schoolhouse steps, watched the government soldiers scramble from the smoking trench and throw their guns on the ground. Wild fear on their faces, they waved their hands in the air, but the filibusters began shooting them anyway until some big-shouldered Irishman shouting “Don’t kill the prisoners! We need those men!” managed to gain control of the troops.

  As the filibusters marched on, a high yipping shriek pierced the air, and a machine gun began to rattle. Señor Gerardo watched as a pack of unfortunate yellow dogs was torn to bloody shreds. Somebody shouted, “Cease fire, you crazy bastard!” and the machine gun stopped.

  On they came, the ragtag invaders, singing hoarsely:

  I’ll bet my money on the bob-tail nag,

  Somebody bet on the bay.

  Señor Gerardo realized that school was over for the day and hurried back inside to retrieve his bottle.

  

  “I wanna lug all day, I go backa Port-au-Prince,” Pierre muttered at Francisco Flores’ back as they hastened down the Calle Severo, heading for Hilario’s dry goods store, where they expected to meet Isabel and lay low in the storeroom until the fisherman was able to take them to the Pierrot. He staggered along, weighed down with luggage, his keys jingling round his neck. The heat shimmered from the cobblestones. The sound of gunfire seemed to be getting closer.

  “Hush up,” Flores ordered. He turned a miffed expression on Pierre. He was beyond peeved at the man’s bitching and moaning. Of course he was grateful for all Pierre had done. But really!

  

  From his room on the second floor of the hotel, Porter watched Flores, trailed by Pierre, hurry along the street and disappear from view. He hoped that Isabel had made it to the rendezvous before the fighting began. His heart was breaking into a hundred sharp pieces.

  

  The steamer trunk gaped like a mineshaft, swallowing Isabel’s entire wardrobe, including a dozen pairs of shoes she had never worn, the gramophone with the morning-glory horn, her library of recordings, fine editions of Leaves of Grass and the Oxford Book of English Verse, the pilfered jade artifacts that had decorated the back parlor, a wedge of letters from Francisco Flores, four Morley-designed dinnerware sets, four Towle silverware sets, a Sèvres vase, a croquet set, and her favorite goose-feather pillow. She would have packed Pauline’s dog, Monroe, if she thought he would survive. As she worked, she could hear far-off gunfire. Monroe panted in the heat. He pushed himself up on his hind legs and leaned over the rim of the trunk, burying his head in her dresses and whining piteously.

  Just as Isabel was going to slam the lid, Elinora appeared. She looked upset. “Mr. McCoy is going to town,” she reported. “There is much shooting.”

  “Oh boy,” said Isabel, straightening up. She realized that there was, indeed, much shooting. “This is going to be hairy.”

  She dug around in the trunk until she found her opera glasses. Peering through the window, she saw that a dinghy had tied up to the dock below the consulate and that her husband and the quarantine doctor, Grieg, were climbing out.

  “Christ! He always does this.”

  As she peered at the stretch of road that was visible through the trees, a pair of mules raced toward the jungle, tin cans and rifle shells spilling from their packs.

  “Go tell the stable boy that I’m ready for my wagon.”

  “No,” Elinora said.

  Isabel turned and glared at her. “I’m ready to leave,” she said shrilly. “Get moving!”

  “Not now, missus. They have machine guns.”

  

  Fifty yards from the back door of the consulate, a squad of filibusters was rousting the last of the soldiers from the trench and lining them up in descending order of height. Geddie watched from the kitchen doorway. The bantam sergeant he had seen drilling the troops brought up the rear as the men marched, in an orderly file, toward the center of town.

  The consul walked around to the front of the building and stepped up onto the veranda in time to meet Walter Whitaker and Herman Grieg, who were picking their way through the witchgrass on the path from the dock. Whitaker looked as if shooting battles were none of his concern.

  “That’s close enough, Walter. If you come up here, I’ll have to detain you. You know why.”

  “I need to telephone my man,” Whitaker said. He stopped a few inches short of the bottom step. “McCoy.”

  “I know who your man is,” Geddie told him. “I’m surprised he isn’t out there with your—” He jerked his head in the direction of the road. “Whatever you call that crew of criminals.”

  “I call that an army of liberation. I need to use the telephone, Buck.”

  “You aren’t coming onto this property.”

  Whitaker stared at the consul in a cold rage. His mustache twitched. He advanced the tip of his shoe.

  “I whipped you twenty-five years ago, Walter. The evidence is in your mirror. I can do it again.”

  “Perhaps I could use the telephone,” suggested Dr. Grieg and shot a stream of tobacco juice at the dirt.

  “You’re not coming inside either, Herman. I doubt that you have anything to do with this fiasco, but right now you’re showing damned poor judgment in your associations.”

  “That’s not fair,” Dr. Grieg protested. “McCoy sent me out to the steamer. He told me she needed to sail for Gulfport by two p.m.”

  “Shut up, Grieg,” Whitaker snapped without shifting his unblinking arrogant blue gaze from Geddie’s face.

  The doctor mopped his brow. “Do you mind if I sit out back for a while?”

  “Be my guest,” said the consul. “As soon as Walter leaves, I’ll bring you a chair.”

  A machine gun began to bark.

  

  Vaught let loose with the Hotchkiss gun and tore the first tent to tatters. Only one round hit the second tent, but it ripped a hole through the wire cage inside. A moment later, the first parrot squeezed through the hole, followed by another, and another. As each parrot, screaming at the top its lungs, breached the wire mesh, it dropped to the ground inside the tent. Then, as the space filled, the parrots dropped onto the backs of the previous parrots, until the whole mass of birds was pressed into the seam between the cage and the side of the tent, beating their wings in agitation and clawing at the canvas.

  When Vaught saw the tent bulging and churning, he resumed firing, lacerating the canvas. Bloody green feathers and bird parts exploded in all directions. “Whoo-ee!” he shrieked. “That’s some fun, boys!”

  He cut loose again, scattering parrots across the plaza. The tattered canvas was soaked in blood.

  When the other filibusters saw what was happening, they quit singing and swung their rifles toward the guanacaste tree. As the parrots came pouring through the gashes in the tent, shrieking, wings flapping furiously as they tried to get into the air, the filibusters opened fire. The parrots thudded on the flagstones like grotesque fruit falling from a tree.

  A thin cheer went up from the French ocean liner, where the tourists leaned on the rails to watch the invasion through binoculars. They were echoed by the hurrahs of the old salts and pluguglies outside the New Century and the Bar Coralio. When a parrot managed to escape the fusillade, the tourists shouted and beat on the side of the main cabin, and t
he salts and pluguglies bellowed encouragement, until a filibuster spotted the fugitive bird and took it down.

  The banana skiffs and bumboats that had rowed to safety along the hull of the ocean liner bobbed in the heat.

  

  Francisco Flores and Pierre reached the plaza. An acrid cloud of gunsmoke drifted across the pavement, which was strewn with dead and dying parrots. The birds made a hideous noise, like children being whipped. As the mob of filibusters advanced down the Calle Grande toward the wharf, Flores started to run. Pierre tried to pick up his pace and slipped on a puddle of bird guts. He banged to his knees, clutching the president’s luggage.

  “Come on, you stupid turnip!” Flores cried, and somebody shot him dead.

  

  As soon as Higbee ordered his Krupp gunner, an alcohol-ravaged veteran named Santelli, to blast the trenches along the wharf, the filibusters unleashed a barrage of gunfire, kicking up a cloud of dirt so thick that nobody could see the government soldiers, outgunned once again, tossing up a litter of white handkerchiefs and undershirts. Several were killed before they could surrender.

  Higbee ordered his men to keep clear of the trenches. He worried that the federales had rigged booby traps.

  “They ain’t got no dynamite,” his Krupp gunner informed him.

  “The hell you know what they ain’t got?”

  “Feller told me they used up all the dynamite on some sharks they had out there.”

  

  “What exactly would you have me do, Evans?” said the consul. He did not need the telephone line to hear the grenades exploding around the custom house.

  “Call in the Marines!” screamed Evans. “They’re trying to blow me out! Don’t you have a ship-to-shore radio over there!”

  “I guess they forgot to give me one of those.”

  “Send a boat to get them!”

  “I’m sure the Navy is aware of the situation,” Geddie snapped.

  A grenade exploded.

  “Evans? Are you there?”

  “They’re battering the door!”

  “So let them in. Face it, man, the Marines won’t come ashore unless somebody starts killing Americans.”

  “I don’t want to be the first!”

  “They won’t kill you, Evans. Who would open the safe?”

  

  As Higbee strode through the smoke, crackling with the joy of battle, he spotted a man wearing a major’s insignia who was issuing quiet orders to the prisoners. The commandante. Drawing nearer, he realized that the officer was the same one who had ambushed his platoon in the Cordillera during the last coup and who had spared his life when Higbee dared the officer to kill him for buzzard food. Higbee had not forgotten the beating the federales gave him before packing him back to Coralio on the mule. His chest still hurt when he laughed, and his shinbone had never mended, so he shot the commandante twice, once in each thigh, with his Luger and considered them even-steven.

  

  From the hotel portico, Porter could see most of the plaza. Among the bloody bodies of the parrots, he counted four dead government soldiers and twenty-three live ones, including the commandante, tourniquets on both legs, sitting on the pavement with their hands on the tops of their heads. The torn corpses of two men lay inside a mutilated tent. Near the east edge of the plaza sprawled a civilian in a light suit. Some rough characters were prodding the body with the toes of their boots. Keogh, the photographer, had set up his camera on a tripod and had his head under the black silk hood, focusing on the dead man, who, Porter realized with a jolt, must be Francisco Flores. Pierre was nowhere in sight.

  He moved cautiously to the street and around the side of the hotel. A dog was sniffing the front steps of the cuartel, and some men in corduroy britches and striped shirts were poking their Springfield rifles into the windows and doors. Sporadic gunfire rattled from the wharf, although Porter could not see that there was anyone left to shoot at. It looked as though the marauders had mostly moved on. They had gathered at the railroad wye and started cooking fires. Some of them slept under the boxcars, out of the sun.

  A column of prisoners guarded by two gray-headed Buffalo Soldiers marched up the street and filed into the cuartel. Many of the prisoners were bloodied. Several, crying out for their loved ones, had to be carried by their comrades. One was missing the bottom of his face. Porter heard the Buffalo Soldiers tell the filibusters in corduroy britches to stand guard.

  It occurred to Porter that the wounded needed tending. He could prescribe medicine, but he had no surgical training. For that, he needed to find Dr. Grieg. He remembered that the quarantine doctor had been ordered to inspect a fruiter at dawn. He had not seen him return to the hotel before the mayhem. Buck Geddie would know if Grieg was trapped on board the fruiter.

  Porter sucked in his breath and plunged across the plaza, drawing a burst of desultory machine-gun fire, the bullets thwacking at the low adobe wall at the front of the hotel, until someone shouted to cut it the hell out, killing an American was plain murder.

  

  Cornelia Anderson, her two chippies—who were still quarantined because of the fever that had carried off their colleague, Sylvia—and a counterfeiter newly arrived from California threw on clothing and rushed downstairs to the hotel bar. A machine gun rattled. As they crowded into the room, bullets smashed through the front window, tearing the drapes and ricocheting off the stamped-tin ceiling. The chippies, Agnes and Belle, screamed—rather on cue, the counterfeiter thought—and everyone scrambled behind the bar and hunkered down, where they remained, long after the shooting had stopped. Cornelia considered the possibility of mayhem and rape. She grasped a liquor bottle in each hand, ready to beat heads.

  The front door of the hotel slammed open. Boot heels advanced across the tiles of the lobby. She counted each step, ready to spring.

  “Hullo! Hullo in there.”

  “Butch?” Cornelia popped up from behind the bar. “Butch Higbee, you old son of a gun!”

  “Connie!”

  “What the hell ya doin’ here, Butch?” She patted her hair and straightened her robe. The two chippies and the counterfeiter cautiously lifted their faces over the edge of the bar.

  “Revolutin’,” said Higbee, leaning on the bar as if he had all day to chew over old times. He laid his Luger on the mahogany surface. Cornelia poured him a shot of guaro.

  “Again?”

  Agnes and Belle and the counterfeiter began edging toward the kitchen. “Are you almost done shooting?” Agnes said and flashed a nervous brown-toothed smile.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Higbee told her. He turned back to Cornelia. “We’re puttin’ Flores back in power.”

  “Ain’t he already?”

  “Is this what I can expect here?” the counterfeiter whispered to the girls, not missing the chance to admire their breasts, which were pressing out of their satin camisoles.

  “Terencio Flores,” Higbee clarified. “Whoa! This stuff tastes like hell-water.”

  “Guaro.”

  “I forgot all about guaro. Francisco’s out on the plaza. Dead.”

  “Suck on this,” Cornelia said. She cut a wedge of lemon and handed it to him. “I ain’t got whiskey till the Navy leaves.”

  “Bastards.”

  “You take that back! Those are our boys.”

  “Sorry.” Higbee sounded chastened. He sucked on the lemon, and his eyes and nose began to run.

  “Still, without the proper libations, business is terrible,” Cornelia said.

  Higbee wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Where’s that sonuvabitch William Sydney Porter?”

  “Butch.”

  “’Scuse me—that miserable, no-good, shit-suckin’ prick William Sydney Porter.”

  “You sound like you aim to hurt somebody.”

  “There ain’t usually so much shooting,�
�� one of the girls, Belle, told the counterfeiter. He was not a bad-looking guy, not at all. His pajamas were made of rose-colored silk. “Would you care to hide in my room till it cools off?” she said.

  “What a fine idea!” exclaimed Agnes, taking the counterfeiter by the arm. “I’ll show you my tattoo.”

  “Porter’s stayin’ here, ain’t he?” Higbee said. “I got somethin’ fer him before we move inland.”

  “He ain’t in his room right now,” Cornelia said hastily. “Don’t you have more pressing concerns, Butch?”

  “The men do need supervisin’,” Higbee admitted. “I got a crazy one out there mannin’ the Hotchkiss gun. Lord knows what he’d do with one a the cannons. I planned to see that fat-bottomed doc about some powder for the men, keep ’em fired up in the Cordillera, but now I’m thinkin’ any more energizin’ would be a mistake.”

  The counterfeiter and the chippies had slipped across the room and, arms linked, were ascending the stairs in a lascivious excess of pinching and giggling. “Do you girls like cognac? I have a bottle in my suitcase,” the counterfeiter promised.

  “Truth is, Butch, the doc’s supply has more or less dried up. That ain’t been good for my business neither.”

  A thought popped into Higbee’s head. “Hey, y’all don’t have some gramophone recordin’s around here?” He paused. “And mebbe I could borrow your storeroom for a while. Or a woodshed.”

  

  Dr. Grieg was sitting on a chair behind the consulate, mopping his brow.