Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  First she went to the sick bay and got herself a dose of laudanum. Then she went up to the communications room and sent a cable to Pauline in New Orleans. Pauline sent one back: Get screwed. Not a dime. See you in New York for New Years.

  This seemed confusing.

  Isabel decided to cut all communication with her step-daughter until she had found a lawyer who had the skill to break an iron-clad trust.

  

  In the afternoon it rained. They had luncheon in the cabin. The steward set up a folding table with two sterling serving plates heaped with smoked fish, dinner rolls, sliced beef, tomatoes, cucumbers, liver-paste sandwiches, boiled chicken, sauerkraut, orange wedges, scrambled eggs, and aspic. Isabel ate a chicken leg. Porter ate a roll.

  There was no good time to tell Isabel about the loss of the loot, so he spilled it.

  “Oh, my,” she said, deflating. The chicken bone fell from her fingers onto the carpet. “Darling, we could have had such a good time together.”

  “Are you angry?” Porter said.

  “Very.”

  They sat in silence for an hour or more. Rain beat against the porthole. Isabel scratched herself with a nail file; Porter wrote his thoughts on three sheets of paper. Out on the deck, some men were engaged in a tug-o’-war in the rain.

  “Maybe you can get some more,” Isabel said at last. She poked the file at his thorax. “These old duffers look like they aren’t worth a rap at cards.”

  Porter looked up from his writing. A smile spread across his features, like the sun warming an alpine hillside.

  “Start with that gruesome Cruikshank,” Isabel said.

  

  The next few days were passed drinking brandy and playing bridge with wealthy people in the aft smoking room. Since Porter had paid extravagantly to secure their berths on the Pantagruel, he, personally, was once again flat-broke busted. He proposed to Morrison that the two of them take these Newport pillars to the cleaners and split the proceeds. There were almost five-thousand dollars of actual cash in the Gladstone bag—big stakes for an eight-day cruise up the Atlantic seaboard. Morrison, despite episodes of profound gloom over his failure either to do his job properly or to make off with the goods—he was torn—proved to be an excellent partner.

  They were at the table eighteen hours a day, eating turtle soup and liver sandwiches from trays the stewards brought in, and entertaining their tablemates with made-up tales of the battle for Coralio. They were interrupted only by gale-force winds off Cape Hatteras, which sent everyone lurching back to his cabin and spoiled Porter’s appetite for any more turtle or liver. The ship pitched and rolled. Waves crashed across the deck. He and Isabel drank a little whiskey for their stomachs, but it did not help. He sorely missed the calming influence of reposado.

  Porter and Morrison cleaned up at bridge. The defeated rich people formed a private bitch-club over scotch and soda, diagramming the many ways they had been rooked and speculating about the pair of sharps who never seemed to be out of each other’s sight. Every hundred nautical miles, more or less, a new member joined the fraternity, until they had taken over the aft smoking room, and Porter had to get up a new game in the library where there were not so many venomous kibitzers.

  They switched to playing poker with the future heirs of the Newport fortunes, and then to rummy with all-comers, including off-duty crew, until no one would play with them anymore. By now the ship was a day out of New York, and the duo had almost tripled their money. Then Porter met an heir to a tobacco fortune who had been below decks with the stomach flu for the past week and wagered the whole pile on whether they would spot a whale before the Statue of Liberty rose into view. Ten minutes later, he lost the bet, when the tobacco heir pointed out the spout on the horizon as the whale breached.

  Whatever fellow feeling had waxed between Porter and Shorty Morrison immediately waned, and the Pinkerton paid a grim visit to the captain.

  

  Porter thought it prudent not to mention the loss of the funds to Isabel. The news would spoil her Christmas.

  The Pantagruel entered New York harbor an hour before sunset in heavy snows and choppy seas and was met by the tugboats. As she was escorted west of Governors Island, the towers of lower Manhattan rose dreamlike through curtains of snow and the smoke pouring from the factory stacks that lined the rim of the island. Cranes bristled in the smudged air. The dark dirty waters teemed with tugs, ferries, barges, merchant ships, and an unseasonal double-decker excursion steamer packed to the rails with men in overcoats and homburgs, and women in cheap furs and mufflers, who stared with hostility at the ocean liner as it moved toward the river.

  Porter and Isabel, coatless, stood shivering at the rail. The wind had picked up, sweeping down a thousand miles from Hudson Bay just to slap them in the face.

  “Maybe we should go in for a last drink,” Porter said hopefully. “My hands are numb.”

  “Are you kidding? What a glorious chill!” Isabel cried, her voice tingling with excitement. “Isn’t it thrilling?”

  He drew her to him, feeling her warmth, the firmness of her waist and the curve of her hip, catching the familiar catty stench of her greasy hair.

  

  The teeming masses covered the piers. The streetlights were on, casting halos in the winter air. Black rattletrap automobiles slid along the slick pavement, and Stephenson horsecars jammed the intersections. The cries of vendors and the cursing of stevedores on the wharf, the shrilling of police whistles and the heavy crashing of cargo, the booming of ships’ horns and the creaking of block-and-tackle reverberated from the brick fronts of the warehouses, the din softened somewhat by the swirling snow.

  As they descended the gangplank, Porter spotted the federal marshals, clad in overcoats and rubber boots, standing on the pier.

  “Darling, who are those men?” Isabel squeezed his arm and pointed with a satin-gloved hand. Her nose was as red as a rose; her breath came in little puffs.

  “Killers of dreams,” Porter said sadly.

  As they stepped onto the pier, which was piled with tarpaulin-covered crates and barrels and great spools of wire, he drew her to one side. She clung to his arm. “What does this mean?”

  He suddenly wished he had spent more time in the cabin with her, exercising his virile member. He foresaw an extended period of celibacy in his future. He put on a game smile and extended his wrists:

  “Merry Christmas, gentleman.”

  “And to you, Mr. Porter,” said one of the marshals, tipping his hat, while the other clapped on the cold, cold irons. “A very Happy New Year to you, ma’am. Have either of you any weapons?”

  

  His heart, John Buchanan Geddie remembered, had been well enough alone. It had never murmured, never lagged, roused him in the morning like a butler, so well behaved. In his room on Chapel Street, with his books and his chipped china cup and his bottles of bordeaux, he had laid plans for a lucid life. His heart was well enough alone.

  Age twenty. Home from New Haven to Richmond. Graffitos of fireflies described the thoughts one thinks on June evenings, when one has wandered from dinner to the edge of the conversation—murmurs mingling with murmuring night sounds—to stand gazing into one’s own dusky places from which the better self emerges with a glittering eye, a scripture on the upturned lip.

  When she spoke, his heart demanded everything.

  He had been well enough alone. After the simmer of night rain every smell inscribed suggestions on the air, the leaves and buds, wood and soil. Spare enigmatic pictograms of casual crows ranged across the fences. The world told lovers nothing more than they needed to know. So long ago.

  He stirred and, with effort, raised himself from his bed. Pulled up his suspenders and ran his hand through his tangled hair. He poured another glass of whiskey and moved gingerly toward the window. He looked out through the leaves of the banana palms
and magnolias at the ocean horizon. It was a lid on the past, he used to think.

  After a while he heard a soft chattering, and little Sybil climbed up on the window sill. She dangled her wooden leg over the edge and began to pick at the red scar on her hip. Geddie gulped his drink. He could not remember what year it was.

  

  Federal Prisoner #30664 sat at an oak desk behind the railing of the prison pharmacy, drinking a julep he had made from hospital-grade alcohol and essential peppermint oil, and doctoring the ledger to disguise the fact. He scratched himself absently—lice; everyone had lice—while he tried to read the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It was the beginning of his twelve-hour night-shift mixing and dispensing medicines to those convicts who preferred to survive. Many did not. At the Ohio State Penitentiary suicides were as common as picnics on the banks of the Cuyahoga. The inmates cut their own throats or hanged themselves or swallowed crushed glass. The consumptives and cancer cases were goners in any case and were resigned to waiting it out with daily doses of morphine. As for the sufferers of pneumonia, typhus, measles, scabies, chilblains, whooping cough, catarrh, asthma, cholera, yellow fever, tetanus, mumps, croup, hepatitis, pink eye, and, occasionally, rabies, he gave them what he could scrounge up and hoped for the best. After eleven o’clock the night physician, Dr. Willard, went to bed, and Porter was on his own, the only licensed pharmacist in a population of twenty-five hundred criminals.

  Just now, Dr. George Willard was finishing his rounds, and Porter was reading the final line on the World Series. 1906 had proved a banner year for the Chicago Cubs. Under the management of Frank Chance, they had gone 116-36 but had been upset in six games by Fielder Jones and the White Sox, a team with the worst batting average in the American League. Obviously, Cornelia Anderson needed to tinker with her contraption.

  He had had a letter from her in late August, coinciding with the news that Isabel Whitaker Krum had been arrested for assaulting Nellie Melba, the soprano, during tea at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was in all the papers. She was resting at an estate in the Hudson Valley, where some theosophical heretics had established a community of Spirit Travelers to explore the healing power of anger.

  Cornelia and Butch Higbee were happily if not quite legally married and were renovating the hotel into a tourist spa. They had adopted a mangy little black cat that Butch had found in the jungle. Butch had returned to the insurrection in time for Terencio Flores to lead the American filibusters, federal-army deserters, and bewildered campesinos into the capital, and he had managed to kill six or eight stubborn federales.

  After staging such a successful campaign against the rapacious taxation of Francisco Flores, Vesuvius Fruit Company had been granted permission by the new government to finish the railroad and build a quarter-mile pier. Terencio Flores’ administration had decided to fund itself by nationalizing the opal mines, and Flores had decided to fund himself by means of direct payments from Vesuvius into a bank account in Panama. Everybody was convinced that more tourist yachts would put in. If they did not, Cornelia wrote, the hotel-spa was doomed, since now that McCoy was running the company, Vesuvius employees were forbidden to patronize the bar. The two girls who worked for her, Agnes and Belle, had given notice that they intended to retire and live with that good-looking counterfeiter from California, whose real name turned out to be Marcus Aurelius Porter—imagine that! After San Francisco was destroyed by the earthquake in April, M. A. Porter had decided to stay in Coralio indefinitely; he was working at the hotel as a porter (ha ha) while he forged a title deed to the burned-out firehouse and built a bungalow with the girls’ earnings.

  Speaking of building, the J.P. Morgan folks had paid for a new custom house, but they were not collecting much money now that Terencio had rolled back the tax on bananas. Morgan was biding his time until the next coup. Elliot Evans was back at his desk, awful jumpy, with the custom-house safe guarded round the clock by United States Marines, who had occupied the cuartel and were training the new federales. God bless our boys in uniform. Dr. Grieg, in addition to his duties as quarantine doctor, had moved into the barracks to minister to the Americans. Who knew he had been in the Medical Corps? He never had seemed quite on the level.

  Poor Buck Geddie. She checked on him every morning. He was bughouse, but Sybil was recovering. It was lucky that Pierre had had a little veterinary training.

  She inquired about Al Jennings, hoped he was doing well in Oklahoma. Porter did not have the heart to write her that Jennings was, in fact, also a guest of the federal government, having decided to capitalize his real-estate law practice with the proceeds of a mail-train robbery. Things had not, obviously, gone as planned for Federal Prisoner #30834. Still, it was nice to see old friends. Porter wished, however, that Jennings would stop talking while he was trying to read the newspaper.

  “Your weakness, Bill,” the train-robber was saying, helping himself to a gulp of Porter’s faux julep, “is for sentimental rogues and excess verbiage. It leads one to suspect authorial overreach.” He had his nose buried in the latest issue of Outlook magazine, which featured a story about a hobo Porter had written under a pseudonym. “For instance: As Whistling Dick picked his way where night still lingered among the big, reeking, musty warehouses, he gave way to the habit that had won for him his title. Subdued, yet clear, with each note as true and liquid as a bobolink’s, his whistle tinkled about the dim, cold mountains of brick like drops of rain falling into a hidden pool. You could cull out the trill of mountain brooks, the staccato of green rushes shivering above the chilly lagoons, the pipe of sleepy birds. Really, Bill? It’s not exactly Mark Twain.”

  “You’re condemning me for not being somebody else?” Porter retrieved his drink from Jennings. “What would you have written?”

  Jennings shrugged. “I ain’t saying I could do better. I’m a lawyer. I deal in facts.”

  “As long as they don’t get in the way.”

  “What’s your point, scribbler?”

  Everything he wrote these days was snapped up by the magazines. As a writer of fictions, he was as popular as popcorn, coast to coast—as popular as William Sydney Porter had been, briefly, a year before. No one knew that O. Henry was a pharmacist doing five years for felony embezzlement.

  He directed the magazine payments to Margaret Porter in Pittsburgh, c/o Cecilia Roach.

  

  After a while, the warden, E.G. Coffin, drifted into the room in his shirtsleeves, his head enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke. He looked tired and wet. He had spent the last two hours giving a safecracker named Jimmy Connors—who was also the day druggist—his weekly working over, which involved dangling the prisoner from a hook in the basement and blasting him with cold water from the hose. A few months before, Connors had given Coffin a dose of arsenic for his rheumatism. It was Porter who had stepped up in the nick of time with the antidote. When one man saves another man’s life, the scales are often unbalanced and enmity festers, but in this case the warden and the prisoner became friendly. Coffin had a fine baritone singing voice and, having been raised in West Texas, he could play some cowboy guitar. Every few nights he stopped by the pharmacy for a chat. If Dr. Willard was around to sing alto and Jennings to sing bass, they killed a couple of hours making music.

  Porter pulled his mandolin from under the desk and began to tune it.

  The warden strummed a ringing chord on his guitar.

  As if summoned by the dinner bell, Dr. Willard came in, humming. He dropped his medical bag on a chair and wiped the blood off his hands with a rag. “What are you reading, Al?”

  Jennings tossed the magazine on Porter’s desk. “Junk.”

  “You wonder why they bother to put it out,” said the doctor.

  “K.B.!” the warden shouted. “Get your puckered ass over here.”

  K.B., a furtive trusty with a push broom who had been working hard to give the impression of sweeping the floor, shuffled over, a ring
of keys jangling from his belt, his eyes fixed on some distant spot beyond the walls of the pharmacy. The warden plucked the Essbach concert harmonica from Porter’s breast pocket and tossed it to the trusty. “Play it, you big bastard!”

  Coffin put his cigar in the inkwell on Porter’s desk and tried out a new chord. Porter ran through a couple of scales. The men gathered more tightly around the desk, leaning in, the better to hear one another. K.B. piped a sweet melody on the mouth organ. Then, in the shadowy recesses of the Ohio State Penitentiary pharmacy, their voices rose in perfect harmony:

  The air is so pure and the breezes so fine,

  The zephyrs so balmy and light

  I would not exchange my home here to range

  Forever in azures so bright.

  (With gusto.) Home, home on the range,

  Where the deer and the antelope play,

  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

  And the skies are not cloudy all day.

  

  Seen from the terrace in Pétion-Ville, the city of Port-au-Prince spread out like a great glittering fan in the blue-smoked air. The last golden rays of the sun shimmered on the bay. A breeze kissed the palm fronds and touched the bougainvillea spilling over the whitewashed walls of the villa. The aroma of oyster pie and buttermilk biscuits drifted through the French doors. Light opera played inside.

  Pierre Benoit reclined on a yellow-striped patio chair, sipping a brandy sour with extra nutmeg. Though the evening was balmy, he was wearing fuzzy slippers and a robe with a velvet collar.

  His thoughts drifted to the past. As is often the case with the youngest son—he had nine brothers—he had been forced to strike out on his own at an early age, leaving Terrebonne Parish for the tropics with dreams of striking it rich in the opal trade: not the bluish opals of the coast—you could dig those out in hundred-pound chunks—but the rarer and more beautiful stones extracted with toil and trouble from the basalt in the Cordillera. He was thinking now about his two lonely years on remote mountains, living on canned beans and cactus, swinging a pick from dawn to dusk, chiseling gems from rock by firelight. The sun had baked him as red as pottery, and the rain had rotted his feet and crotch. His mules were his only friends.