Banana Republic
Page 28
As he was returning to the coast, the mules laden with stones, a company of ragged federal soldiers had surged out of the scenery and detained him. They commandeered the mules, divvied up the opals, and after beating him for several minutes, hiked off to intercept a platoon of American filibusters.
He had been lucky to make it to Coralio alive with a dozen of the most precious stones in his boot. The first building he saw when he staggered out of the jungle, a skeleton in rags, was the Masonic lodge. The old man who swept the grounds had opened the gate and allowed him to crawl into an empty room at the back of the courtyard. He stayed for a month. The Masons confiscated the opals.
Now, sitting on his twilit terrace with a drink in his hand, he wiggled his toes in his furry slippers and sighed with contentment.
From inside the house, a woman’s voice called, “Viens à l’intérieur pour manger maintenant, Pierre.”
“Oui, maman,” he called back. “Une minute.”
He finished his brandy sour.
He was thinking about buying some land in the Plaine de l’Artibonite, somewhere he could ride in the morning on his fine bay gelding, Henry, when the air was fresh and his spirit was hopeful. He had heard about a family with eighty-five-hundred fertile acres, who had suffered a reversal of fortune. The time was ripe for investment. The United States government and the National City Bank of New York were not going to allow the Germans to keep control of Haitian commerce for much longer. The island of Hispaniola was too strategically important. If things got shaky, they would send in the Marines.
It seemed to Pierre like the perfect time to get into the banana business.
Drawing a plausible picture of an American expatriate’s life in Central America at the turn of the twentieth century required a fair amount of research. I have tried to capture the political, economic, and imaginative life of the times. In doing so, I am indebted to the following resources: The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer; O. Henry: A Biography, David Stuart; The Fish that Ate the Whale, Rich Cohen; Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, Peter Chapman; The United Fruit Company and Middle America, Arthur Adair Pollan; Honduras: The Making of a Banana Republic, Alison Acker; The Great Singers, Henry Pleasants; The Incredible Yanqui, Hermann Deutsch; Through the Shadows with O. Henry, Alphonso Jennings; The Banana Men, Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover; The Collected Works of O. Henry.
I would like to thank Callie Cardamon for her careful reading of the manuscript, as well as Aimee Bender, Stephan Clark, Chard DeNiord, Ron Hansen, Amy Meyerson, Don Morrill, and David Oppegaard for taking a break from their own writing to read Banana Republic when it was still in manuscript form. Also, many thanks to Jaynie Royal and the fine staff at Regal House.