“Goodbye, then. Tell him I was here, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
She put on her oversize blue shades and went off with her tummy in and shoulders back.
I was considering another go at the contents of the briefcase when who should come along but Mr. Hamilton Burger himself. It was too close for coincidence. I guessed he had been watching her from behind a tree somewhere. Anyway there he was in his white tasseled loafers and white slacks and striped sailor’s jersey. I mean you’d think he was meeting like Brigitte Bardot. At least he wasn’t stoned and didn’t seem to be carrying that Smith & Wesson.
“Good afternoon, young man.”
The chairman of the board himself.
“Hello, Mr. Burger.”
“Anybody aboard?”
Here we go again.
“Just me.” I wasn’t somebody. He had been brought up not seeing people. Now he looked like a kid who has found a nickel and got to the candy store after it closed.
“Mind if I wait?”
“Not at all.”
Those white pants were a problem. The cockpit was none too clean. He finally scrunched down in a kind of half-assed way.
“Say when they were coming back?”
If he and his wife would compare notes it would save everybody a lot of time.
“Nope.”
“Well, there isn’t much to do around here.”
Did he really believe that or did he suspect that Harry had already found something to do? Probably both. Anyway, it was not my problem. I was happy to watch the water turning from blue to purple, and the clouds going red with the sun behind them. It was very beautiful. And the wind made a lovely sound in the palms. Not like temple bells at all, but more like Venetian blinds on a midsummer afternoon in my room at home.
Listening to it made me all of a sudden just a little bit homesick. I remembered the way Mary Ann had looked that last night before I went away, her face all kind of squeezed up and her tears sparkling in the hard blue light of the drive-in. It was about time I sent her a card. She would enjoy getting a card from foreign parts. So too would my dad. I mean he wasn’t really such a bad old goat. I would send the cards from Nassau.
Burger kept looking at his watch. I tried to think of something to say. Hamburgers? Stock market? Pro ball? Chavering? Johnny Unitas? Viet Nam? Did you ever notice the way Unitas drops back and passes out of the pocket? Sheet!
Fortunately Miss McGee came along. Elvira. And with her the senator. He was big, almost as tall as myself, and with no fat. But you could see he was like maybe sixty or so. Black or white? Hard to say. Dark skin but thin lips. Full of life. An opinion on everything. Oh, I could see what she saw in him.
She was barefoot. She wiggled her toes and winked at me. I felt my pecker rise.
The senator and Burger got into an argument. Something about Wall Street. Thinking about Elvira I wasn’t paying much attention. The senator claimed it was a festering sore on the dying body of WASP society. Burger said he sounded like some Panther commie. The senator said if he was a little younger and not a senator he probably would be. Burger wanted to know how a United States senator could talk such rubbish. They have been talking nothing but rubbish for twenty years, the senator told him.
So it went. They were having a great time. They lapped up our rum. Elvira’s toe caressed my instep. My heart jumped. I tasted the rum. It was awful. Burger was getting oiled. He sang two choruses of his department store song. The senator looked pained. I saw Burger glance at him sideways and start a third. He was putting the senator on. They really hated each other. I wished Harry would get back. The rum was running low. The jukebox had switched from ‘Aquarius’ to Johnny Cash.
“Eldridge Cleaver should be shot,” said Burger.
“If it’s up to Nixon he will be,” said the senator.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It would give you the excuse you’re waiting for.”
“Excuse for what?”
“Insurrection. Rebellion. You’d like to see another Castro over here.”
“The only thing wrong with Fidel is he ran all the whores out of Havana.”
“Well what about Buckminster Fuller?”
“Wha?”
“What about the shortage of plastic ore? Where do you get your whole grain rice? What about a handy little do-it-yourself boffing kit?”
“Hey,” said the senator. “Hey, I really dig this cat.”
Along came Harry. He had been in the ocean and his hair stood up like red steel wool. The monkey was a black growth on Miss Wong’s creamy shoulder. With them was the littlest man you ever saw. No bigger than a ten-year-old. Wearing a white linen suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and a short gray beard. He could have sat in the palm of my hand.
“This,” said Harry, “is Professor Grogan. Now I want to know which one of you bastards finished off my rum.”
“Permit me,” said the senator and was off the boat and across the street and into the bar.
Harry watched him go. “Now who was that?”
“My senator,” said Elvira.
“Are you a constituent?”
“You might say that.”
“Well, Burger, old buddy, what are you up to?”
Burger began another chorus of his song. Harry interrupted him coldly. “Any more of that shit and I’ll throw your ass off this boat.”
Burger shut up.
The senator came back with a bottle of rum in either hand. “Ecology,” he said breaking the seal. “Everybody’s talking ecology these days. There seems to be a race on to see which way the world will end. I only hope I live to see it.”
“It will end with water,” said Professor Grogan. “The way it began. Did you know for instance that this very Bahama bank on which your boat is floating was once the site of a vast Inca civilization?”
“I wrote a poem today,” said Harry. “While I was walking back. Want to hear it?”
No one said anything but he went ahead anyway.
portable typewriters, tape recorders, card table sets,
ski bindings, microscopes, electric can openers, battery chargers,
slot car racing, portable snow thrower, automatic steam cooker,
washing machines, clothes dryers, playpens,
Volvos,
Stereo tapes, electric toasters, permanent-press,
Buick,
Mercury,
Oldsmobile,
Chrysler,
This is the way the world ends.
“I like that,” I said. And I did.
“Noble cities once stood here,” said the professor. “Each one the equivalent of Atlantis. Gone now, buried under the sands of time. But their mark remains. Golden artifacts. Nameless treasures. A little digging, my friends, and you have the world in your hands.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to wonder,” the senator was saying to Burger, “what would have happened if the Cuban missile crisis had occurred at exactly the same moment as the East Coast power blackout?”
“Statistics,” said Burger. “Figures. Buckminster Fuller.”
“I’ll give you statistics,” said Grogan. “Did you know that since the last ice age three quarters of the earth has been water, and of the one quarter that is land very little has been lived on? Ninety-nine percent of humanity has lived on only five percent of the earth. Civilizations come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But the debris they leave behind. Now if either one of you gentlemen would be interested in a little venture into the unknown…”
Elvira’s toe warm against my instep. Hand in pocket.
“Care for a little swim?”
She leaned closer. “Love to, baby, but not now.” Inclined her head in the direction of the senator. “Right now is a no-no.”
But the senator wasn’t paying much attention. He was absorbed in Miss Wong. She was giving him a brief course in Taoism.
“You could start with Thomas Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu. That, of course, is of primary interest when v
iewed through the perspective of Virajananda’s Paramartha Prasanga. Or if that is not easily obtainable in these parts, you might start with Sivananda’s Concentration and Meditation.”
“Let’s fuck,” said the senator.
“I used to work in Chicago…” began Burger.
“That does it,” said Harry. “Everybody off.”
When they had all gone Miss Wong prepared supper.
“They keep asking me what you do for a living,” I said to Harry.
“What did you tell them?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You really don’t?”
I shook my head.
“Hell, boy, I’m a crook.”
CHAPTER 12
YOU MEAN YOU ROB FOR A LIVING? I WANTED to ask him. But had no chance. He was too busy talking. A born instructor. Not only he but Grogan as well. That wee man? What has size got to do with crookery? Well, I mean with his archeology and all. That was how he did it, Harry explained. They were working a deal together in Mallorca. What they did, they would go out on an old boat Harry had and plant all kinds of junk in the water and then take people out to find it.
It was a cinch, he explained, because the basic design of cooking pots used in the Mediterranean countries had not changed at all since the time of the Phoenicians, and so you rounded up about five dollars’ worth of pottery and smashed them into little pieces and dumped them overboard and then when one of these archeological cats came up with a hunk of pot he felt as if he had just made the scientific discovery of the age and already could see his name in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and was perfectly happy to shell out twenty-five bucks a day for the use of the boat. They were mostly Germans. The Germans were very serious about it, and carried special little pointed hammers and magnifying glasses. The Germans were not the only ones, of course, but the others spent most of their time boffing the Mallorcan girls, and it was hard to tear them away to go look for pots.
“So what happened?”
He shrugged. “We stayed at it too long. They confiscated my boat and put Grogan in jail.”
“Why not you too?”
“As it happened I was balling the wife of the chief of police. She tipped me off and I got away with some smuggler chums who were running a high speed MTB to Gibraltar. I’ve always felt I sort of owed Grogan for that. A year in a Spanish pokey is no fun. Even with six months off for good behavior.”
Now I understood why Grogan had been giving us all that jazz about lost civilizations. He was getting ready to salt the Great Bahama Bank.
“Well, we might do that,” Hairy agreed. “Or we might not. It’s sort of penny-ante crap when you come right down to it. We might try for a bigger score. Shocked?”
Why should I be? It didn’t sound so bad, all that about the old cooking pots. In a way he was doing people a favor. What if they went all their lives looking and never found anything? Frustration. This way everybody was happy.
What would be my role? Dump the stuff or lead the divers to it or run the boat? Probably Harry at the wheel and me in the water and Grogan spouting all that bull about relics and artifacts. Did they really swallow all that crap? He reassured me. You wouldn’t believe how stupid so-called serious scientists can be. You just needed a little bait. Someone like Miss Wong. One look at Miss Wong and you could make them think they had uncovered Noah’s salad bowl.
But how did she feel about it?
She shrugged. “I am not concerned with middle-class morality, Clay. Good and evil. Right and wrong. To boff or not to boff. Who is to say? I do draw the line at murder, of course, but apart from that—let the heart sing a little.”
I was willing to let my heart sing.
“Any little thievery in your past, Number Three?”
I shook my head.
“Come on now. A little shoplifting? Power saw? TV?”
Those binoculars. Beautiful Zeiss 7x50s. Fat Power Squadron clown lecturing sea scouts. Left them on the desk when he took us outside to demonstrate sextant. Red nose, redder jowls, bullshit artist. Once crossed Lake Michigan, so he said. Couldn’t get those glasses out of my mind. Wandered back in. No one around. Grabbed them up and dashed for my locker. Tucked them away. Back with the group and not breathing hard. Heart pounding. Trickle of sweat between shoulder blades. Uproar. Hullabaloo. Search everybody. Ridiculous. How are you going to stick anything that big in your pocket. Search locker next surely. Disaster. Ruined. But no. Never even thought of lockers. His red face exploding. Damn near crying. Went back that night and got them out. Moon craters big as oranges. But then weakened. Thought of his fat face and wet eyes. Tied them up in wrapping paper and left them behind the hedge near the hotel. Called him from pay station and spoke through handkerchief. “Your glasses behind hedge.”
“What? What? Who is this?” Click. Career in crime cut short.
“No,” I said.
“Very unnatural,” said Harry. “Very bad for the psyche. Got to loosen you up a little, boy.”
“I appreciate your concern, Uncle Harry.”
“How about a little bank job? Nothing too pretentious. Start you off in a modest way.”
“I don’t think I’d be a success at it.”
“Never know till you try. Do wonders for your libido. Give you the biggest hard-on you ever saw.”
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to think about it.”
“Take Nassau for instance. Full of banks. Side by side. Possibly more banks to the square block than any place in the world.”
“How come?”
“A little Switzerland is how come. Numbered accounts. No questions asked or answered. Internal Revenue told to fuck off. Easiest thing in the world to pick up a few hundred thou from one of those banks. Dig?”
He must be putting me on. Or was he? What did I really know about him? Anything—and the more outlandish the better—seemed possible with Harry. Sail around the world. Screw the Queen of England. Why not? He’d already seduced the Burgers that way. Funsville. Gamesville. Now me. Here on this crazy boat in the hot sun with a monkey and Miss Wong, it would be kind of silly to think of right and wrong the way you did in Nebraska. And then too I had the funny feeling that no matter what happened it wasn’t really happening to me. It was like watching a film with actors. There was this actor playing Clayton Bullmore Third and it would be kind of fun to see what happened to him.
But if he really was a crook he was the most outgoing crook you ever saw. He discussed his plans as openly as if setting up the JayCee softball game. When we sat down to dinner he told Miss Wong, “We have just been talking over the possibility of heisting a bank in Nassau.”
“Please pass the pepper,” she said.
I mean did they think they were Bonnie and Clyde or what?
I never got tired of looking at her. That night she was more beautiful than ever. She had placed a candle in a sardine tin and her face was changeable in the flickering light. She was wearing one of Harry’s blue denim shirts and an old pair of jeans. The shirt, as usual, was open to the waist and, as always, she wore nothing under it. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking. What, for instance, did she think about me? Sometimes she treated me like a kid and other times like a man. I was more than half in love with her. Not only because she was beautiful, but because she had this kind of like you know serenity. She gave you the feeling that if you had told her she was to be cut up in pieces and fed to the red ants, she would only have smiled. That, I think, was what drove a guy like Burger right out of his skull—this feeling that no matter what he did he could never buy or possess her. And I guess maybe that was what she liked best about Harry—the fact that he never really wanted to own her and didn’t give a damn. And maybe that was why I was never jealous of Harry even though I knew he was chavering her. He was like some kind of force of nature. You couldn’t be jealous of him any more than you could of the wind and waves.
Harry had lit his cigar. “The thing is,” he said reflectively, “those native cops are a joke. Abou
t the toughest thing they do is warn you not to ride your bike up a one-way street. They have a great band though. Tiger skins and big shiny horns. When that band is marching you could steal the governor’s mansion right off the island brick by brick and nobody would care.”
“Suppose you did crack a bank,” she said. “How would you get the money away?”
“That’s the real beauty part of it. I mean who would look for a gang of crooks on an old tub like Jezebel? A high-speed power boat or a private plane or some nonsense like that, but an old ketch doing five miles an hour wide open—uh uh.”
“Have you ever robbed a bank before?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not. But a fella has to start somewhere. I can hardly run a classified ad to the effect that a willing young robber is anxious to meet an experienced old hand.”
“What I really don’t understand is why you want to bother with it in the first place. If you really need money all that badly I suppose you could go to work.”
“Watch your language. Anyway there’s more to it than that. It would be a gas. A slap in the face for the establishment.”
“But the establishment won’t even know they’ve been slapped. They won’t understand that you have been acting out of a deep ideological conviction. To them you will be just another cheap crook.”
“Listen,” I said. “If you really need money that badly I’ll get a job. In a boat yard or something.”
“You can’t even get a work permit here, Number Three. Strictly the Bahamas for the Bahamians.”
“Then we could go fishing. Sell what we catch to those big hotels in Nassau.”
“Forget it. Never could stand the stink of fish.”
“How about taking passengers? Put up notices in the hotels. Day sailing so much an hour.”
He shuddered. “That would be worse than fishing. There is one other possibility though.”
“Yes?”
“We could stick up the casino.”
“Why is that better than a bank?”
Harry & the Bikini Bandits Page 5