by R. M. Koster
I lived with Alfonso, who had graduated and gone on the Foreign Ministry payroll with a fat salary. Actually he worked for Uncle Erasmo on the newspapers. He had an apartment in a new quarter and hung out at the Excelsior, stalking stewardesses in his Brooks tropicals. Now that he could see me, he tried to include me in his romps. He’d get calls from his regulars when they ricocheted up from Panama or down from Miami—could he get a date for Jean or Joan or Jane or June?—and sometimes I went. But those girls liked the hotel bar and good restaurants where they wouldn’t get the trots, while I had no money and had to be careful about getting the lights out before disrobing. And no stewardess could slake my leech for Angela. That needed white rum and Reservation gringos to whack the piss out of and lava-quimmed street whores with jism on their panties and hair under their arms.
One night, in the Relax or Trópico, some loud cantina hazed with rum and violence, a wizened gringo pushed up next to me and stuck a herring-flavored finger in my face.
“Pussy,” he announced.
“Yours?” I inquired.
He raised his chin and poked my chest with the finger. “You got a nice built,” he said, “but don’t mess with me. I’m a killer.”
He was no taller than I and twenty pounds lighter. His left hand was in his pocket; his front teeth were AWOL from his grin. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap, and had DUNCAN, T.S. and a service number tattooed on the inside of his forearm.
“I’d kill a greaser as soon as a gook,” he said. “Just smell that pussy.”
I might have made a bad mistake, despite the knife I assumed was in his left hand, but a big soldier danced by with one of the bar girls, and Duncan reached between them and grabbed her box. The girl screamed and the soldier bellowed. Duncan drew out his left hand, and there was no knife nor even a hand but a pink stump which he drove into the soldier’s throat. He flung both arms over the soldier’s shoulders and climbed up on him and butted his nose with his forehead. Then he stumped him in the belly and kneed him in the groin and chopped him behind the ear as he fell.
“See?” he said, winking proudly at me. And he dissolved through the swinging doors to the tweet of MP whistles.
When I ran into him again a few nights later, he greeted me like an old friend. He asked me if I was as strong as I looked, and said he’d been looking for me to back me against an arm wrestler in the Cantina California who gave three-to-one odds to Tinieblans. I went along and won sixty inchados for him, though I had to show my Tinieblan identity card before he could collect.
“Any relation to the Sancudo who’s President?” asked my opponent.
“His son.”
“You think I’d back a crum?” sneered Duncan, seizing the bills. “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of this gin mill.”
He was a Marine sergeant who’d lost his hand on one of the islands. They kept him in the Corps because of his record and gave him assignments like sergeant of the stockade guard at Quantico and now steward of the naval officer’s club in the Reservation. He would rather have been in Korea killing gooks. He taught me how to shoot—lovely gold Marine Corps .45 caliber match ammunition, which we blasted into the warm drizzle of Sunday afternoons at the Reservation Gun Club—making me hold and squeeze off timed fire while he lit matches under my nose and blew his old drill instructor’s whistle in my ear. Also how to use a knife and a honed hacksaw blade which could be carried taped in the small of the back, and how to throw an ice pick, and how to kill a man without any of these instruments. Then he tested me against three Reservation punks—soldiers or civilians, I never knew—going up to their table at the Jardín Cortéz, a beer garden opposite Fort Shafter about five blocks up from the Politécnico, and saying, “This kid with me says the three of you is cocksuckers, and you can blow him or fight him outside in the lot.” Then he sat on a car fender and watched me take the three, not even intervening when one broke off an antenna to whip me with, and when I’d finished chopping, twisting, and stomping, he took me inside and bought me a drink and said, “OK, kid. You’re all right. Now let’s make some money.”
In three years Duncan had put aside forty-eight cases of Old Parr whiskey by adding bottles to the bills of private parties and a case or two whenever the admiral gave an official reception. There was so much smuggled whiskey in Tinieblas, he couldn’t give it away, but he could get sixty dollars a case in Ticamala. For that he needed a boat and someone who could speak Spanish.
“Now, kid,” he said, “I never asked you why you hang around gin mills when you could be over to the palace drinking champagne, or how come you’re such a mean bastard, but I never seen you with much money, so maybe you’d like to make some. You get a boat, and we’ll split fifty.”
Now that was interesting, because only two days before I had realized that I could have Angela for money. Strange, perhaps, that this hadn’t come to me earlier, as all the world knew she was a whore, but she was so special for me I had got the idea one had to be powerful or famous or at least not hideously blotched before one could put in a bid. Then I saw that the problem of Angela was financial.
That was at Medusa Beach again. Alejo treated Alfonso and me like dogs—Alfonso like a good dog who knew how to roll over and would fetch a stick, me like a mean dog who snarled when you went to pat him and wouldn’t come to heel. He took us to the villa to show Alfonso a stretch of beach front which he was getting for being a good dog and me what I was missing out on by being a bad dog. He had Gunther blow the horn three times at the gate, perhaps as a signal for Angela to put some clothes on, and when we went down to the beach, she joined us, wearing a bikini. There were no familiarities between her and Alejo and no introductions. She gave me no sign of recognition, though my face burned and I could feel my blotches crimson when I imagined her tail tucked in between her hind cheeks. We picked our way across the point, where palms grew right down to the sea, Alejo stopping on the way to toss his jacket to Egon and open his shirt, revealing the purple wound on his throat. Then we came out on a crescent cove some three hundred yards long.
“Yours,” he said to Alfonso. “You can sell it when my term is up, but if you hold it fifteen years, it will be worth a hundred thousand.”
And Angela looked at Alfonso with interest, as though she had just discovered he was there.
Angela and Alfonso groped obscenely across my movie screen for a frame or two; then it struck me that it was the money which interested her. Alfonso had suddenly become a possible provider of what she wanted. I would do just as well. I simply had to pay her price.
At that moment I was too taken with Angela to generalize from her to other women, but I later found her to be perfectly representative. Any man, however blotched, could have any woman, however beautiful, if he paid her price. And if I stopped dwelling on my blotches, I would know the price, not by figuring it out but as a hunter knows how much to lead a running target. Some only wanted to be asked nicely; others, like Marta, wanted not to be asked. Olga wanted to be treated like a queen, while Elena wanted to be treated like an ordinary woman. Some wanted pleasure and some wanted suffering and some wanted tenderness and some wanted a firm hand. All wanted you to know what they wanted without their having to tell you. I once had a German girl who wanted to be hit. I only had her one night, for I never enjoyed that kind of love, but she came back to my hotel with me at four in the morning and then smirked and said she wouldn’t, and the next thing I knew I had hit her in the face and she was down on her knees fumbling with my belt buckle. Her price had come to me. Well, that afternoon on the beach it came to me that Angela wanted money and that mine would be as good as anyone else’s. So when Duncan made his proposition, I said I could get a boat.
The boat I had in mind was a scow-nosed Higgins landing craft about forty feet long which the gringos had given to the Civil Guard during Lucho Gusano’s administration. Alejo had a cabin built on it and designated it the presidential yacht. He made Belisario Oruga take diplomats fishing on it from time to time. It was moored
about a hundred yards off the end of the yacht-club pier, and it’s a fine exercise in mental masturbation to recall strolling out on that pier five or six midnights later, after Duncan had procured a three-day pass and chatted with the second secretary of the Ticamalan Embassy, not being pushed in a wheelchair or babied in an indian’s arms but padding along on my own power while a dance band wailed “Noche de Ronda” on the club terrace behind me and the lights from the bar shivered in the water on either side. Animated portrait of the vegetable as daring young man: he trips with tennis-shoed softness down the ramp to the float, extracts a sweat sock full of BB’s from his hip pocket, knots a thong around the neck of the sock and ties it around his waist so it hangs dongishly against his left thigh, sits down on the edge of the float dipping his sneaker toes in the water, straightens his back and slides in. Soft gulp from the Pacific Ocean. He finds an oil drum with his feet, uncoils and burps back to the surface. Splashless breast stroke with his mind full of sharks. Just poke them on the snout and they swim away. Shout at them underwater. Bash them with a heel if they nuzzle up behind. Cowardly bullies every one, and you’re perfectly safe if you have no cuts and aren’t menstruating. Arm sweep and frog kick with his back swayed by the weight of the BB sock. Did one hundred yards in a minute five at Payne Whitney. Respectable time for freshman fitness tests. Salt water’s more buoyant too, and no nasty chlorine in your hair. Sweep and glide, kick and glide.
He goes up the mooring line hand over hand until he can grasp the gunwale. See him there, that dark smudge against the white hull, swinging slowly back toward the stern, which the ebb tide has pulled out into the bay. The guard’s dinghy is tied there, and he brushes it away with his feet, then rat-scrambles silently over the transom.
Sopping mound beside the engine housing. Breathing carefully through the mouth and fumbling with soggy leather knots. He creeps forward with the sock in his right hand. Through the windshield the club lights, street lamps, headlights along Avenida de la Bahía. All very distant. The guard sleeps face down, and the armed animal steadies himself against the slanted hull and bludgeons him behind the ear.
Wait, is this filthier or less filthy than shooting a man from behind? The guard’s holster was beside his pillow; on the other hand he was fast asleep. He had never befriended me, but neither had he ever done me wrong. I have more leisure now to debate such questions. At the time I was alertly concerned for my own interests. In fact I was never concerned with morality until Ñato blasted me into the contemplative life. Let me note in my favor that when he rolled half over, I didn’t automatically crunch him again but waited to see if the first blow was sufficient. It was. He flopped back on his face.
Then I carried him, more or less as Jaime carries me now, back to the stern and lowered him into the dinghy. I untied the painter and walked the skiff along to the bow and untied the Higgins’ mooring line and knotted it to the dinghy painter and cast off. Then I let the tide suck the Higgins out into the channel where no one would hear me start the engine.
I steered around to the beach at Fort Shafter, the same beach where Palmiro Inchado’s sailors had found his head. There was a little wharf used by sport fishermen, and Duncan was on it, sitting on a pile of whiskey cases surrounded by jerrycans full of gas. He’d had to make three trips in the officers’ club panel truck and then walk back from the club to the beach, but though Alfonso had told me to watch out for him, he’d thought to bring dry clothes for me. We loaded and were fifty miles up the coast by dawn.
All day the boat ground over the long Pacific swells which rose and fell gently like the breasts of a sleeping woman, churning on under an egg-white sky between the low green coast and a line of rain squalls. When Duncan went down to sleep, I pushed the windshield up to feel the salt wind on my face and kicked off my sneakers to feel the boat’s pulse with my toes, and when a squall caught us, I kept the cabin window open to feel the rain on my cheek and shoulder. The sea stopped breathing then and flattened under the rain, and the drum of rain on the cabin roof deadened the rumble of the engine, and a curtain of water the same color as the sea hung around the boat, so that even when I looked back over the whiskey cases at the wake humped behind the transom, I could get no sense of motion. There was nothing left anywhere beyond the boat. Time had reorganized along biblical rhythms, and the compass tried to swing to port. I held west-north-west for several weeks with the tachometer always at nineteen hundred revolutions, and at length one morning the rain lifted, and the coast reappeared exactly where it had been before.
As it grew warmer, I peeled off my shirt, and then my trousers, and began singing, all the songs I knew, and when Duncan staggered up from the bunks, his eyes stained with sleep, that’s how he found me, standing in my shorts, singing into the wind.
“If you like it so much,” he said, “maybe you don’t want your share of the money.”
I kept on singing, so he said: “Maybe we’ll get caught.”
I kept on singing.
“Well,” said Duncan. “If we don’t get caught and if I give you your share of the money, what are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to buy my father’s girlfriend and fuck her in his bed.”
“It’s too bad you’re not American, kid. You’re mean enough to be a Marine DI.”
Duncan refilled the tank and sank the empty cans, and then I went down to the bunk where the guard had been sleeping when I sapped him behind the car, and as I lay there waiting for the engine to throb me to sleep, I didn’t wonder if I had broken his head or worry about getting caught or even watch Angela dance on my movie screen. I simply felt alive.
Duncan called me when we were off Puerto Ospino. There was a hundred-mile shelf of purple cloud hung a thousand feet off the ocean to our left with a great fading splash of vermilion above it and gloom below. In three minutes the light was gone. We turned to starboard and fingered our way up the coast by starlight with me lying prone on the foredeck looking for breakers that might warn of rocks or shallows. “Why don’t you sing now?” Duncan yelled when the wind came up. Then he stuffed his jacket to me under the windshield. Later he called, “There’s a current here the navy doesn’t know about. Either that or we missed the drop.” And much later: “Four cans left. Think this thing’ll run on whiskey?” The bow rose and slapped down jerkily. Sometimes the dark shadow of the coast forced toward us, and Duncan would turn away to port; sometimes it faded entirely, and he would swing back to starboard. In the long intervals when he did not speak I forgot him completely and lay there like part of the boat, the niggerhead against which my left flank was pressed, the cleat on which my right hand rested, while the water flapped beneath the blunt bow and the engine purred distantly.
When we saw the light it was almost behind us. Duncan had turned out to sea around a spur of coast, and when he turned back we saw there was not one spur but two, and the light was between them.
“Get back here,” said Duncan.
He cut the throttle, and the wake rolled under us, lifting the boat forward. I waited, swaying, on my hands and knees, and then crawled back and dropped feet first through the cabin window. Duncan switched on the running lights.
Truck headlights carved a yellow tunnel through the darkness. Below it was a pier on wooden pilings with a man standing on the end of it holding a flashlight.
Duncan put the boat in neutral. “Back her in,” he said. “If anything happens, come out fast.”
He ducked down to the bunks and came back with an autoloading shotgun. He poked it under the windshield onto the bow and then climbed through the side window after it. He kneeled on the bow and leaned his chest against the windshield. I stood facing the stern with the gear lever in my right hand and a spoke of the wheel in my left. I pushed the lever and let the boat idle in toward the pier.
When we were twenty yards out, the man on the pier reached for our stern with the beam of his flashlight. “Es esa la mercancía?” he called. There was another man crouched beside him with a pistol in his r
ight hand and his right elbow resting on his right knee.
“What’s he saying?” hissed Duncan.
“He wants to know if that’s the whiskey. There’s another one. With a gun.”
“I see him. Tell him what does he think it is. Tell him when we get in close to jump down and tie us on. Tell him not to fuck around. I got them both covered.”
I put the boat in neutral and stepped out from under the cabin roof and translated what Duncan had said.
“Prefiero quedarme,” said the man. “Cuando vengas mas cerca, te tiramos la soga. No tenga miedo, hermano. Somos buena gente.”
“What’s he saying?”
“He says he wants to stay on the dock. That they’ll throw us a line. He says not to be scared, that they’re nice guys.”
“Sure,” said Duncan. “We’re all nice guys.” He paused. The boat wallowed away to the left of the pier. “OK, kid. Do it like he says.”
I put the boat in reverse and turned the wheel to the left and gunned the throttle. Then I cut it back and took the boat out of gear and climbed back on the whiskey cases into the flashlight beam, feeling the pistol eye stare down at me, and took the line a third man threw down from the pier. Then I hauled the boat in against the wooden pilings.
“Cut the engine,” said Duncan. “We got to save gas. Tell him sixty bucks a case. You give him a case, he gives you the money.”
That’s how it was that first time, a moonless night lanced by truck headlights, a narrow cove between two points. It was low tide, and I had to lift each case to my shoulder and push it up onto the pier. One Ticamalan held the flashlight; another held the gun; the third opened the cases with a machete. When he’d counted to twelve, the man with the flashlight gave me three twenties. Duncan stood on the roof of the cabin, cradling his shotgun at the three Ticamalans.
Gunwale squeaking against wooden pilings, machete thrusting under cardboard flaps. There were mangrove thickets beside the pier and a patch of clear sky over the truck which I glanced at each time I raised up with a case. I stopped to breathe with a case on my shoulder—smells of mangrove mud, salt water, gasoline, my own sweat—and the man with the flashlight said, “Apúrate, hermano. Ya la noche s’está acabando.”