Cosmic Banditos

by Weisbecker, A. C.

  The titles of these books are enough to give a person of average intelligence the intellectual shakes, but I’ve been plowing through them anyway, having little else to do. At night, after a hearty dinner, I turn up the kerosene lamp and read to High Pockets while the wild animals grunt and hoot outside our little house. This is heady stuff, especially if one’s been isolated in the jungle for a long while with a dog, a snake and unlimited drugs. For example:The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that different editions of us live in many different worlds simultaneously, an unaccountable number of them, and all of them are real.

  I read this paragraph a few times to High Pockets, put the book down, smoked a joint, had a few shots of homemade rum, then reread it to myself.

  Until I got to this passage I wasn’t taking the book very seriously. I thought it was a complete crock of shit, as a matter of fact, but this concept, I must say, gave me pause.

  ... different editions of us live in many different worlds ... and all of them are real.

  Holy shit, I thought to myself in a flash of insight. I lit another joint, exhaled contemplatively. “What do you suspect he means by ‘editions?’ ” I asked High Pockets.

  High Pockets whined, as he always does when I address him directly, but wasn’t sure what he meant. He sneezed a few times.

  José rode his little burro, Pepe, up from the village the next day with food, ammunition and drugs. He could see I was upset. I sat him down and attempted to explain the problems I was having with the idea of different editions of us living in different worlds simultaneously. He listened, nodding his head sagely, then told me not to worry. He had a buddy who knew an Indian who was familiar with these matters. It turned out to be the same guy who knew the same Indian who was on the fast and wouldn’t talk about snakes, so I’m not holding my breath.

  If there are any other editions of High Pockets and me out there, we would like to hear how you guys are doing. The editions of High Pockets and me that are sitting in a shack in the wilds of South America aren’t doing real terrific. As I mentioned at the outset, High Pockets and I are financially destitute. This is especially upsetting (to me, anyway—as I explained, High Pockets is unconcerned with financial matters) since just a few months ago we were worth several million dollars.

  High Pockets and I also have serious legal problems. We’re being actively pursued by every law enforcement agency in the Western Hemisphere (and probably by every edition of every agency, if agencies have editions like the rest of us). This is why we are living in the shack. We are, as they say, keeping a low profile.

  José is taking care of us, financing our seclusion, as it were, because we are old friends and partners in crime. José is a Full-Blown Bandito and, according to the Bandito Code of Conduct, must look after his down-and-out cohorts.

  José is a stand-up guy, and times have been tough for him, too, as they seem to be everywhere. He felt really bad about our having to subject High Pockets to the ignominy of consuming Milk Bone Flavor Snacks for Small Dogs, but as I told him, the small ones last longer and they’re not High Pockets’ main staple anyhow. High Pockets eats the same food I do, and I don’t get any between-meal Flavor Snacks of any size or description, for chrissakes.

  How High Pockets and I reached our present space-time coordinates (that book again) and came to the violent attention of the authorities is a convoluted and sad tale.

  The reason I am relating this at all is the same reason I have for studying Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics: There is little else to do.

  Not only is the Universe stranger than we think-it is stranger than we can think.

  —Werner Heisenberg

  2

  Operation Don Juan

  At least the weather was good, but it always was. Eighty-two degrees, fifteen- to twenty-knot Northeast Trades, a few cumulus clouds that never passed in front of the sun. It was Antigua, British West Indies, and it was one of those days. Sort of. Robert and Jim, my friends and ship-mates, were sitting with me at the Admiral’s Inn, English Harbor, working on our third bottle of Mount Gay rum and trying to figure out what had gone wrong on our last voyage to Colombia. A voyage that resulted in the loss of our boat and some 10,000 pounds of marijuana. Cap, a local who occasionally worked for us, sat down and helped himself to a belt of rum.

  I adjusted my sunglasses and watched Loopie rowing out to Trick, the eighty-foot trimaran that had just set an unofficial transatlantic speed record with a crew of drunken Swedish lunatics. The new record stands, but no one on the boat had sobered up long enough to find out what island they’d collided with. They’d been aiming for Barbados, several hundred miles to the south.

  I remembered Loopie’s aborted career as a fellow Contrabandista several years back. We were still in the harbor when he cracked his head with the main halyard winch handle as he raised the sail, trying to wave to his girlfriend at the same time. “Oh, mon, oh, mon,” he said before losing consciousness. He didn’t look fit for an extended voyage, so we dumped him on the fuel dock, set the spinnaker and pointed the sloop in the general direction of the 8,000 pounds of gold buds that Jos6 and the boys had handpicked in the mountains just south of Santa Marta. High Pockets was only a few months old at the time and, being a natural sea dog, came along for the ride.

  The trip was successful, with only a handful of minor disasters. High Pockets has been an enthusiastic Canine Contrabandista ever since.

  Robert was glaring at Jim balefully, his face and eyeballs bright red. Jim is a wiry Texan with a very sick sense of humor. He’s a lot smaller than Robert, and their bizarre, antisocial antics prompted their nicknames (all serious Contrabandistas have nicknames): The “Comedy Team from Hell” or, when they’re not together, “Mutt from Hell” and “Jeff from Hell.”

  I was sure Robert was going to do one of his numbers. He did. He picked up our table and heaved it into the shallow water next to the patio. It was an impressive throw. Rum bottles, glasses and money drifted slowly toward the mangroves. Various seabirds and bartenders squawked in fright and protest.

  I got up and headed off the owner of the Inn before he could get near Robert.

  I spread some E.C. (Eastern Caribbean) bucks around and procured another table and a couple more bottles. Robert was smiling at Cap when I sat down again. Jim was howling, razzing Robert about his boils. The ones on his ass. Beating across the Caribbean into twenty-knot head winds for weeks while sleeping, eating and living on wet marijuana bales tends to upset one’s normal complexion, especially on one’s posterior. Robert’s eyes glazed dangerously as Jim yelled to a table of nervous tourists that Robert had the biggest, grodiest boils in the islands. The most artistically arranged as well.

  “Drop trou’ and show’em, sport,” Jim said.

  Now I was getting nervous. There was no point in trying to shut’Jim up. He was drunk and rolling, and loved it when Robert ran amok. Plus we had just lost close to two million dollars, along with our boat, so nobody was in a good mood.

  “He’s gonna blow,” Jim said. “I’m calling for a seven point five on the Robert Richter Scale.”

  Cap sensed he was in trouble. He smiled artificially at Robert, and Robert continued to smile back. It looked like someone had painted his contact lenses red.

  “Oh, mon ... Shit, mon.” Cap was now very frightened. To me: “Wot I do now, mon?”

  Robert liked Cap. Cap had helped us get the Wayward Wind ready for her last run. Cap was a stand-up guy. Cap was a family man. Cap liked animals. Unfortunately, Cap was about to experience grievous bodily harm. Jim was grinning sadistically.

  I had to distract Robert. If he would just look at me for a few seconds, Cap could maybe make good an escape.

  “Hey, Robert, remember the old Don Juan?” My voice was casual.

  Robert, Jim and I had first met on the Don Juan a couple years earlier in Panama. She was a rusted-out 180-foot freighter whose real name escapes me. We dubbed her the Don Juan because of the frequency of sexual activity
experienced aboard during the two months we spent refitting her for an attempt to break the known record for weight of marijuana carried in one vessel. We were all associated with the same international crime cartel and hit it off quickly. We were ensconced in the Holiday Inn in Panama City. This was during the time of the Senate investigations of the Panama Canal treaties. We’d had two Congressmen evicted from their rooms so our contingent could control the whole twelfth floor. Including High Pockets, there were thirteen or fourteen of us, depending on who had use of the Lear that day.

  We had already burnt out the Hotel El Panama, mostly due to Robert’s rampages, some of which, I must say, were justified. I would’ve thrown that whore off the balcony myself, under the circumstances.

  There were several conflicting theories circulating as to just who the fuck we were. We cultivated some of them in subtle ways. It was obvious that we were on an incredible expense account (incredible being one step above unlimited). We paid cash for everything. We looked like criminals. And we were completely disorganized.

  To the Panamanians all this meant we were U.S. government people, probably CIA. Which meant they didn’t want to offend us during the treaty talks, which was okay with us.

  There were other rumors, but the CIA one was my personal favorite, and also the most popular. A casual remark to a cabdriver, a cryptic P.O. box in Guatemala as my registered address, a dinner with a Congressman who was told by someone (probably the desk clerk, whom I bribed constantly) that I was CIA ... it all added up to our being Washington troubleshooters.

  Robert was feared by everyone in the hotel. Word had leaked from the El Panama: If real trouble broke out (and it almost did), Robert was rumored to be a one-man CIA Death Squad. No one at the Holiday Inn said a word when Robert put all the cabs outside the main door on retainer ($10 an hour) and ordered them not to move unless he told them to. And none of them did. So for nearly a week, no one could get a cab at the Holiday Inn. No Senators, no Congressmen, nobody. They had to hire private cars at great expense to the American taxpayer, while Robert played with his taxi fleet.

  He’d come out the door in his straw hat, Aloha shirt and plaid slacks-all 240 pounds of him—and whistle. Twenty cabbies would be at attention in front of their vehicles in maybe four seconds. That’s fast for those latitudes. “Gentlemen, start your engines.” Robert was into auto racing. He would give each man a piece of paper with an address on it, always the same address on each piece of paper. At Robert’s signal, they’d all take off to fetch whatever it was he wanted—drugs, booze, a whore or all three. A hundred dollars U.S. for the man who returned with the goods. He had twenty crazed Panamanians roaring through the streets of the city in his own private Grand Prix.

  Back in Antigua, one of Robert’s eyes blinked. I interpreted this as an indication that some primitive thought process had started up in his brain, that maybe a synapse or two had fired in some kind of normal sequence. Even Jim was startled. Cap was frozen to his seat, still riveted by Robert’s red-eyed zombie grin.

  “He blinked,” Jim said.

  “I saw,” I said.

  “Wot dat mean?” Cap said.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  “He’s coming around,” I said.

  “Wot he gonna do when he come ’round?” Cap said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I think he liked it when you reminded him of the Grand Prix of Panama City,” Jim said.

  I never met a Contrabandista who didn’t love to sit down with one of his kind and reminisce. It sometimes seemed like that was half the reason for doing something weird. You could talk about it later.

  Even in Robert’s prerampage catatonia, these fond memories were having an effect on him. How they would alter his subsequent behavior was anybody’s guess. It was a crapshoot, no doubt about it. I pressed on. Why not? I was starting to enjoy myself.

  The Don Juan was a tribute to Murphy’s Law. In fact, the ship went so far beyond Murphy’s Law that a new law had to be formulated. Don Juan’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong already has, and will be that way forever.”

  I was the captain, but I swear I had nothing to do with choosing her for this run. I have a simple method of surveying big steel ships for structural flaws. I take a 12-pound sledgehammer down into the bilge and start swinging. Whatever breaks is not structurally sound. I immediately started a leak in the forward-most chain locker. A few more swings took out her corroded watertight bulkhead.

  That was when Julio appeared, wide-eyed and yelling in Spanish. I have a pretty good command of the language, but all I could make out was “gringo loco.”

  Julio was the engineer of the Don Juan and had been since his father died twenty years before. This accounted for many of his peculiarities, such as an obsessive crossing of himself, the dozens of crucifixes he had hanging all over the engine room, and an irrational fear of silence. Much later, in a relatively calm moment, Julio explained this last one. Most of the moving parts on the Don Juan would freeze up from time to time for various reasons. Julio would somehow unfreeze them. He had this recurring nightmare that every moving part of the ship would freeze up simultaneously, leaving nothing but “silencio, bombre, silencio cornpletamente.”

  Anyway, after my initial inspection of the Don Juan and her engineer, I attempted to reason with the multinational syndicate that was financing the operation. I remember the conference very clearly. I was supposed to confer with the Colombian onloading crew as to timetables, code names, latitudes and longitudes, radio frequencies, and various contingency plans. The conference had obviously been in full swing for at least three days. The first thing High Pockets and I noticed was the Colombian Dope Lord, Eduardo “El Gordo,” stark naked and passed out across the twelve-foot conference table. He was drooling into a pile of cocaine, a tendril of which led across the table and over the edge. About a quarter pound was scattered on the shag rug. I sensed that the reason everyone was unconscious was the dozen or so mostly empty bottles of pharmaceutical quaaludes that were scattered among incalculable magnums of Dom Perignon. (’69, by the way. You could still get it in those days.)

  Altogether there were six or seven Colombians (including José) and maybe eight or nine of my gringo associates (including Jim and Robert) in various states of naked repose, along with several whores, including, incredible as it sounds, the one Robert had thrown off the second floor balcony at the El Panama. Except for a cast on her left ankle, she looked fine. Under the conference table I found an unconscious room service waiter, naked except for his red Holiday Inn vest.

  Looking back on it now, this may seem somewhat humorous, but at the time I was horrified. I had to reason with these people. My life, and a shitload of money, depended on that ship. However, under the tutelage of Robert and Jim, my professionalism went, as they say, by the boards. Within a week High Pockets and I were attending the regularly scheduled (or continuously running) “conferences.” I was-and I’m not bragging here—responsible for as much drug consumption and damage to the premises as anyone else except for Robert, who managed to convert two singles into a suite while High Pockets chased the hotel security guards around the circular twelfth floor and out the fire exit.

  I did slur out a few complaints about the ship, so Eduardo ordered $100,000 to be spent on improvements. Money, I was told, was no object when it came to the “sheep,” as Eduardo called the Don Juan. The only problem was that the ship broker spent it all on sophisticated electronic navigational gear instead of new plates and welds for the hull. I remember snorting a huge line of flake and yelling, “Great! We’ll know exactly where we’re sinking!” The sick thing is that I was genuinely enthusiastic about this concept.

  Four or five days of drug-ridden, sex-crazed dissipation and vandalism was about all my system could handle, so High Pockets and I packed up our gear and headed for the checkout desk. I felt morally obligated to spend some time aboard the Don Juan. We attempted our escape at three in the afternoon, figuring our associates wo
uld be comatose by then, but Robert and Jim staggered in the front door just as we were checking out. They were on the tail end of a major league drug binge. Robert’s right eye looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta; his left was swollen shut with a rainbow shiner. He collared me and dragged me to a couch, accusing me openly of being a lightweight and a disappointment to the twelfth floor.

  I made the mistake of trying to be logical. The ship needed attention, was my line of reasoning. I tried to explain the structural weaknesses that my aborted survey had revealed.

  Robert countered my logic by dropping a gram or so of coke on the lobby table. “Anybody got a straw or something?”

  Jim rolled up a fifty dollar bill and handed it to him. Robert snorted half the pile, rocks and all, then handed me the bill. I glanced around the lobby to see if anyone who wasn’t on our payroll was lurking around. Just a few tourists and Congressmen. I had a healthy snort, grabbed my bag and bolted before Robert could react.

  “I’ll be on the ship!” was my exit line.

  The Don Juan appeared deserted, but I found Julio kneeling in the engine room in front of the rusty old diesel, saying a Hail Mary.

  After he forgave me for the,sledgehammer incident we got along quite well.

  Julio was obsessed with the Don Juan. She had had six or seven owners in the past twenty years, and Julio had stayed on through them all, for reasons known only to himself. He spent at least fifteen hours a day tearing apart machinery, jury-rigging, crossing himself and trying to reason with the ship. Julio was strange, no question about that, but I didn’t realize how strange until I got a look at his cabin.

  Most sailors have pinups over their bunks and Julio was no exception, except that his were full-color fold-out diagrams of new diesel engines, generators and spare parts. He knew that ship, though—he really did. As the skipper I was happy to have him along, weird as he was. I bought him some welding equipment so he could repair the damage I’d done with the sledge. I never went into the bilge again, for fear I’d put my foot through the hull and sink us at the dock.