Cosmic Banditos

by Weisbecker, A. C.

  José and I discussed the notion of starting a dialogue with Tina’s father, but our talk turned into a heated argument. José was completely against it. I deftly changed the subject by asking him his opinion about quarks, but he was too agitated to think clearly. For now I’ve let the matter drop.

  Since it turned out that José has no interest in Subatomic Particle Theory, I air my views exclusively to High Pockets, usually late at night after one of our meditative sessions in the front yard. I suspect that this has helped him in transcending his somewhat mundane Canine Worldview.

  He has also become more serene. An example: A few nights ago, after I gave a particularly insightful lecture on electron generation, Legs crawled up through his favorite crack in the floor and snaked his way onto the bed. High Pockets was stretched out next to me, wide-awake. He didn’t say a word when Legs curled up and passed out right in front of his nose. For a moment it appeared that High Pockets was about to have one of his sneezing fits (a sign of doggy distress, I suspect), but he only sighed, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  Last week José, High Pockets and I went on a tiger hunt. It seems that this particular tigre—a jaguar—had been decimating local livestock and was number one on the Bandito Hit Parade. A ten-goat bounty was offered by local farmers. High Pockets quickly picked up the scent and bounded off, howling like a maniac, with José and me in hot pursuit. High Pockets knew he was after a cat, but regretted the whole affair as soon as he caught up with it. Evidently he was unaware that the cat he was chasing was bigger than himself. He took one look at it, then, without hesitation or comment, bolted straight back to the shack where he spent two days in seclusion under my bed. But in any case he had done his work, having treed the tiger.

  At this point, José and I had another difference of opinion. I wanted to dispatch the animal quickly with my M-16, but José had other ideas. I had given him a small antitank rocket launcher for Christmas several years earlier, and he wanted to use it. Rocket launchers, I told him, were unsportsmanlike weapons for hunting, and had a negative impact on the environment in general.

  José looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, then proceeded to blow up the tiger, the tree and half the hillside. When he attempted to collect the bounty, however, it became evident that the joke was on him. There was absolutely nothing left of the tiger, and none of the farmers believed his story about blowing it up. He even dragged one of the guys (blindfolded for security reasons) up to my shack so I could verify the kill.

  I was still angry with José for his unsporting methods and for his ho-hum view of Subatomic Particles, so I just shrugged and said, “No sé.”

  I didn’t see him again until yesterday. High Pockets and I were tending our little garden of tomatoes, opium poppies and marijuana plants when he appeared, looking tired and a trifle guilty. He hadn’t been sleeping well, he said, and he had finally come to the conclusion that I’d been right all along about the rocket launcher. He promised that in the future he would use it only against rival Banditos and army vehicles. He also promised to use it, whenever possible, in such a way that its effect on the environment would be minimal.

  I then apologized for not supporting him in front of the farmer. We embraced. It was a very touching scene.

  I had a big favor to ask, so I sprang it on him as he was wiping a tear from his eye. Timing is everything when asking a Bandito for a favor.

  The favor, of course, had to do with Subatomic Particles. It was vital that I get certain other books in order to satisfy my ever-expanding Subatomic Horizons. I had compiled a reading list based on the recommendations of the authors of the books that had come my way via Tina’s father.

  José and I sat down in the dirt and I explained my plan. Being somewhat esoteric in subject matter, these books were unlikely to be stocked in bookstores or public libraries. So I asked José if he’d knock off the University of Barranquilla Research Library. My plan involved having him shave and dress up like a student, then go in and simply steal the required titles by stuffing them down his pants or whatever.

  At this point José interrupted me to say that if he was going to knock off a library, he was going to do it in the prescribed Bandito Fashion. With flair, in other words. He then bragged that he and his buddies would not only get me the books I wanted, but they’d also get me every fucking book in the whole place. It then dawned on me that José probably had never been to a library.

  His bravado cooled down somewhat when I told him that it would probably take his entire gang two days to load all the books in the library onto eighteen-wheelers.

  José stared at me for a moment, dumbfounded. “Muchos libros,” he said softly.

  “Sí. Muchos,” I replied.

  José thought it over for a few seconds, then said he’d get the books I wanted but would still have to do it his way. With guns blazing, I presumed.

  I did my best to talk him out of it. He kept nodding his head as I spoke, but I could tell from the faraway look in his eyes that he was mentally gearing up for an all-out armed assault. I changed the subject.

  It was crucial that I teach José the Dewey Decimal System of cataloging books. One of his buddies knew how to read, so I told him to bring the guy up later that night to go over the system so they wouldn’t fuck up and bring back the wrong books.

  The evening didn’t go exactly as planned. José did bring the guy who could read, but he also brought his whole crew—twenty Banditos, all heavily armed and all completely drunk. I dimly recall going over the Dewey Decimal System with someone, but for all I know it was with High Pockets.

  I woke up this morning with a serious hangover and an empty house. José and his buddies had left sometime during the night. I assume they’re heading for the University of Barranquilla Research Library, since my list of books is missing. It will probably take them four or five days to make the roundtrip, so I’ll have to report on this matter as it develops.

  Having little else to do, I reread a chapter that delves insightfully into Bohr’s famous Specific-Orbits-Only model of the atom.

  I smoked a joint, then began to compose notes to Tina’s boyfriends, Tom and Gary. For some reason, I had put off writing them, but now I was in the mood. It was time to get the distasteful job over with.

  The notes were identical, of course, except that one was addressed to Tom in Sausalito and the other to Gary in San Francisco.

  I explained their situation to them, as far as Tina was concerned, then added a few relevant comments about Man’s Place in the Subatomic Universe. I did this in order to put the bombshell I had dropped about Tina in its proper perspective.

  Of course it occurred to me that I was fucking around with three people’s lives, but this is a responsibility I am prepared to accept.

  The only bothersome thing about my notes is that they may come as somewhat of a different kind of surprise than one might think. Getting disorienting, anonymous messages from the wilds of South America may shake these guys up in fundamental, psychological ways. Not to mention Tina. When she realizes how her duplicity was uncovered, she might suffer a complete existential breakdown. What I’m saying is that I might be altering these people’s very perception of reality.

  Nevertheless, I wrote the notes, addressed and stamped them and fully intend to have José mail them for me when he gets back from pillaging the University of Barranquilla Research Library.

  Whilst waiting for José, I will continue with the story of High Pockets and me, and how we came to be where we are.

  I will next describe the voyage of the Don Juan, since some of you out there may be curious about it, even though it’s somewhat of a digression. I think it important at this point32 to put this tale in its proper temporal perspective. The voyage of the Don Juan took place some three years ago. Robert blew up the Admiral’s Inn on Antigua about six months ago. I realize that I left High Pockets, Robert, Jim and myself in our Learjet somewhere over the Caribbean, and in a sense we are still up there, waiting for me to continue that
part of the story, which I will do when I feel like it.

  Can Nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? —

  Werner Heisenberg

  4

  The Voyage of the Don Juan

  The voyage of the Don Juan went smoothly for about three hours. Then Robert started terrorizing the Latino members of the crew, except for Julio, for whom he felt some affection since the night they took on Riohacha together, although Julio denies ever having left the ship. The first thing Robert did was to put a knife to the Colombian cook’s throat and explain how he liked his food prepared. He then started making rounds of the ship while juggling three hand grenades.

  To prevent a mutiny, Robert made it clear to the “greaseballs” that if he ever caught more than two of them together, he’d blow up the ship and everyone on it.

  This kind of talk naturally made the crew a bit edgy, except for High Pockets, Jim and me. We’d long been stoic about the possibility of a Robert-induced sudden death.

  Our mechanical problems started about four hours out. The big electrical generator, hooked up to a GM-671, broke its coupling and nearly decapitated Julio with flying parts. Over the next few hours Julio, who I suspect had some kind of unnatural and possibly perverse relationship with the machinery on the ship, began acting more and more unbalanced.

  Soon after the generator packed up, the steering quadrant jammed with the helm hard to starboard, causing the ship to describe huge circles and roll horrendously. As soon as that was put right, the fresh-water cooling pump for the big diesel malfunctioned and pumped all our freshwater into the bilge. Luckily we had plenty of rum and several hundred cases of Heineken for drinking and showers.

  Around dawn of the second day the backup generator seized for no apparent reason, leaving us with no electrical power except for a small, gas-driven Honda generator, which we used to keep the batteries charged. By this time Julio had developed a nervous tic in his face and had started sipping rum on the sly.

  Just before lunch of that same day, a propane leak caused an explosion that destroyed half the galley, and Jim’s drug stash along with it. Naturally, Robert took this out on the crew, Julio included.

  Julio countered by removing all the crucifixes from the engine room and locking himself in his cabin, where he mumbled Rosaries and Hail Marys incessantly. I took this desertion of his beloved engine room to be a bad omen indeed.

  “Not to worry,” Robert said. He’d take care of the machinery himself. So, armed with a hand grenade and a sledgehammer, he descended into the heat and din of Julio’s former domain. The sledgehammer was for delicate adjustments, he said; the grenade for serious malfunctions.

  Naturally, the radio and Eduardo’s $100,000 satellite navigational system had ceased working soon after we’d left Panama, so the only warning I had of the approaching hurricane was a sudden falling of the barometer and a backing of the wind from northeast to due north.

  I checked out our safety equipment: two World War II-VINTAGE inflatable life rafts and a wooden dory slung on davits on the upper deck.

  I very casually began to stock the dory with beer and rum.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned quickly. It was Jim. ‘Just stashin’ some stuff,” I reptied, avoiding his eyes.

  Jim took a healthy belt of Mount Gay. “You know something the rest of us don’t?”

  “Weather might kick up a little, is all.”

  Jim paused, absorbing my statement. “This tub’s gonna sink,” he said, “and we’re all gonna die.” He took another slug of rum. “Right?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Robert’s gonna get mad when he finds out.”

  Before I could respond, the ship rocked from a violent explosion somewhere belowdecks.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Fucking Robert.” Jim shook his head.

  We dashed down to the lower deck. Smoke was billowing out of the engine-room door. The ship was listing slightly to port.

  Excited Spanish voices issued from the bridge, foredeck, galley and dining salon.

  Robert emerged from the engine room coughing and waving away smoke. His eyes were tearing, his face was blackened and he looked about as disheveled as I’d ever seen him. He had the sledgehammer in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other. His hand grenade was conspicuously absent.

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  About twenty minutes later the old Don Juan rolled belly-up and sank. All nine of us were crowded into the one raft that could still hold air. The booze-laden dory wallowed a few yards behind, connected to us by a twelve-foot painter.

  As the Don Juan’s bow slid under, Julio let out a joyous whoop. A horrendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  A minute or so later the water around us boiled with bubbles. Between two and three thousand marijuana bales popped to the surface, the main cargo hatch having ruptured from air pressure. Hundreds of swimming rats climbed aboard them and commenced to shake dry their fur. This drove High Pockets nuts, but I calmed him down with a handful of Milk Bone Flavor Snacks for Large Dogs.

  “Well,” Jim said, “at least we didn’t lose the load.” He passed me the Mount Gay.

  It was around sundown when we got picked up. The eastern horizon was black and the wind was rising fast. We had seen the vessel the day before. It was out of Barranquilla on a three-week commercial fishing trip. Luckily they had us on board before they realized that over twenty million dollars’ worth of merchandise was floating all around. But darkness closed in and the wind rose quickly to force ten. With tears. in his eyes, the skipper turned the ship to the southwest and ran us back to Barranquilla.

  Jim had bought several gallons of rum for the ride, so we were all completely blasted when we fell out of the bus and staggered over to Eduardo’s favorite Bandito Watering Hole in Riohacha. With the sinking of the Don Juan, Julio had lost his religious zeal and was as drunk and rowdy as any of us. He and Robert were getting along famously.

  Needless to say, Eduardo wasn’t exactly thrilled to see us, but he recovered quickly after Jim spiked his drink with the usual prescription of coke and quaaludes.

  “We get a-nother sheep and do eet again!” Eduardo announced. 33 He then invited us to stay in Riohacha for a week or so of relaxation.

  Jim and Robert figured they’d start out where they’d left off before we departed Riohacha three days previously, at least as far as drug consumption was concerned. I was seriously considering abstaining altogether, but I was under intense social pressure so I finally gave in ...

  Everytbing we call real is made of tbings that cannot be regarded as real.

  —Neils Bohr

  5

  Big Bang Banditos

  Three days ago, around noon on the sixth day after their departure, José and his gang returned from their assault on the University of Barranquilla Research Library. High Pockets and I were involved in a spirited wrestling match in the front yard. Legs was sunning himself on the front steps of the shack. He apparently had a successful night: A lump the size of a billiard ball was moving slowly down his digestive tract.

  I had just pulled a quick reversal and had High Pockets pinned to the ground in a slight variation of the doggy-ear hold when I heard hoots and gunshots coming from down the ravine, a sure sign of approaching Banditos.

  A few minutes later José emerged from the jungle, his men close behind. Each Bandito carried a leather or sheepskin bag crammed full of books. José carried something large and limp over his right shoulder.

  I jumped up and let loose a welcome whoop. High Pockets bounded to José barking and grinning. The Banditos threw down their guns and bags, everybody talking and gesturing. They appeared to have returned more or less intact, although several Banditos sported bandages. José grinned a special Bandito Grin, then dumped what he was carrying (wrapped in a blanket) at my feet. I heard a moan and pulled back the cloth, then looked down in shock at a thin, frail, middle-aged man dress
ed in a suit. He was bound, gagged, and blindfolded. I surveyed my front lawn—now littered with Banditos, small arms, a few sombreros, hundreds of books and, as it turned out, the head librarian from the University of Barranquilla Research Library.

  José and his men stacked the books in front of the shack, forming a wall about twelve feet long, three feet high and two feet thick. José then removed the gag and blindfold from the librarian, whose name turned out to be Señor Rodriguez. The first thing Señor Rodriguez saw as the blindfold was removed was High Pockets’ huge pink tongue descending onto his face. Señor Rodriguez was sweating profusely and High Pockets loves the taste of salt. I had to drag him bodily off Señor Rodriguez, who appeared to be experiencing some sort of mild heart attack.

  Next, José placed Señor Rodriguez on top of the wall of books and had his gang line up behind it. He then pulled Señor Rodriguez to a sitting position, put his arm around the poor guy’s shoulders and instructed me to take a group picture with Tina’s father’s camera.

  I attempted to explain that I still didn’t have any film but José insisted that I take a picture anyway.

  Over the years I have learned that it’s easier to humor José than to reason with him, so I went inside the shack and got the camera.

  José and the boys were too close to the shack for me to fit them all in the viewfinder. As soon as I pointed this out I realized I had made a pointless and ridiculous error in judgment. Fifteen minutes later the Banditos had moved their act ten feet back and posed again. I told them to say cheso (“cheese” in Spanish) and snapped the shutter.

  I then took José aside and casually inquired about Señor Rodriguez. José explained that Señor Rodriguez was the jefe (boss) of the University of Barranquilla Research Library. I waited for him to continue but he just stood there looking very impressed with himself. When I said I didn’t understand, José shook his head and frowned at my stupidity.