There was something else I gave a lot of thought to—the family I lost and the one I was on my way to meet. There was no one to see me off at Leningrad—I had no real friends, no close relatives that I knew of. I left nothing behind in the city that I cared about and took nothing with me except the memory of my mother and father. In a strange way, I felt they were coming with me, their spirits beside me.
I knew little about the family I was going to meet. My father’s half-sister in British Honduras, Sarah, apparently was my only close relative. “I suppose you’ll have cousins in Britain, that sort of thing, it’ll all be sorted out when you get to the colony,” Mr. Byrd told me. I wondered what she would be like, what her husband was all about. All I knew was that they had no children.
Most of all I wondered about my own qualms about meeting family.
Since the death of my mother, I had been essentially a loner, careful not to have close friendships that would bring pain. I had lost my father when I was eight and my mother when I was eleven. Much of my life had been spent in a time of war and loss. Most of my life had been spent in a struggle for survival. I knew how to survive—to cheat and steal and fight. What I didn’t know was how to be normal.
I had been dealing with gang members for so long, fighting over scraps, being devious to avoid the snare of bureaucrats and policemen, I had forgotten what passed for normal. I was eighteen years old now and had been an adult almost half of my life.
I thought about not showing up at the colony, about jumping ship in New York and getting a job. But I couldn’t do that—my aunt had paid my fare and at the very least I had to honor her kindness.
My qualms about the future took a back place in my mind as I walked down the ship’s first-class deck and experienced the sight, sound and smell of money. I gawked at everything. I hadn’t decided yet whether the women in the West were more beautiful than Russian ones, but the way they dressed, with plunging necklines and body-tight dresses, stirred my preternatural juices. A number of women gave me looks or smiles that to my mind were inviting, but I would quickly look away. Part of my reluctance was the fear of the uninitiated—I would not have admitted it under secret police torture, but I was still a virgin. I was eighteen years old. I had had a couple opportunities to break my cherry, but I had passed, not because I wasn’t horny but because the girls who offered me their bodies expected a commitment beyond sex.
There was also the question of being exposed as a fraud. I paid a small bribe to borrow a steward’s white coat in order to gain access to the first-class deck and see wonders I had only heard about. But my dark brown pants and scuffed, steel-nosed shoes didn’t complete the outfit.
My fears of exposure were realized when a ship’s officer stopped in front of me. I was preoccupied looking at the beautiful people and didn’t see him until I was almost chest-to-chest with him.
“What are you doing out of uniform?” he demanded.
“I—I ripped my pants, took them to the tailor.”
“Report back to your supervisor immediately. You don’t belong up here in first class.”
“Yes sir!”
I could feel him drilling holes in my back as I marched away. It was probably my steel-toed boots. Even if I’d ripped my pants, the boots were obviously not anything like the polished black shoes the stewards wore. He apparently decided to investigate me further, and I heard him call “Steward” behind me but I pretended I didn’t hear him. I went around a corner and into a corridor lined with cabin doors. I took the first stairway down and went around more corridors until I had not only lost him, but had lost myself—the ship was a floating city and I wasn’t familiar with the streets.
Avoiding another ship’s officer, I went around a corridor and faced a dead end. Only one cabin door was in the hallway. I tried the door and the handle turned. I stuck my head in. It was a one-room suite with an open door to the bathroom. The light was on but no one was home. I slipped in and closed the door almost shut, leaving it open only a fraction of an inch. I used the slim crack to check the corridor to see if the ship’s officer was there.
“Are you a thief?”
I almost jumped out of my steel-toed boots.
A woman had stepped out of the bathroom.
“Naa-no,” I stammered.
“Rapist?”
“No!”
“Pity.”
“I—I’m sailing steerage, I wanted to see what the upper decks looked like.”
“Including the cabins?”
“I thought it was empty. A ship’s officer was after me.”
“Well, make yourself useful. Come over here and help me with this.”
“This” was a bra. I didn’t know what to say. She turned to face a full-length mirror and took off her robe, tossing it onto the bed.
She was naked. Suddenly my feet felt like they were in buckets of cement.
“Come over here,” she said. “Or do you want me to ring for a ship’s officer?”
Dry-mouthed, knees trembling, I shuffled toward her.
She was not a large woman but wasn’t small either. Everything was more full about her, nose, mouth, large brown eyes. Her breasts were not as perked as the ones of the young girls I’d petted, but were rounder and fuller and much more buxom than a girl’s. She had long black hair that hung in wet straggles. Her bare skin was still moist from stepping out of the shower.
She stood with her back to me as I came up behind her. She slipped her bra over her breasts and held the two straps back for me to link.
I fumbled with the hooks. I didn’t know how they went together and I was too nervous to see how simple it was.
Her hands came around her back but instead of hooking the straps, she took my hands.
“You’re awfully clumsy. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” I lied. I could pass for it. All except for my knowledge of women’s bras.
“Then you should have more experience.”
She pulled my hands forward, in front of her, letting her bra drop. I cupped her breasts with my hands. Her breasts were full and hot. I gently squeezed them, feeling their lushness. I stared at the breasts I was enjoying and the mound of pubic hair.
“Do you want to fuck me?” she asked.
I nodded affirmatively.
“Have you ever been with a woman before?”
“Lots of times,” I croaked.
She twisted in my arms, turning to face me. Her lips met mine and she swallowed me, covering my lips with her mouth, fucking my mouth with her tongue.
My knees had stopped shaking and I felt the bulge in my pants growing.
She undid my belt and the top button to my pants, then released the last three buttons and slid her hand down my pants, grabbing my throbbing penis. I went off in her hand, my penis jerking out of control.
“Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, sweetie.”
She backed me onto the bed and pulled off my pants and helped me get off my underwear.
“A boy your age can do it more than once.”
She spread my legs and knelt on the floor on both knees. She took my penis in both hands and massaged it with her hands, stroking my testicles with her fingers.
“I like it when it’s soft,” she said. “Let it get hard in my mouth.”
She cupped my testicles, rolling her tongue up my stalk until she swallowed my cock. Her mouth was wet and warm. I felt my cock rising as she sucked, growing bigger in her mouth, pumping it as she sucked.
She stood up grinning and climbed on top of me, straddling me. My cock was high and firm.
“This is what’s good about getting a young one. Letting it get hard in your mouth and then getting it jabbed up your cunt.”
She was wet and ready for me. She took my cock and shoved it inside of her opening.
Oh God, I moaned.
It was a good, uncommunistic expression I learned aboard the British freighter and now it seemed just right. I felt l
ike I was in heaven. I kneaded her large breasts as they hung over me and leaned up to suck them, taking one nipple in my mouth and then the other, as I pumped from beneath her.
For the first time I really felt the power in my male loins. My penis had grown huge. She slid her wet vulva back and forth over it, letting out a little whimper of joy each time she hit her erogenous zone.
I twisted around, lifting her into the air and down onto the bed. I pumped, lifting myself with my arms and legs as I drove into her. She gasped and grabbed my buttocks, spreading herself wider.
“More, more,” she cried, “harder.”
As I went in deeper, she let out a cry and arched her back, riding up with me.
I heard the door open and looked over my shoulder, a wave of fear in my gut.
An elderly man had stepped into the cabin. He saw the two of us fucking and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Oh—sorry.”
He backed out the door, nearly stumbling over backwards. He disappeared, shutting the door behind him.
I tried to get off but her sharp fingernails dug into my buttocks.
“Don’t worry, it was just my husband.”
The
CARIBBEAN
If the world had any ends, British Honduras would certainly be one of them.
It is not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else.
It has no strategic value.
It is all but uninhabited.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
BEYOND THE MEXIQUE BAY
British Honduras is the armpit of the British Empire.
JACK WALSH
19
Belize Town, British Honduras, 1949
Nevski, the paradigm of Soviet justice, had been wrong. British Honduras was not Devil’s Island.
It was hell itself.
Hot, wet, steamy, oppressive. Like breathing from under the covers of a wet wool blanket. An atmosphere you swam through rather than walked. And were parboiled as you did.
It was early in the morning when the ship dropped anchor in deep water several miles outside Belize Town harbor. “What kind of port city can’t handle banana-boat tubs?” I asked the second officer. A week aboard the small American ship had supplied me with another foreign language—American English.
The second officer spit chewing tobacco over the side. “The port’s so shallow, most cargo is hauled out in barges and loaded aboard anchored ships. Worst goddamn port in the Caribbean. Half the crew has to stay aboard to man the ship because we can’t dock. Whole damn colony is less than two hundred miles long and maybe sixty, seventy miles wide. Almost all of it’s jungles and swamps.”
I had worked up a sweat just rolling off my bunk and getting dressed. Along with the sweat, I had built up a dread of arriving in the colony from the moment I boarded the banana boat in New York. I knew nothing about the aunt and uncle I was supposed to live with, whether I would be an intruder or welcomed, whether I would like them or hate them or what they would think of me.
As the ship was within range of the city late last night, I realized that the nagging dread was caused by fear. The same fear that had shadowed me across the Baltic to Liverpool and across the Atlantic to New York. Now I had to face the fear.
I didn’t know if I wanted to deal with that thing called “family.” There was a part of me that really wanted to have a warm, familial connection that I saw all around, mom and dad and the kids. But I was afraid to want anything or need anyone. I had learned early in life that if the gods knew you wanted it or needed it, they took it away.
* * *
I came ashore in a motor launch with the customs official. I hopped onto the dock carrying a duffel bag and wearing a pair of blue-wash jeans, black tennis shoes, and a white T-shirt, all won from sailors on the banana boat in card games. I was also wearing an attitude that I didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything.
At the other end of the dock two people were waiting, a man and a woman. The woman smiled and frantically waved a handkerchief as I came off the launch.
I slowed my pace, a little embarrassed, not knowing how to handle her enthusiasm. She hurried down the dock, almost in a run, and gave me a big hug. I accepted it stiffly.
“You look just like your father,” Sarah Walsh said. “Nicholaus, it’s so good to finally see you.”
I liked my aunt immediately.
“Nick.”
Uncle Jack Walsh offered a handshake and tried to crush my hand as soon as he had a grip on it. It was a kind of “man thing” to show who’s got the biggest balls.
I disliked him on the spot. And I’ve always been good at first impressions.
We chatted as we walked toward their vehicle, my duffel bag over my shoulder. Or I should say that Sarah chatted. Mostly I listened and Jack looked preoccupied.
My bare arms felt itchy. “What—what?” They were black with flying creatures. I brushed them off in a panic, leaving streaks of blood on my arms.
“You have to wear long sleeves early in the morning and late in the afternoon,” Sarah said. “That’s when the mosquitoes feed.”
I slapped the back of my neck.
“A hat and kerchief will help, too, the battlass and doctor flies feed about the same time,” Sarah said. “We rub juice of a plant on our hands and face, it keeps most of the mosquitoes and other pests away, but I’m afraid I didn’t think to bring any.”
My ankles itched and I rubbed them.
“Sand fleas,” she said. She looked distressed.
Mary, mother of God. It was one of the less provocative expressions I had learned on the banana boat. It was one I was going to have plenty of use for. A city where you could poach eggs in a hot wind, a port where ships couldn’t dock and people were eaten alive by insects. This truly was hell.
We got into a vintage Land Rover, the unconquerable jeeplike vehicles that transported a generation of the British soldiers and administrators who wielded the power of the Union Jack in the white man’s world that was coming under attack around the world by indigenous peoples.
Sarah turned around in the front passenger seat and smiled at me. It was a nice smile. My memory of my father was only hazy, and I couldn’t see any resemblance in her. Her hair was darker than I remembered my father’s hair. His was very blond, like mine, while hers was what I heard a man on the transatlantic ship refer to as “dishwater blond.”
Her complexion was fair, though a little ruddier than my Leningrad paleness. Her cheeks were full and rosy red. The smile she gave me seemed to be always on her lips. Pretty in a plain and simple way, she was either a compulsively happy person or worked to keep a pleasant outlook in what looked to me to be a dismal place.
“We’re so happy you’ve finally gotten here. We’ve been waiting anxiously for months, ever since we got word that you had survived the war. We’re just thrilled that you’re finally with us, aren’t we, Jack?”
Jack grunted. He was about my size, five-ten, a little stockier than me, bullnecked with a broad forehead and brown, short-cropped military-style hair. He had a red rash on the side of his neck that he kept scratching, the kind of rash people said came from worry and nerves.
I had picked up other expressions on shipboard and a couple of them fit him—he had a “hard-on” toward life, a “chip on his shoulder.”
I wasn’t sure if he was angry because I was suddenly plopped onto their laps or if he just was pissed at the world in general.
“I’m afraid Belize Town’s not much to look at,” Sarah said.
“It’s plenty to smell,” Jack uttered.
The capital of the colony called British Honduras was an eyesore. It was poor, shabby, dirty and ugly. Most of the houses were unpainted wood, sometimes trimmed in green with the zinc-galvanized metal roofs painted red. Many of the buildings had a splash of color from red and pink bougainvillea and poinciana. The household water supply came from rainwater that washed off roofs and into cisterns and barrels. I learned from Sarah that the houses were propped up several feet of
f the ground for ventilation and to keep from being flooded as storms and hurricanes blew in. The town was only a little over a foot above sea level, making it vulnerable to high waves.
“We get hurricanes frequently,” she said, “but fortunately the killer storms are years apart.”
“The hurricane of ’31 swept in suddenly and killed over two thousand people and nearly wiped the town clean, no loss there, though. The one of ’42 hit us hardest up north and killed—”
“Jack, stop it, I’m sure Nick has seen plenty of bad weather in Leningrad.”
“Nothing that wipes out cities,” I admitted.
And Jack was right about the smell. Compared to Leningrad, one of the great cities of the world, with monuments cast for the ages, the town was a stinking armpit. “Sewer” was another word that came to mind—it was a shanty town with open ditches that served as sewers. Stink was everywhere—the air stunk, the bay stunk, people I had walked by on my way to the Land Rover stunk.
Onboard the great Queen, I’d learned the smell of money. Now I knew the stench of Third World poverty.
I felt alien. The city, the people, the steamy weather, carnivorous bugs, it was nothing like I imagined or had experienced. Even the Soviet officer’s comparison to Devil’s Island had left me with the impression of a tropical paradise. But not even Satan himself would have lived in this place. Leningrad was cold much of the year, but cold at least was antiseptic.
Jack twisted in the driver’s seat and laughed at the look on my face.
“Bloody shitty, isn’t it.”
“Jack!”
“Woman, you want the boy to deny what his eyes see? What his nose tells him? Look out there, what do you see? Poor blacks wearing rags, with rubber-soled sandals made from used tires. The town’s built on a foundation of rum bottles atop a swamp, the houses are rotted shanties propped up on stilts, the waste in the drainage canals along the streets sits and boils and stinks until a rainstorm washes the scum out to sea—and it’s back the next day when people flush their toilets. The only saving grace for the place is the occasional hurricane that levels it, blowing it away as if God had spit on it and wiped it clean.”
The Betrayers Page 10