“Rum bottles?” I asked.
“They say pirates put up the first buildings here on swampy ground by propping them up on empty rum bottles.”
A waste of good bottles, I thought. After one look at the town, I could think of a better use of the empty bottles—fill them with petrol and add wicks to create the fiery “Molotov cocktails” Russian and Yugoslav guerrilla fighters used against Nazi tanks. Then use the cocktail bombs to burn the place.
“Don’t let appearances fool you,” Sarah said, “the people might be poor in terms of material things, but they’re rich in their appreciation for life and family. And courteous. The word ‘no’ is hardly part of the Creole psyche. They are so polite and want to please so much, that even if it is impossible, they’re more likely to vaguely agree to a request than right-out refuse.”
“Can’t rely on them,” Jack said. “The natives go by a different time clock than the rest of the world. They don’t want to work that day, they don’t do it. If I had a hundred stout Englishmen—”
Listening to them talk, it struck me that the town was like the “port” that couldn’t accommodate ships—nothing made sense.
“There is a mixture of people in the colony,” Sarah said. “The majority are called Creoles, they’re either of African descent or a mixture of African and European, mostly British. They speak Creole, which is sort of a pidgin English. It will be hard for you to understand at first, but soon you’ll pick up the rhythm and it will be just like regular English. In the north, we have mostly Mayan Indians whose descendants fled the Yucatán area during the caste wars in Mexico a hundred years ago. They speak their own Indian dialect and some Spanish. The ones who are in business usually speak English. And of course, there are us British colonials. Some are actually white Creoles, born here, and others like Jack and I came here for the opportunities. We even have some East Indians—”
“Descendants of the murderous sepoy mutineers who massacred our people in India back when.”
“The East Indians are very nice people,” Sarah said, “you’ll meet some up north, good farmers, and I don’t know that they’re all descendants from the rebels who—”
“There’s us and them,” Jack said, “whites and blacks, with the browns sticking to themselves mostly. Some of the blacks are getting uppity, troublemakers, think they should be running things. Got themselves political parties, unions, newspapers, stick their nose into everything, try to tell the king’s governor how to run the colony. You wait and see, won’t be long till they’re—”
“Maybe we can talk politics later,” Sarah said. “Nick has a lot to digest just being in a new place. Things will make more sense after he gets a feel of the colony.”
A man stepped out from an alley and threw a rock at the Land Rover as we came down the street. The rock hit the hood and bounced, hitting the window and ricocheting off.
“Sonofabitch!”
Jack slammed on the brakes and flew out of the car. I went out the back door and followed him as he ran to the alley. The man was gone. I had only gotten a brief glance at him. He was a young Creole.
“Bastard,” Jack said. The rock had left a small star imprint in the windshield. “That crack will spread until it’s across the whole damn window. I’ll have to send back home for a replacement.”
“Why’d he throw the rock? Do you know him?”
“I don’t know who he is, but I know what’s he’s up to. He’s one of the black troublemakers, the ones that are trying to drive us from the colony.”
Sarah had joined us on the street. Her smile was replaced by a worry-frown. “There’s trouble with one of the groups of Creoles who want the colony to be independent. They want self-government, rather than a British governor taking orders from the colonial office in London. There was an execution today. A Creole was hanged for killing another Creole during a political argument. The killer supported driving us British out, the other man did not. The man who threw the rock was probably sympathetic toward the independence movement.”
“If I had gotten him in my sights, he’d be a dead sympathizer,” Jack said.
I noticed for the first time that Jack had a revolver in his hand.
A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered, mostly children. I returned their stares as I walked back toward the Land Rover. They were a ragged lot, barefoot, skinny. Other than the color of their skin, the looks on their faces weren’t much different than the street urchins of Leningrad during the war—I saw hunger, poverty and innocence on their faces. But there was one difference. These children were still smiling and laughing, even in their misery. They had a light spirit that had died in the children I was raised with. These children were poor, but they hadn’t gotten to the point of starving to death—or being a meal for someone higher on the food chain.
Sarah waved and exchanged greetings with the children. She took a bag of hard candy from the vehicle and passed out pieces to eager hands.
“Let’s go,” Jack said. His expression didn’t leave much doubt as to his opinion of the children.
“We don’t live in the town, thank God,” Sara said, after we got underway again. “The plantation is nearly a hundred miles north, up near the Mexican border. You’ll like it, it’s a true paradise.”
“A paradise in which you have to worry about stepping on snakes that’ll kill you faster than a cobra, crocs that will have you for dinner, spiders—”
“Jack, stop it, you’ll frighten the boy.”
I could have told her that “the boy” had survived a frozen hell with cannibals that not even crocodiles would want to mess with.
Sarah looked back at me, concern on her face. “I’m sorry this happened, Nick. Belize Town is not a very nice place, but you’ll find things much better up north at the plantation.”
“What kind of plantation is it? Do you grow bananas?”
“Sugarcane,” Jack said.
Sarah gave me that bright, perpetual smile of hers. “We grow the cane and process it into raw sugars and molasses in our own plant. It’s really quite interesting. Don’t let Jack scare you, there are jungle fevers and things like snakes and crocs—”
“Scorpions as long as your foot—”
“But as you can see, we are still around to talk about them.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said.
The permafrost of the Soviet Gulag was beginning to sound attractive in comparison to this hot, bugsy hell.
“We have to stop so I can pick up a few things in the general store. You and Jack can have something cold while I do. It’s an all-day drive home. I’m afraid the road north isn’t much of a road, what there is of it.”
* * *
Jack and I sat at a window table at a small tavern while Sarah disappeared into a store across the street. There were more live flies on the window than dead ones, and there were plenty of those. He ordered beer for both of us and something else. I was sure I had misunderstood the word he used for what he ordered and kept my mouth shut because I thought I heard him order “shit.”
“Can’t drink the water unless it’s been boiled,” he said. “Beer is the only salvation for a thirsty man.”
The waiter served the beer and then returned a moment later with a big platter holding a roasted fish. It was the ugliest fish I’d ever seen.
“Saltwater catfish,” Jack said. “Damn good.”
We each forked into it and he was right, it was good fish, thick white meat, moist and tasty.
We made short work of it and he signaled the waiter. “Give us another shittifish.”
“What’d you call it?” I asked.
“You heard right. Most of the sewage in the city washes from the streets to the river and down to the bay, where there’s a million of these shit-eating catfish waiting for it. That’s why they’re called shittifish in the local jargon.” He grinned. “Bon appétit.”
I had my fill of fish. I took a swig of cold beer, but couldn’t help but wonder where they got the water for the brew.
/>
I had been given fifty British pounds by the Embassy official before I left Leningrad, money from my deceased grandfather’s estate, and had doubled it playing dice and cards on two ships. I tried to pay for the meal with a pound note and Jack shoved it back at me. “I can afford some beer and shittifish. We’re not on sterling here, anyway, colony’s got its own money, pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. We’ll get your pounds exchanged before we leave town.”
I thought picking up the tab was courteous—he took it as a slight, as if I thought he was too poor to pick it up. I didn’t need a road map to tell me that I would have to walk on eggshells around him.
“Running a sugarcane plantation is hard work,” Jack said. “It’s a full-time, all-time, everyday job. I work harder than the blackamoors that do the field work. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand that we’re not rich people, you’ll be expected to pull your own weight.”
“I’m not afraid of work,” I said.
“I’d like to believe that, but I’m afraid I have information to the contrary. A policeman in Leningrad sent the British police commissioner here in the colony a letter stating that you have been involved in criminal activities most of your life. Since you’re barely eighteen, that’s quite an accomplishment—in the wrong direction.”
That bastard Nevski. May he rot in hell. I had been completely wrong about him. The guy did have an imagination—a twisted one. He had gotten his revenge for me slipping out from under the punishment he knew I so well deserved.
“I just want you to know, boy, you’re going to be watched. Don’t let Sarah’s friendly attitude fool you. I’m the boss, not her, and I’m going to make sure you walk a straight line. As far as you’re concerned, I’m going to be your judge and jury. You step out of line, go back to your criminal ways, and I’ll have you before the police commissioner quick as a wink.
“That goes for work, too. We work hard, that means you will work hard. I run a tight ship, it’s the only way the plantation survives. If that isn’t satisfactory for you, as they say, you can take a hike, family or not. My wife thinks a lot of her dead brother, but she forgets that he was the shoddier kind of Red—the egghead intellectual type. He never had a real job, he was one of those university daydreamers who walked around wide-eyed and muttering about social injustices but never got his hands dirty.”
“Did you know my father?”
Either my face or my voice signaled that he had gone too far because he looked away, avoiding my eye.
“Never met the man.” Jack slapped a roach as big as my thumb as the creature made a sudden dash across the table. “You’re going to find out real fast that you’ll be shitting out both ends before your stomach gets used to bacteria in the food. You can’t drink the water, the beer tastes like piss, you have to take quinine and hope it keeps the chills and raging fevers out of your blood. You work day and night to build something and it gets swept away by floods or hurricanes or the stupidity of an arrogant colonial administrator who knows nothing about what it takes to run a business in the colony or shit on by the blackamoors who care nothing about their culture. The colony has free education and most of the blacks can’t even write their name except on a credit chit.”
He took a long swig of his beer.
“Sarah and me, we don’t agree about how to deal with the natives. The only thing they understand is a strong hand. We Brits didn’t build an empire the sun never set on by passing out candy. We did it with guns and guts and that’s the only way we’re going to keep this colony under control.”
I listened and said nothing. In Leningrad, the colonial wars in which people in places like India, Africa and Indochina battled the Western colonial powers had been cast by my Communist teachers and in the news as white European exploiters enslaving indigenous cultures. Personally, I had no opinion as to who was right or wrong and didn’t care who won. I had seen enough of war and death.
I also kept my mouth shut because I was seething about his remarks about my father.
Jack chugged his beer and ordered another mug.
“Bloody fucking country. When I make my pile, I’m going back to Manchester and buying myself a nice farm outside the city and a pub inside. And I’m never going to use a piece of sugar again.”
20
The road north had ruts big enough to swallow the Land Rover. During the long, slow, treacherous drive, I saw a snake slithering in the foliage on the side of the road and spiders as big as a man’s hand scurried across our path. Monkeys screamed and flew from branch to branch, birds with dazzling colors and piercing cries screeched at us.
“Have to watch out for the Tommy Goff’s,” Jack said.
I looked at him with a questioning face.
“A jumping viper doesn’t slither but jumps right at you, likes to spring from trees. Get bit by one, just kiss your ass good-bye.”
“Jack, your language. There are jaguars out there, too,” Sarah said, “big cats, almost the size of African lions. They’re mankillers. Someone told me that the name ‘jaguar’ is an Indian word that means something like ‘kills in one leap.’ But you don’t have to worry, they don’t like people and stay in the jungle.”
Mars would not have been stranger to me.
“The road is bad on vehicles and tires,” Sarah said, “but archeologists hate it more. The colony’s so poor, instead of proper asphalt paving when they put in the road back in the thirties, they used stones taken from Mayan Indian mounds that are scattered all over. Destroyed a bit of history. I’m told you can still find pottery shards in the rubble.”
The wet heat became smothering as we left the coastline and were swallowed by dense jungle.
“It’s much hotter away from the coast,” Sarah said, “but in the Corozal area where the plantation’s located, we get a cool ocean breeze in the afternoons. Really quite pleasant. Corozal Town itself is pretty small; Belize Town has over twenty thousand people, Corozal maybe one tenth that. But it has electric lights and telephone and wireless contact with the capital. Corozal even has a moving picture theatre. Doesn’t play anything that hasn’t been out for a year or two, but there aren’t many towns with their own picture show.
“The northern country where the plantation’s located consists of lowlands. The southern half of the colony has mountains. The biggest, Victoria Peak, is almost four thousand feet high. The Caribbean coastline is really quite beautiful. We’ll go down it by boat sometime and show it to you. There are barrier reefs and numerous cays, little islands and swamps everywhere, especially along the coast. And then there’s the jungle, it’s everywhere, too. Lots of hardwood in it, that’s really what the colony is famous for, logging of tropical woods.”
As we drove, Sarah talked incessantly, first giving me an oral tour of the colony and then telling me stories about my father’s family in Britain and her and Jack’s life in the colony. I already knew the basics about my British grandfather, whom my mother described as a hardnosed, bourgeois engineer. My father had been his only child until he had remarried after my grandmother passed away. Sarah was the only child of that second marriage. She was about ten years older than me, late twenties, maybe thirty, much younger than my father, who had been her half-brother.
My grandfather left most of his estate to Sarah’s mother, putting aside a bit to hunt for me, Jack told me, to extinguish any hope I might have for an inheritance, which I already knew.
“I was just a little girl when I met your mother,” Sarah said. “Peter brought her home from Germany, where they had met and married. He brought her to Lyme Regis to introduce her to the family. It was a triple shock for my father—your grandfather. His new daughter-in-law was Russian, a dyed-in-the-wool communist, and Peter and she were going to live in Leningrad. I guess it was really a quadruple shock because she was also Jewish.” Sarah laughed. “I was in the room when Peter announced they were going to live in Leningrad. I thought my father was going to have a coronary on the spot. His face turned beet-red and his jaw hung op
en.”
She turned back in her seat and gave me another one of her nice smiles. “There was a big age difference between your father and I, about fifteen years. He really wasn’t a big brother to me, he was gone too much, off to school, then off to Europe and finally off to Russia. Rather, my image of him was that he was idealistic and brave. He made my father angry because they disagreed on politics, but to me he was heroic. I often used to boast to the other children at school that my brother was in Europe fighting the Jerries.”
Sarah’s eyes misted.
“I remember your mother, too. She was pretty, very pale, one of those real northern Slavic complexions, but very grave, very serious about life. She didn’t smile a terrible lot, but she was very nice to me and treated me like a young adult rather than a child. It’s too bad you lost both of them.”
I looked out the window and didn’t say anything. There were no more tears left in me.
She continued on with her chatter. “Jack and I were married when he was a sergeant in the army and I was a nurse. There’s lots of class distinctions in the home country, more than you might imagine. We settled here in the colony to get away from all that class snobbery. Back home Jack would be lucky if he could rise to being foreman in a factory but—”
“Will you shut your mouth, woman? You talk—talk—talk. Do you think I want my dirty laundry aired?”
“Well—darling, Nick is family.”
Jack eyed me in the rearview mirror. “I seem to recall that his father abandoned his family and his country and went over to the enemy.”
“Jack!”
I sat quietly in the backseat with my fist clenched and trembled from rage. It took everything I had to keep myself from smacking Jack across the side of the head. I had come to some conclusions about my new “family.”
Sarah was a good person who had a need to help others. She was genuinely happy to see me. Maybe she needed family. She had Jack and no children, not exactly the combination for a homey atmosphere when one of the housemates is a bully.
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