Suez came to dinner at least once a week and everyone assumed that they were lovers. Why else would a Englishman visit a black woman? But they were not lovers. She wasn’t sure why he had never married, but she suspected that he really didn’t feel any significant sexual attraction to women. Or to men, either. Sarita was wise enough in the ways of the world to realize that not all men or women were sexually motivated—why else would one become a priest or a nun?
Their lack of sexual attraction worked out well because while Sarita enjoyed their conversation and the companionship, she wasn’t sexually attracted to him, either. In her culture sex was treated as a natural state of affairs, rather than something to hide in the bedroom under covers.
Early on in their relationship, more out of concern for him than any arousal on her part, after he was feeling relaxed from the Scotch he brought over with him, she had unzipped his pants and taken his penis into her hand, gently pumping it. He calmly sat and talked about the old days at the Suez Canal and drank his liquor without once looking down at what she was doing.
His penis got a bit stiff but never really erupted into a full-blown erection. After a while, she had given up and pushed it back inside his trousers and buttoned him back up again.
Neither of them ever said anything about the incident.
Suez was tall, six feet two, with a knucklebone frame, unruly brown hair and unhealthy skin blotches that looked like he was rusting. He was an intelligent person, well-traveled though rather boring—truly a British gentleman, reserved, well-mannered, but not one to show his emotions.
Even though Sarita had no true friends, and really needed none, he provided a little relief from the everyday monotony of speaking only to the workers at her sugarcane farm and tradespeople.
A widow for ten years now, her husband, Jose Garcia, had been the son of black Creoles, but she was a Garifuna. Her people, who were often called “Black Caribs” and mostly concentrated along the southern coast of the colony, spoke a different language and had a different culture than the Creoles who comprised the majority of the colony’s population.
Most Garifuna stayed with their own people along the southern coast, and she had no near neighbors of her kind in the northern area. That made her both unique and different from her Creole, Mexican and British colonial neighbors in many ways.
The Garifuna were a proud, independent and sometimes obstinate people and she shared the traits. What made them different from other New World peoples of African heritage was their ethnicity. The Garifuna prided themselves on not being the descendants of slaves. Their descendants were Africans captured and shipped to the Americas for the slave trade who revolted and fled into the jungle on St. Vincent island in the Caribbean. They intermarried with Carib Indians who also had refused to submit to Europeans.
That ethnic heritage, rebellious African and Amerindian, created a unique race of people whose skin was black but who did not identify with the black culture of other Caribbeans with African blood.
There was another quality that separated the Garifuna from the others—their connection to the world of ancestral spirits. Voodoo Lady, Witch Woman, were names applied to her by Creole neighbors who neither understood the Garifuna dugu ceremonies nor had any knowledge that she was in fact a buyai, a spirit medium able to make contact with the other world.
People who accused her of being in contact with the spirit world knew only half the truth. The dugu ceremony was performed to contact ancestors. Sarita was a buyai and could perform the traditional ceremony, but for a different reason. She contacted the spirit of her husband and enjoyed sex with it.
She would often lay in bed at night, naked on top of the sheet, close her eyes and begin to utter words that her aunt, a renowned buyai, taught her. The words would come faster and faster, until they were a hum. At some point the words were no longer spoken aloud, but swirled round-and-round dizzily in her head.
Once the words took on a life of their own and no longer needed her to utter them, she would rise from her body, up to the dark ceiling, and look back down at her naked form on the bed and watch her own hands touch her naked breasts and move down between her legs.
Then Jose, her dead husband, would appear by the bed, naked, his powerful manhood erect. To her eye, it was twice the length and thickness of the Englishman’s.
As she watched from above, Jose would slowly run his lips down her body, starting from her neck, caressing her breasts, sucking each nipple in his mouth, teasing her belly button. She would spread her legs and arch them back as he worked his way down to her pubic hair and kiss the swollen lips between her legs. And as he used to do when they made love, his lips would travel back up her body, leaving her laughing and shuddering from delight, until he found her mouth, when he would tell her that he was sharing the taste of her sweet cunt …
She slammed the dough she was kneading for flat bread on the counter. What did she need a new husband for anyway when she had a ghost lover that raped her in her sleep?
Jose Garcia had been well known in the Corozal District as a good businessman, good by the colony’s definition that he made money and usually wasn’t particular about how he did it. He inherited a very small sugarcane farm from his parents that he tripled in size, though it still wasn’t large enough to be called a plantation. But his most profitable business venture had been in trade goods, especially one item: rum.
Like many Creoles in the sugarcane growing region, Garcia, and his father before him, made bush rum for themselves and their friends. Sugarcane and rum went hand-in-hand.
During the processing of the cane, molasses of several different qualities was produced, the higher qualities of which were good for making rum. After obtaining molasses from the cane processing plant—by hook or by crook—it was a fairly simple process to make rum with a small distiller hidden in the bushes, away from the prying eyes of the police, tax and health authorities.
When Prohibition hit the United States and bootleg booze became a high-ticket item in the early 1920s, the enterprising Garcia turned a barn on his property into a real distillery and began producing it in enough quantity to profitably ship it north on a banana boat to Biloxi, Mississippi.
In 1925, he met and married a seventeen-year-old Garifuna girl who was considered the best-looking woman of her ethnicity in the colony. It was a happy event both sexually and economically, because Sarita was not only warm and sensuous, she had a knack for making rum. After she became the official rum blender of her husband’s distillery, Garcia’s rum became a favorite among the imbibers of illegal spirits in the States.
The end of Prohibition in 1933 brought that gravy train to a halt. The Garcias had not become rich from the rum business, there was too much overhead due to U.S. Coast Guard seizures and too many bribes to pay, but they had made enough money to increase the size of their sugarcane farm until it was no longer a family affair but a business one.
Unfortunately for Sarita, who didn’t plan on becoming a widow anytime soon, and even more unfortunately for Garcia, who didn’t plan to die young, instead of retiring on his laurels and sugarcane fields, Garcia was attracted to the darker side of business.
Knowing that there was a small, but profitable market for marijuana in the States, he went into the farming of that plant. It was bad enough that he risked a jail sentence at the hands of the British commissioner, but he made the mistake of luring a Florida “importer” away from a Mexican gentleman who grew a great deal of the plant across the Rio Honda and shipped it north from Chetumal, the Mexican town across the bay from Corozal. That caused the Mexican to one day come across the border and drive the ten miles to Corozal Town where Garcia was drinking in a dingy Creole bar that called itself the Mayfair Pub. He put a bullet between Garcia’s eyes and was back across the border before dinnertime.
Sarita buried Jose, let the marijuana field turn back into jungle, kept the still closed, and remained living on the sugarcane farm. She had no interest in business and the farm was enough for her
to handle. She also had no interest in getting married again, having had a husband that she loved, lusted and respected. Besides, there weren’t any candidates around that could replace him.
She was not that lonely and managed to fulfill much of her sexual needs with her buyai talents.
She heard the front screen door open and Suez’s greeting as he came in.
“In the kitchen,” she yelled.
“Brought you a little gift,” he said, giving her the usual peck on the cheek. He handed her a can of salted herring. “Had a whole case of my favorite brand shipped over from Liverpool.”
“Thank you.” Just what she needed—salty canned fish when she could buy mouthwatering fresh fish every day of the week in Corozal.
She fixed him a whiskey and soda from the ingredients he brought.
“I want you to meet someone. That young man, Cutter. He might be of help to you.”
“Cutter?”
“Nick Cutter, Jack and Sarah Walsh’s nephew.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen him in town. He came to Corozal two or three years ago, didn’t he?”
“Right, rescued from the Reds, Russian born, British father, speaks the King’s English like he was raised proper.”
“Why do you want me to meet him?”
“He’s an enterprising lad, that one, smart. They say he knows more about sugarcane farming and processing than Jack Walsh.”
That didn’t surprise her. She didn’t like Jack Walsh, found his brand of white superiority and quarrelsome personality offensive. Her opinion was one commonly held. He was a big man in the area because he managed the biggest sugarcane plantation and a processing plant, but that gave him power, not respect. She knew what Nick looked like, a pale-skinned, blond young man who appeared to be physically fit.
“Why do you think he can help me?”
“Well, you’re always complaining about how you hate to run your farming operation, letting it deteriorate because you’re not motivated to keep an eye on the workers so they don’t take advantage of you. The Cutter lad might be just the answer. I have it from the horse’s mouth that he and Jack Walsh grate on each other—”
“Is there anyone Walsh doesn’t rub wrong?”
“Personally, I find the man objectionable on many levels. Arrogant ass, if you know what I mean. One of those men who give colonials a bad name, not good at all in a world in which the Union Jack’s been attacked by the locals everywhere. To tell you the truth, I think he’s one of those lower-class chaps who resents the upper classes. He probably comes from a Labour Party background but votes the Conservative Party ticket to identify himself with his betters.”
“I don’t like Jack Walsh, haven’t since the day I met him. His wife appears to be nice, too quiet and forgiving, from what I hear. I haven’t met the boy. Do you think he’s trustworthy?”
“Yes, within reason. I understand he picked up some bad habits under the Reds, but nothing for a friend to worry about, rather reminds me a little of your late husband, a sharp trader, always ready to make a deal, not always concerned about the source of the goods, if you know what I mean. But I’m told by everyone who does business with him that you can count on his word. I got to know the young man making repairs to machinery at Walsh’s processing plant. Nick watched every move I made and I’m sure now he can fix that machine himself if it acts up again.”
“Have you spoken to him about my place?”
“Actually, he’s the one who brought up the subject. Heard from talk among the cane workers that you’ve been having problems getting the most out of your land. Told me he could run your operation in his spare time and make it worthwhile for both of you.”
“Well, then perhaps I should speak to him.”
26
Three years in the tropics had left my blond hair almost bleached white and my skin the color of a dull penny. I moved from the seasonal-worker shack after a few months and bought a bungalow from a Brit who went home, claiming he preferred the cold damp of the Isles over the wet-warmth of the tropics. I drove a war surplus American army jeep that I bought on a foray to Mexico City. I still did work for Jack, second to him running the farm and the sugarcane processing plant, but I had some of my own things going.
My present interest was pre-Columbian artifacts.
It was a natural for the area. The incredible Mayan civilization had occupied southern Mexico and most of Central America, with British Honduras in the center of it, for two or three thousand years. I wasn’t much on book learning, but Sarah took an interest in history.
It was hard to imagine that much of the region had been heavily populated by a race of people in many ways more advanced than we were a thousand years ago. Sarah told me that the Mayans built great cities, constructed roads, had sky observatories, and had a calendar more accurate than the one used today.
Sounded like the Romans, except with a lot of jungle.
Then they up and disappeared one day, leaving behind stone cities that got swallowed by jungle, and creating one of those mysteries of the ages that university types loved to debate.
Personally, I didn’t think there was much mystery about why they left—the damn heat and mosquitoes, snakes and crocodiles were good enough reason.
While I wasn’t particularly versed in Mayan history, I had become something of an authority on Mayan antiquities—at least enough to tell the real ones from the fakes.
There were Mayan sites all over Central America and the Yucatán, most of them still covered in jungle. In the Corozal and Orange Walk districts of the colony, every now and then some farmer who was digging a hole to plant yams would come across a piece of stone artwork. Most of it was pretty rough, but once in a while someone came up with a real quality piece.
Naturally, all antiquities had to be turned over to the government. And it was just as natural that few pieces ever were. There was a healthy trade in pre-Columbian artwork, and I had become one of the chief traders in the contraband. Until I got into the trade, it was pretty hand-to-mouth. Most of the stuff got sold for peanuts by the finder, usually to a shop owner. Every couple of months, a dealer from the States would wander through and buy several pieces.
I took the trade door-to-door, putting out the word that I would come to anyone—anywhere, anytime—who had a piece to sell. My contact for resale was an art dealer in Boston I’d met when he was making one of his annual trips in search of antiquities. I packaged the items in parcel boxes and gave them to a deck officer on the sugar boat that hauled most of our production to a plant at Galveston. There, the deck officer mailed the parcel to the Boston art dealer.
The local police called the business smuggling rather than private enterprise, and I had to watch my back.
I was in front of the bungalow negotiating for the head of a Mayan god with an Yucatán Indian when a Morris Minor came into the yard, kicking up dust. It was Sarah, who took as much offense to rumors of my smuggling activities as the local police did.
“Deal,” I told the Indian, quickly giving him the money and escorting him to his donkey.
Sarah followed me into the house where I set the head on a table and covered it with a shirt I had taken off earlier and tossed nearby.
“Lemonade?” I asked, already grabbing the pitcher to pour.
“You told me you weren’t involved in smuggling.”
“True, but—”
“I boasted to Jack about your work preserving artifacts and he told me you were a bloody smuggler. You lied to me.”
“No-no-no, listen to me.” I gave her my best boyish grin. “I don’t consider it smuggling. I’m working to preserve the great Mayan heritage by getting artifacts out of the jungle where they’re deteriorating and into the hands of museums where they’ll be safe. I’m like those countrymen of yours who stole—uh, I mean, preserved—all those antiquities of Greece and Egypt that ended up in the British museum.”
“You’re a liar and a scoundrel.” She said it without malice.
I laughed.
<
br /> “I really don’t know where you learned such things. Your father was such an honest, idealistic, intellectual—”
“I’m sorry to say that my father didn’t live long enough to pass on any of his fine qualities.”
“I’m sorry, Nicky, I didn’t mean to be hard on you.”
Okay, I deliberately played the sympathy card, I knew my father was a soft spot with her. She was the only one I let call me Nicky. It sounded like a little kid’s name, but it also came with the warmth of family. Jack and I were barely on civil terms. I kept away from him as much as possible even when working at the farm and plant, but I had grown even fonder of Sarah. I was careful to never show anything but familial respect for her. The closest thing to intimacy was a friendly peck on the cheek. I still went to dinner at their house a couple of times a month, but I did that for Sarah’s sake.
“You’re not hard on me. I deserve it. I try to walk the straight and narrow, but I just keep slipping off.” That was a lie, of course. I didn’t slip off, I jumped off with both feet every chance I got.
“Nicky, I—I—”
“What is it?” I asked, letting my eyes linger on her longer than I should have.
“I don’t know. You and Jack seem to constantly be on the outs.”
I shrugged. “We get along okay.”
“Like a cat and dog. I think he’s jealous of you.”
“What?”
“I really do. You seem to succeed at everything you do and manage to do it without antagonizing everyone around you. Poor Jack just can’t help offending people.”
I wanted to say that “poor Jack” would be less abrasive to people if he didn’t try to bully them, but I never badmouthed him to her. I wished she’d kick him in the butt, but she loved him and seemed to have endless patience and tolerance for his transgressions.
“There’s something else you should know.”
“Yeah…?”
“I think the police commissioner is extremely interested in your, uh, ‘artifact preservation’ activities.”
The Betrayers Page 14