Gone Bamboo

by Anthony Bourdain

  Flaco fell backward, knocked clean out of one of his sneakers. But, to Kevin's surprise, he didn't drop the gun. He didn't lie there, collecting his wits, or spitting out teeth, or rubbing his badly split lip. Instead, he bounced right back up, smiling, blood smeared across his large white teeth, and cheerfully held out the Uzi to Kevin. "Ees good," he said. "My bueno. You want gun?" His grin grew wider at Kevin's look of astonishment.

  "See?" said Little Petey. "They make 'em tough where these kids come from. Flaco, baby," he asked. "How many, cuanto hombres you kill, Flaco?"

  Flaco's smile stretched even wider, and he beamed with pride as he held up ten fingers, closed his hands, and then held up three more. "Si!" he insisted, serious now. "Es verdad! Very bad people!" adding, "Paf! Paf! Paf!" to stress his point.

  "See?" said Little Petey. "They're not bad boys. They got experience this kinda thing."

  "Christ Jesus," said Kevin, wiping dead leaves and bits of tree bark off the front of his shirt. He examined the tree where the bullets had gone home, a tight little grouping, good shooting for a kid who'd probably never handled an Uzi before.

  "See?" said Little Petey, again. "What I tell ya?"

  Violetta was only halfway back when Kevin found her. He'd borrowed Little Petey's car, racing down the dry riverbed to meet her. She was walking impassively up the hill, picking her way barefoot over the exposed roots and rocky humps, Kevin's beach bag perched on her head. Headed back to her cramped, clapboard cubicle at La Ronda.

  As Kevin pulled the car up to give her a lift, calling out to her through the open window, he noticed that she'd removed the necklace he'd bought her, and his heart sank. When she slid silently into the seat next to him, he considered saying something to her about it, but he didn't.

  On the short drive back, he was surprised at the depths of pain and unhappiness this simple development had brought on him. That she no longer wore the cheap string of shells hurt him in ways he hadn't felt since childhood. He found himself blinking rapidly, trying to get rid of the sickly sweet sensation that was washing over him like an illness. As if each time he opened his eyes again, the pain would be gone.

  He suspected she'd sold the thing back to the man with the attache case. Pocketed the one or two dollars he would have given her for it. Kevin tried to put a caliber on it, the amount of pain he was feeling now. On the hierarchy of pain, how bad, really, did this hurt? Kneecaps busted? No, it wasn't that bad . . . Stabbed? Yes, more like that, the same icy tendril of fear and uncertainty was working its way into his chest as it had when he'd been stabbed. Kevin's chest hurt.

  He looked over at Violetta, her hands crossed demurely on her lap, smiling shyly as the car bounced and jolted over the dirt road. He slowed down and, without thinking about it, leaned across the seat and pecked her on the cheek. When she turned and kissed him back, opening up her hand to show him the necklace, speaking for the first time since he'd known her, since he'd picked her out from a group of curlered, painted women on the couch at La Ronda, he felt better again.

  C(Gracias," she said, filling Kevin with joy. He sang all the way back, humming when he forgot the lyrics.

  25

  Little Petey was drinking a banana daiquiri from a plastic cup, half-listening to the steel band on the casino's pool deck, and contemplating another pass at the complimentary buffet when he hit the jackpot.

  Bored with watching tourists squealing and laughing as one Farrah-cut behemoth attempted to squeeze her bulk beneath a limbo pole, Petey drifted away from the beach side of the deck, leaving a pile of gnawed spareribs on his paper plate. His drink looked and tasted like fabric softener, and, half drunk and in a pissed-off mood, he wandered over to the street side, considering dropping the cup two floors into the Tropica's gurgling fountain.

  On this side of the building, he was looking down onto Philips-burg's main drag. Unlike those on the narrow strip of trucked-in sand on the bay side, the faces here were black. People stood outside their taxis, hoping for fares, played dominoes in doorways, hustled jewelry and prerecorded cassettes from makeshift stands. There was a busy take-out joint under a stand of ratty-looking palms a little way down, and more of them huddled around two picnic tables with their barefoot children, awaiting their orders. Food was probably a damn sight better than the crap on the casino's buffet, Petey thought, regretting his meal already. These were locals, after all; they had to know the good places to eat. And this place was doing gangbuster business; it was a whole social scene, he saw - young men on scooters and motorcycles flirted with shy girls in brightly colored braids by the roadside. People beeped as they passed in their cars. An updraft brought the scent of grilling chicken and frying johnnycakes to his nose, and Little Petey almost shuddered with desire. He was thinking seriously about going down there and giving it a try when he saw Henry.

  Hard to miss in these surroundings - Henry's was the only white face in sight. Taller than anybody around him, he stepped away from the counter with two plastic bags filled with take-out food, not a care in the world, thought Little Petey. Just look at him. Dressed in cutoffs, dirty T-shirt, and flip-flops, he sauntered over to a parked scooter, exchanged greetings with some dreadlocked young men sitting on a step (did he see Henry give them a joint?), and after some backslapping, hand-shaking, and laughing about who knew what (Petey couldn't hear them), Henry got on his scooter, the bags of takeout at his feet, and zipped off down Main Street.

  This, thought Little Petey, should make Jimmy happy.

  26

  Henry and Frances had a long, boozy dinner at Orient Beach. They ate swordfish, rice, and peas, washed down with a lot of vodka and many beers. By the time they finished, it was dark, and the beach chairs and chaises had been piled up and chained, the Jet Skis returned to their sheds, the Hobie Cats and sailboards stripped and put away for the night.

  They walked down the empty beach for a while, smoking a joint, collapsing on a stack of chaises to watch the shooting stars.

  Feeling loose and happy, they exchanged deep, vodka-tasting kisses and ended up fumbling with each other's clothes on the wobbling stack of chaises. Soon Henry was inside her, Frances astride him, riding him like a rocking horse, the two of them giggling like truants.

  When they were done, Frances wouldn't put her jeans back on until she'd wiped up. "I just got them back. They're clean," she said. They broke the lock on a closed barbecue shack so she could find a napkin. When the door was open, she crept inside, jeans in one hand, and bumped into a table. Suddenly she came bolting from the door, shrieking with laughter.

  "Watchman!" she managed to say, as she ran full speed past Henry toward the parked scooter. The dark figure of a man loomed in the doorway, more stunned, most likely, by the sight of Frances's naked ass charging across the sandy parking lot in the moonlight than concerned with a possible burglary. Henry, caught flat-footed, stammered a few lame apologies.

  "Pardon, monsieur . . . Ma femme . . . elle a besoin d'une serviette." He handed the man a fifty-dollar bill to cover the damage and trotted off to the scooter.

  "Let's get out of here!" said Frances, hurrying him to start the engine, the two of them laughing and excited.

  "I have to get the lock off."

  "Hurry," she said. "I've never been so embarrassed in my life."

  "I doubt that," said Henry, finally starting the engine. They sped down the dirt track to the main road.

  "Do you think he was watching us the whole time?"

  "Probably," said Henry.

  "God," said Frances. "Get us out of here."

  "Maybe you should put your pants on before we hit the main road."

  When they got to the long section of loose dirt and gravel that curved around the high windward bluff over Baie Embouchure, they were still laughing about the incident. Henry was driving too fast, and he felt Frances digging her knuckles into his ribs so he'd slow down. They sped around the ungraded turn, rear wheel sliding a little, past the sign marked only with an exclamation point. Still drunk from d
inner and feeling mischievous, Henry ignored the knuckles in his side and opened up the throttle even more.

  They rounded the final bend, high over the crashing waves, a sudden blast of wind hitting them hard, broadside, forcing Henry to veer to the right as he struggled to keep the wheels aligned.

  There was a car parked at the crest of the hill, a jeep with its headlights on, the door on the driver's side open. The driver was nowhere in sight.

  Two, three muzzle flashes came from the other side of the drop-off, a few yards behind the car. As the reports from the gun were whipped away by the wind, Henry felt the impact of the slug slamming into the scooter's front fender. He only had time to yell, "We're going down!" before he lost his grip on the handlebars and they were on the ground, Henry rolling for the ditch on his right, the terrible, hollow sound of the scooter sliding on gravel in his ears, and more gunshots, distant snapping sounds coming from somewhere in the dark.

  Feeling instinctively for the butt of the H &c K, he called out to Frances. "You okay?"

  But she was already on her feet, running straight at the shooter, her Walther blazing. Henry raised himself onto bloody knees and shot out the jeep's headlights. After the lights went out in a shatter of glass, for a moment the only sounds were the heavy thumping of the waves below and the wind.

  There were two more shots, then a loud yelp from somewhere over the rise. Henry raced forward in a crouch to see Frances, walking erect, illuminated now by the light from the fallen scooter. She was walking along the edge, firing her weapon - Pop, pop, pop - as if she were spraying cockroaches. He caught up with her as she stepped out of the single beam of light, his hands shaking, and pointed his gun blindly in the same direction as hers. He looked over the edge.

  "Oh, man," said the man in the dark summer-weight suit. He was lying on his back, shirt pulled up over his navel, both hands wrapped tightly around a large wet area on his thigh. A Colt 9-millimeter automatic pistol lay useless near the man's head.

  "Why do they always pull their shirts up?" said Frances, her voice funny, eyes shining in the moonlight. "You ever notice that?"

  "Checking their dicks," said Henry. He'd seen that before. A lot.

  "Please," said the man, looking up at Henry, "Don't let her shoot me again."

  Henry put the back of his hand against the barrel of Frances's Walther and nudged it aside. "You okay?" he asked her. When she nodded breathlessly, he leaned down, took the man's Colt, and put it in his waistband.

  "Fuck tried to kill us," hissed Frances, menacing the man again with her gun.

  "Don't," said Henry. "I want to talk with him."

  "So, talk," she snarled, firing a single round into the man's kneecap. "You broke my scooter!"

  "Owww!" said the man,. "Owww! Owww! Owww! That really hurts. That really fuckin' hurts! Stop that!"

  Henry reached under the man's arms and dragged him onto the road, the man grunting in pain. The light from the skewed headlight of the scooter, shining crazily out to sea, lit up his features. They were unfamiliar to Henry. He could see that the man had been hit bad. Apart from the knee, just now beginning to well up with blood, he was bleeding heavily from the thigh. It looked as if one of Frances's first shots had clipped the femoral artery. He'd been hit elsewhere too, Henry saw, earlobe shot off, upper chest, and foot. The man's face was already beginning to go white, and Henry supposed that soon he'd go into shock. He untied a helmet from the fallen scooter and propped the man's head on it, then applied a makeshift tourniquet above the thigh wound with the man's tie.

  Feeling less generous, Frances kicked the man in the side of the head. "Look at that scooter."

  "Chrissakes," the man cried, spitting out a hunk of bloody tooth, "willya get her off a me?"

  "I'm mad," said Frances.

  "I can see that," said the man. "Jeesus." He squeezed a few tears out of the corners of his eyes, breathing heavily.

  "You want to talk to me?" asked Henry.

  "I ain't gonna tell you nothin'," said the man. "You gonna take me the hospital or what?"

  "Gee . . . I don't know about that," said Henry.

  "Then I ain't sayin' nothin'," said the man. "You gonna kill me anyways, right?"

  "Probably," said Henry.

  "At least keep her away from me. Awright?" he pleaded.

  "What's your name?" Henry asked. "If you don't mind."

  "Unnnn," said the man.

  "I'll tell you mine. My name is Henry," he said.

  "Petey," said the man. "My name is Petey."

  "That's a nice name," said Henry. "New York?" It wasn't even a question really; the man's accent was unmistakable.

  "Uh-uh," Little Petey grunted.

  Frances was calming down a bit. She went to get the scooter, shutting off the motor and righting it on its kickstand. Henry sat down next to the man and crossed his legs. "You don't look too good," he said.

  "I fucked up, I guess," said Little Petey.

  "You tried," said Henry. "Really. You did the best you could."

  "Henry," said Little Petey. "At least I got that right." He shook his head from side to side. "That. . . that must be Frances, right? The wife?"

  "Yup," said Henry.

  "The wife . . . they . . . they told me . . . somebody said something about that. I should . . . I should a listened. You went down, and I was lookin' at you. See what you was gonna do." He jerked a wet thumb toward Frances, now standing over him again, wild-eyed, the wind off the sea blowing hair across her face. With surprising robustness, Little Petey reached up and gave Henry a playful punch in the shoulder, leaving an imprint of bloody fist on his shirt. "I mean, Henry. What happens, youse two get in a argument? I mean, holy shit. That is one mean bitch."

  Henry smiled and offered Little Petey a cigarette, lighting it for him and putting it in his mouth.

  "Tell me somethin'," said Little Petey, lowering his voice a little. "Is . . . is she good inna sack? You don't mind me askin'? I'll bet she's un-fuckin'-believable."

  "That she is," said Henry, grinning now. He gave a hopeful look back at Frances, relieved to see she was smiling now too.

  "That's good," said Little Petey, closing his eyes, pleased with Henry's answer. "That's good. I thought so."

  Henry put the muzzle of the H & K under Little Petey's chin and pulled the trigger.

  27

  It took all night, getting rid of the car, the body. Fortunately, nobody drove by until they got Little Petey down to the water's edge, the two of them carrying him, stumbling at one point on the steep, crumbling incline. Henry and Frances rolled and slid the last few yards, Little Petey's corpse with them.

  "Leave him where he is," said Henry. "We'll come back for him in the dinghy after we dump the car." By this point, Little Petey was half in the water, head down, feet sticking out. Henry weighed him down with rocks, pushing the feet under, and marked the spot with a piece of driftwood.

  They crawled back up to Little Petey's jeep. Henry collected shell casings and then got behind the wheel. Frances followed him on the scooter to the mangrove swamp behind Friar's Beach. They wiped down the car, put it in neutral, and rolled it into the dark, stagnant, algae-covered water, relieved when it sank completely from view.

  They took the scooter back to the hotel and wearily rowed the dinghy out of the pond before starting the engine. The chop outside the protection of the reef was difficult to manage in the inflatable dinghy, but they made it to where they'd stashed the body without incident. Henry lashed Little Petey to a towline while Frances combed the water's edge for objects to weigh him down with.

  Little Petey's final resting place was on the far side of Molly Beday, a barren, foam-flecked rock a half mile offshore. Henry cut Little Petey loose a few yards from its jagged face, a necklace of tire rims and broken cinder blocks pulling the corpse straight down through the black inhospitable surf, two hundred feet into a rocky trough.

  When Henry and Frances finally limped up the steps to their rooms, the sun was coming up, the sk
y over the mountains glowing pink and purple with first light. Henry's hands were cut from the high-test monofilament he'd used to truss up the dead gangster. The two of them were covered in road dust, blood, and grease. Frances's jeans were soaked through at the knees, where she'd scraped herself falling from the scooter.

  "We should do something about that," said Frances, pointing back down at the scooter. There was a single bullet hole in the front fender.

  "Shit." Henry groaned, exhausted. He trudged painfully down the steps again with a roll of hurricane tape. He probed the hole with his finger until a 9-millimeter round popped through the other side. Then he stretched a piece of tape over the hole.

  "I'll fix it tomorrow," he said, back in the room. "Right now, I'm just too beat." He helped himself to a long swig of tequila from a bottle by the refrigerator. Frances was already on the bed. She reached up and grabbed hold of his ponytail. When he looked down at her, she was already asleep.

  At noon, Henry was wakened by an insistent tapping at the door. It was the housekeeper.

  'I'm coming, I'm coming," he groaned through the fog of a miserable hangover and growing discomfort from having slept in his wet, dirty clothes, the H & K digging into the base of his spine.

  He opened the door a crack and tried to smile into the blinding sunlight.

  "You can let it go today," he said. "We were out late last night."

  "You have an accident, Mr Henry?" asked the housekeeper. "Your moto—"

  "Yes," said Henry, accepting a pile of fresh bath towels through the narrow opening. "A little one. C'est pas grave. Pas de tout."