Contraband

by George Foy

  ‘But no – no in a big way, because a majority of the real brothers; the skippers, the pilots, the coyotes, in other words, the border specialists – still work for themselves. They still run their own cargoes, make their own connects, in seedy Asian hotels, in small grimy bars in the Bahamas outer cays. In this respect, as in so many others, they are the last of the traditional bandidos . . .’

  *

  The pilot leaned over from the passenger seat of the old Crooked Island Airways Trislander to peer out the windscreen as Sandworm Cay appeared out of the hallucinating transparent X-ray of Bahamian sea.

  Sandworm Cay was and is a mistake. It is too high to be a real sandbar, too low to be a proper island. During hurricanes it essentially disappears under surf and spray. It is four miles long by a quarter mile wide at its broadest point, a long thin turd, like the meager diarrhea of barracuda. It is the dried-up residue of two kinds of sea waste: coral, made of the skeletons of billions of miniature crustaceans; and basalt, formed of the solidified hemorrhage of the earth’s melted blood, lava come oozing hot and tangerine-colored from the broken skin of the ocean floor, to congeal in the cool saltwater and build until it touches air, and is broken off by the Caribbean waves.

  The creatures that live on Sandworm Cay are sea waste too, sea waste feeding on sea waste: for all of them at some point in their evolution were thrown out of happier places until they finally found refuge on this oceanic accident, and either learned to live off the wrack that washed in after them, or died.

  The web-footed gawpies are a good example. The gawpie is a seabird whose feet are too large and whose wings are too small for easy flight. It eats teredo worms off driftwood and broken ships and is too lazy and specialized to survive anywhere else. The iguanas who live here by eating gawpie eggs are the rejects of their own species. They would starve if the gawpies were not, incredibly, even stupider and slower than they.

  As for the humans, they are the products of ten generations of marooned pirates, disoriented smugglers, lost fishermen, washed-up convicts, castaway slaves, shipwrecked mariners, sick and beaten Indians – a half-dozen races bred and interbred into one common denominator, namely, the utter geographic confusion, the spectacular absence of any directional sense, the zero spatial judgment required to get utterly, irretrievably lost, and wind up on the poorest, most godforsaken island in the entire Caribbean – and stay there.

  And yet – Sandworm Cay has an airstrip. Its cracked and broken asphalt takes up about a fifth of the island’s surface. The strip came courtesy of World War II, the island’s east-west orientation into the prevailing tradewinds, and its location not far from the shipping lanes to South America and their U-boat predators. It is kept open and repaired largely because of the smuggling trade.

  The Trislander jinked and putted over the island’s only village. Its shadow made fast, fickle angles on bleached pink sand, pastel shacks, hauled-up skiffs, scrub palms bent double, a scattering of garden plots picket-fenced against the single-minded wind and its eternal coriolis lick. The plane bounced over the heaps of teredo shells, the skeletons of surprised iguanas and gawpies who, in the wild and carefree rut of April, had mistaken incoming aircraft for big gawpies and initiated the dance of copulation, with lethal results.

  The plane came to a stop by a sagging Quonset hut. The pilot climbed out. He was the only passenger. The Trislander’s crew chucked out a sack of mail and assorted cargo and taxied away.

  The pilot slung his ECM-pak and his chartcase, one on each shoulder, and walked down the runway, eastward, into the warm iodine halitosis of the sea. As he walked he looked at the wrecks of planes that had come in too long, or too short, too close to a tropical storm, or too full of bullets from the guns of rival smugglers lying in wait behind the cascarillas. They were single- and twin-engine planes mostly; AeroCommanders, Learjets, Canadairs, Dakotas, Beech 18s. Most had been modified for the Trade with STOL gear, radar-sensing domes, Dornier-Akai floats, RATO mounts, flare chutes. In all of them the rudders swung loose, the flaps sagged, doors hung agape. Eelgrass grew through shattered landing gear. The Trislander gunned its engines and took off, east into the trades, waggling its wings.

  He walked faster through the boneyard till he came to the Connie.

  The Connie was a Lockheed Super-Constellation, a four-propellor, dolphin-nosed, whale-backed, twin-tailed monster, the largest aircraft ever to attempt a landing at Sandworm Cay. She had come in on a March night, pregnant with fifteen tons of Antioquia blow, her pilots – true to Sandworm tradition – being under the impression that this was a much longer runway on an island thirty-five miles to the northwest.

  Now she lay half buried in a dune, her nose overhanging the concrete buttresses of the cay’s only harbor. Someone had spray-painted a slogan on the radar cone: ‘The Quest is the Quest.’ Hawkley. Tattered awnings sheltered the raw aluminum from the sun. Small flowers sprouted scarlet-and-cream from the engine cowlings. The trades had blown sand against the wreck so it covered the fuselage up to the wings and carpeted the plane’s interior. A sign read ‘Super Constellation Tavern and Restaurant.’ The pilot walked through the open First Class doorway.

  The inside was gloomy, lit only by emergency lights and a couple of kerosene lanterns whose greasy smoke helped keep the mosquitoes at bay. A few airline seats had been rearranged into booths under the ornate chrome fixtures and the faded blue fabric of an old passenger section. A bar built of silver sea-weathered wood took up most of the cargo area. There was a strong smell of ganja. A generator chugged in the background. From the cockpit, music thumped softly, heavy on the front beat.

  Free yer mind, to the beat, to the rhythm, of yer ass . . .

  Dr Funkenship.

  A tall black man in jeans and T-shirt squinted at the pilot from behind the bar. He reached automatically for the Letuva bottle.

  ‘Cree-azy Skid,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Gershwin,’ the pilot answered. He put down his gear with a sigh of relief. The chartcase was heavy. The hidden compartment inside was full of VR-Portables. You could make a nice mark-up on VR-Portables on islands like these, so long as you did not inform Customs.

  There was no Customs on Sandworm Cay. There was no Customs on Grand Bahama either – not when you folded a hundred-mark bill around your UCC-card.

  ‘Been long time,’ Gershwin said.

  ‘Sure,’ the pilot agreed. He looked around him, thinking it was probably a good thing. Once he had been fond of this place. Today there was something shabby – no, worse, there was something incredibly lonely about this wrecked plane, and all the other abandoned aircraft around the runway. Delicate systems of metal and electricity, gentle contours of lift and drag once meant to soar and swoop now rusted broken in the pink sand, all because of black money.

  Shabby and lonely it was, this whole island of rejects, of men who fled other men by choice or necessity.

  Shabby and lonely, like his apartment. Like the Trade itself. He shook his head, hard. He had to get over it.

  ‘Been busy?’

  ‘Busy!’ Gershwin laughed. He had a good, rich laugh. ‘Sure, mahn.’

  Gershwin was in his fifties. His mouth was toothless and smiled easier than not. He had very calm eyes surrounded by deep ridges. The lines had been carved by long hours spent in open boats, looking for fish. Searching for the way back to harbor.

  ‘No business anymore.’ He leaned over the bar. ‘Not for two months, now. Been no mahn comin’ heah.’

  A tall young islander with long plaited dreadlocks and a green plastic bag on his shoulder ambled through the doorway. He nodded at Gershwin, picked up a broom, and began sweeping the sand with slow, elegant strokes. After three strokes the broom handle poked out one of the cabin lights. Glass shattered. Gershwin sighed, and leaned closer, over the bar.

  ‘Been no mahn comin’ heah,’ he repeated, jerking his head significantly toward the east, but he meant America. ‘No mahn gettin’ t’rough. Boats, aeroplane. No mahn getting t’rough six, seven
week anyway.’

  ‘Huh.’ The pilot picked up his glass. It read ‘British West Indian Airways.’

  ‘Me nevah seen so dry a spell as this.’

  Gershwin looked with calm eyes at his customer. He wanted something from him, either a question or an answer. The pilot looked through the vodka, at one of the kerosene lamps. The flame burned without movement, orange and black as Hallowe’en. Whatever Gershwin wanted, it would come clear with time.

  You let da man steal yer beat? Dr Funkenship sang.

  ‘Babeelon Emp-aye-yah,’ a voice cried behind the pilot. A wiry man with sanpaku eyes jerked around himself in one of the booths. He wore a blue woolen cape. An Israeli knock-off of a Russian assault rifle hung from one shoulder. His hair was so matted and dirty it looked like a bad wig. A joint, thick as a cigar, drooped from one corner of his mouth. ‘Fock wit righteous chalice of Jah Rastafar-aye.’ He unslung his Galil, cocked it, and pointed it toward the south, still jerking, bouncing on his bench, pumping his feet to the beat of a tune only he could hear.

  I-’n-I no listen, Babylon beat:

  I-’n-I tee-ake out, Babylon heat

  he sang. His features moved to the rhythm but his pupils were still. He cocked the gun again, and a shell bounced out the breach and fell without noise on the sand floor.

  The young islander picked up his broom and held it like a gun to the wiry man’s head.

  ‘Leave it, Eltonjohn,’ Gershwin yelled at the boy. ‘Get out of heah, Presley,’ he shouted at the wiry man. ‘No fock wit weapon my plee-ace.’

  Black Tuna dead now, Babylon beat.

  Boyd Brothers gone now, Babylon heat.

  ‘Out, Presley.’

  The wiry man looked menacingly at Eltonjohn’s broom. He got up, slung the gun back on his shoulder. He jerked over to the wing emergency exit, turned into a dark outline, and vanished. Ganja smoke curled and faded in the rectangle of light.

  ‘Babylon heat.’ Gershwin grimaced sarcastically. ‘Him know what he talkin’ about, for sure. Presley take BON money, half de time.’

  The assistant put the broom down. He picked up Presley’s bottle of Red Stripe, threw it at the garbage barrel, and missed. Glass shattered.

  ‘F-f-fock,’ the assistant said.

  ‘Eltonjohn,’ Gershwin said, with more resignation than reproval. ‘My wife cousin,’ he added, by way of explanation, or excuse.

  The pilot nodded. He remembered how this island worked – the tangled knots of kinship, the way they named their babies for music stars, as if the buzz of high living that came over the transistor could be made truth by using names associated with it.

  Outside the wind mumbled and the sea whispered back. Palmetto bugs made dry scraping noises as they copulated in the eelgrass. Gawpies uttered their strange choking call. The Dr Funkenship tape was cut off by a timer. Cheap speakers relayed the BBC World Service from a radio in Gershwin’s office.

  ‘The United States Justice Department, working from genetic samples, today verified that the man who came out of a New Jersey marsh last week proclaiming he was an American union leader thought to have died several generations ago is, in fact, Mr Jimmy Hoffa.

  ‘Mr Hoffa, a former Teamsters Union president who disappeared from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Illinois on July thirtieth, 1973 – weeks before his scheduled testimony on charges of abetting corruption within that union – was believed to have been executed by organized crime bosses before he could testify against them. Mr Hoffa said at a press conference yesterday that he had been buried alive in a New Jersey marsh by killers from the Gambino crime family. The former union leader says he believes that he actually died during the ordeal, but was quote resurrected by the intervention of Jesus Christ to show the path of salvation to the people of America end quote. Followers of Mr Hoffa within the popular Johnsonist Evangelical Church, which believes in the necessity of paying bribes to powerful religious groups to ensure salvation, have announced a move to rename that church the “Hoffaist Church of the Resurrection.”’

  Gershwin shook his head as he polished glasses.

  ‘What you t’ink of dat?’ he asked the pilot.

  The pilot shrugged. ‘Can’t say. Never heard of the guy.’

  ‘Never heard of Jimmy Hoffa?’ Gershwin looked at him carefully. ‘Of course not. You weren’t even bohn, then.’

  ‘Whatever,’ the pilot replied, draining his glass. ‘Listen.’ He jerked a thumb toward the wing exit. ‘What was he talkin’ about, Black Tuna, the Boyds?’

  ‘Busted.’ The bartender refilled the pilot’s glass with the smooth measure and ergonomic movement of drink professionals the planet over. His eyes shone with the power of news. ‘Week, ten dee-ays ago, maybe. You should listen to the airwaves, pilot.’

  ‘I listen, Gershwin. I look too. There was the usual Trade traffic, on the Wildnets. Nothing different.’

  ‘Same kinda talk?’

  ‘Well, maybe not exactly.’ Remembering those black spider patterns, the sense of traffic unbalanced. ‘When there’s a bust, though,’ the pilot continued, ‘the traffic usually goes way down.’

  ‘Well, I tell truth.’ Gershwin leaned over the counter. ‘Dey go down same time. Boyds, Black Tuna. Bobby on Crooked Island tell me.’

  ‘I run a couple of cargoes for the Boyds, once.’

  ‘Most people done dat, once.’ Gershwin wiped down his bar counter with a wet rag, shoving aside a dog-eared hard-copy of the Smuggler’s Gazette.

  The pilot leafed through the journal as he sipped his second vodka.

  He liked the Gazette because it was ninety percent classified ads. The editors claimed that a classified ad was the only honest form of journalism because it was the only info that went straight from people to people without a middleman.

  No one knew who the editors of the Gazette, or the Smuggler’s Bible for that matter, really were. The hard-copy version was printed in Nevada. The CD-ROMs were mailed from different places – usually seaports, the pilot had noticed – Rotterdam, Singapore, Corpus Christi.

  The only article in this issue was titled ‘Lead-plating and You: Foolproof Your Cargo Compartment Against Ultrasound.’

  The Gazette’s classifieds sold everything from used freighters to satellite detectors to the services of privacy agents and beeper companies. The different Wildnets, and the pirate online services within those ’nets, competed by offering bonuses like VR sex with extinct mammals or anti-stochastic ’net-cyphers ‘guaranteed to resist any BON code-breaker for three months or your credit back’ – a safe promise, given that if the cypher didn’t work, the customer would probably be dead, or in Oakdale Detention Center.

  But the personals were the best, for the pilot’s money. Nowhere else could you find queries from lesbian skateboarders seeking dildos with a two-hundred-megabyte capacity for contraband memory; or ethnologists asking for data on the Karayar smuggling caste and the hallucinogenic Venya fruit they used for their rites (samples gratefully accepted). A lot of the personals were obvious codes, and often quite funny, in their bizarre juxtaposition of random symbols.

  In this issue was a two-inch ad that read: ‘Spend your summers in Halicarnassus! Mythomania field study project seeks short-order saucier with period Torricelli barometer reading to 163.22. Contact Box L.’

  Gershwin finished wiping the bar and said, ‘You wan’ come fohwahd?’

  The Connie’s cockpit was Gershwin’s office. The instruments were dead eyes set at crash settings – throttles zero, fuel shut off – everything flaked with salt and rust. Wires twisted loose, blue insulation hung from the ceiling. Only the radio – a large Japanese IC-M marine single-sideband set, with 1,136 channels including duplex frequencies – was maintained in serviceable order.

  Gershwin kept the shortwave going twenty-four hours a day. It was his only reliable link to the world outside Sandworm Cay. He spent most nights at the set, Dr Funkenship thumping gently on his boombox, playing the tuning buttons with the sensit
ivity of a koto artist; jacked in via earphones to a universe of electronic waves that, since they were broadcast, needed no direction or azimuth but took him ungrudgingly across dark oceans and continents without his ever leaving the Connie’s cockpit. He listened mostly to the amateur or marine bandwidths smugglers used.

  Although the IC-M or any other modern transceiver, going through Iridium or InMarSat links, could handle datastreams with ease, Gershwin never jacked into the Wildnets or any other form of online network.

  The obsessive nature of his listening schedule made up for this limitation. Gershwin knew more Trade scuttlebutt than anyone the pilot had ever met. The information Gershwin gleaned from the ether allowed him to work as an informational clearinghouse for independent smugglers, the kind who in any case tended toward more traditional methods, like ham radio or fast-boat operations. He often put together jobs and contractors, taking a cut each way.

  ‘Cree-azy amount of scrambled traffic, last few weeks. ’Specially wit’ DeLisis. Dey never use radio, before time. BON channels, ship-shore, aviation, you nee-ame it, dere been voices everywhere.’

  ‘Too much radio,’ the pilot stated in Hitchcockian tones, ‘is dangerous.’

  ‘Not so dangerous as Wildnet, mahn.’

  ‘You can’t use a direction finder, on Wildnet.’

  ‘Othah t’ings.’ Gershwin’s tongue made a noise against his teeth. ‘Othah t’ings.’

  The pilot went back to the bar, fetched the ECM-pak, and opened it on the navigator’s desk. Gershwin shook his head irritably as the pilot punched in commands for broad-spectrum, low-range jamming.

  The shortwave reception broke up in a haze of white noise. Gershwin switched off power. He pointed at the ECM-pak.

  ‘Good t’ing,’ he commented, ‘for wire – but dey findin’ out anyway. Black Tuna, Boyd Brothers, dey use ECM too – Bokon catch dem anyway.’

  ‘Bokon.’ The pilot leaned forward, looking, not at Gershwin, but over the controls at the trade wind clouds, towering like a universe of piled-up peach-colored cotton balls against the setting sun. He could feel his heart thud. It was a never-ending source of surprise to him that it could keep on beating without his doing a damn thing about it. ‘Who is this “Bokon”?’