by Robert Stone
Concentrating on them, he tried to unravel the rhythms and count the number of drums. There were too many—so many, he thought, that it was impossible to imagine the drummers at their devotions. The voices in the drums were as good as infinite with their turns and shadows, doubling and tripling and repeating and commenting on their own tattoos. Covering each other, featuring the premonition of a beat, the beat itself, its echo. Each pattern sounded of inevitability, so that what had to come next came, obvious only after the fact, surprising. Then repeated, it surprised again. If you followed a line of the beat you would know what you were about to hear and then hear it and have it repeated for you, each rendering ever so slightly different from the last. The drums made patterns that filled the mind's eye to capacity, crowded out the mind of the listener.
It occurred to him that if he opened himself to the drums he might find himself anywhere at all. He might be emptied of himself, turned into a shifting of the sand at the bottom of the sea outside his window. The drums were in nature, he thought, as surely as a bird call and its answer. They came from a place where the human touched everything else in the world, a secret crossing where they could draw spirits out of the dark.
When he dozed, he thought it must be the malaria pills he had taken, that he was hearing the drums in dreams. But when he stood up and drank from his bottled water or from the bottle of duty-free rum he had put beside the bed, he realized that they would always be there, they were incessant. Events he could not conceive were taking place within them, a different kind of time unraveling. They sounded counterpoint with the sea, who kept her own time.
He was in the grip of some peculiar lust, erect and alone, as though he were waiting in vain for a woman he had lost rather than one found, a woman whose features were melting away into forms he put out of his mind. He leaned into the drums, actually felt like dancing, and did dance, a freak dancing a solitary fever dance, aroused and terrified in his ratty hotel room by the city sea, throwing his arms about. He made himself stop, but it was hard to work free of the drums. In their many voices he heard his name.
Lara. Some of his dreams were of her. Some of Kristin. His skin felt tight with fever. The drums took him to the balcony, which overlooked the Carenage and the sea.
No escape in sleep; he kept going back to look at the ocean, the drums took him. Its surface was blank, there was no moon. But, he thought, there had been one the night before. In some other world. The drums never stopped, nor his wrestling with dreams. The ocean outside his window now had a quality he did not care for. Its darkness only concealed. Trying to pick out the reef line in faint starlight, he wondered where along its edge their dive would be. The place had so much ruin and bad history for an ocean to cover. Hateful angry gods one never suspected might command dimensions out there, gods who owed nothing to him or to reason. He felt more lonely than he had ever felt in his life.
15
THERE WERE NO messages for him at the desk the following day and no one seemed to know of a way he could contact Lara. He spent the morning walking along the Carenage, looking through the markets, declining to buy basketry, dispensing pens to the schoolchildren. Fishing boats with tortuously repaired rigging stood moored bow-landward where the Carenage ended, though it was hard, looking at them, to tell what kind of fish they followed. One had the dried carcass of a sea turtle stretched across its open forward hatch. All of them were brightly painted in the Haitian manner, named in Creole and sanctified with the portraits of saints and the designs that he would come to know as vevers, designs that signified the gods of the Haitian pantheon, whom the Christian saints also represented. The ancestors of the people at that end of the island, he had read, had come or been brought from Haiti after the revolution there.
At the edge of town, he walked unaware into an encampment of soldiers. Their uniforms were of a different shade than those of the soldiers he had seen around the hotel and their helmets had an unfamiliar shape. The men stared at him in hostile silence. Their rifles, stacked in the old infantry manner in the center of their bivouac, looked like relics. Some of them he thought might be M-1's of World War II manufacture. Two of the soldiers came toward him but were called back by a noncom in a language that Michael knew must be English but could not understand. As unconcernedly as possible, he reversed direction.
When the sun became too much for him he went back to the hotel. Still there was nothing from Lara. He put a bathing suit on and paddled among the frangipani blossoms in the pool, then lay down in his room for a while. Late in the afternoon he dressed and went outside. There were several soldiers sitting at the patio tables, officers of the island republic's new army, all in fresh camouflage fatigues and wearing sidearms. Soldiers in the same colors stood guard at the steps that led down to the road and on the rise behind the swimming pool that overlooked the bay.
Van Dreele was at the table closest to the hotel desk. Liz McKie sat with a tall, olive-skinned army officer whose trimmed military mustache and slightly hooded eyes made him at once noticeable and attractive. He looked thoughtful and most observant, and Liz McKie dwelled on his features with admiration.
Michael sat down at Van Dreele's table and ordered a beer.
"Enjoying yourself?" the Dutchman asked him.
Michael shrugged.
"Been to town?"
"I walked to the far edge of town."
"You saw the junta's army."
"Yes," Michael said. "I'm woefully uninformed."
Van Dreele had two newspapers, one Dutch, the other a Miami Herald. He gave Michael the Herald, and Michael tried to focus on it. The State Department said it was determined to support the new government, that the election might have been flawed but the junta had plainly lost, and it hoped the junta's army would stand down without bloodshed.
"So will the junta's army stand down?" he asked Van Dreele.
"Depends what you mean by stand down. They'll all go home when no one gives them dinner. But then we'll all have to get through the night."
From the far table by the pool, McKie called to him.
"Hey, Michael! Let's see your El Heraldo."
Van Dreele relinquished his newspaper with a gesture and Michael brought it over to the table where McKie was sitting with her officer friend.
"Sit down, Michael," she said. She introduced the officer, Colonel Junot, and took the paper.
"Nothing about you, Boonsie," she told her friend.
"Keeping a low profile," he told Michael with a wink. "I am the stealth candidate, slowly slowly slowly sneaking behind the throne." He made a weasel of his hand and slinked it across the table. He wore a Rolex. "Anyhow," he told McKie, "I'm giving you exclusives. I'm gonna appear dramatically in your eyewitness accounts. Amazing America!"
"Not too dramatically, OK? And," she said, "I think we should call my accounts firsthand instead of eyewitness. Eyewitness suggests you've seen something awful. Right, Mike?"
Michael agreed.
"How was the beach?" she asked.
"What?"
"The beach. La playa. La plage. That's what you came for, right? The beach?"
"Yes," he said. "But I went for a walk."
"Really, where?" she asked.
"To the edge of town."
"See any American troops?"
"American troops? No."
McKie and Colonel Junot exchanged a look. Then Junot shrugged. "Supposed to be a medical unit at Dajubon. And some Special Ops. They're on our side."
"Yeah," McKie said, "you sure of that, Boonsie?"
"Sure and certain. America forever. You're looking at a veteran of Operation Urgent Fury." He looked at Michael, challenging him. "Never heard of it?"
Michael had heard of it. "The Grenada invasion."
"As a young shavetail, as they say at Fort Benning. Subaltern. I think we came in handy."
"The operation where the navy bombed the madhouse," McKie reminded them. "Friendly fire."
No one said anything for a moment.
"Oh,"
she said, "listen. Drums. And it's broad daylight."
"Retirer," the colonel told her. "For John-Paul Purcell. Retirer les morts d'en bas de l'eau."
McKie spoke as though she were correcting him. "Wete mo danba dlo."
"Very good," the colonel said. "You're becoming very accomplished, Liz."
Michael, too, listened to the drums.
"So how many you think there are, Mike?" Liz McKie asked him.
"I don't know," he said.
"Four," she told him. She looked impudently at Junot, displaying her knowledge.
"Only four?" Michael asked.
She laid her right hand on the rusting metal tabletop and peeled the drums from her long graceful fingers.
"Four drums," she explained, "for the rites of rada. What you might call the brass is a piece of iron, an ogan." She winked at him. "Listen, Michael!" Her open, long-toothed face looked perfectly happy. "The petite. The seconde. And maman, the big one. Can you hear them?"
"Yes."
"Aren't they good?"
"Yes," he said, "they're good."
"Bigger than us," the colonel said. "Bigger than all of us."
Michael let them buy him drinks until he was dazed again. The prospect of his own room, its drum-haunted silence and darkness and unreassuring light, frightened him. The whole world of otherness was waiting for him there, called up out of the ocean by drums. It was no place for him.
When he went in and turned on the bed lamp, Lara was waiting there for him.
"Michael." She looked pale and tired. "Don't be frightened. Not of me."
His instinct was to hold her and in the next moment he went against her, gathered her up out of the drums. She had been made to be like him and familiar, her swellings and smells—the French soap, her breath, pleasant as a troubadour might claim some little virgin's might be. But she was breathless; she raised her throat from his hands to speak. He was smothering her.
"Oh God, Michael," she said. "You're..."She shook her head and her loose hair, laughed and touched his erection. "You're all engage," she said, in neither English nor French.
"Engage. Engaged."
"Are we engaged, then?"
"Sure," he said, "we're a couple of fiancées."
She sat him down on the bed and leaned into his shoulder. He could not see her face.
"What I have to say is not so good, eh?"
He stroked her glistening hair. He almost laughed at the sad fatefulness with which she spoke. What she had said, he had expected. Maybe telegraphed in the drums, why not?
"I was followed here. Someone is waiting for me to come out. If I don't come out they'll come for me."
For one brief moment he felt humiliated, a mark, the soft center of a gypsy switch, the Murphy game.
"Someone is waiting for you?" he asked lightly. "I thought you owned the hotel. I thought you were with me."
He pushed her back so that they could lie down together. He felt her relax beside him.
"I wish it were a joke," she said. "I lost something I was responsible for. A man's been killed."
He thought about this and said, "You told me no drugs."
"That's what they told me," she said. "Honestly."
"Oh shit," he said.
"They are South Americans," she said. "John-Paul and Roger worked with them and maybe there were drugs."
He laughed unhappily. She sat up.
"Will you not treat me like a criminal? As though I schemed?"
"I think you schemed. I have to think that, understand? Otherwise I'll feel like a total idiot."
"Oh, my dear Michael," she said. "You have to believe me." She was pressed against him. "My scheme was not to hurt anyone, I swear. A worst case happened."
"I keep looking at that door," Michael said. "I keep thinking of your escort."
"They won't come yet," she said.
"What do I have to do, Lara?"
"You have to remember that I really love you. I know what love is, I'm not some crazy person. Maybe someday I'll stop but now I do."
"That's easy," Michael said. "What else?"
"You have to dive a wreck. You have to get three cases out of the aft compartment of a Cessna 185."
He sat silently until he could manage a wan uncalled-for joke. "Cocaine? Can I have some?"
She looked really terrified then.
"To the best of my knowledge," she said, "it is not drugs. I packed some emeralds and some old drawings that may be valuable. It's true the emeralds are being smuggled. I don't care, do you?"
"I'm not sure I have the skills, Lara."
"You dive wrecks in Lake Superior every summer. You can do it."
"Is the pilot in the plane?"
She shrugged. A shrug of sympathy that seemed genuine.
"What if I fuck it up?"
"It's not drugs, remember."
"What if I fuck it up?"
"They'll blame me. And you'll be in danger. You might have to run to the Americans. What can you tell them?"
"I'm not good at running. I thought you were an American citizen."
"I am. But they won't ... you know. I'm involved through my family. They won't let me go. Unless I get them the cargo back."
Then she told him more than he wanted to hear. She and Roger had panicked because of the coup. They thought the lodge would be raided; they sent the plane off without checking with them. The South Americans. She was preoccupied with some ceremony involving her brother's soul.
"I don't think we have a chance," Michael said. "I don't know much about this, but that's my feeling. Mind if I ask you an impolite question?"
She blew him an imaginary bubble of impatience, in the French manner.
"You're a diver," he said. "You're very able. Why don't you dive it?"
"I've never done a night dive."
"Can that be true?"
"Never. Or a wreck. I go for the reefs, Michael. For the trip down the wall. God, don't you think I would if I could?"
This is where I have placed myself, he thought. If he did not panic, imagine tortures, if he accepted the consequences of his actions, if he was strong, he might imagine himself a lucky man. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen was cowering on his bed, demanding heroic measures. Life had gone that way. He thought of the man with the wheelbarrow. He listened to the drums.
"If we fail," she said, "we can die together. I can see to that." She might have been reading his thoughts. Yours in the ranks of death. "But I think it's an easy dive."
Undressing her, taking up her tense body, he felt like killing her then and there. Returning the perfect form to the entropy that composed it, sending it back through the drums.
She said "I love you," the old song, but it made him feel: Here is a companion in danger. Us against the wall. Here is a friend in an adventure. This, he thought, and clung to the thought, is where the drums had taken him, to a world other than middle-aged marriage and professorship and the tiny world of Fort Salines. He had never been a coward. Without physical courage, he had once told a couple of his colleagues, there is no moral courage. A couple of his colleagues who didn't want to hear it.
Unsheathing her, taking her up like a drink. He turned her over on her belly and said, "Let's see."
She said, "What?"
He had meant, Let's see in all the spaces of these bodies together on the edge, by the floating yellow cans that marked oblivion, headed down the wall, let's see if we can find what the other side of the drums is made of. Let's see if there are dark poison flowers in your cunt, if my finger on that little curiosity where love has pitched his mansion tonight produces visions to terrify.
"Let's see," he said.
When he made her come he could hear the language of everything created beyond his understanding.
Afterward he swigged the rum and offered her some. She was weeping, refusing to let his prick go down, a little comic pursuit like a kid worrying a balloon.
"Tell again," he said, "about the bottom of the sea." He asked beca
use he had a notion that it was in some fashion where he was headed.
"Guinee," she said. "Because the slaves believed that by jumping overboard they returned to Africa. So it's where the soul goes for a while. Guinee, it's very beautiful there."
"So maybe we'll go there."
"We'll go there. John-Paul is there. My soul is there sometimes." Then she said, "It's not always beautiful. They're lonely there."
Someone knocked on the door. The knock was so soft as to seem childlike. They were scarcely sure they had heard it, yet it was there. Her eyes opened wide with fear, a look into the heart of the drums.
"They want me."
"Lara."
She nestled against him and said something he could not hear.
"Don't lie to me," he said. "I'm going to give you everything."
"No, never. On my soul." She smiled a little and moved away. "When I have one."
16
THE HOTEL'S dive shop was a few kilometers past town, along the beach. Soldiers were smoking in the palm grove behind it. Michael and Roger Hyde went in quietly and turned on the light, waiting to see if anyone noticed them, but no one did. Several minutes later an islander who worked at the shop appeared in the company of two tiny children, who commenced an evening ramble of the premises. In all but one regard they played like children anywhere. Stalking each other above the bins and storage racks, they whispered in patois.
The shop was not large. It was plainly sinking into a state of abandonment that would render its equipment useless before too long. It had a single high-pressure, lowvolume compressor with an electric motor on its own generator. Parts were in need of lubrication. While Roger watched, Michael and the bare-chested Trinitejan, whose name was Hippolyte, worked on the gear. They got some linseed oil and rubber washers, checked the valves and rinsed salt off the masks. The Trinitejan soldiers had gone back to the road.
The tanks and regulators looked serviceable enough and the compressor seemed to draw its source air from the coconut grove outside the shop. Michael had once begun a dive in Baja where the compressor that filled the tanks was located in a service station. The air it supplied was liberally laced with the fumes of economy Pemex leaded, and a few minutes of down time provided an effect similar to the consumption of death cap toadstool. This Trinitejan outfit, by contrast, had been pretty safety-minded. According to Roger, a husband and wife from Martinique had run it. They had stayed on well into the major troubles and were only a few weeks gone.
