“Plenty of time,” Ellis replied. “He’s visiting his, ha, proletarian friends. And Julia and Larry are out admiring the night scenery, I guess.”
“What’re you hinting?”
“How about a breath of fresh air?”
When they got to their feet, Matt glanced in their direction. Ellis shook his head a trifle. Matt nodded as inconspicuously and stayed put. Ellis conducted Gayle outdoors, down a path between rosebushes.
Dew glistened heavy upon these. Stars in their hordes seemed to match the absent moon. The world reached silver-gray and black, darkly ashine where the sea lay. Insects stridulated. The air was motionless, gently warm, tinged with growth fragrances.
Ellis pulled on his cigar till its end rivaled the fireflies. “I don’t often wish I were young again,” he said. “But this kind of place—”
“Listen, I don’t feel, you know, sociable,” Gayle warned. “Ha! I hardly expect you would, lady. Nor do I, not that way. No, what I mainly wish is that I didn’t ache all over from what I’ve gone through and didn’t have to dread what that damned Commie’s plotting for tomorrow.”
Gayle nodded. “I thought that was what you were getting at,” she said in a harder tone than hitherto. “Okay, Ellis, let’s not bullshit. Tell it like it is. What do you want of me and what am I offered?”
“You’re really a very practical girl under that hippie act of yours, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to be. Nobody else is about to look out for Gayle Thayer. I thought different …” Her voice dissolved but soon recrystallized. “Seems like I was wrong. Unless something new happens, I’m finished here.”
“Maybe something new could happen.”
“Like what?” Anxious animation broke through. She stopped and swung around to face him. He halted too. They were at the botanical garden, as if having sought the concealment of its overshadowing wall.
“Well, now,” he temporized, “that’s hard to say when we’ve no idea about how matters will develop.”
Gayle stamped her foot. “Look, man, do you want my help or don’t you? It’s not for free. Win, lose, or draw, I demand honest pay.”
“For honest work. Ye-e-es.” He streamed smoke across the gloom. “A retainer. … All right. I’ve got traveler’s checks along, ready to endorse over to you. A flat payment for joining my side. A second payment if I call on you to do something for me and you try your best but I don’t make it. Everything’ll have to played by ear, you realize, and you’ll have to stand ready to jump at my command, or my straw boss’s command, with no questions asked.
“If I win the whole million, that second payment, added to the first, will be enough to give you the full sum you want. If I have to share the prize with other players, the amount to you will be prorated.
“We’ll discuss the exact figures later. Right now, though, are you agreeable in principle?”
She pondered.
“Suppose I do try hard on your account, but you wash out anyway,” she said after a time. “Who’s to decide if I really did try?”
“Matt Flagler. He’s joined me on similar conditions. He’ll be your straw boss that I mentioned.” Dryly: “I’d like you to keep him honest in turn.”
“I won’t … do just anything, Ellis. Got to draw the line somewhere.”
“I can’t force you,” he said almost uninterestedly. “What I can do is refuse to pay you that second part of your wage, and it’ll be a lot bigger than the first.” With a quick sharpness from which she recoiled: “Whether or not you join me, whether or not you stick it out with me, you’ll keep everything you may have seen or heard secret. Starting from this minute. Get me? Blab, and you’re in bad trouble.”
“I …” She made fending motions.
His cigar traced a genial gesture. “Don’t be scared, Gayle,” he said easily. “That wasn’t a threat. Let’s just say that you won’t ever—how do they put it—won’t ever spill your guts to the fuzz. Not even if you don’t quite like what you know.” She gulped and nodded, a motion barely visible. “Anyhow,” he continued, “we hope we won’t have to get too tough, you and Matt and I. We’ll fight as fair as the rest, or fairer. Only if someone turns really mean—well, in that case, it says in Ezekiel, ‘Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity.’ ”
“You got a cigarette?” she asked in a tiny voice.
He took a pack from his jacket and followed it with flame. She appeared to draw strength from the smoke, which presently she mingled with his while she said, firm once more, “Okay, it sounds pretty good, but we’ll have to get some reality on it first. Like, what kind of money are you thinking about for me?”
The tub in Haverner’s private bathroom was an antique in itself, claw-footed, long and narrow as a coffin. He stretched out and felt water rise warm around him.
Awake earlier than usual, he saw the first sunlight in a window above. It brightened the dimness he had let remain here, but not much as yet, except on the swirling surface of the water. There its gleams formed what might have been the changeable sketch of a face, just over his withered loins. Gush from the faucets and splash beneath them might have carried words.
“You do not intend to miss a minute of today’s drama,” Samael said on a note of mockery.
“Of course not,” Haverner replied. “It will be the best so far, won’t it? And a playback hasn’t the same excitement.”
“It will be the last, if Cruz gets his way,” Samael warned.
“I know, I know. But I also know about contingency measures that a certain player has developed. Do you?” Haverner gibed.
“Therefore you will allow Cruz’s game. You will permit events to take their course, whatever that may prove to be?”
“Oh, yes. Don’t you agree?”
“The show must go on.” Samael chuckled.
Haverner laughed aloud. To possess this power over lives and deaths was like being young again.
ORESTES CRUZ
Now why are Matt and Gayle here? They have no reason left to get up for a dawn breakfast. Curiosity, I suppose. It must be intense, considering how they watch me out of the same drawn faces as the rest. (Collusion? No, I think not. Julia, deceived in Byron—it would be interesting to know what happened between them—has deftly cut Larry out of Gayle’s herd. Matt, this past couple of days, has been clumsily trying to be cordial to everybody; yes, also to nigger me. That may be camouflage for a partnership with one of them. … No matter. Today this grisly thing will end.)
“We are going down to the beach, please,” I command, and give out a big teeth-baring smile before I turn my back and lead the way.
How odd that I don’t hate them all. Only Haverner the shark, Nordberg the hagfish, Flagler the poisonous drifting Portuguese man-of-war. The rest are likeable enough and, in their different ways, pathetic. They have little or nothing to do—directly—with cold gringo calculators in the offices, ruttish gringo sailors on the streets and in the brothels of Ciudad Vizcaya, or with that white rapist my grandfather.
(Did he exist? The mirror tells me of many a thrust into terrified female flesh whose skin did not happen to be white. But that anguish could be further in the past. I really know only that my father was a black man. Doubtless he stemmed from one of the Caribbean Islands, since there are no other stemmings of black men in Santa Ana: son or grandson of one of the dark multitude who came to help put asunder what God had joined together by the Isthmus of Panama, and afterward, rather than return to the starveling archipelago, trickled north and south into neighbor republics. One evening after work in the canefields he met an Indian girl by the side of the road, and he stayed a few days or weeks. … So she told me, I think. It’s barely at the edge of memory. I scarcely know about her either, having been quite small when she invested her capital in a bolt of bright cloth and a new axhead and moved on in the general direction of her native village without me, since blacks were not wanted there. … I feel certain there have been white rapists on both sides of my “family.”)
<
br /> I step off the veranda and am careless. The sun, low above a molten sea, catches me in the eyes. Good morning, sun. Your image chases across dew-steaming grass, listless leaves and blossoms. Already we breathe in warmth. Before long it will be heat. Not a cloud, says my clearing vision, and my feet are jubilant on the downward path.
How does the Latin go? Sol Invictus!
The beach is wide, smooth, raked. But nothing can tame the fieriness of those sands. Capes on either side, pier-supported steel net stretched across its mouth, mark off Haverner’s part of the lagoon. In this slant sunlight it’s like sapphire, hardly a ripple across it. But beyond, surf tumbles and booms, exploding on rocks that will tear the bottom out of any boat whose pilot forgets them. Nor has Haverner really made these inner waters his. Do what he will, he can’t rub out the ages before man that lie beneath, that gave slow birth to the land and in their own good time will claim it back.
At the end of the path, on the shore edge of the beach, is a kind of summerhouse: straw-matted concrete floor, shading wooden roof and latticework walls, separate dressing cubicles for the oh-so-nice white rapist and his white woman whom only white hands may touch. Above it are sheer bluffs, red granite a-sparkle with mica flecks, crowned by saw grass, palmetto, bamboo thickets, the Island wilderness that presses in on your estate, Sunderland Haverner, the same as the forces of history do.
“Well?” It’s Iron Man Ellis whose question sounds shrill. “What’re we going to do?” Your turn next, isn’t it, Nordberg? You have everything computed and scheduled, like a bombing raid on a village, no? Too bad that villages fight back.
They cluster around. Their dark glasses remind me of their skulls. Anselmo keeps aside by the television camera, showing neither interest nor boredom. His right hand rests casually on his revolver, his left holds a cigarette. He too is wearing loose, full white garments, canvas shoes, broad hat, Polaroids. A shame, those Polaroids. I’d like to watch his eyes. They are so alive in that terra cotta face.
No matter. Triumph makes my throat feel swollen. I can’t make my announcement as lightly as I meant to. But I try.
“I promised you a quiet game, Mrs. Petrie and gentlemen. You shall have one. No exertion, no deprivation of any kind. You may move about freely, talk, sleep, send for food and drink, whatever you wish.” I had wanted to pause and enjoy their waiting; but when I see how Julia’s teeth catch her lip and her fingers try to break each other, I must hurry on. “We merely stay here on the beach in full sunlight. Nude.”
Silence roars over us like the surf out yonder.
Gayle makes the first shriek. Silly little chicken, she’s already failed. Larry clenches his fists. Byron crows what may be a laugh. Ellis shouts above Matt’s obscenity, “No! I protest!” Julia freezes where she stands.
“What is impossible about removing your clothes?” I ask chalky Nordberg in a rush of joy. Fish belly. Fool. White lord of the earth. Die.
“The … you … you’re a breed; you got the skin to last us out—” He whirls on Anselmo. After a second, Larry joins him, and Byron. Matt officiously shoves his voice in among theirs.
“I am sorry,” Anselmo tells them. “The challenge ees fair.”
“Call the old man,” Larry says.
“Yes, do,” Byron adds. “If he didn’t let me take people into water that not everybody could swim—well, we’re not equipped for the tropics the way Orestes is.”
“I am sorry,” Anselmo repeats. “I do not deesturb Meester ’Averner for notheeng. Sr. Cruz ’as asked ’eem and ’e say okay.”
That was a short interview, three days ago, but I came from it trembling. Why did he find my proposal such cause for amusement, when it’s sure to end his game? He is a Hitler, no, stranger even than that, and he frightens me more than the system that brought him to being.
Matt fumes. Anselmo drops hand back to gun. “You are not een play, Meester Flagler,” he says. “Be quiet, please, or I send you away.”
Again they fall silent. I remind them that they can resign.
Julia comes near. “Oh, but my little girl …” she cries.
Her sentiment is genuine, but sentimentalism doesn’t become her. I stiffen myself to answer. “I have seen too many little girls made slaves of, or sick, or dead and rotting, Julia. I fight for all of them.”
And it’s true, it’s true. I saw them tend mosquito-tortured baby brothers when their own legs, encrusted with sores, had scarcely begun to walk. I saw them, not much older, join their mothers to toil in the canefields, beneath that unmerciful sun which I have today turned on the gringo. I saw their bellies puffed up by hunger or shriveled by dysentery; I heard them cough tubercular blood. When I’d come to Ciudad Vizcaya, it was the little girls who first made me know that life in the stews was not all fun, the little girls, their maidenheads not yet fledged, brought crying in; yes, and now and then their little brothers.
“The game begins,” I say, cast off my hat and start to unbutton my shirt.
Julia stares at me an instant before she snarls and follows my lead.
Each of them does. I am surprised. “Be warned,” I say. “Heat stroke can be fatal. Or … We shall be here until nightfall if necessary. Tomorrow you may have no skin left.”
“Maybe you’ll drop dead, Orestes,” Byron retorts with an ugly grin.
“Or we can try to talk you out of this insanity,” Ellis says.
“Spare your breath,” I can’t help myself. “Be careful of your eyes. No sunglasses either. Retinal damage is possible from reflections off sand and water. Blindness? I do not know.”
“You’ll bum us alive, then?” Larry seems shocked.
“No.” I reply. “You will do that to yourselves, if you stay. It is the napalm that gives no option.”
“Or the slave labor camps in your workers’ paradises,” Julia snaps. But at once she turns to Larry, for consolation, I suppose.
Anselmo collects their garments and lays them neatly in the summerhouse. They may watch that cave of shade as long as they choose. (Out here, shadows are blue.) “If you want anything,” I say, “tell him and he will call the house for it to be fetched. I forbid only lotions or burying yourselves to the neck, or whatever else may reduce your exposure.”
The five of us look upon each other’s nakedness. Byron is the most sightly of the men, trim and tanned. (I find my own color more pleasing, alive, human, but my knobbly frame is nothing to boast of.) He should last longest of them. Our gazes clash and he grins again, on the right side of his mouth. Ellis is hideous, though spindle shanks and bulging paunch may be age more than neglect. He seems to take regular exercise, but he’s worn himself out in the course of wearing out earth and man. Fungus white, he’ll soon redden and blister. Good! Larry is burly, shaggy, heavily hung; he has large muscles but he’s let a good deal of fat grow over them, and his torso and legs are pale.
Julia … Beneath that Scythian head is a Grecian body, tall, supple, faintly sun-colored except where two thin strips of ivory outline neat small-areolaed nipples and the black silkiness further down. I feel a stir of desire; it’s been long since my last woman. To keep them from seeing that I too am flesh, I haul out memories to put between me and her.
My references are confused. What Enrico Brunner said was, “In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek,” and he explained, “neither black nor red,”
“Scythian nor Barbarian,” and explained, “latino nor gringo.” I was pleased to learn this; no doubt it was the first germ of my social consciousness. Of course, by age twelve I’d grown less pleased to learn that—evidently—in Christ Jesus there was also to be neither gaming nor wenching, dancing nor cockfighting. Yet I continued to stay and to listen. It was more than the certainty of bread and watered wine when I could scrounge or steal nothing elsewhere, a floor to sleep on among the leather and kerosene smells of the cobbler’s shop….
… After my Jamaican foster mother married that Bay Black who said, “Me no gweyn wuk give nyam Panya b’y,” I’m not going to
work to feed a Spaniard’s boy, and “Mama” shed an easy tear, gave me a baked plantain, a clean shirt and the words, “You mus’ be de God pickney now, me no see you more….”
… No, I had learned my basic survival, but the old man who saw me through to that stage had much else to teach me, and the main thing that he taught me was to want to learn. He did it with hugs and bribes; he did it with scoldings and canings and lockings out, but he did it. So I let him teach me to read, write and cipher; I let him straighten out and build on that warped foundation of English I had from my foster mother and her kind; I devoured his books and sat cross-legged at his single foot and his peg leg to hear, as other children heard tales of heroes and demons and ghosts, his ramblings on about Petion and Boyer and Garibaldi and Juarez and Henry George and Aesop and Madero and Haya de la Torres …
Tío Rico, Tío Rico, I never ran away from you. Never. I only wanted a change, and to try my luck in the city. Listen, I was just fifteen years old by then, and you had taught me that a whole world reached beyond our dust and canefields. I knew I would be back inside a year to bring you a fortune I had won and my love. It’s only, Tío Rico, that somehow I never did win the fortune, and other things came to me, and I never quite found time to return even for a visit, and finally our infrequent letters stopped. Yours first. Did you die, Tío Rico? Did a stroke crash through your brain while you sat alone in your shop at night? I should have written to the priest and asked, but he’s barely literate himself and anyhow I was so involved in the Party….
Gayle is speaking to Larry. “I’d help you if’ I could, honest, but I’ve got to get out of this sun. There in the summerhouse. I’ll wait for you. Or can I bring you something?”
“No,” he says. His attention is on Julia, and he begins to show what I was about to show. Desperation breeds hankerings. “Or me,” Matt puts in unexpectedly. “What can I do?”
“You can stop embarrassing us,” Ellis clips. “Both of you. Please go back inland and wait.” With curious emphasis: “Do what seems best. Only not here.”
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