by Robert Stone
“How long you been divin’?” Sandy asked him.
“I’ve been certified for two years. I don’t do it much anymore.”
Sandy looked out to sea. “Lost a mon on dat drop other year. I follow him dorn near two hundred meters but when I turn off de mon still goin’ down.”
“Suicide,” Holliwell said.
“Das right. Mon take de sleepin’ pills and go down.”
“It must have happened more than once.”
Sandy nodded. “I don’ lose nobody,” he said. “Got to be dere own chosen will.”
Holliwell felt himself shudder. “Did you think that’s what I was doing?”
“Oh, no,” the dive master said quickly. He touched Holliwell on the shoulder in the Caribbean way but avoided his eye.
“I won’t make the dive this afternoon,” Holliwell told him. “Maybe you could leave me off around French Harbor. I’d like to snorkel down there.”
Sandy guessed that it would be all right. French Harbor was on the way. He told Holliwell that if he requested it, the Paradise kitchen might pack a lunch for him. They walked together toward the hotel buildings.
“There was something down that drop this morning,” Holliwell said. “A big shark, maybe.”
Sandy stopped walking and looked at Holliwell, holding his hand on his brow to shield his eyes from the sun.
“You see any shark?”
“No.”
“Then don’ be sayin’ shark if you don’ see one.”
“Something was happening down there.”
“I tell you don’ go down that far, Mistuh Holliwell. I give you de dive plan. When you down so far, das not a good place.”
“Why’s that?”
Sandy walked on; Holliwell followed him.
“Dat drop, people see tings, den dey don’ know what dey seen. Dey be frightened after.”
“Was it always like that?”
“Jus’ dangerous divin’, das all. Surface current and de drop is cunnin’. You get deeper den you know.”
“So pretty, though.”
“Jus’ as pretty on de top,” Sandy said. “Always prettier in de light.”
“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, of course.”
Justin was trying to reread To the Finland Station in the afternoon shadows of the veranda. She had almost dozed off when she saw the man snorkeling along the southern end of Playa Tate. For days now, her dispensary had been ready to receive wounded insurrectionists; each night she had spent awake and prowling in the light of her hurricane lamp among the stacks of stretchers, the basins and the small array of surgical instruments—listening to the government radio until it went off the air and then to U.S. Armed Forces radio or the BBC foreign service. Sometimes she would turn the volume down and tune in Radio Havana. Nights were long.
It was high tide and the swimming man crossed over the inner reef and headed for the roadside beach in front of the mission steps. Only a few hundred yards past the steps, a sizable stream ran down from the foothills of the Sierra, carrying with it all the refuse and infections of the hillside barrios. Its small estuary was a dirty place to swim. The shrimp that lived there grew to great size and Justin had often seen boats from the hotels up and down the coast come at night to gather them. Moreover, she knew that in the water offshore there was a deep channel where hammerhead sharks came in to feed upon the shrimp.
The man would be a tourist from one of the hotels. There would be many more before long as the fruit companies liquidated their unprofitable plantations and converted to the resort business.
The swimmer’s absurd sportive presence irritated Justin considerably. If he persisted in staying near the channel, she would have to go down and wave him out of danger and she was not in the mood for personal engagement. To her further annoyance, the man came out of the water by the mission pier, took his fins off and sat down on it. Two women carrying laundry on their heads passed the pier and Justin felt as though she could see the false smile he gave them, hear his fatuous “Buenos días.”
While Justin was watching the tourist on the dock, Father Egan came out on the veranda.
“There’s someone on the dock,” he said to her.
“A tourist. Snorkeling through.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“He wants to sun himself on the glistening sands of Tecan. That’s what he paid for.”
“But why on our dock?”
“Because he owns the place. Chrissakes, Charlie, go ask him.”
She watched Egan make his way down the steps, slack-jawed, shuffle-gaited. His deterioration was proceeding at an alarming rate; he had aged dreadfully in the past months, sometimes he seemed to her almost senile.
Egan was talking to the tourist now; the tourist had accepted a cigarette and a light from him. An odd pair they made—the tourist tanned and muscular, towering over the priest’s gray, lumpish figure. The two of them turned toward the mission building; Egan was pointing into the forest behind it. She stood up impatiently and went inside to make herself some coffee.
It had all been smoke before, Godoy had said. Perhaps it was still.
One time, she thought, they will require something from me other than my well-exercised reverent attention and prayerful expectation. People—men, when you came down to it—were always dreaming up glorious phantasmas for her to wait joyously upon. Justice. The life to come. The Revolution. There are limits, she thought. Justin Martyr.
When she went out with the coffee, Egan and the snorkeler were sitting on the pier in conversation.
Well, she thought, why not, we’re all tourists now. For weeks no one had come. Campos had some method of keeping them away.
After a few minutes, Father Egan came huffing up the steps.
“Know who he is, that fellow? He’s an anthropologist. He had business in the city and now he’s come to see our ruins.”
“Yours and mine?”
“Haw,” Egan said. “Clever kid.”
But Justin was growing anxious about the swimmer.
“And did you volunteer to take him back and show him?”
“Yes, I did. And I asked him to dinner on Friday.”
Justin looked at him in dismay.
“Go down and un-ask him,” she said in a steely voice. “We can’t have him here.”
“We certainly can.”
“We can not!” Justin almost shouted.
“May one ask why?”
She looked away, out to sea.
“Good heavens, I suppose we can go to town and have dinner. I don’t understand what the objection is. Do you think I’m so unpresentable?”
“It’s not that,” Justin said. Better to let it go, she thought. The chances were that the man would not come back. Or that Egan would forget. She watched the strange swimmer now, saw him sit waist deep in the water putting on his fins. He began to crawl toward deeper water. He was not far from the river channel now. If he continued as he went, the bottom would slope sharply and without warning he would be over it. It was no place for a tourist to be—the sharks, and the bottom covered with sea urchins. A few feet short of the surge channel, she saw him crumple up and stop swimming. He was splashing, clutching his knee. Justin stood up. The tourist had crawled into the shallows and was lying in the slight surf, both hands folded over his wound.
Damn you, she thought, you asshole tourist.
“He’s hurt himself,” Father Egan said helplessly.
“He stepped on a goddamn sea urchin is what he did. Either that or something took a piece of him.” She went into the dispensary wing, snatching up a bucket on her way through the kitchen. In the bucket she poured a pint of ammonia and then diluted it with well water from the tap. She hauled the solution down the veranda steps and across the road to the water’s edge. The swimmer was sitting upright now, with his back to the ocean. When he saw her, he was squinting in pain, his teeth clenched, pale under his tan.
“Watch where you’re sitting, sir. There are sea urchins all
around you.”
The man turned on his side and eased toward her, feeling the way before him with his swim fin. She put out a hand and he took it in his, leaning his weight on her, dragging the injured leg. His mask was up on his forehead.
Justin guided him out of the water and had a look at his leg. Sure enough, his left knee was swollen and purple with small spine ends visible through the skin. Justin poured some of the ammonia solution over his knee and rubbed it in with a cotton swab.
“You can also piss on it,” Justin explained.
“It’s not so easy to piss on your knee sitting down,” the man said.
He was looking grateful and embarrassed. He was a tall well-built man; his face, in Justin’s eyes, bespoke softness and self-indulgence. But perhaps it was only the pain and his being a tourist.
“I’m really sorry to be trouble. Are you from the mission here?”
“Yep.” She took a hemostat from a kit and lifted a spine end off the mottled flesh of his knee. “Hey,” she said, “I got the end out.”
“I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
“Oh, stop it,” Justin said. She went after the second spine and pulled it out. “That’s gonna be sore for a while but the real bad pain will stop very soon. It’s nothing serious.”
“I guess I was lucky.”
“I guess you were. When you doubled up I thought a shark had hit you.”
“A shark? Right here?”
“There are sharks in the channel here. And a carpet of sea urchins. And the water’s polluted. It’s like a harbor.”
“I’d better restrict my snorkeling to Playa Tate then.”
“You should,” she said. “This is a lousy place for it.”
And what now? He should be given an aspirin, put in the shade. He did not appear to be in shock. Nursey business for the tourists.
She helped him across the dirt road, sat him under a ceiba tree and went back up to her dispensary for aspirin.
“Poor fellow,” Egan said as she passed through the kitchen to replace her bucket. “A nice chap.”
“Yep,” she said.
As she went down to him, two young loafers from town walked by along the road and paused briefly to mock him. He was indeed mockable, she thought, with his swim fins in his lap and the mask and snorkel still fitting on the front of his skull and his Day-Glo kneecaps. An absurd and unnecessary person.
“Have an aspirin,” she said. “Have two. Forgot the water.”
He took the pills and swallowed them. Some color was coming back to his face. In the scattered afternoon sunlight that shone through the great ceiba’s branches, she noticed that there were two identical and very nearly invisible scars on his right earlobe and that a small piece of the lobe itself was missing.
“My name is Frank Holliwell,” the man said. “I was just talking with your Father Egan.”
“Is that right?” When the man’s ear was out of the sunlight the small scar disappeared. “How will you get back now?”
“The boat will pick me up.” He looked at the angle of the sun through the ceiba leaves. “They should be by anytime.”
“You O.K. now?”
“I feel a lot better.”
“Good. Take care now.”
“I understand I’m coming to dinner on Friday.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Justin said, blushing. “I think Father Egan means to go into town with you. If he’s well enough.”
“I see.”
“We’re in a state of disarray. We’re closing down soon.” There was something in the man’s affectless stare that made her uneasy. She glanced quickly at the scar, visible again in the sunlight. “They’ll have to get along without us.”
“You’re a nun?”
“That’s right,” she said.
He asked her what order she was and she told him. He went on nodding as though the Devotionists were familiar to him. Catholic.
“They used to rap you on the knuckles, right?” she asked lightly.
“Not on my knuckles. I had Jesuits for that.”
“Oh, I see. Well, that’s … classy.”
“Are you coming to dinner with us too?” he asked. She was startled by the manner in which he put it. It was as though he was flirting with her. What’s the world coming to? she thought. And how would I know?
It sometimes happened to Justin that she would relax a bit and speak earnestly and directly to a man and the man would think she was becoming flirtatious. It was annoying. It had something to do with the way she looked.
“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a whole dispensary to pack.”
“What’s it like being a nun these days?”
“Oh,” she said, “well, there are all kinds of nuns.”
He is, she thought, he’s coming on. He probably can’t help himself. That’s what that softness in his face is all about.
“What’s it like for you?”
“It’s medieval,” she said. “And otherworldly.”
She was pleased when he laughed, in spite of herself. “What’s that business on your ear, Mr. Holliwell?” Put him on the defensive.
The question seemed to surprise and embarrass him.
“It’s a tribal scar. I got it in Southeast Asia.”
“Really? Where?”
“Indonesia,” he said quickly. “Celebes. I’m an anthropologist.”
“And you were being one of the gang.”
“Yes,” he said, “one of the bunch. I asked for their smallest size.”
The buzz-saw whine of a large outboard sounded on the ocean; they both turned to see the Paradise dive boat on its way to Playa Tate.
“Well,” she said, “take care of your foot. Be thankful you knelt down on a baby one or we might have had to open up your leg to get the spines.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“And try to keep it clean.”
“What?”
She laughed at him. “Your knee.”
“Oh … yes. Look, maybe I’ll see you again. At the ruins or somewhere. I’d like very much to talk.”
“I’ll be pretty busy.”
“Packing and telling your beads.”
She smiled at him and turned away. He was impertinent and patronizing and for all she knew, depraved. He was the kind of man she thought of as “cheesy.” But he was sort of nice. And not just a tourist, she thought; Justin was innocently snobbish in the extreme.
Back on the veranda, she felt a little high. The very recognition of her exhilaration was enough to depress her; she was shortly guilty and ashamed. Air-headedness. Petty foolishness. The thought of waiting through another night was dreadful. But she would have to. She would have to go on believing in them.
She leaned on the rail, gripping it until her knuckles were white.
“Christ, it’s impossible,” she said.
Egan was in the kitchen. Drunk.
“Now, now,” he said. “There’s a good girl.”
Pablo opened the hatch to dazzling sunlight and stepped out on the hot boards of the afterdeck, barefoot and shirtless. The Cloud was tied up by a cement pier in a town of red-tiled roofs. The streets, unlike those of Palmas, were paved, the walls of the harborside buildings were whitewashed. Over the port captain’s shed was a double-masted flagstaff displaying a banner with a white cross on a star-dappled blue field and the horizontal tricolor of Holland. Beyond the town was desert, grown with cactus and thorny acacia. Across a sparkling bay lined with limestone palisades, a low white peak rose like a cone of salt.
The water lines were over; Pablo picked up a hose and laved his head and face with a jet of fresh water. The water was good and cold. Spring water. Wiping it from his eyes, he saw Tino approaching.
“Like to start d’ day wid some beer?” Tino asked pleasantly.
“You kidding me?”
Tino motioned him toward the rail. Stacked up on the dock were a dozen cases of Amstel beer. A yellow-haired Creole driving a forklift was lowering mo
re beside it.
“You go get ’em, sailor,” Tino said, slapping him on the shoulder.
Pablo took his morning Benzedrine; a barbed wave of resentment ran through him. Fucking pull and tote. He climbed over the rail and took a closer look at the town.
At the end of the pier was a market square dominated by a gabled stone building with “Perreira Brothers” lettered over its central doorway. To the right of it, behind a garden wall enclosing royal palms and banana trees, was a government building marked by the same two flags.
Two seagoing tugs were berthed at the adjoining pier, one flying U.S. colors, the other Dutch. Beside the tugs were two small Venezuelan freighters. As far as Pablo could see, there were no other craft in port.
He lifted a crate of Amstel, carried it aboard and set it down beside the forward hold. After a while, he fell into the rhythm of hauling; the speed, the sweating, the sun on his body made him feel powerful. When the beer was aboard, there were cartons of frozen meat for the reefer, then greens and fruit.
Each time Pablo shouldered a box past the shuttered main cabin, he heard the voices of the people conferring inside and although he could not make out what was being said there was something about the very tone in which they spoke that made him think of high fortune and the big-time score. He began to take less pleasure in his donkey work and to feel turned around.
After a little more than a half hour, he decided that he would take a break, let the cartons pile up on the pier for a while and get out of the sun. Tino was down in the engine space, working on the diesel.
In the shade of a hatch cover, Pablo contemplated the scheme of things. He kept thinking of the old man called Naftali who was with them in the cabin now, and who lived in a hotel room amid piles of hundred-dollar bills.
He had made his move, he thought. He had put a thousand miles between himself and the life of petty day-by-day. McPhail and his like, the crummy trailer, the chickenshit, that bitch and her rat-burgers. He was out where it mattered; out here, he thought, you made it big or you went under. He would go under or go back and let them put the irons on him and do the time. But if he made it big, he might go back and no one could touch him. Or he might settle down, on some island, a better island than this one—and be like the men you read about in Soldier of Fortune, men who had lived the life of adventure in hot countries and by their strength and cunning made it big, gotten rich, and who lived exquisitely in plantation houses high above the harbor with beautiful native wives.
