Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  "At least," said Iris. "You're not going to have to buy any more water or chase the Guadeloupe barge for a while. Not if this keeps up."

  He said, "I'm trying to decide whether to cross over in this mess and see if the quake did anything to Paperman's Fancy, or just let it go hang."

  Iris laughed. "Paperman's Fancy is good. Let it go hang. The quake did nothing, I assure you. Take me to the movie."

  5

  The narrow, dingy little marquee on upper Prince of Wales Street read Teen-Age Corpse Eaters, but Iris assured Norman that that was the big weekend attraction, the only title the manager ever bothered to put up on the marquee. "The weekend is always a horror thing, or some ancient Western," she said, "or one of those Italian jobs, with thousands of Romans hacking up thousands of Christians, and raping squadrons of naked slave girls. The Kinjans like that. Tonight's an old Cary Grant."

  "How did we rate the passes?" Norman said as they walked into the chilled, grimy green hall full of rows of splintery wooden seats. The little Puerto Rican manager in the lobby had waved them past the ticket taker with a bow and a sad smile.

  "Oh, they know me. In my decline I did a few horror movies. The Daughter of Dracula is still a great favorite in Kinja. They keep reviving it."

  "Really? I missed that."

  "Oh, it's a honey. I'm a playful lovely girl in an old castle in the Dolomites, see?" Iris said. "Just the prettiest, sweetest young thing. Well, in due time I turn into a big bat before your eyes, and I proceed to drink the blood of a horse-what are you giggling at? It's God's truth. That's the big scene. A cheer always goes up here when the horse collapses, all pumped dry."

  "You're making up every word of this," Norman said, laughing hard despite the way the slats of the wooden seat were pinching him.

  "I wish I were. I'd give anything if I could buy up that negative. A stag movie is nothing in comparison. It's a favorite on TV back home, too. My silly face, the way I looked nearly twenty years ago, all fixed up with fangs and bat ears, and dripping horse blood. That's how a new generation of Americans knows me. I may have some trouble making a comeback as Candida."

  The movie began after about a half hour or so of short films extolling beers, deodorants, cigarettes, whiskeys, and hair dyes. The film kept going out of focus at odd times, and turning into a sliding gray smear for a minute or two; the air-conditioning blew on Norm like a strong winter wind; the wooden seat hurt his rear abominably; but even apart from these distractions, he found the film hard to follow. It was a suspense movie, with some humor, a dramatic death, and two or three fairly passionate love scenes. During the death, the Kinjans roared with laughter. They sat respectfully silent through the comedy, and helped out the sound track of the love scenes with whistles, shrieks, hoots, giggles, and the loud sucking noises of a mule's hoofs in thick mud. "How can you stand this?" he murmured to Iris.

  "Stand what? Oh, the audience. I don't even notice it any more."

  In time Norman stopped noticing it too. The picture ended with a chase through Times Square at night-Broadway theatres, restaurants, night clubs, all his old haunts. Coming outside afterward was a shock. The Tain had stopped. Damp, very hot air rolled through the opened steel doors of the chill theatre. The low shops and plaster arcades of Prince of Wales Street, in the dim yellow light and the steamy heat, seemed grotesquely foreign.

  "Iris," he said, "you know something? We're a long way from home."

  "Yes, darling. A long, long way."

  The few whites in the audience-one or two hill-crowd couples, and some bearded vagabonds like Church Wagner in shorts and water-buffalo sandals, with their young slatternly wives or wenches-looked cross and sleepy, but the crowd of young Negroes was full of laughter, gaiety, and loud chaffing. The girls wore demure cotton frocks and their hair was carefully groomed; the boys, in short-sleeved shirts and tapering slacks, seemed bursting with good spirits. Norman could not understand their Calypso chatter at all, though it was presumably English; but he was struck by the good cheer of these Kinjans, nearly all of whom were not brown or yellow, but black, and strikingly handsome.

  He said in the car, "What's the difference between the Kinjans and the mainland Negroes? Why are they so much more attractive?"

  She looked at him with head aslant, eyes half-closed, her hand restlessly fingering her pearl choker. "Oh, you've decided that? Well, they're exactly the same people. Here it's their island, that's all, there's no place they can't get in, and the white man lives in peace on their sufferance. It makes a difference. Back to Paperman's Fancy, dear-my doggie wants his bone. I hope you've enjoyed your outing."

  "It's saved me," Norman said. "The news about Akers was worse than the earthquake. I'm all right now. I'll manage."

  The quake had caused no damage, and the rain had raised the water level in the cistern by three feet, Church reported. Some guests had not even noticed the tremor, and the rest had taken it as a lark. The bar was full of people, so was the dance floor. Passing through the lobby, Paperman slipped behind the tarpaulin for a moment, and contemplated the moonlight glinting on toilet stools, window glass, and the brass knobs of stacked doors. Through the tarpaulin he could hear the carefree thumping of the steel band. He walked out through the enormous moonlit hole in his hotel and went to bed.

  Chapter Seven

  The Quake

  The second earthquake came a week later. It was not much more sevens than the first. It occurred about half-past ten in the morning, when most of the guests were sailing, swimming, or playing on the beach, so no alarm ensued. Norman and Iris were going over accounts in the office, and Norman was quite pleased with his own manful calm during the trembling and the rumbling. The guest who reported the gush of water from the cistern did so casually, about half an hour later. He was a bald, dignified doctor from Indianapolis, in an orange beach robe, and he poked his head into the office just long enough to remark, "Oh, Mr. Paperman, I think you have a broken pipe or something. There's water coming out of your foundation wall pretty fast." Then this messenger of disaster went his way.

  Norman put his head down on his arms on the open ledger, and moaned.

  The news in the ledger was in itself bad enough. On his first week of Caribbean hotel-keeping, Norman Paperman had netted thirty-seven dollars and forty cents. There were reasons for this shocking figure, to be sure. The payroll was large: cook, maids, waitresses, steel band, bartender, gardener: none of them were paid much, but it added up to a lot. There had been the terrible water purchase. Money had to be set aside for the bank; and this he would have to go on doing each week, for some three hundred weeks, to pay off the loan and the notes. The revenue from the new units was supposed to balance off this drain, but they remained unbuilt. The game room full of materials stood open to wind, moon, rain, and sun, undisturbed by human hands. Bids to complete the job had come in. The range of prices was imbecile. The low bid was fifteen hundred; the high one was twenty-one thousand. Collectively, the contractors of Amerigo seemed to have as much reliability as a flock of migrant birds, and little more knowledge of construction.

  But none of this was the true trouble. Even the existing rooms were not all occupied; far from it. People were checking in at a great rate, for the blizzards had started in the north. But the hotel was a coarse sieve that retained only a fraction of the arrivals. The rest leaked away complaining and cursing over one discomfort or another: electric failures, water shortage, unreliable toilets. Ever since the departure of Thor, the days had been a hell of small breakdowns.

  "The cistern has cracked," Paperman said hollowly into his elbow. "On top of everything. I know it. An earthquake cracked it once be/ore."

  "Well, then, if it was cracked, it was patched, wasn't it?" Iris said. "It can be patched again."

  "I know. I'll fight on," said Paperman. "I'll never quit. I LIKE the tropics." He raised his head, wiped his red eyes, blew his red nose, and threw the Kleenex into a wastebasket. "Let's go look at the leak."

  Senator Pullman was on
the grounds, attempting to repair the electrical failure that had darkened one third of the hotel for two days. Some guests good-humoredly took the kerosene lamps in their rooms as romantic touches. Others had checked out in rage over the uselessness of their electric razors and hair dryers. The failure was a stubborn mystery. New fuses put into the circuit gave way with loud reports, big blue sparks, and some smoke and flame. The real calamity was that the pump was on this circuit: no electricity, no water. Attempts to rewire the pump had blown out all the remaining circuits in the hotel for a while, and Norman had ordered the senator to stop trying, until he located the trouble. At heavy expense, Anatone had located and brought over a giant old gasoline generator and hooked it to the pump. It was now chugging in back of the hotel like a trailer truck climbing a mountain, emitting noise and fumes that had caused the departure of several more guests occupying rear rooms; but at least it was feeding electricity to the pump, and the pump was feeding water to the hotel.

  The senator and his young apprentice electrician joined them on the beach to contemplate the long jagged cistern crack. In volume the escaping water was not yet large, but it spurted out under high pressure, in narrow sparkling arches.

  "The question is," said Norman, "what to do?"

  The senator scratched his head. He wore a Palm Beach suit and a narrow neat yellow tie; for, as he had explained to Paperman, he would have to leave the electric repair job at eleven to attend a session of the legislature. Paperman did not understand exactly what the senator contributed to the electrical repair work. Mostly he stood and watched his apprentice crawl into dark cobwebbed crevices to set off terrible sparks. The two usually conversed in island English, and the legislator's ability to switch at will into smooth mainland polysyllables was remarkable.

  "It's a perplexing question," said Pullman. "The Guadeloupe barge came in when?"

  "Yesterday."

  "Then you're full."

  "To the brim. We'd had the rain, so we only needed ninety thousand gallons. At Lorna's suggestion I tipped him a fifty-dollar bill."

  The senator nodded. "Very thoughtful. Very customary." He turned to his apprentice and said something like, "Wha hoo hee baba de whass kum hoo ba sistom dis time ba whoa?"

  To which the apprentice replied, with twinkling eyes and a jolly laugh, "Yes, I tink so. De ting wha bee ha du kistuss mak la fa berry rag de sistom whis poss. Moss du far kum."

  "That's what I thought," said the senator. "Mr. Paperman, you have to let all the water out of the cistern immediately."

  "What? Why, for God's sake?"

  "Your wall here is seriously weakened. Mass masonry is very subject to shearing stresses. All that water is a tremenjus weight, and the hazard is that it will suddenly bust out the whole wall. If that happens, most of your hotel can just collapse down into the cistern and you actually will own nothing but a big ruin. You have to get the water out and repair the cistern right away."

  Utterly staggered, Norman said, "But plastering it from the outside won't work?"

  "Sada bee plossa wha kum loff rappa soggle ba soff de ting you tink?" said the senator, approximately, to his apprentice.

  "No, de ting barra cull to de ba whada rupp ha hee sang dabee no good."

  "No it will leak all around. You have to repair it from the inside out," the senator said to Paperman. He pointed to a valve like a giant faucet projecting from the bottom of the wall. "There's your emergency discharge, and you'd better open it now, if you want to save your foundation."

  Paperman glanced at Iris, who shrugged.

  After the trouble he had had filling this cistern, after the money he had squandered to get just a few thousand gallons in an emergency, it was hardly easier for him to open this valve than it would have been to open a vein in his wrist and let out the blood. But the apprentice, in his humble inarticulateness, reminded Norman of the lost Gilbert. This boy might know something.

  "Okay," he said sadly to the boy. "Open the valve."

  The corroded brass wheel did not turn easily. The apprentice straddled it, muscles bunching under his shiny black skin. All at once a glittering stream half a foot thick shot out of the valve, flying parallel to the sand for perhaps twenty feet before wavering and drooping into the beach. A pool formed on the instant, with rivulets trickling toward the sea.

  Senator Pullman grinned in admiration. "There's water pressure for you," he said.

  Norman pulled his eyes away from this horrible roaring waste, and studied the cracked cistern. An idea struck him. "Look, Senator. Look how far down that crack extends." He gestured at the dripping fracture. The crack began not at the ground but at the top of the wall, and extended about two thirds of the way down. Below that, the wall was solid. At least it looked solid.

  "Why do I have to empty the cistern? Why can't we just let the water down to this solid level? Then there's no risk of collapse, and my guests will have water until I can line up a mason. If I empty the cistern now, I'll empty my hotel."

  Iris looked at Senator Pullman, he looked at his apprentice, and the apprentice regarded Paperman with awed surprise, as though a horse had opened his mouth and spoken.

  "Dat does be a good idea," said the apprentice clearly. "Dat work okay."

  "I'll be damned," Iris said. "So simple."

  "It's a most ingenious adjustment to an emergency," said Senator Pullman. "That is the kind of thinking that makes a successful Kinjan. I congratulate you, Mr. Paperman. As it happens, Anatone is a fine mason. Or at least he can get you one. So essentially you have no problem any more, once we locate this little short-circuit. Unfortunately I must go to the legislative session now."

  Pullman departed, taking his apprentice with him, as Paperman and Iris stood watching the cistern water shower out of the valve and carve a deepening canyon in the beach sand. "I have to remember to turn this valve off," he said. "Let's see. At ten gallons a second-and we're not losing that much, surely-it'll still take a couple of hours to empty down."

  "Honestly, Norm, you're getting so resourceful and masculine," Iris said. "I could fall in love with you, if you didn't keep saying was to all the time."

  "Shut up," Norman said. "Let's meet at your cottage for a swim in ten minutes."

  "Done," Iris said.

  2

  Lorna greeted him at the desk with a handful of letters. Most of them were local hills; he looked for airmail stamps and pulled out one letter from Henny and another from Atlas.

  "De toilet overflow in twenty-six," Lorna said.

  "What? That's the third one this morning."

  "De lady say dey check out if it don't work by twelve o'clock. Dere be five guests you got to meet on de noon plane."

  "Yes, yes, I know that. Anything else? Anything good?"

  "Miss Buckley she waitin' for you in de office."

  "Who's Miss Buckley?"

  "She fum Immigration," said Lorna, with a peculiarly unpleasant look.

  The air in the little office was somewhat more bearable now, for Senator Pullman's apprentice had hacked a hole through the heavy masonry of the back wall and had put in a rattling, screeching air-conditioner. Miss Buckley of Immigration sat in a chair directly in the line of the noisy breeze. She was a very dark young woman in a purple dress with a red jacket, quite stout, with pretty features marred by drooping unfriendly eyes, and thick magenta-caked lips set in an outraged pout. An open briefcase on the floor leaned against her chair. She had some manila folders on her lap, and in one of these she was writing with a ball-point pen. She paid no attention to the arrival of the proprietor. Since her crossed legs blocked his way, he waited for a long time, while she wrote and wrote, often sighing loudly and shaking her head.

  "Excuse me," he finally said.

  Miss Buckley gave him a single nauseated glance, as though Be had shouted a string of filth, and moved her feet. He slipped past her and sat behind his desk. She continued to write.

  "I beg your pardon," Paperman said after another long wait. "Is there something I can do for yo
u?"

  The lady from Immigration slowly turned her revolted glance on him again. "She still here," she said.

  "What? Who's still here?"

  The lady official from Immigration brandished a folder. "She. Who else?"

  "Would you give me the pleasure of naming the person you're talking about?"

  "De pregnant girl from Nevis. Dat who I'm talking about. Esm‚ Caroline de Quincy. She still here."

  "Yes, she is. Aren't her papers in order?"

  "She papers ain't de question, she condition de question. Esm‚ Caroline de Quincy got to leave, or she employer take de responsibility."

  "What responsibility? This is all news to me."

  Miss Buckley explained, with weary contempt, the problem of Esm‚ de Quincy.

  Esm‚ was a foreigner, a British subject. Pregnant alien women in the Caribbean were forever trying to get to an American island to have their babies; for the law gave these children United States citizenship, providing only that they emerged from the womb on American soil. The nationality of the mother or the father, in such a case, was of no consequence. Immigration was forever trying to stem this obstetrical skirting of the quotas. The office had been keeping an eye on Esm‚, and by its calculations her time was at hand, and she had to go.