Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival

by Don't Stop The Carnival(Lit)

  He sat up with an awful moan, his head in a whirl, his eyes throbbing in pain from the white sunshine at the window. The knocking on the door came again, louder and more urgent. He now realized that he had been awakened not by his own physical misery, but by the usual reveille of the Gull Reef Club, knuckles on the door rapping out the alarm.

  "Who-ah, who is it? Wha' is it?"

  "Sheila, suh. I does have to talk to you, suh. I wery sorry to hoross you, suh."

  "Give me two minutes."

  A hair of the dog was the only thing at such a time, medical theory and warnings notwithstanding. Norman staggered to the bathroom and choked down a tumbler of tap water and scotch with one of the mighty oval yellow pills which Henny took to fend off migraine, and which, he had accidentally discovered long ago, acted for him as a sure head-clearer for about four hours, at a cost of perhaps twenty-four hours of the shakes. He knew, from the very sound of Sheila's knuckles on the door, that this morning would require an alert mind and a strong heart. Ye gods, that pink slop he had drunk by the gallon! He brushed his hair and his teeth, flushed his mouth violently with full-strength mouthwash, and dizzily opened the door.

  The leading bulletin in the cook's evil tidings was that all six chambermaids had quit. Amaranthe had sent this word by Virgil; no explanation. Insatiable demands for water had been coming from all the rooms since seven in the morning. It was ten now, Millard was half-dead with running up and down the stairs, Virgil was helping him, and still the guests were in an angry uproar and some were starting to check out. It had been impossible to do anything about the party wreckage as yet; the lobby and the old dining room still looked, as Sheila put it, "like Noah's flood done go troo de hotel." Immigration had telephoned three times. There was a cable from New York, requesting an eighteen-hundred-dollar check for the Tilson party provisions before they would ship anything. That, Sheila said, was about all.

  "Sheila, I badly need food," Paperman said, clutching his brow. "Make me-make me a mushroom omelet. Right away."

  "Yassuh. De maids does be de serious ting, dey ain' no maids to get in Kinja. I tink dey does be concern for Esm‚."

  "Can't the dining-room waitresses make the beds, just for today?"

  "No suh, de union dey does be very strick about dat."

  The upheaval in the lobby was so appalling that Norman hurried through with averted eyes to the dining terrace. Many guests were still at breakfast, a glum, silent, red-eyed lot. Iris Tramm sat in the slant sunshine of a far corner table, in a blue silk shirt with large gold polka dots, and tailored white shorts, looking fresh and radiant; or perhaps she only appeared so to Paperman, through the kindly screen of his dark glasses, and the glow of the scotch and the yellow pill, which were commencing their work of uplift. Meadows sat beside her, tightly leashed to a table leg, and she was giving him bacon scraps.

  "Don't say it," she greeted Norman as he approached. "No dogs allowed on the dining terrace. We're just leaving. I sneaked him in because it's his birthday."

  "Don't go." He fell in the chair opposite her, with a groan. "I need company."

  "I can imagine. What on earth hit the lobby last night?"

  "Just let me eat something. Then I'll talk." Paperman rested his face in his hands.

  "You didn't go to the Thousand Steps, did you? I woke up worrying about you."

  "The Thousand Steps? No. God knows I should have."

  His mushroom omelet came. The sun was warm and comforting on his back, and the whiskey and the pill took firm hold as soon as he had eaten a few bites. He began to feel much better. It wouldn't last, he knew, but the relief was wonderful. While he was recounting the misadventures of the night and the morning, Church appeared, rather gray in the face, and told him that a fourth couple had just checked out. "I tried carrying water up for a while, sir, but so many of them are in the bar, trying to get over last night-"

  "Stay in the bar, Church. Sweat it out till I find Esm‚. I'm going from here to the Thousand Steps. Once she comes back the others will."

  Church gnawed his lower lip, and pulled at his beard. "Sir, I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time. I think she's disappeared into the brush. She always said she would. I'll get at the lobby as soon as I can, I know it's a mess." The bartender shook his head, and walked off scratching his beard.

  Iris untied the dog from the table. "Just let me put Meadows away. I'll do the rooms."

  "You? Don't be fantastic."

  "I was a hospital volunteer in the war. I can make up ten rooms in the time these Nevis girls do one."

  He said, "Look, if it comes to that I can make the rooms."

  "Well, maybe you'd better work with me, Norm. Two people go fast, making beds. And when they see the poor hung-over proprietor cleaning the rooms, it may stop the check-outs. Sympathy."

  "Iris, you're a paying guest, not a chambermaid."

  "It's just for this morning. Once we've done the rooms, I'll hunt down Amaranthe and she'll herd the girls back. Get yourself a mop and pail, and never say die."

  As often happens, this unthinkable business of cleaning rooms with Iris became a sort of lark, once Paperman fell into the swing of it. They joked about the luggage, the photographs, the clothing they saw. Paperman had never before pictured the breach of privacy that went with a chambermaid's access to one's room; nor how guests characterized themselves with the state of a bathroom, the way clothes were hung, the books, magazines, and more intimate objects littered about; nor, most of all, what pigs most people were. He soon recovered the knack of making beds, something he had not done since his boy scout days, and he and Iris made swift progress down the hall. They had been at this for half an hour or so; they were shaking out a bedsheet, laughing over the lady's flimsy pajama bottoms that went floating to the floor, when the building trembled under them, and they heard a distant noise like the dumping of large stones down a chute. They froze, looking at each other, still holding the extended sheet.

  "Not a quake," Iris said in a low nervous voice. "That's not a quake."

  "Sh!" Paperman said.

  A heavy vibration was coming up through the floor, unlike any usual operating noises of the hotel. Paperman flung his end of the sheet on the bed, ran out of the room, trampled down the stairs, and rushed through the chaotic lobby to the dance terrace. There was a jagged break in the red tiles at the edge, and a section of the rail was gone. Leaning over the broken rail, Paperman saw green water spouting out of the foundation like blood from a cut throat. The cistern had broken wide open, and was losing water in a torrent four or five feet wide. Guests lined the beach, watching the novel sight, shouting at each other and laughing.

  As Paperman stared down at this visible death of his Caribbean enterprise, motionless, his hands gripping the rail, tears starting to his eyes, he felt Iris's warm hand clasp his. He was ashamed to look at her, or to try to talk.

  "I'm sorry, Norm," she said, in a sweet, husky tone, full of undisguised affection. "I'm awfully sorry."

  This note of feminine despair gave Paperman strength. He cleared his throat. "Well, let's go and see just how bad it is, shall we? The hotel hasn't fallen down yet, you know. Neither has the sky."

  It took the water about five minutes to pour out of the broken cistern, gouging a deep canyon in the beach. Paperman stood on the sand, to one side of the rushing water, with Iris, Church, and Sheila. He had plenty of time to review the totality of his defeat-the wreckage in the game room, the vanished wall, the unsolved electric failure, the stopped pump, the departed chambermaids, the empty bank account, the unpaid debts, the certain departure of most of the guests after this new disaster. Nor could he accept any more incoming guests. To run a hotel, he needed water.

  The escaping water slowed to a murky trickle. The hole, now visible from top to bottom, was a ragged, lop-sided V in the wall. One side was almost vertical, the other slanted and zigzagged up to the break in the terrace. Chunks of masonry lay tumbled on the beach, and big blue and brown stones protruded all along the broken
edges.

  The guests, clustered behind Paperman, were not laughing any more. They stood silent or whispered, with the embarrassed long faces of people at a funeral. Sheila was at Paperman's side, weeping and dabbing at her eyes with her apron. "I didn't tink dey be so much rain," she said. "So much rain, so much rain, so much rain-"

  Paperman patted her shoulder. "Sheila, it wasn't your fault. I should have thought of it, if anybody should have, and opened the valve. I didn't, and it happened, that's all."

  He stepped up to the broken wall, unmindful of the wet sand and muck squirting over his shoes, and peered into the cistern. A shaft of sunshine illuminated the big space, and the wet rocks glittered on the far wall. The bottom was inches thick in brown slime.

  "Hello," he shouted, and the silly word resounded and boomed. He walked back to Iris, Church, and Sheila, who stood together, a little apart from the rest. "Just as I thought," he said. "Empty." He turned to the guests, and threw his arms wide. "Champagne, anyone?"

  Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything.

  Sheila had stopped crying, and her fat face had hardened. "Mistuh

  Papuh, I be back one o'clock. De lunch on de stove, you just tell de girls start dishing it up." She started to waddle off, putting the back of her hand to her eyes.

  "Where are you going, Sheila?" called Paperman. "I need you here." The heavy black mask turned and looked at him with blank eyes. "I comin' back. Tings does be too confuse in de hotel, Mistuh Papuh. Dey ain't no oder way no more. I going to get Hippolyte."

  Part Three

  CARNIVAL IS VERY SWEET

  Chapter Eleven

  Hippolyte Lamartine

  I

  Within ten days, a striking change had come over the Gull Reef Club. The cistern was repaired. The dance terrace was tiled over and the rail was repaired. The pump was working. There was plenty of water, and electricity was restored in all the rooms. The chambermaids, including Esm‚, were back on the job. There were no further telephone calls from Christophine Buckley. The lobby was straightened up, shining and clean. Most surprising of all-so very strange that Paperman blinked every morning when he saw it-the old dining room was being transformed into bedroom units. In the place of Akers' destroyed wall stood a raw cinder-block wall with four louvered windows. Most of the partitions for the rooms were up. The plumbing was going into place, and the estimate was that the rooms might be ready by Christmas Eve. All this was the doing of the man named Hippolyte Lamartine and his strange crew.

  Hippolyte Lamartine was a broad-shouldered fattish fellow, perhaps five feet nine, with a round, pale, red-patched and somewhat scaly face and thick straight black hair growing low on his forehead. He always wore a heavy khaki shirt buttoned to the throat and wrists, khaki pants, and a high-crowned straw hat with an enormous ragged brim turned down in front. He went barefoot. His feet and toenails looked horny as a beast's. He had small brown eyes close together, and his face was set in a puzzled squint, with deep worry lines on the forehead converging to the bridge of his thick short nose. His mouth was a line, pulled down at the corners, the lips out of sight. When he spoke-which was not often-he disclosed irregular dirty teeth. He always carried a long curved machete with a red wooden handle, which he called a "cutlash." If he was doing nothing else, he was usually whetting his cutlash on a smooth square stone, with little shrieks of sharpening iron. At the end of his day's work, he retired to the gardener's shack behind the kitchen; crawled onto a wooden bunk which he had hammered up over Millard's bed the day he came; and fell into slumber with the cutlash at his side. He was at work again before dawn.

  He repaired the cistern in a couple of days, aided by two white men who were dressed like him, who looked enough like him to be his brothers, and who talked to him in barbaric guttural grunts. When Paper-man, in an early effort to be sociable, asked Hippolyte whether they were in fact his brothers, the man just shook his head, and went on grunting to the others in a language that was not Calypso. Nor was it French to Paperman's ears, though that was what Sheila told him it was.

  Sheila hated to discuss Hippolyte. When Norman pressed her, she said that he was a Frenchman from Guadeloupe; that there was a settlement of these white Guadeloupe natives at the west end of Kinja off beyond the sugar fields on the rocky coastal slope; that they mostly were fishermen and construction workers. Norman tried addressing Hippolyte in French; the man just squinted peculiarly at him, as though he were gibbering. He understood English, but often he gave Norman much the same kind of uncomprehending, surly squint when Norman asked a question or gave an order. Hippolyte paid very little attention, in fact, to anything Paperman said. He returned to the Gull Reef Club like an owner who had been away for years, and was setting to work with a will to fix the long decay due to incompetent caretakers.

  He never explained what the electric failure had been. In his first hour on the premises he disappeared beneath the hotel, and when he emerged some time later, all sandy and greasy, the circuit was fixed, the lights were on all through the hotel, and the pump thumped healthily, drawing on the emergency tank. Paperman was working on the ledgers in the office when he felt through the floor the life-giving pulse of the pump. He rushed down to the beach to salute his rescuer, who came out of the crawl space brushing off sand and wiping grease from his hands on a rag. Hippolyte listened to Paperman's joyous congratulations with an impassive, worried squint, then picked up a shovel and walked off. Norman followed him but halted when Hippolyte marched through the gap in the cistern, splashing ankle-deep with his bare feet, and began shovelling out the vile brown muck.

  "Look here, Hippolyte," he called into the echoing cave of the cistern, "I want to talk about your wages. What were you getting paid in the old days?"

  "Hunnerd a mond."

  "I'll start you at a hundred twenty-five."

  "Okay," the Frenchman grunted in a dissatisfied tone.

  "If things go all right I'll do better than that."

  "We see."

  Later-that same first day-Norman saw the two other men arrive at the beach on a barge carrying a cement mixer, a wheelbarrow, piles of rock, and stacked cinder blocks and bags of plaster. He became concerned about money, and tried to discuss with Hippolyte the costs of the materials and the barge, and the wages for his helpers. But he found it very hard to get a word in. The three men fell to unloading the barge, exchanging their coarse grunts, and shoving him out of the way. At last he planted himself directly in Hippolyte's path, as the Frenchman was tottering up the beach under two bags of plaster.

  "Look, Hippolyte, I'd like to have an idea of what all this is costing."

  "Dunno yet." Hippolyte tried to shoulder past, but Paperman held his ground.

  "Don't you want money for the barge? For the materials?"

  "No."

  "What do these men get by the day?"

  "We see."

  Coming downstairs next morning, Paperman found seven other men cleaning the old dining room, stacking up the scattered panels and toilet seats, and laying out paint-stained cloths and power tools. There were several whites like Hippolyte, and the rest were burly Negroes. Norman thought he recognized them as members of Akers' crew, but he wasn't sure. Again he went after Hippolyte, who was well along with his new cistern wall. This time when Hippolyte merely squinted at him, Paperman lost patience and shouted, "Look here, how do those men up there know what to do? They haven't got the sketches, the blueprints, the specifications, nothing! Have they? Who's supervising? Who's the contractor? What's the price? I mean I appreciate the fine work you're doing, Hippolyte, but I want to know what the hell's going on here."

  "I come de offus."

  About two hours later Hippolyte came to the office, covered with plaster dust and sharpening his machete. "Where de plans?"

  Paperman dug into his desk and brought out Akers' roll of sketches and folder of specifications. The Frenchman put his machete on the unrolled plans to hold them flat, and inspected them sheet by sheet, running his thick filthy fingers al
ong the wiring schemes and the plumbing diagrams, looking very worried and working his nose like a rabbit. He rolled the plans up, and tucked them under his arm with the folder.

  "You got two hunnerd dolla?"

  "Yes, I've got two hundred dollars."

  "I need two hunnerd dolla. Later more."

  "Are you going to try to do this job yourself?"

  "Last year I foreman Mr. Akers."

  "Well-what's your estimate for the whole job?"

  "Not too bad."

  "How long do you think it will take?"