The woman watched the bus drive off, when it struck her: Buses aren’t that small, and they don’t go puttering around taro fields. She let out a gasp and strained to get a parting glance, but by the time she reached the embankment—one leg sucking up a thick slurp of muck, then the other—the bus had vanished into the banana trees. Now wait, she told herself, that bus didn’t even reach as high as the lowest bunch of bananas. Words that figured in her official testimony and later appeared in Foreign Office documents about the missing bus.
The woman made her way over to the banana trees in question and peered into the undergrowth, but the bus was long gone. If only she could have seen if there were tiny people on board or some other species of passenger. She waited around for an hour or so through the worst of the midday heat, until finally—still no bus—she put her basket of taro on her head and trudged back home.
Matías first met the two of them after losing the third presidential election, when he was at a very low ebb. He hadn’t just lost his job and authority, word had it—leaked by accident or possibly on purpose—that this new President Bonhomme Tamang’s investigators were closing in on him day by day. Papers detailing his under-the-table dealings in connection with the construction of the Navidad Teikoku Hotel might soon fall into Tamang’s hands. Meanwhile, for what it was worth, Matías kept passably busy compiling a list of Tamang’s political errors as ammunition for his comeback in the fourth election. Though if the shit hit the fan over his own corruption, there’d be nothing he could do. Fleeing overseas would be suicide. Living in Japan on his bank accounts posed no problem, but what would he do with himself each day? No, exile was out of the question. Think as he might, he was at an impasse.
Predictably, his hours at Angelina’s increased considerably during this career slump. Matías would have happily taken up full-time residence, but Angelina wouldn’t hear of it. He was the mainspring of the business, and with him out of government, official guests had already dwindled; if he continued to sit there on his ass, she’d lose all her customers. He could still come around at night via the green door, but if he insisted on spending his days there, holding court in the salon, meeting with his not-so-secret informants, then others couldn’t help but see. This was her brothel too. And if the great man didn’t get up on his own two feet, Angelina scolded, how was she expected to stand behind him?
One night, having crept in the back way to Angelina’s bed, Matías picked up on something in her daily recap. A couple of new customers had come in. Europeans, different color hair and eyes, but otherwise they could have been twins. Thirtyish—no telling white people’s ages—they just stood there, hesitating, in the doorway “Welcome, step inside,” encouraged Angelina, who happened to be close by. Actually, the men told her, they weren’t looking for women. They were gay and, frankly, quite content with each other. No, what they wanted was a drink. The hotel and guesthouse bars had the odd bottle, but not the label they were after. Someone had suggested, however, that Angelina’s might have the very thing.
“So what’s your poison?” asked Angelina.
“Twelve-year-old I.W. Harper,” said the fairer and slightly taller of the two. “Got any?”
“Sure do. Come on in. Is that really all you want?”
“That’ll do just fine,” he said, smiling at his friend. (“A real beautiful light-up-the-sky kind of smile,” Angelina told Matías.)
The two of them came in and sat down. Each ordered a shot glass and a big chaser. They stayed on for what must have been six hours, sipping their bourbon nice and slow. Savoring the taste, smiling at each other, exchanging quiet jokes, they practically polished off the whole bottle while remaining, to all appearances, sober. At first the girls eyed this odd couple with curiosity, but when neither man showed the least interest in them sashaying past en déshabillé, they finally gave up, disheartened.
“They probably still down there drinking right now.”
Just then the intercom buzzed from the ground floor salon. The two men were saying they wanted a room for the night, was it all right? Angelina thought it over for a second, then said, “Well, if they wanna make this their hotel, why stop them? Only give them the smallest room, number four. Can’t really charge them same as for a trick.”
The following evening, hearing that they were back, Matías decided to take a look for himself. With Angelina’s permission, he made a rare foray downstairs into the salon and found the two sitting happily at a corner table with a bottle planted between them.
“Mind if I join you for a while?” asked Matías.
“Not at all. Please do,” said one of the men, the other nodding in unison.
“I’m Matías Guili. Up until a few days ago … I was president here.”
“I’m Yin.”
“And I’m Yang.”
Funny, thought Matías, they don’t look Chinese.
“Or no, I’m Port.”
“And I’m Starboard.”
Seamen were they now?
“Er, Laurel?”
“Hardy.”
“Castor.”
“Pollux.”
“We’re a mixed-up couple, the two of us. Call us what you like, we’re inseparable.”
“Each just a part of a pair.”
“Care for some bourbon?”
“Uh—no,” said Matías, lifting his champagne glass in disconcerted response to the jabbering duo. “I’m okay with this.”
“Ah, you got us there.”
“An equally fine tipple. The French sometimes do get things right.”
“Excuse us. We still hadn’t settled the name question. Seriously, my name is Paul Joel.”
“And I’m Peter Ketch.”
Finally, thought Matías, some real-sounding names!
“Totally unrelated, yet people say we look alike.”
“Unrelated? Well I like that! We’re lovers. I hope you don’t mind that sort of thing.”
“All the same to me. East and West, everyone’s got superstitions about twins and the like, but there’s room for all sorts in this world.”
Joel was blond and blue-eyed, and Ketch had chestnut hair and dark brown eyes, yet in actual fact the two did look very much like twins.
“We’re so glad to find this bourbon here.”
“Give us this and we’re fine anywhere.”
“Weren’t we just saying, if we had this every day, we’d be happy doing almost anything?”
“Which makes me curious,” said Matías, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what is it you two do?”
“Whatever. We do magic tricks, done our share of boxing too.”
“First off, we worked as coal miners in Sweden, then we were doctors in Madagascar.”
“No no no, you got it backwards. The longest was that stint in the circus. After that we sold gibbons, worked as dance instructors, that sort of thing.”
“More recently, we headed up an advertising firm.”
“In Manhattan.”
“Truth is, we’ve even killed people.”
“Yes, we have killed people. Can’t go into details, naturally, save to say it was a CIA job.”
“What are you talking about? It was Mossad.”
“Stasi.”
“Okay, anything but KGB. That really would be too much.”
“So you see, we’re fickle. Can’t stick to any one job for more than three years.”
“Eventually, we got tired of doing different jobs altogether. Thought we’d take a break, lie low for a while. So we started island-hopping across the Pacific … and here we are.”
“Pretty soon, though, the money’s going to run out. We’ll stay while the drinking’s good, but when our last bottle’s gone, we’ll just have to look for gainful employment, now, won’t we?”
“Go wor
k for Mr. Harper.”
“Goes down easy. Tickles your throat from the inside.”
“Er, you two,” Matías finally managed to get in an awkward word, “being homos and all …”
“That’s right. That’s how we can be happy, just the two of us. Granted, having beautiful women around is nice too, though perhaps we’re a tad disappointing for the ladies. Especially considering the line of work here,” said Ketch (or was it Joel?), gesturing with a shot glass toward the girls entertaining the other customers.
“With Joel beside me and this to drink, what else could I need?”
“With Ketch beside me and this to drink, what more could I want?”
In the end, Matías never did learn anything reliable about them—except their names. Back at his own house later that night, however, he checked the dictionary just out of curiosity. Sure enough, he found that a ketch was a two-masted Bermuda-rigged sailboat, differing slightly in the position of its mizzenmast from a yawl or jolly boat, derived from the German Jolle. Not “Joel,” but suspiciously close. And wait, Peter and Paul, weren’t they the two principal Biblical apostles? Aliases again?
A few days later, when Matías was feeling even lower and more insecure, he struck a deal with the two to retain them as handymen at Angelina’s and—if and when the occasion should arise—as his personal bodyguards. In return, they’d be granted room and board and all the I.W. Harper they could drink, for as long as they stayed on the islands.
Every day they did their allotted duties around the premises, and every evening they happily downed a bottle of Mr. Harper’s finest, then retired to their tiny room number four and fell asleep in each other’s embrace. Not the least bit secretive about their gay proclivities, they were, however, reluctant to have their morning slumbers disturbed by Angelina sending one of the girls to wake them up. This arm wrapped around that shoulder, they’d grumble about the knock on the door, but a contract was a contract.
BUS REPORT 6
The warm coral-reefed seas around Baltasár and Gaspar islands are home to a number of rare species of plankton not to be found in any other waters. Similarly numerous are the foreign scientists who come to the islands with proposals to set up permanent research facilities. Attractive though it might be to see a generation of local boys and girls grow up to be world-renowned plankton experts, the President has no intention of agreeing to this—at least for the moment—and douses all such offers from abroad in a cold shower policy. Nonetheless, among the undeterred visiting researchers, one young scholar from the Wood’s Hole Oceanic Institute set up a laboratory in the basement of the third cheapest guesthouse in Baltasár City. During the daytime, he boated about the lagoon casting his plankton nets, then spent the late afternoon classifying the specimens collected, and typed up his findings by night. A reclusive fellow, only rarely did he ever go out on the town.
One afternoon, this David Crosby spied something extraordinary swimming across the eyepiece of his microscope. Could that have been a yellow and green bus? He distinctly saw some little old men cheerfully waving from the windows. For the next hour or so, he toyed with the knobs, frantically adjusting the magnification and focal plane, but the bus never reappeared.
Understandably, the very next day, he packed up his research and headed back to America. When life-changing good fortune comes along, one mustn’t let it slip by. We can only hope that when he told his colleagues about his amazing experience, they were equally appreciative of the significance of his rare discovery.
04
One slow evening, Ketch and Joel are ensconced at their usual table in a corner of the near-empty salon, while Angelina stands by the door on the lookout for customers. The younger girls are all chatting in threes and fives, underscored softly by Miles Davis—a 1953 New York recording with Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker on sax, “Round Midnight” medleying into “Compulsion.” Angelina’s extensive collection of jazz rarities is lost on the islanders, but it’s been known to draw the occasional gasp from foreign visitors. For jazz aficionados Ketch and Joel, this cache of several hundred records is a source of immense enjoyment.
In the far corner sits the young woman from Melchor. The same age or younger than the rest, she most decidedly is not one of the girls. She has never been “kept” by parents nor madame nor patron. She rarely talks to the others; she either does her chores or sits in her corner. She aspires to invisibility: never enters into gossip, never the butt of any jokes, yet everyone notices if she’s there or not. Imagine someone leaving a big package in the salon; people might learn to overlook it in time, but they’d still wonder what was inside—that’s her. Normal-looking as can be, though since she hardly ever talks to anyone, there’s little opportunity to see her face straight on. She always averts her eyes and rarely glances around the room. But tonight it’s so quiet, she seems transfixed. Maybe it’s Miles Davis who’s cast a spell on her. Just now, two Indian traders come in, hurriedly choose partners, and disappear into the back rooms, but the maid from Melchor just sits listening to Miles’s trumpet, oblivious to their exit. Even when Joel calls Angelina over, nothing can make the maid look up.
“Slow night,” says Joel, as Angelina takes to a plush sofa.
“Uh-huh, that’s how it goes. Men all got better things to do. Business or family or sick parents or somebody’s wake, it all put this good-time establishment off-limits. And no one in from overseas either, unfortunately. Everybody got off-nights.”
“Gives everyone a breather,” says Ketch.
“Nice change for one night maybe. But if it go on like this for a month, heaven help us.”
“Not much chance of that. You’ve got a solid reputation. The President’s a regular here, VIPs always pass through,” Ketch says reassuringly.
“You don’t like drunks, do you?” Joel asks her, apropos of nothing, his impossibly blue eyes glinting in the chandelier light.
“No, I happen to like drunk men and women. I even been known to get drunk myself.”
“But skin-to-skin in the sack’s better than just drinking, right?”
“Who says you gotta choose one or the other?” she counters logically. “We make our business here offering both. Most johns knock back a few drinks before they take a girl.”
“But not us. We just drink and go to our room. On busy nights when you’d kill for an extra room, nonpaying guests like us must put a crimp in your profits.”
“Never cross my calculating mind. Paying customers or not, you’re guests of this house. I happen to like you two.”
“We’re so happy to hear you say that,” says Ketch.
Joel looks skeptical. “Do you really mean it? Are you really happy to have us here?”
“Sure. And not just me, the girls all enjoy having you here. And there’s your contract with the President,” she adds in a lowered voice. “We all welcome you.”
“Nah, c’mon,” says Joel.
“Plus, you two have your uses. Wanna know why?”
The two men nod, clearly drawn in.
“Too many women staying together is a mess. Before your time, we have the girls selling, we have the johns buying, and we have me taking care of business, that’s it. Often the girls fight, a little too often, steal customers back and forth, bitch bitch bitch … stupid stuff. Then you come along, and all that stop. The difference is, somebody looking on. Not a customer, not another girl, somebody they can trust, somebody they respect, somebody from a whole different world, but near enough to understand. The girls all feel your eyes on them, so they act nice, on their best behavior. You’re not women, so no competition, nothing to get catty about. And you’re not men—well, you know what I mean—so no need to flirt. Ideal housemates, no? Or you already know this, and just playing along?”
“We knew it. But then we’re always drunk.”
“Which is fine. You gay and you boozers, so that make
you double distant.”
“So it’s all right for us to stay drunk? All right for everyone here, I mean, not ourselves.”
“Why not? You both fun, you good with words and charming, and most of all,” she searches for the proper phrase, “you satisfied with life. Drinking helps. It really does.”
“Now that, I must say, is something I’ve given considerable thought to,” says Joel.
“Joel here’s lectured on ‘Drinking as Social Consciousness,’ ” says Ketch, gazing off.
“That’s right, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”
“No! Really?”
“To harden their resolve, they decided to expose themselves to opposing opinions, or some such crazy notion. So I went and talked about the contribution of alcohol toward pacifism.”
“Joel’s a good speaker, very persuasive,” adds Ketch.
“All in good fun, a bit of a lark. But you know I don’t remember a thing. I was drunk at the time. Anyway, it was Ketch who wrote the text.”
“Just notes, really.”
“And what exactly did I make of those notes, Mr. Ketch? You were there.”
“Well, Mr. Joel, you talked about the drunkard as the most evolved genus of peaceable creatures,” says Ketch. “I remember it all very well. The gist of it was, for starters, that we humans have too many desires. We want to conquer other countries, or we want the most beautiful woman in the world for a bed warmer, or we want that rare one-of-a-kind ancient vase for our mantelpiece, we want it all. But the effort to acquire these things costs so very much, both for oneself and for others. Especially others, too many sacrifices.”
“Did I really say that? Are you sure you’re not just making this up?”
The Navidad Incident Page 12
