And then it was over. The man had packed up his herbs and his snake and his trunk—the bottles and blanket, everything gone, leaving only a few dazzled lingerers and Caitlin, who was penetrated by a rich sorrow.
She took her compact out of her bag and looked in the mirror. Oh. Time to redo her makeup and sit down for a refreshing snack. She looked around. Hopeless. But up on the rim of town she saw a towering structure. Perhaps that was where all the cafés and nice shops were. To cheer herself up, she bought a clump of sticky candy from a little stand on the street to eat while she walked.
The steeply inclined streets curved up across little ravines choked with garbage, and, with every dip or turn as Caitlin drew nearer, the massive tower disappeared and then loomed again in the tinted, fumy air.
Up high the town was more prosperous. Houses were set back from the street behind dry gardens. Spectral cars slid by, their occupants invisible behind black glass, and muscular dogs strained at their tethers, baying as Caitlin passed, or snapping their teeth. She paused for a moment, breathless from the heat, and the garden beside her heaved—heavens, there was a man in camouflage clothing!—and she turned away quickly, to find herself right in front of the towering building. It was Harvey Gumbiner’s hotel.
Beige light draped the vast lobby, masking clusters of people. “Praise the Lord,” someone seemed to be saying, and something stirred in a deep chair. Pale men, like those on Caitlin’s flight, spoke quietly, disclosing the contents of their briefcases to dark men in sunglasses. A group of backpackers with Bibles whispered in a corner. A breathtaking girl walked by dreamily with a blond man of about fifty, who looked permanently soaked in alcohol. He wound her long black hair around his hand. She whispered something to him, and he smiled, closing his eyes, her hair still coiled around his hand like a leash.
Caitlin found Harvey in the bar with a man named Boyce—from the Embassy, Harvey explained. Boyce’s eyes were inflamed, and he scratched at himself. “Allergies,” he said unhappily and waved to a group of waitresses, who leaned against the bar, gazing out the window like convicts, or children. One disengaged herself, walking slowly, and shifting her weight from haunch to haunch. She stopped, swaying slightly, at their table, still looking out the window as though she were asleep.
“Is the rum here sensational?” Caitlin asked. The waitress smiled helplessly, then shrugged. “O.K.,” Caitlin said. “What’s to lose? Cuba libre, please. Bless you,” she said to Boyce, who had choked.
When her drink arrived, she told Harvey and Boyce about the man with the amazing soap.
“That’s impossible,” Harvey said. “Soap that lathers without water?” He squinted at Caitlin. “How much did this ‘soap’ cost?”
“Two of those things,” she said. “The red ones.”
“Two lempiras!” Harvey said. “It cost two lempiras? That’s damned expensive, you know—that’s about a dollar.”
“Seems reasonable.” Boyce rubbed at his eyes. “If it doesn’t require water. After all, they don’t have water.”
“Of course it requires water,” Harvey said. “Soap requires water—I know soap. Obviously, it’s some sort of trick. Two lempiras! You know, this is a very expensive country. I mean considering how damn poor it is. I stopped to buy some batteries this morning for my radio? And two batteries cost me thirteen lempiras! Now, I call that damned expensive.”
“Well,” Boyce said, waving his hand slightly, “what you see here in Tegucigalpa is a dual economy. The international community that’s arrived with all the expansion confuses the picture; the wealthy Nicaraguan émigrés, the new-rich military—” He cleared his throat furiously. “Excuse me. No, what I mean is that the prices you’re seeing confuse the picture, because those prices are for foreigners, not for Hondurans. Out in the smaller cities—Choluteca, for example—you don’t see those prices.”
Harvey frowned. “Still,” he said. “I mean, look: two batteries for my radio cost me thirteen lempiras. Now, that simply has to affect the people in—what did you say? Choluteca.”
“Well, no,” Boyce said. “Because my point is, the people in Choluteca don’t have radios.”
“Ah. How do you do?” A well-dressed man had stopped at their table to address Boyce. “Excuse me, I shan’t interrupt.”
“Well,” Boyce said. “Mr. Best.” He looked away, but Harvey was already introducing himself and Caitlin. “O.K.” Boyce sighed. “Might as well sit down.”
“My, my,” Mr. Best said. “I see that all our friends are arriving.”
“Oh boy,” Boyce said. “That’s right—entire international press corps. Another couple of hours they’ll be clogging the pool like lemmings.”
Caitlin looked around and saw that men and women with large bags slung over their shoulders were filtering into the bar. “Why so many reporters?” she said.
Mr. Best smiled and motioned for drinks from a waitress who was idly stacking glasses in a pyramid at the bar.
“It seems, my dear,” Harvey said, as the pyramid of glasses tumbled to the floor, causing convulsions of giggles among the waitresses, “that you and I have arrived on a rather tense day. The White House has announced that Nicaragua invaded Honduras last night.”
“Oh, that’s what it is,” Caitlin said, trying to remember. “Honduras and Nicaragua are at war—”
“Well,” Boyce said. The three men looked at Caitlin. “Not exactly.”
Harvey glanced at Boyce, then turned to Caitlin and smiled. “You see, we’re in Honduras. And Honduras is a democracy—everything is fine here. But next door in Nicaragua? Well, about nine years ago the dictator there—an extremely unattractive man—was overthrown—”
“By Communists,” Boyce and Mr. Best said simultaneously.
“Yes,” Harvey said. “And, of course, that’s no good. So we give money to Nicaraguans who liked it better the other way—the Contras, they’re called—to fight the new government. And we let the Contras encamp here in Honduras, where we can—”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Best said. “One slight correction.” He twinkled charmingly at Caitlin. “Honduras is a neutral country—the Contras are not here.”
“No, the point,” Boyce said loudly to Caitlin, “the point is that Honduras is a highly sensitive strategic area. Of course we have financial interests in the region—we’ve never attempted to deny that—but the point is that, strategically speaking, Honduras is money in the bank. And that’s why the Soviets and the Cubans are stirring up these indigenous movements all over the place. Otherwise, Jesus. I mean, these people are pacific; they don’t know what’s going on—they’re farmers, for heaven’s sake. And that’s the point, you see—that we’re not just here because we go all gooey inside when we think about the relationship between free enterprise and democracy!”
Caitlin looked at him. She liked to travel. But this was not traveling.
“I can see that I haven’t convinced you,” Boyce said gloomily. “I can see you think I’m overestimating the danger in order to justify intervention, or God knows what kind of things you’ve been reading. But that’s not true, it’s not true. Think of the proximity to the United States, think of Cuba, think of the Canal. When’s the last time you really thought about the map? I want you to close your eyes and picture the map.”
Caitlin took a sip of her drink, and in the reddish mist behind her eyelids tired, dusty figures—like the people in the stone plaza—scrambled across a confused surface. But then flat colors began to mass: the blue of North Carolina, sweet pink of New York, orange of California; little mountain ranges and lakes, little capitol buildings jogged up and down, waiting to be superimposed. They fanned out over the map, the map swung into the night, a light shone in North Carolina from Holly’s room, where Holly sat alone, in her tiny rocker, cradling a bear, waiting. The rum came up Caitlin’s straw again, washing it all away in a flood of gold as she opened her eyes to see Mr. Best watching her with a faint smile.
“‘Mr. Best,’” she said slowly. He was dark,
and very attractive. “Are you from Honduras?”
“I live much of the time in Tegucigalpa, but the import-export business requires an unfortunate amount of travel. It becomes a chore.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. “I’m an actress, so I know.”
“Ah.” Mr. Best raised his eyebrows. “An actress…”
“But just what brings you here?” Boyce said suddenly.
Really, Caitlin thought—from the moment she’d gotten to her plane people had behaved as though they’d never seen a tourist before. But she only glanced at Mr. Best and laughed. “My daughter’s fiancé is in business here, and the two of them invited me down. So, of course, I drop everything I’m doing, I hop on a plane, and as soon as I get here they have to dash off to some other town. Pomarola, I think they said.”
“Palmerola—” Boyce said.
“Palmerola,” Harvey said, glancing at Boyce. “That’s no town—that’s the U.S. base, isn’t it? Where the U.S. Army is?”
“Honduran base,” Boyce said. “Where the Honduran Army is.”
“Quite right.” Mr. Best twinkled at Caitlin again. “The U.S. Army is not here.”
“And just what,” Boyce said, reddening, “does your daughter’s fiancé do?”
The force of his interest confused Caitlin for a moment, but she composed herself in the calm emanating from Mr. Best and remembered the conversation at breakfast. “Oh, Brandon’s quite the entrepreneur. He has his own plane and he flies around from country to country.”
“Really,” Mr. Best said thoughtfully. “A young man I ought to know. Let me give you my card; perhaps we could all meet for dinner one evening.” Boyce stared in astonishment as Mr. Best extracted a card from his wallet, but when Caitlin reached over to take it Mr. Best frowned and replaced it. “Sorry,” he said, selecting another, “that one was…incidentally—” He stood and turned to Boyce. “I believe I’m expecting something from you today?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Boyce said. He raked his hands through his hair. “Stop by the Embassy. See my secretary…. Oh, God,” he said as Mr. Best left, “I’m so tired. Oh,” he said sourly, as Lewis came through the entrance. “Hello, Lewis. Long time no see.”
“‘Long time no see,’” Lewis said. “Kinda catchy. Well, well, well, this appears to be a most congenial company.”
Boyce picked petulantly at the label on his beer bottle, but Harvey held out his hand. “Harvey Gumbiner,” he said.
“You’re putting me on,” Lewis said, drawing up a chair. “Hello, pretty lady.” He patted Caitlin on the shoulder. whatever “freshening up” meant to Lewis, it did not include changing his clothes.
“You two know one another,” Boyce announced accusingly.
“So the joint’s already jumpin’, huh?” Lewis said.
Caitlin looked around. By now most of the chairs were occupied by journalists, and a small, good-looking dark girl with a camera over her shoulder pirouetted lazily by the window. “Attractive young people,” Harvey said, looking at the girl. He picked up a handful of peanuts from a dish on the table and shoved them into his mouth.
“All waiting to watch the 82nd Airborne Division fall out of the sky,” Lewis said.
“What?” Harvey said.
“Well, naturally,” Boyce said sheepishly. “We could hardly not respond, could we? I mean ‘Reds,’ get it? ‘Invading a democratic ally.’”
“The 82nd Airborne!” Harvey said, turning to Caitlin as though this were supposed to mean something to her. “Well, you and I certainly picked one hell of a day to show up.”
“Relax,” Lewis said. “There’s no one here for them to fight with—this is a photo op.”
“In fact,” Boyce admonished, “this is a very important moment. Which requires documentation. Because when everyone back home sees this footage, of all these courageous paratroopers diving into the jungle, they’re going to understand the danger; they’ll see what an invasion means, and maybe then they’ll get it through their heads why we’re here. Why I’m here, why I’ve been posted in this Goddamned cow town for the last year and a half. Year and a half, mind you. No restaurants, no night life, white-trash hoodlums out at Palmerola terrorizing the women. My God,” he said to Caitlin. “I mean, have you seen Guatemala City?”
“Cheer up,” Lewis said. “A job’s a job.”
“What the hell is this—” Harvey interrupted. Caitlin followed his horrified gaze to where Ricky was goose-stepping through the lobby in his khaki shorts and black gloves.
“Just Ricky,” Lewis said. “On his way from the casino, looks like.”
“He’s not American, I hope,” Harvey said.
“We don’t strictly have jurisdiction over him,” Boyce said stiffly to Harvey. “We don’t strictly have jurisdiction over the casino—”
“No, but if it off ends you so painfully,” Lewis said, “why don’t you just—”
“This is a free country,” Boyce said shortly. “We intend to keep it that way. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Mr. Gumbiner and I have a—”
Lewis picked up Boyce’s beer bottle and waved it. “Be our guests,” he said. “Goodbye.”
“That Boyce,” he said as Boyce and Harvey disappeared through the lobby. “You don’t blame the laundromat ’cause you’ve got dirty laundry, right? I mean, if you want clean hands, stay out of the kitchen. Because people ought to stand behind what they do. You should say, ‘Well, look, these things are what we do. Because we believe in certain things. So we have to do certain things.’” There was something odd, Caitlin thought, about his distant look, as though he were peeking out from behind it to check her reaction. “Anyhow,” Lewis said, abandoning whatever he’d been driving at, “I’ve got to admit he’s pretty cute. Rotten liar, isn’t he? Poor guy, he’s never going to get out of Tegucigalpa.”
“He sure got out of here in a hurry,” Caitlin said. And with Harvey, her fallback position for dinner.
“Hope it wasn’t something I said.” Lewis held up the beer bottle and nodded to a waitress.
“Hello, Lewis.” One of the journalists sat down. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“How sorry?” Lewis said pleasantly. “’Cause I’m just curious.”
The journalist closed his eyes and smiled briefly, turning his back to Caitlin. “Bingo,” he said. “All kidding aside, though, I want to know something about this invasion.”
“What’s to know?” Lewis said, and winked at the waitress who was setting down his beer.
“I’d like to know, for example,” the journalist said, “if there was one; I’d like to know, for example, if any Nicaraguans actually crossed the border.”
“Got me,” Lewis said. “No one knows where the border is. Yuk yuk. Of course there was an invasion, honey bunch—didn’t you hear that on the news?”
“You know what, Lewis?” the journalist said. “Don’t you ever worry that someone might mistake you for garbage and throw you to the sharks?”
“Look at me, pal,” Lewis said, putting down his bottle. “What do I look like to you? Joint fucking Chiefs of Staff? If you want the story, why not go out and get it? Or better yet, why not just sit tight in Washington and listen while they tell it?”
“Thanks anyway, man.” The journalist tipped his beer slightly and sauntered off, nodding self-consciously to the good-looking dark girl, who didn’t see him.
“Rude little cliché-bound bastard,” Lewis said. A muscle jumped in his arm. “I give the guy enough information to jam a memory bank, and look at the way he acts.”
“So he’s an asshole,” Caitlin said. “That’s his problem, not yours.” She hadn’t followed the conversation, but that much was clear. “And you were very open with him.” She nodded. Then nodded again.
“Yeah.” Lewis closed his eyes. “Well. Mutual respect, in a manner of speaking.”
After a moment he opened his eyes again. “Look. Look at this spectacle; look at this mass of human waste. In a few hours, not forty kilometers away, the sky’s going to be bla
ck with specks—the 82nd Airborne floating down, all the cameras in this room pointing up. Photographs of vines, photographs of specks, give the folks back home a look at what it means to live near Communism. What do you bet three-quarters of these jerk-offs were in Vietnam, photographing specks and vines? After a hard day’s work, they’re going to come back here, sit around the pool, talk about the old days. Sit around the pool here, Panama City, San Salvador, Managua, get all weepy about how they sat around the pool in Saigon, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Bangkok. Hey, now they get to do it all again. Specks, vines, flames, buddies fallen in the line of duty yada yada, brings tears to the eyes.” He paused and darkened. “You’re thinking who am I to talk, right? Vines and specks, we all got a taste for it back then.”
So…yes. So why was Holly here, exactly? “I hate this place,” Caitlin said.
“So what are we waiting for?” Lewis said. “Fresh air! Countryside!” He motioned to the dreaming waitress for a check. “Come on, we’re out of here.”
Lewis’s jeep clung like an animal to the road as it undulated away from town. Clay-colored earth covered with acres of shacks, made from what looked to Caitlin like garbage—cardboard, plastic, scraps of wood—gave way to sunlit valleys and grand, pine-covered hills. Caitlin gazed out the window, until Lewis switched on a tape and driving rock and roll obliterated the landscape. “Our sound,” Lewis said. “But kids are still growing up on it. Isn’t that wild? We were rebels, but we created this enduring institution. Now it’s just one more thing that’s always been there. But for me it always sounds like that time when it was just invented. Remember what it was like? Remember how loose and new everything was?”
Caitlin remembered. There was always something happening, and something good just about to happen—no end of things ahead. Someone always had money, night horrors were gone by morning, the nasty and boring bits melted away in rainbows. “We had fun,” she said.
“Yeah,” Lewis said. “We had fun. But you know what?” He frowned and switched off the tape. “For me, there was a certain parting of the ways from you guys. During the war they used to ship us over to Bangkok to chill out. And a lot of times, in the bars, we’d hear the new songs, we didn’t know what was going on. The lyrics, I mean. What was everybody talking about? It was our home, right? I mean we were representing this place, we were fighting for its stuff, this was our generation. But evidently back at ‘our home’ there was this whole other life going on. So, I mean, who were we supposed to be?
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 28
