I spread a biscuit and hand it to her.
“If you feel all right, I was hoping you’d drive me to San Vincente.” She gestures at Bud Wilkins’s pickup truck. “I don’t like to drive that thing.”
“What if I didn’t want to?”
“You won’t. Say no to me, I mean. I’m a terrific judge of character.” She shrugs, and her breasts are slower than her shoulders in coming down.
“The keys are on the kitchen counter. Do you mind if I use your w.c. instead of going back upstairs? Don’t worry, I don’t have horrible communicable diseases.” She laughs.
This may be intimacy. “How could I mind? It’s your house.”
“Alfie, don’t pretend innocence. It’s Ransome’s house. This isn’t my house.”
I get the key to Bud’s pickup and wait for her by the bruised tree. I don’t want to know the contents of the crates, though the stencilling says “fruits” and doubtless the top layer preserves the fiction. How easily I’ve been recruited, when a bystander is all I wanted to be. The Indians put down their machetes and make signs to me: Hi, mom, we’re Number One. They must have been watching Ransome’s tapes. They’re all wearing Braves caps.
The road to San Vincente is rough. Deep ruts have been cut into the surface by army trucks. Whole convoys must have passed this way during the last rainy season. I don’t want to know whose trucks, I don’t want to know why.
Forty minutes into the trip Maria says, “When you get to the T, take a left. I have to stop off near here to run an errand.” It’s a strange word for the middle of a jungle.
“Don’t let it take you too long,” I say. “We want to be back before hubby gets home.” I’m feeling jaunty. She touches me when she talks.
“So Clovis scares you.” Her hand finds its way to my shoulder.
“Shouldn’t he?”
I make the left. I make it sharper than I intended. Bud Wilkins’s pickup sputters up a dusty rise. A pond appears and around it shacks with vegetable gardens.
“Where are we?”
“In Santa Simona,” Maria says. “I was born here, can you imagine?”
This isn’t a village, it’s a camp for guerrillas. I see some women here, and kids, roosters, dogs. What Santa Simona is is a rest stop for families on the run. I deny simple parallels. Ransome’s ranch is just a ranch.
“You could park by the pond.”
I step on the brake and glide to the rutted edge of the pond. Whole convoys must have parked here during the rainy season. The ruts hint at secrets. Now in the dry season what might be a lake has shrunk into a muddy pit. Ducks float on green scum.
Young men in khaki begin to close in on Bud’s truck.
Maria motions me to get out. “I bet you could use a drink.” We make our way up to the shacks. The way her bottom bounces inside those cutoffs could drive a man crazy. I don’t turn back but I can hear the unloading of the truck.
So: Bud Wilkins’s little shipment has been hijacked, and I’m the culprit. Some job for a middleman.
“This is my house, Alfie.”
I should be upset. Maria’s turned me into a chauffeur. You bet I could use a drink.
We pass by the first shack. There’s a garage in the back where there would be the usual large, cement laundry tub. Three men come at me, twirling tire irons the way night sticks are fondled by Manhattan cops. “I’m with her.”
Maria laughs at me. “It’s not you they want.”
And I wonder, who was she supposed to deliver? Bud, perhaps, if Clovis hadn’t taken him out? Or Clovis himself?
We pass the second shack, and a third. Then a tall guerrilla in full battle dress floats out of nowhere and blocks our path. Maria shrieks and throws herself on him and he holds her face in his hands, and in no time they’re swaying and moaning like connubial visitors at a prison farm. She has her back to me. His big hands cup and squeeze her halter top. I’ve seen him somewhere. Eduardo’s poster.
“Hey,” I try. When that doesn’t work, I start to cough.
“Sorry.” Maria swings around still in his arms. “This is Al Judah. He’s staying at the ranch.”
The soldier is called Andreas something. He looks me over. “Yudah?” he asks Maria, frowning.
She shrugs. “You want to make something of it?”
He says something rapidly, locally, that I can’t make out. She translates, “He says you need a drink,” which I don’t believe.
We go inside the command shack. It’s a one-room affair, very clean, but dark and cluttered. I’m not sure I should sit on the narrow cot; it seems to be a catchall for the domestic details of revolution—sleeping bags, maps and charts, an empty canteen, two pairs of secondhand army boots. I need a comfortable place to deal with my traumas. There is a sofa of sorts, actually a car seat pushed tight against a wall and stabilized with bits of lumber. There are bullet holes through the fabric, and rusty stains that can only be blood. I reject the sofa. There are no tables, no chairs, no posters, no wall decorations of any kind, unless you count a crucifix. Above the cot, a sad, dark, plaster crucified Jesus recalls His time in the desert.
“Beer?” Maria doesn’t wait for an answer. She walks behind a curtain and pulls a six-pack of Heinekens from a noisy refrigerator. I believe I am being offered one of Bud Wilkins’s unwitting contributions to the guerrilla effort. I should know it’s best not to ask how Dutch beer and refrigerators and ’57 two-tone Plymouths with fins and chrome make their way to nowhere jungle clearings. Because of guys like me, in better times, that’s how. There’s just demand and supply running the universe.
“Take your time, Alfie.” Maria is beaming so hard at me it’s unreal. “We’ll be back soon. You’ll be cool and rested in here.”
Andreas manages a contemptuous wave, then holding hands, he and Maria vault over the railing of the back porch and disappear.
She’s given me beer, plenty of beer, but no church key. I look around the room. Ransome or Bud would have used his teeth. From His perch, Jesus stares at me out of huge, sad, Levantine eyes. In this alien jungle, we’re fellow Arabs. You should see what’s happened to the old stomping grounds, compadre.
I test my teeth against a moist, corrugated bottle cap. It’s no good. I whack the bottle cap with the heel of my hand against the metal edge of the cot. It foams and hisses. The second time it opens. New World skill. Somewhere in the back of the shack, a parakeet begins to squawk. It’s a sad, ugly sound. I go out to the back porch to give myself something to do, maybe snoop. By the communal laundry tub there’s a cage and inside the cage a mean, molting bird. A kid often or twelve teases the bird with bits of lettuce. Its beak snaps open for the greens and scrapes the rusty sides of the bar. The kid looks defective, dull-eyed, thin but flabby.
“Gringo,” he calls out to me. “Gringo, gum.”
I check my pockets. No Dentyne, no Tums, just the plastic cover for spent traveller’s checks. My life has changed. I don’t have to worry about bad breath or gas pains turning off clients.
“Gringo, Chiclets.”
The voice is husky.
I turn my palms outward. “Sorry, you’re out of luck.”
The kid leaps on me with moronic fury. I want to throw him down, toss him in the scummy vat of soaking clothes, but he’s probably some sort of sacred mascot. “How about this pen?” It’s a forty-nine cent disposable, the perfect thing for poking a bird. I go back inside.
I am sitting in the HQ of the Guerrilla Insurgency, drinking Heineken, nursing my indignation. A one-armed man opens the door. “Maria?” he calls. “Prego.” Which translates, indirectly, as “The truck is unloaded and the guns are ready and should I kill this guy?” I direct him to find Andreas.
She wakes me, maybe an hour later. I sleep as I rarely have, arm across my eyes like a bedouin, on top of the mounds of boots and gear. She has worked her fingers around my buttons and pulls my hair, my nipples. I can’t tell the degree of mockery, what spillover of passion she might still be feeling. Andreas and the idiot boy s
tand framed in the bleaching light of the door, the boy’s huge head pushing the bandolier askew. Father and son, it suddenly dawns. Andreas holds the birdcage.
“They’ve finished,” she explains. “Let’s go.”
Andreas lets us pass, smirking, I think, and follows us down the rutted trail to Bud’s truck. He puts the bird cage in the driver’s seat, and in case I miss it, points at the bird, then at me, and laughs. Very funny, I think. His boy finds it hilarious. I will not be mocked like this. The bird is so ill-fed, so cramped and tortured and clumsy it flutters wildly, losing more feathers merely to keep its perch.
“Viva la revolución, eh? A leetle gift for helping the people.”
No, I think, a leetle sign to Clovis Ransome and all the pretenders to Maria’s bed that we’re just a bunch of scrawny blackbirds and he doesn’t care who knows it. I have no feeling for revolution, only for outfitting the participants.
“Why?” I beg on the way back. The road is dark. “You hate your husband, so get a divorce. Why blow up the country?”
Maria smiles. “Clovis has nothing to do with this.” She shifts her sandals on the bird cage. The bird is dizzy, flat on its back. Some of them die, just like that.
“Run off with Andreas, then.”
“We were going to be married,” she says. “Then Gutiérrez came to my school one day and took me away. I was fourteen and he was minister of education. Then Clovis took me away from him. Maybe you should take me away from Clovis. I like you, and you’d like it, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t be crazy. Try Bud Wilkins.”
“Bud Wilkins is, you say, dog meat.” She smiles.
“Oh, sure,” I say.
I concentrate on the road. I’m no hero, I calculate margins. I could not calculate the cost of a night with Maria, a month with Maria, though for the first time in my life it was a cost I might have borne.
Her voice is matter-of-fact. “Clovis wanted a cut of Bud’s action. But Bud refused and that got Clovis mad. Clovis even offered money, but Bud said no way. Clovis pushed me on him, so he took but he still didn’t budge. So—”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh, God.”
“Of course I am serious. Now Clovis can fly in his own champagne and baseball games.”
She has unbuttoned more of the halter and I feel pressure on my chest, in my mouth, against my slacks, that I have never felt.
All the lights are on in the villa when I lurch Bud’s pickup into the parking lot. We can see Clovis T. Ransome, very drunk, slack-postured, trying out wicker chairs on the porch. Maria is carrying the bird cage.
He’s settled on the love seat. No preliminaries, no questions. He squints at the cage. “Buying presents for Maria already, Al?” He tries to laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She swings the cage in giant arcs, like a bucket of water.
“Where’s Bud?” I ask.
“They jumped him, old buddy. Gang of guerrillas not more’n half a mile down the road. Pumped twenty bullets in him. These are fierce little people, Al. I don’t know how I got away.” He’s watching us for effect.
I suspect it helps when they’re in your pay, I think, and you give them Ted Turner caps.
“Al, grab yourself a glass if you want some Scotch. Me, I’m stinking drunk already.”
He’s noticed Bud’s truck now. The emptiness of Bud’s truck.
“That’s a crazy thing to do,” Maria says. “I warned you.” She sets the cage down on the patio table. “Bud’s no good to anyone, dead or alive. You said it yourself, he’s dog meat.” She slips onto the love seat beside her husband. I watch her. I can’t take my eyes off her. She snakes her strong, long torso until her lips touch the cage’s rusted metal. “Kiss me,” she coos. “Kiss me, kiss, kiss, sweetheart.”
Ransome’s eyes are on her, too. “Sweets, who gave you that filthy crow?”
Maria says, “Kiss me, loverboy.”
“Sweetie, I asked you who gave you that filthy crow.”
I back off to the kitchen. I could use a shot of Scotch. I can feel the damp, Bombay grittiness of the air. The rains will be here, maybe tonight.
When I get back, Ransome is snoring on the love seat. Maria is standing over him, and the bird cage is on his lap. Its door is open and Clovis’s fat hand is half inside. The bird pecks, it’s raised blood, but Clovis is out for the night.
“Why is it,” she asks, “that I don’t feel pride when men kill for me?”
But she does, deep down. She wants to believe that Clovis, mad jealous Clovis, has killed for her. I just hate to think of Maria’s pretty face when Clovis wakes up and remembers the munitions are gone. It’s all a family plot in countries like this; revolutions fought for a schoolgirl in white with blunted toes. I, too, would kill for her.
“Kill it, Alfie, please,” she says. “I can’t stand it. See, Clovis tried but his hand was too fat.”
“I’ll free it,” I say.
“Don’t be a fool—that boy broke its wings. Let it out, and the crabs will kill it.”
Around eleven that night I have to carry Ransome up the stairs to the spare bedroom. He’s a heavy man. I don’t bother with the niceties of getting him out of his blue jeans and into his pajamas. The secrets of Clovis T. Ransome, whatever they are, are safe with me. I abandon him on top of the bedspread in his dusty cowboy boots. Maria won’t want him tonight. She’s already told me so.
But she isn’t waiting for me on the patio. Maybe that’s just as well. Tonight love will be hard to handle. The dirty glasses, the booze and soda bottles, the styrofoam-lidded bowl we used for ice cubes are still on the wicker-and-glass coffee table. Eduardo doesn’t seem to be around. I bring the glasses into the kitchen. He must have disappeared hours ago. I’ve never seen the kitchen in this bad a mess. He’s not in the villa. His door has swung open, but I can’t hear the noises of sleeping servants in the tropics. So, Eduardo has vanished. I accept this as data. I dare not shout for Maria. If it’s ever to be, it must be tonight. Tomorrow, I can tell, this cozy little hacienda will come to grief.
Someone should go from room to room and turn out the lights. But not me. I make it fast back to my room.
“You must shut doors quickly behind you in the tropics. Otherwise bugs get in.”
Casually, she is unbuttoning her top, untying the bottom tabs. The cutoffs have to be tugged off, around her hips. There is a rush of passion I have never known, and my fingers tremble as I tug at my belt. She is in my giant bed, propped up, and her breasts keep the sheet from falling.
“Alfie, close the door.”
Her long thighs press and squeeze. She tries to hold me, to contain me, and it is a moment I would die to prolong. In a frenzy, I conjugate crabs with toads and the squawking bird, and I hear the low moans of turtles on the beach. It is a moment I fear too much, a woman I fear too much, and I yield. I begin again, immediately, this time concentrating on blankness, on burnt-out objects whirling in space, and she pushes against me murmuring, “No,” and pulls away.
Later, she says, “You don’t understand hate, Alfie. You don’t understand what hate can do.” She tells stories; I moan to mount her again. “No,” she says, and the stories pour out. Not just the beatings; the humiliations. Loaning her out, dangling her on a leash like a cheetah, then the beatings for what he suspects. It’s the power game, I try to tell her. That’s how power is played.
Sometime around three, I wake to a scooter’s thin roar. She has not been asleep. The rainy season must have started an hour or two before. It’s like steam out there. I kneel on the pillows to look out the small bedroom windows. The parking lot is a mudslide. Uprooted shrubs, snakes, crabs, turtles are washed down to the shore.
Maria, object of my wildest ecstasy, lies inches from me. She doesn’t ask what I see. The scooter’s lights weave in the rain.
“Andreas,” she says. “It’s working out.”
But it isn’t Andreas who forces the door to my room. It is a tall, thin Indian with a calamit
ous face. The scooter’s engine has been shut off, and rain slaps the patio in waves.
“Americano.” The Indian spits out the word. “Gringo.”
Maria calmly ties her halter tabs, slowly buttons up. She says something rapidly and the Indian steps outside while she finds her cutoffs.
“Quickly,” she says, and I reach for my pants. It’s already cold.
When the Indian returns, I hear her say “Jew” and “Israel.” He seems to lose interest. “Americano?” he asks again. “Gringo?”
Two more Indians invade my room. Maria runs out to the hall and I follow to the stairs. I point upwards and try out my Spanish. “Gringo is sleeping, drunk.”
The revolution has convened outside Clovis’s bedroom. Eduardo is there, Andreas, more Indians in Ted Turner caps, the one-armed man from Santa Simona. Andreas opens the door.
“Gringo,” he calls softly. “Wake up.”
I am surprised, truly astonished, at the recuperative powers of Clovis T. Ransome. Not only does he wake, but he sits, boots on the floor, ignoring the intrusion. His Spanish, the first time I’ve heard him use it, is excellent, even respectful.
“I believe, sir, you have me at a disadvantage,” he says. He scans the intruders, his eyes settling on me. “Button your fly, man,” he says to me. He stares at Maria, up and down, his jaw working. He says, “Well, sweets? What now?”
Andreas holds a pistol against his thigh.
“Take her,” Ransome says. “You want her? You got her. You want money, you got that too. Dollars, marks, Swiss francs. Just take her—and him—” he says, pointing to me, “out of here.”
“I will take your dollars, of course.”
“Eduardo—” Ransome jerks his head in the direction, perhaps, of a safe. The servant seems to know where it is.
“And I will take her, of course.”
“Good riddance.”
“But not him. He can rot.”
Eduardo and three Indians lug out a metal trunk. They throw away the pillows and start stuffing pillow cases with bundles of dollars, more pure currency than I’ve ever seen. They stuff the rest inside their shirts. What must it feel like? I wonder.
The Middleman and Other Stories Page 2
