Peter said, “Go slow. It won’t hold very long. Very slow.”
The group filed into the Land Rover. Levin brushed soil off the back of Peter’s shirt. The man with the pistol shepherded the woman in the red dress, his hand hovering around her lower back. The man kept nodding obsequiously to Peter, who returned him his kerchief and gestured toward the revolver on his hip.
“You need that here?”
“The bad types are starting to come down out of the trees,” the man said.
“No army up here? Gendarmerie?”
The man threw his head back with a silent laugh, saluted, and got into the Land Rover behind his woman.
Peter said nothing as he drove on, seemed angry. Levin felt responsible for his dirtied shirt, for the threatening pointlessness of the trip itself, even for the ugliness of the wasteland through which they had to pass.
“Strange thing, his giving you that rope for free,” he said, trying to cheer Peter up. He then told him about the man lending the battery thirty years ago in very nearly this same place.
“What about it?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know, it just seems unusual. Or do they normally help out strangers that way?”
Peter thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. But I don’t understand what gets into people anyway. I guess he just wanted to do it.”
It occurred to Levin that Peter had stopped to repair the taxi with no thought of any kind of reward for himself. He felt ashamed, then stupid as he struggled and failed to understand the man beside him, just as he couldn’t understand the horseman’s gift, or the truck driver’s so many years ago. Maybe what was so bewildering was Peter’s lack of any sentimentality or enthusiasm about the people he was helping. There had even been a tone close to contempt in the way he’d ordered the driver around. Why had he bothered?
• • •
Scraggly pines were appearing now on both sides of the road, with numerous stumps between the trees. The road was blacktop again here. Peter glanced at Levin and said, “We should be getting closer. You recognize any of this?”
“They lived in a bungalow off a side road. It wasn’t far from the manager’s office, if I recall. It came in from the right, I think, but it’s hard to recognize it with the trees gone.”
“I think the office would be a bit further up ahead, maybe we could ask there.” But suddenly Levin recognized a pile of white stones beside a dirt road leading off to the right. “Here!” he cried, and Peter swerved the truck into the narrow road. And there, a hundred yards in, stood the bungalow.
Levin said, “Last time I saw this was thirty-three years ago.” Peter pulled up before the porch. The screen was ripped and the door hung open, windows were broken, the place looked sullen. Levin got out and went onto the hollow-sounding porch, Peter behind him, and paused to look around at the junk still in the yard, the weeds, the dead bushes. He hadn’t dreamed it, after all; he could see Douglas scanning his blueprints and yelling for tea, and his wife appearing in her pink blouse and sling. They were going to beat the system, cruise the sea showing movies, lie on deck at night licking the stars. Then turpentine, be useful to the people, trying to matter. He walked into the living room. The four disintegrating books were still on the mantelpiece, and two long-cold carbonized logs lay half-burnt in the fireplace. The organ still stood against the wall. Douglas’s wife had once invited him to play; now he would never learn how she’d known he could. He went to the organ. His steps seemed to echo. The ivory had been picked off the keys. He sat on a box and pumped, but the rotted bellows wheezed. He remembered her coming out in her pink blouse, her hand held protectively over the cast. He looked around. The room was as he remembered; there was nothing here to steal, and their dream and their wonderings were vanished with them. To be useful, he supposed, was the idea that had captured them and Vincent as well, but something else had won out in the end.
“I have a feeling I could find the still. We drove to it from here that day,” Levin said as they walked outside. Peter seemed softened; “Was it like this before?” he asked. The romance of the search seemed to have entered him, and he liked it; Levin judged that it might be the profitlessness of it all that appealed to him, the romantic’s natural attraction to lost things. Perhaps, Levin speculated, because his mother had chosen a new man to replace his father. Like Levin himself, Peter seemed to live with one foot over the edge searching for the cloud he could stand on.
Peter drove the truck onto the paved road and proceeded slowly, Levin watching the roadside tangles of vines and bushes for a sign. Peter slowed as they passed the manager’s Alpine office, but there was no car parked in front, probably nobody inside. “Anyway, I’d rather not get the government involved,” Levin said. Not since she died had he felt Adele’s absence like this. He wanted her now, in the truck, saw her as she’d looked in her twenties, forty years before her death, with her flesh firm and her full arms around him. I guess I’m also looking for what was lost, he thought, and the idea seemed to illuminate his return to this place. It made him smile—then it’s her I’m looking for?—he almost said aloud, and then he thought, well, it’s as good a reason as any.
They continued on for a half mile. When Levin said he didn’t recall the still having been this far from the office, they stopped and instantly heard a chain saw starting up nearby. They got out and found a narrow footpath into the brush, and after a short walk, came on four men hacking at a fallen pine, with a pile of stems nearby in a clearing. On seeing the strangers the men immediately stopped, waiting for the blancs to speak. They were all young, in their twenties, except for a bent, old, silver-haired man in a ragged overcoat, with a machete hanging from one hand and a stick for a cane in the other. He was catching his breath. Toward him Peter walked, and after a touch to his cap and a rather formal, quiet greeting, he asked him if he had worked around the area very long. The man said he had, all his life. The other men watched, alert as trespassers.
“There was once a blanc living over there in that bungalow with his wife and two children, he operated a machine to make turpentine. Did you ever hear of him?”
“I worked for him,” the old man said, “when I was young.”
“And is the machinery still to be found?”
“It’s that way,” the old man said, and pointed in the direction Peter and Levin had come from.
With the old man, whose name was Octavus, sitting between them they drove back along the paved road. He held the machete point down between his legs. He had tiny eyes in a flattened face, and his dank old man’s smell filled the cab. “He smells like old iron, if that could smell,” Peter said toward Levin. Then to Octavus he asked in Creole, “Papa, are we getting closer or further away?”
“Près, près,” the old man said, pointing ahead.
“Près could mean a couple of miles,” Peter said. Just then the old man jabbed his finger toward the brush, croaking, “V’la, v’la,” and laughing like they’d been playing a game.
Stiff as he was, Octavus had to slide himself across the seat and onto the ground like a board. Peter grasped his elbow as he moved unsteadily into the brush, parting it with his machete and straightening up to shield his face. He walks like he’s parting the sea, Levin thought. The spiky vines snatched at their shirts and trousers as if defending a space. Levin, coming up behind, felt short of breath and recalled the altitude here, or was this his long-awaited heart attack? His slight struggling for air reminded him of Jimmy P.’s broken nose and how he would snort like a boxer whenever he exerted, the image reminding him that Jimmy must be dead some twenty-five years. And what happened to Jimmy’s abject faith in the Russians, in the built-in virtue of the working class and the inevitable unspooling of history into benevolent socialism? Belief that profound almost deserved having dimension and weight enough to be buried; a national holiday might be good, perhaps, when people could visit their dead convictions. Funny, how it was ea
sier to accept Jimmy’s disappearance from the earth than that of his passion and all the mix of love and vengeance that had gone into it. What was more dispiriting than the waste of devotion that leaves behind the vanishing footsteps of the people it has misled? Or was there some other point to all the striving, he wondered.
They stepped into a clearing filled with stumps and weeds. The old man stopped with Peter still touching his elbow, prepared to catch him if he toppled, and he pointed to the right, to a low butte with a dense mass of spiky vines at its base. The three men approached and peered through the vines, and once their eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the thicket, they saw deep within it a tall dark object, a black tube some six feet wide and maybe fifteen feet high. The thing leaned at an angle with its head raised against the butte as though it were resting, exhausted.
“I’ll be damned,” Peter whispered, “he really did it.” And then laughed at its outrageousness, but his eyes were serious.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Levin said, glad now that Peter had found some excitement to make up for the troubles on the trip, and relieved also that the thing had turned out to be real. “He dragged it all the way up from the port!” He laughed, and in his happiness he couldn’t help confessing to Peter, “You know, I was getting to where I wasn’t sure I’d dreamed the whole thing, like I’d invented an obsession of some sort. I’m really relieved, though I still don’t understand it.”
“Well, you’d have to see it to believe it. I gotta get a closer look,” Peter said, and he borrowed Octavus’s machete and attacked the tank’s vine barrier. Levin helped, dragging away the cut vines. “It’s like a leopard’s hideaway,” he said, breathing hard. “We saw one once in Africa, my wife and I. Leopards are very secretive, live in the middle of thorn bushes, a lot like this.” When they pulled away a dense eucalyptus the main tank was bared to the sunlight with a phalanx of smaller tanks piped together. Some pipes that must have connected to other tanks were amputated and ended in midair. The whole apparatus stood over them like a snake-armed god, Levin thought, a presence, a mute intention asking to be read. And it was much grander than it had seemed at first, maybe twenty feet tall by eight or ten wide.
“Christ!” Peter exhaled, “he really meant it, dragging all this up here!”
“I’d love to know if he ever lit it,” Levin said.
Peter turned to Octavus and asked in Creole whether they had ever operated the still. The old man sighed and lowered himself onto a stump. Peter sat on the ground in an easy descent and translated as he spoke. Levin bent in a crouch and tumbled back onto the ground. The old man’s voice was hoarse and cracked.
Mister Douglas had lit the fire and Octavus and three others had milked the pines, and he recalled Vincent the Jamaican who had supervised the process for only one day and then never came back. They had made turpentine, which was like a miracle coming from the pines, and everyone was given a liter to keep from the first draw, and barrels of it were trucked down to the port. And then sick people had begun showing up but they had nothing to pay for turpentine so Mister Douglas would give a cup or two to some of them for their bowels and skin troubles and mouth sores and the babies until in the end there were crowds of people some days, hoping for a cure of their sicknesses. Douglas would even examine them like a doctor, and his wife was like a nurse. “Some people paid with bits of goat meat or garden beans, but he needed more money to operate, as I understood,” Octavus said, “because my family has always run a store and I know about business. So Mister Douglas went down to the bank at the port and they sent people up to look at the thing, but they said it was not the right kind of pine and they wouldn’t give him anything.”
“We worked like this for five or six months,” Octavus went on, “until one morning when we started to work he came and told us to stop and said he had no more money to pay us. We all sat down and talked about this but there was nothing anybody could think of doing, and so we went away and never came back. But my place is near so every few days I would stop by just to look around and see if maybe he was going to start up again, and one morning I found him bent over on the ground before the main tank like he was at prayer, but he was not moving and I touched him and he looked up at me, his face was only bone. His wife, I should mention, her arm had swelled up and she went back to the States for an operation and took the children and we never saw her again. But Douglas held my hand and we sat together on the ground for a long time. He spoke very good Creole so I remember it well. He said that he was dying now and thanked me for my work—I never allowed slacking on the job, and I was the responsible one over the others, you see. And he said that I should be the owner now, and handed me a paper from his shirt pocket which I couldn’t read as it was in English. But the priest could read it and it said that I was the man inheriting. But where would I get the money to pay the workers? And so it ended.”
“Was that the last you saw of him?” Peter asked.
“No, after a while I went to his house to see how he was faring now that I knew how sick he was, and he was alone there with one of the old women giving him goat’s milk and so forth. He was glad to see me again and held my hand and then he wrote some words on a paper and gave it to me. I always keep it as I never saw him alive again.”
He reached under his arm to a worn kid sack and brought out a yellowed patch of note paper with Douglas’s name elegantly engraved on the top. Peter read it and handed it to Levin. If the idea goes let it go, but if you can keep it, do so and it will surely lift you up one day. It was signed, Douglas Brown.
Peter watched the old man intensely and now asked, “What idea did he mean?” Levin caught the tone of longing in Peter’s voice.
The old man’s head was square as a block; at one time he must have been very strong. He shook his head gravely and said, “I don’t know. I never understood. The tanks . . .”
He broke off, turning to the tanks, staring at them for a long time, trying, it seemed, to bring something to the surface. Levin thought it must all seem like a dream to him too after so many years. The old man seemed on the verge of speaking but gave up, shaking his head, his small eyes blinking, and Levin thought, And now it will all slide into oblivion, all that life and all that caring, and all that hope, as incoherent as it was.
As they made their way out to the road, Levin saw a shiny bolt lying in the weeds. He picked it up and put it in his pocket, wondering what metal could have kept its shine after so many years. Levin, once inside the truck, saw that the old man was moved and looked satisfied. “He looks happier now,” he said.
“Well, he passed it on,” Peter said.
• • •
Swaying and thudding on its unforgiving springs, the Land Rover shouldered down the devastated mountain, the diesel grinding against the crazy tilts of the all but vanished roadbed. Staring out the window, Levin said, “They really destroyed the whole landscape. I would never have believed it was possible. And there was a pretty good road up here, you know.”
Peter merely nodded. His silences, Levin understood now, were a kind of mourning for something far greater than his own life; the whole country was a surround of suffocating greed, inexpressible in the face of his hopelessness about changing anything. In the silence between them, Levin remembered once again how the last descent so long ago had brought him back with Vincent, dead Vincent now, to Mrs. Pat’s house and to Adele to whom he had told the whole adventure that evening, and even how they had rediscovered their bodies that night in the broad beams of moonlight flowing into the room at the hotel, and it was once again inconceivable that she was no more, not to be found anywhere. They were two giants in bed, four feet sticking out from under the covers. How he had loved to rely on her body, feeling small sometimes on top of her. All gone. Pitching back and forth now between the unlined truck door and Peter’s shoulder, the remorselessness of his loneliness astonished him. Douglas, he saw, had been driven crazy by hope. Hope on this mountain which
even then, thirty years back, was being stripped of its life down to dead stone. Who could feel the quality of that hope any more? Or was it illusion? But what was not? Up here he had caught a whiff of it again; blundering Douglas may have touched something almost sacred, having wanted to make a Madison Avenue life mean something and not knowing how except to do something so absurd. And maybe that was why his image, after so short a time in his presence, stayed on in my mind, Levin thought. It seemed now it would never leave him, even if he could only partially grasp its connection to himself.
He turned to Peter, whom, after all, he had known since he was a boy stuffing his mouth with cherries. “What do you make of it, Peter?” he asked.
“Make of what?”
“All this,” Levin said, gesturing out the window. “Everything.”
“Did you know my mother in New York?”
“Your mother? No, we met here. Why?”
Peter shrugged, but decided to continue. “They all thought they had the answer here. The political answer. Did you think that way?”
“Me? You mean some kind of socialism.”
“Yes.”
“I did, for a while.”
“What happened to all that?”