The truck drivers followed one another, taking the same route across the water each time, such was their training or their instincts or their orders, and they soon churned the fording place into a quagmire. As might have been foreseen, one of the trucks bogged down and we, the loaders, had to stand in the water and remove every last bag from the bed. Thus lightened, the truck moved forward about eight inches before settling down again.
The officious Jack stepped in and began to direct this operation too. He took the wheel from a soldier. It was a matter of feel, he said. The trick was to go to a higher gear and start off gently and then shift down one notch and pour on the steam at the precise moment you felt the tires take hold. Jack did this. The truck made a lurch, and then another one, and things looked good for a moment, before all ten wheels burrowed down another foot or so, beyond hope. Jack said the gear ratios were too widely spaced in that truck. The young British officer, none too sure of himself before, pulled Jack bodily from the cab and told him to stay away from his vehicles “in future”—rather than “in the future.”
The second truck went down trying to pull the first one out and the third one made a run to town and never came back, for a reason that was not made known to us. We had a mountain of undelivered bags and no more empties to fill. Shovels were downed and we lay back against the bags, our first rest break in four or five hours. By that time there was very little fury left in the storm, though the rain still came. An army sergeant walked back and forth in front of us to show that he himself wasn’t tired.
“Good way to get piles,” he said to us. “Best way I know. Sitting on wet earth like that.” But no one got up, just as no one heeded him when he warned us against drinking a lot of water in our exhausted state.
Jack was breathing noisily through his mouth. He was the oldest and he had worked the hardest. The palms of his hands were a ragged mess of broken blisters. I watched my own fingers, curled in repose, as they gave little involuntary twitches.
It was our first chance for a talk. Jack said he had had his Chrysler towed into Monterrey, where he arranged to have the drive shaft straightened and two new universal joints installed. There had been no difficulty in tracking me from San Miguel. The juiceheads at the Cucaracha bar had put him on to the farm in British Honduras. He couldn’t locate me immediately in Belize. He went to the American consul and learned of the two Dupree farms in the country. I had missed a bet there, going to the consul, but Jack missed one too. He went to the wrong place, the Dupere farm, the one south of town.
The ranch manager there was an old man, he said, a Dutchman, who claimed he knew nothing of any Guy Dupree from Arkansas. Jack wasn’t satisfied with his answers and he insisted on searching the premises. The old man reluctantly allowed him to do so and before it was over they had an altercation, something about an ape. It must have been a pet monkey, only Jack called it an ape.
“That nasty ape followed me around everywhere I went,” he said. “He stayed about two steps behind me. The old man told him to do that. I had seen him talking to the ape. Whenever I opened a door or looked into a building, that nasty beast would stick his head in and look around too. Then he would bare his nasty teeth at me, the way they do. The old man had told him to follow me around and mock me and spit on me. I told that old Dutchman he better call him off but he wouldn’t do it. I said all right then, I’ll have to shoot him, and then he called him off. That was all. It didn’t amount to anything. I wouldn’t have shot the ape even if I had had a gun. But when I got back to town they arrested me. That old guy had radioed ahead to the police and said I pulled a gun on him. I didn’t even have a gun but they took my belt and shoes and locked me up.”
The black prisoners had begun to stir. They had come to their feet and were muttering angrily among themselves. The young American doper said they wanted cigarettes. Their tobacco and their papers were wet and they wanted something to smoke. It was a cigarette mutiny! Captain Grace whacked the ringleader across the neck with his leather crop and that broke it up. He ordered everyone to be seated and he addressed us through his bullhorn.
I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Jack couldn’t make it out. I asked a red-faced corporal and I couldn’t understand him either. The young doper had acquired an ear for this speech and he explained it all to us. The emergency was now over. The prisoners and the soldiers were to wait here for transport. Those of us who had been roped in off the streets were free to go, to walk back to town if we liked, or we too could wait for the trucks.
Captain Grace got into his Land-Rover and signaled the driver to be off. Then he countermanded the order with a raised hand and the driver stopped so short that the tires made a little chirp in the wet sand. The captain got out and came over to Jack and said, “You. You can go too.”
“Thanks,” said Jack. “Are you going to town now in that jeep?”
“Yes, I am.”
“How about a lift?”
“Lift?”
“A ride. I need a ride to town.”
“With me? Certainly not.”
“You’ve got my shoes at the station. I can’t walk all the way in like this.”
Captain Grace was caught up short for a moment by Jack’s impudence. He said, “Then you can wait for the lorries like everyone else.”
We walked all the way back to Belize, my second long hike of the day. Since Jack was handicapped, I let him set the pace. We soon pulled ahead of the others. Jack was barefooted but he was not one to dawdle or step gingerly on that account. He stopped once to rest, hands on knees, head low, in the dramatic posture of the exhausted athlete. The sun came out. We rounded a bend in the road and a cloud of pale blue butterflies appeared before us, blown in perhaps from another part of the world. I say that because they hovered in one place as though confused. We walked through them.
Jack talked about how good the fried eggs were in Mexico and how he couldn’t get enough of them. They were always fresh, with stand-up yolks, unlike the watery cold storage eggs in our own country. He talked about eggs and he talked about life. There was altogether too much meanness in the world, he said, and the source of it all was negative thinking. He said I must avoid negative thoughts and all negative things if I wanted my brief stay on earth to be a happy one. Guy Dupree’s head was full of negative things, and so to a lesser extent was mine. That was our central problem. We must purge our heads, and our rancorous hearts too.
For all I knew he was right, about Dupree anyway, but this stuff didn’t sound like Jack. This didn’t sound like the Jack Wilkie I knew in Little Rock who had a prism-shaped thing on his desk that said, “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” It was my guess that he had been reading something in his cell. Two or three days in jail and he was a big thinker! The ideas that are hatched in those places! I told him that Dupree’s malaise, whatever it might be, was his own, and that to lump the two of us together was to do me a disservice.
“Food for thought,” he said. “That’s all. I won’t say any more.”
The waters had receded from town. We were greeted by a spectacular rainbow that arched from one end of the estuary to the other. I watched for it to shift about or partially disappear as our angle of approach changed but it remained fixed. The color bands were bright and distinct—blue, yellow, and pink—with no fuzzy shimmering. It was the most substantial rainbow I’ve ever seen. There were mud deposits in the streets and a jumble of grounded boats along the creek banks. They lay awkwardly on their sides. Their white hulls had fouled bottoms of a corrupt brown hue not meant to be seen. Everyone seemed to be outside. Women and children were salvaging soggy objects from the debris. The men were drunk.
Jack went into the police station to claim his things. I stayed outside in the motor pool and looked around for Spann’s bag. It was gone. I had told him I would keep an eye on his bag and then I didn’t do it. Someone had made off with it. Someone was at this very moment pawing over his songs and his jade and his feathers, which, I suppose, Spann himself must have stolen,
in a manner of speaking. I found out later about his death. He was hanging sandbags over the crest of a tin roof—one bag tied to each end of a length of rope—when he slipped and fell and was impaled on a rusty pipe that was waiting for him below in the grass.
Jack came out on the porch fully shod in his U.S. Navy surplus black oxfords. His socks, I guessed, had been mislaid by the property clerk, or perhaps burned. He stood there chatting in a friendly way with a black officer, Sergeant Wattli maybe, two comrades now in law enforcement. All was forgiven. Jack saw me and waved his car keys.
The yellow Chrysler was parked in one of the garage bays. We looked it over and Jack pointed to some blood spatters on the license plate and the rear bumper. He laughed over the success of his trap, which was a razor blade taped to the top of the gas-filler cap. An unauthorized person had grabbed it and sliced his fingers. For a person whose own hands were bloody, Jack showed amazing lack of sympathy. No such security measures had been taken at the front of the car. The battery was gone. The two cable heads hung stiffly in space above the empty battery pan. Jack was angry. He said he was going to demand restitution. He was going to demand of Captain Grace that the city of Belize buy him a new battery.
“I’ll be right back and then we’ll go get us some bacon and eggs.”
He went into the station again but this time he didn’t come out. I grew tired of waiting and left a note in the car saying I would be at the Fair Play Hotel taking a nap.
Fifteen
I MADE MY WAY THROUGH a sea of boisterous drunks. It was sundown. There would be no twilight at this latitude. The air was sultry and vapors were rising from the ground. The drunks were good-natured for the most part but I didn’t like being jostled, and there was this too, the ancient fear of being overwhelmed and devoured by a tide of dark people. Their ancient dream! Floating trees and steel drums were piled up beneath the arched bridge. Through a tangle of branches I saw a dead mule.
A man pinched my arm and offered me a drink from a bottle—clear rum, I think. A few translucent fish scales were stuck to the bottle. He watched me closely for signs of gratitude. I took a drink and sighed and thanked him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand in an exaggerated gesture. At the edge of the stream some children were taunting a coiled black snake with an inflated inner tube. They were trying to make him strike at it. He would bump it with his snout but he had already sensed that the fat red thing wasn’t living flesh, only a simulacrum, and he refused to bring his hinged fangs into play.
I asked about Webster. The children hadn’t seen him. I wondered how he and other people had fared during the storm, thinking of them one by one, even to Father Jackie’s mother, on whose yellow flesh I had never laid eyes. Had Dr. Symes made it safely out of town? And if so, how? He wouldn’t ride a bus and he wouldn’t fly and he was certainly no sailor. What did that leave?
Cars and trucks were moving once again in the streets. There was a lot of honking, at drunks who blocked the way, and in celebration too of life spared for another day. I picked out the distinctive beep of a Volkswagen and almost at the same instant I saw Christine in her van. She was caught in the traffic jam. She was beeping away and slapping her left hand against the door. Victor was in his seat blowing a plastic whistle.
I went to her and said, “You shouldn’t be out in this.”
“I’m all right. It’s Melba.”
The glass louvers on the driver’s side were open and I saw Melba lying down in the back, nestled in amid all the art and green coconuts.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to get her to the hospital.”
“This is an emergency then.”
“You bet your boots it is.”
I walked point, flapping my arms in front of the van and clearing the way like a locomotive fireman shooing cattle from the tracks. “Gangway!” I shouted. “Make a hole! ¡Andale! Coming through! ¡Cuidado! Stand back, please! Hospital run!” I can put up a fairly bold show when representing some larger cause than myself.
All the rolling tables were in use at the hospital and I had to carry Melba inside the place and down a long corridor jammed with beds. She weighed hardly anything. She was all clothes. Her eyes were open but she wasn’t speaking. There was standing room only in the emergency room and not much of that. Victor found a folded wheelchair in a closet and Christine pulled it open and I set Melba down into it. We couldn’t find anything in the way of restraining straps and so I put a big Clorox carton on her lap to keep her from pitching forward.
Christine waylaid a nurse or a female doctor and this person looked into Melba’s eyes with the aid of a penlight and then went away, doctor-fashion, without telling us anything. I rested Melba’s chin on top of the empty brown box to make her more comfortable. A male doctor, an older man, began to shout. He brandished a stainless-steel vessel and ordered everyone out of the room who wasn’t a bona-fide patient. He had to repeat the order several times before anyone made a move. Others took up the cry, various underlings. Christine told me that proper identification was very important in a hospital. We looked about for admittance forms and name tags. But now the crazed physician was shouting directly at us. He wouldn’t allow us to explain things and we had to go. I wrote “MELBA” on top of the box in front of her chin and we left her there. I couldn’t remember her last name, if I had ever known it.
Scarcely was I out of the room when I was pressed into service again. This time it was helping orderlies push bedridden patients back to their rooms. These people, beds and all, had been moved into the central hallways during the storm, away from the windows.
Christine went off on her own to look for Mrs. Symes and to buck up sick people. She made a cheery progress from bed to bed, in the confident manner of a draftdodger athlete signing autographs for mutilated soldiers. Some were noticeably brightened by her visits. Others responded not at all and still others were baffled. Those capable of craning their necks stole second and third glances as she and Victor passed along.
I worked with a fellow named Cecil, who knew little more about the layout of the hospital than I did. He was out of sorts because it was his supper hour. He looked sick himself and I took him at first for an ambulatory patient, but he said he had worked there almost two years. Once he led us blundering into a room where seven or eight dead people were laid out on the floor, the tops of their heads all lined up flush as though by a string. Spann must have been among them but I didn’t see him that time, having quickly averted my gaze from their faces.
Our job was not as easy as it might seem. The displaced beds were not always immediately outside the rooms whence they came, and there were complicated crossovers to be worked out. The patients were a nuisance too. They clamored for fruit juice and dope and they wanted their dressings seen to and they complained when we left them in the wrong rooms or when we failed to position their beds in precisely the same spots as before. Cecil, old hand at this, feigned deafness to their pleas.
I was dead on my feet, a zombie, and not at all prepared for the second great surprise of that day. I found Norma. It was there in that place of concentrated misery that I found her at last, and my senses were so dull that I took it as a matter of course. Cecil and I were pushing her into an empty room, a thin gril, half asleep and very pale, when I recognized her from the pulsing vein on her forehead. Her hair was cut short and there was a red scarf or handkerchief tied around her neck, just long enough to tie and leave two little pointed ends. Some thoughtful nurse has provided this spot of color, I said to myself, though it was no part of her job to do so. My heart went out to those dedicated ladies in white.
I spoke to Norma and she looked at me. There were dainty globules of sweat on her upper lip. She had trouble focusing. I had a weak impulse to take her in my arms, and then I caught myself, realizing how unseemly that would be, with Cecil standing there. I drew closer but not rudely close. I didn’t want to thrust my bird face directly into hers as Melba had done so often to me.<
br />
“Midge?” she said.
“Yes, it’s me. I’m right here. Did you think it was a dream?”
“No.”
She couldn’t believe her eyes! I explained things to Cecil, babbling a little, and I searched my pockets for money or some valuable object to give him, to mark the occasion, but I had nothing and I just kept patting him on the back, longer than is usually done. I told him that I would now take charge of her and that he could go on about his business. Cecil was turning all this over in his brain and I could see he didn’t believe she was my wife, even though she had called my name. I could see in his eyes that he thought I was a perverted swine who would bear watching. And it is to his credit, I suppose, that he refused to leave me alone with her. He stood in the doorway and watched for his supper and kept an eye on me.
I questioned Norma at some length. Her answers were slow in coming and not always to the point. I was patient with her and made every allowance for her condition. She said she had been in the hospital about a week or ten days. Her appendix had been removed. A week ago? Yes, or maybe longer. Then why was she not yet on her feet? She didn’t know. How had she happened to get appendicitis? She couldn’t say. Had she been in a private room all along, or a ward? She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember whether there was anyone else in her room or not? No. Did she not know there was a great difference in the cost of the two arrangements? No.
She turned away from me to face the wall. The maneuver made her wince. She stopped answering my questions. I had been careful to avoid mention of Dupree and other indelicate matters but I had somehow managed to give offense. I smoothed out her sheet and pulled it tight here and there. She didn’t shrink from my touch. She had turned away from me but my touch wasn’t loathsome to her.
“I have a little surprise for you,” I said. “I brought your back pills all the way from Little Rock.”
She extended a cupped hand behind her.