Port Tropique Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  for

  El Gringo Grande

  and

  El Hombre Derecho

  and for

  Don and Chris

  “He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. . . . Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”

  —Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

  “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”

  —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  THE FIRST THING WAS THE SKY, how wide it was and how many clouds there were in it. There were many clouds and every five minutes one of them would block out the sun for as long as a minute and it would still be hot but without the glare. The sun was very hot, it burned you even if you were already deeply tanned. When your back was turned it came into your shoulder blades and felt like the heat was coming from the inside out.

  Beautiful Indian girls passed on the street. It was impossible to guess their ages except that they were very young, between fourteen and twenty. Their wide eyes looked at you for a moment very seriously then turned away suddenly and completely.

  Franz sat in the zócalo and walked around the town like it was all a dream. He drank beer and ate onions and peppers in the bars by the market where men fell over dead drunk on their faces on the floor. He bargained for whatever he wanted to buy and didn’t buy if he didn’t feel the price was as low as he wanted to pay and didn’t feel badly later because he hadn’t bought something.

  It rained furiously for a few minutes every day and late at night the wind shook the birds from the flamboyana trees.

  HE HAD NEED TO GET AWAY, though he’d never had any great love for the tropics. As a boy in New Orleans the heat had seemed unbearable, he’d never gotten used to it, but now it soothed him, and he was beginning to like it.

  WALKING ALONG THE BEACH at madrugada, the hour just before dawn, companion only to darting lizards and the waves, Franz awoke in a dream where everything was purple, gray, black, invisible.

  THE LARGE STRANGER SAID NOTHING the entire time. The thin one told Franz someone would meet him tomorrow or the next day, perhaps the day after that, or the day after, here in the zócalo, at this time, and tell him what to do.

  Franz was going to ask the thin man why he couldn’t be more specific about the date but decided against it. As they walked away from him Franz watched the big guy. He leaned to his left and every few steps spit to the right. Both of the men wore pajamas. Franz was certain the big one carried a gun. There was no other reason for a big ugly goon to be wearing a sports coat when it was a good hundred degrees at ten o’clock in the morning.

  HE ORDERED A SUPERIOR and immediately a citizen came up and grinned and offered his hand and said something unintelligible meaning would Franz buy him a beer too. The people in Port Tropique were handsomer than in the rest of the country. Indian faces spread almost completely around the bowl-like head with eyes that looked straight at you only when you weren’t looking or when they were asking for something.

  Franz and his new friend drank their beers and sweated and listened to three compañeros sitting at a table play guitars and sing. They were off-key and drunk and the music sounded as bad as the bar smelled. There was a tiny old man sleeping on the floor of the urinal next to the bar but nobody bothered him when they used it, pissing over his body so that only the last few drops fell on him.

  A young boy came through the swinging doors wheeling a cart filled with empty bottles. He and the bartender jabbered back and forth for a few minutes before the bartender gave him some money and a bottle of beer. The boy’s teeth were very brown and he had a very skinny but muscular body. After he drank the beer he wiped his face with a black rag he kept tucked into his sleeveless shirt under his arm, insulted the bartender and everybody in the bar and went out with his cart.

  FRANZ SAT IN THE ZÓCALO across from the side of the fountain where the swishes hung out. If there weren’t so many babies he would have been convinced the entire country was queer. Every so often one of the pompadours turned toward Franz and said in a loud voice, “Do you like to dance with me?” or “Do you like homosexuals?”

  Early evening was the best time for sitting in the zócalo. You could watch the sun fall behind the church and the girls going home or to the shops. All of the girls wore crucifixes of course and Franz thought about fucking them on the cool stone floor of the big church while their bent little mothers and grandmothers genuflected and prayed and agonized.

  THE MAN REMINDED HIM OF A SNAKE, the way he twisted his neck and head around as he spoke, squirming his body and looping his arms through the spaces in the bench. His name was Renaldo, he said, but Franz privately labeled him El Serpiente.

  “You will bring to the old dock at eight-fifteen the empty suitcase. Nada mas. That’s all you have to know. Nada mas. Entiende?”

  After El Serpiente had disentwined himself from the bench and walked away Franz considered the danger of the situation. Until now he hadn’t really given it much thought, at least as much thought as he now considered he should give it, but seeing this serpent person made it very clear that death was a genuine possibility.

  Lying in the bottom of a ravine, the body of his eight-year-old son pinned dead to his chest underneath the wreckage, he had had a moment to consider it, but there he had lost consciousness and now there had been the intervening years to cloud the head. He remembered driving around the curves drunkenly, cursing, the boy silent, then just before the fall the large orange moon and his thought of Li Po’s attempt to embrace it.

  “Please allow my excuse. I am no an Indian. I am work for this bank—” the man was pointing to a business card. “I am officer of this bank. I would like me introduce me to you.”

  The fat, drunk, stupid officer of a bank who was not an Indian swayed and grinned hopefully at Franz. Franz saw some paper money on the ground by the man’s right foot that must have dropped out when he’d taken out his card.

  “You dropped something,” said Franz, and left the officer of a bank who was not an Indian staggering around by the bench looking for it.

  A RED AND WHITE 1941 WILLITS school bus squealed around the corner like a fat lady singing opera. Franz watched it zoom down the narrow street scattering citizens and even more recklessly careen around another corner coming as close to turning over as was possible without actually doing so. There were certainly more distressing facts of life in Port Tropique than berserk bus drivers but whenever Franz narrowly avoided being banged down by one that had headed full throttle for him and any other pedestrians unfortunate enough to have cause to undertake the crossing of a road he had a difficult time remembering what they were.

  BECAUSE OF THE NEW LAWS against the killing of elephants there was a shortage of African ivory and the Japanese had to get horn from North America, from Canada and Wyoming and Montana. Bighorn sheep, elk, moose, caribou, boar and deer were processed there, taken by truck to Tampa, ferried across the gulf to Port Tropique, transferred there and taken by freighter to the Far East, where the tusk and horn became costume jewelry, religious medals, chess pieces, assorted trinkets, then exported legally back across the ocean. Franz had once bought a Japanese made “genuine ivory” backscratcher in a discount store in San Francisco, but he couldn’t remember now what had happened to it.

  All he had to do was bring the suitcase, let them fill it, keep it for about twenty-four hours, then deliver it to the others, who would pay him for his services.

  Franz looked down from the window at Calle Cincuenta Ocho. In the middle of the street a man was lying under the f
ront end of a 1937 Cadillac fixing something. A woman and several children stood around waiting, also in the middle of the street. All of them were barefoot except for the man.

  “HE WENT TROPICAL, like any white man queer for both whisky and Indians does. Nothing fancy or unusual about it, except he had a wife who stayed with him, and that’s always unusual.”

  Franz was in The Habana, a Spanish-style café off the zócalo where the waiters wore white shirts and black bow-ties and old world politeness was expressed in no way more succinctly than by the ornate ceiling fans that revolved so as not to disturb even the large blue flies that slept on the blades. He was sipping coffee con leche while listening to a Norte Americano professor who was an expert on the local culture and was in Port Tropique on holiday tell with much flourish and an equal amount of undisguised relish the story of another Norte Americano professor, now dead, who had been an expert on the local culture and had gone native and come to a bad end.

  The problem for the professor who was not dead and who was telling the story, as Franz saw it, was that the professor who had gone bad and was now dead was also more famous, having made several important archaeological discoveries before achieving the state of disgrace, if only in the eyes of his academic colleagues. Not the least of the sins of the deceased and disgraced professor, according to the professor who was alive and apparently in academic favor and who was telling the story, was his having been memorialized as a figure of semi-mythic proportions by the members of the local culture on which he had been an expert.

  “That was poor Max’s undoing, that great white father crap,” the professor whose name meant nothing to Franz told his informal audience who were seated along the two white tablecloth-covered tables against the back wall of the café.

  There were six of them including the two tourist couples from San Antonio and Mobile who were staying at the Hotel Tropique, and Franz and the professor who was drinking tequila cocktails while he bad-mouthed the famous dead man Maximilian Kroner. It is a mistake to be famous while you are alive, thought Franz, but it is an even bigger mistake to be famous after you are dead and be unable to have the pleasure of ignoring your detractors.

  “Max Kroner came over from Germany and went to work for an American oil company exploring new territory. They sent him down here—he was just a young man then, twenty-two years old—and he fell in love with the jungle. Being out with sweating mules and poison snakes and billions of stinging insects in the hellhole heat, that’s what Max liked. That’s when he stumbled on the Esperanza ruins, working for the oil people. It wasn’t until later that he went to Harvard and started drinking. He came back here to die, and lasted another twenty years and became a great man. ‘El Max’ the Indians call him.”

  “What happened to his wife?” the wife from Mobile asked. “Is she still alive?”

  The professor drank down his tequila cocktail and nodded. “Yes, she’s still here. Frau Kroner has a large house on the road toward Domingo City, but she doesn’t like visitors unless they’re locals. She has a lot of family money.”

  Franz finished his coffee con leche and excused himself. It was late and he did not want to hear the professor start in with the wife from San Antonio and the wife from Mobile about the wife of the dead hero of the Indians.

  FRANZ NEVER SAW THE RATS, but in the morning there were always fresh droppings around the sink. He had learned not to keep any packets of food out, to always keep them in a tightly sealed jar, but in the morning there were always the rat pellets, as if they expected he would slip up one night and forget to replace the remaining biscuits in the jar. Or maybe it was just that they would come and stare into the jar, trying to figure out a way to liberate the contents.

  Liberate was a large word in the country, Franz noticed. Or libertad, to be more precise. Liberty. The government never admitted there were rebels in the jungle but sent troops regularly on search-and-destroy missions and kept patrols on constant duty in the Montejo section where the rich people lived. Some families, Franz was told, kept large houses just to have parties in and lived in other large houses.

  Franz hoped there would not be a revolution while he was there because the government allowed the smuggling operations to continue so long as they were given a percentage of the action. A new government would just mean that there would be a suspension of activity until a new deal could be worked out, but Franz could not afford the time.

  After I make enough to leave let them have it, he thought. Let them drag the ones with the refrigerators out of their houses on the Calle Montejo and shoot them or hang them up by their feet or their thumbs like they did to Mussolini and brand them and let las viejas pinch and bite them and scratch them until they bleed. Let them pretend there will never again be a privileged few who keep large houses just to have parties in only let it be after I am somewhere that I can read about it in the newspapers.

  HE RECALLED A TIME when he was a very young boy walking home from grammar school and got lost cutting through a strange yard where a woman was hanging out her wash. Running under the yellow and white sheets and blankets he had been afraid the woman would make fun of him for losing his way. It never occurred to him that she might take him for a thief. When his mother asked him why he was late Franz had cried and been unable to answer.

  ONCE IN NEW YORK Franz had heard a news report on the radio about how the Turban Saints and the Abyssinian Royal Nomads had rumbled in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Three persons were killed and the several injured were taken to such-and-such hospital. Like the results of a football game. It was always a shock to learn of the existence of worlds other than his own.

  HIS GRANDFATHER’S SUITCASE would do. It was all leather and covered with stickers from a dozen exotic places and had straps and was large enough to hold it even if it was mostly small bills. This was the suitcase Franz had carried around the world, or most of it, and if something was going to happen that wasn’t so good it would help to have an old friend along. He was sure his grandfather wouldn’t mind, not only because he was dead but because he had never minded a little scrape.

  His grandfather had been an unpredictable man. He’d once been supposed to meet his wife and daughter, Franz’s mother, for a holiday in Miami but instead boarded a liner in Boston and sailed to France. He’d wired them from mid-ocean saying he’d changed his mind and would see them back in New Orleans in six weeks.

  At first Franz thought he would take the five-shot Ridge-field .38 but changed his mind and took the Smith & Wesson .32 because it was the gun his brother had used on those jockeys in LA and would be more likely to not freeze up in a spot if only for sentimental reasons.

  THE LAST TIME FRANZ had seen his brother they were out at the Sea Breeze restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico. The guy at the table in front of them had just slumped nose first into his soft-shelled crab, the redhead he was with grabbing her purse and running out the door.

  “The bitch,” said Chris.

  All the men at the bar looked like Gilbert Roland and were drinking rye and soda or just rye. All the women at the bar looked like Ava Gardner and were drinking Cuba Libres with twists of lemon.

  “Hermano,” said Franz, feeling Spanish, or Mexican, or Cuban, though there is a great difference, but Latin, “I like this place. It’s what I like about the west coast of Florida, the feeling here.”

  His brother grimaced as he drank his beer.

  The drunk at the table in front of them got up and wiped off his face and tie with a napkin. He left some money on the table and stumbled out.

  “Wallace Beery in The Champ,” said Franz.

  “What?” said Chris.

  “That guy.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  They ate their crab and walked outside. There was a strong fish wind coming in off the water. It made Franz shiver in his shirt sleeves but it felt good and he waited until Chris started the car up before he got in.

  NIGHT IN THE TROPICS was supposed to be peaceful. Buzzing insects mayb
e but cooler and calmer without the white heat and hiss of the day.

  Franz was nervous but hoped he looked calm. He was at the old dock where the famous novelist and short story writer had once boxed the famous poet at the insistence of the poet and badly beaten him. They had boxed in the evening and the poet, wearing dark glasses and a hat, had left Port Tropique early the next morning.

  The famous poet had been several years older than the famous novelist. Both of them had gone on to write about the place but neither had ever referred publicly to the boxing match, this being much to the credit of the novelist, who was not widely known for his humility. After the poet’s death there was delivered to the by that time absurdly famous novelist and short story writer a letter from the poet thanking him for his kindness.

  It was only a short time before his own death that the novelist admitted the incident to a reporter from a national publication with the comment that he had taken it easy on the “old man,” that he could have “taken him apart” if he’d wanted to, but he’d known it would have “buried” him—the novelist—“even deeper” with the critics. A poet wasn’t supposed to know how to fight, anyhow, he said, and the “old fellow” had been no exception.

  Franz felt cold and uncomfortable waiting on the pier. He was on time and then he saw the running lights of the small boat coming in. He caught the line and looped it around a cleat. El Serpiente jumped onto the dock and took the suitcase. His face was yellow, one eye glowed red and the other gold. The snake handed the suitcase to a man on the boat whose face Franz could not see and the man went below with it.