Blow-Down, page 1
Blow-Down
Lawrence G. Blochman
Chapter One
New Job
For hours now, the purple mountain wall, shivering grotesquely in the steamy heat, had been following the train as though drawn by two shining ropes of steel that stretched back endlessly through the vast, monotonous green sea of banana plantation. At last a few manaca huts, a few whitewashed shacks with corrugated iron roofs broke through the glaring verdure. The locomotive whistle shrieked.
The train boy came out to collect the empty beer bottles and said, “Puerto Musa, Señor.”
Walter Lane looked at his watch. When the train boy had gone back inside the car, Lane glanced around to make sure he was alone with the dozen wicker armchairs on the observation platform. Then he took the telegram from his pocket. He had read it twenty times since it was delivered to him in the Capital that morning, but some morbid fascination compelled one final reading:
April 3, 1938
Post mortem analysis indicating Bossert’s blackwater fever to be simple case of arsenic poisoning we release you further obligations continue present mission stop either return home or proceed Puerto Musa on own responsibility. Haliaetus.
Lane tore the telegraph blank into tiny bits which fluttered into the swirling, dusty wake of the train.
When the train stopped, Lane got off—a tall, deliberate, well-muscled young man in his late twenties. No other passenger got off the salon car at the station; the rest stayed with the train as it puffed wearily on its last quarter-mile to the end of the pier where a banana steamer gleamed white against the dazzling blue of the Caribbean. Lane walked beyond the platform, put down his suitcases, turned his head slowly for his first appraising glimpse of Puerto Musa.
There was nothing particularly sinister in the prospect. The little town was sprawled along the narrow rim of civilization between sea and jungle, sprawled supinely, gasping for breath, yet scarcely breathing. The gaudy flag above the Comandancia drooped limply in the anesthetic heat of late afternoon. The bare-footed soldiers lolling on the Comandancia steps were as still as corpses. Lifeless, too, were the open-front shops and dingy cantinas on one side of the railway tracks—the seamy side. Only signs of activity in the suffocating panorama was the movement of banana conveyors—great red towers moving slowly down the pier.
But, although he had never been in Puerto Musa before, Walter Lane knew there would be activity on the other side of the tracks, in the fruit company town. Here, leading from a lush, green plaza, was a broad, palm-shaded street that paralleled the sweep of white, sandy beach all the way to the radio towers on the point of land opposite the pier. Here were neat rows of yellow houses with red roofs and rain-water tanks, close-cropped lawns and trimmed hibiscus hedges. Here were well-screened offices and homes on concrete stilts, housing the administration and administrators of the Caribbean Fruit Company for this particular sundrenched hunk of the American tropics. And here, too, was Walter Lane’s immediate business.
Lane took off his hat—a battered. Stetson with brim that curled unevenly to an angle at the front, in the manner of a tricorn—and mopped his brow. His hair was straight and dark, with mahogany highlights, and grew down to a point at the center of his forehead. The forehead returned the compliment by growing up to a point deep into the part on the left side of his hair. The tanned, intelligent face that reappeared at last from behind the large handkerchief seemed to be erected upon the quarry-faced cornerstone which served him as a jaw. It was a hard jaw, yet it did not make his expression hard; determined, purposeful, perhaps, but not hard; his humorous, deep-set eyes, dark and almond-shaped, prevented that.
With easy, unhurried strides, Lane walked into the fruit company settlement until he came to a building that bore the multiple sign: Port Office—Division Manager—Superintendent of Agriculture—Division Engineer. He went through the double screen doors, and found himself leaning on a long counter, looking at a room full of desks. A score of office workers were busy there, most of them Latin-looking clerks. Two of them were girls who were not Latin-looking. A third girl came into the general office from a door marked Mr. Perry and sat down at a typewriter almost opposite Lane. She was a small girl, with fluffy blond hair, and her nimble fingers began an immediate tattoo on the typewriter. Lane cleared his throat. The girl looked up, but did not stop typing.
“I’m looking for the division manager,” Lane said.
“The office closes at four,” the girl said, jerking at the carriage return with a slim white forefinger.
“Not when there’s a ship in port, it doesn’t,” said Lane. “I don’t see many cars of fruit on the dock yet. My guess is that you’ve still got a long day ahead of you.”
The girl stopped typing at last. She looked at the khaki jacket hanging in the crook of Lane’s elbow, nearly white from many launderings, almost as white as his shirt which was open at the throat, displaying the furry darkness of his chest. She seemed to be studying the blue necktie which dangled from the pocket of the coat.
“You a banana herder?” she asked.
“Do I look like one?”
“You talk like one.” She pulled the page from her typewriter, inserted a fresh one. “Mr. Perry’s on the dock,” she said.
“He be back soon?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’ll wait,” said Lane. “Perry’ll want to see me. He has a job for me.”
The girl looked up again. She stared at Lane long and curiously.
“Does Mr. Perry know that?” she asked.
“Not yet. That’s what I’ve come to tell him.”
“I’m sure he’ll be surprised and delighted,” the girl said. “Maybe you ought to go over to the Musa Club and have a drink—just in case you’re surprised too.”
“I’m all right here,” said Lane, leaning his elbows on the counter.
The girl didn’t even shrug. She went on typing, sublimely indifferent to Lane’s thorough and approving scrutiny.
Yes, she was a small girl, all right—small, heartshaped face—No, not heart-shaped, either. Heartshaped faces were usually doll-like and insipid, and hers wasn’t. Her chin was small and pointed, her mouth small but full, her nose small with just a suggestion of an inquisitive tilt at the end Her cheeks were broad, however, to accommodate her tremendous blue eyes—big, sapphire blue eyes that were limpid and solemn but somehow seemed to hold a sly, latent wink far down in their wise, luminous depths. It was startling to see such large eyes on such a small girl. Small girl, yes, but not puny. It was easy to see that there was plenty of substantial, delightfully organized personality beneath the deceptively stiff contours of her crisp linen frock. She had been modeled with a lavish and graceful hand.
“Enjoying yourself?”
Lane colored slightly at the sound of the girl’s voice—a rather low-pitched voice, exciting in its throaty undertones. There was no annoyance in it, however. She was even smiling faintly.
“Immensely,” he said.
“Then we may as well get the preliminaries over with,” the girl said. “It will save time if I tell you that my name is Muriel Monroe, that I’ve been Mr. Perry’s secretary for three years, that I didn’t come down here to run away from a broken heart, that I like the tropics—and that I’m not free tonight!”
Walter Lane grinned. His teeth were very white and regular except for a slight space between the two front upper ones.
“What about tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Previous engagement,” Muriel said. “There are exactly seventeen women in the Puerto Musa division, twelve of whom are married. And there are two hundred and eleven men—if you include the chief train dispatcher, who is bald and has false teeth.”
“So I’m No. 212?”
Muriel Monroe did not reply. She was typing again. Very efficient, Lane reflected; efficient and beautiful, and refreshing; an amazing contrast to the usual Hollywood picture of the white woman gone to pot in the tropics. In the Hollywood version, white women quickly became indolent and slovenly—mentally, morally; and physically. It took only a few months for them to lose their youth, their virtue, their ambition, and their good looks. They became pale, washed-out caricatures of themselves, wasted by the heat, ravaged by some private digestive disorder. But not in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean tropics, they were more like Muriel Monroe. Muriel Monroe, in fact, was the very symbol of the tropics where the fruit companies had dug in. The fruit companies were so damned American. They refused to admit that the subversive influences of the tropics were a match for American business genius. They ignored the heat and the rains, screened out the mosquitoes, cleared away a million acres of bosque, strung a network of telephone lines a hundred miles into the jungle, laid down a private railway system to connect outlying farms with a made-to-order port, erected wireless stations to co-ordinate shipping and agriculture. The companies had converted jungles into a vast American factory to turn out bananas by assembly-line methods—a tightly organized machine to deliver perishable fruit to the refrigerated hold of a steamer within twenty-four hours of being cut from a plantation eighty miles away. The tight organization of course called for efficient American office routine, which in turn called for smart, quick, clear-eyed American office girls: Muriel Monroe and her tribe. Lane liked their kind. The only trouble was, even in 1938, there wasn’t enough of them to go around.
“What about next week, then, Miss Monroe?” Lane asked.
“How do you know you’ll be here next week?”
“I’m going to work here, Miss Monroe.”<
The girl ran her thumb along the top of a card-indexed drawer, not looking at Lane.
“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” she said.
“Why not? Perry needs a man. He had to send Bill Bossert home in a box after his blackwater fever.”
Muriel looked at him again. She smiled somewhat strangely.
“So you think you’ll get Bill Bossert’s job?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
The girl’s smile vanished. She was looking right through Lane—or over his head.
“You might ask Mr. Perry about that,” she said. “Here he is.”
Dave Perry, division manager for Caribbean Fruit Company at Puerto Musa, towered impressively behind Lane, an imposing figure in starched whites. His hair, too, seemed starched—bushy, straw-colored, streaked with gray, standing up straight to make him look taller than he really was. He examined Lane with shrewd, not unkindly eyes that peered out from under pale eyebrows that would have been invisible if they weren’t so luxuriant. Deep rictus furrows framed his straight, thin-lipped mouth and a perpetual frown bisected his forehead—a frown that gave him a worried, thoughtful, harassed air.
“Looking for me?” the division manager asked.
“I’m looking for a job,” said Lane.
“Ever work in the tropics before?”
“Sure. I’ve been up and down the banana coast for the last year or so.”
“Where, for instance?” Perry’s voice was sharp, crisp, challenging.
“I was timekeeper for Standard at La Ceiba.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“For a better job—with United Fruit at San Pedro Sula.”
Perry looked Lane over carefully from head to foot. The young man was probably telling the truth when he said he had worked on banana farms. There were tell-tale brown stains on his white shirt—the indelible stain that banana sap makes when it dries, the hall mark of the banana herder.
“Why didn’t you stick with United Fruit?” he asked. “They’re a big outfit—twice as big as we are. And they’ve got twice as much room at the top for ambitious young men.”
“Maybe I’m not ambitious,” said Lane.
“Why did you leave Pedro Sula? Shoot a politico?”
“No. I didn’t shoot anybody.”
“Gal trouble?”
“No. I just quit. Restless; I guess.”
“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” said Perry pontifically. “What are you grinning at? Your name’s not Stone, is it?”
“No. It’s Walter Lane—the lane that has no turning.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“What difference does that make? I can grow bananas. That’s all you want, isn’t it? I can start from scratch with new root stocks and have your new supplies shooting nine-hand fruit in ten months. I can draw up a pay sheet and cuss out backers and checkers and cutters in fluent and profane Spanish. I can keep your drainage ditches clean and the suckers pruned and the mozos sober—except on payday. Isn’t that enough?”
Perry said nothing. He took a pack of King Bees from his pocket. He shoved a cigarette pensively into his mouth, then offered Lane one as an afterthought. As he squinted through the smoke, he tried to size up this rangy youth. It was hard to place him exactly. He was obviously educated. That wasn’t unusual. Most of the young men who came to work on the banana farms these days were educated—but they were hired in the north, before they left the States. The few casual drifters who still came through, applying for spot jobs like Lane, were not Lane’s type; they were old-timers, the last of the tropical tramps, men like Pinky Hind, the men that Lane’s generation were supplanting.
“Well, do I get the job?” Lane asked after a long pause. “Or do I have to wait until Stilton comes down from the Capital?”
Dave Perry dropped his cigarette. “Who told you Mr. Stilton was coming down?” he demanded.
“I’ve just come down from the Capital myself,” Lane said. “I get around the cantinas some. And I keep my ears open, as well as my mouth.”
“You know Mr. Stilton?”
“No.”
There was just a second of hesitation in Lane’s answer. Or did Perry imagine it? He said:
“Mr. Stilton hasn’t anything to say about running Puerto Musa division.”
“I thought he had plenty to say about anything anywhere in the Caribbean,” Lane chuckled.
“Why didn’t you strike Mr. Stilton for a job in the Capital, when you were up there?” Perry seemed a trifle annoyed.
“I don’t want to work in the Capital,” Lane said. “I want to work on the coast. At Puerto Musa.” He grinned at Muriel Monroe. “I like it here.”
“You know what a timekeeper gets here?” Perry asked.
“I think so. Seventy-five a month, quarters, ice, electricity, twenty pounds of fresh beef, and one servant. Right?”
The division manager hesitated an instant, then turned to his secretary. “Call Rio Sangre;” he said. “Get Hind on the phone.”
“Where’s Rio Sangre?” Lane asked, as he watched the girl twist the crank on a bracket telephone. “End of the line, I suppose.”
“Not quite,” said the division manager. “In fact, it’s not on the main line at all. The Rio Sangre District feeder line branches north at Kilometer 20. Your farm is about ten kilometers toward the river. You’ll have the river in your backyard, in fact.”
“Rio Sangre on the wire, Mr. Perry,” said the secretary.
“Hello, Pinky,” said the division manager into the instrument. “I’ve got a new timekeeper for you. Will you come down and get him tonight? … All right. Meet him at the junction, then. His name is Walter Lane. I’ll send him up with the mules on the morning train.”
Perry hung up.
“You’ll have to sleep in port tonight, Lane,” he said. “There’s a room over the club you can have. Miss Monroe will show you how to get there. And have Alcott put his name on the payroll, Miss Monroe.”
The division manager shook hands silently, then frowned his way into the inner office and closed the door.
“We were talking about next week, when we were so rudely interrupted.” Lane was leaning over the counter again, smiling at Muriel Monroe.
The girl’s lips parted, but something held back her reply. She looked at Lane for a long time with a peculiar expression of uncertainty, of something repressed, something that may have been eager curiosity or perhaps merely a shadow that flickered through her blue eyes like the ruffle of wind on the sea. She did not smile as she said, “If you get back to port in six weeks, you’ll be lucky.”
“My luck’s always been uniformly good,” Lane countered.
“It’s run out now,” the girl said. “You’ve got Pinky Hind for an overseer.”
“What’s the matter with Mr. Hind?”
“You’ll see. Was Bill Bossert a friend of yours?”
“Never met the man,” said Lane.
“He was Pinky Hind’s timekeeper when he got sick,” the girl said. Something about the way she said it gave Lane a queer sensation of cold at the pit of his stomach.
Chapter Two
Banana Herder
Pinky Hind was sullen of spirit, surly of speech, and red of hair—a composite condition which had been his for nearly fifty years. Pinky Hind’s life had been blighted at the baptismal font. The infant Hind had been christened “Barnaby” by unimaginative and short-sighted parents, who, although they had given him a name inevitably destined to indelicate contraction, ribald paraphrase, and an embarrassing initial, were unfortunately unable to give him the sense of humor to go with it. And since he was also endowed with bowed legs, prognathic profile, and pitifully inadequate stature, he was preordained for the permanent role of embattled gnome. If he wasn’t fighting because of a nickname—only Dave Perry called him Pinky, for Auld Lang Syne—he was fighting to compensate for his smallness. He even fought professionally on two occasions—a soldier of liberty on each side successively in the same electoral battle in Nicaragua—but usually he fought from an inner urge.
He had come to the tropics nearly thirty years previous, when he and Dave Perry were banana herders together in Costa Rica. But while Perry had stuck to fruit growing and become an executive, Hind varied his career with aggressive loafing, serious drinking, and any job which came to hand. He had bossed a dragline crew in Colombia, helped build a railway in Honduras, floated mahogany logs down the Belize River. He had dabbled in cacao in Cuba and coffee in Guatemala. For a year he had done very well for himself, smuggling chicle over the Yucatan border. The rest of the time he had occupied himself chiefly with bananas and hating the world.
