Blow-Down, page 2
The announcement that Walter Lane was arriving with the mules was not calculated to relieve Pinky Hind’s chronic misanthropy. On the contrary. A green timekeeper and green mules were too much to inflict upon an overseer at once. If the mules had been Nicaraguan animals, it wouldn’t be so bad, but they were American mules. American mules might be better at hauling heavy, banana-laden trams than the smaller, tropical-bred mules; they were better riding animals, too; but they were snobs. American mules had been raised on hay and oats, and turned up their black, rubbery noses at the idea that any self-respecting mule should eat green bananas—bruised bunches, rejected as unfit for shipment. It took two months for an American mule to go native, bury his pride, and eat green bananas—two months of uselessness, mulish cussedness, and, probably, frequent walking home across muddy miles of plantation. It seemed only fitting, therefore, that the newly arrived timekeeper and at least one of the newly arrived mules should learn their lessons together.
Walter Lane had hardly time to walk up the steps of the little yellow farmhouse on stilts, cross the screened-in veranda, and drop his bags in the bare, cheerless bedroom before the bandy-legged overseer was standing on the threshold.
“Come on, lead pants,” said Hind. “We’re ridin’ the farm.”
“I was going to unpack—”
“You can unpack on your own time,” said Hind. “This is a workin’ day.”
Lane glanced at the .45 on Hind’s left hip. Without a word he turned around, opened a suitcase, lifted out his own belt and holster, and buckled them on. Then, slowly and deliberately, he pushed two octaves of cartridges info the front of the belt.
“Never mind the artillery,” Hind said. “We ain’t goin’ huntin’.”
“I always dress in the latest style of the country,” Lane replied. He bent over again to pick up his Acapulco—a long, Mexican machete—slipped his wrist through the loop of the finely tooled leather scabbard. “Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s look at the finca.”
The stockman was waiting at the hibiscus hedge with the saddled mules, and the two men crossed the railway tracks to follow a tram line deep into the bananas. They rode for a mile down a green cloister of broad, arching leaves that met overhead in an interlacing lattice of shade. They crossed a drainage ditch, then turned into a narrower, thickly grown Gothic aisle. They could see no more than fifty feet in any direction, and then only a green monotony of leaves and stalks, old tattered leaves like battle flags, young sucker leaves like unfurled banners.
The new mule was leaping rotted logs and stumps of felled jungle, floundering through mud, galloping through undergrowth that sang with mosquitoes, trying to brush off his rider against passing trees. The new timekeeper, however, was handling his fractious animal-well—too damned well, Pinky Hind thought. They had been riding for two hours and were at the eastern limit of the plantation before Pinky saw the opportunity he had been awaiting.
The sea of restless banana fronds broke against a cliff of virgin jungle, a creeper-hung wall of giant ceibas, ironwood, and mahogany. In a little cleared space not fifty yards beyond the edge of the plantation there was a manaca-thatched hut in an obvious state of disrepair. Walter Lane reined up. He pointed.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“Engineers built that shack when they was clearin’ the land for plantin’,” Hind said.
“Not the shack. I mean that gadget shining on that branch above it. Looks like a porcelain insulator.”
Hind was spared the necessity of answering, for Lane rode closer to the shack and dismounted. He dismounted, Hind noted with satisfaction, as a man who was jungle wise, a man who, knowing that a halter rope can furnish transportation to incredible myriads of stinging insects in amazingly few minutes, never ties an animal to a jungle tree. When Lane walked into the shack, the red-headed overseer rode close to the riderless mule, unslung his machete from his pommel, and brought the flat of the blade down across the surprised rump of Lane’s animal. The mule reared, bolted, reared again, then galloped into the bananas.
Hind could see Lane through the doorway of the shack, bending over something so intently that he did not even turn around.
Hind dug his heels into his own mule’s flanks, rode off in the opposite direction. Feeling quite pleased with himself over a good afternoon’s work, he jogged leisurely across the plantation to the Rio Sangre commissary where he killed two hours and six bottles of beer talking to the overseer of the next farm.
When he got home he was surprised to hear water splashing in the shower. He stalked in, bursting with profanity for a careless houseboy. When Walter Lane’s dripping head peered around the painted partition, the profanity died. He could only say:
“What the hell happened to you?”
“My mule ran away.” Lane spouted water, grinned, and churned up a lather that had a carbolic smell.
“I tried to catch him,” lied Hind. “You were gone when I went back for you. How’d you get home so quick?”
“I found my way to the labor camp and borrowed a mule from one of the contractors.”
“You don’t waste no time findin’ your way around.”
“I’ve got a good bump of direction.”
“You got—” Hind paused, his mouth open. He was staring at a blue blur of tattooing that developed on Lane’s chest as the soapy foam dissolved under the streaming shower. Lane turned his back.
“Hey, go easy on that agua!” Hind resumed. “The rain-water tank ain’t very full, and a banana herder don’t have no call to smell like the flowers in May, anyhow. Besides, we eat in ten minutes.”
“Good,” said Lane. “I could eat a horse—a small one—if it was cooked right.”
“Black bean soup with pigs’ tails,” Pinky Hind announced as they sat down to dinner. “You prob’ly don’t like it, but I do, so you’ll get plenty.”
“Very tasty,” said Lane, after the first spoonful.
“The young squirt that was here before you hated it,” said Hind.
The second spoonful stopped suddenly at Lane’s lips. He sipped it cautiously. He remembered reading somewhere that arsenic was practically tasteless, except in some compounds which smelled of garlic. There appeared to be a touch of garlic in the black bean soup.
“I don’t suppose,” Lane said, “that a man could get blackwater fever from bean soup.”
“You mean Bossert? Hell, no. He was just careless about takin’ his quinine, that’s all.”
Lane pushed back his plate. “You didn’t like Bossert, did you?” he asked.
“Why should I? Why should I like any o’ the young squirts the company is sendin’ down here nowadays to push us old-timers out in the tall grass? Why should I kiss any guy’s ankle just because he’s young and full o’ table manners and education, when he don’t grow no bigger bananas than we did when we was all full o’ rum and machete scars and maybe a hunk o’ lead or two? Why should—?”
“In other words, why shouldn’t you get rid of Bossert just as quickly as possible?”
“Was Bill Bossert a friend o’ yours?”
“Never met him. I was just wondering if you weren’t planning to get rid of me, too.”
“I wouldn’t of had to get rid o’ Bossert,” Hind said. “If the fever hadn’t of got him, he’d have queered himself soon enough. He wasn’t no banana herder. He was a crook o’ some kind, hidin’ out down here.”
“Was he?”
“He must ’a’ been. He had three different passports. They all had his picture on ’em but they all had different names.”
“Nice of him to show them to you,” said Lane.
“Hell, he didn’t show ’em to me. When Bossert got the fever, Doc Janvier phoned to bring his stuff down to the company hospital when they thought he was goin’ to kick in. I just happened to see the passports when I was runnin’ through his stuff.”
“I see. Just running through his stuff.” Lane was suddenly not hungry any more. He stared at his overseer across the table and instead of seeing the aging, hard-bitten face of the red-headed gnome, he saw again the strange shadow that flickered in the blue eyes of Muriel Monroe when she told him his luck had run out because he had Pinky Hind as an overseer. He had been thinking a lot of those blue eyes during the past twenty-four hours, but he had begun to remember the shadow only since he had made his discovery in the manaca shack on the edge of the jungle. He said suddenly:
“By the way, Hind. I ran across a couple of big storage batteries in that old hut this afternoon. How do you suppose they got there?”
“Engineers prob’ly left ’em,” Hind said.
“I doubt it. They haven’t been there long. The connections aren’t badly sulphated, and the lead seems to have been scraped fairly recently for contacts. Besides, the batteries are of German make.”
“German?” Hind’s lower jaw worked laterally in the pensive manner of a calf chewing its cud. “Maybe the Heinies across the river are up to something.”
“I thought the Germans were all up in the hills on their coffee fincas.”
“There’s a few Heinies in Liberica,” said Hind. “And a few independent planters across the river.”
“Banana planters?”
“Well, they grow a few bananas on the side. Coffee mostly, though.”
“I didn’t know they raised coffee down here on the plains.”
“They do, a little. This Liberian tree coffee grows down here. Graulitz raises some on his finca. You’ll probably see Graulitz tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“I forgot to tell you,” said Hind. “You’re going out on the river pick-up tonight. English fruit. Eight hundred stems from company farms. Three hundred from the independents across the river. The foreman will be along to show you where the bacardillas are. The launch will pick you up at the landing behind the house at two o’clock. You’ll have time for a nap before then.”
“Sleep is a waste of time,” Lane said.
“Don’t keep the launch waitin’,” growled Hind. “You got half a dozen barges to spot before daylight.”
“They’ll be spotted,” Lane said.
When Lane went to his room, he did not go to sleep. He finished unpacking his bags, hung up his clothes. Out of the second bag he took a compact portable radio set, no larger than a fat dictionary. He set up a folding loop-aerial, bending the cross-arms down until the network of green silk-covered wire tightened into a diamond-shaped spider-web. He unhooked the speaker connection and plugged in a pair of earphones which he clamped over his head. Then he switched on the current and squatted on the floor. While he was waiting for the tube-filaments to warm up, he twisted the short-wave dial to the 9-megacycle band. A minute later he was listening to the German short-wave station DJB. The voice in Berlin came in clear and strong, reading in Spanish an amazing series of bulletins of the Spanish War which would appear in no newspapers. The Nationalists (they were never Rebels to the Berlin announcer) continued to make tremendous gains upon the Marxists (they were never Loyalists). A group of misguided Central Americans serving with the Marxists had been completely annihilated. Three Latin-American nuns had been tortured and put to death by the Marxists at Barcelona.
More German stations were carrying the same story over the 15- and 17-megacycle bands.
Rome was coming in strong on 11.810 megs, telling how Italy, mother of all Latin lands, was demonstrating anew her friendship for her spiritual children by trading two fine Caproni bombers for a few paltry tons of Tierra Rican coffee and a little sugar.
Lane dialed the North American short-wave stations and got only noise. He tried one channel after the other and heard the same steady roar, like the crackling of a prairie fire, that completely covered whatever program was coming down from the States. He swung the frame of his loop-aerial back and forth until the roar was loudest. He glanced down at the small compass set into the base of the aerial. The needle was dancing. He shut off the current, waited until the needle had come to rest, then made an entry in a black-leather memorandum book.
Lane put out the light and stretched on his bed, fully dressed. He lay for a long time in the dark, thinking, listening to the frogs outside in the warm night. They made strange and wonderful sounds, these tropical frogs—cackling like hens, grunting like pigs, lowing like cattle, crying shrilly like frightened children—nothing to recall the cheerful ringing frog chorus he used to hear heralding the spring from the banks of a Connecticut river.
He sat up suddenly, guiltily aware of the fact that he had been dozing. He heard the put-put of a gasoline motor somewhere in the night. He got up, went to the screened window. The beam of a flashlight was swinging along the hibiscus hedge. He took his hat, started out.
A kerosene lamp was burning dimly on the veranda. On the table beside it was a thermos bottle of coffee and some sandwiches that Hind’s cook had left. Lane picked them up.
The flashlight had reached the steps by the time Lane opened the screen door. The glow made polished-ebony highlights on a round black face under a wide-brimmed hat. A tall Jamaican Negro said:
“Hi ham pleased to meet the new timekeeper, sar. My name his ’Enry Morgan, sar, foreman for this farm.” Morgan’s accent was cockney with a Kingston twist and Maroon Town overtones.
“Mine’s Lane.” The youth held out his hand. After an instant of surprise, the Jamaican shook it heartily.
“You hare ready to haccompany river pick-up, sar?”
“Quite ready,” said Lane. He tucked the thermos bottle under his arm and followed the foreman around the house toward the river.
Chapter Three
Pot Shot in the Jungle
At Kilometer 20, Dave Perry’s car stopped on the tracks beside the dispatcher’s telephone booth. The shiny blue automobile was a popular-priced sedan, undistinguished except that it wore steel-flanged railway wheels instead of balloon tires. The fruit company having discovered that sixty-pound rails were more resistant to tropical rains than motor roads, no wheeled traffic moved out of Puerto Musa unless it was equipped to ride standard-gauge tracks. And none moved, therefore, without being routed by the train dispatcher in the port.
“Get the via, Muriel,” Perry said, leaning across to open the door. It was the first time he had spoken since they left Puerto Musa. He watched his secretary walk to the dispatcher’s box, her golden hair blowing defiantly free in the hot wind, her trim figure almost boyish in the gray jodhpurs she always wore when she accompanied Perry to the farms.
The man in the back seat was watching her, too. Henry Alcott, the accountant, took off his glasses and wiped the blur of perspiration from the lenses. He also seemed to take off fifteen years and his austere, guardian-of-the-millions expression. Without his glasses, he had the earthly, slightly dissipated air of a man who had repeatedly lost his illusions, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. He eyed the girl for a moment, as with brisk, efficient gestures she opened the phone box, cranked the instrument, and picked up the pencil that hung by a string beside it.
“Dave,” said Alcott, “why did you have to bring the gal along? Why don’t you keep her out of this business?”
“Try to keep her out of anything within a radius of a hundred miles,” Perry replied.
“Losing your grip, Dave? You used to be boss of this division.”
“Ever hear of a boss who didn’t let a smart secretary handle details and make routine decisions, Hank?” Alcott leaned back against the cushions. His chuckle was a little like a cackle. He said, “Know what the gang in Honduras calls this division now, Dave? Puerto Petticoat.”
Perry’s shoulders squared, but he didn’t turn around. “For your information,” he said, “which you can pass on to Honduras if you want: Women haven’t worn petticoats for twenty years, Hank.”
“You know more about that than I do, Dave.”
“What’s the matter? Does Mrs. Alcott still wear ’em?”
Alcott made a moist, explosive sound with his lips, put his glasses on, and relapsed into silence.
At the phone box, Muriel Monroe was reading back her orders to the dispatcher. “Order No. 67 to Motor Car 1 at Kilometer. 20. Proceed to Rio Sangre. Track clear ahead. Okay and complete. 2:41 p.m.” She hung up, closed the little door, and came back to the car. “All aboard, chief,” she said.
Perry let in the clutch and the blue sedan rolled down the tracks to the red-roofed bungalow that was headquarters for the ten farms in the Rio Sangre District.
Cecil Holliday, the district superintendent, was standing on the steps, watching a mozo cut his lawn with a machete. Holliday was the only man in the division who could wear a white sun helmet without being accused of affectation. Stetsons and soft felts were all right for his colleagues, but a sun helmet seemed as much a part of Holliday as the crooked pipe that was constantly between his teeth. He was English and he looked it. He hadn’t the red face of a professional bearer of the white man’s burden, or the pomposity of a retired colonel, or the precious superiority of a provincial snob flaunting an Oxford accent like a school blazer. He had a quiet authority about him that somehow recalled the orderly hedgerows of Surrey on a summer evening, a gentle refinement that lay in his calm gray eyes and showed in his sensitive features. It showed in the interior of his house, too. Although Holliday was a bachelor like the other banana herders in his district, there were rugs on the floor instead of piles of dirty laundry, pictures on the walls, a photograph, well-lined bookcases instead of stacks of pulp magazines.
He offered his left hand to Perry and Alcott—he was sensitive about his right, which lacked two fingers and part of a thumb—and he patted Muriel Monroe affectionately on the shoulder as though to say, While I’m almost old enough to be your father, I could still be terribly fond of you.
