One Night in Copan Read online

  “Inspector Lionel Hendricks confirmed summoning Drew but insists that it is routine to conduct random checks on foreigners entering Stonewall.”

  Item:

  “‘In coming to the aid of film producer and magician Don Drew, the Benevolent Order of Muskrats acted promptly to help a brother in distress,’ Hugh Hale, a Muskrat spokesman said yesterday. Noting that the Muskrats do not normally offer charity to their members, Mr. Hale said that when asked, Drew was unable to produce ‘any evidence of membership, past or present in a Muskrat lodge, anywhere in the world. Nor could he recite the Muskrat Obligation or display the Muskrat secret grip and sign of distress.’

  “Mr. Hale went on to say that ‘the person described in the Solicitor as a famous magician told a rather extraordinary tale to several of our members, most of whom found it hard to comprehend let alone believe that a grownup carrying a briefcase filled with money could leave it behind -- except if it hadn’t existed in the first place.’

  “‘Our incredulity deepened,’ Mr. Hale went on, ‘when we learned that Mr. Drew had no credentials or any proof of his alleged renown. The rope trick and disappearing coin act he performed failed to convince us of his prowess as a magician, though they did provide some measure of comic relief. Nevertheless, the Muskrats, imbued with compassion, acted promptly and extended the hospitality of food and shelter to a perfect stranger.’”

  Clyde Ng (pronounced ng’) was born in Guyana which, for all its shortcomings, must seem like dream heaven compared to the nauseating walled city of Kowloon where his grandparents came from. Ng owns and runs the only Chinese eatery on Stonewall. His cuisine is as Chinese as Great Neck is unpretentious, which is just as well because his clientele is strictly local, and so are the cooks. Forget Pell Street. Forget Grant Avenue.

  Ng is tolerable in the dark or when he doesn’t burp, pick his teeth or yawn. Bedecked in rippling layers of solid gold around his neck and wrists, he rarely has anything interesting to say -- a blessing in his case, considering that all his teeth are capped with gold, too.

  His wife Kina, a pleasantly plump Orinoco bush Indian who went to mission school, says even less. She paints her nails, brushes her long black tresses with slow, languid strokes and plays dominoes.

  The Ng visit regularly. Just to kill time. I sleep with Kina when Clyde is out of town. Everybody sleeps with Kina when Clyde is out of town.

  The Zanzi Bar. You can smell the sweat and the beer and the urine long before you reach the top of the stairs. Dimly lit, it’s Mobile and Mombasa, Yalta and Yokohama, Rotterdam and Rangoon, Gdansk and Guayaquil all rolled into one stinking pit of depravity.

  In one corner, a group of beefy, pink-faced Swedish sailors lean against the counter in drunken stupor, waiting their turn to dance or get laid, their eyes screwed on the apish rear-ends that rock and roll by the juke box.

  Dance is the most erotic form of self-expression and eroticism is infectious, so every now and then couples leave the dance floor and retire to a windowless alcove behind the unisex lavatory and down onto filthy mattresses where the owner’s dogs sleep at closing time. The music doesn’t always drown out the grunts and the ululations.

  Amid the graffiti, a limerick sums up the truism of the century. Penned in a tight, disciplined script, it cautions against an especially tenacious breed of body lice, the kind that is “a pain in the groin to get rid of.” It is signed by one Jonathan Morris-Moore.

  Mr. Morris-Moore has obviously never been to Khartoum.

  Item:

  “Immigration officials breathed easier yesterday with the expulsion of Don Drew, a citizen of New Zealand caught in a number of squabbles for nearly a month.

  “Drew, a self-styled film producer/magician, gave the media and the authorities a hard-luck story involving the loss of a briefcase containing ten thousand dollars on a flight from Bigoudi to Puerto-Diablo.

  “When authorities summoned Drew for what they said was a routine consultation, he refused, claiming he was being ‘hounded.’ Meanwhile, the TeleCom Office has called in their attorney to deal with staff grievances alleging that Drew had verbally abused several operators while attempting to place collect calls to New York, Auckland, Zagreb and Casablanca, with parties at the other end refusing to accept the charges.

  “A formal complaint was subsequently delivered at the south coast bed-and-breakfast where Drew was staying. When asked to vacate the premises, Drew made obscene gestures, threw an overflowing chamber pot at immigration agents and barricaded himself in his room.

  “Police were called to remove the locks from the doors. Drew grudgingly paid his bill in a dozen different currencies and agreed to leave.

  “The episode ended Monday when, under heavy escort and the watchful eye of armed soldiers, Drew boarded a flight to Amsterdam via Paramaribo.

  “The Muskrats, whose aid Drew had sought, have since issued a statement in which Drew is described as a ‘cheap crook and a swindler.’”

  The ruby sun is sinking. Try not to blink. The fabled “green flash” is as elusive as a fading dream. Should you glimpse the fleeting burst of emerald iridescence, make your wish before night drapes the island in sweet fragrant darkness. If you miss it, come back same time tomorrow and try again. Sometimes, the only remedy against boredom is ritual.

  Item:

  “Mr. Louis Musgrove, 75, of Split Rock, St. Patrick, received a ten-year jail sentence for sodomizing a goat during recess in full view of the pupils at Bishop Johnson Anglican School for Girls.

  “Defending Mr. Musgrove, court-appointed counsel, Sir Oswald Bloomquist entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, asserting that his client had quickly been overcome with deep feelings of contrition and was about to slit the goat’s throat and donate the carcass to the school’s kitchen when he was apprehended by the school custodian, Mr. Nestor Ogilvie of Felarnum Heights, St. Cecilia.

  “Sir Oswald pleaded for clemency, arguing in favor of his client’s spontaneous -- ‘if somewhat misguided’ -- good intentions.

  “A last-minute motion to remand Mr. Musgrove to Queen Victoria Asylum was denied. In handing down his verdict, Justice Swathmore Hornblythe, Q.C., expressed his personal sense of relief and noted with magisterial panache that, owing the defendant’s age and the length of his sentence, the island’s goat population could now resume without fear the existence to which it is destined -- ‘goat water stew….’”

  When you smell formic acid in the air -- you will one night soon -- turn off the lights everywhere. Flying ants are descending on the island and light attracts them.

  Congregating on the ceiling in dense, frenzied clusters, they shed their wings and fall to the ground. They will never fly again. Most will be gone by morning. Shake your clothes and shoes before you put them on. Their mandibles are unforgiving and the irritation lasts for days.

  It seems that one of old man Godfrey’s boys, after defiling the rest of her anatomy, has conquered the heart of one Marie-Thérèse Lapine, of Chicoutimi, and the two are getting “married” at The Bearded Fig Tree

  Rounding up guests and “witnesses” for the impromptu ceremony is a cinch. Godfrey sends his scouts to the beaches, the rum shops, the guest houses and the wharf. The dragnet yields a dozen volunteers who will do or submit to anything with ravenous abandon.

  Unkindly regarded by nature, Mademoiselle Lapine is one step beyond homeliness, which accounts for the unprecedented extra ten dollars Godfrey had to offer the young stallion for sticking with it a bit longer.

  Poorer but outfitted with a man for one short, irreversible dream, Mademoiselle Lapine will awaken alone in a day or two. She will come to her senses, conclude that you can’t put a price tag on a dream, and fly back home for another fifty weeks at the typing pool and Sunday confessions until the itch returns, insistent and unmanageable.

  Wingate, a licensed notary public, performs the sham ritual. Then everyone joins in. After a while, it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to whom.

  Dolores Wingate is away a
t her sister’s. Business has been brisk at The Bearded Fig Tree. She will not drink this time. She cries a lot when she is sober.

  You won’t warm up to Bates right away but don’t prejudge him. His story speaks volumes about the frailty of dreams. Accused of treason by Ennis Garrison -- “Uncle” to his adoring fans -- the very man he helped hoist to power, Bates was awakened shortly before dawn, forcibly removed from his bed and escorted to the first plane out of Deception where he lived. He landed in Stonewall with the clothes on his back, leaving behind a villa nestling atop a sandy cove and a sloop that often took him for a day or two of seclusion to the outer rims of Deception’s coral archipelago.

  Bates now earns his keep doing chores for Wingate. His former station in life has earned him the privilege of eating with the rest of us.

  Pushing fifty, Andrew Barrington Bates was born in Sri Lanka -- Ceylon at the time -- of British parents who left mother England, “the better to serve her” and as far away as possible from the grayness of her skies and the tedium of her middle class. He was nineteen when he first went to Manchester to study architecture on a stipend extracted from the Home Office by his father in return for some unspecified favor.

  Shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, Bates married the daughter of a Liverpool barrister. Eleven years and three children later, he walked out on his wife and fell for a ballet dancer who sucked his savings dry, did a jeté and split. Tired of the drizzle, yearning for some curry in his veins, Bates accepted a civil service posting on Deception and promptly married the first pretty mulatto he’d laid eyes on, Marcia, the maid who came with the house.

  For his part, Ennis Garrison quit school early. He earned money fetching tennis balls for his colonial masters and keeping his cute little black ass clean for Major Fitzhugh down at regimental headquarters.

  Marcia produced two boys, both the spitting image of their natural father, and a daughter, somewhat darker than anticipated. Bates knew his Cromwell but eugenics escaped him. He later learned that Garrison, the handsome agitator who shocked the ruling party into surrender, had regularly fucked Marcia and lavished her with assorted gifts for her munificence.

  Marcia held the door wide open when Garrison’s goons, the feared Weasels, yanked her husband out of bed and threw him on the first plane out of Deception.

  They called her Daphne. Brooding all day, she draped the sky with a thick overcast that kept rolling in from the east in menacing formations. The wind rose by mid-afternoon, sending shivers through the palm fronds. Squalls lifted beach sand, sending it crashing against the stone parapet with relentless wrath. Thunder rumbled in the distance in muted tones and lightning clawed at the sky, spattering a black, embattled horizon with a brief milky radiance. By sundown, seized with convulsions, the sky turned colors, churning angry clouds that alternately collided and parted to reveal gashes of starlit blue.

  Daphne slammed into us a little after midnight at high tide. The assault was merciless. She ripped into the shore, uprooting trees, pulverizing dikes and sea walls. The verandah collapsed. The tin roof was upended. Half the beach caved in and a thick, bubbling sandy bog invaded The Bearded Fig Tree’s lower quarters.

  Blondie was found floating in the dry well near the tool shed. Brooks was decapitated when a sheet of corrugated roofing tore off the bar and flew into him. Crabs were feasting inside him when we unearthed his headless body in the morning.

  Heeding the radio station’s advisories, Wingate, old man Godfrey and Gwen Peckham had fled inland to Campbell’s Summit. Protected by high, barren ridges, their refuge sustained little damage. Bates, young Brunner and I stayed behind, drawn perhaps by the spectacle of Daphne’s magnificent fury. Dolores rode the storm at her sister’s cottage on Graham’s Landing.

  My friend, Max Pontifex, who had not visited for days, later told me he’d taken refuge not on high ground, as disaster preparedness wardens had instructed, but in the flimsy hunters’ blind he’d erected in the mangrove and where he often spent the night.

  “If I must die, let the sea be my grave,” Max had proclaimed with his usual swagger.

  Brook’s death went largely unnoticed. What with the repairs and the mess to clean up, no one paid much attention when his remains were carted away to a potter’s field where unclaimed bodies are interred. That’s what his folks in East Hampton had wanted.

  Back from her sister’s, Dolores immediately drowned the news of Brook’s death in a quart of whiskey that took her system three days to distill. She didn’t shed a tear. It was her way of celebrating the deliverance of a kindred spirit.

  “I adore exotic cuisine. My favorite is God’s tongue, or Qx, as the Wanambudu call it. Imagine a large pink slug adorned with markings that resemble a pair of human eyes, each set in a red triangle. How very Masonic…. What? Yes, actually, Qx has a crunchy sort of gumminess to it. Think of caramelized anchovy and headcheese; or pigs’ knuckles in aspic. You must try it sometime. I’m also quite fond of rattlesnake. Had some in a Yuma cantina one blistering afternoon. Siberian yak, you say? Why, of course. I was dining with General Fyodor Gregoritchnikov when I first sampled it. Did I ever tell you about dear old Fyodor? No? Ah, what a charmer. Such a good listener. So attentive. He never interrupted me, though he did fall asleep once or twice, the dear fellow. But you know, generals are such busy men. I’ll never forget the day we first met in Saint-Tropez. We were both so very young. He was a mere lieutenant then. I was vacationing with Aunt Trudy, may she rest in peace. Yes, well, Fyodor gave me a yak hair comforter when we parted. Must have come from the beast we had just dined on, ho ho ho, what? I’m still mad about it after all these years. I take it to Minneapolis every spring. It keeps me warm. Would you believe I once had to wear my mink coat, gloves and a scarf in Minneapolis in mid-June? Dreadfully cold it was, you know. It seems Minneapolis never escaped the Ice Age. I remember cutting my visit short and booking a flight to St. Kitts that very same afternoon. My friend Gladys -- the one from Minneapolis -- was mortified, poor woman. She even called the weather bureau and complained.

  “Have you ever been to Patagonia? No? Rotten climate, I say. Not unlike Newfoundland. Reminds me of the Orkneys, you know. Well, it’ll soon be time to move on. Helga is expecting me in Hamburg next week. We’re flying to Mogador for a fortnight. The desert air will do us good. Hamburg is so damp, nicht war?”

  Helmut Brunner, who has just finished scraping a soup bone clean, marrow and all, with his bare teeth, is about to answer but Gwendolyn Peckham has no patience for trivia so she goes on to recount that fateful day in the Congo when a Pygmy mistook her plumed pith helmet for a bird of paradise and shot poisoned arrows at her through the brush.

  Item:

  “Prime Minister Ennis Garrison has flatly denied rumors that Deception has become ‘the epicenter of regional espionage activity’ in recent months.

  “In a similar communiqué, opposition leader, Foreign Minister Lewis Sandiford Malta, labeled allegations of irregularities by members of his cabinet as ‘ludicrous and demented,’ and warned that ‘rumor-mongers and slanderers’ would be unmasked and prosecuted.”

  Trebor Wirst, editor and publisher of the Solicitor, is a man of refinement and wit. His logic and insights slash through bombast and oratory, and his arguments seldom leave any wiggle room.

  Every once in a while, when his hormones act up, when his negritude resurfaces and peels away the gilt of a Cambridge education, Wirst can be expected to deliver one of his legendary broadsides. There are a hundred counterpoints, a thousand repartees, but you find none that appeases your conscience. So you listen politely until he calms down. It’s the least you can do for a useful if moody colleague.

  “Come now, you can’t expect us to survive on raw sugar, nutmeg and saffron, rum and molasses and a rare goodwill visit by the Queen Mum, can you? Sure, we control fifty-one percent of the bauxite mining rights. So what? We have one of the highest density populations on earth. Our trade deficit triples every nine months and the Commonwealth, which had steadf
astly shouldered our debt, is itself nearly bankrupt.

  “The Regional Common Market? What a farce! We still can’t agree on a permanent capital -- though there are more contenders than crabs up a whore’s ass. All this makes for lofty parliamentary debate back at Whitehall but nothing ever gets done. Taking sides doesn’t help. Yes, we could live by another set of dreams for a while but the granaries would still be half-empty and the police would step up their gruesome witch-hunts.

  “So, we invite the world. And every time a plane touches down at Waring Field, with every cruise ship full of chic bleached blondes and white-shod tycoons climbing down the gangplank, we put on our affable, soft-spoken, smiling native faces. Exoticism has a way of camouflaging poverty and political sleaze. So they come back. Then they send their friends and relatives. Word gets around and they all return. Their parenthetical sojourn in ‘paradise’ guarantees us a permanent listing in the travel guides. It helps us keep our flag unfurled.

  “We just can’t do without these hordes of part-time interlopers. Our very dreams belong to them. If this goes on, we may never learn what it is we can do without them. We shall forever live in fear that someday, someone else will decide to rearrange our reality. It won’t be what we had in mind, what we’d hoped for. The weak and the insolvent must make do with a less obliging reality than most, isn’t that right?”

  Cop out. Breaking out of bondage is the work of heroes. Freedom is expensive; some forms of servitude last forever. The shackles that once bound wrists and ankles can ensnare souls. Weigh the alternatives. Don’t procrastinate. It may be time to turn off the lights when you finally make up your mind. You might not be sleepy yet but who are you to argue with the final curfew?