One Night in Copan Page 9

  Low tide. Sharma’s nubile body glistens through the water. Her cinder-hued skin feels like wet porcelain and her buttocks, firm and spirited, rest against your thighs as her legs encircle your waist. Hardened by lust, her purple nipples press against your chest.

  You take her that way, far from shore, your feet firmly anchored in the soft silt-like sand lining the shallow lagoon.

  Facing the sea, feeling her warmth through your veins, you look past her searching eyes until the last wave of pleasure tells you it’s time to thank Sharma and head back to shore.

  Max Pontifex was a master of the epigram, of the off-the-cuff one-liner. He kept large land crabs in a cistern in the lush orchard behind his house on Rock Hall Terrace. He used them for bait and fed them scraps of fish he’d caught earlier in the day.

  “It gives the crabs a chance to get even -- in advance,” Max had remarked without a trace of sarcasm.

  Reliving Stonewall, even in my dreams, forces me to exhume Max, my old friend, my alter ego, the man whose deceptive serenity and lack of pretense I envied above all virtues from the moment our lives intersected and merged.

  Max was unkempt and eccentric and anarchic and petulant, but he never came empty-handed. There were always blushing mangoes, tangy tamarinds and other very special treats in his knapsack: turtle soup, fried conch in ginger and saffron, broiled plover breasts stuffed with avocado, to name a few of the delicacies he lavished on me.

  But let me tell you about Max.

  I’d been fishing that morning, or trying to. Waist-high in water, I’d landed no more than seaweed. Then came Max, wading toward shore, an old rowboat in tow. A straw hat, grimy and frayed, obscured his face, save for the leathered, jutting cheekbones and large, sad eyes, blue like tempered steel. Fixed somewhere on the open sea, they gleamed like the eyes of a man possessed or racked with fever. I will never forget those eyes, the crooked teeth, the untrimmed beard, the scars that tilled his face, the strong, gnarled, skillful hands, the jutting blue veins that tunneled under his sun-bleached pink Scottish skin.

  The rowboat brimmed with fish and I suddenly felt like a schmuck with my expensive fiberglass rod and reel and the piece of salami dangling from the hook.

  “Some catch,” I ventured. “How far out do you go?”

  “Not far. Up yonder.”

  “Up yonder?” I would soon master the subtleties of linguistic ambiguity. “Up yonder,” like “over dee hill,” “up dee road” and “round dee bend,” are not precise indicators of distance. Perhaps where time is as elastic as it is on Stonewall, near and far have no real meaning. When I later lived in Central America, I would learn to cope with yet another oddity: the absence of street names or numbers. A common address, I recall, went something like this: Two hundred [meters] south, fifty [meters] east of Lupe’s shop. Turn right at the yellow house with the black Chihuahua, then left at José’s gas station. That’s assuming you knew how to get to Lupe’s shop.

  “Yes, by the reef.” Max pointed to a darker patch of sea three hundred feet from shore.

  “What do you use?”

  Max held up a battered plastic Clorox bottle and a coil of 20-pound test line.

  “What about bait?”

  Max pointed to a large tin. “Sea cat” [octopus in our parlance] “and chum.” Max removed the lid from a pail in which simmered a rotting bouillabaisse of squashed squid, crushed crab and other putrefying morsels of aquatic life.

  “Can I join you sometime? I’ll gladly pay you for your trouble.”

  Max studied me for a moment, took a deep puff from his cigarette, snorted and spat in the water.

  “Tell you what. Meet me by Hartley’s tomorrow at five. We’ll….”

  “Five… uh… in the morning?”

  Max’s eyes narrowed. A hint of sarcasm animated a tentative smile.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No, no, no,” I muttered. Five is fine.”

  “Another thing. Keep your money. Just share your catch.” Max eyed my state-of-the-art rod and reel and grinned. “That’s if you catch anything.” He then turned solemn. “You gotta swear you can swim, man, and won’t puke in my boat or I’ll toss you overboard like bilge water.”

  I swore and we were friends, and we left with the morning tide and the catch was abundant. I gave Max my meager take.

  “Sorry, I don’t eat fish.”

  Max scowled. He said that killing an animal and not eating it is a senseless pastime. He may have been unkempt and eccentric but he related to animals. He was less tolerant of men. It was difficult not to like him.

  Max understood animals: they reminded him of his untamed self. He’d adopted nine dogs and seven cats, all strays. He bred tropical fish and exotic birds, and played mother to a capuchin monkey and a pair of surly macaws that would have gladly scratched each other’s eyes out had Max not taken the precaution to house them in separate cages. He also tended to a herd of giant tortoises, a brood of somnolent iguanas and a mongoose that would eventually claim a chunk of his left pinkie.

  His favorite creatures, I would soon realize, were the land crabs. Earth-gray, some nearly a foot wide, their claws are bigger than a man’s hand and they can crush a toe or snap a finger clean off the joint as if it were a twig. Crabs have one thing in common. They’re antisocial and territorial. Every so often, when they feel the urge, they seek out an adversary and fight to the finish. There is rarely a victor in such contests, only lifeless shards of carapace and severed, quivering limbs. Max said that man is descended from crabs; or sharks. He wasn’t sure. Max was not always in a generous mood.

  Item:

  “A Librana Airways plane exploded off Bathsheba’s jagged coast shortly after takeoff from Waring Field. All 73 passengers and crew are presumed to have perished. The Coast Guard has dispatched a cutter and divers are now scouring the crash site.

  “Several area residents said they were awakened by a loud conflagration at about four in the morning. Mr. Ambrose Fletcher, keeper of the North Point lighthouse, reported seeing flaming debris hurtling toward the sea from an altitude of about one thousand feet.

  “An investigation is now underway. No official statement will be issued until fragments from the ill-fated aircraft are recovered. The four-engine DC-8 jetliner had been refueled and was reportedly en route to Santiago when it burst in midair.

  “Airport officials here say refueling took place uneventfully under the supervision of two Librana Airways ground personnel. The rest of the crew did not deplane during the hour-long stopover.”

  Item.

  “Downed in a fiery explosion yesterday, Librana Airways Flight 455 was sabotaged. So allege investigators who, sifting through the wreckage, found traces of Semptex and remnants of a timing device taped to a shard of tubing identified as the main fuel line.

  “Seventy-three mangled bodies have been recovered, all burned beyond recognition.”

  Item.

  “Investigators now report that the doomed Librana Airways DC-8 aircraft that exploded and crashed off the Bathsheba coast had failed to file a flight plan and was operating under night visual flight rules before it landed in Stonewall.

  “It was further revealed that the control tower at Waring Field had not picked up the inbound plane until it entered Stonewall’s airspace, well below the pattern, and requested landing instructions.

  “Authorities believe the plane had been skimming the ocean surface for a distance of about a hundred nautical miles to the southwest to avoid radar detection.

  “The motive for this stratagem has not been elucidated.”

  Item:

  “Deception Prime Minister Ennis Garrison has reported sighting a ‘covey’ of flying saucers hovering over the ministerial mansion and has instructed his ambassador at the United World League to request an emergency meeting of the Security Conclave.

  “Taking note of P. M. Garrison’s plea, United World League Secretary General Olatunji Illabobo conveyed his sympathy and assured Deception’s head of state
that the matter would be addressed when the world body reconvenes after summer recess.

  “An independent dispatch filed by our special correspondent on Deception confirms large formations of migratory birds vectored on a southerly course and transiting for a brief rest on the island’s coastal marshlands.”

  The moon is high. You can hear the snarls and the whimpers, the wails and the howls as a pack of feral dogs saunter out of the shadows to copulate on the open road.

  Sometimes there aren’t enough bitches to go around so the males lose patience and mount each other. So much for the fiction that homosexuality is the sole province of humans.

  Move toward them. Vulnerable, galvanized by fear, roused by lust, they freeze and stare, baring angry fangs. Clap your hands once or twice. They disperse and night swallows them.

  Find me. Look for the sign, beyond the breadfruit and the almond trees. You’re not here to dream but you must find a way.

  Fear is such an ugly emotion.

  Item:

  “Two men, one from Broome Hill, St. Peter, and the other from Irish Gulley, St. Ann, were jailed at the Fortress Prison. Each drew a 90-day sentence.

  “Marshall Winston, 27, a car washer, and Olivier Smythe, 24, unemployed, appeared on separate charges. Winston pleaded guilty to using indecent language, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. He was separately charged with loitering. Smythe was charged with masturbating on Palmetto Lane and urging a group of visiting Southern Baptist church members to take his picture.

  “Both cases were prosecuted by Sgt. Bingham Leonard in District A Criminal Court before Magistrate Coleman Grant.

  “In the same court, murder suspect Gloria Prince, of Licorish Village, St. Andrew, made a second appearance. She is accused of murdering her common-law husband, Victor Milling last April. Ms. Prince alleges that Milling fathered five of her seven children but refused to contribute to their support.”

  Item:

  “Former Deception Prime Minister Ennis Garrison, who disappeared under mysterious circumstance two weeks ago after the collapse of his government, is now a guest at an unnamed psychiatric institution in the United States, a reliable source revealed yesterday on condition of anonymity.

  “Garrison was thought to have been eliminated when rebels led by Morris Cardinal launched a surprise pre-dawn attack on Deception. The former Deception leader, an incongruous cross between ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and Idi Amin (Dada), is said to be entertaining other inmates with accounts of UFO encounters and excursions in space in the company of winged angels.

  “The informant has declined to confirm or deny whether Mr. Garrison had been secreted out of Deception. An independent press contact suggested that ‘the likelihood of U.S. involvement cannot be written off.’ He cited America’s ‘historic propensity for giving shelter to political renegades and misfits, war criminals, spies and deposed dictators, or to surgically alter their appearance and arrange for a prosperous and serene retirement in a debtor client-state.’

  “The informant further alleged that Garrison is suffering from dementia praecox, possibly the aftermath of an irreversible syphilitic infection of long duration.”

  So Bates gave Wingate notice. He promised he’d tend to the few remaining chores and thanked him for his hospitality. Wingate toasted the news in his customary fashion that evening and Bates helped him back to his room and tucked him in bed as he’d done so many times before.

  On the morning of the fifth, Bates flew to Miami where he’d obtained a professorship in architecture at one of the state’s universities. Deception was far behind him. He’d itched for something new. If there’s nothing quite as maddening as a persistent itch, nothing gives as much pleasure as a good scratch. Cromwell notwithstanding.

  Bates died of a massive heart attack in 1988.

  And then, one day, Max, the man I thought I always wanted -- but never had the courage -- to be, Max, with glints of Jesus and Robinson Crusoe flashing from his steely blue eyes, Max, philosopher and fisherman, Max, my good old friend, was dying. I knew the end was near when he saw me off before Christmas, offering me a hollow, almost brittle handshake, his once inexhaustible rucksack now empty, insanity and looming death etched upon his face, disdain and resignation dominating his distant gaze. The transformation had been swift and obvious. He himself had alluded to it from time to time, describing episodes alternating between “awakenings and dizzying descents into dungeons of despair.” It was I who had stubbornly dismissed the warning signs, ignored his chivalrous reticence to elaborate, disregarded the hints and the blunt entreaties. I had selfishly reveled in Max’s maturing psychosis, pretending that by poking into the dark corners of his mind we would both be headed to some spiritual Promised Land. In reality, I’d carelessly used Max. He’d been a passport to my own self-discovery. He’d made me lust for a power found only in the dreams of children and madmen, and I’d overlooked his pain by pretending that we were both at play in some cerebral dimension that only the two of us could access.

  I’d imagined that neighbors would find his partially mummified remains amid the carcasses of parrots and dogs and cats and tortoises, rats scurrying across the filthy litter where he lay, their excrement flecking his hair and beard, maggots, intoxicated and trapped, thrashing about in his stench-filled room.

  I could have predicted his unseemly end. His once pristine hilltop home was a shambles and the skeletonized remains of the animals he had raised and collected lay pell-mell throughout the house. His eyes had acquired that glossy, pitiable, distant look of madness.

  Max had once said, “Death ain’t no cure for madness.” It had come, as did all his non-sequiturs, from nowhere, unsolicited and out of context as we fished silently for conger at the edge of the reef. “No,” he’d added, his eyes fixed on the horizon as sunset’s widening crimson stain splashed the sea before us, “sanity begins at the far end of eternal sleep.”

  I remember asking him to elaborate but he’d shrugged his shoulders, snorted and spat in the water, as if to consecrate the impending capture of a nightmarish creature, fanged jaws snapping idly at the air, slime dripping from its writhing snakelike body.

  “Take congers,” Max said, laughing nervously. “They have no friends, you know. We’re lucky you and I, we have each other,” he added, a primeval fear gripping his voice as the machete rose and fell, decapitating the hideous monster of the deep.

  I had over-dramatized my friend’s demise, but not by much. Max and the woman who’d mothered him since infancy -- he’d called her “Auntie,” both made a slow but irrevocable descent into poverty. The woman eventually died. Max survived, malnourished, slovenly. Eccentricities turned to recklessness. He chain-smoked, antagonized his friends, nettled his detractors.

  “I’m mad between long intervals of horrible sanity,” he’d once blurted out. “I feel no pain when madness crests.” His fleeting but intense bouts of lunacy, it was widely believed, were triggered by alcohol, speed and Valium washed down with Coca Cola. His excesses had become part of the gossip of Stonewall.

  “This chap is self-destructing.”

  One day, as he staggered in a delirious state on the streets of the small east coast village where he’d been given refuge, Max passed out and collapsed. Bleeding profusely from a wound to his skull, he was found by a passerby and rushed by ambulance to a local hospital. He died a couple of days later at the age of 62. The autopsy listed lung cancer and bronchogenic carcinoma of the brain as the main causes of death. He was buried a week later in an unmarked grave.

  That year, 1998, the Lunar Prospector found evidence of frozen water near the Moon’s poles; cosmologists asserted that the universe’s rate of expansion is increasing. Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, declaring jihad against Jews and Crusaders. Linked to him, a series of explosions at U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500.

  As Max is laid to rest, nineteen European nations sign a treaty banning human cloning. Unfettered reproduction, even if
it results in monsters and madmen, is sanctioned by the Church.

  A framed picture of Max adorns one of my walls. A straw hat cockily crowns his shoulder-length hair. Slung over his left arm is a backpack filled with goodies, His right hand, held close against his bosom, restrains a fawn and tan spider monkey. Feigning half a smile, Max’s blue eyes seem to focus on mine from any angle in the room. When I look at them I see myself. Max may have been unkempt and eccentric but he made dreaming worthwhile.

  If Max looms slightly larger-than-life, or mythic in stature, perhaps even more ethereal in his jarring earthiness, it’s because he was flesh and blood, not legend. Reassuringly, that did not prevent him from assuming allegorical dimensions after his death. Those who knew him still speak of him, some with guarded awe, others with aversion. Some saw him as a tormented man; others as a half-witted buffoon. Those who only heard of the barefoot motorbike-riding, shotgun-toting hippie who preferred animals to the company of men still refer to him at the Birdman of Graeme Hall.

  I’d ridden on the back of Max’s motorcycle, napped on the veranda of his pink coral house and marveled at his animal collections. I’d even spent time with him at the swamp. He had a wicked sense of humor, a disdain of ostentation, an utter lack of affectation. He became my alter ego in another time and space. When I last saw him in 1986, I knew that some deep psychosis had taken hold of him. His speech was slurred, his gait uncertain. He looked dazed. His once-immaculate home was in a state of disarray. Attempts to contact him after my return to New York were met with silence.

  I would never set foot in Stonewall again.

  Part two

  The story behind the tales

  THE OPPOSITE OF SILENCE

  A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the human species….