Gone Bamboo (14 page)

24

F
or the first time in his life, Kevin was getting a suntan. He was pleasantly drunk. Also, he was in love.

It had been a week since he'd moved into La Ronda. Other than work on the vans, there hadn't been much to do. The guns had yet to arrive. The planning, such as it was, had been completed.

He spent his time at the beach, or drinking at the bar, with Violetta.

Though his nose, cheeks, and shoulders were still painfully red, the rest of his body, rapidly slimming from exercise, was becoming golden brown. That morning, in the streaked mirror of the communal bathroom, he had barely recognized the grinning, healthy-looking bugger who greeted him over the sink.

He swam every day. He ate breakfast with the whores in the rear kitchen each morning, their children tugging at his sleeves to play with them, television blaring Spanish soap operas. Then he'd jog down to the beach, heave himself into the water, and swim until he could stand it no more. Then he'd visit the trash-strewn gully by the mouth of the dirt road, where the abandoned earthmover was, and drag whatever parts he needed back to the garage behind La Ronda. Little Petey had managed to find him an oxyacetylene torch and some tools, and the work went well.

He'd usually knock off around noon. By that time it was too hot to continue. Time for drinks. Then maybe a trip upstairs with Violetta. Sex, a nap. Then back to the beach.

Kevin liked the beach best during those magic hours from three until five-thirty. The shadows grew long, and the light from the sinking sun made glimmering white peaks on the water. Not too hot, not too cold, he'd lie there with the silent Violetta, drinking beer, napping some more, maybe taking a short walk down to the little barbecue shed at Dawn Beach Hotel for a burger or some hot dogs.

Violetta seemed to like the pina coladas there, foamy and thick in the plastic cups. He always made them give her extra cherries.

Violetta, Violetta, Violet, Vi - he called her Vi. He gazed down at her now, at the foot of the blanket where she was massaging his feet, the tip of her tongue poking earnestly from the corner of her mouth. She spoke no English as far as he could tell. If the other whores were to be believed, she didn't speak much Spanish either. They had been surprised and much amused when he chose her. An Indian, they said contemptuously, barely out of the jungle. What would he want
her
for? To the others, Violetta's broad nose, large, almond-shaped eyes, straight, black hair and bangs were an affront that detracted from their somewhat more metropolitan airs. They made fun of the scars on her legs, her thick ankles and powerful forearms, as if she were carrying a great weight.

But to Kevin she was beautiful. An exotic, an Amazon, a girl like he'd seen in
Mutiny on the Bounty.
Watching her at the beach, splashing water over her shoulders, skin shining in the failing light, gave him the most excruciating pleasure.

"Vi . . . Vi," he said, patting the blanket next to him. She came up and sat next to him. He took her hairbrush from her little red plastic purse and began to brush her hair.

A man in a hat woven from palm fronds came by, selling jewelry from an attache case. Kevin paid ten dollars for a necklace made of seashells and mother-of-pearl, an item he could easily have had for a dollar in town. He didn't care. Reaching around Violetta's throat to fasten the clasp, seeing the corners of her mouth turn slightly upward, her Toltec mask face softening into a smile, he was happy, happier than he'd ever been.

Late in the afternoon, the locals came down to the beach. Whole families, parents and all their children, came to swim in their underwear, black skin reflecting in the late afternoon sun. They'd lived by the beach their whole lives, Kevin thought, watching them splash each other, children doing headstands on the wet sand at the water's edge, yet each time he saw them, they appeared to be newly thrilled, as if visiting this beach for the very first time. He could live here, he thought. He really could.

Near the end of the day, the water crowded with families, the white tourists long gone, he'd swim among them, sometimes holding Violetta in his arms, drifting in the shoulder-deep water, and it was as if he was sharing a bathtub with them, the blacks looking at him with amused benevolence.

"Yo!" came a voice from the palm trees. "Yo! Kevin!"

It was Little Petey, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, sweating behind mirrored sunglasses. Kevin, annoyed, got up from his blanket and walked back into the shade.

"Jeesusss," said Little Petey. "Lookit 'em all."

"What is it?" said Kevin.

"The guns are here," said Little Petey. "And some people you should meet."

"Now?"

"Yeah, now," said Little Petey. He was looking at Violetta on the blanket, fingering her necklace. "She speak any English?"

"No," said Kevin.

"We'll take my car," said Little Petey. "Leave her. She can walk back."

It was an impressive array of firepower. Laid out on a sheet-metal billboard advertising Ting orange soda were enough guns to overthrow a medium-size Caribbean country. There were Uzis, four of them. M-16s, two of those, two pump-action Remington shotguns, an assortment of handguns, fragmentation grenades, and, drawing the most attention from the awestruck, shabbily dressed Dominicans who stood gaping and transfixed like a cargo cult around the guns, was a South African special purpose automatic shotgun, its huge drum canister and wide, ugly steel snout already the subject of heated debate.

Two of them, both in flower print shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, were arguing over who would get to wield this fearsome weapon. They were pushing and shoving like little kids, voices rising into curses and threats.

Little Petey had to step in, telling them to shut up in his high school Spanish. The Dominicans fell into sullen silence, eyes still glued to the big shotgun.

"This is Orlando," said Little Petey, throwing an arm roughly around a slightly built youth with a scorpion tattoo on his wrist. "Orlando is one bad dude, right, Orlando?"

Kevin wasn't so sure. They looked like spindly, underfed little bed wetters to him. If this was what he had to work with, it was not going to be easy.

Kevin unfastened the lock on the rotting wood garage door behind La Ronda's garbage area. The whole group followed, stepping over the empty propane tanks, beer cartons, and torn mattresses. When he pulled the doors open, a waft of damp, stifling air escaped. Everyone squeezed inside the dark garage to admire Kevin's work.

There were two Ford vans, their passenger compartments heavily reinforced by heavy steel plates, still rusted from years in the weeds. The rear cargo areas were similarly protected, top and sides, with large X-shaped gunports crudely cut through the centers of the plates on both sides. Smaller metal plates had been attached over the outer wheel wells to shield the tires, and protruding from the front of the first van, like the horn of a mutant stegosaurus, was an intimidating orange hunk of steel, a section of hydraulic arm from a front-end loader. Kevin had mounted the thing right through the dash; it rested on the floor between the two front seats and protruded at an angle, three feet beyond the bumper. He'd had to put a counterweight in the rear of the van so the back wheels didn't lift off the ground. Orlando whistled admiringly through his teeth at the fearsome-looking battering ram and stroked the flattened tip with his hand like he was petting an animal.

"Paf! Paf!" Somebody was yelling outside the garage. It was Flaco, Orlando's rail-thin brother with one drifting, milky eye, dry-firing the automatic shotgun. Jorge, a near-child wearing an Orioles cap, grabbed his chest and feigned being shot. Suddenly, the whole group was joining the fun, grabbing at weapons and pointing them at each other, the scene degenerating into a children's game. Hector and Alfredo, two dwarfish cousins, wrestled on the ground, competing to get the single remaining Uzi, while Papo, the only normally proportioned member of the group, tried to fit all of the grenades into the pockets of his threadbare cotton shorts.

Little Petey was embarrassed by the scene.
"Calma!"
he yelled.
"Tranquillo!"
He made them put the guns down, waiting until everything had been returned to the metal sign. Only Flaco still held a weapon, the automatic shotgun, which he'd managed to snatch out of Jorge's hands at the last second.

"Gimme!" commanded Little Petey, unsuited as a schoolmarm, wresting the weapon from the resentful Dominican only by exerting his superior strength.

They stood once more around the sign, looking sheepishly at their feet while Orlando, their apparent spiritual leader, hurled abuse at them in Spanish. Every once in a while, one of them would look up from his sneakers to gaze longingly at the guns.

"This a bloody fucking kinnergarten you got here. I'm supposedta work with these pitiable bastards? They're . . . they're fuckin' hopeless!" grumbled Kevin.

"Don't worry about it," said Little Petey. "Watch. Watch this." He picked up an Uzi and slapped a clip in, handing it to Flaco, the one with the walleye. With startling ease, the skinny Dominican had the safety off and was firing away on full auto, the tamarind tree a few feet over Kevin's shoulder bursting into confetti. Kevin dove for the ground and waited for the firing to stop. When the clip was exhausted, he got to his feet, walked over to the shooter, and hit him full in the face with his fist.

Flaco fell backward, knocked clean out of one of his sneakers. But, to Kevin's surprise, he didn't drop the gun. He didn't lie there, collecting his wits, or spitting out teeth, or rubbing his badly split lip. Instead, he bounced right back up, smiling, blood smeared across his large white teeth, and cheerfully held out the Uzi to Kevin. "Ees good," he said.
"My bueno.
You want gun?" His grin grew wider at Kevin's look of astonishment.

"See?" said Little Petey. "They make 'em tough where these kids come from. Flaco, baby," he asked. "How many,
cuanto hombres
you kill, Flaco?"

Flaco's smile stretched even wider, and he beamed with pride as he held up ten fingers, closed his hands, and then held up three more.
"Si!"
he insisted, serious now.
"Es verdad!
Very bad people!" adding, "Paf! Paf! Paf!" to stress his point.

"See?" said Little Petey. "They're
not
bad boys. They got experience this kinda thing."

"Christ Jesus," said Kevin, wiping dead leaves and bits of tree bark off the front of his shirt. He examined the tree where the bullets had gone home, a tight little grouping, good shooting for a kid who'd probably never handled an Uzi before.

"See?" said Little Petey, again. "What I tell ya?"

Violetta was only halfway back when Kevin found her. He'd borrowed Little Petey's car, racing down the dry riverbed to meet her. She was walking impassively up the hill, picking her way barefoot over the exposed roots and rocky humps, Kevin's beach bag perched on her head. Headed back to her cramped, clapboard cubicle at La Ronda.

As Kevin pulled the car up to give her a lift, calling out to her through the open window, he noticed that she'd removed the necklace he'd bought her, and his heart sank. When she slid silently into the seat next to him, he considered saying something to her about it, but he didn't.

On the short drive back, he was surprised at the depths of pain and unhappiness this simple development had brought on him. That she no longer wore the cheap string of shells hurt him in ways he hadn't felt since childhood. He found himself blinking rapidly, trying to get rid of the sickly sweet sensation that was washing over him like an illness. As if each time he opened his eyes again, the pain would be gone.

He suspected she'd sold the thing back to the man with the attache case. Pocketed the one or two dollars he would have given her for it. Kevin tried to put a caliber on it, the amount of pain he was feeling now. On the hierarchy of pain, how bad, really, did this hurt? Kneecaps busted? No, it wasn't
that
bad . . . Stabbed? Yes, more like that, the same icy tendril of fear and uncertainty was working its way into his chest as it had when he'd been stabbed. Kevin's chest hurt.

He looked over at Violetta, her hands crossed demurely on her lap, smiling shyly as the car bounced and jolted over the dirt road. He slowed down and, without thinking about it, leaned across the seat and pecked her on the cheek. When she turned and kissed him back, opening up her hand to show him the necklace, speaking for the first time since he'd known her, since he'd picked her out from a group of curlered, painted women on the couch at La Ronda, he felt better again.

C(
Gracias,"
she said, filling Kevin with joy. He sang all the way back, humming when he forgot the lyrics.

25

L
ittle Petey was drinking a banana daiquiri from a plastic cup, half-listening to the steel band on the casino's pool deck, and contemplating another pass at the complimentary buffet when he hit the jackpot.

Bored with watching tourists squealing and laughing as one Farrah-cut behemoth attempted to squeeze her bulk beneath a limbo pole, Petey drifted away from the beach side of the deck, leaving a pile of gnawed spareribs on his paper plate. His drink looked and tasted like fabric softener, and, half drunk and in a pissed-off mood, he wandered over to the street side, considering dropping the cup two floors into the Tropica's gurgling fountain.

On this side of the building, he was looking down onto Philips-burg's main drag. Unlike those on the narrow strip of trucked-in sand on the bay side, the faces here were black. People stood outside their taxis, hoping for fares, played dominoes in doorways, hustled jewelry and prerecorded cassettes from makeshift stands. There was a busy take-out joint under a stand of ratty-looking palms a little way down, and more of them huddled around two picnic tables with their barefoot children, awaiting their orders. Food was probably a damn sight better than the crap on the casino's buffet, Petey thought, regretting his meal already. These were locals, after all; they
had
to know the good places to eat. And this place was doing gangbuster business; it was a whole social scene, he saw - young men on scooters and motorcycles flirted with shy girls in brightly colored braids by the roadside. People beeped as they passed in their cars. An updraft brought the scent of grilling chicken and frying johnnycakes to his nose, and Little Petey almost shuddered with desire. He was thinking seriously about going down there and giving it a try when he saw Henry.

Hard to miss in these surroundings - Henry's was the only white face in sight. Taller than anybody around him, he stepped away from the counter with two plastic bags filled with take-out food, not a care in the world, thought Little Petey. Just look at him. Dressed in cutoffs, dirty T-shirt, and flip-flops, he sauntered over to a parked scooter, exchanged greetings with some dreadlocked young men sitting on a step (did he see Henry give
them
a joint?), and after some backslapping, hand-shaking, and laughing about who knew what (Petey couldn't hear them), Henry got on his scooter, the bags of takeout at his feet, and zipped off down Main Street.

This, thought Little Petey, should make Jimmy happy.