The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (32 page)

“‘Mr. Best,’” she said slowly. He was dark, and very attractive. “Are you from Honduras?”

“I live much of the time in Tegucigalpa, but the import-export business requires an unfortunate amount of travel. It becomes a chore.”

“Yes.” She looked at him. “I’m an actress, so I know.”

“Ah.” Mr. Best raised his eyebrows. “An actress…”

“But just what brings you here?” Boyce said suddenly.

Really, Caitlin thought—from the moment she’d gotten to her plane people had behaved as though they’d never seen a tourist before. But she only glanced at Mr. Best and laughed. “My daughter’s fiancé is in business here, and the two of them invited me down. So, of course, I drop everything I’m doing, I hop on a plane, and as soon as I get here they have to dash off to some other town. Pomarola, I think they said.”

“Palmerola—” Boyce said.

“Palmerola,” Harvey said, glancing at Boyce. “That’s no town—that’s the U.S. base, isn’t it? Where the U.S. Army is?”

“
Honduran
base,” Boyce said. “Where the
Honduran
Army is.”

“Quite right.” Mr. Best twinkled at Caitlin again. “The U.S. Army is not here.”

“And just what,” Boyce said, reddening, “does your daughter’s fiancé do?”

The force of his interest confused Caitlin for a moment, but she composed herself in the calm emanating from Mr. Best and remembered the conversation at breakfast. “Oh, Brandon’s quite the entrepreneur. He has his own plane and he flies around from country to country.”

“Really,” Mr. Best said thoughtfully. “A young man I ought to know. Let me give you my card; perhaps we could all meet for dinner one evening.” Boyce stared in astonishment as Mr. Best extracted a card from his wallet, but when Caitlin reached over to take it Mr. Best frowned and replaced it. “Sorry,” he said, selecting another, “that one was…incidentally—” He stood and turned to Boyce. “I believe I’m expecting something from you today?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Boyce said. He raked his hands through his hair. “Stop by the Embassy. See my secretary…. Oh, God,” he said as Mr. Best left, “I’m so
tired.
Oh,” he said sourly, as Lewis came through the entrance. “Hello, Lewis. Long time no see.”

“‘Long time no see,’” Lewis said. “Kinda catchy. Well, well, well, this appears to be a most congenial company.”

Boyce picked petulantly at the label on his beer bottle, but Harvey held out his hand. “Harvey Gumbiner,” he said.

“You’re putting me on,” Lewis said, drawing up a chair. “Hello, pretty lady.” He patted Caitlin on the shoulder. whatever “freshening up” meant to Lewis, it did not include changing his clothes.

“You two know one another,” Boyce announced accusingly.

“So the joint’s already jumpin’, huh?” Lewis said.

Caitlin looked around. By now most of the chairs were occupied by journalists, and a small, good-looking dark girl with a camera over her shoulder pirouetted lazily by the window. “Attractive young people,” Harvey said, looking at the girl. He picked up a handful of peanuts from a dish on the table and shoved them into his mouth.

“All waiting to watch the 82nd Airborne Division fall out of the sky,” Lewis said.

“
What?
” Harvey said.

“Well, naturally,” Boyce said sheepishly. “We could hardly not respond, could we? I mean ‘
Reds
,’ get it? ‘
Invading a democratic ally.
’”

“The
82nd Airborne
!” Harvey said, turning to Caitlin as though this were supposed to mean something to her. “Well, you and I certainly picked one hell of a day to show up.”

“Relax,” Lewis said. “There’s no one here for them to fight with—this is a photo op.”

“In fact,” Boyce admonished, “this is a very important moment. Which requires documentation. Because when everyone back home sees this footage, of all these courageous paratroopers diving into the jungle, they’re going to understand the danger; they’ll see what an invasion means, and maybe then they’ll get it through their heads why we’re here. Why I’m here, why I’ve been posted in this Goddamned cow town for the last year and a half. Year and a
half
, mind you. No restaurants, no night life, white-trash hoodlums out at Palmerola
terror
izing the women. My
God
,” he said to Caitlin. “I mean, have you seen Guatemala
City
?”

“Cheer up,” Lewis said. “A job’s a job.”

“What the hell is
this
—” Harvey interrupted. Caitlin followed his horrified gaze to where Ricky was goose-stepping through the lobby in his khaki shorts and black gloves.

“Just Ricky,” Lewis said. “On his way from the casino, looks like.”

“He’s not
American
, I hope,” Harvey said.

“We don’t strictly have jurisdiction over him,” Boyce said stiffly to Harvey. “We don’t strictly have jurisdiction over the casino—”

“No, but if it
off ends
you so painfully,” Lewis said, “why don’t you just—”

“This is a free country,” Boyce said shortly. “We intend to keep it that way. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Mr. Gumbiner and I have a—”

Lewis picked up Boyce’s beer bottle and waved it. “Be our guests,” he said. “Goodbye.”

“That Boyce,” he said as Boyce and Harvey disappeared through the lobby. “You don’t blame the laundromat ’cause you’ve got dirty laundry, right? I mean, if you want clean hands, stay out of the kitchen. Because people ought to stand behind what they do. You should say, ‘Well, look, these things are what we do. Because we believe in certain things. So we have to do certain things.’” There was something odd, Caitlin thought, about his distant look, as though he were peeking out from behind it to check her reaction. “Anyhow,” Lewis said, abandoning whatever he’d been driving at, “I’ve got to admit he’s pretty cute.
Rotten
liar, isn’t he? Poor guy, he’s never going to get out of Tegucigalpa.”

“He sure got out of here in a
hurry
,” Caitlin said.
And
with Harvey, her fallback position for dinner.

“Hope it wasn’t something I said.” Lewis held up the beer bottle and nodded to a waitress.

“Hello, Lewis.” One of the journalists sat down. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“How sorry?” Lewis said pleasantly. “’Cause I’m just curious.”

The journalist closed his eyes and smiled briefly, turning his back to Caitlin. “Bingo,” he said. “All kidding aside, though, I want to know something about this invasion.”

“What’s to know?” Lewis said, and winked at the waitress who was setting down his beer.

“I’d like to know, for example,” the journalist said, “if there
was
one; I’d like to know, for example, if any Nicaraguans actually crossed the border.”

“Got me,” Lewis said. “No one knows where the border is. Yuk yuk. Of course there was an invasion, honey bunch—didn’t you hear that on the news?”

“You know what, Lewis?” the journalist said. “Don’t you ever worry that someone might mistake you for garbage and throw you to the sharks?”

“Look at me, pal,” Lewis said, putting down his bottle. “What do I look like to you? Joint fucking Chiefs of Staff? If you want the story, why not go out and get it? Or better yet, why not just sit tight in Washington and listen while they tell it?”

“Thanks anyway, man.” The journalist tipped his beer slightly and sauntered off, nodding self-consciously to the good-looking dark girl, who didn’t see him.

“Rude little cliché-bound bastard,” Lewis said. A muscle jumped in his arm. “I give the guy enough information to jam a memory bank, and look at the way he acts.”

“So he’s an asshole,” Caitlin said. “That’s his problem, not yours.” She hadn’t followed the conversation, but that much was clear. “And you were very open with him.” She nodded. Then nodded again.

“Yeah.” Lewis closed his eyes. “Well. Mutual respect, in a manner of speaking.”

After a moment he opened his eyes again. “Look. Look at this spectacle; look at this mass of human waste. In a few hours, not forty kilometers away, the sky’s going to be black with specks—the 82nd Airborne floating down, all the cameras in this room pointing up. Photographs of vines, photographs of specks, give the folks back home a look at what it means to live near Communism. What do you bet three-quarters of these jerk-offs were in Vietnam, photographing specks and vines? After a hard day’s work, they’re going to come back here, sit around the pool, talk about the old days. Sit around the pool here, Panama City, San Salvador, Managua, get all weepy about how they sat around the pool in Saigon, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Bangkok. Hey, now they get to do it all again. Specks, vines, flames, buddies fallen in the line of duty yada yada, brings tears to the eyes.” He paused and darkened. “You’re thinking who am I to talk, right? Vines and specks, we all got a taste for it back then.”

So…yes. So why
was
Holly here, exactly? “I hate this place,” Caitlin said.

“So what are we waiting for?” Lewis said. “Fresh air! Countryside!” He motioned to the dreaming waitress for a check. “Come on, we’re out of here.”

Lewis’s jeep clung like an animal to the road as it undulated away from town. Clay-colored earth covered with acres of shacks, made from what looked to Caitlin like garbage—cardboard, plastic, scraps of wood—gave way to sunlit valleys and grand, pine-covered hills. Caitlin gazed out the window, until Lewis switched on a tape and driving rock and roll obliterated the landscape. “Our sound,” Lewis said. “But kids are still growing up on it. Isn’t that wild? We were rebels, but we created this enduring institution. Now it’s just one more thing that’s always been there. But for me it always sounds like that time when it was just invented. Remember what it was like? Remember how loose and new everything was?”

Caitlin remembered. There was always something happening, and something good just about to happen—no end of things ahead. Someone always had money, night horrors were gone by morning, the nasty and boring bits melted away in rainbows. “We had fun,” she said.

“Yeah,” Lewis said. “We had fun. But you know what?” He frowned and switched off the tape. “For me, there was a certain parting of the ways from you guys. During the war they used to ship us over to Bangkok to chill out. And a lot of times, in the bars, we’d hear the new songs, we didn’t know what was going on. The lyrics, I mean. What was everybody talking about? It was
our
home, right? I mean we were
representing
this place, we were fighting for its stuff, this was our generation. But evidently back at ‘our home’ there was this whole other life going on. So, I mean, who were
we
supposed to be?

“Now look,” Lewis said a few minutes later as they pulled off the highway onto a dirt road. “What do you see?”

“I give up,” Caitlin said.

“That’s right,” Lewis said. “Nothing. You can zip up and down all day long and never know these villages are here.”

And as he spoke, in fact, a little village was unfolding like paper flowers in a glass of water. First there was only the dusty road, and then there were oxen, with flowing horns and long Egyptian faces, and ribs that stood out, stretching their hides, yoked to a cart with great wooden wheels. A small boy sat astride one of the oxen, his ribs protruding, too, above his swollen belly. He sat and stared as the jeep passed, though Caitlin waved, and then the road was lined with painted walls, velvety in the sun, with openings that led into what must have been tiny homes or shops.

Lewis parked where the road stopped and the walls opened out onto a little village square waving with lilies, in the center of which sat a few wooden benches in the shade of an enormous tree, whose bluish bole shot up and up to a dense and massive dome of leaves floating, very green, against the deep, even sky. Tiny birds darted and chattered. In the heat, little yellow butterflies danced above the high grass, making the air around them flicker, but a chilly darkness was pouring down stone steps out of a church that faced the square. Doves, resting among the cracked angels on its immense wooden doors, ruffled up as Caitlin and Lewis passed through.

Phantom colors dropped from the high windows. A barefoot woman knelt, her hair streaming down her back, and far away, in the shaft of light that pierced the altar, Christ hung bleeding and serene in his perpetual agony. “Let’s go,” Caitlin whispered. “I want to go.”

The heat was intense, but it didn’t seem to bother Lewis. He guided Caitlin out behind the church to a lane where, inside tiny painted rooms, she could see some rough pieces of furniture, or a case or two of soft drinks and shelves that held a few cans or sacks of food. On one dirt floor huge and glossy avocados lay mounded like a heap of slumbering animals, and through another doorway Caitlin saw a circle of old men in coarse clothing playing oddly shaped stringed instruments. They sang in a fragile harmony, and a pale marine light came from their dark eyes as they listened intently to the notes their fingers released, their faces skeletal and papery. People disappeared inside as Caitlin and Lewis passed, and children hung back.