The Middleman and Other Stories (2 page)

“She's putting you on, Al,” Ransome shouts. He's just carried a case of beer out to the jeep. “She prefers St. Moritz.”

“You ski?”

I can feel the heat rising from her, or from the towel. I can imagine as the water beads on her shoulders how cool her flesh will be for just a few more minutes.

“Do I look as though I ski?”

I don't want to get involved in domestic squabbles. The
indios
watch us. A solemn teenager hefts his machete. We are to have an uncomplicated view of the ocean from the citadel of this patio.

“My husband is referring to the fact that I met John Travolta in St. Moritz,” she says, defiantly.

“Sweets,” says Ransome. The way he says it, it's a threat.

“He has a body of one long muscle, like an eel,” she says.

Ransome is closer now, “Make sure Eduardo doesn't forget the crates,” he says.

“Okay, okay,” she shouts back, “excuse me,” and I watch her corkscrew to her feet. I'm so close I can hear her ligaments pop.

Soon after, Bud Wilkins roars into the cleared patch that serves as the main parking lot. He backs his pickup so hard against a shade tree that a bird wheels up from its perch. Bud lines it up with an imaginary pistol and curls his finger twice in its direction. I'm not saying he has no feeling for wildlife. He's in boots and camouflage pants, but his hair, what there is of it, is blow-dried.

He stalks my chair. “We could use you, buddy.” He uncaps a beer bottle with, what else, his teeth. “You've seen some hot spots.”

“He doesn't want to fish.” Ransome is drinking beer, too. “We wouldn't want to leave Maria unprotected.” He waits for a retort, but Bud's too much the gentleman. Ransome stares at me and winks, but he's angry. It could get ugly, wherever they're going.

They drink more beer. Finally Eduardo comes out with a crate. He carries it bowlegged, in mincing little half-running steps. The fishing tackle, of course. The crate is dumped into Bud's pickup. He comes out with a second and third, equally heavy, and drops them all in Bud's truck. I can guess what I'm watching. Low-grade arms transfer, rifles, ammo and maybe medicine.

“
Ciao, amigo
,” says Bud in his heavy-duty Texas accent. He and Ransome roar into the jungle in Ransome's jeep.

“I hope you're not too hungry, Alfie.” It's Maria calling from the kitchen. Alfred to Alfie before the jeep can have made it off the property.

“I'm not a big eater.” What I mean to say is, I'm adaptable. What I'm hoping is, let us not waste time with food.

“Eduardo!” The houseboy, probably herniated by now, comes to her for instructions. “We just want a salad and fruit. But make it fast, I have to run into San Vincente today.” That's the nearest market town. I've been there, it's not much.

She stands at the front door about to join me on the patio when Eduardo rushes us, broom in hand. “
Vaya!
” he screams.

But she is calm. “It must be behind the stove, stupid,” she tells the servant. “It can't have made it out this far without us seeing it.”

Eduardo wields his broom like a night stick and retreats into the kitchen. We follow. I can't see it. I can only hear desperate clawing and scraping on the tiles behind the stove.

Maria stomps the floor to scare it out. The houseboy shoves the broom handle in the dark space. I think first, being a child of the overheated deserts, giant scorpions. But there are two fugitives, not one, a pair of ocean crabs. The crabs, their shiny purple backs dotted with yellow, try to get by us to the beach where they can hear the waves.

How do mating ocean crabs scuttle their way into Clovis T. Ransome's kitchen? I feel for them.

The broom comes down, thwack, thwack, and bashes the shells in loud, succulent cracks.
Ransome, Gringo
, I hear.

He sticks his dagger into the burlap sacks of green chemicals. He rips, he cuts.

“Eduardo, it's all right. Everything's fine.” She sounds stern, authoritative, the years in the presidential palace have served her well. She moves toward him, stops just short of taking his arm.

He spits out, “He kills everything.” At least, that's the drift.
The language of Cervantes does not stretch around the world without a few skips in transmission. Eduardo's litany includes crabs, the chemicals, the sulfurous pool, the dead birds and snakes and lizards.

“You have my promise,” Maria says. “It's going to work out. Now I want you to go to your room, I want you to rest.”

We hustle him into his room but he doesn't seem to notice his surroundings. His body has gone slack. I hear the word Santa Simona, a new saint for me. I maneuver him to the cot and keep him pinned down while Maria checks out a rusty medicine cabinet.

He looks up at me. “You drive
Doña
Maria where she goes?”

“If she wants me to, sure.”

“Eduardo, go to sleep. I'm giving you something to help.” She has water and a blue pill ready.

While she hovers over him, I check out his room. It's automatic with me. There are crates under the bed. There's a table covered with oilcloth. The oilcloth is cracked and grimy. A chair by the table is a catchall for clothes, shorts, even a bowl of fruit. Guavas. Eduardo could have snuck in caviar, imported cheeses, Godiva candies, but it's guavas he's chosen to stash for siesta hour hunger pains. The walls are hung with icons of saints. Posters of stars I'd never have heard of if I hadn't been forced to drop out. Baby-faced men and women. The women are sensual in an old-fashioned, Latin way, with red curvy lips, big breasts and tiny waists. Like Maria. Quite a few are unconvincing blondes, in that brassy Latin way. The men have greater range. Some are young versions of Fernando Lamas, some are in fatigues and boots, striking Robin Hood poses. The handsomest is dressed as a guerrilla with all the right accessories: beret, black boots, bandolier. Maybe he'd played Che Guevara in some B-budget Argentine melodrama.

“What's in the crates?” I ask Maria.

“I respect people's privacy,” she says. “Even a servant's.” She pushes me roughly toward the door. “So should you.”

* * *

The daylight seems too bright on the patio. The bashed shells are on the tiles. Ants have already discovered the flattened meat of ocean crabs, the blistered bodies of clumsy toads.

Maria tells me to set the table. Every day we use a lace cloth, heavy silverware, roses in a vase. Every day we drink champagne. Some mornings the Ransomes start on the champagne with breakfast. Bud owns an air-taxi service and flies in cases of Épernay, caviar, any damned thing his friends desire.

She comes out with a tray. Two plates, two fluted glasses, chèvre cheese on a bit of glossy banana leaf, water biscuits. “I'm afraid this will have to do. Anyway, you said you weren't hungry.”

I spread a biscuit and hand it to her.

“If you feel all right, I was hoping you'd drive me to San Vincente.” She gestures at Bud Wilkins's pickup truck. “I don't like to drive that thing.”

“What if I didn't want to?”

“You won't. Say no to me, I mean. I'm a terrific judge of character.” She shrugs, and her breasts are slower than her shoulders in coming down.

“The keys are on the kitchen counter. Do you mind if I use your w.c. instead of going back upstairs? Don't worry, I don't have horrible communicable diseases.” She laughs.

This may be intimacy. “How could I mind? It's your house.”

“Alfie, don't pretend innocence. It's Ransome's house. This isn't
my
house.”

I get the key to Bud's pickup and wait for her by the bruised tree. I don't want to know the contents of the crates, though the stencilling says “fruits” and doubtless the top layer preserves the fiction. How easily I've been recruited, when a bystander is all I wanted to be. The Indians put down their machetes and make signs to me:
Hi, mom, we're Number One.
They must have been watching Ransome's tapes. They're all wearing Braves caps.

The road to San Vincente is rough. Deep ruts have been cut into the surface by army trucks. Whole convoys must have
passed this way during the last rainy season. I don't want to know whose trucks, I don't want to know why.

Forty minutes into the trip Maria says, “When you get to the T, take a left. I have to stop off near here to run an errand.” It's a strange word for the middle of a jungle.

“Don't let it take you too long,” I say. “We want to be back before hubby gets home.” I'm feeling jaunty. She touches me when she talks.

“So Clovis scares you.” Her hand finds its way to my shoulder.

“Shouldn't he?”

I make the left. I make it sharper than I intended. Bud Wilkins's pickup sputters up a dusty rise. A pond appears and around it shacks with vegetable gardens.

“Where are we?”

“In Santa Simona,” Maria says. “I was born here, can you imagine?”

This isn't a village, it's a camp for guerrillas. I see some women here, and kids, roosters, dogs. What Santa Simona is is a rest stop for families on the run. I deny simple parallels. Ransome's ranch is just a ranch.

“You could park by the pond.”

I step on the brake and glide to the rutted edge of the pond. Whole convoys must have parked here during the rainy season. The ruts hint at secrets. Now in the dry season what might be a lake has shrunk into a muddy pit. Ducks float on green scum.

Young men in khaki begin to close in on Bud's truck.

Maria motions me to get out. “I bet you could use a drink.” We make our way up to the shacks. The way her bottom bounces inside those cutoffs could drive a man crazy. I don't turn back but I can hear the unloading of the truck.

So: Bud Wilkins's little shipment has been hijacked, and I'm the culprit. Some job for a middleman.

“
This
is my house, Alfie.”

I should be upset. Maria's turned me into a chauffeur. You bet I could use a drink.

We pass by the first shack. There's a garage in the back where there would be the usual large, cement laundry tub. Three men come at me, twirling tire irons the way night sticks are fondled by Manhattan cops. “I'm with her.”

Maria laughs at me. “It's not you they want.”

And I wonder,
who
was she supposed to deliver? Bud, perhaps, if Clovis hadn't taken him out? Or Clovis himself?

We pass the second shack, and a third. Then a tall guerrilla in full battle dress floats out of nowhere and blocks our path. Maria shrieks and throws herself on him and he holds her face in his hands, and in no time they're swaying and moaning like connubial visitors at a prison farm. She has her back to me. His big hands cup and squeeze her halter top. I've seen him somewhere. Eduardo's poster.

“Hey,” I try. When that doesn't work, I start to cough.

“Sorry.” Maria swings around still in his arms. “This is Al Judah. He's staying at the ranch.”

The soldier is called Andreas something. He looks me over. “Yudah?” he asks Maria, frowning.

She shrugs. “You want to make something of it?”

He says something rapidly, locally, that I can't make out. She translates, “He says you need a drink,” which I don't believe.

We go inside the command shack. It's a one-room affair, very clean, but dark and cluttered. I'm not sure I should sit on the narrow cot; it seems to be a catchall for the domestic details of revolution—sleeping bags, maps and charts, an empty canteen, two pairs of secondhand army boots. I need a comfortable place to deal with my traumas. There is a sofa of sorts, actually a car seat pushed tight against a wall and stabilized with bits of lumber. There are bullet holes through the fabric, and rusty stains that can only be blood. I reject the sofa. There are no tables, no chairs, no posters, no wall decorations of any kind, unless you count a crucifix. Above the cot, a sad, dark, plaster crucified Jesus recalls His time in the desert.

“Beer?” Maria doesn't wait for an answer. She walks behind a curtain and pulls a six-pack of Heinekens from a noisy refrigerator.
I believe I am being offered one of Bud Wilkins's unwitting contributions to the guerrilla effort. I should know it's best not to ask how Dutch beer and refrigerators and '57 two-tone Plymouths with fins and chrome make their way to nowhere jungle clearings. Because of guys like me, in better times, that's how. There's just demand and supply running the universe.

“Take your time, Alfie.” Maria is beaming so hard at me it's unreal. “We'll be back soon. You'll be cool and rested in here.”

Andreas manages a contemptuous wave, then holding hands, he and Maria vault over the railing of the back porch and disappear.

She's given me beer, plenty of beer, but no church key. I look around the room. Ransome or Bud would have used his teeth. From His perch, Jesus stares at me out of huge, sad, Levantine eyes. In this alien jungle, we're fellow Arabs. You should see what's happened to the old stomping grounds, compadre.

I test my teeth against a moist, corrugated bottle cap. It's no good. I whack the bottle cap with the heel of my hand against the metal edge of the cot. It foams and hisses. The second time it opens. New World skill. Somewhere in the back of the shack, a parakeet begins to squawk. It's a sad, ugly sound. I go out to the back porch to give myself something to do, maybe snoop. By the communal laundry tub there's a cage and inside the cage a mean, molting bird. A kid often or twelve teases the bird with bits of lettuce. Its beak snaps open for the greens and scrapes the rusty sides of the bar. The kid looks defective, dull-eyed, thin but flabby.

“Gringo,” he calls out to me. “Gringo, gum.”

I check my pockets. No Dentyne, no Tums, just the plastic cover for spent traveller's checks. My life has changed. I don't have to worry about bad breath or gas pains turning off clients.