Banana Republic Read online

  When he was fifteen, Billy Porter went to work at his Uncle Clark’s drugstore on Elm Street across from the Benbow Hotel. He learned to mix compounds and elixirs and to promote patent medicines in ornate tin boxes and brown bottles with labels as intricately engraved as banknotes. Working behind the counter made him privy to the secrets of his fellow citizens. He knew about their seizures, hysterical fits, abortions, outbreaks of gleet, bloody discharges, and suppurating ulcers, every malady revealed in the purchase of pills, powders, syrups, creams, tinctures, tonics, plasters, and salves. He knew which ladies needed a compound of tansy and pennyroyal for fleas, which men a cure for impotence and spermatorrhoea, who craved elixir of hydrastis and coca, whose catarrh responded only to paregoric. He prepared beef-wine for the unblooded and fig laxatives for the overstopped. He could not look at the bottles of turpentine, arnica, glycerine, and celery malt lined up in the glass presses behind the counter, at the mortar and pestle or the Troemer apothecary scale, without imagining the extravagant sufferings of humanity. There was scarcely a soul in Greensboro who was not desperate for worm syrup, neutralizing cordials, or Gumbault’s caustic balsam. It made him sick to think about it.

  When he was not compounding prescriptions, he learned to engage in minor gossip about dogfights and bark-beetle infestations with the local dignitaries who hung around the place from dawn to dusk. Compared to the hustlers at Gantry’s, these minor merchants and public servants were as dull as ham at Christmas. Learning to maintain an interest in other people’s trivial interests proved useful in the long run, but at the time, as he complained to his mother, he felt discouraged and impatient. “I can feel myself rot. I’d rather be locked up in Central Prison.”

  “Soon enough,” said his mother, who was a difficult woman and an accomplished ceramicist in the piedmont Moravian tradition. “Or worse. I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” In fact, she would be surprised if he lived long enough to be sent to the penitentiary. Her four brothers, serving in the Fourth North Carolina under Lt. Col. Bryan Grimes, had been killed at Seven Pines, and her father and his brother had died of a single lightning strike before the age of thirty, so she more or less expected her last living male relation to meet with an early death, probably as one casualty among many.

  Then there was Billy’s father. Dr. Algernon Porter was famed for his heroic consumption of moonshine. He made it a practice to take a shot of whiskey at every house on his rounds, in lieu of a fee, since no one but the carpetbaggers had cash money during those years. By suppertime, stuporous and stinking of hooch, he had to let his mule, Pete, find the way back to the barn. By the time Billy went to work at the pharmacy, Dr. Alternon, too, was dead, of a brain hemorrhage triggered by excessive celebration on New Year’s Eve. An angry ceramic bust of Dr. A. at his most dissolute occupied a polished pine side table in Mrs. Porter’s dining room.

  For four years, William Sydney Porter endured; became a registered pharmacist and a member of the state association; joined a serenading choir and played the mandolin and picked magnolia blossoms for young ladies; caught rheumatic fever; almost died; recovered; learned sleight-of-hand tricks from a magazine; closed the poolrooms on Saturday nights; spent every penny he earned on clothes at Hersch’s, money he would have shelled out on booze if he had not had ready access to the bottles of bonded pharmaceutical-grade whiskey refilled daily from the cobwebby barrel in the cellar of the drugstore. On any day of the week, an observant employer might find him and Pink Lindsay, the old relic who swept up around the place, tossing around a dead soldier in the alley behind the store. Whoever let the bottle break had to stand watch while the other took a nap in the storage shed. It was, in fact, the rapid evaporation of alcohol from the barrel in the cellar that prompted Clark Porter’s suggestion that Billy relocate to Texas for his health. “That’s a godawful cough, son. You were lucky with the rheumatic; you might not be so lucky with consumption. It runs in the family.”

  

  “Whoa, Henry.” Porter pulled lightly on the reins.

  The horse snorted and danced a couple of steps to the left, and then stopped in a deep shadow on the street. Porter swung down and brushed the dust from his pants. He led the horse to the open doors of what looked like a livery stable. He peered inside. Pitch black. He could hear the soft warm movements of the animals shifting their weight in the stalls.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hola.”

  At the back of the stable, a match flared. The flame moved through the inky darkness, small as a firefly, and then swelled to a brighter copper glow as the wick of a kerosene lantern caught. As the globe of light advanced through the stable, the rough form of a man took shape behind it.

  “He’p you?” said a familiar voice.

  “I’m looking to put up this horse. I thought maybe—”

  He broke off. Emerging from the darkness was the figure of Pierre. He wore denim trousers, a buckskin coat, and a white Stetson identical to Porter’s. His necklace of keys clinked.

  “Ain’t got no room for a horse, Mr.—”

  “Porter. You know who I am.”

  “Ain’t got no room, no,” Pierre repeated. He lifted the lantern and brought it close to Henry’s face. The horse’s eyes rolled, and he stepped back with a snort. Porter jerked the reins. Henry’s ears twitched. “Nice lookin’ an’mal. How much you take for ’im?”

  “I don’t want to sell him, you damned Cajun. I want to house him. Cornelia sent me from the hotel.”

  “Ain’t got no room for ’nother horse. And I ain’t no Cajun. Hail from Port-au-Prince.”

  “If you haven’t room,” Porter said impatiently, “can you point me to another livery stable?”

  “This the on’y one in town.”

  Porter peered inside the building. “All you have in there is a bunch of mules.”

  “Mules is horses.”

  “No, they’re not,” Porter snapped. “The whole point of a mule is that it’s not a horse.”

  “They’s half a horse, half a donkey. You want me to turn out the part ain’t a horse?”

  “No,” he said stupidly. “What am I supposed to do with this horse?”

  Henry lifted one foot and dropped it with a thud.

  “Guess you’ll hafta pasture him somewheres.”

  “Where can I find a pasture?”

  In the lantern light, Pierre’s pupils were huge. The flame cast monstrous shadows across his coppery features. He fingered the keys on the thong around his neck. “Mr. Whitaker got a pasture.”

  “Mr. Whitaker.”

  “He got a piece a land up there.”

  “Can I speak with the owner?”

  “Mr. Whitaker.”

  “No, the owner of this livery stable.”

  “Who’s askin’?”

  “I am!”

  “Mr.—”

  “Porter! Bill Porter!”

  Pierre studied the space above Porter’s left shoulder. “I give you eighty bucks for that horse.”

  “I didn’t come here to sell the horse!” Porter shouted. A shutter banged open nearby, and a woman started berating them in Spanish.

  “Might as well sell him,” Pierre said. “Y’ain’t got nowhere to house a horse. ’Sides, you need the scratch.”

  “How in blazes do you know what I need?” Even before the words were out, Porter was shocked to realize that Pierre knew exactly what he needed. He did not have two sticks to rub together.

  Porter took a breath and forced an even tone: “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Hold this.” Pierre handed the lantern to Porter. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a waxy lump of cash and peeled off some bills. “Here you go, yeah. Six’y bucks.”

  “You said eighty bucks. The saddle’s worth that.”

  “Market keep changin’. How I know you ain’t sellin’ me a lame ole feller? Mig
ht have the infectious flu.”

  “This horse is perfectly healthy, I can assure you.”

  “You had this horse a while, have you?”

  “No, but—God dang it, look him over. He’s the picture of health. You just said he was a nice-looking animal!”

  Pierre did not look the horse over. He pursed his lips and looked at Porter’s knees. “What’s a man to think? Comin’ up here with a strange horse in the middle the night.”

  “It’s not a half-hour since sunset,” Porter protested.

  “You finna argue ’bout the time?”

  Suddenly Porter felt very tired. The darkness around him seemed to roar.

  Pierre pushed back his Stetson and scratched his chin and looked Porter in the face. “I give fitty bucks for him.”

  Porter nodded. He took the limp bills from Pierre and shoved them into his pocket.

  As he picked his way back down the deep-shadowed street, his feet dragging and his hands hanging as limp as dead pigeons, Porter could hear Pierre cluck twice to get the horse moving. Then: “That’s right, Henry. Got a nice warm place for you in here, mon cher.”

  

  Geddie’s mind wandered across the lagoon, across the sea, to his last posting. At the end of the war with Spain, the State Department had sent him to Cuba to oversee the prisons—and prisoners—that the United States had inherited when they expelled the Spanish. This, on the theory that a man who could read Latin could decipher the documents that had sent men to the Cabaña fortress and, furthermore, could distinguish the murderers, rapists, and thieves from the spies, rebels, and local jokers. The current prison administration was so corrupt that even an adventurous Yankee with an uneven history of public service looked like a paragon.

  Havana had been hopeless. Everyone knew that he was there not because his resume featured a history of administrative excellence but because he “understood the mind” of Walter Whitaker, the president of Vesuvius Fruit Company, who had such vast sugar interests on the island that the new government needed a personal ambassador to keep him happy. The fruit-king had not set foot in Cuba in ten years, not since he had shot the doctor, Rodrigo Bonilla, who was organizing the peasants at the time of the second insurrection against the Spanish; but Vesuvius controlled 46,000 acres of sugar cane and employed 6,000 workers to chop it down, so Whitaker could demand an agent who was on the government payroll.

  Geddie and Whitaker had shared rooms in New Haven. Whitaker was the ideal Yale man, ignorant, cold-hearted, and uncommonly proud of his boxing skills; but Geddie threw a harder punch. He broke his roommate’s jaw in the ring—Queensberry rules—initiating a low-burning hostility shading into respect, which had never died. The stuff of youthful friendships. For two decades, their interests had been entwined, just as the interests of Vesuvius Fruit were entwined with the interests of the United States of America, which extracted a percentage of customs collections on all goods entering or leaving the ports of the Caribbean.

  Those who did not know better might have judged the consul’s presence in Coralio as an administrative exile, but John Buchanan Geddie had been sent there for a reason: Walter Whitaker, he of the Cuban sugar interests, had even vaster holdings beyond the island. From his endless tracts around Coralio, he extracted indigo, sarsaparilla, coffee, and, most of all, bananas. For some reason, Whitaker, who could have ruled in splendor from New Orleans or Chicago or New York, lived in the jungle that generated his wealth. Now he was building a railroad to make the process more efficient.

  It was Whitaker that the consul had been thinking about all morning. There had been some business about the railroad, more men killed by dynamite. They were Jamaicans, but there might be trouble. Nobody had been paid in six months.

  Then there was the telegram from Englebart in the capital. The government was on the verge of collapse again. Zamaya was planning an invasion. Or Sierra. Any day some free-lance general would stand Francisco Flores up against the wall. The British were concerned, and the Germans, who had business along the coast. It had been reported that a German destroyer that had been patroling off Hispaniola for the last month was on the move toward Panama. Or the Bahamas. Moth-like rumors floated on the subtle currents of tropical life.

  Geddie was grateful for these problems. He could do nothing about them, but they occupied his time—time which, since his arrival at this cloacal place, would otherwise be spent in a state of narcotic numbness until he was slid by his domestic staff into a root-snarled grave in the old pirate boneyard.

  

  To begin his overseas journalistic career, Porter took his steno pad and three pencils, and ventured out to explore the village. He poked his head into every tiny store, stinking watering hole, and pestilential single-table eatery, plus a private residence he had mistaken for the dockworkers’ dance hall and another that looked like a garment factory but was actually an orphanage where the walls were black with curtains of cockroaches. Besides lacking a bank, Coralio lacked a post office, a city hall, a police station, a green grocer, a railroad depot, a tailor, a hospital, and a feed store. He would have found more municipal substance at a crossroads cow town in Kansas.

  Coralio, as far as he could determine, was all right there, sprawled around the lagoon like a cachectic jaundiced animal, and backed by a solid palisade of wild nature, hard against which the dockworkers, fishermen, and vendors lived in long snaggled ranks of shacks. The Vesuvius hierarchy lived at appropriate elevations on the hillside. The long-time Coralians and the American outlaws resided in the single-story zinc-roofed buildings that were sardonically referred to as The Neighborhood.

  An hour after he had started, he was done with his survey.

  

  A fat slice of moon rose before the light of day had faded from the lagoon. Fishermen waded ashore, waist-deep, hauling nets and spreading them over the rock-ribbed beach near the consular dock, while women cooked skewers of fish over a driftwood fire. A breeze ruffled the moonlight as Porter turned off the Calle Grande and strolled around to the rear of the consulate, which rose as whitely as a New Hampshire farmhouse in the stirring shadows of the nipa trees. Three men were seated on straight chairs under a gigantic spreading ficus. In the purple twilight, he could see them gathered round a galvanized steel tub filled with bottles of beer. Porter recognized the consul and the quarantine doctor. Geddie, with his shoes off and his galluses undone, strummed a Martin guitar. The men murmured the pointless murmurs of early evening. The consul’s monkey, Sybil, sat on a ridged ficus root, trying to pry the cork from a beer bottle.

  “You suggested I stop by sometime,” Porter said and lifted his mandolin in greeting.

  “Evening, cowboy.” The consul gave him an easy look, as if he had been expected. “You can square the quartet.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “You’ve met Herman Grieg, I believe.”

  “We’ve crossed paths. I’m Bill Porter,” he said to the burly doctor, who was perched on his chair like a circus bear on a tricycle. Grieg peered at him and spat at his feet in a friendly way.

  “And this fellow here,” pointing his fingers like a pistol, “comes from your neck of the woods. Mr. Al Jennings. He had a little law practice back in Oklahoma before he started robbing trains.”

  “For purely ideological reasons,” Jennings interjected. “Not out of inherent criminality. I’m not a gunslinger.”

  “You’re not roosting down here on account of ideology,” observed Dr. Grieg.

  “I don’t need to explain myself,” said the train-robber.

  Jennings looked about twice Porter’s age and half his size, worn down early by life in the Indian Territory. He had a drooping mustache, drooping eyes, and drooping shoulders. He did not look like a lawyer, but neither did he look like an outlaw; he looked like the owner of a bankrupt haberdashery. Porter touched the brim of his hat. “Good to know you, Jennings. Not to be contrary, but I�
�ve never been to Oklahoma. I come from a different neck of the woods—Texas.”

  “That’s all right. My brothers and I robbed the Missouri Pacific outside of Fort Worth in ’98. Shot the expressman in the ear, but I heard later that he lived. He was a stubborn cuss.”

  “I read about that in the newspapers. If I’m not mistaken, you all lost the spoils from that one. North of thirty thousand, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, the reports were based on true events. The satchel burst open as we rode across the prairie, and the wind carried off the cash like chaff. Looked like a dust-devil whipping against the azure dome of summer as those banknotes swept up to heaven. As a practicing Christian, I appreciated the lesson. There was no real reason to shoot that expressman, and we were punished for it. From then on we stuffed the take into our collars and waistbands like scarecrows, stopped robbing women and preachers, and tithed ten percent to local charity. The sole material gains from that Fort Worth job were a bottle of whiskey and a bunch of bananas we took off the conductor.”

  Dr. Grieg snorted.

  Porter liked this man, Jennings; he spoke in a way that suggested he had tested the limits of fate and accepted the inevitability of failure. He was a true son of the frontier, born to reach beyond his grasp, faithful, murderous, repentant, and puzzled that he had spent so long striving for nothing but chaff in the wind. Back home, Porter thought, he’d do well in the new motion-picture business.