[Miss Fellowes thrashes through the foliage at the top of the jungle path.]
SHANNON: Miss Fellowes, never do that! Not at high noon in a tropical country in summer. Never charge up a hill like you were leading a troop of cavalry attacking an almost impregnable. . . .
MISS FELLOWES [panting and furious]: I don’t want advice or instructions, I want the bus key!
SHANNON: Mrs. Faulk, this is Miss Judith Fellowes.
MISS FELLOWES: Is this man making a deal with you?
MAXINE: I don’t know what you—
MISS FELLOWES: Is this man getting a kickback out of you?
MAXINE: Nobody gets any kickback out of me. I turn away more people than—
MISS FELLOWES [cutting in]: This isn’t the Ambos Mundos. It says in the brochure that in Puerto Barrio we stay at the Ambos Mundos in the heart of the city.
SHANNON: Yes, on the plaza—tell her about the plaza.
MAXINE: What about the plaza?
SHANNON: It’s hot, noisy, stinking, swarming with flies. Pariah dogs dying in the—
MISS FELLOWES: How is this place better?
SHANNON: The view from this verandah is equal and I think better than the view from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, the view from the roof-terrace of the sultan’s palace in—
MISS FELLOWES [cutting in]: I want the view of a clean bed, a bathroom with plumbing that works, and food that is eatable and digestible and not contaminated by filthy—
SHANNON: Miss Fellowes!
MISS FELLOWES: Take your hand off my arm.
SHANNON: Look at this sample menu. The cook is a Chinese imported from Shanghai by me! Sent here by me, year before last, in nineteen thirty-eight. He was the chef at the Royal Colonial Club in—
MISS FELLOWES [cutting in]: You got a telephone here?
MAXINE: Sure, in the office.
MISS FELLOWES: I want to use it—I’ll call collect. Where’s the office?
MAXINE [to Pancho]: Llevala al telefono!
[With Pancho showing her the way Miss Fellowes stalks off around the verandah to the office. Shannon falls back, sighing desperately, against the verandah wall.]
MAXINE: Hah!
SHANNON: Why did you have to . . . ?
MAXINE: Huh?
SHANNON: Come out looking like this! For you it’s funny but for me it’s. . . .
MAXINE: This is how I look. What’s wrong with how I look?
SHANNON: I told you to button your shirt. Are you so proud of your boobs that you won’t button your shirt up?—Go in the office and see if she’s calling Blake Tours to get me fired.
MAXINE: She better not unless she pays for the call.
[She goes around the turn of the verandah.]
[Miss Hannah Jelkes appears below the verandah steps and stops short as Shannon turns to the wall, pounding his fist against it with a sobbing sound in his throat.]
HANNAH: Excuse me.
[Shannon looks down at her, dazed. Hannah is remarkable-looking—ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated. She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking—almost timeless. She is wearing a cotton print dress and has a bag slung on a strap over her shoulder.]
HANNAH: Is this the Costa Verde Hotel?
SHANNON [suddenly pacified by her appearance]: Yes. Yes, it is.
HANNAH: Are you . . . you’re not, the hotel manager, are you?
SHANNON: No. She’ll be right back.
HANNAH: Thank you. Do you have any idea if they have two vacancies here? One for myself and one for my grandfather who’s waiting in a taxi down there on the road. I didn’t want to bring him up the hill—till I’d made sure they have rooms for us first.
SHANNON: Well, there’s plenty of room here out-of-season—like now.
HANNAH: Good! Wonderful! I’ll get him out of the taxi.
SHANNON: Need any help?
HANNAH: No, thank you. We’ll make it all right.
[She gives him a pleasant nod and goes back off down the path through the rain forest. A coconut plops to the ground; a parrot screams at a distance. Shannon drops into the hammock and stretches out. Then Maxine reappears.]
SHANNON: How about the call? Did she make a phone call?
MAXINE: She called a judge in Texas—Blowing Rock, Texas. Collect.
SHANNON: She’s trying to get me fired and she is also trying to pin on me a rape charge, a charge of statutory rape.
MAXINE: What’s “statutory rape”? I’ve never known what that was.
SHANNON: That’s when a man is seduced by a girl under twenty. [She chuckles.] It’s not funny, Maxine honey.
MAXINE: Why do you want the young ones—or think that you do?
SHANNON: I don’t want any, any—regardless of age.
MAXINE: Then why do you take them, Shannon? [He swallows but does not answer.]—Huh, Shannon.
SHANNON: People need human contact, Maxine honey.
MAXINE: What size shoe do you wear?
SHANNON: I don’t get the point of that question.
MAXINE: These shoes are shot and if I remember correctly, you travel with only one pair. Fred’s estate included one good pair of shoes and your feet look about his size.
SHANNON: I loved ole Fred but I don’t want to fill his shoes, honey.
[She has removed Shannon’s beat-up, English-made Oxfords.]
MAXINE: Your socks are shot. Fred’s socks would fit you, too, Shannon. [She opens his collar.] Aw-aw, I see you got on your gold cross. That’s a bad sign, it means you’re thinkin’ again about goin’ back to the Church.
SHANNON: This is my last tour, Maxine. I wrote my old bishop this morning a complete confession and a complete capitulation.
[She takes a letter from his damp shirt pocket.]
MAXINE: If this is the letter, baby, you’ve sweated through it, so the old bugger couldn’t read it even if you mailed it to him this time.
[She has started around the verandah, and goes off as Hank reappears up the hill-path, mopping his face. Shannon’s relaxed position in the hammock aggravates Hank sorely.]
HANK: Will you get your ass out of that hammock?
SHANNON: No, I will not.
HANK: Shannon, git out of that hammock! [He kicks at Shannon’s hips in the hammock.]
SHANNON: Hank, if you can’t function under rough circumstances, you are in the wrong racket, man. I gave you instructions, the instructions were simple. I said get them out of the bus and. . . .
[Maxine comes back with a kettle of water, a towel and other shaving equipment.]
HANK: Out of the hammock, Shannon! [He kicks Shannon again, harder.]
SHANNON [warningly]: That’s enough, Hank. A little familiarity goes a long way, but not as far as you’re going. [Maxine starts lathering his face.] What’s this, what are you . . . ?
MAXINE: Haven’t you ever had a shave-and-haircut by a lady barber?
HANK: The kid has gone into hysterics.
MAXINE: Hold still, Shannon.
SHANNON: Hank, hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It’s the big female weapon, and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it, and I can’t believe you can’t. If I believed that you couldn’t, I would not be able—
MAXINE: Hold still!
SHANNON: I’m holding still. [To Hank.] No, I wouldn’t be able to take you out with me again. So go on back down there and—
HANK: You want me to go back down there and tell them you’re getting a shave up here in a hammock?
MAXINE: Tell them that Reverend Larry is going back to the Church so they can go back to the Female College in Texas.
HANK: I want another beer.
MAXINE: Help yourself, piggly-wiggly, the cooler’s in my office right around there. [She points around the corner of the verandah.]
SHANNON [as HANK goes off]: It’s horrible how you got to bluff and keep bluffing even when hollering “Help!” is all
you’re up to, Maxine. You cut me!
MAXINE: You didn’t hold still.
SHANNON: Just trim the beard a little.
MAXINE: I know. Baby, tonight we’ll go night-swimming, whether it storms or not.
SHANNON: Ah, God. . . .
MAXINE: The Mexican kids are wonderful night-swimmers. . . . Hah, when I found ’em they were taking the two-hundred-foot dives off the Quebrada, but the Quebrada Hotel kicked ’em out for being overattentive to the lady guests there. That’s how I got hold of them.
SHANNON: Maxine, you’re bigger than life and twice as unnatural, honey.
MAXINE: No one’s bigger than life-size, Shannon, or even ever that big, except maybe Fred. [She shouts “Fred?” and gets a faint answering echo from an adjoining hill.] Little Sir Echo is all that answers for him now, Shannon, but. . . . [She pats some bay rum on his face.] Dear old Fred was always a mystery to me. He was so patient and tolerant with me that it was insulting to me. A man and a woman have got to challenge each other, y’know what I mean. I mean I hired those diving-boys from the Quebrada six months before Fred died, and did he care? Did he give a damn when I started night-swimming with them? No. He’d go night-fishing, all night, and when I got up the next day, he’d be preparing to go out fishing again, but he just caught the fish and threw them back in the sea.
[Hank returns and sits drinking his beer on the steps.]
SHANNON: The mystery of old Fred was simple. He was just cool and decent, that’s all the mystery of him. . . . Get your pair of night-swimmers to grab my ladies’ luggage out of the bus before the vocal teacher gets off the phone and stops them.
MAXINE [shouting]: Pedro! Pancho! Muchachos! Trae las maletas al anejo! Pronto! [The Mexican boys start down the path. Maxine sits in the hammock beside Shannon.] You I’ll put in Fred’s old room, next to me.
SHANNON: You want me in his socks and his shoes and in his room next to you? [He stares at her with a shocked surmise of her intentions toward him, then flops back down in the hammock with an incredulous laugh.] Oh no, honey. I’ve just been hanging on till I could get in this hammock on this verandah over the rain forest and the still-water beach, that’s all that can put me through this last tour in a condition to go back to my . . . original . . . vocation.
MAXINE: Hah, you still have some rational moments when you face the fact that churchgoers don’t go to church to hear atheistical sermons.
SHANNON: Goddamit, I never preached an atheistical sermon in a church in my life, and. . . .
[Miss Fellowes has charged out of the office and rounds the verandah to bear down on Shannon and Maxine, who jumps up out of the hammock.]
MISS FELLOWES: I’ve completed my call, which I made collect to Texas.
[Maxine shrugs, going by her around the verandah. Miss Fellowes runs across the verandah.]
SHANNON [sitting up in the hammock]: Excuse me, Miss Fellowes, for not getting out of this hammock, but I . . . Miss Fellowes? Please sit down a minute, I want to confess something to you.
MISS FELLOWES: That ought to be int’restin’! What?
SHANNON: Just that—well, like everyone else, at some point or other in life, my life has cracked up on me.
MISS FELLOWES: How does that compensate us?
SHANNON: I don’t think I know what you mean by compensate, Miss Fellowes. [He props himself up and gazes at her with the gentlest bewilderment, calculated to melt a heart of stone.] I mean I’ve just confessed to you that I’m at the end of my rope, and you say, “How does that compensate us?” Please, Miss Fellowes. Don’t make me feel that any adult human being puts personal compensation before the dreadful, bare fact of a man at the end of his rope who still has to try to go on, to continue, as if he’d never been better or stronger in his whole existence. No, don’t do that, it would. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: It would what?
SHANNON: Shake if not shatter everything left of my faith in essential . . . human . . . goodness!
MAXINE [returning, with a pair of socks]: Hah!
MISS FELLOWES: Can you sit there, I mean lie there—yeah, I mean lie there . . . ! and talk to me about—
MAXINE: Hah!
MISS FELLOWES: “Essential human goodness”? Why, just plain human decency is beyond your imagination, Shannon, so lie there, lie there and lie there, we’re going!
SHANNON [rising from the hammock]: Miss Fellowes, I thought that I was conducting this party, not you.
MISS FELLOWES: You? You just now admitted you’re incompetent, as well as. . . .
MAXINE: Hah.
SHANNON: Maxine, will you—
MISS FELLOWES [cutting in with cold, righteous fury]: Shannon, we girls have worked and slaved all year at Baptist Female College for this Mexican tour, and the tour is a cheat!
SHANNON [to himself]: Fantastic!
MISS FELLOWES: Yes, cheat! You haven’t stuck to the schedule and you haven’t stuck to the itinerary advertised in the brochure which Blake Tours put out. Now either Blake Tours is cheating us or you are cheating Blake Tours, and I’m putting wheels in motion—I don’t care what it costs me—I’m. . . .
SHANNON: Oh, Miss Fellowes, isn’t it just as plain to you as it is to me that your hysterical insults, which are not at all easy for any born and bred gentleman to accept, are not . . . motivated, provoked by . . . anything as trivial as the, the . . . the motivations that you’re, you’re . . . ascribing them to? Now can’t we talk about the real, true cause of. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Cause of what?
[Charlotte Goodall appears at the top of the hill.]
SHANNON: —Cause of your rage Miss Fellowes, your—
MISS FELLOWES: Charlotte! Stay down the hill in the bus!
CHARLOTTE: Judy, they’re—
MISS FELLOWES: Obey me! Down!
[Charlotte retreats from view like a well-trained dog. Miss Fellowes charges back to Shannon who has gotten out of the hammock. He places a conciliatory hand on her arm.]
MISS FELLOWES: Take your hand off my arm!
MAXINE: Hah!
SHANNON: Fantastic. Miss Fellowes, please! No more shouting? Please? Now I really must ask you to let this party of ladies come up here and judge the accommodations for themselves and compare them with what they saw passing through town. Miss Fellowes, there is such a thing as charm and beauty in some places, as much as there’s nothing but dull, ugly imitation of highway motels in Texas and—
[Miss Fellowes charges over to the path to see if Charlotte has obeyed her. Shannon follows, still propitiatory. Maxine says “Hah,” but she gives him an affectionate little pat as he goes by her. He pushes her hand away as he continues his appeal to Miss Fellowes.]
MISS FELLOWES: I’ve taken a look at those rooms and they’d make a room at the “Y” look like a suite at the Ritz.
SHANNON: Miss Fellowes, I am employed by Blake Tours and so I’m not in a position to tell you quite frankly what mistakes they’ve made in their advertising brochure. They just don’t know Mexico. I do. I know it as well as I know five out of all six continents on the—
MISS FELLOWES: Continent! Mexico? You never even studied geography if you—
SHANNON: My degree from Sewanee is Doctor of Divinity, but for the past ten years geography’s been my specialty, Miss Fellowes, honey! Name any tourist agency I haven’t worked for! You couldn’t! I’m only, now, with Blake Tours because I—
MISS FELLOWES: Because you what? Couldn’t keep your hands off innocent, underage girls in your—
SHANNON: Now, Miss Fellowes. . . . [He touches her arm again.]
MISS FELLOWES: Take your hand off my arm!
SHANNON: For days I’ve known you were furious and unhappy, but—
MISS FELLOWES: Oh! You think it’s just me that’s unhappy! Hauled in that stifling bus over the byways, off the highways, shook up and bumped up so you could get your rake-off, is that what you—
SHANNON: What I know is, all I know is, that you are the leader of the insurrection!
MISS FELLOWE
S: All of the girls in this party have dysentery!
SHANNON: That you can’t hold me to blame for.
MISS FELLOWES: I do hold you to blame for it.
SHANNON: Before we entered Mexico, at New Laredo, Texas, I called you ladies together in the depot on the Texas side of the border and I passed out mimeographed sheets of instructions on what to eat and what not to eat, what to drink, what not to drink in the—
MISS FELLOWES: It’s not what we ate but where we ate that gave us dysentery!
SHANNON [shaking his head like a metronome]: It is not dysentery.
MISS FELLOWES: The result of eating in places that would be condemned by the Board of Health in—
SHANNON: Now wait a minute—
MISS FELLOWES: For disregarding all rules of sanitation.
SHANNON: It is not dysentery, it is not amoebic, it’s nothing at all but—
MAXINE: Montezuma’s Revenge! That’s what we call it.
SHANNON: I even passed out pills. I passed out bottles of Enteroviaform because I knew that some of you ladies would rather be victims of Montezuma’s Revenge than spend cinco centavos on bottled water in stations.
MISS FELLOWES: You sold those pills at a profit of fifty cents per bottle.
MAXINE: Hah-hah! [She knocks off the end of a coconut with the machete, preparing a rum-coco.]
SHANNON: Now fun is fun, Miss Fellowes, but an accusation like that—
MISS FELLOWES: I priced them in pharmacies, because I suspected that—
SHANNON: Miss Fellowes, I am a gentleman, and as a gentleman I can’t be insulted like this. I mean I can’t accept insults of that kind even from a member of a tour that I am conducting. And, Miss Fellowes, I think you might also remember, you might try to remember, that you’re speaking to an ordained minister of the Church.
MISS FELLOWES: De-frocked! But still trying to pass himself off as a minister!