“He have money in that long notecase,” he said. “Big money.”
It was true. I still had the doctor’s wallet and I had forgotten about it. I went back to the room and got it from the suitcase. I paid Ruth twenty American dollars and I thought this would put me on a new footing with her, but it seemed to make her even more disagreeable. I asked her where the government agriculture office was and she ignored me. I asked her where the police station was and she turned her back to me and went through the curtain to her living quarters. I rang the bell but she wouldn’t come back.
I was annoyed with Webster for poking around my room while I was asleep but I didn’t mention it. I asked if he could run an errand for me. He said nothing and kept working in his notebook. He and Ruth both had decided that I was the sort of person they didn’t have to listen to. There were certain white people that they might have to listen to but I was not one of them. I spoke to him again.
“I’m busy,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m drawing the car of tomorrow.”
“Yes, I see now. It looks fast. That’s nice work. Everything will have to wait until you’re finished with it.”
I went out into the soft tropic morning. Roosters were crowing all over Belize. My two-day torpor was gone and I was ready for business. Webster had put his tomato plant out on the sidewalk for the sunlight hours. There were two green tomatoes on it.
The little Buick was filthy but it appeared to be intact. There was a leaflet under the windshield wiper. The letters at the top of the sheet were so big and they were marching across the paper in such a way that I had to move my head back a little from normal reading range to make out the words.
LEET WANTS THIS CAR
Hullo, my name is Leet and I pay cash for select motor cars such as yours. I pay promptly in American ($) Dollars. I pay the duty too so as to spare you bother on that Score. Please see me at once on the Franklin Road just beyond the abandoned Ink factory and get an immediate price quotation. Before you deal with another person ask yourself these important questions. Who is this Person? Where was he yesterday and where will he be tomorrow? Leet has been in business at the same location for Six Years and he is not going any where. Here’s hoping we may get together soon. I am a White Man from Great Yarmouth, England, with previous service in the Royal Navy. With every good wish, I am, yours for Mutual Satisfaction,
Wm. Leet
Leet’s Motor Ranch
Franklin Road
Belize, B.H.
I threw it away and got my Esso map from the glove compartment and retrieved the doctor’s flashlight from under the seat.
Where were the government buildings? I set out toward the arched bridge to find them. No one was about on the streets. I stopped to read signs and posters. A band called the Blues Busters was appearing at an all-night dance. The movie house was featuring a film of a Muhammad Ali fight. I made a plan for breakfast. I would stop at the second restaurant that I came to on my left.
It was a Chinese place and not a restaurant as such but rather a grocery store with a coffee machine and an ice-cream machine and a few tables. An old Chinese man was wiping off the stainless-steel ice-cream machine. Maintenance! The firemen of Belize were gathered there at two tables for coffee and rolls. A piece of luck, I thought, my hitting on the very place that the firemen liked. They looked at me and lowered their voices. I didn’t want to interfere with their morning chat so I bought a cone of soft ice cream and left.
Across the way on the bank of the river there was a public market, a long open shed with a low tin roof, where bananas and pigs and melons were sold, though not this early in the morning. Outside the shed on the dock there were three men skinning a giant brown snake that hung from a hook. There, I said to myself, is something worth watching. I went over and took up a close viewing position and ate my ice cream. The job was soon done, but not with any great skill. The long belly cut was ragged and uncertain. It might have been their first snake. They kept the skin with its reticulated pattern and dropped the heavy carcass into the river where it hung for a moment just beneath the surface, white and sinuous, and then sank.
As I thought over what I had seen, very much puzzled as to how the specific gravity of snake flesh could be greater than that of water, someone came up behind me and pinched my upper arm and made me jump, as before, in Chetumal. I had come to fear this salute. It was Webster Spooner this time. He had his newspapers and greeting cards. He seemed to be embarrassed.
“Are you vexed with me, sor, for going through your things?”
“I am a little, yes.”
“I was looking for a President Kennedy dollar.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I know you don’t.”
“You missed the big snake. There was a monster snake hanging up there just a minute ago. Some sort of constrictor.”
“I see him last night.”
“How would you like to tangle with that big fellow?”
Webster twisted about and gasped as though in the clutches of the snake. “He be badder than any shark.”
“I saw your tomatoes. They looked pretty good.”
“A bug done eat one of ’em up.”
One bug! A whole tomato! I asked again about the government offices and this time Webster was helpful and agreeable. But it was Sunday, I was surprised to learn, and the offices wouldn’t be open. I unfolded the blue map and spread it out on one of the market tables.
“All right, Webster, look here. You will recognize this as a map of your country. An American named Dupree owns a farm here somewhere. I need to find that farm. I want you to go to your police connections and get them to mark the location of that farm on this map. I’m going to give you five dollars now and that’s for the policeman. When you bring the map back to me, I’ll have five dollars for you. How do you like that?”
He took pains to get Dupree spelled right in his notebook and he didn’t whine or raise difficulties, as might have been expected from the corrupt Travis. I described my Torino and told him to be on the lookout for it. He asked me if I could get him a Kennedy dollar. He had that coin on the brain. Every time he got his hands on one, he said, Ruth took it away from him.
“I’ll see if I can find you one,” I said. “It’s a half dollar and I should tell you that it probably won’t be silver. All our coins now are cupronickel tokens of no real value. I want that Dupree information just as soon as you can get it. I’ll be walking around town for a while and then I’ll be at the Unity Tabernacle. I’ll wait for you there. Do you know that church?”
Webster not only knew it, he was a sort of lapsed member. The tomato plant in the Texaco bucket had started as a church project. He didn’t go much anymore, he said, because he had seen all the movies. He liked the singing and the Christmas program and the Easter egg hunt and he didn’t mind seeing the Heckle and Jeckle cartoons over and over again. But the rest of it was too hard. And Mrs. Symes, no fool, had rearranged the schedule so that the Bible quiz was now held before the movie—and no one was admitted late.
He showed me his selection of greeting cards. I bought one, and a newspaper too, the first one I had ever seen that was actually called the Daily Bugle. It was made up entirely of political abuse, mean little paragraphs, and I threw it away.
For the next two hours or so I made figure-eight walking circuits of all the downtown blocks. I saw a good many Ford Galaxies, the big favorite here, but no sleek Torino of any model. Some of the dwelling houses had cozy English names . . . Rose Lodge, The Haven. I stopped at the Fort George Hotel for coffee. Some British soldiers were there, still a little drunk from the Blues Busters dance, and they were talking to an American woman who was at the next table with a small boy. They asked her why Americans said “budder” and “wadder” instead of “butter” and “water” and she said she didn’t know. I asked them about their regiment and they said it was the Coldstream Guards. Were they lying? I couldn’t tell. The Coldstream Guards!
The hotel desk clerk was a woman and she said she vaguely remembered a Mr. Dupree, remembered his renting a car, and she thought his farm was south of town somewhere but she wasn’t sure.
The door of Unity Tabernacle was bolted against quizdodgers. I hammered away on it until I was admitted by a boy monitor wearing a safety-patrol belt. The chapel was dark. Mrs. Symes was showing a George Sanders movie to a dozen or so Negro children who were scuffling on the pews. She herself was running the projector and I stood beside her and watched the show for a while. It was a Falcon picture. A wild-eyed man with a tiny mustache was trying desperately to buy a ticket in an enormous marble train station. Mrs. Symes said to me, “He’s not going anywhere. The Falcon is laying a trap for that joker.” Then she gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5 ( ), $10 ( ), or $25 ( ) toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot inner light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St., and I had to put this information on the back. I pledged ten dollars. It was just a pledge and I didn’t have to pay the money at that moment.
The doctor had been removed to a bed upstairs. I found him awake but he was still gray in the face and his eye looked bad. He was sitting up, shapeless as a manatee in a woman’s pink gown. He was going through a big pasteboard box that was filled with letters and photographs and other odds and ends. His hair had been cut, the jaybird crest was gone. He needed a shave. Melba gave me some coffee and apiece of cinnamon toast. She said that the three of us presented an interesting tableau, what with one person in bed, one in a chair, and one standing. Dr. Symes was fretful. He wouldn’t talk until Melba had left us.
“What happened to your hair?” I said.
“Mama cut it with some shears.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Yes, I do. They won’t let me have any medication, Speed. They’ve put my bag away. They don’t even keep a thermometer. I’ve lost my money and I’ve lost my book. I can’t find my grooming aids. Some Mexican has got my flashlight.”
I gave him his wallet and his flashlight and told him that the Dix book was safe in my room. This brought him around a little. He fingered through the money but he didn’t count it.
“I appreciate this, Speed. You could have put the blocks to me but you didn’t do it.”
“I forgot all about it.”
“Where in the world have you been?”
“Asleep.”
“Is that asthma acting up on you?”
“No.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At a hotel down there on the creek.”
“A nice place?”
“It’s all right.”
“Do they have roof-garden dancing and a nice orchestra?”
“It’s not that kind of hotel. How’s your diarrhea?”
“I’ve got that gentleman turned all the way around. I’m excreting rocks now when I can do my job at all. Did you get your sweetie back?”
“I’m not trying to get her back. I’m trying to get my car back.”
“Well, did you get it?”
“Not yet. I’m working on it.”
“Taking to your bed won’t get it. You need to get after it.”
“I know that.”
“You need to read Dix. You need to read Dix on how to close.”
“I didn’t get very far in that book.”
“He tells you how to close a sale. Of course it has a wider application. The art of closing, of consummation. Master that and you have the key to the golden door of success. You need to let Dix take you by the hand.”
“I read the part about not imposing on people but I never did that anyway.”
“You read it wrong. It is necessary to impose on them. How else can you help a sap? Did you read the chapter on generating enthusiasm?”
“I read part of it.”
“Read it all. Then read it again. It’s pure nitro. The Three T’s. The Five Don’ts. The Seven Elements. Stoking the fires of the U.S.S. Reality. Making the Pep Squad and staying on it.”
“I read the part about the fellow named Floyd who wouldn’t work.”
“Marvin, not Floyd. Where do you get Floyd? There’s no Floyd in any book Dix ever wrote. No, this was Marvin. It’s a beautiful story and so true to life too. Old sorry Marvin! Pouting in his hotel room and listening to dance music on the radio and smoking one cigarette after the other and reading detective magazines and racing sheets. Sitting on the bed trying to dope out his six-dollar combinations. That guy! Wheeling his sap bets for the daily double! Dix knew Marv so well. Do you recall how he summed him up—‘Hawking and spitting, we lay waste our powers.’ I was once a Marvin myself if you can believe that. I had the blues so bad I was paralyzed. Then I read Dix and got off my ass.”
“My money hasn’t come in from Little Rock yet.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long do you expect me to carry you?”
“It should come in today. I’m looking for it today. Anyway, you’ve still got my bonds.”
“I don’t want any more of your bonds. I’m caught up on bonds.”
“It should come in today. I figure I owe you about thirty dollars.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s about fourteen hundred miles from San Miguel. I figure sixty dollars for the gas and oil and other stuff.”
“How much for the motorized canoe ride?”
“Do you think I’m going to pay half of that?”
“People are careless when they’re spending other people’s money. That stuff is hard to come by.”
“It wasn’t a canoe. It was a boat.”
“I have to work for my money. I’m not like you.”
He had sorted the memorabilia from the box into three piles on the bed and took a long brown envelope from one of the piles and waved it at me. “Come here a minute, Speed. I want to show you something.”
It was a new plan for Jean’s Island. On the back of the envelope he had sketched an outline of the island, which was shaped like a tadpole. On the bulbous end he had drawn a dock and some rectangles that represented barracks. This was to be a nursing-home complex for old people called The City of Life. He and his mother would live on the island in a long yellow house, he at one end and she at the other, her bathtub fitted with a grab-bar. Together they would run the nursing home. He would supervise the medical care and she would minister to the spiritual needs. He anticipated a licensing problem because of his record but he thought he could get around that by registering the thing in his mother’s name. And in Louisiana there was always some official you could pay to expedite such matters. He had also drawn in a nine-hole golf course. I didn’t get the connection between the nursing home and the golf links and I asked him about this but he wasn’t listening.
“A lot of bedpans and bitching, you think, but I’m talking about a seventeen-percent bottom-line profit,” he said. “I don’t mind fooling with these old people. Never have. Put a halfgrain of phenobarbital in their soup every night and they won’t give you much trouble. They’ve all got money these days. They all get regular checks from the government.”
“You’ve got quite a few buildings there. What about your construction money?”
“No problem at all. Tap the Feds for some Hill-Burton funds. Maybe float some Act 9 industrial bonds. Hell, mortgage the island. Roll over some short notes. I figure about eight thousand five hundred square feet under roof for the long house, with about six thousand feet of that heated and cooled. The rest in storage rooms and breezeways. Put your cooling tower down at this end, with about forty-five tons of air-conditioning. I don’t say it’s a sure thing. If it was a sure thing, everybody would be in it. But you have to go with the odds and you have two high cards right off in me and Mama.”
“Your mother said that island was dedicated as a wildlife refuge.”
“Have you been discussing my business with her?”
“She was the one who brought it up.”
“Jean’s Island has never been dedicated in any legal sense.”
“I’m just telling you what she said.”
“She meant it was posted, that’s all. No hunters and no trespassers. She doesn’t know the difference. Why would she be paying taxes on it if it was dedicated?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re mighty right you don’t. Did you get the impression that she might be willing to come to terms on the island?”
“I didn’t get that impression.”
“Not favorably disposed then.”
“She’s afraid some woman will get her hands on the property.”
“Some woman?”
“She talked about a woman named Sybil.”
“What has Sybil got to do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sybil’s all right.”
“Your mother doesn’t approve of her.”
“Sybil’s all right but she came down here and showed her ass is what she did. She ran her mouth all the time. I was disappointed. It was a misplaced confidence on my part. I should never have brought her down here, but it was Sybil’s car, you see.”
“There was another woman. Your mother mentioned another woman named Marvel Clark.”
“Marvel!”
“Marvel Clark. Do you know her?”
“Do I know Marvel. My old valentine. Mama must be losing her mind. What has Marvel got to do with anything?”
“Is she one of your sweethearts?”
“She’s a rattlesnake. I didn’t see it at first. Mama told me not to marry her. She knew those Clarks. I didn’t see it until we were married and then I saw it with great clarity. Even so, I miss her sometimes. Some little thing will remind me of her. Can you imagine that? Missing a coiled rattler.”
“I didn’t realize you had a wife.”