The Convict and Other Stories

  The moon was full and the black-green jungle-covered crests of the mountains were coming up fast, and I was leaning back on the stick and juicing it with everything I had while Klaus’s man whimpered beside me with his fist against his teeth. The downdrafts were hammering on the wings, and I heard stuff busting loose and sliding around in the hold, and I knew we’d either rip apart at the joints in midair and rain down on the jungle like an exploding junkyard or nose straight into a rock wall and fill the sky with thunder and yellow light.

  But I believe a lot in prayer, and sure enough I dropped through a deep cut between two mountains, saw the valley open up before me, saw a long shining river bordered by coffee plantations, and wiped my palms on my windbreaker while the flat, geometrical, moonlit landscape moved by predictably a thousand feet below.

  “Relax, podna,” I said to Klaus’s man, the Nicaraguan. “You look as uncomfortable as an ice cube in a skillet. That’s the strip where those truck flares are burning, isn’t it?”

  His face was white and sweating in the instrument lights, and he twisted his head back at the rolling clatter of noise behind the cabin, his mouth too dry and pinched with fright to speak.

  “That stuff’s not going anywhere,” I said. “If it didn’t punch out the ribs a few minutes ago, it’s not going to do it now.”

  “Three-point-fives,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Bazooka rockets. Dey already unstable. I seen dem blow up with my cousin in back of yeep.”

  I took a deep breath, held it, and eased down on the dirt runway that was lit by two rows of hissing flares spiked into ground. The runway was short, and I was standing on the brakes by the time I reached the wall of eucalyptus trees at the far end. A large crate crashed into the bulkhead right behind my seat.

  “That Klaus is one entertaining fellow,” I said.

  Short Indians in tiger-striped fatigues and U.S. Army steel pots off-loaded the whole store. Stroessner’s traveling dry goods included flamethrowers to polish a face into a roasted egg, Garands and Thompsons to blow hearts and lungs all over the trees, grenades, mortars, and rockets that could make dog food out of a whole village.

  I decided to let the Guatemalans keep Klaus’s DC-6, with its bum engine and its cargo hold that smelled of death, and I would catch a commercial flight back to Miami or New Orleans. The major, who was a friend of the Nicaraguan, gave me a ride into the village in his jeep. The air was warm and smelled of the long rows of coffee trees that stretched away toward the encircling mountains in the moonlight, and I could see the river winking through the thick groves of bananas that grew along its bank. We reached the village just as the dawn rimmed the mountain crests in the east, and the air was so hushed in the rock streets, in the graying light that slowly revealed the glistening tile roofs, the rust-colored, dew-streaked adobe houses, the colonnades and stone horse troughs in the square, that it was hard to believe that these people lived in the iron sights of the guns that Klaus sold to moral dimwits.

  I thanked the major, a compact, mustached little man who looked like a streetcar conductor, and asked where I could catch a bus to a town with an airport.

  “No, no, you stay here till plane fixed,” he said, waving his small hand like he was swatting at flies. “It very dangerous for you out there. The communists kill many people along the road. You safe here.”

  And he locked me in the village jail.

  For two weeks I watched a war through my barred window. Each morning trucks full of soldiers would drive down the crushed rock street and out into the hills. I’d see them advance up a switchback on a mountainside, small-arms fire would start popping like strings of firecrackers, then the shadows of two gunships would streak across the village, the chopper blades beating in the glassy blue sky. The soldiers would flatten out behind the switchback while the door-gunners opened up on the tree line, then the rocket launchers would kick smoke, and balls of orange flame would balloon out of the jungle.

  One afternoon the soldiers came back with six prisoners roped together by their hands in the back of an army truck. They were barefoot, covered with dust, and sweat ran in clear lines down their faces. The soldiers marched them by my jail window; one of them fell, and a soldier kicked him and then pulled him erect by his hair.

  “What’s going to happen to those guys?” I asked one of the alcoholic thieves who shared the cell with me.

  “Dey tie him up on phone crank.” He began giggling and pumping his fists in circles like he was working invisible bicycle pedals. “When dey call up a communist, he always answer.”

  I never saw the prisoners again and I don’t know what happened to them. But three days before I got out, I saw the handiwork of the death squads. An American priest driving an old flatbed truck brought in the bodies of sixteen Indians who had been shot in a ditch outside of town. The police tied handkerchiefs across their noses and put the bodies in a line under the colonnade. It was a burning hot day and I could hear the blowflies droning in the shade. The thumbs of the dead were tied behind them with wire, and the cop who had to snip them free was sweating heavily behind his bandanna. There were two fat, middle-aged women among the victims. Their faces were painted with blood. The wind blew their dusty dresses and exposed their underwear and swollen thighs. The priest took a torn piece of striped canvas awning from inside his truck and covered their lower parts.

  The alcoholic thief began to giggle next to me at the window. When the others pulled me off him, his tongue was almost halfway down his throat.

  Amanda is brushing her hair in front of the dresser mirror. Her red mouth points upward with each stroke. She wears an orchid-colored nightgown I’ve never seen before and smells of a new perfume. It’s like the odor of four-o’clocks opening along the banks of the bayou in the evening. I put my hands on her shoulders and rub the back of her neck. She neither resists nor acknowledges me. The muscle tone of her skin is perfect, smooth as sculptured soapstone.

  I feel my resolution, my respect for myself, draining into an erection. I begin to touch her everywhere.

  “Don’t, Marcel.”

  My hands turn to wood.

  “It came early this month,” she says.

  I don’t believe you. You got it on with Klaus this afternoon.

  “What?” she says. She flips her head when she starts brushing again.

  “We could see a marriage counselor,” I say. “Lots of people do it. You talk it out with a third person there.”

  “I think behavior like that is silly.”

  Her accent changes. Her daddy was a gyppo logger, and she grew up from Montana to Maine in the back of a rig. She once belonged to a fundamentalist religious cult in Florida, but when I met her she was waiting tables in a Galveston bar that was one cut above a hot-pillow joint.

  “You think maybe I ought to boogie on down the road and find a sweet young rock-and-roller?” I say.

  “It’s not your style, Marcel.” She bites off a hangnail and examines it.

  “You’re right.” But at one time our style was to fly out over the Gulf in my pontoon plane, set down on a patch of floating blue ink, and drink Cold Duck and fish out the doors for gaff-top and speckled trout. Then when the sun boiled like a red planet into the watery horizon, I would inflate the air mattress and make love to her on the cabin floor, rocking in her embrace, which was deeper and more encompassing than the sea.

  “I’m going up to the colored beer joint and listen to some zydeco,” I say. Then I grin at her. “But I’ll leave you with a thought.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If I catch you with him, I’ll ice the pair of you.”

  Her face freezes in the mirror and her eyes look at me like blue marbles.

  I started my own national beautification project the next morning: KEEP AMERICA CLEAN, DEPORT YOUR LOCAL NAZI GEEK AND GRIME BAG TODAY. But the man I talked with on the phone at the Immigration Department thought I was drunk, and the wire service in New Orleans told me they’d already done a sto
ry on Klaus—about his collection of South American Indian art.

  “Lampshades?” I asked.

  “What?” the wire reporter said.

  “He was one of the Katzenjammer kids that threw them through the oven doors.”

  The reporter hung up on me.

  But the FBI man I called was a good listener. So I unloaded on him, told him everything, even about flying illegally into Guatemala. I felt as if a fish bone had been cleaned out of my throat.

  He paused when I finished, then said, “What do you want us to do?”

  “Arrest him. Pack him in a Wiener schnitzel can and ship him to Nuremberg.”

  “What for?”

  “He was SS. I’ve seen the lightning bolts tattooed in his armpit.”

  “It’s not against the law to wear a tattoo, pal. Bring us something else. In the meantime spell your name for me and tell me a little more about this fun-in-the-sun trip you took to Guatemala.”

  “Adios, amigo,” I said, and looked with a beating heart at my sweaty handprint on the dead phone receiver.

  . . .

  But I couldn’t just give up. It was a beautiful gold-green morning, with a cool breeze riffling the bayou and the cypress trees, and I could smell the four-o’clocks that were still open in the damp shade. It was a day for boiling crawfish, for zydeco music and barbecue and baseball; it wasn’t a day for surrendering to the likes of Klaus or some government and newspaper guys who didn’t take me seriously.

  My daddy, who trapped every winter at Marsh Island, used to say, “Son, if it ain’t moving, don’t poke it. But if it starts snapping at you, wait till it opens up real wide, then spit in its mouth.”

  I figured Klaus started snapping at me the first time he put his manicured, slender hand on top of Amanda’s forearm at the Petroleum Club cocktail party in Lafayette. It was just a touch, a rub of the hair, a light gesture that an older, fatherly man could get away with. Except for his eyes. They sliced through tissue and bone, linkage and organ.

  I’d read in the Daily Iberian that a large garden party was planned for Klaus that afternoon in New Orleans. Yes, I thought, and I put a city map, my field glasses, a thermos bottle of water, and two ham-and-onion sandwiches wrapped in wax paper into my canvas flight bag and filled up at the gas dock. Within an hour I was lifting above the long, flat expanses of dead cypress and salt marsh into the blue summer sky, the wonderful smell off the Gulf, the wind currents that the great pelicans ride on high above the spreading coastline of Louisiana.

  A friend of mine owned an aerial sign service outside of New Orleans, and I’d already called him to set up the letters on a big black-and-yellow tow and to string the pickup wire across the strip, so all I had to do was come in low with my hook down, snag the tow, and juice it back into that shimmering blue-white sky that always pulls on me a little like eternity.

  I could feel the heavy canvas drag of the sign behind me as I flew across Canal and followed the streetcar tracks down St. Charles Avenue. The street was thickly lined with oak trees, and palm trees grew on the esplanade and groups of black people waited in the shade on each corner for the streetcar. I saw Audubon Park and the old stone buildings of Tulane University ahead, and I veered toward Magazine, which separated the colored slums from the Garden District, and passed right over a lawn party that was in progress between two beautiful, white-pillared, iron-scrolled homes that were surrounded with oak and mimosa trees. It was like a fortress of wealth down there. Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, waiters carried trays of drinks around the clipped lawn, swimmers dived into an emerald pool with barbecue pits smoking on the flagstones. Two blocks away on the other side of Magazine were several square miles of paintless, dilapidated shacks on dreary, narrow streets that had always been set aside for New Orleans’s Negroes. That had to be Klaus’s crowd down there on that lawn.

  So I went in for a closer look, several hundred feet under the FAA minimum. Sure enough, Klaus looked up at me from a deck chair where he was lying in a bikini and shades while a blond gal rubbed oil on his chest. I made a slow turn so that the sign arched around the party like an angry yellow jacket: HELLO TO LT. KLAUS STROESSNER, DACHAU CLASS OF ’44.

  I kept it up for twenty minutes. They started moving around down there like ants on a burning log. They carried their drinks and paper dinner plates into the trees, but I flushed them out with a power dive that almost clipped some bricks out of a chimney. They tried to hide under the veranda and I circled wide so that my engine sounded like I was headed out toward the Mississippi. Then I flattened her out and roared in full throttle like I was on a strafing run and blitzed the sign through the treetops and showered the lawn and pool with leaves and broken twigs.

  I almost didn’t hear the police helicopter whipping through the air on my starboard wing. But that was all right—I’d gotten my message across. And to make sure I did, I pulled back on the stick, wobbled over them one more time, released the hook, and floated the sign down on the rooftops and lawns like a gutted snake.

  I spent two days in the New Orleans jail before I could make bail. The Times-Picayuneran a story about an ex-convict pilot “with a known drinking history” who had buzzed the Garden District. The Daily Iberian wrote that not only had I been in Angola but I had an irregular work record and federal authorities thought I’d done time in Latin America. People around town weren’t going out of their way to be seen with me that week.

  I figured Klaus had won again. I’d dropped the dime on him with the feds and the wire service, plastered his name and his crime all over the sky, and ended up in the lock with a good chance of my license being yanked. Maybe the Catholic brothers were wrong when they taught us the bad guys lost the war.

  But a couple of Klaus’s friends blew it for their man. When I boxed Golden Gloves at New Iberia High, I learned to swallow my blood, to never show the other guy I was bleeding behind my mouthpiece. Klaus should have boxed.

  Two of them caught me outside the colored beer joint. They didn’t touch me; they just stood real close to me while my back hit up against my truck door. One of them had the kind of bad breath that comes from rotted teeth.

  “You been telling some lies about a friend of ours,” he said. “Do it again and we’ll feed you into your own propeller.”

  I smiled with the happiness of a man who knows the world might turn out right after all.

  “Hey, I can understand you guys worrying over your friend, but you really shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Those three black dudes behind you are my friends, but the one with the barber’s razor is hard to control sometimes.”

  We learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot more damage shooting from behind a tree than charging uphill into a howitzer. My tree was the telephone.

  “Hello, my name is Klaus Stroessner,” I said into the receiver, my feet propped up on the sunny deck rail of my houseboat, “and I’d like my utilities turned off for the next three months. Now, my brother-in-law will probably call you up and tell you he’s me and try to get you to turn them on again, but if you do I’m not paying one cent on the bill. The fact is, I’ll sue you for helping him occupy my house.”

  Then I called a wrecker service and had Klaus’s Cadillac towed to a garage 110 miles away in Lake Charles, told a fertilizer company to spread a dump-truck-load of fresh cow manure on his lawn, informed the parish health office he had AIDS disease, ran an ad with his phone number in a newspaper for sexual degenerates.

  “Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?” Amanda said from the kitchen door. She was dressed to go to town. Her designer jeans looked sewn to her skin. Her breasts were huge against her yellow silk cowboy shirt.

  “I’ve got an errand or two at the post office,” I said. “Stay here till I get back.”

  “Marcel, when did you think you could start talking to me like this?”

  “Make some chicken-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and put some Cold Duck in the icebox. I’ll be back in an hour. Turn on the window fan in the bedroom.”


  I left her there with her lips parted, her tongue barely touching her teeth, her blue eyes caught with a curious pause.

  In town I bought a box of envelopes, a package of writing paper, and a pair of skintight rubber gloves. I wrote the letter in the typing room of the public library, then dropped it, still using the gloves, from my truck window into the mailbox outside the old redbrick post office on Main Street. It was a perfect south Louisiana summer morning. The sun was shining through the moss-hung oaks overhead, the wind smelled of rain and flowers, and the lawns in front of the nineteenth-century homes along Main were filled with yellow hibiscus and flaming azaleas.

  As an afterthought, I went inside the post office, filled out a change-of-address card, and had Klaus’s mail forwarded to general delivery in Nome, Alaska.

  A light, warm rain was denting the bayou when I got back to the houseboat. I parked my pickup under the cypress, undressed on the bank, and walked naked into the kitchen. Amanda dropped the jar of mayonnaise to the floor.

  “I’m calling the sheriff’s office, Marcel,” she said.

  “Good idea,” I said, and jerked the telephone out of the wall and handed it to her. Then I loaded her across my shoulder and carried her into the bedroom. The window fan hummed with a wet light from the bayou.

  “I’ll file charges. They’ll send you back to Angola,” she said.

  “They won’t have time. They’re going to be busy investigating Klaus.”

  I set her down on the bed. Her face was quiet, motionless on the pillow.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I wrote a letter to the president of the United States and signed Klaus’s name.”