"In Idlewild Airport for me," giggled a grayheaded woman, whose feathered hat was askew over one ear. "My, there's always a first time for everything, isn't there? I think I like straight bourbon out of paper cups."
"You're a swinger, Millicent," said Atlas, throwing his arm around her waist. "Us two are going to make beautiful music together. Let's go, sexpot. We're in the tropics now." He chanted unmusically,
"Down de way Where de nights are gay And de sun shines gaily on de mountain top-"while he waggled the woman around in a revolting parody of a Calypso dance.
"That's right. Keep everybody amused, Lester, for one minute," Paperman said. "I've got to check on the meat."
"What meat?" said Henny. "Where are you running off to?"
The air-cargo manager, a plump Kinjan in a business suit-named Elias Thacker, according to the plate on his desk-waved a wad of papers as Norman entered the office. "All fix. You got you meat. It all pile in de shade by de cargo depot. You drives you car right on de field troo de next gate and picks it up." With great relief, Norman paid the charges and signed the papers. He found Cohn waiting outside the office. Norman asked him to load the meat in the station wagon, and take it back to town.
"Sure thing," Cohn said. "Say, your Hazel looks pretty good."
Norman shrugged. "She always does. Her boy friend seems a bit haggard."
"Why, no. He's full of the old fight. He wants to go down in an aqualung right away. Today. Says he swam for Chicago University."
"Can you find him a lung with a slow leak?" said Paperman.
Cohn laughed and went off. Norman returned to the Gull Reef party, which sat now on benches in a huddle, the only people left in the terminal. Atlas, hunched and sagging, glowered at Norman as he came. "Norm, what's the holdup? You got a bunch of hot and tired people here, including me."
"What's this meat that's causing all the trouble?" Henny said.
"No trouble. Everything's fine."
Norman started to tell them about the Tilson party and the chateaubriands.
"Hey, Norm!" Cohn was calling to him from the field, on the other side of the locked plane gate about twenty feet away. "You did say steaks, didn't you?"
"Of course. Chateaubriand steaks. Why?"
"Come and take a look. Better hurry."
Norman ran to the gate, clambered up the hinges, and vaulted the high wire fence.
"Norman!" shouted Henny. "Who do you think you are, Tarzan? Stop that."
"What now, for Jesus' sake?" bellowed Atlas. "We're dying here!"
Norman followed Cohn at a trot to the cargo depot, where eight frosty wire-fastened paper cartons were stacked on the porch, oozing blood. Large green labels on each package read San Juan Wholesale Meat Supply. Highest Grade Chicken Necks and Wings.
"Look here." Cohn squatted, pointing to shipping labels pasted to the side of each carton, with typed addresses:
Grosvenor House Barbados, B.W.L Rush-Perishable.
"I would guess there's been some mistake, Norm," he said. "They probably took off the wrong shipment."
"It's a nightmare," said Paperman, clutching his head. "What gibbering lunatic in Barbados wanted eight cartons of chicken necks and wings air freight, for Christ's sake?"
A loud growl of revving motors startled him.
"That plane! Bob, my steaks have to be on that plane. The cargo office has the airway bill!"
The airplane was swinging around for take-off, far down the runway. Paperman ran out into the knee-deep grass of the field, thrashing his arms in the air. The plane roared past him, lifting off the ground, and dwindled away into the sky. He came back to Cohn, and said with a deathly grin, "Maybe there's another pile of cartons somewhere. My pile. Let's go to the freight office."
There were no other cartons. Mr. Thacker blamed the pilot. He had been in a hurry to take off again, and had rushed the cargo boys. This was always happening, he said. That particular pilot was a very unpleasant man. Probably the steaks had been under the pile of luggage bound for Barbados, Trinidad, and Caracas, and the pilot certainly should have given Mr. Thacker's boys a chance to have a good look. But no, hurry, hurry, hurry, and naturally the boys, seeing packages of frozen meat, had assumed that this was the Gull Reef shipment.
"Yes, yes, but what's going to happen to my steaks?" exclaimed Norman. "They're off to Venezuela, defrosting as they go."
"God knows," said Mr. Thacker. "It is an unfortunate confusion."
Lester Atlas barged into the office. "Norman, what the hell? They're closing the goddamn doors of this terminal."
Norman told him in great agitation what had happened. Atlas gave the cargo manager a grossly charming smile. "Where's the next stop for that plane, Mr. Thacker?"
"Barbados," said the manager.
"Barbados," Atlas purred. "Now how about telephoning Barbados, Mr. Thacker, and telling them to take off those steaks, see, and put them in a freezer, and send them back on the next plane. Don't you think that would be a nice idea?"
The cargo manager said cordially that this was irregular procedure, and out of the question. There would be the matter of the freezer charges; the Barbados people needed the airway bill before they could take the meat off the plane; he had no authority to make overseas calls; it was all the fault of Windward-Leeward Airways, but unfortunately their agent was gone for the day by now; and he himself was late for lunch. As he said this he started to walk away from his desk.
Atlas charged and blocked him, his smile turning to a horrid glare. "Listen, mister! This airport operates on a federal subsidy and I just happen to have a few connections in Washington," he thundered. "I swear to Christ that Federal Aviation Agency men will be down here next week checking into the competence of a certain ELIAS THACKER" -he spat out the name like a curse-"if anything happens to those steaks. You hear me?" He ripped the telephone off its cradle. "Now, who do I talk to in Barbados? I'll handle this, and then I'm calling my
Washington attorney, right from this telephone, mister."
Thacker rolled white-rimmed eyes at Paperman. "Dis de porson what on de cover of Time?"
"That's the person," Norman said.
The cargo manager sadly took the telephone. "I see what we can do. -Ovaseas?"
Atlas stood over the cargo manager as he put the call through. Norman meantime found Cohn, and asked him to take the guests to the Reef in the Land Rover; he would drive back the navy truck, he said, as soon as this business was wound up. "Okay," Cohn said, "I guess we can get everybody into the Rover, all right, except maybe Hazel's friend. There's quite a mess of luggage, and all."
"Splendid. I'll bring him," Norman said.
The Barbados call took a half hour to get through, and somehow Thacker arranged the return of the steaks, or said he did. Norman drove Atlas and Klug to Georgetown along the back road down the coast, which usually elicited raptures from newcomers to Amerigo; but Klug was not impressed. "The filth of this place," he observed several times, mopping his face. He also said things like, "Don't they have trash collection on this island?" and, "What's the incidence of diseases like cholera and leprosy? I should think every other native would have something."
It struck Paperman that, in truth, Amerigo was a damned dirty place. He had long ago stopped seeing the empty beer cans, sodden cartons and newspapers, and broken boxes that lined the roads, but now he saw them again. The Kinjan drivers habitually drank beer or fruit nectar as they went, and disposed of the cans with a cheerful toss through the window. Every half mile or so there was a large iron trash bin, heaped to overflowing or wholly invisible under a garbage mound. Rusting wrecks of cars dotted the wayside. When a Kinja automobile expired, its corpse was dragged off the road and in a day or two was picked clean to the chassis; there it lay where it had fallen, oxidizing fast in the sun and sea air, but still requiring a few years to rot to earth. Cars in all stages of decomposition were part of the island scenery.
In his first days of enchantment, Norman had seen only the lovely views of hills and sea. In time he had noticed, and been repelled by, the refuse and the wrecks; then these had become a vague annoyance, just one more of the tropical irritations like the sand flies and the power failures. On balance he still thought Amerigo was a pretty place, if not exactly Eden. Klug obviously didn't, but Norman had a feeling that Klug would never like the tropics. He was a perspirer. He was perspiring in streams, his shirt was streaked black, and his handkerchief was wet and gray.
2
Norman found Henny in his apartment, freshly combed and made up, wearing a brand-new, sheer creamy lace negligee, and nothing else. She had lost a. bit of weight. "Oh, hi there," she said, casually tightening a blue silk sash around her slim waist. "Is the meat crisis solved? I thought I'd go on ahead and get a shower before lunch. This is a nice little apartment. Airy, anyway."
Norman took her in his arms.
"Really, Norm, what's this bottle of champagne on ice here for? And all these gardenias and red lilies? I mean, brother, how corny can you get?" He was kissing her, and these sentences emerged between kisses. She went on, "Aren't you hungry? I'm famished. Let's have lunch. Norm, really, if I go drinking champagne before I have something to eat I'll never make it down the stairs. Norman, for pete's sake, it's been all of three weeks. Don't overdo it or I'll get suspicious."
"How's your pain?" he mumbled into her hair.
"Pain? What pain? Oh, the pain. Funny, I had it like mad all the way down on the jet, but then it went away in that bouncy ride. The doctor says-Norman. Ye gods. Mr. Hot Hands."
"I'm glad to see you, Henny."
"That's good," Henny said, and she sighed deeply. "Oh, well, go ahead. Open the champagne."
Cohn, Hazel, and Klug were finishing lunch at a large round table when Norman and Henny came out on the dining terrace considerably later, looking gay and somewhat silly. Hazel sat with her chin on her fist, yawning. The two men appeared to be arguing volubly. "What happened to you? Sit down," Hazel said to her parents. "These fellows started on courage, and got on to bullfights, and I'm about to pass out."
Klug gave an ironic little smile to the Papermans. "Grace under pressure is the topic. It all began with aqualtmging, and branched out-"
"Let me finish and then I'll shut up on this, Hazel," Cohn said. "Sure I admit that I'd be too scared to try to stab a wounded bull to death with a sword. I said that ten minutes ago. But I just don't know if the act is courageous. Isn't it just a cruel, dangerous form of commercial entertainment? I guess those fellows show grace under pressure, whatever that is, doing all the stylish dancing close to the horns. But I think the only courageous thing to do in a bull ring would be to try to stop the bullfight."
'That's not bad, actually," Klug said, with a small reluctant smile, and an instructor's approving nod. "You insist on a moral content to courage, then. You're not content with an abstract, lovely arabesque of death and risk. I think you might develop that point of view in an article. It would have thrust, coming from a man in a hazardous occupation."
"Me? I can barely sign my name," Cohn said.
"Oh, come, come," said Klug. "In any case, to get back to the point, will you, or can you, take me out for a dive in an aqualung? Or is it against regulations, and will I have to rent a lung somewhere? Because dive I will."
"I guess you can make a dive with us if you want to," Cohn said. "We're going lobstering tomorrow morning on Cockroach Rock, and my commanding officer is pretty non-regulation."
"Perfect," said the Sending.
"Gosh, can I come?" said Hazel.
Cohn said to her with an affectionate light in his eye, "Want to make a dive, Hazel?"
"Horrors, no. I just want to see Shel go down and come up."
Henny said, "Well, you'll certainly see him go down."
"The rest," Norman said, "is a question of grace under pressure."
Klug stood. "Do you have any idea where I can lay my head tonight? I want to get unpacked and into some cool clothes."
"The island's pretty tight," said Norman. "Why don't you telephone Casa Encantada? They might squeeze you in."
"Casa Encantada-Enchanted House," said Klug. "Sounds delightful. Bye, Hazel. I'll be back here for dinner." He leaned down and gave her a proprietary kiss, which she seemed to relish, her immense slanted eyes sparkling on the frogman.
"Casa Encantada?" Cohn wrinkled his forehead at Paperman, as Klug walked off. "I really think you're guessing wrong, Norm."
"What's the matter with that place?" Hazel said suspiciously to her father. "You're so mean. I know you. Has it got rats?"
"Birds," Norman said. He glanced at his watch. "Do you know where Atlas is? He and I have an appointment at the bank soon."
