The Dog of the South (27 page)

There were two white Americans among the jailbirds—a young doper and an older, heavier man. He was barefooted, this older fellow, as were all the prisoners, and he wore a knit shirt that was split on both sides from his exertions. He appeared to be the boss of the shovelers. They were hard put to keep up, there being so few of them, and he was trying to prod them on to heroic efforts with a lot of infield chatter. His team! He was digging like a madman and yelling at the boys for being slow and for not holding the bags fully open. I had noticed him early but he was little more than a noisy wet blur to me.

I soon made a pickup at his station and he said, “Wrong way! Wrong way! Get your bags on this side and go out the other way!” I had been holding my head down to protect my eyes against all the blowing stuff and when I raised it to get a look at this loud person I was knocked for a loop. It was Jack Wilkie! I spoke to him. He recognized me and waved me off. We were meeting under strange circumstances in a faraway place and there were many questions to be answered—but this was no time for a visit! That was what I understood him to be saying with his urgent gestures. He hadn't shaved for several days and there were clumps of sand stuck to his copper-wire whiskers. He had to keep hitching up his trousers because he had no belt.

I went back to work and considered the new development. Someone called out to me. It was the skinny fellow from Texas, hanging on the back of a truck and holding to one end of a long wooden ladder. He had been shanghaied into a new gang, a ladder gang. His bag was stowed in one of the garage bays and he wanted me to keep an eye on it while he was gone. I nodded and waved, indicating that I would do so, message understood. The truck pulled away and that was the last time I saw that mysterious bird alive. His name was Spann or Spang, more likely Spann.

Three army trucks came through the gate and wheeled about together in a nice maneuver. British soldiers jumped to the ground with new shovels at the ready. Now we had plenty of shovels but there was no more sand. The army officer and Captain Grace conferred. A decision was quickly reached. All the small boys were left behind and the rest of us were herded into the trucks and taken to some grassy beach dunes north of town. The captain led the convoy in his blue Land-Rover. Jack and I were together and there were about twenty other men in the back of our truck. We had to stand. The tarpaulin top was gone and we clung to the bentwood frame members. I could see that I was taller than at least one of these Coldstream Guards, if indeed that's who they were. We were flung from side to side. Jack punched out angrily at people when they stepped on his bare toes.

Captain Grace had made an excellent choice. This new place was the Comstock Lode of sand and I could hardly wait to get at it. The dunes were thirty feet high in places and were situated about three hundred yards from the normal shoreline, so we were fairly well protected from the sea. Even so, an occasional monster wave swept all the way across the beach and broke over the top of the dunes, spraying us and leaving behind long green garlands of aquatic vegetation. The sand had drifted up here between an outcropping of rock and a grove of palm trees. The slender trunks of the palms were all bent in picturesque curves and the fronds at the top stood hysterically on end like sprung umbrellas. None of the trees, however, had been uprooted, and I decided then that this blow, already falling off somewhat, was probably not a major hurricane.

It was a good place for sand, as I say. The only catch was that the trucks had to cross a strip of backwater on the inland side of the dunes. The water wasn't very deep but the ground underneath was soft and the trucks wallowed and strained to get through it with a full load of sandbags. We were now filling them and loading them at a much faster rate. Jack took charge once again and whipped us up into frenzies of production. No one seemed to mind. The prisoners and the soldiers thought he was funny and the officers stood back and let him do his stuff.

The truck drivers followed one another, taking the same route across the water each time, such was their training or their instincts or their orders, and they soon churned the fording place into a quagmire. As might have been foreseen, one of the trucks bogged down and we, the loaders, had to stand in the water and remove every last bag from the bed. Thus lightened, the truck moved forward about eight inches before settling down again.

The officious Jack stepped in and began to direct this operation too. He took the wheel from a soldier. It was a matter of feel, he said. The trick was to go to a higher gear and start off gently and then shift down one notch and pour on the steam at the precise moment you felt the tires take hold. Jack did this. The truck made a lurch, and then another one, and things looked good for a moment, before all ten wheels burrowed down another foot or so, beyond hope. Jack said the gear ratios were too widely spaced in that truck. The young British officer, none too sure of himself before, pulled Jack bodily from the cab and told him to stay away from his vehicles “in future”—rather than “in
the future
.”

The second truck went down trying to pull the first one out and the third one made a run to town and never came back, for a reason that was not made known to us. We had a mountain of undelivered bags and no more empties to fill. Shovels were downed and we lay back against the bags, our first rest break in four or five hours. By that time there was very little fury left in the storm, though the rain still came. An army sergeant walked back and forth in front of us to show that he himself wasn't tired.

“Good way to get piles,” he said to us. “Best way I know. Sitting on wet earth like that.” But no one got up, just as no one heeded him when he warned us against drinking a lot of water in our exhausted state.

Jack was breathing noisily through his mouth. He was the oldest and he had worked the hardest. The palms of his hands were a ragged mess of broken blisters. I watched my own fingers, curled in repose, as they gave little involuntary twitches.

It was our first chance for a talk. Jack said he had had his Chrysler towed into Monterrey, where he arranged to have the drive shaft straightened and two new universal joints installed. There had been no difficulty in tracking me from San Miguel. The juiceheads at the Cucaracha bar had put him on to the farm in British Honduras. He couldn't locate me immediately in Belize. He went to the American consul and learned of the two Dupree farms in the country. I had missed a bet there, going to the consul, but Jack missed one too. He went to the wrong place, the Dupere farm, the one south of town.

The ranch manager there was an old man, he said, a Dutchman, who claimed he knew nothing of any Guy Dupree from Arkansas. Jack wasn't satisfied with his answers and he insisted on searching the premises. The old man reluctantly allowed him to do so and before it was over they had an altercation, something about an ape. It must have been a pet monkey, only Jack called it an ape.

“That nasty ape followed me around everywhere I went,” he said. “He stayed about two steps behind me. The old man told him to do that. I had seen him talking to the ape. Whenever I opened a door or looked into a building, that nasty beast would stick his head in and look around too. Then he would bare his nasty teeth at me, the way they do. The old man had told him to follow me around and mock me and spit on me. I told that old Dutchman he better call him off but he wouldn't do it. I said all right then, I'll have to shoot him, and then he called him off. That was all. It didn't amount to anything. I wouldn't have shot the ape even if I had had a gun. But when I got back to town they arrested me. That old guy had radioed ahead to the police and said I pulled a gun on him. I didn't even have a gun but they took my belt and shoes and locked me up.”

The black prisoners had begun to stir. They had come to their feet and were muttering angrily among themselves. The young American doper said they wanted cigarettes. Their tobacco and their papers were wet and they wanted something to smoke. It was a cigarette mutiny! Captain Grace whacked the ringleader across the neck with his leather crop and that broke it up. He ordered everyone to be seated and he addressed us through his bullhorn.

I couldn't make out what he was saying. Jack couldn't make it out. I asked a red-faced corporal and I couldn't understand him either. The young doper had acquired an ear for this speech and he explained it all to us. The emergency was now over. The prisoners and the soldiers were to wait here for transport. Those of us who had been roped in off the streets were free to go, to walk back to town if we liked, or we too could wait for the trucks.

Captain Grace got into his Land-Rover and signaled the driver to be off. Then he countermanded the order with a raised hand and the driver stopped so short that the tires made a little chirp in the wet sand. The captain got out and came over to Jack and said, “You. You can go too.”

“Thanks,” said Jack. “Are you going to town now in that jeep?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How about a lift?”

“Lift?”

“A ride. I need a ride to town.”

“With me? Certainly not.”

“You've got my shoes at the station. I can't walk all the way in like this.”

Captain Grace was caught up short for a moment by Jack's impudence. He said, “Then you can wait for the lorries like everyone else.”

We walked all the way back to Belize, my second long hike of the day. Since Jack was handicapped, I let him set the pace. We soon pulled ahead of the others. Jack was barefooted but he was not one to dawdle or step gingerly on that account. He stopped once to rest, hands on knees, head low, in the dramatic posture of the exhausted athlete. The sun came out. We rounded a bend in the road and a cloud of pale blue butterflies appeared before us, blown in perhaps from another part of the world. I say that because they hovered in one place as though confused. We walked through them.

Jack talked about how good the fried eggs were in Mexico and how he couldn't get enough of them. They were always fresh, with stand-up yolks, unlike the watery cold storage eggs in our own country. He talked about eggs and he talked about life. There was altogether too much meanness in the world, he said, and the source of it all was negative thinking. He said I must avoid negative thoughts and all negative things if I wanted my brief stay on earth to be a happy one. Guy Dupree's head was full of negative things, and so to a lesser extent was mine. That was our central problem. We must purge our heads, and our rancorous hearts too.

For all I knew he was right, about Dupree anyway, but this stuff didn't sound like Jack. This didn't sound like the Jack Wilkie I knew in Little Rock who had a prism-shaped thing on his desk that said, “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” It was my guess that he had been reading something in his cell. Two or three days in jail and he was a big thinker! The ideas that are hatched in those places! I told him that Dupree's malaise, whatever it might be, was his own, and that to lump the two of us together was to do me a disservice.

“Food for thought,” he said. “That's all. I won't say any more.”

The waters had receded from town. We were greeted by a spectacular rainbow that arched from one end of the estuary to the other. I watched for it to shift about or partially disappear as our angle of approach changed but it remained fixed. The color bands were bright and distinct—blue, yellow, and pink—with no fuzzy shimmering. It was the most substantial rainbow I've ever seen. There were mud deposits in the streets and a jumble of grounded boats along the creek banks. They lay awkwardly on their sides. Their white hulls had fouled bottoms of a corrupt brown hue not meant to be seen. Everyone seemed to be outside. Women and children were salvaging soggy objects from the debris. The men were drunk.

Jack went into the police station to claim his things. I stayed outside in the motor pool and looked around for Spann's bag. It was gone. I had told him I would keep an eye on his bag and then I didn't do it. Someone had made off with it. Someone was at this very moment pawing over his songs and his jade and his feathers, which, I suppose, Spann himself must have stolen, in a manner of speaking. I found out later about his death. He was hanging sandbags over the crest of a tin roof—one bag tied to each end of a length of rope—when he slipped and fell and was impaled on a rusty pipe that was waiting for him below in the grass.

Jack came out on the porch fully shod in his U.S. Navy surplus black oxfords. His socks, I guessed, had been mislaid by the property clerk, or perhaps burned. He stood there chatting in a friendly way with a black officer, Sergeant Wattli maybe, two comrades now in law enforcement. All was forgiven. Jack saw me and waved his car keys.

The yellow Chrysler was parked in one of the garage bays. We looked it over and Jack pointed to some blood spatters on the license plate and the rear bumper. He laughed over the success of his trap, which was a razor blade taped to the top of the gas-filler cap. An unauthorized person had grabbed it and sliced his fingers. For a person whose own hands were bloody, Jack showed amazing lack of sympathy. No such security measures had been taken at the front of the car. The battery was gone. The two cable heads hung stiffly in space above the empty battery pan. Jack was angry. He said he was going to demand restitution. He was going to demand of Captain Grace that the city of Belize buy him a new battery.

“I'll be right back and then we'll go get us some bacon and eggs.”

He went into the station again but this time he didn't come out. I grew tired of waiting and left a note in the car saying I would be at the Fair Play Hotel taking a nap.

I
MADE MY WAY THROUGH a sea of boisterous drunks. It was sundown. There would be no twilight at this latitude. The air was sultry and vapors were rising from the ground. The drunks were good-natured for the most part but I didn't like being jostled, and there was this too, the ancient fear of being overwhelmed and devoured by a tide of dark people. Their ancient dream! Floating trees and steel drums were piled up beneath the arched bridge. Through a tangle of branches I saw a dead mule.