Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival
1965
Author's Note
There is no island of Amerigo, or "Kinja," in the Caribbean Sea. In this tale of imaginary people on an imaginary island, fictional freedoms are taken with calendar dates, political and theatrical events, astronomic occurrences, and the like. The book contains no intended portraits of, or references to, actual individuals living or dead; any such resemblance that may be discerned is a coincidence, and without intent on the author's part. Where celebrated public personages are mentioned or seen, no historic accuracy concerning them is intended. Finally, regarding the native dialects in this story: Calypso accents vary from island to island, and even from one part of an island to another. The intent here is only a general indication of the West Indian patois.
Part One
THE SMARTEST MAN IN NEW YORK
Chapter One
Lester Atlas
1
Kinja was the name of the island when it was British. Now the name on the maps and in the Caribbean guidebooks is Amerigo, but everybody who lives there still calls it Kinja.
The Union Jack flew over this enchanting green hump in the blue ocean for almost two hundred years. Before that the island was Danish; before that, French; before that, cannibal. Smoky gun battles between sailing ships and the old stone fort went with these flag changes; whizzing cannon balls, raiding parties, skirmishes, and an occasional death. But the fort guns have been silent for more than a century. The United States acquired the island peaceably in 1940, as part of the shuffling of old destroyers and Caribbean real estate that went on between Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill. The Americans ended up in this instance not only with the submarine base in Shark Bay-now gone back to tall guinea grass and catch-and-keep, the piers sagging and rotting, the rusty Quonset huts all askew-but with the whole island. The details of the transaction were and are vague to the inhabitants. They were not much interested.
Keen-ja was the short, musical native version of the actual British name, King George the Third Island. Obviously this was a bit awkward for an American possession, so somebody in the Department of the Interior thought of Amerigo. The new name is used mainly on official stationery and in the school classrooms. There the pupils docilely scrawl themes and recite facts about Amerigo, but in the streets and playgrounds they call the place Kinja, and themselves Kinjans. All through the Caribbean they still say of a native of this island, "He fum Kinja."
The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.
Long ago they came in their white-winged ships, swarmed over the islands, slaughtered the innocent cannibals, chopped down magnificent groves of mahogany that had stood since the Flood, and planted sugar cane. Sugar was money then, and it grew only in warm places. They used the felled mahogany to boil molasses. Those were the days of the great stone plantation houses and sugar mills; of seasick slaves hauled in from Africa, the ancestors of the Kinjans; of wealthy landowners with pink cool wives back in England, and warm black concubines on the premises. Then the sugar beet, which can grow in the north, came in, and black slavery went out. Bankruptcy and insurrection exploded along the island chain. The boom collapsed. The planters left. The plantation houses fell in. Today the natives put tin roofs over one nook or another in the massive broken walls and live there.
The West Indians do not know what will cause the frantic whites to leave next time. Perhaps a bad earthquake: the entire chain of drowned mountains rests on a shaky spot in the earth's crust. Or a tidal wave; or a very bad hurricane; or an outbreak of some dormant tropical disease; or the final accidental blow-up of the white man's grumbling cauldron in the north, which will send the Caribbean white remnant scurrying to-where next? Tasmania? Tierra del Fuego? Unlike the natives they cannot subsist, if the ships and planes stop coming, on crayfish, mangoes, coconuts, and iguanas.
Meantime, in a fashion, Amerigo is getting Americanized. The natives like the new holidays-Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Presidents' birthdays, and the rest-added to the old British holidays and the numerous religious days, none of which they have abandoned. The work calendar has become a very light and unburdensome thing. The inflow of cash is making everyone more prosperous. Most Kinjans go along cheerily with this explosion of American energy in the Caribbean. To them it seems a new, harmless, and apparently endless carnival.
2
Two men came out of Prince of Wales Street into the white sunshine of the waterfront, on a November morning in 1959. One was a big oyster-pale fellow in a rumpled black silk suit, with a thick bald head like half a bread loaf rising out of fat shoulders. He was bawling, "Trade winds, hey? All right, here's the waterfront and where's your goddamn trade winds? That's what I want to know, Norman. This whole island is one god damned furnace. This island is hell with palm trees. How the Christ can a white man breathe in this hole?" He was holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigar in the other, and he gestured with both, scattering ashes and splashing beer.
The other man, who kept making pleading, soothing noises, was smaller, slighter, and tanned. He had a well-brushed head of silvering hair, and a lean face of young middle age; he looked perhaps forty-five.
He wore a navy linen blazer, gray slacks, an open turquoise shirt, and a gray-and-yellow silk scarf tied inside the shirt. The costume was faultless for a color advertisement in Holiday. After a while one learns that in the Caribbean only tourists or homosexuals wear such clothes. The little man was a fastidious dresser, but new to the West Indies.
The big man yelled, "Okay, okay, I know I'm in a strange place. Strangest goddamn place I've ever been in. Now where the hell is this Gull Reef Club?"
"They said we could see it from the waterfront-ah, Lester, just look at all this, why don't you? Just look at where you are! It's like landing in another century. Look at that church! It must be two hundred years old. I bet those walls are seven feet thick. That must be for hurricanes."
"I wish one would start blowing," bellowed Lester. "Cool the place off. This beer! It's piss!" He hurled the can spraying and clattering across the cobbled plaza. "Don't they even have refrigerators here? I bet they don't, you know something? I bet they cool the beer with the goddamn trade winds."
The smaller man was looking around, with the air of a child just come to a birthday party-at the clumsy old island schooners tied up at the water's edge, with red sails furled; at the native women in bright dresses and the black ragged crewmen, bargaining loudly over bananas, coconuts, strange huge brown roots, bags of charcoal, and strings of rainbow-colored fish; at the great square red fort, and at the antique cannons atop its slanted seaward wall, pointing impotently to sea; at the fenced statue of Amerigo Vespucci, almost hidden in purple, orange, and pink bougainvillea; at the houses of Queen's Row, their ancient arching plaster facades painted in vivid colors sun-bleached to pastels; at the old gray stone church, and the whitewashed Georgian brick pile of the Sir Francis Drake Inn.
"It's beautiful," he said with sudden loud firmness. "It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life. If you don't think so, you ought to get your head examined."
The patio of the Sir Francis Drake Inn, an old brick yard shaded by two gigantic mahogany trees, stretched to the edge of the water along one side of the square. The only people in the patio at the moment were the Tilsons. They had the neat, flushed, freckled, corded, dried-out look of long-time white dwellers in the tropics. The Tilsons usually sat immobile and silent as lizards over their first three white rum-and-tonics, scarcely blinking. But when Tom heard the little man talk, he turned his white-and-pink head heavily toward his wife. "New York," he said. "Both of them."
She nodded. "And in November. This island has had it." The Tilsons did not speak another word, but they watched the two invaders with vague hostile interest. A tall colored boy in old slacks and a ragged shirt approached the men, taking off a flat broad straw hat with dangling red and yellow ribbons. "Mistuh Papuh?"
The little man smiled in relief. "Paperman. I'm Norman Paperman."
"I de Gull Reef boatman." He led them to an odd little vessel with a curving, comb-like prow, and the long rounded shallow black hull of a gondola, abruptly trailing off into a plain shabby rowboat, with a square stern and uncushioned thwarts.
The big man stared skeptically. "Is this thing safe?"
"It safe." The boatman took the two suitcases from the boy who sauntered up.
"Where are we going?" said Paperman, stepping into the boat. "Where's the Club?"
The boatman flicked a thumb toward the harbor. "Dah." Out in the harbor, beyond the red slanting mass of the fort and separated from it by a couple of hundred yards of green shallows, Paperman saw a small island feathered with palm trees; and through the trees, a rambling white terraced building. The man called Lester stepped into the sawed-off gondola. The boat sank a foot, rocking; Lester cursed and waved his arms, the boatman sprang to him and grabbed his elbow, and down on the seat beside Paperman he dropped with a splintering thud. "Christ, this thing's worse than a canoe. Is that it, that white building?" The boatman nodded, and pushed off with an oar. "Well, if this isn't ridiculous. Why don't they build a bridge?"
"It's kind of charming," said Paperman. "The little boat ride."
"Charm, my ass." Lester mopped his fat face and his naked conical head. "It's a way to scare off customers."
The boatman rowed powerfully toward the cement pier of the little island. A woman emerged from among the palms and hibiscus of the island, a tall, broad-shouldered woman dressed in a yellow shirt and white shorts, with orange hair piled on her head. She came striding like a man across an emerald lawn and down a curved flowery path to the pier, where she stopped and waved. "Hello there! I'm Amy Ball," she called. "Welcome to the Reef."
"Hi. Can we land without passports?" Paperman shouted back.
Mrs. Ball's laugh was pleasant, if somewhat baritone. Paperman leaped from the boat to the pier, grasping the strong freckled hand the woman held out to him. The two of them, with the aid of the gondolier, got the fat man safely out of the boat.
"This is Lester Atlas. I wrote you about him," Paperman said.
"Ah, yes. How do you do?" She offered Atlas her hand.
Paperman was afraid that Lester would instantly compromise both of them with a horrible burst of coarseness. Mrs. Ball intimidated him by her negligent assured air, and her strangled British diction. Her lips scarcely writhed when she spoke. It suddenly struck Paperman that the Gull Reef Club was a place where a Jew had perhaps never before set foot.
Atlas took Mrs. Ball's hand and collected himself, feet together and back straightening. "Are we really welcome?"
"Of course. Why not?" Mrs. Ball said through her teeth.
"Well, I just don't know how anybody could actually want to sell such a beautiful place."
She opened her mouth to laugh, then shut it firmly. "I'm probably crazy. But that's an old story. What'll it be? A nap after the plane ride? Breakfast? A drink? A swim?"
"A swim sounds perfect," said Paperman. "To begin with."
"I want to get out of these clothes," said Atlas, "and then I'd like to talk. If," he added with a surprisingly pleasant smile at the woman, "you don't mind getting right down to business."
"Not at all. American style," she said.
