Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (10 page)

‘You guys can have the hut. We'll sleep in the open. We're sorry for all this Russ Hinze crap.' Matt takes a step toward the door and one of the soldiers fires a shot. The candle flames leap in the muzzle blast, making the hut quiver. Amelia screams. The billy swings wildly on its handle bleeding gouts of stew from a wound onto the fire which hisses, filling the room with a smell of burning meat.

The soldier who has fired the shot shouts, ‘
Viva la Patria!
' Then points at Matt with his gun and says, ‘I will have those boots now.'

Another shouts at Chris, ‘
Libertad
.
Libertad
.' Then says, ‘You are wearing a rugged watch, made for a man of action. I am such a man.' Thus leavening their demands for loot with cries for liberty, revolution and equality, the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation strip the Australians of their valuables.

When they are sitting in their underwear shivering by the fire trying not to look at the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation bedecked in their Gore-Tex and Rolex, El Capitan Zambro tells them, ‘In the morning you will meet Jorge Luis Enriquez. You will tell him your turtle soup story in which appears the chauffeur and the Russ Hinze and the Frenchman. You will tell an obese God a joke of which a fat man is the butt. We will see if he laughs.'

At first light the Australians, shoeless and treading carefully, are marched out into the jungle of the Central Highlands. The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation follow behind watching Amelia hungrily. The jungle is like a cathedral with many different coloured shafts of light falling from its ceiling to its dark floor. At another time it would be beautiful. But El Capitan Zambro directs them from behind. And Jorge Luis Enriquez awaits them. They imagine him a grossly obese savage. Pity and compassion just two of the constraints he has cast off in order to remain president of this failed revolution.

After walking for an hour they emerge from the jungle onto a black sand beach on the shore of a lake in a caldera surrounded by high forested peaks. The water of the lake is likewise black from the many tannins leeched into it from the jungle. ‘Wait,' El Capitan Zambro calls when they have walked part way along this beach. ‘I have forgotten something.' He stops, puts his chin in his hand searching for a memory, until his eyes light with its discovery. ‘Oh, yes. Debauchery.'

The three Australians are ordered to strip their remaining clothes, and with these in the black sand at their feet they feel more naked than they have ever felt before. Their beautiful bodies, which have caused so much lust and tenderness in the past, might spark any form of depravity here. One soldier, boggling at Amelia's pubic hair trimmed into a heart shape, lays a hand on his own heart and pulls his chin back into his neck in astonishment and blinks slowly. The West … the West … evermore new heights of depravity, evermore fresh corruptions. Amelia places a hand in front of her crotch and closes her eyes. In Sydney that heart was, happily, a provocation and an excitement … it is, sadly, a provocation and excitement now. Matt places himself between her and the soldiers.

The first the Australians know of the plane is El Capitan Zambro snapping a hateful look skyward and hissing ‘
Bastardo
' at the clouds. They don't hear the plane for some seconds and they wonder is he cursing some personal ghost. Then, a violin note rising and falling on the air, a surging vibrato slowly getting closer.

Through the cerebrally bulging cumulus comes one of the despised fleet of Cessnas flying out of Colombia owned by the Medellin Cartel, carrying cocaine to the Baptist politicians and strutting negro rappers of the United States. This river of cocaine, wending and interlacing its way through the sky above the Central Highlands of Nicaragua, is the means by which the evil drug lords of Colombia maintain their wealth and power and deny the people of that country, brothers and
sisters of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, a revolution of their own.

‘
Disparen contra estos bastardos malvados
,' El Capitan Zambro shouts. The guards, knowing this a cosmetic aggression only, performed for form's sake, begin to fire their guns from the hip at the plane. And when their ammunition is expended the plane is unhurt, as usual, and flying on with its evil payload. But as they widen their mouths in awe at their own marksmanship it begins a spiralling dive bleeding a corkscrew trail of black smoke. Closer and closer it dives toward them, screaming in death before breaking apart hundreds of metres above them and raining its innards into the sky.

Scores of twenty-kilo cellophane bags of purest Colombian cocaine begin to strike down like bombs on the beach around them. The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, who had a moment before been whooping and chittering delight at their victory, now begin to stampede this way and that to escape the deadly barrage, never moving more than ten paces from their starting point before doubling back to rush away again in another direction. As the bales of cocaine strike they explode into vicious rolling clouds that crash slowly into each other, their bulbous storm fronts fusing together until the whole beach is whited-out in a fog of coke.

In high doses, it is said, cocaine will make a person feel extremely agitated, paranoid and aggressive. Unpleasant physical effects include dizziness, hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, tremors, headache and heart
pain. But studies on the metabolic effects of surviving such a rare meteorological/chemical event as a blizzard of cocaine have not been available until now.

So let this episode serve as a study, and let the study show that if you are a Red Guard of the Nicaraguan Liberation who despises cocaine as an evil and have never partaken and thus have the tolerance of an ascetic nun, then you will either: (a) Believe you are dead, and be thus horrified to find yourself in the waiting room of San Pedro preparing to state your case for entry to a glorious afterlife while sporting a boner. And will be, then, slapping at your crotch and calling, ‘
Modestia, Anselmo. Modestia
' (the reaction of Red Guard Anselmo Zapata); (b) believe that if you pretend to be a parrot you will escape the further horrors of this revolution because people will think you insane and limit you to a woman's duties (the reaction of Red Guard Napoleon Noriega); (c) be so amazed at the transparency of your own skin you decide to rent yourself to a medical school in Paris as a star exhibit for a fortune (the reaction of Red Guard Jesus Zin); (d) believe you are bidden by a God, who strictly speaking you shouldn't believe in, to apologise to whoever you meet for all of the sins committed by everyone ever (the reaction of Red Guard Anselm Anselm); or (e) believe you are Russ Hinze's chauffeur and that everyone else is Russ Hinze with a busy day ahead and not yet fully dressed (the reaction of El Capitan Zambro himself, who, though a Marxist revolutionary only moments before, now seems to consider this servitude a proud station). These are the five
reactions, noted and recorded, of the five Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation to being caught in a fog of cocaine.

The two rowing chums from Sydney, Chris Barlow and Matt Downey, being private school graduates of that city, are weekend users. But this is no place for amateurs and dilettantes. This is a mighty shit-storm of white with no reprieve. Every breath here is another step down into the cellar of flat-arsed, rat-faced stonery. They can only look at each other and laugh. Chris says, ‘Well … good. This is good. Who wants to meet a Jorge Luis Whatever straight? I needed a little something … to meet a dude like that.' They drop to their knees giggling, sniffing like beagles at air laden with happiness.

Only Amelia breathes freely. Naked, she stands in the fog burrowing her toes into the black sand with her hands held to the sky, inhaling deeply, accepting this bounty. In the crystal palaces of the Sydney A-list she has raced her face back and forward across a thousand tabletops hoovering up the ambrosia that is raining on her now like great gouts of love from a God that looks like Kurt Cobain. If in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then in this blizzard of cocaine Amelia is queen and this fogged-out beach is a country she rules.

By the time a southerly breeze has dispersed the cocaine and cleared the air, dopamines are caroming around her veins like drunk tourists through the streets of Pamplona pursued by bulls. She feels beyond happy. Only minutes ago she was destined for a terrible fate. So happiness seems a ramshackle halfway house on the
road to this place here and now. She drops into a crouch, hands held before her like a ninja, cutting dance moves through the clear mountain air toward the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. Her mind has hacked into some mainframe of human wisdom and she is able to prophesy simultaneously five or six steps of five or six different scenarios ahead of any other person on this beach. These men, mouthing their idiocies, are homo erectus, a million generations behind her, at closest.

Schmoozing coked-out scumbags has been how she's made her income for a number of years now. So these guys on the black sand beach dressed in their khaki and their red scarves, each beset by a compelling predicament invisible and unknowable to the world, are no surprise to her. One Red Guard is seated, slapping at his crotch, wailing apologies to San Pedro. Another is walking circles, flapping his arms like wings, and El Capitan Zambro, born-again obsequious, is standing before this Red Guard twirling his red bandana on the upright middle-finger of his right hand, imploring his flapping comrade to hold still as it is time for the double-windsor and its attendant procedures. The Red Guard stops his circling and flapping and lays his head on its side and eyes El Capitan Zambro a moment before screeching at him like a macaw and flaring his wings. El Capitan Zambro leaps then, thrusting his finger and casting his bandana like a lasso and the two wrestle in the black sand, the Red Guard screeching and his captain shouting, ‘
Por favor
, Senor Hinze.
Por favor
.'

Another Red Guard sits in the sand transfixed by the
diorama of his forearms, the pumping blood and twitching muscles, tendons making the finger bones dance like puppets. Beside this transparent Red Guard sits the final liberator of Nicaragua apologising to him for the rape of Nanking by the Japanese.

Keeping one AK-47 for herself Amelia throws the others into the lake. Out in the water she sees the tip of an aluminium wing pointing skyward, on fire. She dresses and dresses her brother and his friend and gathers the Red Guards as easily as a goatherd gathers his flock, and using her rifle she prods the soldiers and raps at their legs and bids them lead on to the hidden village of Jorge Luis Enriquez Great Leader of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation.

The Red Guards stumble and slap and flap and apologise their way along the jungle trail above the lake. In order to prevent themselves being adorned by El Capitan Zambro with a bandana in the same ingenious manner in which Russ Hinze was adorned with a necktie by his chauffeur, they cover their buttocks with one hand and cover their heads with the other and he is frustrated in his duty.

After an hour they move through a mountain pass and there is the village laid out below them. A mere sprinkle of huts in the jungle, made of the jungle itself, it hardly looks like the El Dorado which will birth revolution and utopia.

Amelia halts her party of stoned dolts and takes El Capitan Zambro aside. She sits him on a fallen tree and sits beside him and lays a hand on his knee gently.
Many birds are calling through the jungle and his head is moving absently tracking their sounds. She slaps his face to get his attention before admonishing him. ‘Chauffeur, these men … these men here you have been trying to adorn with your necktie, they are not Russ Hinze. What type of chauffeur are you? Do you even have qualifications? A driver's licence?' El Capitan Zambro nods his head vigorously, scrambling through his pockets for such a document. Amelia catches his hands and places them in his lap. ‘These fellows are lackspittles and gofers who do not know a chauffeur from a greenskeeper. Look at them.' El Capitan Zambro does look at them. And, detecting lackspittles and gofers, sneers at them. ‘Russ Hinze does not slap at his crotch and beseech San Pedro,' she says. ‘Nor does he preen himself and raise his splayed fingers above his head crestlike, in imitation of a cockatoo. Russ Hinze is a Great Leader. You will know Russ Hinze when you see him. He will be fat. A very fat man.' El Capitan Zambro is nodding his head slowly now, absorbing this. It seems to make sense. These men, with their scrawny necks, and so modest regarding their buttocks, they do not resemble the turtle that the chauffeur in the story defeated. They do not appear to be mighty potentates who have eaten themselves amorphous. This woman is talking true.

‘He is down there,' Amelia points through the foliage at the village below. ‘Russ Hinze is down there,' she whispers urgently. ‘And,
Dios mio
, he is late for an appointment. He must be dressed quickly. Made ready
in his dignity. What are you doing sitting here? Are you not his chauffeur?'

El Capitan Zambro leaps to his feet and shuffles hurriedly down the trail toward the village, holding his bandana before him. His men, though not his men now, fall in behind him from habit, one slapping at his crotch, another flapping his wings, a third lifting his shirt and marvelling at the circuitous plumbing of his gut, and the fourth berating himself and asking the Red Guards' forgiveness for the shrivelled potatoes and the likewise shrivelled Irish of the Irish Potato Famine of the eighteen-fifties.

Amelia sits Chris and Matt on the log beside her to watch the progress of that party of five. They are lost to view in the jungle for half-an-hour while she scans the village with her binoculars. Then they reappear, entering the village from the north, still flapping and swatting while returning the welcoming waves of fellow Red Guards.

Atop the largest hut in the village flies the triple-barred red and yellow flag of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. This hut is obviously the home of Jorge Luis Enriquez. And it is to this hut the party makes its way, led by El Capitan Zambro. And it is from this hut the scream comes.