Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (9 page)

Eamon Walter Aloyse placed Armadillo's head on a bed of straw in the centre of the enclosure. He then took down the sign that read
This Exhibit Is Temporarily Unwell
and on the blank side of it he wrote
This Exhibit Has Been Eaten
.

Many illiterates wandered past the armadillo enclosure that day, stopping to stare at the armadillo's head and wondering what had become of the rest of him. Until, just before closing, the first literate visitor stopped and read the sign. She was a mother with a swaddled piccaninny named Bravo on her hip. In anger and disbelief she thrust this child face-first at the sign as if he were literate and prone to outrage. ‘See, Bravo,' she shouted. ‘Witness the wickedness of zookeepers. An armadillo.' Others gathered behind her, all touched with a similar fury. Cries rang through the crowd. ‘An armadillo. An armadillo. The zookeepers have eaten an armadillo.' It seemed a great compassion was abroad for this thing called armadillo that none of them had ever seen or suspected.

The crowd raged through the zoo committing exciting vandalisms in its anger. An armadillo had been eaten. When the crowd came to the infirmary it tried to batter down the doors. It threw stones and broke windows while the zookeepers hid relishes and disposed of sauces before climbing into cages and covering themselves with straw, frightened and mystified by this sudden advocacy of the armadillo.

Eventually the crowd washed up against the bars of the zoo's sole remaining exhibit. An edgy badger, pacing and grimacing, shaking his head in what may have been disbelief. The mother of Bravo, sole literate among the crowd, read the sign outside that cage, ‘Common English Badger. Donated by His Highness The Prince of Wales.'

‘Fuck im Prince of Wale,' shouted one.

‘Hurryup,' shouted another. ‘Before these greedy bastard eatimup also.'

They kicked in the cage door and bludgeoned the badger thoroughly and built a fire from its food trough and barbecued him and portioned him out equally and fairly, as should have been done by the zookeepers with the armadillo.

This was the last wild thing to inhabit Sir Barnaby Lomus' famed Port Moresby Zoological Gardens and the establishment was closed on the 22nd of August 2000.

Since then the gates have been thrown open and the visitors' fees waived in perpetuity by the man whose name the zoo took, and it has enjoyed a second life as a housing estate for the homeless of that town. Thus, in Papua New Guinea it is now possible to visit a family living in an enclosure with a brass plaque naming them as Namibian Warthogs and telling the world they were donated by Nelson Mandela. Also possible to ogle a widow behind glass announced as a Horse-Fanged Viper. A family, happily behind bars and signposted as Dove Weasels with a warning beneath that (They Bite!).

More people visit the housing estate than visited the zoo. The young and humorous of Port Moresby seem never to tire of their outings to the Zoological Garden Housing Estate to smirk at the many brass insults heaped upon its residents. The laughter rings out and it seems a happy place.

Only one young man wanders there in sadness, fingering the plaques that tell of the species once incarcerated, and softly, nostalgically mimicking their chatters and cries. A man with an honours degree in zoology, living in a time after animals.

T
hree Australian hikers are huddled around the fireplace in a high mountain hut in the cloud forests of the North-Central Highlands of Nicaragua. One of the men is stoking the fire, one blowing on it, while the woman adds water to a gravel of desiccated stew in a pot dangling above it. She is talking excitedly about a bird she has seen that day. A crested caracara. ‘Did you see it, Matt? My God. It makes our rosella look like a house sparrow.' The hut is lit by four quivering candles and in this shifting light-play the Gore-Tex suits of the hikers leaning hollow by the door move like haunted armour.

Unmoving in the shadows, waiting their turn at the fire, sit five Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation.
Torn between the need for camouflage and the need to proclaim their revolution they are dressed in army greens with bright red bandanas. They are wet, but uncomplaining.

Chris Barlow, having stoked the fire, stands and unscrews a hip flask of grappa and hands it by the capful to his sister Amelia and his old rowing chum Matt. They throw it back and flash their burning tongues in the candlelight and wow and whistle at its potency. Chris manages a fund for the Catholic Church in Sydney, one of whose charities is the Street Urchins of Managua. He is in this country to deliver two mobile kitchens to the local church for these children. As an adjunct he has organised this hike into the high cloud forests of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. For he and Matt, in the confines of their double-scull at Sydney University, found they shared an appetite for exotic places and high mountains, for ruffling the hair of scrawny village kids as they trudged on through to a summit. Since this discovery they have travelled together many times to the world's highest ranges.

This is Amelia's first trip overseas for some years because she has become a star of the Sydney social scene since becoming a door bitch at Full Moon Rut in Woollahra, where she refused Leonardo DiCaprio entry, saying, ‘DiCapri … oh. You think you can mince around in a trainwreck of a shipwreck pic and then towel yourself off and wander in here like we forgive that shit? We don't. Try the Angler's Club on Watsons Bay, there's a sackload of sunburnt drunks over there that'll be
delighted to see you aren't drowned.' She'd had four lines of coke when she said it and only did it for a laugh, and was, absolutely, going to let him into the club. But before she could take the remark back DiCaprio and his floozies and muscle had turned on their heels and stormed off into the night. And made Amelia famous.

Because Sydney, taken as a personality, is a sycophant who floods her pants with anxious waters when addressed directly by a Californian governor or an English duchess. A stout and sneering monarch over the many dunghills such as Goulburn, Brisbane and Auckland, she is cap-in-hand suckhole to any northern hemisphere notable. But on this night she discovers, through Amelia, how good it feels to spurn the gods. Suddenly, with this DiCaprio story doing the rounds, Sydney seems a place A-list internationals are desperate to get into, and it makes the town feel good to bar their entry. DiCaprio's mojo becomes Amelia's. Hollywood's mojo becomes Sydney's, Sydney thinks.

So in the two years since the inhospitable spurning of that boy-faced Hollywood hero, Amelia has been invited to and photographed at all the openings and closings and comings and goings and anniversaries and exhibitions in a proud town. She's become one of Sydney's muses and only comes alive at night now in a five-star festivity after six lines of coke and a pill or two.

Her family is concerned at the turn her life has taken. Every time she appears in the social pages draped over some designer or rapper with his own boutique, the magazine lies open for days on the kitchen table of her
parents' house for them to grieve over and wince at in passing. What to do? How to put the genie of celebrity back in the bottle? She was studying Fine Arts before this dreadful DiCaprio fellow burdened her with such plausible cool she fell for it herself. She was a serious anatomical artist who could spend days drawing the wing of a pallid cuckoo or a Bogong moth, before that bastard stormed off into the night with his entourage leaving her status impossibly enhanced.

When their parents hear of Chris' trip to Nicaragua they think it might do Amelia good to accompany him. First of all seeing Chris help the poor children of that desecrated place might give her perspective. Then an exploration into the cloud forests where she can reconnect with the natural world and rediscover her love of wild things and of capturing them with a pencil or a brush. They beg him to take her. They want her to see the fêted wildlife of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve; the quetzal and macaw, the puma and jaguar. They reason that when magical creatures such as these are set alongside such dull creatures as the fashion designer, the magazine editor, the photographer and the gallery owner, they will trounce them and maul them and bring Amelia back to sanity.

Her brother doubts the power of the quetzal and the puma to trounce the celebrities of Sydney, but he knows she has become a drug-addled socialite, so anything is worth a try. Thus he asks her to come with him to Nicaragua. And to his delight the crested caracara today does seem to have inflamed her.

Chris has travelled widely and is respectful of other cultures and therefore sees the ambush and slaughter of Nicaraguan peasants as an in-house affair that you have to be Nicaraguan to understand and/or condemn. Thus he has shaken the hands of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation one by one and given them health bars. Knowing they do not speak English, he has waggled the bars at them and said, ‘Health bars. Muchos healthy. Very special goodly good. Make im fit. Make im strong.' And pointed at his hunched bicep. In the dark the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation have sniffed the health bars and laid them aside.

The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation are one of the many fragments of political ideology that chipped off the great stone of Nicaraguan independence when the United States brought down the sledgehammer of invasion in the nineties. They have haunted the vast parks of the Central Highlands ever since, patrolling the cloud forests, loosing automatic fire on fleeing jaguars and dreaming of a Marxist utopia stretching from Vancouver to Uruguay in which Red Soldiers stroll the streets of the cities with beautiful American blondes on leashes.

Though it is clear the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation can't speak English, conversation between the three Australians is stilted with their five sets of ears listening. To lighten the air Chris decides to tell the turtle soup joke he heard from a Jesuit accountant in Wollongong. ‘You boys can listen in,' he tells the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, knowing they can't. ‘It's
funny. It's a funny joke.' He puts his hand flat on his belly and mimes laughter. ‘You remember Russ Hinze? Well … you boys wouldn't, but, anyway, a great big fat pollie. A minister in Joh Bjelke's hillbilly government. Enormous dude.'

He turns then and begins to tell the joke to his sister and friend. ‘So, anyway, one time his chauffeur drives Russ down to Sydney for a big conference of politicians and Russ checks into the Hilton and he's feeling a bit peckish, like always, so he rings room service and says he'd like a bowl of turtle soup sent up, which is a favourite of his. He waits quarter-of-an-hour. No soup. Waits half-an-hour. No soup. And big Russ isn't a dude who likes to be kept waiting, you know. He says “jump” and people Fosbury flop all over the shop. So he sends his chauffeur down to the kitchen to see what the hell's going on.

‘This chauffeur is really his secretary and manservant and everything, you know, but we'll just call him a chauffeur. So, the chauffeur bursts into the kitchen at the Hilton. “What the hell's goin' on here?” he asks. “Big Russ Hinze is up there waiting for his turtle soup.” And he sees this French chef guy, tall hat and all, with a turtle up on the bench and a cleaver raised over it. “Eez not possible,” says the Frenchy. He's crying, at his wits' end, dabbing at his eyes with his apron. “I cannot kill zis turtle. Every time I raise zee cleaver to chop off his head he pull it into zee shell.” “Here, give us a go,” says Russ' chauffeur. And he takes the cleaver in one hand and with the other he jams a finger right up the turtle's
arse. The turtle thrusts its head out of its shell all popeyed with surprise and the chauffeur brings the cleaver down,
wham
, and voila, the turtle's history. Decapitated. Well the French chef, he's in raptures. “Oh, sank you, sir. Sank you. You are the genius, sir. A master chef of the marine creature. You have made much turtle soup in your life, yes?” “Never made any turtle soup at all, mate,” the chauffeur says. “But, sir, it must be that you have made turtle soup before. How else do you have zee technique?” The chauffeur shrugs his shoulders. “How do you reckon I get Russ' tie on in the morning?”'

The three Australians laugh and when they are finished a soft voice asks from the darkness, ‘Did you tell this tale because our Great Leader Jorge Luis Enriquez is an obese man?' From the darkness into the candlelight, the face of El Capitan Zambro of the Red Guards of Nicaraguan Liberation. An ugly, chiselled face covered in a craterscape of acne scars. ‘No. It was a joke,' Chris tells this face.

‘Did you tell it because of the mythic appetite and subsequent morphology of the Great Leader, my friend? Did you, perhaps, know of our Great Leader's predilection for turtle soup?'

‘No, dude. Hey, I didn't even know turtles lived in Nicaragua.'

‘Could it be …' El Capitan Zambro leans further forward into the candlelight, ‘you were speaking of Jorge Luis Enriquez?'

‘Hey, come on,' Amelia chips in. ‘Presumably a revolutionary leader doesn't wear a necktie,
the
trademark
garment of the bourgeois capitalist.' She smiles at the undeniable logic of her argument.

‘A red cravat,' El Capitan Zambro tells her. ‘Made from the silk shirt of a would-be assassin hired by the imperialist Satan United States to kill Fidel Castro. A well-known story. This bumbling Oswald was inches from success when he stepped upon the husk of a martyr beetle on the floor of Castro's bedroom. The great man woke and sprayed the room with bullets and the assassin's finery was donated throughout the length and breadth of revolutionary Latin America where the leaders wear it as charms to keep off the hireling killers of the West.'

‘Well, this wasn't about Jorge Luis Enriquez and his famous cravat. This was about Russ Hinze and his tie,' Chris says.

‘Sadly, my friend,' and El Capitan Zambro's face droops with a plausible sadness, ‘you have left me with a demeaning image in my mind of Lieutenant Coetzel, hero of the October Thrust and adjutant to Jorge Luis Enriquez, adorning the Great Leader with his red cravat in the very manner you suggest your chauffeur has adopted. It is an awful image. Treasonous and heretical. The neck of Jorge Luis Enriquez extends like a giraffe and his eyes bug as if with a vast voltage, whereupon Lieutenant Coetzel completes a hasty double-Windsor. My friend you should not have suggested this thing.'

‘I … I didn't even know you spoke English.'

‘And yet you told us of the surprising properties of the healthy bars.' A busy silence falls then. The three
Australians scrambling to think what this man's accusation might mean. Does he seriously believe they were mocking his Great Leader? Is he making a joke of our joke? Is he about to laugh? They are two days' walk from the nearest village with a government military post. Up here the Red Guards are the political reality. Why would they mock paramilitary zealots who live in the jungle sleeping with AK-47s? And how could they know Jorge Luis Enriquez was fat? No outsider has seen him for years.

‘How could I know Jorge Luis Enriquez was fat?' Chris asks.

‘Perhaps you are a spy.'

‘No, man. I'm with the church. Here for the street kids. You can check that. Listen, I'm sorry. It was just a stupid joke about a fat Australian guy.'

‘Yet, my friend, and I think my logic is correct here, if your Russ Hinze is, being fat, then also laughable, contemptible … then aren't all fat men equally guilty? Eh? My friend? Isn't Jorge Luis Enriquez also a man whose size makes him shameful? In your mind?' No one answers this question. It has become horrifically apparent to the Australians this man is committed to taking offence.

El Capitan Zambro takes a greasy red scarf from his jacket pocket and says to Amelia, ‘You are sweating. Understandable.' He throws the scarf into her lap. ‘It is never nice being in a strange land surrounded by gun-toting necrophiliacs.' She recoils from the scarf, standing and letting it fall, and he tells her, ‘Oh, it carries
my secretions? No reason not to use it. Soon enough you will be covered in those.' Amelia grimaces. Her teeth are whiter and more perfect than any these men have ever seen or broken.

‘Hey.' As Matt Downey gets to his feet four candle-lit AK-47 foresights track his rise. Matt is a lawyer. His chances of survival are slim, being brave and chivalrous, in this land where bravery is a serious condition and chivalry a terminal disease. Slowly, softly, El Capitan Zambro spells out their crime and their predicament. ‘You have mocked Jorge Luis Enriquez, my friend. It is not your time to say “Hey” or to say “You there” or to say “Well now”.'