Thompson, Hunter S (17 page)

I shuffled nervously in the dirt, looking back at the bartender, who seemed to be in
charge. He smiled maliciously, pointing behind me. I turned and saw a car coming slowly
through the crowd. “Here's your cab,” he said. “I'll get your friend.” He stepped over to
Yeamon and jerked him to his feet. “Big man go to town,” he said with a grin. “Leave
little girl here.”

Yeamon stiffened and began to shout “You bastards!” He swung savagely at the bartender,
who dodged easily and laughed while four men shoved Yeamon into the car. They shoved me in
after him, and I leaned out the window to yell at the bartender: “I'll be back with the
police -- that girl better be all right.” Suddenly I felt an awful jolt on the side of my
face, and I drew back just in time to let the second punch go flying past my nose. Without
quite knowing what I was doing, I rolled up the window and fell back on the seat I heard
them all laughing as we started down the hill.

All I could think about was getting the police, but the driver of the car refused to take
us to the station or even tell us where it was. “Better forget it,” he said quietly.
“Everybody mind his own business.” He let us out in the middle of town and said it would
be all right if we gave him two dollars to pay for the gas. I grumbled bitterly and gave
it to him, but Yeamon refused to get out of the car. He kept insisting that we were going
back up the hill to get Chenault.

“Come on,” I said, tugging at his arm. “We'll get the cops. They'll take us up.” Finally
I got him out and the car pulled away.

We found the police station, but there was nobody in it. The lights were on and we went
in to wait. Yeamon passed out on a bench and I was so groggy that I could barely keep my
eyes open. After about an hour I decided we'd be better off looking for a cop in the
streets. I woke Yeamon up and we started down toward the bars. The carnival was
dissipating now and the streets were full of drunks, mostly tourists and Puerto Ricans.
Little knots of people wandered from bar to bar, passing bodies in doorways, and a few
just sprawled on the sidewalk. It was almost four, but the bars were still full of people.
It looked like the town had been bombed. There was no sign of a cop anywhere, and by this
time we were both ready to fall down from exhaustion. Finally we gave up and took a cab
out to Lindbergh Beach, where we dragged ourselves over the fence and fell down in the
sand to sleep.

Sometime during the night it started raining and when I woke up I was soaking wet I
thought it was dawn, but when I looked at my watch it said nine o'clock. My head felt
swollen to twice its normal size and there was a big, painful bump in front of my right
ear. I took off my clothes and went into the bay for a swim, but it made me feel worse
instead of better. The morning was cold and dreary, and a light rain peppered the water. I
sat on the raft for a while and thought about the night before. The more I remembered, the
more depressed I became, and I dreaded the idea of going back into town to look for
Chenault. At that point I didn't really care if she lived or died. All I wanted was to
walk across the road and get on a plane for San Juan, leaving Yeamon asleep on the beach
and hoping I'd never see either one of them again.

After a while I swam in and woke him up. He looked sick. We went to the airport for
breakfast, then got a bus to town. After getting our clothes off the boat at Yacht Haven,
we went to the police station, where the gendarme on duty was playing solitaire with a
deck of cards that showed naked women in various lustful poses.

He grinned and looked up when Yeamon finished talking. “Man,” he said slowly, “what can I
do about your girl if she likes somebody else?”

“Likes, hell!” Yeamon shouted. “She was dragged off!”

“Okay,” he said, still smiling. “I live here all my life an' I know how girls get dragged
off at carnivals.” He laughed softly. “You tell me she had all her clothes off, dancin'
for all those people -- and then you say she was raped?”

The cop made several more remarks of the same kind, and finally Yeamon's eyes got wild
and he began to shout in a voice that was angry and desperate. “Listen!” he yelled. “If
you don't do something about this I'm going up to that house with a goddamn butcher knife
and kill everybody I see!”

The cop looked startled. “Take it easy, mon. You heading for real trouble if you keep
runnin' your mouth.”

“Look,” I said. “All we want you to do is go up there with us and find the girl -- is
that too much to ask?”

He looked down at his cards for a moment, as if by consulting them he could divine the
meaning of our appearance, and what to do about it. Finally he shook his head sadly and
looked up. “Ah, you troublesome people,” he said quietly. “You jus' can't learn.”

Before we could say anything, he stood up and put on his pith helmet. “Okay,” he said.
“Let's go take a look.”

We followed him into the street. His attitude made me nervous, almost embarrassed for the
trouble we were causing.

By the time we pulled up in front of the house I wanted to jump out and run away.
Whatever we found was going to be bad. Maybe they had taken her somewhere else, to some
other party, and staked her out on a bed, a white, pink-nippled nightcap to wind up the
carnival. I shuddered as we went up the stairs, then I glanced over at Yeamon. He looked
like a man on his way to the guillotine. The cop rang the bell and it was answered by a
meek-looking black woman who stuttered nervously and swore she had seen nothing of a white
girl and knew nothing about a party the night before.

“Balls!” Yeamon snapped. “You had a hell of a party here last night and I paid six
dollars to get into it.”

The woman denied having knowledge of any party. She said there were people sleeping
inside, but no white girl.

The cop asked if he could come in and take a look. She shrugged and let him in, but when
Yeamon tried to follow she got excited and shut the door in his face.

In a few minutes the cop reappeared. “No sign of a white girl,” he said, looking Yeamon
straight in the eye.

I didn't want to believe him because I didn't want to face the other possibilities. This
should have been simple -- find her, wake her up, and take her away. But now nothing was
simple. She might be anywhere, behind any door on the island. I looked at Yeamon,
expecting him to run amok and start swinging at any moment. But he was slumped against the
porch railing and he looked ready to cry. “Oh jesus lord,” he muttered, staring down at
his shoes. It was such a genuine despair that the cop put his hand on Yeamon's shoulder.

“Sorry, mon,” he said quietly. “Come on now. Let's go.”

We drove back down the hill to the station and the cop promised to look for a girl of
Chenault's description. “I'll tell the others,” he said. “She'll turn up.” He smiled
kindly at Yeamon. “You got no business lettin' a woman run you 'round in circles like this
anyhow.”

“Yeah,” Yeamon replied. Then he put Chenault's raincoat and her small suitcase on the
desk. “Give this to her when she turns up,” he said. “I don't feel like lugging it around.”

The cop nodded and put her clothes on a shelf in the hack of the room. Then he wrote down
my address in San Juan so he could send a message if they found her. We said goodbye and
walked down the street to the Grand Hotel for breakfast.

We ordered rum and ice with hamburgers and ate them in silence while we read the
newspapers. Finally, Yeamon looked up and said casually, “She's just a whore. I don't know
why this should bother me.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “She went crazy -- totally crazy.”

“You're right,” he said. “She's a whore. I knew it the first time I saw her.” He leaned
back in the booth. “I met her at a party on Staten Island about a week before I came down
here; the minute I saw her I said to myself, now this girl is a rattling fine whore -- not
the money type, but the type that just wants to hump.” He nodded. “She came back to my
place with me and I fell on her like a bull. She stayed there all week, didn't even go to
work. At the time I was staying with a friend of my brother's and I made him sleep on a
cot in the kitchen -- pretty much ran him out of his own place.” He smiled sadly. “Then
when I left for San Juan she wanted to come with me -- it was all I could do to make her
wait a few weeks.”

I had several Chenaults on my mind right then: a chic little girl in New York with a
secret lust and a Lord & Taylor wardrobe; a tan little girl with long blonde hair, walking
on the beach in a white bikini; a yelling, drunken hellion in a loud St. Thomas bar; and
then the girl I had seen last night -- dancing in those flimsy panties and bouncing those
pink-nippled breasts, weaving her hips while a crazy thug pulled the panties down her
legs. . . and then that last glimpse, standing in the middle of the room, alone for just
an instant, that little muff of brown hair standing out like a beacon against the white
flesh of her belly and thighs. . . that sacred little muff, carefully nurtured by parents
who knew all too well its power and its value, sent off to Smith College for cultivation
and slight exposure to the wind and weather of life, tended for twenty years by a legion
of parents and teachers and friends and advisers, then farmed out to New York on a wing
and a prayer.

We finished breakfast and took a bus to the airport. The lobby was jammed with pitiful
drunkards: men dragging each other into bathrooms, women sick on the floor in front of
benches, tourists babbling with fear. I took one look at the scene and knew that we might
wait all day and all night before we got a seat on a plane. Without tickets, we might be
here for three days. It looked hopeless. Then we had a wild piece of luck. We had gone to
the coffee shop and were looking around for a seat when I saw the pilot who had flown me
over to Vieques on Thursday. He seemed to recognize me as I approached. “Ho,” I said.
“Remember me? Kemp --
New York Times
.”

He smiled and held out his hand. “That's right,” he said. “You were with Zimburger.”

“Pure coincidence,” I said with a grin. “Say, can I hire you to take us back to San Juan?
We're desperate.”

“Sure,” he said. “I'm going back at four. I have two passengers and two empty seats.” He
nodded. “You're lucky you found me this early -- I wouldn't have had them long.”

“Christ,” I said. “You've saved our lives. Charge me anything you want -- I'll bill it to
Zimburger.”

He grinned broadly. “Well, glad to hear that. I can't think of anybody I'd rather ram it
to.” He finished his coffee and put the cup on the counter. “Got to run now,” he said. “Be
on the runway at four -- it's the same red Apache.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “We'll be there.”

The mob was piling up now. A plane left for San Juan every half hour, but all the seats
were reserved. The people waiting for vacancies were beginning to get drunk again,
hauling out bottles of scotch and passing them around.

It was impossible to think. I wanted peace, the privacy of my own apartment, a glass
instead of a paper cup, four walls between me and this stinking mob of drunks that pressed
on us from all sides.

At four we went out to the runway and found the Apache warming up. The flight back took
about thirty minutes. With us was a young couple from Atlanta; they had come over from San
Juan earlier in the day and now they couldn't get back soon enough. They were absolutely
appalled by the wild and uppity nigras.

I was tempted to tell them about Chenault, giving them all the details and finishing up
with a hideous vision of where she was now, and what she was doing. Instead, I sat quietly
and stared down at the white clouds. I felt like I'd survived a long and perilous binge,
and now I was going home.

My car was in the airport lot where I'd left it, and Yeamon's scooter was chained to a
railing by the attendant's shack. He unlocked it and said he was going on out to his
house, despite my advice that he stay at my place so he could pick her up if she came in
sometime during the night.

“Hell,” I said. “She might already be back for that matter. For all we know, she thought
we abandoned her last night, so she went to the airport.”

“Yeah,” he said, jerking the scooter off its stand. “That must be what happened, Kemp.
Maybe she'll have dinner ready when I get back to the house.”

I followed him out the long driveway and waved goodbye as I turned off on the highway
toward San Juan. When I got back to the apartment I went to sleep immediately and didn't
wake up until noon the next day.

On my way down to the office I wondered if I should say anything about Chenault, but the
moment I walked into the newsroom I forgot all about her. Sala called me over to his desk,
where he was talking excitedly with Schwartz and Moberg. “It's all over,” he yelled. “You
should have stayed in St Thomas.” Segarra had quit and Lotterman had left the night before
for Miami, presumably in a last-ditch effort to get new financing. Sala was convinced the
paper was going under, but Moberg thought it was a false alarm. “Lotterman has plenty,” he
assured us. “He went to see his daughter -- he told me right before he left.”

Sala laughed bitterly. “Wake up, Moberg -- do you think Greasy Nick would have dumped a
soft job like this if he didn't have to? Face it, we're unemployed.”

“Goddamnit,” Schwartz exclaimed. “I was just getting settled here -- this is the first
job I've had in ten years that I wanted to keep.” Schwartz was about forty and although I
didn't see much of him except at work, I liked him. He did a good job on the desk, never
bothered anybody, and spent his free time drinking in the most expensive bars he could
find. He hated Al's, he said; it was too clubby, and dirty besides. He liked the Marlin
Club and the Caribe Lounge and the other hotel bars where a man could wear a tie and drink
in peace and occasionally see a good floor show. He worked hard, and when he finished
working he drank. After that he slept, and then he went back to work. Journalism to
Schwartz was a jigsaw puzzle a simple process of putting a paper together so that
everything fit. Nothing more. He considered it an honorable trade and he'd learned it
well; he had it down to a formula and he was damn well going to keep it that way. Nothing
annoyed him more than a screwball or a crank. They made his life difficult and caused him
to brood endlessly.

Sala grinned at him. “Don't worry, Schwartz -- you'll get a pension -- probably forty
acres and a mule, too.”

I remembered Schwartz's first appearance at the
News.
He wandered into the newsroom and asked for a job the same way he'd walk into a
barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down. Now, if
there was another English-language paper in town, the collapse of the
News
would mean no more to Schwartz than the death of his favorite barber. It wasn't the loss
of a job that upset him, but the fact that his pattern was being threatened. If the paper
folded, he'd be forced into some strange and irregular action. And Schwartz was not that
way. He was perfectly capable of doing a strange and irregular thing, but only if he'd
planned it Anything done on the spur of the moment was not only stupid, but immoral. Like
going to the Caribe without a tie. He viewed Moberg's way of life as a criminal shame and
called him “that job-hopping degenerate.” I knew it was Schwartz who had put into
Lotterman's head the idea that Moberg was a thief.