Diseased palms formed a visual fence between the wattled huts and a sandy beach where sewage from Boca Grande, borne on a trick current, washed up in stringy clumps. The village smelled of brackish water, pig feces, charred lumber. It had the rudiments of a community but it was in no way clear where people living in the huts made their money or bought food, the only business in the area being a clapboard shack with a rusted Coca-Cola sign nailed to its side. The shack sold cold drinks out of a rusted metal cooler and small bags of potato chips. There were other foodlike things for sale but nothing you would want to eat. Long structures set back among the trees had black glassless openings full of staring, huddled faces. The blacks living there did not appreciate being told to move out of camera range and ambled into shots to display their resentment. When Paul gave the most aggressive ones money to vanish, others materialized. It didn’t help that the cameraman and his assistant shouted and waved at the natives like Nordic conquerors clearing a Munich sidewalk. Maria had attempted diplomacy in the local dialect. Since she was a woman, the villagers smiled and nodded and pretended to agree and then resumed their interference.
Paul’s obsession with Michael Simard had begun to determine the alterations of the script, which Paul took with him at night in a canvas shoulder bag, along with a Polaroid camera and other paraphernalia to be used during dinner to record a promising location or a comely potential extra. He would amend the next day’s shooting pages over strong rum drinks in the Arsenal Disco (where a number of local transvestites battled for his attention, hoping to secure parts in the film), scribble more dialogue in the taxis shuttling us between the old city and the resort peninsula of Boca Grande, and improvise scenes as we sat in the basement casino of the Don Blas Hotel, feverishly losing thousands of Alex’s pesos at roulette. Paul believed that Irma and Michael were “coming together” in some occult way, and kept adding scenes between the two of them to urge things along.
That morning, for example, a love scene between Irma and Alex had been postponed on Paul’s insistence, and something entirely different was arranged, a scene at the market just below San Diego. The cameraman was permitted to shoot inside the block-long tent, using a crucifix of battery-powered floodlamps and a hand camera. He followed Michael and Irma through the loamy fragrances of the bazaar, into crowds thronging around vast piles of vegetables, sweating Mayan pyramids of cheese, and butcher stalls where the fetor of dried blood swaddled impaled goats and rabbits. An endless profusion of straw baskets and balsa crates overflowed with tomatoes, carrots, peppers, guavas, and mangoes. Filtered cathedral light sprinkled down on makeshift shrines to the Virgin, cardboard altars festooned with garlic necklaces and clumps of squash. The sound technician contentedly trailed the camera, headphones clamped to his ears, his omnidirectional mike recording an unbelievable cacophony of voices, breathy flutes, cackling hens, butchers’ saws and cleavers chopping dead flesh, the cries of ragged children, the shrill electronic gurgle of hand-held video games.
Outside the tent, among sellers of pistachios and Brazil nuts, Paul filmed Irma and Michael strolling away from the market into a field where the grass was chewed up by truck tires and utility trailers. In a secluded spot near the edge of a woods, she was directed to stand looking up at the uneasy sky with an expectant expression, to point her arm up at the clouds, to hold this pose for several seconds until Michael, likewise, reached toward the sky, his hand angling until it brushed against hers; at the moment they touched, they threw themselves on the ground side by side. Paul rehearsed the actors several times, giving elaborate instructions about the configuration he wanted them in. Next, he had them each remove one shoe, and told Michael to take his sock off and roll up his pant leg. Lying on their backs, the couple stared into space. Her knees pulled up, Irma crossed her bare left foot over her right knee, while Michael’s naked right foot came up and crossed his left knee, until their feet touched in midair . . . then they dropped their feet to the dirt.
“What’s he doing?” Ray wanted to know. We were standing behind some parked cars several yards away from the filming, watching the cryptic choreography of arms and legs. We could hear the sibilant nattering of Paul’s breathless directions, unintelligible from that distance but audibly rapt and exacting.
“It looks like some sort of ritual,” I said, wondering how Irma would choose to interpret Paul’s fetishism. Ray acted puzzled and dismayed.
“Alex is just livid,” he commented drily. “Paul’s been cutting his scenes down. What’s worse, he’s making Michael’s longer. Those shots back and forth the other day. What for? Look at this! It’s unnecessary! And I mean, what are they doing? What is that? It’s . . . it’s obscene.”
It was true. The stilted, artificial movements of Michael’s hand and Irma’s hand, Michael’s foot and Irma’s foot, the unnatural way these parts of their bodies met and flew away from each other, exhibited a powerful, bewildering eroticism, a studied carnality—it was indecent, in a way that an actual sexual act wouldn’t have been. From a distance, the actors might have been signaling a passing aircraft, such was the initial impression of innocence, yet the longer you looked, the more perplexing and naked these symmetrical movements became, charged with a pornographic bluntness . . .
An hour later, Paul observed, “Between the two of them is developing the possibility of murder,” as he scanned the baleful Boca Chica sky, its ragged clouds raking low over the palms, pointing his Coke bottle at the long avenue of mud ribboning into the rain forest. We were sitting on the tailgate of the white truck, as Maria resumed her negotiations with the locals. We might have been in Central Africa, Cameroons, Mozambique: the poverty of the surroundings verged on the conditions associated with life in the wild.
“Between their characters,” I said, encouraging clarification.
“Well . . . yes, naturally. The possibility exists that they’ll conspire to murder Alex.”
Paul craned his head around and smiled at Michael, who stood with his back against the bulkhead of the truck, technicians at his feet unpacking reflectors and magazines of film stock. Michael grinned back disarmingly. I realize that I have described him as Russian-looking, Italiante, Greek, a French schoolboy, etc., etc.: the fact is that Michael’s beauty was, like all extreme beauty, indescribable. Certainly he was “dark” rather than Nordic, Mediterranean rather than Celt, let’s say, closer to Slav or Arabic than to WASP; he was probably an inch or so short of six feet, his body type somewhere between a “swimmer’s build” and “bodybuilder.” His face had smooth, regular features, thick black eyebrows, piercing gray eyes with green-brown aureoles, a fleshy, longish nose, wide lips, a wide, squared chin . . . but it’s futile to itemize his attractions. Michael Simard was the shepherd you hope will stumble over you in the forest. As far as what he was actually like is concerned, this was still, improbably, mysterious. For one thing, the boy was so laconic that we had learned almost nothing about him. His résumé was simple: a friend of Paul’s had discovered Michael modeling nude at the Art Students League in New York. (“That doesn’t mean he’s a prostitute,” Paul assured me. “It just means he’s comfortable without his clothes on.”) He also worked as a chauffeur for a limousine company.
He had a ready smile and an apparent willingness to do anything Paul asked of him. But he seemed utterly incurious about the film—except when he became interested in things the technical crew was doing—and he spent a great deal of time staring off into the clouds. Michael drifted in and out of our thoughts, an object of intense preoccupation and at the same time a complete irrelevance, like some childhood fetish bedeviling your responsible, adult self . . .
Meanwhile, Alex Gavro, alarmed at Paul’s script changes, afraid not merely of being upstaged by Michael but also of losing money (since every departure from the established shooting schedule risked prolonging our stay), had driven into Boca Chica to supervise, with the line producer (a dour woman named Hannah) and Valentina Vogel, who sat in the front seat of the Cadillac preening her long auburn hair with a plastic brush. For several days, Valentina had stayed in the villa on the pretext of some obscure indisposition; Irma reported that the haughty editor (like Ray, a longtime veteran of Rudolph Bauer’s celebrated films) emitted a subtly disparaging view of Paul’s project. She had only agreed to edit the movie out of friendship, and to have a paid vacation in South America. Today she had condescended to “take a look” at the shooting, to groan good-naturedly over Paul’s amateurishness, maybe to interject a wise if obvious suggestion.
I was supposed to walk beside Michael along the mud road, past a corral full of pigs and a large pink building on stilts, the local schoolhouse. We carried suitcases, the premise being that a transportation strike obliged us to walk into the city from the airport, through the fetid marshland between the forest and the harbor. We had agreed to play the scene for comedy, my impish character struggling in the heat with a luggage that was loaded down with bricks while regaling Michael aka Max with risqué gossip about Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Michael remained silent, impassive, preoccupied with his own thoughts. The first shots took us past the pig corral and into the deserted outskirts of the village. From there the camera, mounted on the truck, would track us front-on.
We had already shot a few takes, none of them to Paul’s liking, when a cloudburst supervened. My sneakers were caked with mud; Michael was cleaning grime from his shoes with a rag. Paul had just reiterated his desire to use this timeless, primitive colony in his “historical flashback.” Alex had once again proclaimed his aversion to this proposed sequence, claiming the movie would grind to a halt as soon as it came on. The first sheets of rain fell without preamble. Alex stopped haranguing Paul to hop back into the Cadillac and put the roof up, while Ray and the crew men spread greasy tarps over the equipment in the pickup.
I jumped into the Cadillac with Paul and Valentina. The others huddled in the rear of the black van. Through the splattered windshield we saw them framed between the open doors, figures in parentheses, sitting with knees up along the van floor, passing joints around.
“I haven’t been up this way in years,” Alex said, lighting a joint of his own and extending it to Paul like a peace offering. Valentina and I politely ignored each other’s body in the backseat, like strangers on a subway car. The smell of rain mingled with a stale dusty scent of the upholstery, a smell redolent of old powder puffs and closets choking with mothballs, ruched gowns and faded taffeta in forgotten cedar chests. With the raindrops rattling on the soft vinyl roof, this smell transported me to some long-ago moment of childhood, exploring the attic of our family house. Some desultory talk among the three of them followed, starting in English but lapsing into German, effectively locking me out of the conversation. Every so often Valentina looked at me and smiled a bit helplessly, her severe face softening, as if in apology for the language barrier. “Would you like some more of this?” she asked in English, holding out the joint.
Since I only understood one in six or seven German words, I couldn’t really follow Alex’s ruminations. The most I caught was his reminiscent tone, as he waved the dwindling cigarette at the rain, recounting past escapades in wonder at his former daring. Alex had unsuspected narrative gifts—when he got going, he loved spinning out a tale, replete with strangely nuanced observations. The wooden self-importance he carried around on his face was only one, daunting side of an off-putting personality. You can turn a rock over with your foot and find a whole world crawling around.
Alex had every reason to turn on the charm: the rest of us didn’t trust him. His part was being whittled down, not in any systematic way that he could fight with his powers as producer, but in supple, deft, logical-sounding strokes. Alex seemed incapable of ordinary social pleasure, so I assumed that this plangent interlude had an ulterior motive—but perhaps it was simply what it was. Paul, with whom he’d been bickering only minutes before, sat spellbound, and soon was translating Alex’s spiel for my benefit.
In the less organized early days of drug smuggling, Alex had operated a small air service between the islands, one single-engine Dakota that flew between Boca Chica, the Caymans, and the Everglades, and numerous unmarked islands and sandspits along the way. It was in the sixties, before Alex’s stretch in prison, and the drugs were mainly marijuana and peyote plants instead of coke. “And of course,” he added wickedly, “heroin.” Valentina clucked and guffawed throughout the recitation, exactly like a goose, I thought, nervous and silly: what was the Edith Sitwell poem Paul was forever quoting? “Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly, walk by the shore of the wan grassy sea—”
Those had been days of manly adventure. And if anyone subscribed to Paul’s ponderous credo that fucking and killing were the only actual events in life, it was Alex. He spoke of dodging DEA agents and drug pirates, sinking competitors’ boats on the high seas, jettisoning a half a ton of weed in advance of a bust. He hinted, darkly, that in the kill-or-be-killed circles he had traveled in, murder was all in the day’s work, though he himself had never done a hit—but he had witnessed a few. Yes, the whole area was saturated in lore.
“He says that behind the mountain near Santa Marta there’s a tribe of Indians,” Paul said. “The men can only have sex with their wives once every three months, according to the lunar calendar or something . . . and if you go on the beach over there and spread out your towel, the men will come out of the forest and fuck you, one at a time, until the whole tribe has had you.”
“It’s true,” Alex asseverated, hunching around behind the steering wheel.
“Fuck you and then eat you, probably,” Valentina suggested. “I suppose this is only for boys?”
“Stupid,” Paul said savagely, “the whole point is not to have to enter that horrible vagina.”
The moment froze, since Paul’s anger almost never surfaced, and when it did its meaning was never clear. Alex coasted over the brittle patch in German while Paul told me in English, “Alex has a friend he thinks we should meet. He lives in the hills over there.”
Up ahead, the three-man crew, abetted by Michael, Ray, and Hannah, were pretending to dance inside the van, squatting in the doorway, pumping their arms up and down, and chanting something unintelligible. Maria climbed out of the front of the van and ran over to us. She climbed in next to Paul, black hair dripping:
“They want food,” she said. “Like always.”
Paul glanced at his watch. It meant going all the way into the city, and several lost hours, since each time the equipment was boxed up and moved it took forever to unpack it again.
“Alex, what do you think?”
Alex looked at his own watch. He answered Paul in German. Valentina had some objection. Alex nodded, considering it, then made an “it’s all the same” gesture with his hand. Paul twisted his face ambivalently. Maria and I looked at each other with goofy, clueless expressions. Something was decided, at any rate, since Valentina started gathering her things up.
“We’re going?” I said.
Paul thought about it.
“You can either go,” he said, “or . . . maybe come with us to meet this person.”
I shrugged. Valentina was nudging Paul’s half of the front seat forward, obliging Maria to scrunch against him. Valentina was obviously smarting from Paul’s insult, though when he spoke to her in an imploring tone, to smooth it over, she laughed and waved him away. “I need food,” she said flatly, stepping out of the car and skipping toward the pickup. Maria poised herself for a dash back to the van.
“I’ve taken enough speed that I’m not going to eat anything, anyway,” I said. “So who is this person?”
I noticed that Alex’s grim face wore a dreamy, idiotic smile. As soon as Maria had bolted for the van, Ray jumped out of it and came up to Paul’s window, knocking on it furiously. The keys to the pickup were clenched in his fingers. Through the steam and driblets on the plastic rear window, I got a weirdly distorted glimpse of Valentina climbing into the pickup, her large purse impeding her progress. Paul rolled down the window.
“How about meeting us at Paco’s?” Ray said. The rain dripped off his petite face, collecting at the fringe of his moustache. His eyes were sore and red in the corners. I wondered again if my influence on Paul, Paul’s influence on me, terrified this bland, excitable man.
“Well, of course, maybe—”
“You have other plans?”
“I have to discuss things with Alex,” Paul protested.
Ray cast a significant look at me in the backseat.
“Concerning the next scenes,” Paul added. “Look, you’re soaked, go on ahead and we’ll meet you there.”
“Paco’s,” Ray reminded him.
“Yes, yes, Paco’s,” Paul said with exasperation after Ray had walked off to the pickup. “Why on earth he wants a gingerbread cottage in the forest of Hansel and Gretel, after all this time . . .”
“He only wants you to love him,” I said, with feeling. As I said it I felt excluded from all love, but flooded with altruism.
“It isn’t so simple to love what you love,” Paul said.
Soon we were driving into the woods, under the dense forest canopy, the shrinking road developing an acne of sinkholes and boulders.
“It’s necessary to hate,” Paul shouted as the car dipped into a gully of spraying stones then lurched up through mud.
“Hate what?”
“All affectional ties are predicated on hate,” he said. “Hatred of the others. I’m sure it’s a perversion of Kant’s universal ethics. We want all to be as we would wish in order to be right, and if we think it’s right, then all should do as we do, and they don’t.”
The car bounced through a pothole.
“Therefore,” Paul concluded, “we must hate them.”
Alex adjusted his Tonton Macoute sunglasses as though he had long ago accepted the practical necessity of hatred.
Behind the flatlands of Boca Chica there were hills that rose into a vertiginous zone of emerald verdure. The road became straighter, less onerous, wending across meadows and groves of cultivated fruit trees before plunging back into the jungle. The rain stopped abruptly, as it always did, and Alex put the top down. Sunlight poured through the treetops.
The house was set back several yards from the road in the shade of monstrously tall trees: a plain, well-appointed little house whose main area was a terraced living room with no front wall, the open space overlooking hundreds of miles of forest spread out in the direction of Venezuela. A dog started barking as soon as the car pulled into the dirt drive, and then came galloping around the house, a skinny Airedale-looking mutt tethered to a clothesline wire by a retractable leash.
Skirting the perimeter of the dog’s terrain we approached the veranda, which had a flagstone subterrace as a repository for potted ferns and metal flower boxes full of jasmine and gardenias. On the upper level a large, powerful-looking man was seated in a motorized wheelchair, gazing out across the million treetops through which a wide, sluggish, gray river snaked, streaked like the treetops by thick bands of sunlight. Behind the strong fragrance of the flowers lay a stronger odor of mulch or compost lifting from the forest floor, a smell that summoned thoughts of boa constrictors and other slithering things.
“Who coming there?” The man lifted his shaggy head and fixed an intense, level gaze on Alex.
“It’s me, Jaybill. Alex Gavro.”
“Who be talking to Jaybill?”
“What, you are blind and deaf now as well as crippled?”
“Shee-it, Alex, you come on up here now. Let me look at you. How’s yoah mutha? These your friends?”
“No, my enemies. I always travel round with my enemies, don’t you?”
Jaybill Hanratty, as he was called, had a harsh sensuous mouth framed by a rakish beard and moustache. His face had a saturnine cast, the skin light brown, like a North African Arab’s. He wore an orange, short-sleeved Villanova sweatshirt and denim cutoffs. Almost the first thing you noticed about him was that his arms ended in stumps just below the sweatshirt sleeves and his thighs tapered into smooth rounded tips where his knees should have been.
Behind his wheelchair was a long elegant sofa covered in dark green silk with a pattern of white daffodils. Piled on the sofa cushions were numerous prosthetic limbs, plastic arms and legs with sectioned steel and flesh-colored surgical straps lying askew like the overcoats of party guests heaped on a bed.
“Simone—!” Jaybill yelled, tilting his head back, aiming his voice at the hidden depths of the house. High-heeled footsteps clattered on bare floors and the dog resumed barking, without much conviction.
Alex introduced us to Jaybill, who told us we should take a look around God’s country. In fact, the area around the house had a monumental quality, like the Ecuadorian panoramas painted by Frederick Church: endless woods borne down by a whole democracy of climbing plants, an infinite entanglement of sylvan loveliness.
“Someday this will all be a desert of soil erosion,” Jaybill said with satisfaction. “Much of what you see has already been sold to cattle ranchers.”
“And you still have to go to Paco’s for a decent hamburger,” Alex said. He sounded nostalgic. “What is it, Jaybill, that dooms the Orinoco valley to this kind of third-class, third-world style of shitty half-done development?” He waved his arm at the panorama, becoming vehement: “This, this here, it was El Dorado!”
Jaybill Hanratty nodded his head, looking like a fifties jazz musician on goofballs.
“That is true,” he said finally. “We are looking straight at what the Spanish thought was El Dorado. Pizarro thought it was and Ferdinand and Isabella thought it was, Sepulveda and Herrera and De Soto and Alvarado thought it was, quoth the raven, El Fuckin’ Do-ra-do.” He paused, stuck out his lower lip, hawked and spat across the lower terrace into the yard. “I do believe they were correct, too. It was El Dorado. Trouble is, Alex, it ain’t El Dorado anymore.”
Paul and I stood on the lower terrace taking in the view, while Alex crouched beside the wheelchair, conferring with Jaybill in an unfamiliar patois. In the depths of the house the sharp footsteps of Simone clacked back and forth, as if she, whoever she was, could not make up her mind to come out.
“Let me tell you what I’d like to happen with your character,” Paul said ostentatiously, leading me off to the far corner of the terrace. I could hear the dog’s leash scuttling along the wire on the other side of the house. “Alex’s friend was a big drug dealer,” Paul murmured. “He used to control this whole part of Colombia, not Cartagena but the countryside and all the inlets along the coast. He still takes a lot of drugs and he’s really out there, you know?”
I looked back over Paul’s shoulder to the rather strange tableau of Jaybill Hanratty in his wheelchair, staring Nietzsche-like at the teeming jungle, Alex off to the side in a wicker chair, bursting now and then into hacking laughter. It was odd that Jaybill, judging from the way his clothes hung, had an athletically proportioned body despite his missing limbs.
A woman came into the living room, a scrawny woman in a strawberry sundress, a blonde Marilyn wig, and red spike heels. She spoke to Jaybill in a sharp voice, then turned to Alex, ignoring us. As she talked she gripped the handles of the wheelchair and began pushing it gently back and forth.
“How did he . . . ?”
“That’s the best part,” Paul whispered. “He burnt some people in the Cali cartel, for something like a million dollars. That’s what Alex says anyway. And they did this to him—they didn’t want to kill him. They knocked him out with chloroform in the parking lot of El Laguita. Then they kept him in a cabin in the mountains, on morphine, chopping off one limb every four or five days. There was a doctor who sewed him up each time so he wouldn’t bleed to death.”
The information gave Jaybill a sudden freakish glamour, like a movie star disfigured in a car crash. I tried to imagine his exposed stumps as objects of a keen, adventurous eroticism. Simone was running her fingers through his thick black hair, brightly painted nails flashing.
“Y’all wanna whiskey or somethin’?” Her American voice with its strong southern accent was distinctly male. I now noticed the muscular calves under the sundress hem, the bulky shoulders. Now she came clacking over to the edge of the veranda. “Yew prob’ly think we’re peculiar or just demoralized to start so early in the afternoon, but this is the tropics, gentlemen. And besides,” she winked, “things bein’ as they are, they ain’t very much else to do.”
Paul lit up with appreciation: Simone’s gender delighted him.
“I wouldn’t mind a little breath of whiskey,” he called. “Unless of course you’ve got gin. And my friend here would like whiskey also unless you have gin.”
“No,” I told him.
“Your friend there can say for hisself, cancha darlin’.” Simone laughed. “I have gin, I have vodka. I have tequila. I can make you a gin and tonic, a gin and lime, or a gin and orange squash. I can give you gin and vodka, as far as that goes. I can even,” she said with a leer, “make you a gin and piss, if you give me a minute or two.”
“Maybe some ice water,” I said. “If that’s okay?”
“Might not be okay down at the Bolivar,” Simone said, letting us know she knew a little bit about our arrangements already. She moved off toward the kitchen. “But I make my ice with spring watta ’stedda tap watta. Keeps that malaria at bay, keeps the piss outta the ice cubes.”
“I have to act this afternoon,” I reminded Paul, though it sounded like an apology for not drinking.
The sun was evaporating the last of the rainfall. A luxurious wet heat rose from the forest floor, with the twitter of a million insects and small animals making a muggy symphony.
“I want to change that scene in the village,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. He paced the edge of the lower terrace, pulling me along with his arm around my neck. “The way it is, it’s just a comedy scene floating in the void, where what we really want is something much darker . . .
Alex and Jaybill, deep in conversation, looked like astral opposites, one white as chalk, the other dusky, romantically disfigured. Alex’s chair was in the shade of the interior wall, Jaybill in a blade of sunlight. There was a haze in the air, a fine mist that put a white sheen on the spaces between things.
We stood at the base of the terrace, watching Simone move in and out of an outdoor pantry off the kitchen. Paul jumped down into the undergrowth. He strolled beside the house, picking tall weeds out of the wild grass, while I followed just above him. The architectural distinction between inside and outside obtained nowhere in Cartagena: parts of the inside extruded out, and vice versa.
“Instead of just playing it for laughs, I thought we could foreshadow this possible act of violence with the gun—let’s say that you and Michael, walking along, get into an argument, he loses his temper and hits you, knocks you to the ground, he shouts abuse at you . . . ?”
“It’s up to you.” I shrugged. Certainly this inspiration had nothing to do with Paul’s script. The question was, what part did it play in his private movie, the one unfolding in his head?
Simone brought the drinks. We perched on the edge of the upper terrace, near Jaybill’s wheelchair. Simone pushed the prostheses to one end of the couch, clearing a space to stretch out. She lay on her side with her elbow on the rail-thin couch arm, a transvestite Cleopatra. It occurred to me that the elegant fabrics and conservative decor of the house were completely at odds with its inhabitants, whose own tastes would undoubtedly run to the arriviste. Their money had come from pimping and whoring and dope. They carried that atmosphere around with them. There was nothing wrong with that as far as I was concerned, but it didn’t go with the furniture.
“How is your mutha, Alex,” “she” asked languidly, craning her neck and clinking her ice cubes. “She still doin’ fine?”
Alex interrupted himself to answer her. “Oh, you know Carlotta, she’s a rock of life.”
“A rock of life. That would be a way of putting it. What’s her opinion on these bodies they found in the canal?” Simone turned to us. “Old Reen Wilson that owns that Sandwichy Cubanos over next to the Hotel Medellín, drove all the way up here the otha day just to describe the horror. He went on in such gross detail I practically fainted. Just imagine, two separate bodies, all cut up, with the heads sliced off, and from what Reen Wilson says, some stuff inside all missing too . . .” Simone made a pained face. “Seems like you neva get any normal kind of killin’ around this area.”
“That is the Bible-thumpin’ truth,” intoned Jaybill in a James Earl Jones voice. “It’s the army that sets the example. It’s not enough to make one person disappear; the wife has to be tortured, the daughter raped, the father decapitated, the mother burnt alive, the sister’s children gang-banged by twenty soldiers and so on. Why, they even kill your pets in terrible ways.”
“Killed Reen Wilson’s toucan, and his dawg. Course that they say was a accident. There’s always them American advisers out at the Caribe,” Simone said. “Always see their cars parked out at the yacht club too.”
“The bodies are incredibly mutilated, they say,” Paul told me. “They found them quite near the Arsenal.”
“I guess you want Jaybill to act in your movie,” Simone told Alex. She looked at us. “Seems like everybody wants to see him perform. Don’t they, Jaybill.”
“Damn if that ain’t true,” Jaybill muttered. He smiled to himself. Some white spittle appeared on his dark lips. Alex shifted in his chair. He looked at Paul. A little conference in German ensued. As they talked across Simone and Jaybill, the latter both looked at me with sly, knowing faces. I could see that under its vivid makeup Simone’s face was bland and even slightly ugly, the nose wide and flat and the eyes a queer round shape, the face of an unloved boy-child grown to quotidian monsterhood.
“She” spun herself into a sitting posture on the sofa and crouched forward, lightly gripping a handle of the wheelchair, attempting a sleek, imperious, Diana Ross album cover stance. Alex and Paul continued to chatter and Jaybill’s big brown eyes continued staring into space. Simone’s little movements were accelerating—“she” gave the impression of someone pacing rapidly inside her own skull. In some indefinite way she had fixed on our arrival as a golden opportunity that Jaybill remained insensible to. She also looked completely stoned on freebase, beyond the stage of verbal diarrhea, at the level where words, if they come at all, eject in a mad gabble and hang in the air as a sort of spoor.
Amid the many noises in the air—Alex and Paul jabbering in German, chirping insects, forest sounds—I now heard a sucking and surging noise, as regular and unobtrusive as the purr of a refrigerator. I realized it was Jaybill’s breathing. His upper torso rocked gently against the beige leather backrest of his wheelchair.
Simone was talking. “She” had been talking for some time, her mouth against Jaybill’s ear. “Gotta be paid, paid plenty,” she was chanting, slurring her words, between great belts of whiskey that sometimes poured down her chin. “Jaybill here been in plenty of motion pictures. He’s what you might call a specialty act—for a special type of audience. Go ’head, show him the merchandise, ask him what he thinks.”
“Alex ain’t making that typa movie, Simone,” Jaybill rasped. But Simone was implacable, down on her knees beside the wheelchair, tearing at his shorts.
“Take it out, go ’head, don’t be shy, show that thang! This boy’d like to see it, I am sure, Jaybill . . .”
Now Paul and Alex were paying attention, and I felt that an invisible wall keeping one thing apart from another was suddenly being torn down, one thing becoming mixed up with another. Jaybill’s penis sprang out of his open fly, even in its flaccid state a true curiosity of nature: its length and width easily rivaled that of a donkey’s love pole, which it also resembled in color.
“Ain’t that something?” Simone wanted to know. Jaybill, of course, was unable to replace the organ in his shorts, and after some useless grumbling let himself be handled with an air of philosophical resignation. His meat rested in Simone’s firm grip like an engorged python. He was looking down at it as if he had never seen it before and had no idea how it got there. For some reason I thought of those funnels of ragged flesh that revolve on spits in Greek restaurants. “Feel this thing, it all muscle.”
“Magnificent,” Paul crooned. I looked at him. His face was “ironic.” Something was taking its course, an image developing in the red light of his brain’s darkroom. He did not take up Simone’s invitation.
“Anyhow, now you know,” “she” babbled, “what a South American movie star looks like.” A moment later, Jaybill released a long, thunderous, wet-sounding fart, which spread a thick cloud of stink across the veranda.
A second later the whole episode was over, Jaybill’s business was tucked safely back into his shorts, Alex conferred once again with Paul, then the two of them with Jaybill, while Simone straightened up the pile of prosthetic limbs at the foot of the couch, talking to herself the whole time. The veranda resembled a proscenium stage on which some quirky minimalist drama had just been acted out.
“Don’t you think he’s perfect?” Alex asked Paul as we drove back to Boca Chica. Since he phrased the question in English, it was clear that he wanted me to understand him. He was signaling his own complicity with Paul’s unstated schemes, the scenarios hatching in Paul’s unconscious. Exactly what these schemes were, however, remained opaque. And I was confident that Alex was more a pawn than a conspirator.
I slouched against the rear seat of the Cadillac, probing the back of my teeth with a fingernail. The scaly, rocklike protrusion in my gum moved slightly when I pressed it. In my mind, it was connected to the convergence of Irma’s mouth with Michael’s mouth, of both mouths with the wire mesh top of the restaurant ashtray, and now with the arm and leg prostheses lying askew on Jaybill Hanratty’s couch. Tooth, mouth, mesh, mouth, leg, arm, tooth.