Shartelle stopped and looked at Coit’s eyes. Their faces were not more than eight inches apart. “Why, no, Mr. Coit, I haven’t. Have you?”
“No, I haven’t either.”
“If you hear of anything like that, would you let us know?” Shartelle asked.
“Of course,” Coit said.
Shartelle looked at him some more and nodded his head slightly. “Of course.”
We walked out into the hall and found our way to the front of the Consulate. We walked out of the pleasant seventy-two degrees into the ninty-nine degrees that was the Barkandu afternoon. Both of us hastily put on sunglasses. Shartelle smoked another cigarette while we waited for William to bring the car up.
“You ticked him off,” I said.
“Some. He’s a cool customer.”
“He is that.”
“We’ll warm him up,” Shartelle said. “Come Labor Day he’ll sizzle.”
Chapter 7
On the way back to the hotel, the car got caught in a midafternoon traffic snarl and we were forced to inch along Bailey’s Boulevard at four miles an hour. There was no breeze and we sweltered in the thick, palpable heat that made me want to gasp. As a concession to it, Shartelle unbuttoned his vest, took off his slouch hat and fanned himself.
“Fans,” he said.
“What?”
“Fans. Remember the funeral parlor ones, the kind that contained advertising?”
“Like the one that the Great Commoner used during the Scopes trial?”
“Like that. We’re gonna get us some, Pete. You want to make a note of it?”
I took out a notebook and wrote down “fans.”
“How many?” I asked.
“A couple of million,” he said. “Better make it three.”
I wrote down “3,000,000” after fans. “Think they’ll cinch it for us, huh?”
“We can’t lose,” Shartelle said. “Not with three million fans.”
“To be crass, don’t you think we’d better have a little commercial on them? Maybe a jingle?”
“You’re the word man, boy. Just set yourself to composing.”
“I’ll give it the afternoon.”
“Mastah want me drive?” William asked, skillfully missing a goat by an inch.
“When?” I asked.
“Now, Mastah.”
“No.”
“I go for brother’s house,” he announced.
“You have a brother here in Barkandu?” Shartelle said.
“Many brothers, Mastah,” William said and smiled his big-toothed smile. “They give me chop. Go small-small time.”
“Okay. You go for brother small-small time,” Shartelle said. You be back at the hotel, six o’clock. Right?”
“Yes, Sah!” William said.
“How’s my pidgin coming, William?” Shartelle asked.
“Very good, Sah,” he said and giggled. “Very nice.”
“What are your plans for the afternoon, Sahib?” I asked.
Shartelle looked out of the car window at the harbor. “Some harbor,” he said. “Well, I plan to get ahold of some hickory nuts and stain my face, slip into my burnoose, and flit about the bazaars to pick up the native gossip. Then I got some planning to do,” Shartelle went on, “and I do planning best when I’m in the solitude of my own counsel.”
“What you want to say politely without hurting my feelings is that you don’t hold with the DDT theory of brainstorming during which everybody spews out everything and a pearl appears among the hawkings.”
Shartelle looked at me. “You don’t honestly do that — you and Pig and all those grown men?” He sounded horrified.
“Honest to God.”
“Does it work?”
“Not for me. But then I’m the type who lurks in the wet forest and throws rocks at those cozily sitting around the camp fire.”
“You’d like to be asked to join, huh?”
“So I could say no.”
“You got problems, boy,” he said.
“I’m going swimming.”
“That’s healthful. Let’s meet for dinner about seven.”
“In the bar?”
“Good enough.”
At the hotel, Shartelle went up to his room and I found out from the Lebanese desk clerk that the hotel ran a shuttle car to a beach. There was a place to change on the beach, but no shower. I went upstairs and got my trunks, a white duck hat with a floppy brim, the biggest hotel towel I could find, and caught the Morris Minor shuttle. I was the only passenger.
At the beach there was a snack stand that sold Pepsi-Cola and Beck’s Bier. I bought a Beck’s in its tall green quart size, took it into the shack that served as a dressing room, changed and carried the beer and my clothes out to the beach. It was virtually deserted, except for three or four Albertian children who were running up and down in pursuit of a small brown dog with an enormous tail that waved ecstatically. They never caught the dog but nobody seemed to mind. I put my shoes down on the sand, folded my slacks, shirt and underwear and placed them on top of the shoes as carefully as a suicide who wants to leave something neat to commemorate a messy life. I spread the towel out on the beach, pulled at the brim of my white-duck hat, took a swig of beer, lighted a cigarette, and sat down on the towel and looked at the ocean.
Like the rest of the Dakotans, I felt that anything larger than a two-acre pond held the promise of wild adventure. The ocean was a body of unbearable expectation. I sat looking at the South Atlantic lace itself into combers as the Benguela current rolled up into the Gulf of Guinea. I put the cigarette out, squirmed the beer bottle firmly into the sand, and ran out into the sea. I caught a wave and dived through it. I could feel the undertow, strong and cold, pulling me out towards Fortaleza and Cayenne, eight thousand miles away. I decided I didn’t want to go so I swam back, scrambling when my feet touched bottom. Then I tried it again and got the hang of the undertow, playing a game with it to see how long I could last without scrambling to get back. I was a less-than-average swimmer, but that made the game more interesting. If it had been raining, I could have stayed in my room at the hotel and played Russian roulette.
The cigarettes, the martinis, and English food had provoked my chronic malnutrition. Weariness forced me to quit my war against the sea. I stumbled back to the tidy pile of clothes, shook the sand out of the towel, and dried myself off.
The blue jeep drove down as far as it could, until the beach sloped too sharply, and then it stopped. The girl who was driving it got out and walked towards the dressing room shack. She knocked on the door and when there was no response, she went in. She was carrying one of those blue airline bags. The jeep had some white lettering on the top of its hood, but it was too far away for me to read.
I lighted another cigarette and picked up the bottle of Beck’s from the sand and swallowed some. It was warm but wet. I watched the dressing shack and in a few minutes the girl came out and walked towards me carrying the airline bag and a large, black and red striped beach towel. She wore a white two-piece bathing suit that was almost a bikini. She moved with an awkward grace that signalled a total lack of self-consciousness.
Her hair was blond, almost white, as if she spent much time in the sun, and she wore it carelessly long. It framed a smooth tan face that would never conceal an emotion. The face was smiling as she walked towards me, swinging the blue bag and carrying the towel. The face was alive — the mouth was wide and full and the smile was dazzling white against the dark tan. She had kind, soft dark-brown eyes that you could learn to trust.