I knew he was lying, but it didn’t matter. Martin was like an auto mechanic who’d just discovered the insurance company, or a punk gone mad on his first expense account. I looked forward to the day when he and Zimburger would find each other out.
The best room in the Carmen cost three dollars, and had a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor. I was very full and half drunk, and when I got in the room I went to sleep immediately.
Two hours later I was awakened by someone tapping on the door. Senor, the voice said. You have dinner with Senor Kingfish, no?
I’m not hungry, I said. I just ate lunch.
Si, the voice replied, and I heard quick footsteps on the stairs going down to the street. It was still light and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went out to get a bottle of rum and some ice. In the same building with the hotel was what appeared to be a storage bin full of liquor. A grinning Puerto Rican sold me a bottle of rum for a dollar, and a bag of ice for two dollars. I paid and went back upstairs to my room.
I mixed a drink and went out on the balcony to sit down. The town still looked deserted. Far out on the horizon I could see the neighboring island of Culebra, and from somewhere in that direction came the shuddering thump of explosions. I recalled Sanderson telling me that Culebra was an aerial bombing range for the U.S. Navy. Once it had been a magic place, but no longer.
I had been there about twenty minutes when a Negro came down the street on a small grey horse. The hoofbeats rang through the town like pistol shots. I watched him clatter up the street and disappear over a small rise. The hoofbeats carried back to me long after he was out of sight.
Then I heard another sound, the muted rhythm of a steel band. It was getting dark now, and I couldn’t tell what direction the music was coming from. It was a soft, compelling sound, and I sat there and drank and listened to it, feeling at peace with myself and the world, as the hills behind me turned a red-gold color in the last slanting rays of the sun.
Then it was night A few lights came on in the town. The music came in long bursts, as if someone was explaining something between choruses, and then it would start again. I heard voices below me on the street, and now and then the hoofbeats of another horse.
Isabel Segunda seemed more active at night than it had been during the long, hot day.
It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real. Here I was on Vieques island, a place so insignificant that I had never heard of it until I’d been told to come here — delivered by one nut, and waiting to be taken off by another.
It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot — and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.
Then I remembered the Marines — no maneuvers this month — and I remembered why I was here. Zimburger wants a brochure. . . aimed at investors. . . your job is to sell the place. . . don’t be late or he’ll. . .
I was being paid twenty-five dollars a day to ruin the only place I’d seen in ten years where I’d felt a sense of peace. Paid to piss in my own bed, as it were, and I was only here because I’d got drunk and been arrested and had thereby become a pawn in some high-level face-saving bullshit.