These chores were undertaken mainly to stuff his mind with distractions and delay the inevitable. It was nearly one A.M. when Keyes finished, and he lay down on the battered sofa and fell asleep. Before long he felt the coarse grip of the Browning semiautomatic in his right hand. He looked down and saw that his hand was covered with lustrous black mosquitoes, which were swelling up and bursting one by one, little blood balloons. A bony-looking puppet appeared and began to dance, and the Browning went off. The bullets traveled slowly, leaving orange contrails. One after another they puffed into the limestone around the puppet’s feet. Just as the puppet’s likeness changed from Jesus Bernal to Ernesto Cabal, one of the bullets smashed its head into a thousand wooden splinters. The slivers flew in all directions, twanging the puppet strings which led to the sky. In the dream Brian Keyes saw himself racing toward the broken puppet and snatching the strings with blood-splashed hands. Then he was airborne over the ocean, clinging for life. In a wispy cloud high above, a familiar man with long blond hair and Gypsy eyes twitched the puppet strings and muttered about the usurious price of coffins.
31
Port-au-Prince, Haiti. December 28th—By the time this is published, I might be dead or in jail, or hiding in some bleak rathole of a country where Td never get to read it anyway. Which would be a shame.
But I suppose I’ve got it coming.
For many years I’ve written a daily column for this newspaper, a column that achieved an unforeseen but gratifying popularity. I admit that the reportage was not always faultless, but I never strayed too far from the truth. Besides, you folks knew what you were getting.
I probably could have continued to grind out fifteen inches of daily outrage, insult, poignancy, and sarcasm until I got old and my brain turned to porridge. See, I had a nifty deal going here at the paper. The brass liked me, and to keep me contented paid a salary nearly commensurate with my talents. This is what happens when you sell the merchandise: they make it worth your while.
About six weeks ago something changed. Whether it was my job attitude, spiritual diet, or moral equilibrium, I can’t say. Things got out of hand, I suppose. The simple and convenient view is that I went berserk, which is possible though unlikely. In my business you learn that sanity, not insanity, is the greater riddle—and that there’s nothing so menacing as a sane person suddenly alerted to his own fate.
One thing is true. Over time I came to see the destiny of Florida in a singularly horrid vision, and I took steps to change that destiny. Extreme steps. I assembled a few choice acquaintances and we made some moves, as they say.
In my ardor I might have committed a few unforgivable felonies, but my mission was to save the place and to inspire those who cared, and to that noble end I suppose I’d break almost any law. Which they say I did.
For once it was a fair fight, both sides battling with tantamount weapons: publicity versus counterpublicity. Their ammunition was fantasy and whitewash, and ours was the meanest of truths, random crime, and terror. What better way to destroy bogus mail-order illusions!
The odious reality is that we live on a peninsula stolen from the Indians, plundered by carpetbaggers, and immorally occupied by Yankee immigrants who arrive at the rate of one thousand per day, Okies in BMWs.
Most of us born here were always taught to worship growth, or tolerate it unquestioningly. Growth meant prosperity, which was defined in terms of swimming pools and waterfront lots and putting one’s kids through college. So when the first frostbitten lemmings arrived with their checkbooks, all the locals raced out and got real-estate licenses; everybody wanted in on the ground floor. Greed was so thick you had to scrape it off your shoes.
The only thing that ever stood between the developers and autocracy was the cursed wilderness. Where there was water, we drained it. Where there were trees, we sawed them down. The scrub we simply burned. The bulldozer was God’s machine, so we fed it. Malignantly, progress gnawed its way inland from both coasts, stampeding nature.