Season of the Machete Read online

  The muscular soldiers picked up driftwood, seahorses, periwinkle, clear, rubbery jellyfish. They picked up chewing gum, matches, lint, stomach-turning shreds of human flesh, strands of hair, the nub of a woman’s finger. They picked up everything on the beach that wasn’t sand: literally everything.

  They put whatever they found into heavy-duty plastic bags marked XYXYXY.

  Then the marine captain ordered his men to “’rake the sand back to normal.”

  Hand in hand up on the Shore Highway, Peter Macdonald and Jane Cooke watched the dubious detective work going on all over the beach.

  Beside a big man like Macdonald, Jane seemed slighter than she really was. Close up, she was somewhat big-boned—an old-fashioned midwestern beauty right out of Nelson Algren. Freckles, dimples, long blond hair a river of curls.

  Before she’d become a social director at the Plantation Inn, Jane had been a high-school English teacher in Pierre, South Dakota. At twenty-one she’d married another English teacher; miscarried their future Joyce Carol Oates in a Pierre shopping mall; was separated at twenty-three.

  After that, Jane had decided to see a little bit more of the world than the Dakota Badlands. She’d traveled down to South America. Traveled up to the Caribbean. Haiti, finally San Dominica. Then Peter Macdonald. Crazy, funny Peter—who reminded her of a poem—also of a Simon & Garfunkel song called “Richard Cory.”

  Before he’d come to the Plantation Inn, Peter had been, first and foremost, the last and least worthy (in his own mind, anyway) of the six Macdonald brothers. Three college baseball stars, two academic big deals—and then Peter. Little Mac.

  As a result, Peter had become a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (like his father— Big Mac). He’d left West Point after his second class year—become a soldier for real. A Special Forces sergeant; decorated twice; shot in the back once. A war hero—whatever that was in the mid-seventies.

  With a little luck and good planning that winter, he’d wound up in the sunny Caribbean. R&R … “Getting your shit together,” his suddenly contemporary-as-hell father had written in a long letter…. He’d met Jane in September, and they’d moved in together by the end of the month. Both of them living and working at the ritzy Plantation Inn … not bad.

  Jane had only one question about the marines working down on Turtle Bay. “What in heck do they do it for?”

  Peter found himself smiling. “Rake dirt? … I don’t know what for. They don’t know. Somebody probably knew why at one time or another. Now they just do it. Soldiers rake dirt on every military base in the world.”

  “Well, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. One of the dumbest. It’s dumber man baseball.” Jane grinned.

  “It’s a whole lot dumber when you’re behind the rake. That’s okay, though…. Let’s walk…. By the way, baseball isn’t dumb.”

  They walked up through a lot of banana and breadfruit trees. A pretty jungle with a few parrots and cockatoos to spice things up. Kling-kling birds, too.

  Macdonald took his baseball cap out of a back pocket and tugged it on to keep out bugs.

  “What are you going to do now, Peter?” she finally asked him.

  Macdonald sighed. “I don’t know what I should do…. Maybe the murders were just what the police say. Dassie Dred making sure his people get fair trials from now on. No more hanging sentences. Simple as that.”

  “And the Englishman?”

  “Ah, the bloody white man. The damn, tall, blond, Day-of- the-fucking-Jackal character. Complicating our beautifully uncomplicated existence.”

  Peter picked up a rock and sidearmed a high inside curve around a banana tree. “You know what else? … I’m starting to feel bad about wasting my life all of a sudden… Anything but that, dear God. Please don’t make me feel guilty about feeling good. See, I was just in this fucked-up war and …”

  Jane put her arms around Peter’s slim waist. Behind him she could see sharp blue sea through palm leaves. It was all so perfect that most of the time she didn’t completely believe in it.

  “Tell me this, Peter Macdonald. Where does it say that not killing yourself working is wasting your life?”

  Macdonald smiled at the wise blond girl. He held on to one of her soft breasts and kissed her mouth gently. “I’m not sure … but it’s engraved on my brain. I feel that exact thought grinding away in there every day that I’m down here. Every time I dive into the deep blue sea.”

  He put his hand over his mouth. When he did that, his voice came out deep and strange. “Get yourself a decent job, Macdonald, you bum. Shape up before it’s all over, Pete. Be somebody or be gone… Anyway” —his voice came back to normal—“I guess I have to do something about the Englishman, huh, Laurel?”

  Jane winced slightly. In their little South Seas fantasy world—their paradise life in the Caribbean—she was called Laurel; Peter was Hardy-ha-ha.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” the blond woman said. “Really. I’m serious, Peter.”

  “I have to try one more thing,” Peter said.

  For that moment, though—at 8:30 on Thursday morning—the two of them made a little clearing on the pretty hillside. They lay down together like two missionary lovers.

  Peter pulled gently at the white shirt knotted under her breasts. Jane lifted her slender arms. Let the loose white shirt go up around her neck, shoulders.

  “I love you so much,” she whispered. “Just thought I’d say that.”

  He took a soft, cool breast in each hand. Unzipped her shorts. Slid shorts and panties down over her dark brown legs.

  She unbuckled red L. L. Bean suspenders, pulled at blue jeans, helped him out of underwear and baseball hat. He was kissing her everywhere, tonguing her nipples for a long, lazy time. Feeling soft, invisible down on her stomach. Smelling coconut oil.

  Peter entered Jane slowly, an inch at a time, then long, slow thrusts….

  They stopped each other twice. Delaying, saving. Then they came with little spasms that made them dizzy. A long climax, both of them whispering as if they were in church.

  When they finally sat up again, all the marines were gone. Turtle Bay looked perfect and innocent again. Raked neat as a farmer’s field.

  Chuk, chuk, chuk was the sound machetes made cutting sugar cane.

  Chik, chik, chik was the sound Peter heard.

  Chik, chik, chik.

  Chik, chik, chik.

  Chik, chik, chik. Cashoo.

  Peter had found Maximilian Westerhuis tabulating fancy yellow-on-white hotel bills in his eight-by-eight office wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses, looking somewhat mathematical. A cipher.

  The coal black machine the German used for counting looked as if it had somehow survived the Weimar Republic. In addition to the machine, there were red-and-blue-edged letter envelopes scattered all over the inn manager’s desk: news from the Fatherland.

  Resting on some of the papers was a big foamy mug of Würzburuger dark.

  Peter stood in the doorway, reluctant to announce himself to the huffy young German. Then the pecking on the adding machine stopped.

  “Peter, what do you want? Can’t you see I’m too busy with all of these fools checking out of the hotel?”

  Looking slightly dizzy, the white-blond man eyed him with distaste over his wire rims. “Macdonald,what is it you want!” The strident voice came once again.

  I want to beam myself right back out of your office, Peter was thinking. You’re so full of yourself, hot shit and vinegar, that it turns my stomach.

  “I have to ask a personal favor,” Peter said softly, wincing inside at the toady way the words came out. Playing Heinrich Himmler to Max’s Hitler. “I need to borrow your BMW.”

  The inn manager huffed out a small nose laugh. “Borrow my motorcycle? Have you gone mad? Leave me alone. Get out of here.”

  “Yeah, well, in a minute…. You see, I’ve got to talk to somebody else about the man I saw on the Shore Highway yesterday. It’s bothering me, Max. I’ve got to find out w
hy the hell they—”

  “You talked to me, Macdonald,” Westerhuis cut in.I talked to the stupid newspaper people. You talked to the policeman last night. People know about your man up on the hill, nicht wahr? Now I tell you, leave. You don’t ever call me Max, by the way.”

  Peter suddenly cut off all pretense of diplomacy. “I want to talk to the American ambassador in Coastown! … Lives could be at issue here, Westerhuis. I need your fucking BMW for two or three hours. That’s it, you know. Be a human being, huh? Pretend.”

  The inn manager began to use one side of his metal office desk like a brass drum. “Absolutely not!” he pounded. “I thought it over for five seconds, and the answer is no! Now get out of here. One more word and I fire you as bartender Johnny on the spot.”

  Peter turned away and started out of the claustrophobic office. “Peter on the spot,” he mumbled. “Screw you, you Nazi love child.”

  “What is that I hear?” Westerhuis called out the door after him.

  Then, chik, chik, chik, he was operating the antique tabulator again, thinking: Poor damn fool Peter Macdonald. Poor fool bartender. Should have stayed in the army for your entire life.

  Outside, an expensive-looking silver key was turning the ignition of the shiny black BMW motorcycle—Peter Macdonald and Jane Cooke had taken big steps in the wrong crazy direction. Both of them were about to jump in way over their heads.

  Peter said, “Sure. Max said it was okay…. Hang on tight, here we go!”

  Which was, perhaps, the understatement of the decade.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I believed that Damian could be happy in Europe on $10 a day. I could be content, I think, on Jacqueline Onassis’s $10,000 a week. Sometimes I find myself reading Cosmopolitan and identifying with Jackie. Weird fantasy life! I’ve even plotted out how I could get to marry one (or more) of the world’s richest men…. Damian could be wealthy if he cared primarily about money. Damian could be an international film star like Branson or Clint Eastwood. Or the still-life president of General Motors. Damian could be, Damian could be … sitting on rocks in Crete. Starting to repeat myself as I approach thirty. Scary thoughts for your basic hick out of Nebraska.

  The Rose Diary

  Coastown, San Dominica

  In the middle of a world of hack-arounds—fruit and straw vendors, fruits, package-rate tourists, cabdrivers by the gross, beeping double-decker buses—Carrie Rose looked around Politician Square and tried to single out one poor bugger who had to be sacrificed that morning.

  She concentrated on ten or so long-haired dopers grazing near the entrance to Wahoo Public Beach.

  Here pure white trash floated down from the United States … semiacceptable bums in tie-dyed REGGAE T-shirts. In LOVE RASTAFARI T-shirts. Drinking out of Blue Label beer cans. Chewing gum to a man. Eating fresh coconut.

  Beyond choosing the comatose group, it was all too disturbingly arbitrary, Carrie couldn’t help thinking. Depressing. Damian’s sort of game.

  Finally she settled on a short, skinny one. A freak’s freak among the idle young Americans. Carrie named him the Loner.

  The Loner appeared to be nineteen or twenty. Dirty jeans and a buckskin vest over his bare, sunken chest. Long, stringy blond hair. Wide moon eyes.

  The Loner was also smoking island marijuana like a morning’s first cup of Maxwell House coffee.

  Carrie Rose stopped a schoolboy walking on her side of the triangular street section. A pretty brown boy of eight or nine. Books all neat and nice, held together in a red rubber sling. She asked him if-he had time to earn fifty cents before his classes started that morning.

  When the boy said that he did, Carrie pointed through the crowds. She directed his eyes until he saw the long-haired white man in the gold vest.

  The Loner had moved up against the wall of a paint-scabbing boathouse. “Holding up the walls,” they used to say back in her hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska.

  “All you have to do,” Carrie explained to the schoolboy, “is take this letter to that man. Give him this five dollars here. Tell him he has to deliver my letter to Fifty Bath Street. Fifty Bath Street. …

  “Now tell me what you have to do for your fifty cents.”

  The little black boy was very serious and bright. He repeated her instructions exactly. Then the boy’s face lit up.

  “Hey, missus, I could deliver yo’ letter myself.”

  Carrie’s hand sunk deep into her wallet for the money. “No, no.” She shook her head. “That man over there will do it. And you should tell him that a big black man is watching him. Tell him the letter is going to the black man’s girlfriend.”

  “All right. All right. Give me everything. I take it to him all right.”

  The boy disappeared while crossing the square in the hectic, colorful crowd. Carrie panicked. Started to cross the street herself.

  Then the boy suddenly resurfaced near the lounging hippies. He approached the Loner, grinning a mile, waving the long yellow envelope.

  The long-haired man and the boy negotiated m front of the boathouse.

  A buttery sun was rising up just over the building’s buckling tin roof, SAN DOMINICA—BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD was painted in red on the shack.

  Finally the Loner accepted the letter.

  Carrie sat on a bench and took out the morning Gleaner,COUPLE SLAIN ON BEACH. Cross-legged, wearing her large horn-rimmed glasses, she was among twenty or thirty tourists reading books and newspapers down a long line of sagging white benches.

  The Loner looked up and down the crowded street for his benefactor. Very paranoid, apparently. Then the man did an odd little bebop step for whoever was watching. “Dyno-mite.” They would find out his nickname later that day.

  Finally the Loner headed off in the direction of Trenchtown District.

  To deliver a soon-to-be-famous letter at 50 Bath Street.

  The American embassy in Coastown was wonderfully quiet, Macdonald was thinking.

  A little like West Point’s Thaver Hall in the lull of summertime. Like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he’d spent one lonely, lazy summer after the army.

  Green-uniformed security men walked up and down long corridors on the balls of their spongy cordovans. Whispejy receptionists whispered to messengers about the latest machete murder. Friendly casuarina trees waved at everybody through rows of bay windows in the library.

  Peter passed the plush wood and dark leather furniture in every room and hallway. Heavy brass ashtrays and cuspidors left over from the Teddy Roosevelt era. The smell of furniture polish was everywhere. Lemon Pledge furniture polish and fresh-cut hibiscus and oleander.

  Peter decided that it was all very official and impressive—very American, in some ways—but also very cold and funereal.

  And frightening.

  Dressed in a neatly pressed Henry Truman sports shirt—windblown palm trees and sailboats on a powder blue background—with a permanent flush in his cheeks, Peter was led up to his hearing by a starchy butler type. A haughty black in a blue holy communion suit.

  Up thick-carpeted stairways. Down deserted passageways with nicely done oil portraits of recent presidents on all the wall space. Up a winding, creaking, wooden stairway.

  Finally, into the doorway of a cozy third-floor office. A neat room where some teenager could have had the bedroom of his dreams.

  A young man, a public safety adviser, was sitting • at a trendy, refinished desk inside the attic room. Very suntanned and handsome, the man struck Peter as a case study favoring the pseudoscience of reincarnation. The subconsul was an exact lookalike for the dead American actor Montgomery Clift.

  “Mr. Campbell.” The snippy black literally clicked his heels. “A Mr. Peter Macdonald to see you, sir.”

  “Hi,” Peter said. “I’m sorry to bother you like this.”

  “No bother. Sit down. Have a seat.”

  Peter sat on a wine red settee across from Campbell. Then, talking with a soft midwestern accent— vaguely aware of the Helter-Sk
elter horrors and dangers he was officially associating himself with—he began to tell Brooks Campbell what he’d seen….

  The two black men chugging up through high bush from the beach at Turtle Bay.

  The blood so bright, stop -sign red, it looked as if it had to be paint.

  The striking blond man forever framed among sea grapes and royal palms in his mind.

  The expensive German-made rifle. The green sedan.The jacket from London… all of it happening roughly parallel with the place where the two nineteen-year-olds had been killed and mutilated, had their corpses desecrated beyond belief.

  By the end of the strange, appalling story, a new, wonderful sensation: Peter felt that he’d actually been listened to.

  Campbell was leaning way back on his swivel chair, smoking a True Blue cigarette down to the filter, looking very serious and interested. Looking like a young, troubled senator in his starchy blue shirt with the rolled-up sleeves.

  “You said you’d gone around another bend in the Shore Highway.” Campbell spoke in a deep orator’s voice. A hint of wealth in it; a slight lockjaw tendency. “Did you see the black men actually join up with this other man? The blond man?”

  That was a good point, Peter considered. Not a bad start. He had never seen the men actually get together.

  “No. I was really going on the bike by then. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to stop and … well, you know … the whole thing lasted about thirty seconds.”

  Peter began to smile. An involuntary, nervous smile. A serious moment of doubt and vulnerability. He caught himself twisting his sports shirt between his thumb and forefinger.

  Campbell sat forward on his swivel chair. He crushed out his cigarette. “I’ve got to ask you to take my word about something, Peter.” He leveled Macdonald with a stare.

  “I’II try. Shoot.”

  “Turtle Bay was an isolated incident. It was retribution for a harsh Supreme Court decision here in Coastown…. Except for the fact that some Americans were killed, it’s a local affair. I don’t know if you’ve read anything about the murders at Fountain Valley golf course on St. Croix—”