Authors: Season of the Machete
High up in the rocks, the lazy island trade winds had chiseled two primitive heads over centuries and centuries—neither of which, Rose was thinking as he moved along, had been worth the hot air and bother.
His fingers curled into small cracks, Rose pulled himself up over countless tiny ledges toward the sea blue sky. He could feel his boots crunching loose rocks as he ascended; he could taste his own salty sweat.
After fifteen minutes of hard climbing, he pulled himself onto a barren ledge of flat rock. The small jut of rock was about four feet long, less than three feet wide. Close up, the black rock was loaded with specks of shiny mica. Mica and tiny seagull bones.
From the gull’s high burial ground, Damian could see everything he needed to see.
The morning after the Turtle Bay murders had turned out crisp and pure, with a high blue sky all over the Caribbean. A hawk flew directly over his head, watching the empty highway and watching him, it seemed.
Far below, the sea was choppy in spite of the pacific blue skies. Brown reefs were visible on the outskirts of Titchfield Cove.
There was a long, dramatic stretch of crystal beach that ended in another hill of high black rocks.
Damian Rose began to concentrate on a slightly balding dark-haired man and his two children as they walked down the perfect beach.
The three of them were getting their feet and legs wet in the creamy surf… walking along as if they were waiting for the man who photographed such moments for postcards and greeting cards.
Damian took out two lengths of streamlined black pipe. He began to screw them together. Made a barrel. Screwed the longer pipe into a lightweight stock. Made a gun. Added a sniper’s scope from his backpack.
The dark-haired man, Walter Marks, dived over a small blue wave and disappeared.
His boy and little girl seemed leery of the water. Attractive children, Rose bothered to notice. Two blonds, like their mother.
Their father was an ass to take them out the morning after the machete killings. A shallow, foolish ass. Promised them a vacation. Always kept his promises.
Rose put the sight of the German rifle to his eye. Thin crosshairs that didn’t meet.
He watched Marks’s slick brown hair surface in bubbles. The man stood up, and the water was only to his waist. He had a very hairy chest: brown hair that seemed to turn black in wet tufts.
Through the powerful Zeiss sight, Walter Marks seemed close enough to reach out and touch.
Rose saw the Cuban waving from high weeds not far behind the beach. “Shooting goldfish in a bowl”: he remembered a strange, wonderful saying.
Damian squeezed off just one shot.
Walter Marks fell over backward in the three-foot-high water. He looked as if he were trying to step back over a wave to amuse his children.
The bullet had gone through the center of his forehead, spitting out brain like a corkscrew.
The children began to scream at once. They hugged each other and seemed to be dancing in the suddenly pinkish water.
Kingfish and the Cuban appeared with the machete. The Roses’ inspired buck-and-wing team. Wading out into the sea.
Fortunately, but at the same time unfortunately for the Marks children, there had to be witnesses this time. The witnesses were to be the children themselves.
Too bad, Rose thought for a split second. And yet perfect.
The cold-blooded murder of the president of ASTA. The public execution of the president of the American Society of Travel Agents.
Who deserved it for being such a pompous fool. For ignoring all the warnings.
Turtle Bay, San Dominica
Somewhere in the U.S. Marine annals, it says that “a Marine on Embassy Duty is an Ambassador in uniform.”
Clearly out of uniform—dressed in gray insignia shorts and nothing else—twenty-four embassy duty marines spent the morning of May 3 conducting a dreaded sector search of the beach at Turtle Bay.
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 why 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.
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.