A beefy, bearded man was saying, ‘Like telling us we can’t go to our boats. What the hell! They’re our boats!’
‘Like saying we can’t fetch a little rum, a little Havana, up from the islands.’
‘That’s different. That’s agin the law. It ain’t right, but it ain’t lawful.’
‘Politicians!’ said a thin man with long black hair drawn back in a ponytail and a scar down his cheek. ‘Politicians, see, they got to be crooked by their nature. See it? They weren’t crooked, they would never of riz in politics. Figures, don’t it? But you or I do something what they ain’t told us to do, they pass a law what makes us crooked.’
‘These guys ain’t politicians, though.’
‘They’re bastards, though…’
The bartender nodded in agreement with the piratical philosopher and, nodding, spotted me in the doorway. He sensed my uncertainty and waved me in. Everyone else, seeing his gesture, turned to look at me. They stopped talking and stared at me, grim and hard-eyed. I knew how the misguided stick-up man must have felt when they turned on him, aborting his crime. They didn’t look hostile, exactly, but they looked infinitely capable of hostility.
I walked up to the bar and the bartender moved down to meet me, two ships joining on a charted course. I knew he was doing this to make me feel welcome and that embarrassed me. I was damned if I would act nervous and, instead of stopping at the end of the bar nearest the door, I walked right down the bar to the far end, running the gauntlet of their attention. The woman, laughing, swung a playful leg at me. The bartender passed me, going in the opposite direction, and now he had to retreat, parallelling my course along his own side of the bar. This struck me as funny and I laughed. The bartender laughed too, although he probably didn’t know why. Greeting me by name, he asked if I wanted my usual and that broke the tension. The locals relaxed. One by one, they nodded, not so much to me as to the realisation that I was a neutral. I knew how a Swiss must feel. The bearded fellow nodded first, then the man beside him, then the pirate, and the nod ran down the line, heads rippling in sequence, like falling dominoes. Then they ignored me.
I stood at the end of the bar, by the stairs, listening to the talk and wondering if I should buy a round for the house, or if that would compromise my neutrality? I had a second drink. The bartender, my ally, kept looking down to make sure my glass was filled. The woman gave me a shy look that, with her black eye and coarse demeanour, was rather endearing. A gradual change altered the mood of the drinkers. They were men of abrupt rage never long sustained.
‘Listen!’ said one. He slapped his hand on the bar like a gavel. ‘Listen, what if that dog-eater had walked in here?’
‘Hey, that would of been something.’
‘We’d of showed him what we does to dog-eaters, eh?’
‘It would of been just like the old days!’ cried an ancient mariner, gleefully.
This was rare good humour to them and everyone was laughing and drinking and taking turns in making lewd suggestions to the woman. Her replies outdid them. They had actually slipped from outrage to gaiety as abruptly as if they’d stepped from shadow into light and their levity depressed me far more than their resentment had. I finished my second drink and shook off the eager bartender. I didn’t run the gauntlet again; I went up the back stairs to my room.
These were the descendents of the wreckers.
I could still hear the undulation of their mingled voices from my room. Laughter came in sudden bursts, punctuating the steady drone. They were speculating on how they would deal with a man who ate dead dogs and they spoke of that unfortunate man without the slightest sympathy, just as, I knew, a wrecker from the past would have joked with his peers, mocking the way some pitiful victim had squirmed and pleaded under his cudgel — and then, without the faintest feeling of wrongdoing, dutifully fetch his loot home to his adoring wife and happy children.
I felt a timeless despair.
I dozed in depression and awoke to find the walls vibrating again. They seemed to pulse in and out like plastered lungs, billowing around me. It was not my heartbeat. A distant shouting sounded. I sat up, frightened, filmed by a pyrexia of dread. Then I realised the commotion came from below, running like fluids up the timbers of the building. There was a cry of anger… a crash… another cry that rose to a scream. It appeared that the ephemeral good humour of the crowd had turned surly again: autophagous anger devouring itself with ravenous rage. They had few tools, those rough men; they saw every frustration as a nail to be hammered by violence.
Then, of a sudden, the noise ceased.
There was no transition, no gradual ebbing of the uproar — there was bedlam and then there was a silence so absolute that it was sound in itself… a cosmic boom. That void of sound roared in my ears. Fights do not end in such abrupt silence, unless…
I went downstairs…
From the balcony, gripping the banister, I looked into the barroom. The men were standing in a circle, looking inwards and down. The bartender was standing back, a broken truncheon in his hand. The woman was leaning against the counter, one hand at her throat. No one moved. I waited, scarcely breathing, knowing that there was some terrible centrepiece to that silent circle. I wanted to bear no witness to this scene: my impulse was to creep back up the stairs but I could not move. My legs seemed to grow from the floor, my hand was glued to the railing.
The big, bearded man moved. Something flashed silver in his hand — flashed silver and, turning, flashed red. His hand went to his pocket, he stepped aside. Another man moved. One by one they broke from that ring, cast off by the centrifugal force of shock; they went to the doors. I saw the body around which that motionless orbit had described its silent arc. Blood had spread out like melted wax; in that blood, the body was like a fossil, preserved forever in red amber.
It was Sam Jasper, and he was dead.
The woman walked out, stumbling, still holding her throat. Only the bartender remained. He still gripped the broken truncheon, like driftwood that kept him afloat in reality; his face was as bloodless as if he, too, had spilled his veins onto the floor.
I was able to move then — I had to move, for my trembling legs threatened to collapse. I went down the final steps into the room. The bartender turned towards me.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
He had anticipated my words; already launched from my throat, they came out, anyway: ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, again.
I was trying not to look at Sam. I looked at the telephone and the bartender followed my gaze. He moved towards the phone and I stepped forwards. Then he came back towards me and I stopped. It was like some ritual dance choreographed in Hell. He moved the broken club like a baton, leading the silent music of our gavotte. Then he broke the pattern, leaning against the bar, his head lowered. He began to speak.
‘Jasper,’ he said. ‘But not like Jasper. He came in the door. Someone asked him how he was, but he didn’t answer. His mouth was open but not making any noise and… drooling. He came at us. Not fast, he had a strange, deliberate step… not like he was weak, like he was just remembering how to walk…’ The barman’s throat worked convulsively, disgorging his words as if vomiting up poisoned food. ‘… His fingernails… teeth… like an animal… Nobody did anything at first, we all knew old Sam…’ He looked at me as if he wanted confirmation. I nodded. I could imagine those men, confronted by the unknown, unable to react… unable to identify the nail that had to be hammered. ‘But then he grabbed Sally. She’d jumped up on top of the bar. Sometimes she used to dance on the bar,’ he said, as if that were miraculous. ‘Sam got her by the ankle… pulled her off. Her back hit the edge of the bar and she screamed… then everyone got hold of him… it was because of Sally… if she hadn’t of moved… that’s when Sam went for her, when she jumped up on the bar…’ He stared at me. He was justifying it. An attack on a woman had played the catalyst to their stunned immobility, it was a thing to which they could react in their fashion. I nodded my understanding.