"What's a letter cost, to St. Michael's?" the Long was asking. "We could, telephone for a reservation," the Short suggested. Jack was about to tell them unsolicited, how fat the chance was of anybody in St. Michael's having a telephone or anything which could be reserved, let alone of understanding what a reservation was—then he took more than a peripheral look at them.
The Long had red hair and was wearing dungarees and a man's shirt. Not common, ordinary, just-plain-red: copper-red. Worn in loops. Her shirt was blue with a faint white stripe. Her eyes were "the color of the sherry which the guests leave in the glass." Or don't, as the case may be. The Short could have had green hair in braids and been covered to her toes in a yashmak for all Jack noticed.
At that moment the clerk had asked him, "What fah you?"—a local, entirely acceptable usage, even commonplace, being higher than "What you want?" and lower than "You does want something?"—and by the time he had sorted out even to his own satisfaction that he wanted postage for a card to Canada and not, say, to send an armadillo by registered mail to Mauritius, and had completed the transaction in haste and looked around, trying to appear casual, they were gone. Clean gone. Where they had been was a bright-eyed little figure in the cleanest rags imaginable, with a sprinkling of white hairs on its brown, nutcracker jaws.
Who even at once declared, " 'And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three, and the greatest of these is charity,' you would not deny the Apostle Paul, would you, then, sir?"
"Eh? Uh . . . no," said Limekiller. Pretense cast aside, craning and gaping all around: nothing.
"Anything to offer me?" demanded the wee and ancient, with logic inexorable.
So there had gone a dime. And then and there had come the decision to visit St. Michael of the Mountains, said to be so different, so picturesque, hard upon the frontier of "Spanish" Hidalgo, and where (he reminded himself) he had after all never been.
Sometimes being lonely it bothers the way a tiny pebble in the shoe bothers: enough to stop and do something. But if one is very lonely indeed, then it becomes an accustomed thing. Only now did Limekiller bethink himself how lonely he had been. The boat and the Bay and the beastie-cat had been company enough. The average National boatman had a home ashore. The two men and two women even now aboard the Sacarissa in jammed-together proximity—they had each other. (And even now, considering another definition of the verb to have and the possible permutations of two males and two females made him wiggle like a small boy who has to go—). There was always, to be sure, the Dating Game, played to its logical conclusion, for a fee, at any one of the several hotels in King Town, hard upon the sea. But as for any of the ladies accompanying him anywhere on his boat . . .
"Whattt? You tink I ahm crazy? Nutting like dot!"
Boats were gritty with sand to fill the boggy yards and lanes, smelly with fish. Boats had no connotations of romance.
Such brief affairs did something for his prostate gland ("Changing the acid," the English called it), but nothing whatsoever, he now realized, for his loneliness. Nor did conversation in the boatmen's bars, lately largely on the theme of, "New tax law, rum go up to 15¢ a glass, man!"
And so here he was, fifty miles from home, if King Town was "home"—and if the Sacarissa was home . . . well, who knew? St. Michael of the Mountains still had some faint air of its days as a port-and-caravan city, but that air was now faint indeed. Here the Bayfolk (Black, White, Colored, and Clear) were outnumbered by Turks and 'Paniar's, and there were hardly any Arawack at all.(There seldom were, anywhere out of the sound and smell of the sea.) There were a lot of old wooden houses, two stories tall, with carved grill work, lots of flowering plants, lots of hills: perhaps looking up and down the hilly lanes gave the prospects more quaintness and interest, perhaps even beauty, than they might have had, were they as level as the lanes of King Town, Port Cockatoo, Port Caroline, or Lime Walk. And, too, there were the mountains all about, all beautiful. And there was the Ningoon River, flowing round about the town in easy coils, all lovely, too: its name, though Indian in origin, allowing for any number of easy, Spanish-based puns:
"Suppose you drink de wat-tah here, say, you cahn-not stay away!"
"En otros paises, señor, otros lugares, dicen mañana. Pero, por acá, señor, se dice ningún!"
And so forth.
Limekiller had perambulated every street and lane, had circumambulated town. Like every town and the one sole city in British Hidalgo, St. Michael's had no suburbs. It was clustered thickly, with scarcely even a vacant lot, and where it stopped being the Town of St. Michael of the Mountains, it stopped. Abruptly. Here was the Incorporation; there were the farms and fields; about a mile outside the circumambient bush began again.
He could scarcely beat every tree, knock on every door. He was too shy to buttonhole people, ask if they had seen a knockout redhead. So he walked. And he looked. And he listened. But he heard no women's voices, speaking with accent from north of the northern border of Mexico. Finally he grew a little less circumspect.
To Mr. John Paul Peterson, Prop., the Emerging Nation Bar and Club:
"Say . . . are there any other North Americans here in town?"
As though Limekiller had pressed a button. Mr. Peterson, who until that moment had been only amiable, scowled an infuriated scowl and burst out, "What the Hell they want come here for? You think them people crazy? They got richest countries in the world, which they take good care keep it that way; so why the Hell they want come here? Leave me ask you one question. Turn your head all round. You see them table? You see them booth? How many people you see sitting and drinking at them table and them booth?"
Limekiller's eyes scanned the room. The question was rhetorical. He sighed. "No one," he said, turning back to his glass.
Mr. Peterson smote the bar with his hand. "Exactly!" he cried. "No one! You not bloody damn fool, boy. You have good eye in you head. Why you see no one? Because no one can afford come here and drink, is why you see no one. People can scarce afford eat! Flour cost nine cent! Rice cost fifteen cent! Lard cost thirty-four cent! Brown sugar at nine cent and white sugar at eleven! D.D. milk twenty-one cent! And yet the tax going up, boy! The tax going up!"
A line stirred in Limekiller's mind. "Yes—and, 'Pretty soon rum going to cost fifteen cents,'" he repeated. Then had the feeling that (in that case) something was wrong with the change from his two-shillings piece. And with his having made this quotation.
"What you mean, 'fifteen cent'?" demanded Mr. Peterson, in a towering rage. Literally, in a towering rage, he had been slumped on his backless chair behind the bar, now stood up to his full height . . . and it was a height, too. "Whattt? 'Fifteen-cent?' You think this some damn dirty liquor booth off in the bush, boy? You think you got swampy," referring to backwoods distilled goods, "in you glass? What 'fifteen cent?' No such thing. You got pure Governor Morgan in you glass, boy, never cost less than one shilling, and pretty soon going to be thirty cent, boy: thir-ty-cent! And for what? For the Queen can powder her nose with the extra five penny, boy?" Et cetera. Et cetera.
Edwin Rodney Augustine Bickerstaff, Royal British Hidalgo Police (sitting bolt-upright in his crisp uniform beneath a half-length photograph of the Queen's Own Majesty):