Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Jack had had two gin drinks. He felt that he needed two more. At least two more. Or, if not gin, rum. Beer would not do. He wanted to pull the blanket of booze over him, awfully, awfully quickly. He had this in his mind as though it were a vow as he walked up the front street towards the Cupid Club.

Someone hailed him, someone out of the gathering dusk.

“Jock! Hey, mon Jock! Hey, b’y! Where you gweyn so fahst? Bide, b’y, bide a bit!”

The voice was familiar. It was that of Harry Hazeed, his principal creditor in King Town. Ah, well. He had had his chance, Limekiller had. He could have gone on down the coast, down into the republican waters, where the Queen’s writ runneth not. Now it was too late.

“Oh, hello, Harry,” he said, dully.

Hazeed took him by the hand. Took him by both hands. “Mon, show me where is your boat? She serviceable? She is? Good: Mon, you don’t hear de news: Welcome’s warehouse take fire and born up! Yes, mon. Ahl de carn in King Town born up! No carn ah-tahl: No tortilla, no empinada, no tamale, no carn- cake! Oh, mon, how de people going to punish! Soon as I hear de news, I drah me money from de bonk, I buy ahl de crocus sock I can find, I jump on de pocket- boat —and here I am, oh, mon, I pray fah you… I pray I fine you!”

Limekiller shook his head. It had been one daze, one shock after another. The only thing clear was that Harry Hazeed didn’t seem angry. “You no understond?” Hazeed cried. “Mon! We going take your boat, we going doewn to Nutmeg P’int, we going to buy carn, mon! We going to buy ahl de carn dere is to buy! Nevah mine dat lee’ bit money you di owe me, b‘y! We going make plenty money, mon! And we going make de cultivators plenty money, too! What you theenk of eet, Jock, me b’y? Eh? Hey? What you theenk?”

Jack put his forefinger in his mouth, held it up. The wind was in the right quarter. The wind would, if it held up, and, somehow, it felt like a wind which would hold up, the wind would carry them straight and clear to Nutmeg Point: the clear, clean wind in the clear and starry night.

Softly, he said — and, old Hazeed leaning closer to make the words out, Limekiller said them again, louder, “I think it’s great. Just great. I think it’s great.”

The literature of the expatriate has a proud tradition in English and American literature, marked by names such as Conrad, Lowry, Kipling, Bowles, Greene, and Stone, and by some of the best novels produced in the language, novels such as Under the Volcano, Lord Jim, and The Sheltering Sky. Its classic themes are loneliness, man’s folly, and the inimical nature and mysterious laws of a place not one’s own. But more pertinently, in every instance the literature is marked by a writer’s fascination with the place in which he — and his protagonist — have chosen to live, and with his love for that place, even though he may depict it as vile and treacherous and sad.

In his story “Manatee Gal,” Avram Davidson engaged the classic themes with the quirky eloquence for which he became known, incorporating as well many tropes of the great adventure stories—: embracing all his characters, whether villain or naïf or boor, with a kind of splendid, generous crankiness that makes plain his affection for the setting of the story — British Honduras, or Belize. The sense of place he gives us in this and in all the Limekiller stories is pungent, lustrous, sensual in every regard, a feast for eye and nose, ear and palette, and though Jack Limekiller is a wonderfully drawn character, it is ultimately Belize that is the dominant character of the tale, with its dancing butterfiles and magical lizards and mystical coves, all illuminated by the exotic precision of the speech of its citizenry, which Avram rendered in such loving detail. It, Belize, is a great character, as palpably individual as Conrad’s Borneo and Stone’s Vietnam, and I only wish Avram had done more of these stories, or had expanded his territory to include the surrounding region. Had he done so, I believe his name would have been more widely known while he was alive — as it most certainly will now that he has passed away — and we might have seen something even more remarkable from his pen, for I believe he had barely scratched the surface of what he had to tell us about this beautiful, devious, and subtle stretch of beach and jungle and cay.

Sad to say, Avram’s Belize no longer exists, as it is currently being inundated in a wave of American and British commercialism, which may one day soon transform it into something grotesquely Cancun-esque. But that, of course, speaks to the other virtue of the expatriate writer: his ability to preserve a corner of the world and of time for our enduring pleasure. So here, in all its pervasive sweetness and Gauguin-like brightness, embellished by colorful bromeliads and majestic garobos and trees older than most nations, is a real place and time now elevated to the realm of the fantastic and the legendary, caught at the moment when its innocence was just about to be swept away, a place in which every oddly shaped rock had a story attached to it and the lore of jungle and sea was a vital element of people’s lives, and bandits who robbed chicleros had not yet been replaced by Colombian cowboys with aluminunm suitcases and small black guns.

When I was starting out as a writer, I wrote Avram a letter telling him that I had recently finished a couple of stories set in Central America, and that I was a bit concerned that, because of the Limekiller stories, people were going to think I was stealing his act, and that I hoped he didn’t think so. It was a terribly naive letter, one of those you wish to God you hadn’t mailed the second you drop it through the slot. A couple of weeks later I received a reply wherein Avram, utilizing that generous crankiness of which I’ve spoken, informed me that “yes, you are absolutely right. The Caribbean littoral is my exclusive preserve. No one could possibly illuminate it as well as I …” Of course I knew he was kidding.

Now, having just reread the story you have read, I’m not so sure.

I once told Avram Davidson that I was very busy, finishing a first novel. “But you mustn’t do that,” he wrote back, “you’ll be letting down the side.” Eventually I found myself writing a second novel. I told Avram. He sighed. “But I’ve told you that you mustn’t do that. ”

He was a very droll man, was Avram, and one who knew a thing about the perils of literature, and a thing about the giving of encouragement.

I miss him. I missed him quite sharply, and unexpectedly, one afternoon this past winter, when I was forestalling the completion of yet another novel with an A-to-Z reading of a facsimile edition of the Lexicon Balatronicum, 1811, otherwise known as A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence. Deep in the W’s, my day a dead loss, I had just discovered the following entry:

WOLF IN THE BREAST. An extraordinary mode of imposition, sometimes practised in the country by strolling women, who have the knack of counterfeiting extreme pain, pretending to have a small animal called a wolf in their breasts, which is continually gnawing them.

Now the truly stunning peculiarity of that, its sheer lack of context, is quite phenomenal. Extraordinary mode of imposition. Strolling women. Counterfeiting pain. Wolf in the breast. And the instant of my missing Avram, and very precisely Avram, was the instant of my running down the full and lifetime list of my available human resources, frantic for someone to whom to take this mystery, this marvel, this extraordinary mode of imposition, and finding that, of course, there was Avram, and only Avram. Avram who could at the very least have invented a context for a small animal called a wolf, or who might even have known, somehow, through the vast and trackless courses of a lifetime’s reading and remembering, what it possibly was that these strolling women were about.