Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

“Maybe it got too expensive,” said Shuck. “It costs—”

But I was still fulminating. “Play ball, you say, then you call off the game! You call that fair?”

“I never figured you for a hawk.”

“I’m not a hawk, you silly bastard!”

“Okay, okay,” said Shuck. “I apologize. What do you want me to say? We’ll do the best we can for the people here — compensate them, whatever they want. You’re the boss.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m the boss.” I was sitting behind my desk, puffing on the cigar, blowing smoke at Shuck. Briefly, it had all seemed real. I had a notebook full of calculations: in five years I would have saved enough to get myself out, quietly to withdraw. But it was over, I was woken.

Shuck said, “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“You’re darned tootin’ I don’t,” I said. “I had a good job before you hired me. A house, plenty of friends.” Hing’s, my semidetached house on Moulmein Green, the Bandung. There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung.

“I mean, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“Well, you can roll your proposition into a cone and shove it. I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t even heard it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It means money,” said Shuck.

“I’ve seen your money,” I said. “I don’t need it.”

“You’re not crapping out on us, are you?”

“I like that,” I said. “Ever hear the one about the feller with the rash on his arm? No? He goes to this skin specialist who says, ‘That’s a really nasty rash! Better try this powder.’ The powder doesn’t work. He tries ointment, cream, injections, everything you can name, but still the rash doesn’t clear up. Weeks go by, the rash gets worse. ‘It’s a pretty stubborn rash — resisting treatment,’ says the doc. ‘Any idea how you got it?’ The feller says he doesn’t have the foggiest. ‘Maybe you caught it at work,’ the doc says, ‘and by the way where do you work?’ ‘Me?’ the feller says, ‘I work at the circus. With the elephants.’ ‘Very interesting,’ says the doctor, ‘What exactly do you do?’ ‘I give them enemas — but the thing is, to give an elephant an enema you have to stick your arm up its ass.’ ‘Eureka!’ says the doc. ‘Give up your job and I guarantee the rash on your arm will clear up.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says the feller, ‘I’ll never give up show biz.’”

Shuck pursed his lips. I didn’t blame him: I had told the joke too aggressively for it to raise a laugh.

“Do you know the one about Grandma’s wang house? Seems there was this feller—”

“I’ve heard it,” said Shuck. “‘You’ve just been screwed by Grandma.’”

“That’s how I feel,” I said. I split a matchstick with my thumbnail and began picking my teeth.

“Just listen to my proposition, then say yes or no.”

“No,” I said. “Like the feller says, it’s a question of mind over matter. You don’t mind and I don’t matter. Get it?”

“You’re being difficult.”

“Not difficult — impossible,” I said, and added, “Mr. Shuck,” lisping it with the same fishmouth buzz that he gave his name. I regretted that, and to cover it up, went on, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go break the news to Hing. I get the feeling Hing and I are on our way back to Beach Road. I’m not really a pimp, you know. That’s just talk.” I puffed the cigar and grinned at him. “I’m a ship chandler by profession, and it’s said that at ship chandling I’m a cracker jack.”

I winked.

Shuck glumly zipped his briefcase. “If you ever change your mind—”

“Never!”

At lunchtime it rained and the rain quickly developed into a proper storm, a Sumatra of the same velocity I had weathered in the harbor on Mr. Khoo’s launch when we towed that lighterful of girls to the Richard Everett. Ever since then, storms excited me: I could not read or write during a storm, and for the duration of the rain and wind my voice was louder; I found it easy to laugh, and I drank more quickly, standing up, peering out the window. I couldn’t turn my back on a storm. I switched off the radio and watched this one from my office at Paradise Gardens. It grew as dark at half past twelve as it was at nightfall — not sunset, but after that, dark sunless evening. I threw the windows open to hear the storm; it was cool, not raining yet, but very dark, with leaves turning over and stiff tree branches blowing like hair.

The lower part of the sky was lighted dully and all the pale green grass and the palm leaves turned olive, and tree trunks blackened. The birds disappeared: a last blown one straggled over Dr. Lim’s hedge. The fronds of the traveler’s palms parted and the larger trees swayed, and in the darkness the widely spaced drops began, as big as half dollars, staining the driveway. There was a rumble of faraway thunder. At the beginning it was still dark, but with the torrent it grew silvery, the air brightened as the rain came down, and softened to daylight as the larger clouds collapsed into the dense glassy streaks of the downpour flooding the garden. Soon it was all revolving sound and water and light; the trees that had thrashed grew heavy, the drooping leaves seeming to force the branches downward. Water foamed and bubbled down the roof tiles and flooded the gutters of Dr. Lim’s bungalow.

It continued for less than an hour, and before it was over the sun came out and made the last falling drops and the mist from the hot street shine brilliantly. Everything the rain touched glistened and dripped, and afterward all the houses and trees and pushcart awnings and bamboo fences were changed. The wetness gave everything in the sun the look of having swelled, and just perceptibly, buckled.

Some months later, in the old shop on Beach Road, Gopi the peon sidled into my cubicle, showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes, and said, “Mr. Hing vaunting Mr. Jack in a hurry- lah. ” You know what for.

THE SMOKE behind me — Leigh combusted — as I drove from the crematorium with Gladys, was the same pale color as the mid-morning Singapore cloud that sinks in a steamy mass over the island and grows yellow and suffocating throughout the afternoon, making the night air an inky cool surprise. I felt relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise: a change of air.

Leaving, I was reminded of the chase of my past, my season of flights and reverses; and I began to understand why I had never risen. The novelist’s gimmick, the dying man seeing his life flash before him, is a convenient device but probably dishonest. I had once been clobbered on the head: my vision was an unglued network of blood canals at the back of my eyes and the feeble sight of the sausage I’d had for breakfast. Pain made my memory small, and Leigh had looked so numb and haunted I doubt that he had remembered his lunch. A life? Well, the dying man risks pain’s abbreviations or death’s halting the recollection at a misleading moment. The live glad soul I was, bumping away from the crematorium, had access to the past and could pause to dwell on the taste of an ambiguity, or to relish an irony: “Let’s face it, Flowers,” the feller had said, “you’re an institution!” I was rueful: feeling chummy I had helped so many, stretching myself willingly supine on the rack of their fickleness — any service short of martyrdom, and what snatchings had been repeated on me! But, ah, I wasn’t dead.