Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

And he would have had to protest, “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” and invent another story, and go paler.

He began to give the taxi driver the address through the side window, as he would have done in London. But cutting him off, the driver — foreign — said, “Hop in.”

He spoke the address slowly, stammering a bit.

“Where’s that?”

“Roxbury.”

“Cost you extra.”

“No problemo.” And Raleigh laughed, saying the word.

Alone, sitting in the back seat of the taxi, he felt safe at last. And when, after all the traffic, the taxi dropped him and he stepped into the hot street, then made his way to the shady side and turned into the alley, he was free again, his heart pounding.

He found the doorway and knocked. There was no answering voice, and he was anxious until he heard a sound, a chair being scraped backward across an uneven floor, the bump of heavy shoes. And then the door opened a crack, and he saw the cruel mouth and bloodshot eyes.

“Git on in here.” The voice was fierce.

Thrilled, averting his eyes, whinnying a little once again, he obeyed.

WE WERE SITTING, heads bowed in prayer, waiting for the local Indians, Secoyas, to come barefoot into the mess container with the platters of food. When Max Moses said grace, as he was doing tonight, his terrifying vitality shone in his bulging eyes. Yet, rumbling on in his old smoker’s vibrato, he did not raise his voice. His slight speech defect made him seem truthful: there was a babyish innocence in “daily bwed.” His lazy tongue turned and snagged with a soft fruity catch on words like “church” or “chicken,” and instead of “gravy” he said “meat juice,” probably for the slushiness of the sound. It was “Wab” when referring to Silsbee’s dog, a Labrador retriever. He said grace standing.

I was always surprised when Moses stood up, because the man I regarded as a giant was almost as small as the Mbuti pygmies we’d had on the payroll on the Uganda job. His tenacity and godlike resourcefulness in getting his people to obey him seemed to enlarge him. Though he could be chivalrous even in the worst conditions, we knew our lives depended on our obedience to him. Whenever strangers asked me how he was able to command unswerving loyalty, I used this meal as an example — every incident that had led to it.

In a world where many private companies were chasing the money from little countries to complete development projects, Moses was a rarity. His record of success was brilliant, his costs were low, his estimates fair, and he always had work. “I sometimes surprise myself.” You think of charity or foreign aid as the deciding factor in the completion of these projects, but no, it is always the private contractor. “I want to surprise you, too. We are all in this together. If someone fails, everyone is accountable.”

Moses’ rule was to oversee every job himself and to be judicious in the matter of corruption. He had an odd neutrality when it came to bribes (“Cost of doing business — think of it as a tax”), always paying off the top man, whoever that happened to be, and depending on him for protection at lower levels. He used local labor at slightly above the going rate, and local materials whenever possible, even to the point of dismantling abandoned buildings if it meant a ready supply of steel or timber. Most of the others imported expensive building materials. Moses often used scrap, recycled wood, made bricks using local concrete and molds, bulking out the bricks with rubble that we crushed ourselves from the broken buildings. He rehabbed heavy machinery, so you would see an old bulldozer or cement mixer, good as new. “Found it. Fixed it up.” That also meant profit. He had the frugality of a junkman, and the foresight too. We lived in steel shipping containers.

All this depended on cooperation. He often said that his business model was a traveling circus. The circus arrived in town with all the rides, the tents, the cages, the food stalls, and local labor was hired to raise the tents, bolt the seating, fetch water, sweep, scrub, wash dishes, feed the animals. The talent was in the circus; the muscle was local, and cheap. It meant the circus could travel light, picking up labor along the way, paying them off, leaving them behind.

Moses said, “If I were a general in a foreign war, I’d recruit soldiers locally.”

No one dared to ask what he would do if they refused to obey, yet he answered the question anyway.

“In every man there is something — a sentiment — that you can tap into to make him take orders. It is often an anxiety. It’s sometimes sacrificial.”

Moses applied the traveling circus principle to his development contracts. A country secured a loan for a new road or a bridge or a clinic, and it hired his company to build it.

“Wars are fought with private companies, doing security detail, providing meals, putting up barracks,” he said. “Someday all soldiers will be mercenaries, as they’ve been in history. Even now, money is a motivator — for scholarships, or the big payout at the end of the tour. This is the era of the private sector helping governments achieve their goals with somebody else’s money.”

In another age Moses would have been the captain of a clipper ship, or a general, as he said, or an explorer in the pay of a king who wanted gold from a far-off jungle.

We were in Amazonas, in a jungle now, oil depot work, on a river, the Oriente province of Ecuador, in the mess container. Moses sat at the head of the table like a chief, with a glow of satisfaction on his face. If he had said to any of us, “Stick your hand in that candle flame,” we would have done it. But he was too practical for that. His rule, “Get up before dawn and be at my door at four-thirty, ready to work,” was one we obeyed.

Five of us at the table, still saying grace, Moses, Chivers, Silsbee, Tafel, and me. The cook boy, Hong, was still outside with the Secoya servants. I was struck by how pious Silsbee and Tafel were in their prayers, murmuring along with Moses, sitting far apart tonight for a change.

Silsbee and Tafel had been the problem from the beginning. First time I saw them I knew it wouldn’t work. Tafel had been with Moses for a year, Silsbee was a new hire. He’d been overseas on jobs before, an expert welder. Moses wanted him to teach locals this skill so that Silsbee would have a team. It worked at first, when we refitted a floating dock on the river, but when we got to rebuilding the bridge, two problems arose.

The friendship between Silsbee and Tafel was one — their instant liking for each other, talking, laughing, lollygagging. The average person thinks, Great, harmony. But harmony wasn’t Moses’ way. Friendliness and good humor relaxed the locals (was how Moses put it). Instead of working to a deadline, we were working as the locals did. “It’s why nothing got done before. It’s why we’re here.”

Work was social in places like this, Moses said; work was a party. “People love going to work, to meet their friends, to have a coffee break, to share meals. It’s nothing to do with finishing a job. The job exists to support a social framework — they want to get out of the house and talk.”

He did not say the easy relations between Silsbee and Tafel set a bad example. He could convey this with looks. He watched the two of them with a trace of astonishment.

Moses said, “I can take insolence from the work gangs, but not from my own men.”

The other problem was Silsbee’s dog, Gaucho. It was a Lab mix, big and sleepy. The idea that this dog did nothing infuriated Moses, who saw it as no better than a three-legged village mutt. It didn’t earn its keep.

Silsbee had a way of blinking that showed a thought was passing through his mind. He said, “My dog makes me happy.”