Anthony Wright

Bad America

"So dream thy sails, O phantom bark
That I thy drownèd man may speak again."
                                             -- Hart Crane

Kim e-mailed me yesterday, requesting that I join him in Belize City. The forced tone of his entreaty, and the quiet desperation sweating off it, spawned epithets in my mind that frankly summed up the city itself. I did not regard the place with fondness; in fact, I'd vowed never to return there. I'd only spent 48 hours in the ex-capital of the former British Honduras, several years ago when Her Majesty's soldiers still patrolled certain quarters of the town and a handful of wags had tagged it the Belfast of the Caribbean. Some strange things happened during that trip, or at least there were moments less than on a par with average -- but nothing that would score me any points for meritorious behavior.

Kim couldn't have known about my previous visit or if he did, cared less. It had, after all, been my experience -- irrelevant, as far as Kim was concerned. Anything that lay beyond the parameters of Kim's kingdom of self was relegated to a dusty storeroom of fading files: a vast internal junkyard of other people's useless revelations. Pointless trying to impress Kim.

When I established there was nothing personal in this, that it was just Kim, it often amused me to sit back and let him do the jabbering, and sometimes drift off into daydreams of my own. Contemplating his missive, my time in Belize City crashed the gates of memory...

Within five minutes of arriving in the hot, shoddy seaport town, having alighted the bus and hailed a taxi to take me to the center, the driver -- a moody Creole sporting grimy dreds and buckshot eyes, darting nervous glances at my general countenance from his rearview mirror -- deftly swerved into a side-street after a ride of only several blocks, brought the old car to a screeching halt, pulled out a revolver from under his Bob Marley T-shirt, and held me up.

The bandit relieved me of watch, sunglasses, camera and $1000 worth of travelers' checks -- then demanded my cash and passport. I told him to go to hell, got out of the car and started walking back to the main thoroughfare. For safe measure I broke into a trot. I twisted my head; saw my driver bolting in the opposite direction. Several youths were already working the obviously stolen vehicle for spare parts, like an efficient pit stop crew.

It was a relief, at least, to be able to converse in English in this part of Central America, and on Cemetery Road a couple of souls directed me to the docks area of the A & R Station, situated at Haulover Creek. Around here, cheap accommodation and all the Chinese restaurants anyone could want were to be found. I obtained lodgings in a beaten-up clapboard boarding house -- flaky white paint, rotting timbers and rickety staircase. The joint looked as if it had floated all the way down from Galveston, unhooked itself from a spit of flooded coast during a 19th century hurricane and washed up here whole.

The derelict ark was home to a number of Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and -- to my surprise -- Pakistani migrant workers, living and laboring on the cheap. A lithe young Garifuna prostitute was also a tenant of the old hotel; she spied me (and vice versa) while I was signing the register.

She was knocking on the door to my room a few minutes later.

"Where you from?"

She strode in, brushed past me, gave my crotch a quick squeeze, and let go. She sat on the bed, and without further formality, swiftly drew off her singlet, leaned back on her elbows and spread her legs, worn linen dress settling back on her bony hips.

Jesus Christ. The suddenness of it hit me like a malaria attack. I was delirious with lust.

The girl quickly elucidated the terms of engagement.

"Eight dollar we do it now, sweet lark. I come back tonight, stay wit' you."

I stared at her breasts. Black winds rushed in the hollow of my stomach.

"Eight Belize dollar."

***

Later, strolling the streets, I couldn't walk a block without getting accosted by some Rastafarian peddler trying to panhandle me for whatever I was worth, putting on the hard sell for coke, crack, sisters, brothers -- orgies on the coast, good times, dark times. When diplomacy failed, I'd whip out the switchblade I bought in Panama City and hiss: "nebba caal de crocodile til you done cross de ribba" -- a tricky mouthful coming from a bacra, that impressed the local lads no end. Of course, the phrase more properly applied to myself than to them.

The young Garifuna gave me the two-knock signal late in the evening. I'd consumed half a bottle of Old Belizeno and lay writhing on wet sheets, swatting at mosquitoes in the darkness and fully experiencing the delayed-shock comedown of the afternoon robbery. I was glad I couldn't see the walls of the cramped cubicle closing in on me like a jerrybuilt coffin.

I took two steps to the door and opened it. The girl stood there, waiting to be invited in, but I turned her away. I strongly suspected that she'd rob me of whatever I still possessed while I slept. When they came, those rum sleeps were heavy ones.

Caution played its role in diminishing my ardor for her; so, too, did a sense of propriety. During my first hour in the strange city a number of roles had been quickly thrust upon me: victim, john, and so on. I barely gave these roles a second thought, I merely played them, operating on base instinct. Now I knew I needed to grab several hours of unconsciousness, before the merry-go-round started up again.

By the end of the next day, having ironed out a miscellany of pain-in-the-ass formalities resulting from the hit, endured 12 hours of sweat and frustration tramping the reggae-saturated streets of this humid hellhole, and received more than my fair share of suspicious looks from pasty-faced Tommies and wild-eyed drug fiends, I'd assigned Belize City top slot on my short list of shit holes. I packed up and packed it in that evening.

I secured the services of one of the wharf rats to hook me up with a boatman at the A & R who was sailing an old sandlighter to Spanish Lookout Caye. A short time later we put out to sea, and happily bade farewell to Belize City. Arriving at Spanish Lookout, I was introduced to a wizened Venezuelan sea captain, a "midnight rider" -- he was a smuggler in exotic birds.

After a show of intrigue I scored a berth aboard his spartan supply vessel. Supplies: two scarlet macaws, six Aztec parakeets, four brown-hooded parrots, a red-footed booby, and a magnificent keel-billed toucan. The Capitan also kept a baby fer-de-lance for a pet.

We spent a couple of carefree nights gliding through The Cayes: Bluefield Range, Alligator, Sandfly; on past the Columbus and Tobacco Reefs: Man O'War, Bread & Butter, Wee Wee; and south onto Wild Cave Caye -- where we dropped anchor during the day, not too far from the fishing port of Punta Gorda, the last town of any size in Belize.

We never sailed during daylight hours, but the Capitan threw caution to the wind on the third day, departing the Southern Cayes and tacking fair breezes into the open waters of the Gulf of Honduras. The crusty Venezuelan was itching to unload his rare, feathered contraband on the so-called "Gringo connection" in Roatan.

The trip cost me a packet, but I'd decided more or less spontaneously to get out of Belize City, and in my impetuousness desired a sea route. There was something perversely pleasurable in sailing off in a smuggling ship -- I'd long harbored a tingling psychic resonance with the lives of pirates -- but a slight guilt assuaged me, concerning the fate of the tropical birds. The Capitan assured me that they were headed for reputable zoos in Southeast Asia.

A week later, I found myself safely ensconced at a relatively exclusive tourist zone in the Hog Islands. Belize City had dissolved into a weird memory. I had no real notion of why I'd gone there in the first place -- except just to see it. I fell asleep across a golden afternoon on a beach on Cochino Grande, and dreamt of a Garifuna Medusa, shrilling like a parakeet in the throes of a sweaty embrace.

***

To: Brossard
Subject: B-Town
From: Kim Tyner

Yo, Lance. This town is trick! What town? BELIZE CITY. Citay, mon. Yah mon! B-Town mon! I guarantee, no I GUARANTEE you will LOVE this town. It's sweet, mon. I know you got the spare cash and time so why don't you get over here and we'll have some FUN?

OK I cut the crap. Do it for your old buddy. We haven't hit it in awhile. Soon I'll be headed Stateside, my time is almost over. Drudgery beckons. Thought I'd spin around these parts before I get my shit together. You can get away -- won't regret it. Take a road trip. Whatever you want. I'm flexible.

Been here four days now. Need a friend, someone to talk to. Seriously. Get back to me. It's Wednesday. Can you get here by Friday? We'll have a blast.

Well, they say you can't have enough friends in this world. Yes, I could get away -- that presented no problem. And it was only a short hop by air -- although I was not enamored of flying and hated the climb out of the airport at Toncontín, the only way out.

Thinking about Kim ... Shit, I might as well do it. You only live once.

OK, so I was just a sounding board for all the philosophical bullshit that sprang into Kim's mind. What the hell? He was an infuriating character -- but on a good day fun to be around. Some of the things he said were interesting -- insightful, even. Kim knew where the pitfalls were.

A native of California, Kim had spent several years bumming around Central America. He'd started off in the Peace Corps; wandered; worked as an English teacher and journalist. He married; started off numerous business ventures that invariably wound up the same way: failed.

Now his marriage was falling apart.

If he was bumming around Belize City, I figured Kim's wife Abigail was back in San Jose listening to her family implore her to get rid of the Gringo once and for all. I had a feeling her family was finally going to tip the scales in favor of divorce.

Kim loved his wife deeply -- or as much as a man as self-centered as Kim was capable of. Yet we all know how often the marriage gig doesn't work out. Particularly the mixed marriage gig. Especially when the money gig isn't coming together. After five years of balsing around -- at the marriage, the money -- none of it had come together. He'd thrown in his last job, as a translator in a Costa Rican government department. He couldn't stick at anything.

Kim's background was undistinguished. He came from the working classes and this fact immensely frustrated him. Kim was destined for bigger and better things -- but his bloated concept of success had not materialized, and he couldn't figure out why. He once told me that it was better to be stupid and poor than intelligent and poor, because if he was just like all the other chumps where he came from he probably would have ended up a salesman, truck driver or bank clerk and been in "hog heaven."

He even ruefully admitted that those school pals who had indeed enlisted in these occupations all now owned their own homes, had money in the bank, enjoyed stable family lives, and were insured to the teeth. Kim's contemporaries were living the American Dream in their own predictable way -- and such a thing is still possible, if you keep your head down. But Kim only dreamt of the Big Strike.

"Why should I be like those other bums if I'm better than those bums?"

You can do it, but it only works if it works -- and to make it work you've got to work it. Anyone who's done it right will tell you that: there's simply no other way. Short of picking the correct numbers in a lottery or finding a hastily discarded bag of drug money, you really have to push some inner buttons to get out of the back blocks if that's where you come from.

There's as much white trash stewing away in Bangkok or Tel Aviv as in Jacksonville or Baton Rouge, or dragging their feet along the gleaming pavements of Miami Beach or LA. They'll grimace with psychotic hatred at the Mustangs and Porsches cruising by their bus stops and Payless stores in the mid-afternoon, dream of hacking those cars' beautiful occupants to pieces, and in the hazy sunset of another fruitless day envision sheets of fire leveling the aspirations of all. They see it in the States -- the Haves flaunting it at the Have-nots. Maybe they figure if they went somewhere else it would make all the difference: a door flies open, Opportunity smiles, squeezes their arm and pumps their hand. Welcome aboard, you smashing hunk of man, we're glad you made it. Sometimes it does, too -- but you still have to prise open the door like anywhere else.

Kim was like the rest of them. He figured the good life would casually trot up to him like a friendly dog and give him a nice big lick. He had slaved away at enough shit jobs in his life, and knew how to slave hard -- but only in spurts. By his early 30s he decided his boat was due in -- in fact it was long overdue. All he ever saw was a blank expanse of sea.

Kim's misfortune and bad judgment distressed him and it obviously distressed his Costa Rican wife, who came from a money-grubbing middle class family. She'd never learned to fend for herself. Abigail was a Lite version of Kim -- she figured the world came with the ring. She was also Daddy's Little Girl, and wanted to know why Kim wasn't more like Daddy. There was no way he could be. The old prick was rich.

"My father is twice the man you are. He worked hard. He is a success."

I once heard Abigail say this to Kim in a voice brimming with reproach. Embarrassing stuff. It was during dinner at a restaurant in Alajuela, in the Meseta Central -- they'd gone to the mountain resort town to try and patch up their differences. I'd been invited along for the second week, as had a girlfriend of Abigail's -- she was forever trying to pawn me off on one cloying neurotic or another. The whole week was close to unendurable.

When he had money, Kim threw it away on expensive suits and shoes, upmarket wines, Cuban cigars, and ridiculously overpriced knickknacks. He'd order cognacs and martinis in bars while I drank beer. All in all he could be quite the fucking show-off.

These gestures were simply acts of bravado, since Kim was intensely jealous of the highbrow credentials of many of the young men and women he had to deal with in this part of the world: people educated at fine schools, bilingual, cultured; who'd lived unusual lives riding the coattails of adventurous parents -- high rollers, diplomats or big wigs in multinational companies. People, in short, with money. Yet those same characters were often admirably frugal with their own scratch, albeit in a pretentious way. They were not given to overwrought displays of wealth -- and that angered Kim. They were dry sorts: wary of handing out favors, spiritually vacuous and completely superficial.

In such affectations, they presented Kim with an exemplary code of behavior from which he could have, should have, gleaned hints concerning the correct social persona to adopt, and how to comport himself in business matters. Of course, Kim counted few of these "sophisticates" as friends and resolutely learnt nothing from the one or two he did. Moreover, he was suspicious of Old Hands and expats -- categories to which he inevitably belonged. As for the locals, well, he'd married one, but he regarded all his short-lived entrepreneurial partners, and the locals in general, as enigmas. Essentially, he ignored people. Kim remained independent, arrogant, passionate, brooding, paranoid -- a precarious balance of extremes in anyone's book.

The longer I knew him, the more impenetrable he became. It was a gradual process at first, which gained momentum. Our relationship did not move forward, it spun backwards. Yet he was still a friend; a friend who, by degrees, was seemingly bringing the curtain down on everything he called "the gig." I sensed that if Kim needed me for anything in Belize City, it was to draw a morsel from someone he considered adroit in the discipline of solitude.

***

Like Kim, I've floated around Central America for several years now. I am a gold prospector. Actually, I call myself a metallurgist by profession. That's what it says on my university certificate and that's what I say when I want to impress a woman. But I'm really just a hungry digger and I love the gold. I'm an independent operator and my successes have been moderate. I'm not so obsessed with money as with seeing a good chunk of the world while I'm still relatively young, and being my own man. I've got a profession. So why worry?

Three years ago, I made a sweet little grubstake for myself in the game in Panama, on the basis of three ounces of alluvial gold panned from a river during 72 hours of torrential rain. Quite a fairy tale strike, this one, since I ended up earning $20,000 from those three beautiful ounces. It was all thanks to a book I read in my early twenties, called Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written by a New England historian in 1942.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the value of knocking around secondhand bookstores and browsing through old books highly enough; particularly those dealing with gold, the sea, exploration, anything of that nature -- from the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Many such books contain the sort of information old enough to have been forgotten about and discarded, but recent enough to be fairly accurate. I still have the little volume with me -- it's falling to pieces and I'm forever rebinding it; but it's my own personal charm, an amulet in words.

When I first read the book, the part that stuck in my craw was a section referring to Belen. This is a river located in the Veruguas region on the Caribbean coast of Panama. The Mosquito Gulf. Columbus landed here on the Feast of the Three Kings, 1503, during his fourth and last voyage to America -- it was called the High Voyage. Columbus tried to set up a trading post at the mouth of Rio Belen, because gold was understood to be abundant in the area. But Veruguas is also subject to very heavy rainfall -- from afternoon downpours to violent tropical storms. Nothing came of the Admiral's efforts to establish a beachhead except death, misery and ruin. Then the intriguing bit:

"In 1940, we encountered an old prospector who had gone up one of the rivers with a partner and an Indian guide. 'Where do we find gold?' he asked. 'Right here!' said the Indian, who pulled out a clasp knife, dug some clay from the riverbank, and panned out some ten dollars' worth of shining gold grains! The prospector and his partner returned to the nearest town for supplies and lumber and built sluice boxes, the product of which should have made them rich. But in the next freshet all their gear was washed down into the Caribbean."

The book noted that there was still "gold in them thar hills." When I read Columbus, I was completing my degree; but I determined on the spot to get to Veruguas some day in the near future and see if I couldn't defy nature and all her might, and dig up some gold.

I did it, too...

Of course, my measly tin pot operation failed, the same as the rest of them down through history. The grand I panned barely covered my expenses. Plus I contracted the malaria that still lays me up from time to time. But a month later, with the stroke of a pen in a plush office in Panama City, I came up trumps -- thanks to the Genoese mariner, the New England historian, two executives from a Venezuelan/Panamanian mining consortium, and, yes, Kim.

It was quite an adventure. Practically nobody gets out to these parts: we are talking primordial, tough, wet jungle. In the small town of Penomone I hired a guide to lead me down the Rio Zarati, into the region of La Angostura -- where, in fact, copper and gold mining activities take place. My guide tag-teamed me with another fellow, who took over the reins for the next several days' journey across the isthmus: it was by foot, mule and dugout canoe.

Tiring business. I was deposited at the tributary of a small river, where I arranged to meet the guide two weeks later to lead me back to civilization. I was given directions to a Guaymi Indian hamlet a couple of kilometers upstream. Man, were they surprised to see me. I don't think I'd be exaggerating when I say that these folks probably hadn't encountered a white devil in years -- conceivably decades.

Of course it was impossible for me to communicate with them or vice versa. But I was able to rudimentarily indicate my basic needs: food, shelter, gold. They provided me with food and shelter immediately. I gave them my Walkman and three Perez Prado cassettes. They were impressed. They directed me to several forest streams.

On the third day I found gold.

Just like in the book, I dug the first few grains from the banks of an unknown river deep in the heart of Veruguas territory -- a good two days' hike from the Guaymi village -- while taking a crack at the alluvial deposits. I began panning from the edge of the river's still, brackish water, and found more gold.
I panned three days and nights. The clouds opened up; I kept panning. The river became a rushing torrent: I kept panning. The mosquitoes ate me alive: I kept panning. I panned until my eyes saw double, blinking double the heavy raindrops splashing into the pan, doubling the pale luster of gold fragments tumbling in the silt. I panned while rainbows poured upwards from the river into my eyes, and comets ranged across the glowing mauve night.

Gold fever.

During these labors, I began to experience headaches and chills. I spent a whole day too enervated to even feed myself. The body sweats came on and I knew I was in trouble. Malaria. Made it back to the Guaymi settlement -- the exhaustion, fever and nausea were terrible -- but I as staggered along narrow wild boar trails, hacked at the bush with my machete, climbed over fallen logs and forded leech-infested streams, I still had the presence of mind to keep my small, bulging leather pouch of gold grains close to my person at all times. My stash was inviolate.

Relaxing in Panama City a few weeks later -- having completed the quinine treatment in a mission hospital in Anton, and twisting through the cure's potent hallucinations -- I drew up a rough proposal to develop low-impact exploratory operations in the area where I'd found the gold. To my surprise, I was able to establish from a good geophysical map and my own calculations in the field, that I'd camped not more than a dozen clicks east of where Columbus had tried to establish the doomed post of Santa Maria de Belen.
With a Panamanian chum acting as partner -- he was a barman from the Pavo Real (I was silent) -- "we" lodged a claim on the obscure pocket of uninhabited jungle. A couple of bribes were involved. It was a cinch. I paid off Juan and we went our separate ways.

I then sought to sell the claim to a mining company.

It was around this time that I met Kim. He was on a freelance job for a U.S. magazine to write a story on the Blue Goose, an evidently legendary Panama City bar that enjoyed a long and infamous history -- so Kim said -- dating back to Captain Morgan's sacking of the city. Met him right there at the Blue Goose, where I was drinking the night down -- trying to figure the best angle to turn on my vainglorious expedition to El Dorado.

Kim barked at barmen in pretty good Spanish. He conducted a fluent conversation with an aging transvestite, and then interviewed a shoeshine boy who articulated his speech with the staccato of a machine gun. I was pretty impressed. To cut a long story short, I needed somebody who could slide in and out of the language with Kim's easy grace. He agreed to act as my front man to flog the claim. For a third of the cut -- whatever he could wrangle. Kim was familiar with the downtown financial zone -- I wasn't. He owned a Hugo Boss suit -- I didn't.

Well, yeah, it's true that I didn't feel too great about the idea of handing over a potentially large amount of money to a person such as I took Kim for -- a smarmy con artist. I'd really sweated for that gold, and scored an unpleasant illness into the deal ... Still, there was nothing to be done. Unlike Juan the barman, Kim wouldn't accept a fee. He was a lot of things -- but not an out-and-out fool.

As we perfected the proposal over the next few days, he moved into my hotel. We got on quite well. By the time the business was over, we'd cemented a friendship. He was already married to Abigail by then, and based in Costa Rica.

We hit pay dirt after three day's traipsing around the gelt district, knocking on about half a dozen doors. The mining executives were impressed with the coordinates, it didn't look as if anyone could sue them over anything, and the venture was deemed to offer enough potential returns to purchase the claim and spot us for a finder's fee. Kim could be a smooth talker when he wanted to, and since I was new to this part of the world and still grappling with the language, he really earned his cut. The total sum came to 30 Gs. Kim took 10,000 bucks.

Ironically, the company wrote off the operation after only a few months. Almost a year had passed when I heard about it on the grapevine. Nothing stayed standing in that drowning world. Well, that wasn't our fault. Kim had never discounted this hardship from the proposal and any schoolboy knows what it's like down there. Certainly the element of risk hadn't seemed to faze the executives.

Kind of makes me wonder how we ever got away with it. Unless they were planning a write-off all along. No matter what field of endeavor you choose, if it's in an independent line and you're your own guy, the big boys always deem you a greenhorn. Their agendas contain, for the most part, unfathomable integrants that are weighed on a visionary scale of capitalist greed and politics beyond one's immediate comprehension. Then get out fast and cash the check.

Kim and I parted company -- but we stayed in touch. I visited the couple a few times in San Jose, and while I suppose Kim's wife seemed to like me -- I could never really tell for sure; nor penetrate her blank facade of cordiality -- I can't say that I felt at all comfortable in their uneasy realm of so-called domesticity. Who would?

Meanwhile, Kim went and blew his 10 grand in quick measure. He spent most of it on a fishing trip to Cuba. Abigail must have loved that effort...

Anyway, since then I've made a base for myself in Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras. People think there's nothing here at all, and that suits me down to the ground; let them keep on thinking it. The fact is, I plumbed a nice little gold mine for myself in these parts -- and this is only half a pun. Although it's also back to rivers again: miserable, remote backwaters; malaria-infested swamps; long, hard days setting up clandestine sluice boxes; and nights of excruciating loneliness.

I'm working a silt bed on a small, unmapped tributary located X-amount of clicks down the Rio Patuca, in the aptly named Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras. Squirreling away the ounces. The locals generally guffaw at my one-man operation -- they obviously think I'm loco, and I'll admit that a certain eccentricity attaches itself to the profession. It's like that with gold. Gold is exotic.

Of course, I don't toil away in that hellish swamp forever and a day. Whenever the introspection, drunken nights, and exquisite torture of the mosquitoes get to be too much, I close shop and hike upriver to Ahuas, where there's a small airstrip. I contact my pilot-for-hire, Kiki Aguilar, by two-way radio two or three days before I'm ready to depart, and usually find him there at the strip, dozing under his el cheapo crate of a 1970s Cessna -- but juiced up and ready to split. Then it's back to "the world."

After a couple of weeks in the city (if you could call Tegucigalpa that), I return to the jungle -- like an existential Ping-Pong ball -- anxiously looking out the Cessna's mud-caked cockpit window until I see the reassuring expanse of matted, undulating green below me.

***

I'd returned to my downtown pad the day before last, read Kim's e-mail when I logged into my laptop the next morning, and spent that evening mulling over the invitation with a bottle of I.W. Harpers and the sounds of mambo blasting out of my stereo.

I e-mailed Kim a drunken, affirmative reply.

The next day I made flight arrangements and packed. Kim replied back that night saying I should check into his hotel -- the Bon Adventure -- where he'd reserved me a room, and meet him Friday afternoon at a bar called The Wrong House. The order of the day would be drinking. Fine, straight into the breach. I could endure any litany of misery with a few drinks under my belt. Suddenly I was in the mood for company. Kim's company.

Yes, I needed to commune with a reliable character. Although I hadn't seen him in months I still knew Kim's moves when we twisted through a session. There was a predictability to him with which I was more than conversant. Indeed, I only had to look at myself; since I really saw in Kim many of my own failings and stupid behavior when I'd been in the company of acquaintances I had no need of respect from -- or, for that matter, when I was alone.

I doggedly tried to keep my act straight with Kim, since his booze threshold always struck me as a projection of myself three drinks ahead. Kim, as the mirror of myself, prevented me from eagerly stepping headlong into that abyss which I so often discreetly pursued alone.

Nevertheless, I'd weaken and veer to the psychic edge, and throw myself right in after him.

Lying down for an afternoon nap, I divined these inner soliloquies to be simply the latent gnawing of my conscience. In truth I looked forward to the fray, the ambience of a new bar, the rosy camaraderie of that first toast, rounds of rum on ice, and Kim's impossible ramblings.

People came and went in this part of the world. It wasn't advisable to form too a close an attachment to anybody -- they'd move on. Plus, of course, there were any fucking number of jerks, Johnny-come-late lies, smart asses -- all of them good for a big fat nothing. I counted few Hondurans as pals, not more than several associates to meet for drinks at the Cafe Allegro or Duncan Maya.

Kiki the pilot was a good guy, but his old lady kept him on a firm leash, forever having some need of him at any old drop of a hat. I kicked around some with my accountant, Rolando Bermúdez -- but his only interest was in playing swordsman with the local talent. Since he was married and I knew his wife, I wasn't comfortable seeing Rolando play the shit; by association I became his shit-in-crime. After a few drinks, of course, we simply couldn't help ourselves. Before that point, we'd only talk about women, anyway, or finances, and all the rest of that redundant, male-bonding crap.

Hardly anyone communicates these days. The more I reflected on this sad fact the more I realized I found solace, in an oddly contradictory sense, in the jungle. I'd augmented my kit with a micro cassette-recorder, for the purpose of taping scraps of spontaneous poetry and other abstractions apt to issue from my mouth -- with no one to relate them to except the howler monkeys, or a dusted pale of constellations, remote chariots of ice cartwheeling through the universe: audiences to what some good citizen might call my madness.

I would soon be subjected to the same treatment from Kim and I took comfort in it -- the way he bounced his pain off me, as though he were studying his face in a mirror and seeing the failure of his life; as if the mirror could provide an answer, a solution, anything except his own reflection -- mute and indifferent.

***

It was an uneventful hop from Tegucigalpa to Belize City. I hailed an airport taxi to drive me through the streets of that brief and brutal stomping ground, straight into the heart of town. There was a stifling air of familiarity about the place -- not to mention the stifling air in general, buildings and asphalt containing it, refuse and sea breezes extricating it: a sweating city.

I checked into the Bon Adventure -- reasonable digs. Kim was not there, but had left a message saying he'd gone for a walk to the docks, and then would head to The Wrong House for lunch. By the time I was settled, showered and ready to push off, it was nearing two in the afternoon. Obtained directions to The Wrong House and walked over there.

I entered The Wrong House. It was suitably dark. There were a few backpackers sitting around; the bar possessed the hung over-afternoon quality of a "party venue" -- the kind of joint that got kicking late at night when groups of people (and especially women) arrived. A jukebox beat out the ubiquitous Marley, one barman behind the bar, no waiters to be seen.

At a table in the center of the room, from which he could command a sweeping view of all the action, or inaction, sat Kim. He looked over to me and nodded, a slight smile crept across his face. He took a sip from his drink, and leaned back to pull out his cigarettes.

It irked me that his immediate reaction was not one of jump-out-of-the-chair exuberance. I'd just flown over from another country, after all. We hadn't seen each other all year -- he acted as if it was yesterday. But Kim was unpredictable, and anyway, his marriage was all but over -- he wasn't supposed to be in a great mood. I was almost at the table when he lifted up his tired, now admittedly happy eyes and said: "Yo, Lance."

"Don't have a heart attack."

He laughed. We shook hands. I sat down.

"You have to get your own drink, man," Kim said. "The waiters aren't on yet."

"What is it? Rum?"

"Rum and lime on the rocks. It's sweet, mon."

"I see you've got the lingo down pat."

"Yah, mon," he drained his glass, the ice cubes rattled.

I took his empty and went over to the oak-paneled bar, ordered two rum and limes on ice, told the Rasta barman to make them heavy on the rum. He didn't say a word but he did it -- poured the Captain Morgans long and deep into two tall glasses. All right.

We lined them up, clinked glasses -- "here's to it" and without further remark slid a couple of ice-cold draughts of the ambrosia down our respective hatches. It tasted good.

"So," I said. "What's the story, what are you doing here?"

"Wait a minute, man," Kim laughed. "What's your story? Lucky Strike Lance?"

"There's a suggestion," I pulled out my cigarettes, offered the pack to Kim.

"No, man, I got my Pall Malls," he picked the cigarette up off the table, tapped it, put it to his mouth. "Light up the night."

I gave him a brief synopsis as to my recent doings. There was little to tell. It wasn't like I spent nights at the opera. Anyway, as if he cared. As if I cared! This was Kim's gig, and I was here in this bar to hear him talk -- Kim, unleashed by the powers of his misery, paranoia, and dreams. But the key was still finding its way in the lock, see? -- For now, Kim maintained the formalities of chitchat.

"So what do you think of the Wrong House? Great name, huh?"

"Hard to forget," I said. "Place looks OK. They clearly give you a decent pour. I suppose it's the best bar I've been to in Belize City."

"Ha! It's the first bar you've been to in Belize City."

"Not exactly. I've been here before."

"Belize City?"

"Yeah."

"Aw, man! You never told me that!"

"I've been to a number of places I've never told you about."

"OK, Lucky, OK, you're right. I'm just surprised, is all."

Kim seemed deflated that the city was no longer his discovery.

"I wasn't here long," I said, to make him feel better. "I don't know it from a bar of soap."

"Yeah, you probably got up to a thing or two."

I stared at my drink.

"But you're right, eh? Like I don't think I'd retire here, you know? But, but, it's cool. It's a cool city. It's got plenty more personality than San Jose. That place is too clean, man. Too, I don't know, too, and uh, uh..." He trailed off.

Now I could feel it coming on: Kim kneeling in the confessional.

"You know the deal. I'm not kidding you. With Abigail, I mean."

Second drink time. Kim was picking up speed. He drained his glass. Next round. Third drink for Kim, he began to nurse it. Subterfuge. I drank a little faster. A few laughs, some thrust and parry, soon the first hour had clicked by...

***

For all the pressure I imagined he'd been under, Kim hadn't changed much physically, since there was so little of him to ravage that hadn't already pronounced itself on his face, in the two or more years since I'd known him. He was small and wiry and the tropical climate certainly suited him. He never gained an ounce of fat on his body, which resembled a jockey's -- light, yet jerky -- and covered in a thick mat of black hair. Ringlets of chest hair climbed all the way to his Adam's apple and meandered luxuriantly from his open Hawaiian shirt, sprouting quivers of sweat that streaked the shirt's lurid florid design.

His face was pale, although black rings had formed under his profoundly sad, dog-kicked eyes. His wild, jet-black hair -- which had not been perturbed by either brush or comb for months -- now receded beneath the unkempt, knotted tufts. Shadowed wrinkles arched like dead rivers from his cheekbones to the sides of his down-turned mouth, and across his forehead to the stressed bridge between those eyes, staring at me.
He'd recently turned 32.

It was heading towards sunset when Kim started to spill his flooded dam. The Wrong House began filling with thirsty travelers. Kim and I we were four rums in by the official Happy Hour -- for the next two hours it was two-for-one on -- what else? -- rum. Waiters now worked the tables, people animatedly discussed their lives and the decibel levels rose. Bob Marley kept shooting the sheriff but not killing the deputy, and Kim felt that whatever he had to say could be said in the freedom of noisy anonymity.

For a start, he'd lied to me in his e-mail.

"I was bullshitting you when I said I'd been here only four days," he said. "Actually, it's been two weeks. Trying to get my head around it all. Days and nights, getting fucked up. Always finding the bottle, man. I've woken up with The Fear a few times, it's a fucked-up feeling."

As if I didn't know what he was talking about. Staring at him, it struck me how that sensation of self-loathing -- what Kim called "the Fear" -- lingered and ebbed, and then gravitated to another form: regret. The inner knowledge that the person who did those things last night was not you. But it was you. A part of yourself, somewhere deep, you couldn't control it because you didn't want to, you wanted to do bad things. That's why I preferred to drink alone. That's why I was watching myself with Kim tonight. Because it was his party, not mine.

"You tell yourself it's a Jekyll-Hyde deal" Kim's voice drifted back out of the echo chamber. "It feeds the hole, man, the flophouse. You explain it to yourself, but it's doubtful you'll want to explain it to all the people you, you fucked with..."

"Just don't go all sober on me," I said.

He nodded, thoughtfully. I looked around the bar.

"Which brings us to Hemingway," Kim said, smiling.

"Pardon?"

"Which brings us to HEMINGWAY," he repeated the name loudly, and I saw a young man nearby glance at us, snigger, turn back to his girl and make some remark. They both laughed and he looked over again, saw me staring back at him. He stopped chortling and put his drink to his mouth. Yes, Hemingway. This was a favorite Kim topic. I should say an inevitable Kim topic.

"Well, I've been thinking about it, man. No, just in general terms. And Abigail, well, she was always accusing me of this so-called 'complex.' As if she had a clue. Word up."

He leaned forward and threw out his hands. His red face took on a serious aspect and he gesticulated in a slightly rocking motion.

"OK, you've got your definition of the complex: someone, well, a guy, anywhere between 25 and, uh, 65, who fixates on Hemingway and wants to emulate the dude's actions in every way, except write great novels, and, generally, go to war."

He smiled inwardly, like a serene Buddha, impressed by the opening to his lecture.

"There's some types still go to war on a Hemingway kick," he proceeded. "I knew one guy, OK? -- He got his Nikon, couple of lenses, off to Afghanistan in the early '80s. OK, so I didn't know him, but the story got around. He figured, well, the way into the pantheon of the greats is do the photojournalism gig, hit the front lines, win an award. A real hero, the whole nine yards.

"Three weeks there, he's moving out with a Russian tank division, slips in the mud and gets crushed to death by a tank. How about that? But he held the distinction of being the first 'photojournalist' -- actually the first foreigner of any stripe -- to die in that long, protracted conflict. By the time it was over, he was forgotten, completely forgotten."

Kim leaned back on his chair.

"Africa. This guy, right? Well, this guy tells me about a pal of his -- true story -- who was staying in a hotel in Tanzania. A tourist, mind you -- possessed by the complex one adventure-filled morning. Sees a riot taking place on the streets of, of, what you call it -- Dar es Salaam?"

I lifted two fingers at a passing waiter, nodded back at Kim.

"Dar es Salaam," he broke into an impish grin. "This guy -- lately of a Boston hospital -- decides to record the action -- he's got his camera, too, on the spot, big adventurer. He bolts from the breakfast table. Into the streets! Among the Dangs! He is immediately set upon by riot police, truncheoned over the head, gets his skull nice and cracked. Had to be flown out there. End of exotic holiday."

"Hopeless case," I concurred.

"Bullfighting. Well, the Hem' nut has no real passion for bullfights. I've been to dozens, run with the bulls, all of it -- but watching them? Say after a dozen times? It gets to be a drag, man -- especially on a slow day, windy day. Yeah. Yeah-yeah. Hey, salud."

Kim swallowed the dregs of rum in the glass.

"Maestro!" He shouted. The waiter headed over to our table with the drinks I'd just ordered, staring me quizzically -- I nodded and shrugged.

"No, man, this is it," Kim tapped his empty glass. "The core of the complex is drinking."

The fresh drinks set before us, we went back to work.

"Papa's greatest kick," Kim opined, "after death and writing -- in close conjunction with death and writing -- was booze. The Holy Trinity, man. Cheers."

He took a deep swig and prodded his index finger into my shoulder.

"You gotta learn ta' drink and get very, very drunk."

He raised his glass. I felt the giddy swirl of the words and booze. Kim slid down the mountain. He darted his eyes, scanned the room, looked at me very seriously now; the rings under those eyes had turned purple.

"But for me, it's boiling down to the death."

"The death? OK, it's all death." I smirked and lit a cigarette.

"The genuine article," he said. "Hem's not still out there machine-gunning sharks and gaffing Nazis. No way, Jose. No glossing over the brains-against-the-wall bit. I know it's not too palatable."

"It was the definitive gesture," I smirked in a deliberate taunt -- not knowing why.

"It's definitive, all right," he laughed weakly. "No changing your mind about it, eh? But for the dudes, it's a slight, uh, aberration. The proverbial bad hair day in the life of a god."

"The proverbial 12-gauge, both barrels."

"Because I been thinkin' about this carbon copy … Shit just piling up, up, up. You don't even know if it's real. The whole miserable fucked-up gig."

"The proverbial fucked-up gig."

Smart-ass comment. Lighten it up. It was the imp of the perverse. Now I wished that the subject be dropped entirely. I readjusted the sights from my drink, the table, Kim, scanning the room for women, trying to catch the eye of someone, the booze working inside me, guts churning. Kim stepped up his feelings a gear.

"Oh, OK. That's the deal," he smiled coldly. "Funny, is it? But do you know how it feels, when you're a … and you can't … Iss all right for you. Ha, ha, yeah, iss all right for you. You don't have to worry, do ya? What the fuck. Yeh."

He sneered in my general direction, put his drink to his mouth and kept it there, hunched his shoulders around his body as if to protect himself from attack.

"Kim, sorry."

"Nah, that's OK," Kim spoke to his glass.

The play worked. He gave up the ghost of his aggression. Why bother? He looked up. He was a very tired man.

"No, I'm sorry. I'm glad you came. I'm jus' needin', someone to talk to. Jus' gotta, lay it out, so's I see how it got ... How I got here. The, the summation."

"You're partying down," I grabbed his arm. "Take a load off. Think of what you have achieved, for Christ's sake. You've come a long way from ... From where you're from."

"Livingston."

"Yeah, Livingston, from where you started out."

"It's not that far, Lance. This is America, dude. It's all America. Don't think I ever got far away, enough. It's just one big neighborhood, man. JESUS!" -- he abruptly slammed an open hand on the table, my drink shook, a few patrons looked over at us, turned away.

"Jesus," he vented. "It's all over. How can I go back there? OK, there are the folks. I guess. But all the people I went to school with, that never moved away, cutting their grass and painting their white picket fences. It's all just a bad Bruce Springsteen song, man. Shitty Boss ballad, sad ol' freight trains n' farts in the wind."

"You could think of it more like Steinbeck, if you like."

"Yeah, but it ain't Steinbeck. It's Springsteen. It's a bunch of shitty clichés hangin' on every street corner. Five-and-dime sunsets. Nights in hell watching the tube."

Despite this succinct tirade, Kim was a big fan of Springsteen. He once gave me a tape he'd made: "The Boss, As I Know Him" -- although I couldn't take any of the songs: Born in the USA, Adam Raised a Cain, This Land is Your Land … Kim loved them all. He was a fanatic, right down to Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad -- the really depressing stuff.

First Hemingway, now Springsteen. Kim was dismantling his heroes, breaking them down. I'd read about that, how we destroy our heroes, first projecting our transference before staging revolt.

"Shitty Boss ballad -- man, that town was always too small for me," Kim shook his head repeatedly. "I still can't believe I'm going back... No, I don't wanna think about it. What a mess. Too complicated, too, too ... Abigail doesn't even know I'm here -- she thinks I'm Stateside, finding a job. To give her something, you know, and I'm not stingy that way. But shit, man, Abigail's got money. She's got her old man. Figure I can get blitzed in Belize, let my hair down, why not? It's over. She gotta know my every move? Don't fuckin' think so."

He raised his glass in the air for an invisible, bitter toast to Abigail's memory. He considered the rum swishing in the glass, mouth closed -- and sighed, defeated.

"Yeah, Livingston, I go back there, I'm pretty well ... Forgotten. Or walk into a bar, you know, coupla' clowns recognize me. Give me their sideways glances. Always been that way -- 'cept for this one pal, really wild guy. Fito. I miss Fito."

"You told me about him," I said, remembering the name, and surprised by the mention of it. "Didn't he steal your driver's license last time you saw him? Then stole a car and trashed it, pawned himself off as you? Your folks received these phone calls from the cops -- then the FBI called you in San Jose -- said they were after your ass?"

"Yeah, that's him," Kim said. "You're right, it wasn't too good. Abigail had a fit about it. But, I never said he was perfect, man. I never said Fito was perfect."

"What you basically said," I said, "was that he killed some people."

"Uh-huh. Vehicular manslaughter. It ruined him. Fito never would have would have stolen my license and done ... All that other shit -- if he hadn't got really screwed up doin' all that prison time for killing that woman and her child; which, after all, was a tragic accident." -- "Whatever you say, Kim."

"But it was, man, wassa' accident," Kim stamped his fist on the table for effect. "Plain bloody accident. Fell asleep at the wheel, driving back from Vail. It's a long way, man. Not to ski or any of that shit, just ... Dig the scene, man, check out the snow and fine babes. An' tha' beautiful people. Dream. Fito's car veered across the line, flat stretch of blacktop, open highway -- straight into the oncoming vehic, vehic, car. This woman and her child...

"Her family's lawyers crucified Fito in court -- afa he's let outta hospital. Call him, call him, a murderer. Fito had no chance. You donna' nuthin' in tha' States without MONEY."

Kim took a long slug -- he was there, drunk now -- said the word again: "Money."

He lit up a Pall Mall and said it again.

"Money" -- he pointed at me through gray smoke.

The money. Sure, tell it to the Hondurans. Tell that poor Garifuna whore.

"Over with Abigail and Fito's gone," Kim sighed. "Like I handle some shit, the whole fucking mess, if I wasn't ... Yeah."

Down, going down. I wasn't too far behind him, drinks-wise -- just those imaginary three drinks -- but the gap was closing. Sensed I was soon going to join Kim's black maelstrom, broiling out of the deep. When it came, it was always too late.

And so the night marched on. It had become a vigil, which was to have been expected, for Kim was laying bare his soul. He was making his cry in the darkness and I was supposed to pull him out of it, count off all the great things he had done. But I couldn't think of any.

I sat there, drinking.

Kim bounced his pain off me, studying his face in the mirror and seeing the failure of his life, as if the mirror could provide an answer, a solution, anything except his reflection -- mute and indifferent.

***

Full Wrong House: international traveler set, backpackers, party animals. After a considerable eternity, someone ended Bob Marley & The Wailers' reign, and we were now being treated to Beny Moré. Some hippies tried to dance. Several yuppies turned up -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, loudly chatting about hockey so I assumed they were Canadians. An assortment of locals, obviously blacks, gave the joint its groove.

I felt the booze fug enveloping every pore. Even if I could have caught a woman's eye -- and up to now I had actually caught several -- there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. My coordination was shot to hell, eyes red saucers, and my deodorant had given up on me long ago. I kept going to the bathroom, splashing water over my face, trying to get the red out; I'd return and Kim would be finishing another drink, calling for a new round.

It was getting on eight hours, and we'd certainly liberated the bar of at least one bottle of Captain Morgans. They no doubt thought we were jolly pirates, and the tab kept getting higher. Kim was obviously determined to blow a large wad; I'd brought along a fat stash, too, since I'd learned through harsh experience that it was never wise to run out of money in a bar.

Kim was now close to checkout time. His rocket to the moon had detached all its boosters; there was only the capsule of his brain floating inexorably forward, toward the meteor-pocked satellite, the dead sphere of his everlasting night.

"Wha' does a bitch n'stand? Huh? I ask you. Wha' does she know?"

"An' tell me, Kim. Wha' d' yah think you k-know, 'bout women?"

Now I was getting there, slurring along with him -- and I'd said the wrong thing, and Kim's anger flared anew.
"Hey! Shut up! Shut the fuck up. You a guy or what? You a guy? This is man-to-man shit, OK? Don't give me that liberal crap. I come down here 'cause a guy's a, guy and a chick's a fucken' ... chick! Nah, nah, but they're all the fucking same. Eat you up, spit you out -- spendin' yer money. It's all the same, same, same. And hey, hey, I don't see YOU saddled with a wife so ram it, you donna' know ... the fuck ... talkin' about an, an..."

He tapered off. I saw I had only two cigarettes left and decided to order another pack, loudly intoning the demand to a passing waiter. Feeling arrogant, the way the booze worked inside and all of a sudden the world and every prick in it was at your beck and call. The waiter gave me a dirty look, but he went and got more Luckies. I tapped the pack on the table, threw another cigarette into my goddamned mouth and lit up.
"Hey," Kim piped up, and a sickly, enigmatic smile settled across his face. "You been to Tikal, man? Let's go to Tikal."

"That's Guatemala," I said.

"I know it's Guatemala! C'mon, you been?"

"Yeah, I've been."

"Aw! Ain't nowhere you ain't been?"

"I been nowhere a million fucken' times," I said.

"Tikal, man!" Kim, tunnel mode. "Jungle, man, jungle. I'm talkin' 'bout the Maya temples. Temple of the Jaguar. I wanna climb that fucker, check out my domain."

"Your domain."

"My world, man," he said. "C'mon, it'll be great. What's it like there, huh? What's it like? Jungle, far n' eye can see, uh? How, like, you know, it compare?"

"Great, great."

"I'll pay for a taxi. What, it's, only five hours to the border? Cross the fucken' border!"

"What do you mean -- a taxi?" I sneered. "It'll cost a fucking packet!"

"No, no," Kim enthused. "Been talking to some dudes. Taxi drivers. Guy says he'll take us for 100 bucks. Hundred Belize."

"Issa' lot, the same."

"I said I'll pay!"

"Say that now 'cause you're fucking drunk," I swallowed some rum. "You change your mind in the morning. You're nuts, more screwed than I thought."

"You wound me," he retorted. "You wound me. Fuck you, I go my own."

"Don't pull that shit," I said angrily. "I came here, remember? Too see you. Don't fuck with me, for once."

"I make the offer! I treat," he said. "TREAT! So what am I, an asshole?"

"OK, OK," I said.

"Am I? Am I?"

"OK," I said.

"We go?"

"We think about it."

"We go, then."

"You pay to the border."

"Temple of the Jaguar, man." Kim purred, with a satisfied finality.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

"The Jaguarrrr..."

Kim swigged his rum, chuckled into his glass, tilted the glass at the lights above enclosed in their Chinese globes, held it over the flickering candle on our table. He cocked an eye and beamed grotesquely at the kaleidoscope of colors he made in the honeyed clutter of melting ice cubes, lost in the minute world he now magnified to encompass an entire continent. Making a bleary reconnaissance of the room, I vaguely wondered if there were others here getting as plastered as us, knew it was time to wrap it up, but couldn't, wouldn't.

It abruptly began to rain. Excluding my brief spell from the airport to the Bon Adventure, and the stroll to the Wrong House, I'd seen virtually nothing of the outside world this day. I don't think I'd looked up once at the sky -- assuming it to be a blank, bluish nothingness. Now the jukebox competed to be heard over the pounding deluge and peals of thunder.

"It rains some, at night," Kim observed, then lowered his head and sighed, deeply, swinging high swing low with each toss of the rum. Its flat, viscid schizophrenia played him any way it liked.

"Yeah, I, find ... Well, find," he pronounced, slowly going over each word, talking to the table, carefully dictating the anarchic swirl. "People, innaressin' suckers -- I'm an, inneress, sucker. Not ... Meanin' you, like you're not, a sucker. But it's, if I don't find 'em, I sure don't care. No, I don't. I ask you to come -- dig what I'm saying, 'cause you done it. Out there. You done ... All I wanted, to do. Make my mark. All I wanted. Transcend the predestined gig. Get off the bus. Get off the bus ... An' I'm goin' to the shitter."
Kim lifted himself off the chair, and knocked the chair to the ground. A couple of people cheered -- he spasmodically bowed to them, Kim the performer, not smiling, eyes half-closed. He then jerked erect and stumbled off to the men's room.

Get off the bus -- the sensation of it. Complete escape.

Kim returned to the table, but didn't take his seat; he called out to a waiter in the crowd, began scribbling in the air for the bill, and, muttering incoherently, pulled out a wad of Belize dollars and threw them onto the table.

"Temple of the Jaguar." His face had collapsed.

He was gone, and then he started hollering.

"Fucken reggae CRAP! Gimme Jane's, Chilies. GIMME SOMETHIN' STATESIDE!" He sprang off, pushing through the dancers to the jukebox. He stared blearily at the machine, swaying over it. He pulled out some change. It fell to the floor.

"GIMME GUN CLUB!"

A waiter tried to take Kim by the arm, but he shook himself free and stumbled to the center of the dance floor. People quickly made a space, and over an innocuous Ziggy Marley tune Kim began bellowing an old Jeffrey Lee Pierce neo-punk song, a little known anthem from the 1980s LA club scene: Bad America. As he did so he evoked the dead junkie-poet's ghost in a twitching, palsied performance.

"An' issa BAD/Issa bad America/Unner Wessen' Skies! Izza bad Americaaaa!"

He beat his own time over the reggae music, violently jolting his head up and down, careening, making an absurd spectacle of himself. The hippies shrugged, stone-faced. I heard the table of yuppies ask each other what's he singing? -- and laugh.

A waiter moved through the throng and brusquely stuck the bill in my face.

"Got a modmon dar, mon."

"We go, go," I said.

"Be kind and do dat for us."

"I pay."

"Yah, move on, take de modmon wit you."

The bill was a whopper. I paid up. Telepathically, Kim broke out of his trip, saw the transaction being completed, and rushed over.

"We paid up? We paid up?"

"Yeah, yeah, paid up."

I gave Kim his change; he rammed it in the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt.

"Lessgo," he said urgently. "Lessgo."

I got up, looked down at the floor, it fell a mile and slowly rose back to my sandals. I stood still for a minute, and then felt I could walk.

"Lessgo."

Kim charged for the door, spun around and gave the crowd the finger.

"You're all losers!" He croaked, and starting pumping his fist in the air, chanting: "Bad America! Bad America! Bad America!"

He slammed into the door, banging his shoulder, got the door open, and staggered out onto the street. I followed him; it was raining harder than ever. Kim began a jig in the rain.

"I'm gonna ... Do it, yeah. Do it, yeah!"

"Wiss ... Which way to the hotel?" Feeling the exhaustion descend like a mallet.

Kim ignored me, lifted his face to the falling rain.

"Aaahghglglglh," he gulped down rain.

"Which fuckin' way, goddamnit!"

He stumbled off, I caught up behind. In a few minutes we were both soaked, drifting block after block through the storm, I presumed to the Bon Adventure, as lightning lit the sky and thunder hollowly cracked. No one else on the streets in this downpour.

"Honk 'em with your sirens," Kim said. "Honk 'em with your sirens."

Kim stopped at a corner. He stood panting, his scrawny body heaved, and scraggly hair ran over his eyes. He glowered in victory, mutely pointing down the crossroads. There, at the end of the street, I saw food stands covered in tarpaulin, under which sat several figures. Parked taxis. Taxi drivers. Kim, re-energized, zigzagged on the spot -- evidently gearing up for a sprint -- crinkling his face, manifesting a decision to act -- to rush into the act before any veneer of cogent logic dashed it to pieces. He bayed a feral whoop and laid both hands on my chest.

"I'M OUTTA HERE! OUTTA HERE! OUTTA HERE! Outta this shit hole -- TEMPLE OF THE JAGUAR! Go for a dive. HERE LIES KIM TYNER, HE JUMPED OFF THE JAGUAR! Put it on yer Livingston, Le Grand, Chowchilla Forest-fucking-Lawn Cemetery! Mah name in lights! I'm a death star! Death star!"

I tried grabbing his arms to hold him still; he squirmed violently and abruptly threw a punch. It missed, but I spun on the wet sidewalk to avoid the errant fist, and fell sprawling on the ground. The rain poured harder, thunder filled my ears.

"Yer won' find nuthin' in a fucken hurricane!" I hoarsely barked.

Kim zigged, zagged -- "Yah! Yah!" -- suddenly froze and pointed at me. An accusatory finger, it began to dissolve, the rain slid down his face: he looked like he was melting.

"Won' find," I uttered after him, "you won't find..." as I watched Kim stumble off, trip and fall, pick himself up, stumble once more and then break into a slow jog, and down past the crossroads of Belize City night, disappear.

The Caribbean freshet picked up on the wind, blowing itself out, cleaning away all the shit, sweeping Kim away with it.

Swept away. He was gone.

I lay down the sidewalk and let the rain pummel my face, soak my body. The wind died down, the rain settled into a measured adagio, I closed my eyes, God knows how many rums sunk and thinking I'm outta here, outta here, outta here...

***

I woke up curled next to the entrance of a barber's shop. The barber was contentedly cutting somebody's hair. Two old men sitting inside smoking pipes, leisurely gazed at my stirring form. They were expressionless as I briefly nodded to them, feeling like an utter bum. I turned and legs brushed past me. Saturday morning, Belize City. Hot and sunny. My mind then registered the last act: Kim had vanished with the night.

I dragged my sorry ass through the streets, asking directions as I went, back to the Bon Adventure. There was altogether less of my overall ass to drag -- I had been rolled by some opportunistic citizen, naturally.
I completed an unnerving inventory of what was missing: switchblade, wristwatch, onyx ring, silver crucifix ... Little trinkets defining my image of self had alighted to go and define someone else's image of self. Money gone -- of course. I thought of Kim sleeping soundly in his room. He better not be there...
He wasn't. I knew that. I pulled off my steaming clothes, collapsed on the bed and crashed all day. Rose at sunset, hungry, checked to see if Kim had turned up. He hadn't. Took a stroll over to the docks and ate a bowl of fried rice. Went back the Wrong House, asked them about Kim. They grimly shook their heads. Returned to the Bon Adventure.

Still, no Kim.

Sunday was a quiet day -- The Fear creeping in, that sense of dread. My flight left Monday morning. Maybe Kim had made it to Tikal -- or at least Belmopan, on the border. I tried to find the taxi stand -- I couldn't even find the barber's shop.

Finally I decided to go to the police. I told them about Kim. They had me go through the motions of filing a missing persons report. They called the Bon Adventure. If he didn't show up there in a week, they'd send the report to the authorities in Belmopan. They didn't act too enthusiastic.

The next morning I packed and had the staff call me a taxi. In lieu of Kim's absence, I paid an extra week on his room, and had the concierge lock up his belongings in the hotel safe. If he didn't return, the hotel management was to forward Kim's small backpack and change of clothes to Abigail's apartment in San Jose. I flew back to Tegucigalpa.

A week passed. I entertained the fantasy that Kim might phone, e-mail me from some cyber café or whatever, even turn up at my doorstep, shamefaced, sheepishly grinning, sorry if I scared you, man … Nothing. After 10 days of restlessness and worry, phoning Abigail every 48 hours and thoroughly engaging myself in all the futile mystery of Kim's disappearance, the frustrations had piled so high, that I finally unplugged the computer one evening, settled back with a bottle of I.W. Harpers, and set the mambo blasting.

The next morning I called Kiki, and told him to crank up the Cessna.

***

Kim e-mailed yesterday ... Funny reading back over these notes. That was a long ago yesterday -- going on two years now ... Two years since I last saw Kim, stumbling off in the rain to find his Temple of the Jaguar. In the churning tempest of his mind, Kim knew the deal. He only wanted to get off the bus. I wondered if he'd ever got back on it.

I spoke with Abigail again after the drama of her husband's vanishing act plateaued. Initially, she'd been quite distraught. She contacted Kim's parents, who then informed the U.S. authorities. The wheels of bureaucracy trundled with great excitement; then ground to a halt. Abigail's concerns were then replaced by cynicism. She figured Kim had done a "runner" to avoid paying her support.

I told her he'd had no intention of doing that, even if under the terms of their marital agreement Kim was not duty-bound to hand over one cent. I tersely intimated that as far as I knew, this agreement -- which in the event of a breakup neither party was subject to any form of financial liability -- was signed at the express wish of her parents, since they were unwilling to authorize ownership of the apartment her father had given her, jointly to the newlyweds.

"You assholes are all the same," she said, and hung up.

I soldiered on with my gold operations in the Mosquitia, and spent many nights speculating over Kim's fate. By degrees I lost interest in alcohol, and after that, the jungle, and spending my life alone. I headed back to the world, kicked around for a bit and eventually found a job with a petroleum company. I met a Mexican woman, a tourism consultant. We plan to marry. Maybe one day I'll even take her home.

***

Recently, I had to fly from San Diego to Seattle on business. During the uneventful transit, passing high over the Californian coastline on a warm, cloudless afternoon, I sipped Evian and stared out the window at a band of sunlight reflecting off the wing. A vision of Kim suddenly danced before my eyes.

I felt the urge to look down, craned my neck and saw a small town far below, slowly passing beneath the thick partition of circular glass. It was a mere daub set amid the vast canvass of desiccated rock that formed the bleak contours of a continent. I became possessed of a plaintiveness I couldn't decipher; it slowly cohered into a pensive reverie. I wondered if Kim had not indeed finally made it back stateside, to become a salesman, truck driver or bank clerk, another chump in hog heaven.

He was probably down there, Kim the Prodigal Son returned to the mirrored fold, to live and work, find another woman, and laugh from time to time -- more than he ever had before, and perceive the awakening of a footsore wisdom. I could see him, getting ready for work on a bright morning before breakfast, staring in the mirror as he shaved, and in a fleeting shaft of sunlight reconcile dreams full of headlines with the anonymity of his memories.

The outpost of souls engaged in the human drama far below me vanished, replaced by the barren stasis of landscape. It had appeared no more than a trifle of construction, illuminating meek bands of contentment.
It was from this random geometry of colored boxes and crisscrossing lines -- there, or a town like it -- that Kim had traced the inexorable axis of his journey, along the same weather-beaten coastline thousands of miles south, stretching from the Mustangs and Springsteen songs to the Indian temples and slave-built cities; and beyond Kim's miles and potentialities, farther south to the Amazon and Andes, and north to Alaska and the Arctic Circle; from the top to the bottom of the world, a prodigy of impassive fate.

It was still America, Kim's bad America. He'd never left it, and he never would.