Beneath a Panamanian Moon (32 page)

He was a big man, holding his head up and playing the melody with one finger. I went to the bar, bought two Balboas and carried them over to the piano.

The piano player had a tattoo of an eagle, globe, and anchor on his right hand. He was a Marine. And so were his friends.

Bars catering to servicemen are strictly segregated. Squids drink with squids, grunts drink with grunts, and marines drink with marines. Anyone else is made to feel brutally unwelcome, and this bar was, at least for the evening, wall-to-wall jarhead.

“Semper fi,” I said, and sat next to the leatherneck, who was still plunking out “Heart and Soul” with his index finger. I handed him a beer.

“Semper fi, Marine,” he said. He looked very sad and very drunk.

“Incoming!”

I ducked and a bottle shattered against the wall, showering us in glass. Mr. Heart and Soul didn't blink. Casually, I started playing the left-hand harmony. He looked over at me and smiled. “Hey, man, that sounds like fucking A-okay, you know?”

“Thanks,” I said, and watched the door. Three of the white-shirted men came in and looked around. One of them saw me and pointed. They started to wade through the drunken Marines.

I made a suggestion. “Hey, partner, you mind if we play something different?”

“It's the only song I know,” he said.

“You could sing!”

“I don't know any songs,” he said sadly.

“You know this one.” I played a few introductory chords and the bar went silent.

“To the corps!” I yelled.

“Fuck the corps!” they yelled back. Thank God, a cooperative audience. My experience had taught me to play to the crowd. They want Gershwin, give 'em Gershwin. They want Bach, give 'em Bach. This crowd cried out for “The Marines' Hymn” and I gave it to them.

“‘From the halls of Montezu-u-ma,'” I sang, and one by one, the men stood and sang with me. “‘To the shores of Trip-o-li.'” The bar rang with drunken men in full-throated song. The white-shirted Latinos in shiny black shoes pushed their way toward the piano.

“‘We will fight our country's ba-a-ttles,'” we North Americans sang together. The men in white shirts were next to me now. One gripped my elbow. “Venga. Come with me,” he yelled.

“‘On the land, and on the sea.'”

He pulled me away from the piano. The music stopped.

“Hey!” I yelled. “What the fuck you think you're doing?”

The marines stopped singing, confused, and stared at the reason why their music had been interrupted. They didn't like this. Like the fish in the lagoon, and the birds in the sky, they had been together so long they had come to think with a single, collective mind.

“Hey!” I said again. The room was quiet. The Marines looked at the white-shirted men and the men looked nervous.

My piano-playing partner grabbed one man's shirt. “Why don't you hike your little brown hoochie ass down the fuckin'
calle,
huh, Pancho?”

“We are Colombian officers and you will remove your hand from my apparel,” the man said, all puffed up.

My piano partner dropped his hand.

“Oh, excuse me,” he said. “I thought you were Panamanian. I hate Panamanians. In fact, the only thing I hate more than Panamanians is fucking officers.” The punch came from south of the border and caught the Colombian square on the chin. As he crumpled to the floor, the other two officers froze.

I raised my fist in the air and yelled, “These guys think they can whip the U.S. Marines!”

The Marines looked shocked, then angry, then truly, truly happy. One of the men pulled a gun and the entire room fell on him before the barrel could clear his trousers. I looked for a way out.

I have to say, the two conscious Colombians held their own. I saw a couple of Marines fall as I crawled on all fours across the floor. I edged along the wall, trying to avoid the broken glass. A chair splintered over my head. A man came down hard in front of me and I had to crawl over him. I found the door and hit the sidewalk. There was the other white-shirt waiting for me. He grabbed me by the arm.

That's when La Guardia Nacional, the police force that's always there when you need them but especially when you don't, pulled up in the Black Maria. The first patrolman hollered, “¡Alto!” and cracked the white-shirt with his baton. I put my hands up. “Lo siento,” I yelled. “I'm sorry.” It was the best I could do.

They threw me into the back of the wagon and I was soon joined by the Marines, who were joined by the four Colombian officers. They were pretty ragged, but that didn't stop the Marines from continuing to beat them all the way to the Modello, the Panama City jail. You would have thought their arms would get tired, but then, you probably haven't been drinking with Marines. I recommend it, at least once.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Panamanian government, as a whole, works with the same expediency as a Stateside DMV. But inside the Modello, criminals are processed like cattle in a slaughterhouse. The beaten Colombians were taken to the clinic to reflect on the awesome power of music and the Corps.

Those of us who could walk were herded down a dark hallway and thrown into El Tanque de Noche, the Night Tank. It was a large cell, thirty by thirty feet, with bars on two sides and cold stone walls along the other two. In this room was the human debris the La Guardia swept off the streets after dark. On New Year's Eve, this cell would soon be SRO with murderers, rapists, pickpockets, underage prostitutes, drug dealers, and foreign civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, usually with their peckers exposed.

Marilyn had told me a story about two Italian sailors, whose hair length had been considered a misdemeanor by the police, snatched off the street, given a more appropriate buzz cut, and escorted back to their ship in an ambulance. A minor international incident followed when the captain of the Italian liner, in high Italian umbrage, refused to allow any Panamanian officials on board. This humiliated the dictator, Omar Torrijos, who was scheduled to ride through the Canal on the luxury liner as a gesture of Panamanian-Italian friendship.

Not one to take insult lightly, General Torrijos impounded the ship until a substantial amount of cash changed hands and public apologies were issued by the Italian government. The people of El Chorillo cheered their hero in a parade that broke out into a riot that killed three Panamanian students. In Panama, it did not take much for events to spin out of control, and when they did, someone, usually a Panamanian, ended up dead.

But in the Modello, things were always in control, even in the Night Tank. Only visible bottles and guns were confiscated, so the men and women had money, cigarettes, drugs, and weapons, the essentials of modern urban life. But even with temptations and opportunities, there were few problems as the residents fell into a workable social contract: All property was communal. If you were big, you got what you wanted. If you were small, you didn't.

All I wanted was out. Not that the simple life of the Night Tank wasn't appealing, and I did need rest, but I had pressing obligations. My watch was gone, but I could tell we were approaching midnight by the increasing levels of intoxication of the new prisoners.

Another American was brought in and he sat next to me. He was a mycologist, he said, traveling throughout Latin America studying the use of psychedelic fungi in indigenous religious ceremonies. His name was Eric. “I've been in graduate school for eight years,” he told me. “The best thing I learned was how to write a grant.”

“You mean the government pays you to get high with the Indians?”

“Yeah. What do you do?”

“I play piano. Right now I'm studying the blues.”

He laughed. “A philosopher.”

“Jail does that to you.”

Eric dug into his brown Boy Scout pack and pulled out a plastic bag filled with wrinkled, knotty-looking things the size of my thumb. He popped one into his mouth and swallowed. “You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Hey, it takes your head places where your body can't go.”

Eric and I sat for a while watching the other inmates settle in for the night. People curled up on the stone floor and huddled together for warmth.

“This whole part of the world's gotten real scary,” said Eric. “Especially Colombia and southern Panama. Before, almost no one in Darien had guns, and now it's like everyone's got one. I try to tell the
campesinos
that nonviolent resistance is the way to go, like Gandhi and Dr. King, but they get their hands on a machine gun and they want to use it. Can't really blame 'em, I guess, considering how long they've been getting fucked over.”

“You've seen the people in Darien with machine guns?”

“Nasty-looking things.”

Eric was starting to get a faraway look in his eye. He'd be over the rainbow soon.

“Where'd you see these guns? What'd they look like?”

“Geez, I don't know. But I've seen pictures of them. Seems like whenever there's something on TV about war in the third world you see them. Usually being carried by kids.”

“You mean AK-47s?”

Eric shrugged. “I don't know. That's not really my thing, you know?”

“Where'd the guns come from, they say?”

“The Indians say they fall from the sky.” Eric smiled, already in a more peaceful place. “I heard they're coming in from Cuba.”

“Could be.”

“Indians say they come from ‘the Lamb.'”

“How many of these mushrooms do you have to eat before you see the Lamb?”

Eric laughed again. Laughter was coming easier now than before. “No, no, it's not like that. This is a real guy. Funny, though.”

“What's funny?”

“The Indians call him by a French name.”

“The Lamb?”

“Yeah. They call him ‘Mouton.' That's French for ‘lamb.' Strange, huh?”

“No. I don't think it's strange at all.”

“Hey, man, you ever really look at your knuckle? See all those creases.” He broke into a wide grin. “Like pleated pants.”

I left Eric staring at his fingers, his pupils big enough to suck in the world, his head high enough to consider the universe of an atom.

Most of the other prisoners were sleeping. In a far corner, a Marine was negotiating a trade with one of the prostitutes. Eric was passing boundaries without a visa, and I was wondering about Mouton, or Morton, however you said it, arming the rebellious underclass with crates of AKs and making sure Fidel got the credit, if not the cash.

I learned how government works from my time in Washington and it's really quite simple. If you had a job, you worked to make that job bigger. That was your job. So, if Morton's job was to fight terrorism, it would be a smart career move to make sure there were plenty of terrorists to fight. Arming them with Chinese weapons and making it look as though the Canal were in deep shit would certainly make his job secure.

But Morton's real genius was in getting somebody else to pay for the arms that would go to the revolutionaries. And with the DEA, CIA, NSC, NSA, and other USA acronyms willing to deal with every scummy thug on earth before they would walk across the hall and share intel with one another, Morton could play one group off the other and retire early with whatever cash he'd stashed away in the Caymans.

Deep in chasing these thoughts to ground, I didn't see we had visitors until a guard poked me with a rifle.

“That's him, Officer. That's my husband.” In the darkness of the corridor I saw Kris pointing her finger at me and shaking her head. “How can you get involved in a bar fight? And why weren't you in the hotel? I swear, I take my eyes off you for a minute and you end up in prison.” She looked at the La Guardia officer. “And a very nice prison it is, I'm sure.” The officer looked confused at first, then he looked at me and shrugged. “Mujer?”

“Sí,” I said. “My wife.”

“Lo siento,” he said quietly, obviously a man with his own mujer troubles.

He held a finger to his lips for silence, unlocked the door, and I followed him down the dark corridor, Kris at my side.

“What am I supposed to tell my parents?” Kris said. “And Billy and little Susie. I'm sorry, kids, but your daddy can't come to your high school graduation. He's locked up in a foreign prison for the rest of his life. Honestly, sometimes I think you mean to cause this family grief and upset, that it's your purpose in life.”

And on she went until the officer led us through several unlocked doors and into an open courtyard. “Ssssh,” he hissed. We walked along the outside wall until we came upon a small barred gate set into the stone. The guard opened the gate and turned his back. Kris and I slid through the opening and strolled casually down an alley. I expected someone to stop us but we joined the people on the street without any alarms going off or angry gendarmes taking target practice at the fleeing gringos.

The sidewalks were in full party mode, with half-naked dancing, open bottles passed from stranger to stranger, and music, everywhere music, accented by fireworks that made me jump.

“How'd you know where to find me?”

“Phil.”

“How did you find him? Where is he? Is Marilyn all right?”

“I don't know how he found us. He just showed up at the bar and took us to Choppo's. Yes, Marilyn is safe.”

“Okay, okay. Just keep moving.”

“I'm so tired I can hardly walk.”

I put my arm around Kris's waist and said, “Wherever we collapse, at least we collapse together.”

“Marilyn warned me you were a romantic.”

“You two had a long talk about me, huh?”

“No, we soon moved on to more interesting things, like getting our legs waxed.”

“How is she?”

“About the same as the rest of us. Scared and tired. But she's safe in bed at Choppo's house.”