Limekiller!

Who even at once declared, ‘“And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three, and the greatest of these is charity,’ you would not deny the Apostle Paul, would you, then, sir?”

“Eh? Uh. no,” said Limekiller. Pretense cast aside, craning and gaping all around: nothing.

“Anything to offer me?” demanded the wee and ancient, with logic inexorable.

So there had gone a dime. And then and there had come the decision to visit St. Michael of the Mountains, said to be so different, so picturesque, hard upon the frontier of “Spanish” Hidalgo, and where (he reminded himself) he had after all never been.

Sometimes being lonely it bothers the way a tiny pebble in the shoe bothers: enough to stop and do something. But if one is very- lonely indeed, then it becomes an accustomed thing. Only now did Limekiller bethink himself how lonely he had been. The boat and the Bay and the beastie-cat had been company enough. The average National boatman had a home ashore. The two men and two women even now aboard the Saccharissa in jammed-together proximity — they had each other. (And even now, considering another definition of the verb to have and the possible permutations of two males and two females made him wiggle like a small boy who has to go —). There was always, to be sure, the Dating Game, played to its logical conclusion, for a fee, at any one of the several hotels in King Town, hard upon the sea. But as for any of the ladies accompanying him anywhere on his boat.

“Whattt? You tink I ahm crazy? Nutting like dot?’’

Boats were gritty with sand to fill the boggy yards and lanes, smelly with fish. Boats had no connotations of romance.

Such brief affairs did something for his prostate gland (“Changing the acid,” the English called it), but nothing whatsoever, he now realized, for his loneliness. Nor did conversation in the boatmen’s bars, lately largely on the theme of, “New tax law, rum go up to 15c a glass, man!”

And so here he was, fifty miles from home, if King Town was “home” — and if the Saccharissa was home. well, who knew? St. Michael of the Mountains still had some faint air of its days as a port-and-caravan city, but that air was now faint indeed. Here the Bayfolk (Black, White, Colored, and Clear) were outnumbered by Turks and ’Paniar’s, and there were hardly any Arawack at all. (There seldom were, anywhere out of the sound and smell of the sea.) There were a lot of old wooden houses, two stories tall, with carved grillwork, lots of flowering plants, lots of hills: perhaps looking up and down the hilly lanes gave the prospects more quaintness and interest, perhaps even beauty, than they might have had, were they as level as the lanes of King Town, Port Cockatoo, Port Caroline, or Lime Walk. And, too, there were the mountains all about, all beautiful. And there was the Ningoon River, flowing round about the town in easy coils, all lovely, too: its name, though Indian in origin, allowing for any number of easy, Spanish-based puns:

“Suppose you drink de wat-tah here, sah, you cahn-not stay away!”

„En otros paises, senor, otros lugares, dicen manana. Pero, por aca, senor, se dice ningun!”

And so forth.

Limekiller had perambulated every street and lane, had circumambulated town. Like every town and the one sole city in British Hidalgo, St. Michael’s had no suburbs. It was clustered thickly, with scarcely even a vacant lot, and where it stopped being the Town of St. Michael of the Mountains, it stopped. Abruptly. Here was the Incorporation; there were the farms and fields; about a mile outside the circumambient bush began again.

He could scarcely beat every tree, knock on every door. He was too shy to buttonhole people, ask if they had seen a knockout redhead. So he walked. And he looked. And he listened. But he heard no women’s voices, speaking with accent from north of the northern border of Mexico. Finally he grew a little less circumspect.

To Mr. John Paul Peterson, Prop., the Emerging Nation Bar and Club:

“Say. are there any other North Americans here in town?”

As though Limekiller had pressed a button, Mr. Peterson, who until that moment had been only amiable, scowled an infuriated scowl and burst out, “What the Hell they want come here for? You think them people crazy? They got richest countries in the world, which they take good care keep it that way; so why the Hell they want come here? Leave me ask you one question. Turn your head all around. You see them table? You see them booth? How many people you see sitting and drinking at them table and them booth?”

Limekiller’s eyes scanned the room. The question was rhetorical. He sighed. “No one,” he said, turning back to his glass.