Copyright © 1986, 1996-2008, Randy R. Johnson, all rights reserved
Yellow kerosene light splashed the walls of Leo's little wooden hut and the smell was of fish frying. In through the open shutters, in past the knotted curtain of red lace came the roll of the Caribbean surf, over the mumble of gas generators. White moonlight spattered the banana leaves outside, and in the darkness beneath the little wooden table, mosquitoes sucked quietly on our ankles.
"All right, all right, all right," Leo's greeting danced across the room as he shuffled in from the kitchen with big bowls of black beans and rice. Leo's dark, murky eyes glowed in the warm light, and his furrowed black face hovered in mid-smile, white eyebrows arched, metal gleaming from his mouth.
Leo spoke slowly, in crisp, quiet pidgin. "There you are, ladies and gentlemen. Now, I can get you more breadfruit, if you like."
Ani beamed up at him, "Oh yes, Leo, and more of your coffee, please." She grinned at Ray and I. The pale light bathed our faces, making us appear much cleaner than we were.
"All right, ma'am." Leo's eyes twinkled into Ani's smile as he turned to the kitchen. "All right, all right."
Ani was French, young and attractive in a dusky, road-worn way. Ray was Australian, tall and wiry. They had traveled together six weeks since Guatemala City. I was neither young nor attractive, just sun-bleached and road-worn. We had met on the weekly mail boat to Tamarindo two weeks before. We were travelers together in this foreign land, and Tamarindo was as far as you could travel, so there we stayed.
We stalked turtles on the beach at night and read in our hammocks in the heat of the day. We borrowed Leo's dugout and paddled up the mangrove creeks in the cool mornings, watching the monkeys, caymans, and swamp birds. We swapped our road stories and believed each other the little lies we told. We were excellent company and the days passed unheeded.
This place is not Costa Rica, I thought then, as I tucked into the black beans. The slap of dominoes pealed from the store across the field. Tamarindo, and Leo, were Caribbean -- lazy, laughing, friendly.
I had spent eight months wandering through Central America, and the east coast was what I liked best. It was the people. They were Caribbean, from Belize on down through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
There, in Tamarindo, we were six hours down river, six hours of swamp and jungle to the nearest road that led to Costa Rica -- Spanish, Catholic, somewhat civilized Costa Rica. It could as well have been Nicaragua, or the moon.
Even in its heyday, Tamarindo had been a sleepy backwater of a timber town. Before that, only Miskito Indians had camped at the mouth of the Rio Dulce where tarpon, sharks, and sea turtles spawned.
The lumber company went bust and the huts they left behind were claimed by castaways, fishermen, and those too broken themselves to move on with the jobs. That was twenty-some years ago.
What remained was a scattering of huts among the palms and breadfruit trees in a narrow triangle between the river, the jungle, and the rough sea. There was one store, a makeshift bar and no restaurant, but meals could be arranged at Miss Mary's or at Leo's little hut, just a few hundred yards from the jungle.
There was precious little in Tamarindo, but it was the only outpost for hours, between the unguarded frontier up the coast and the encroaching plantations up river.
Jose Maria was one of those stranded in Tamarindo. He was propped there against the wall by the front window of Leo's hut that night. His thick lower lip sagged out, exaggerating its bulbous size and dragging the rest of his thick round face down with it. His cheeks sagged, his eyes sagged; only his cropped black hair held firm, standing out thick and bristly from his sagging scalp. Jose Maria was a simple-minded, middle-aged drunk.
"Hey, Mister Joe!" A heavy laugh echoed from his barrel chest and a single white tooth poked up from the side of his mouth. One step carried him across the cabin floor.
"Yo soy Indio, cuño carajo! Nicaraguense. No black man, Fisher-man. 'Come, I make you fishers of men"'. Jose stumbled back and grabbed my shoulder to keep afloat. "Ha! They ask me before go out to sea." He was leaning dangerously close to my eyebrows. "Jose Maria know where Fish go."
Leo returned with a bowl of fried breadfruit and a big enamel coffee pot. "All right, there you are, folks." Then he snapped, "Jose! Jose Maria, c'mon boy, leave these folks to eat now." He pulled Jose up by one arm and Jose let himself be led back to the window.
Leo shuffled back to us, uncertainly. "Jose Maria don't hurt any body. But he don't know when he's being a bother to folks. You understand." Leo tilted his head over at Jose.
"Yessir," he said to no one in particular, "Jose Maria's almost as black as me. But he ain't no black man. And he sure ain't no white man, or Ladino either. Nossir. He's just an Indian -- pure blood, and he don't know any different. Hard enough being colored in this Spanish-man country."
Leo looked down at his laceless sneakers; the tongues flopped over the toes. "Jose Maria was a big fisherman with his people in Nicaragua. Yessir." Jose Maria looked up to Leo and his glazed eyes glistened. "Least wise, that's what he says."
The wind quickened and the gruesome screams of the howler monkeys rose out of the jungle, filling the blackness outside. White lights played across the grass and the sound of laughter wandered up onto the front porch.
"Oiga! Hay comida? Hey, Leo, you got food?" A tall man with straight black hair and mustache filled the doorway, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Behind him came a smaller, round-faced brown man and a lanky young black. Banana men from up river. They were grinning and smelled of rum.
"Yes sir? You want to eat here now?" Leo asked.
"Sí, hombre, tenemos hambre," the smaller man spurted out. Leo waited for the bigger man to say in English, "We, ah, hungry, Leo." He had taken the grin off his face and tried to look humble.
"Well, I don't know if I have anything left for you all. You know I only make enough for people that tells me ahead." The three men stared at each other in silence. "Well, I'll see if I can get you some beans and rice." Leo moved slowly back to the kitchen.
The two Ladinos sat at the only other table and lapsed into guffaws, and talk of the trip down river. The black man didn't join them, although he certainly spoke Spanish. He leaned on the doorway sipping from a half pint bottle and watched the kitchen door.
"Eh, amigos," Jose Maria re-emerged from his corner and stood at the smaller man's shoulder, wheedling in Spanish. "Don't you have a little drink for Jose Maria, eh?" Just then he stumbled forward and fell over the man's legs, sprawling him off his stool.
"Bastard! Son of a whore!" the man cried. He jumped up quickly and kicked Jose Maria in the stomach. "Stupid Indian." He kicked him again.
"Get out," shouted the bigger man. Jose Maria lay still on the floor, gasping and drooling. Ray and I glanced at each other, round-eyed. "Vaya!" he shouted again as he grabbed the bulbous black head at his knees and flung Jose over on his side toward the door. The startled black man lowered the bottle from his lips and backed into the half-light.
The big man had his hand on a hunting knife when I heard Ray shout, "Hey, leave him alone!" The authority in his voice startled me as much as his recklessness. "He's not hurting you," he said with less conviction.
The big man's eyes burned through Ray. He was more drunk than he looked. He slammed his fist down too hard on the table and stood up abruptly, leaning on the fist as his stool clattered to the floor. "You big,...talk big, Gringo," he slurred loudly. "I close you mouth, good. Stan... stand up!"
Ani clutched my sleeve, leaning unconsciously away from Ray. The big man grasped the sheathed knife so tightly that his hand shook.
Ray stared back wide-eyed and his nostrils flared. The short man stepped back against the curtain and reached down slowly into the front of his pants, his face intent on Ray. Ray hadn't seen the movement -- I had to say something. Now.
But it was the clean, heavy click of metal that broke the silence from the kitchen door, where Leo stood with a big wooden-butted pistol filling his hand.
The kerosene light played across the dull-steel barrel and Leo's heavy thumb stuck straight up from the cocked hammer. His legs were spread and his left hand dangled at his side. Leo was dwarfed by the door frame, and by the size of the pistol that glared from his grasp, yet his voice was calm.
"You don't act like that in this place," he said slowly. "Now you all get out of my house right now." We sat motionless at our table and the screams of the howlers sent cold streams of sweat down my back.
"You gonna shoot us all dead, Leo?" The tall man laughed, too loudly. He stood only six feet from Leo.
"Yeah, Leo, you keel us all wit dat pistola, huh?" The little man spoke boldly but with a quiver in his voice. Leo's .45 was pointed at his belly, where his hand still rested on a pistol butt.
"Well now, that just depends on you all." Leo spoke with the same open-faced innocence he had that morning when we asked him if he would be making supper. "Well now," he said then, looking around wide-eyed, "that just depends on you all."
Hearing him repeat those words with the same bright-eyed servility, almost made me laugh. For all his humble sadness, there was no mistaking the conviction behind Leo's words. He would certainly shoot them all if they forced him to, just as certainly as he had our supper ready at six-thirty.
Spoken across his steady .45, Leo's words broke the rowdy mood of the men from up river. Their shoulders sagged and their chins dropped towards the floor.
"Vaya, put down the gun, Leo. We don't mean no trouble," the tall man crooned.
"I don't mean no man no harm," Leo spoke flatly and straight ahead, to no one in particular. "So you all get out of my place. And don't you come back." The pistol gestured rudely toward the door where the black man stuffed the bottle into his pants.
"Vamos, muchachos," the big man slurred. Defeated and shamed, the three shuffled out of the house, and creaked down the steps.
Leo bolted the door before releasing the hammer carefully with both hands. Jose Maria crawled back onto his stool by the wall, sniveling.
Leo turned and glared at us without a smile. "Those sons o' bitches got no business actin' like that in here. And they know it, too. They get so crazy drunk, they think they can do any thing. They come down 'cause we got no law man in Tamarindo, not like up river."
"Dammit, they can't do those things in my place. They make me get my gun." Leo looked down sideways as if the gun were an ugly wound on the end of his dangling hand.
"Sons o' bitches!" The pain and the sadness of hate welled up and twisted Leo's face as he spat the words out slowly. Sweat gleamed like wax over his pitted black nose in the yellow waves of kerosene light.