Banana Republican by Eric Rauchway

Author:Eric Rauchway
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429933117
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8

* * *

I held the pistol still in my hand after I stopped firing. I wanted everyone to have a good look and wonder if maybe I wasn’t quite finished shooting people. After a moment I took a quick look around at the fellows on deck. Buttons was looking right at me, one eyebrow raised. But the rest of them, the crew, were working hard to keep their gaze anywhere else. Which was good.

I don’t like to think of myself as the kind of fellow who would shoot someone out of pique or carelessness. I hadn’t tried very hard to hit Boater Hat. And at that range maybe I missed him. With the tilt of the boat deck and the tug’s engines pushing hard against the harbor chop, it wouldn’t have been difficult for a set of shots to go far wide of the mark. Perhaps he’d slipped back into the water because a fit of great good judgment washed over him when he heard shots being fired in his direction.

Or perhaps I did hit him. If so, there was no help for it. The thing was, once I’d taken a look around at the crew, I just knew I had to do something impressive, and right quick. You see, none of the fellows on the deck looked white to me. Even these days, an American boat registered in New York ought to have one or two Americans on it. But every single fellow on the deck was a dago—Mexicans, mainly, by the look of them. What’s more, they didn’t look all that much like sailors. For one thing, more than a few of them had cartridge belts crossed over their chests and rifles stuck in a scabbard across their backs. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I’d just been pitched into their midst more or less at their mercy, and I wanted them to worry about me. Shooting someone would make me worrisome. And Boater Hat offered himself as the most plausible person to need shooting at. So I shot at him, and if I hit him, well, he had put himself squarely in my way, there was no doubting that.

All the same, I wondered if it wouldn’t suit my purposes just as well for him to get back to New York bearing word of the high style in which I’d departed. There went old Tom, guns drawn, riding a well-armed makeshift warship straight into the thick of the great good fight. It’d make fine copy if the press ever got hold of it, and I would have handed it along myself to any reporter I could, if I knew when I’d next see one. Hell, it might even be worth an illustration, me standing in the lee of the Stars and Stripes, blazing away—

Which was another thing. Up atop the tug’s superstructure, it was not Old Glory at all, but the Nicaraguan flag flapping madly in the breeze we made as we went.

From below, the beginning of an explanation appeared.

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