The Next New World: Stories by Bob Shacochis

Author:Bob Shacochis [Shacochis, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

for Barbara Azar Davis

THE TRAPDOOR

ONE

Like the unambitious towers of the New World, the playhouses rose before the passengers to a modest height and then stopped unconvincingly. The pilot tied off the skiff to the landing and waited to be paid. The first gentleman out turned back to offer a hand to the lady, lifting her up by the elbow onto the boardwalk stuck into the muddy bankside. Resisting the urge to return with the ferryman to London, Sir Philip’s guest, the privateer Captain Relsworth, stood up in the bow of the unstable boat and gracefully leapt ashore, a hand on his rapier to keep it from banging between his legs.

There, like the towers of Santa Marta, of Maracaibo, of Havana, the Captain said to himself, looking up the bank: squat white hives close to the earth, afraid of heaven but brilliant in the afternoon sun, somehow begging faith in their solidness and invulnerability. The Spanish had no time to build proper defenses, no apparent need to build them high. The golden tropic sun ruined one’s sense of proportion: Men were not men in the Indies but gods and animals. Drake’s culverins had been able to lob nine-pound shot into the towers like a child dropping raisins into a fish basket.

“You see, Captain,” Sir Philip said, his palm held out in front of him, “there to the left is the Globe, bearing the sign of Atlas, and there the Rose in the middle, and there is the bear-baiting ring in the trees, you see?”

The woman had turned, with a coy expression, to witness that the Captain did in fact see, so that she did not know they had come to the end of the boards, where there was a drop to the grass. She missed her step and tripped. The high heel of her shoe snapped off and she would have fallen had she not caught her escort’s arm. The Captain frowned. He did not like the ostentatious woman with her affectations, her lemon velvet, her hair dyed pale orange and crisped so that it erupted from her temples, her jewels of colored glass. She was a trull as far as the Captain was concerned. Whether or not the court was willing to acknowledge its demimondaines now that Elizabeth was dead, Sir Philip was still a fool to have such a woman on his arm.

“Oh, la,” she was crying. “Wait. I’ve broken it. We must go back. The louts shall have a laugh at my uneven step.”

Sir Philip sought to calm her with sugary words. She stood pouting, raised on her left toes to compensate the loss of her heel. A few forced tears loosened the paint in the corners of her eyes, leaving black-rimmed trails along the sides of her nose. The Captain thought the woman looked and acted absurdly, but he wanted to agree with her, he wanted to return to his office in London and finish the business that had brought him to the city. Sir Philip took her hand and stroked it in a fatherly fashion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.