Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Rum Diary > Status Update

Down on the waterfront I could hear the slow clang of a ship's bell as it eased against the pier, and somewhere in the city a motorcycle roared through the narrow streets, sending its echo up the hill to Calle O'Leary. Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street.

I lit a cigarette and thought about other people, and wondered what they were doing tonight, while I was here on a dark street in Fajardo sipping rum out of a bottle with a man who would tomorrow morning be a fugitive murderer.

Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

I was propped up on pillows and she had her head on my chest. The silence was so total that the clink of the ice in my glass sounded loud enough to be heard on the street. The moon was bright through the front window and I watched the expression on Chenault's face, wondering how she could look so peaceful and content.

It was a hot, muggy night and I felt like getting drunk as a loon.

Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about Freedom of the Press and Keeping the Paper Going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one.

There were more than a hundred boats, everything from tiny harbor sloops to huge schooners, and their naked spars swayed lazily against a background of green hills and a blue Caribbean sky.

I sat there a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness.

I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.

My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.