Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Incident in the Oriente

WE WERE SITTING, heads bowed in prayer, waiting for the local Indians, Secoyas, to come barefoot into the mess container with the platters of food. When Max Moses said grace, as he was doing tonight, his terrifying vitality shone in his bulging eyes. Yet, rumbling on in his old smoker’s vibrato, he did not raise his voice. His slight speech defect made him seem truthful: there was a babyish innocence in “daily bwed.” His lazy tongue turned and snagged with a soft fruity catch on words like “church” or “chicken,” and instead of “gravy” he said “meat juice,” probably for the slushiness of the sound. It was “Wab” when referring to Silsbee’s dog, a Labrador retriever. He said grace standing.

I was always surprised when Moses stood up, because the man I regarded as a giant was almost as small as the Mbuti pygmies we’d had on the payroll on the Uganda job. His tenacity and godlike resourcefulness in getting his people to obey him seemed to enlarge him. Though he could be chivalrous even in the worst conditions, we knew our lives depended on our obedience to him. Whenever strangers asked me how he was able to command unswerving loyalty, I used this meal as an example — every incident that had led to it.

In a world where many private companies were chasing the money from little countries to complete development projects, Moses was a rarity. His record of success was brilliant, his costs were low, his estimates fair, and he always had work. “I sometimes surprise myself.” You think of charity or foreign aid as the deciding factor in the completion of these projects, but no, it is always the private contractor. “I want to surprise you, too. We are all in this together. If someone fails, everyone is accountable.”

Moses’ rule was to oversee every job himself and to be judicious in the matter of corruption. He had an odd neutrality when it came to bribes (“Cost of doing business — think of it as a tax”), always paying off the top man, whoever that happened to be, and depending on him for protection at lower levels. He used local labor at slightly above the going rate, and local materials whenever possible, even to the point of dismantling abandoned buildings if it meant a ready supply of steel or timber. Most of the others imported expensive building materials. Moses often used scrap, recycled wood, made bricks using local concrete and molds, bulking out the bricks with rubble that we crushed ourselves from the broken buildings. He rehabbed heavy machinery, so you would see an old bulldozer or cement mixer, good as new. “Found it. Fixed it up.” That also meant profit. He had the frugality of a junkman, and the foresight too. We lived in steel shipping containers.

All this depended on cooperation. He often said that his business model was a traveling circus. The circus arrived in town with all the rides, the tents, the cages, the food stalls, and local labor was hired to raise the tents, bolt the seating, fetch water, sweep, scrub, wash dishes, feed the animals. The talent was in the circus; the muscle was local, and cheap. It meant the circus could travel light, picking up labor along the way, paying them off, leaving them behind.

Moses said, “If I were a general in a foreign war, I’d recruit soldiers locally.”

No one dared to ask what he would do if they refused to obey, yet he answered the question anyway.

“In every man there is something — a sentiment — that you can tap into to make him take orders. It is often an anxiety. It’s sometimes sacrificial.”

Moses applied the traveling circus principle to his development contracts. A country secured a loan for a new road or a bridge or a clinic, and it hired his company to build it.

“Wars are fought with private companies, doing security detail, providing meals, putting up barracks,” he said. “Someday all soldiers will be mercenaries, as they’ve been in history. Even now, money is a motivator — for scholarships, or the big payout at the end of the tour. This is the era of the private sector helping governments achieve their goals with somebody else’s money.”

In another age Moses would have been the captain of a clipper ship, or a general, as he said, or an explorer in the pay of a king who wanted gold from a far-off jungle.

We were in Amazonas, in a jungle now, oil depot work, on a river, the Oriente province of Ecuador, in the mess container. Moses sat at the head of the table like a chief, with a glow of satisfaction on his face. If he had said to any of us, “Stick your hand in that candle flame,” we would have done it. But he was too practical for that. His rule, “Get up before dawn and be at my door at four-thirty, ready to work,” was one we obeyed.

Five of us at the table, still saying grace, Moses, Chivers, Silsbee, Tafel, and me. The cook boy, Hong, was still outside with the Secoya servants. I was struck by how pious Silsbee and Tafel were in their prayers, murmuring along with Moses, sitting far apart tonight for a change.

Silsbee and Tafel had been the problem from the beginning. First time I saw them I knew it wouldn’t work. Tafel had been with Moses for a year, Silsbee was a new hire. He’d been overseas on jobs before, an expert welder. Moses wanted him to teach locals this skill so that Silsbee would have a team. It worked at first, when we refitted a floating dock on the river, but when we got to rebuilding the bridge, two problems arose.

The friendship between Silsbee and Tafel was one — their instant liking for each other, talking, laughing, lollygagging. The average person thinks, Great, harmony. But harmony wasn’t Moses’ way. Friendliness and good humor relaxed the locals (was how Moses put it). Instead of working to a deadline, we were working as the locals did. “It’s why nothing got done before. It’s why we’re here.”

Work was social in places like this, Moses said; work was a party. “People love going to work, to meet their friends, to have a coffee break, to share meals. It’s nothing to do with finishing a job. The job exists to support a social framework — they want to get out of the house and talk.”

He did not say the easy relations between Silsbee and Tafel set a bad example. He could convey this with looks. He watched the two of them with a trace of astonishment.

Moses said, “I can take insolence from the work gangs, but not from my own men.”

The other problem was Silsbee’s dog, Gaucho. It was a Lab mix, big and sleepy. The idea that this dog did nothing infuriated Moses, who saw it as no better than a three-legged village mutt. It didn’t earn its keep.

Silsbee had a way of blinking that showed a thought was passing through his mind. He said, “My dog makes me happy.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Why isn’t it doing something useful?” And in a kindly way Moses asked, “What is the insufficiency inside you that is satisfied by a dog?”

When, one day, some propane tanks were stolen by locals from the depot, Moses said, “Didn’t even bark!” and held the dog and Silsbee partly responsible for the theft.

“Labs aren’t like that,” Silsbee said, and looked at Tafel for approval.

Tafel was a darkly handsome man who could have been Arab, with a sharp indicating nose, thin lips, close-cut hair, a narrow chin, and slender fingers, like a superior type of stern-faced Gypsy woman. He had been a foreign hire who’d stayed on with Moses. His specialty was supervising the work gangs, organizing the way they gathered material — posts, planks, struts, trusses, the usable fittings like window units, or if we were doing a steel frame, the plates and pipes.

“We are creating something,” Moses said. “We are leaving something behind. Our names will be forgotten but these structures will be here long after we’re gone.”

We were leaving monuments, was his view.

Chivers drew the plans at Moses’ direction, and did the paperwork and the accounts too, paying the men every two weeks. That Moses paid in dollars was another reason he was sought out by the local labor, since dollars were spendable anywhere.

But this job was going slowly, and the concern that showed as a knot in Moses’ forehead was Tafel and Silsbee. Tafel had been one of the most loyal of Moses’ men. I knew that because I prided myself on having Moses’ trust, and I was competitive in this. Staging was my responsibility. In the Oriente province the scaffolding was fist-wide bamboo poles lashed together with split cane or hemp rope to make skeletal towers of frames and ladders.

Silsbee’s welders set one of the scaffolds blazing. Moses told Tafel to reprimand him, which he did, but not long after that the two men were seen together laughing. The Lab killed some chickens. “We can’t eat them now!” The local Indians sometimes seen laughing with Silsbee infuriated Moses. He asked, “Is this a social occasion?” in his jaw-twisting lisp and slipping tongue. The dog intimidated the locals but otherwise just slept in the shade. “That Wab.”

A month into the job we were already behind schedule. Moses knew that he had no power over Silsbee, that he was losing Tafel, and that the laxity of these two men was undermining the project.

Moses gave a talk after dinner about the role of the private contractor, how essential it was, how it was accountable to the institution paying the bills.

“It is government work for money — not patriotism or justice. No abstractions. We aim for results. I have spent my whole working life as a contractor, in Kuwait, in Uganda, in Brazil.”

Our core group was small and efficient, but the hundreds of local laborers became our teams. In western Uganda we had Mbuti pygmies sealing the insides of three-foot casings. A whole flotilla of Malay fishermen were signed on for the barging of cement for an offshore fuel dock. In Kuwait we extended the frontier fence — no Kuwaitis on the payroll but plenty of Filipinos and Bangladeshis, who had nothing in common but hunger. In Iraq we worked inside a great enclosure of twelve-foot blast walls to put up modular housing, and after that it was boreholes in Sudan.

“The type of government doesn’t matter as long as we are paid in dollars. Most of the world is in the hands of megalomaniacs. We were hired to complete this job and by God we’ll accomplish it. Think of us as commandos.”

You would have thought in all that laborious lisping that we’d gotten the point. But the next day a tap was left running on a fuel drum, and two hundred gallons of stinking diesel oil drained into the sand. We had to use all our solvent to neutralize it — a mess. And there were more thefts.

Chivers, who was English, said to me, “He should sack them.”

We never used Moses’ name.

I said, “If he does, there’s no way we can finish this. We’ll have to find a master welder to replace Silsbee, and a wrangler like Tafel who also knows how to operate the backhoe.”

Moses, working on tight margins because of the lost time, had invested all the money he’d been advanced. He needed Tafel back as a loyal worker. He needed Silsbee to take orders. He had to find a way of dividing these two men. Tafel might listen, but Moses had no control over Silsbee, who was too new to his command to care. And we were miles up the Aguarico River, on a deadline with the oil drillers.

Chivers said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he just beat them unmercifully about the head and shoulders.”

I had known Max Moses for many years. I had no idea what he would do, only that he would have a better answer than that. In his mental leadership manual there was a different answer for every problem. Each situation was unique; each person was. Had Moses said, “Everybody’s the same,” that would have meant he was afraid or contemptuous. Everyone is different, was his philosophy.

“He’s going to flog Silsbee,” Chivers said.

“He never touches his people,” I said.

“Then he’ll read the riot act to Tafel.”

“He doesn’t raise his voice, but even if he did, Silsbee would still be a friend to Tafel, and the problem won’t go away.”

Seeing us talking together, Moses frowned, and from that moment on I ignored Chivers. At breakfast, Moses said to Tafel, “A needy person is someone you’re always meeting for the first time,” which enraged Tafel and made Silsbee sulk.

That same day he laid out the schedule, the deadlines, the inspections. He said, “At this rate we won’t make it. We’re going to work faster.”

“It’s the locals,” Tafel said.

“It’s us,” Moses said. “It’s you.” There was conviction and even eloquence in the slushy suck-sound of his lisp.

Nothing else happened until later in the morning. Tafel was summoned to Moses’ container. He wasn’t long. He was soon striding out, nose forward, carrying a rifle.

The work site was over a little hill, past the shade trees where Silsbee usually sat chatting with the Indians, among the welding torches and the masks and tanks.

Chivers said, “Crunch time.”

Within minutes we heard a gunshot, and after that, “No!” Back came Tafel, not angry but frightened and looking friendless and paler. Moses, at the entrance to his container, took the rifle from him and must have given an order, because Tafel said, “Yes, sir.”

When Silsbee appeared with hatred and sorrow on his face, carrying his dead dog in his arms, Tafel walked past him without a look. Moses called out to the cook boy, and Hong took the dog by the hind legs, the way you hold a dead chicken.

Without any orders, we completed our day’s objective long before the bell sounded at five. In the evening we assembled in the mess container as usual, Moses leading the grace, and at the end of it saying how confident he was that we would finish ahead of schedule and there might be bonuses. But we’d have to be quicker in taking orders. He let this sink in, then he signaled to Hong.

“Let’s eat.”

In the silence that followed, the stew was served. We ate without speaking, though a village dog began to bark. I wished it would stop, because it sounded triumphant, like mockery. I chewed the meat gratefully, and I smiled at Max Moses to show I wasn’t paying attention to the barking. I was not surprised when he didn’t smile back at me.