“And by licking the boot of the North Americans of United Fruit.”
“Yes, it’s true, I worked for them, but only to acquire money to buy land and build this place and marry and bring all you worthless children into the world. And to borrow tractors from. Without their tractors, where would we be? Señor Jennings, he smiled when the tractors disappeared and he never took them back until the plowing was done.”
“The generosity of the Americans is wonderful. They come to our island and steal and degrade us and you are grateful they let you borrow a tractor now and then!”
“Bah! A man knows gratitude. He feels it. He is not ignorant and petty and selfish and vain. You are all of them. I should have worked you harder. That was my mistake, to my shame. You never had chores. I should have worked you like a dog and made you into a man. Instead, you are womanly.”
“I am not womanly. I am between opportunities, but I swear to you, I am a man of destiny.”
The house was large but crude. It was full of dogs and guns and cats and chickens and dirty boots and crumpled clothes and books and blankets and horse tack. It was really a barn with rooms and beds, and it suited Angel the father perfectly, for it is exactly what he’d wanted to build in the world, from the raw jungle, and he had done so. Animals more or less roamed through it, and its shabbiness was worn proudly, as if to say, true people of the earth live here. Savagery was everywhere; even his wife wore a gun and when she called the younger children to dinner, it was with a gunshot.
Outside, not everywhere but in a certain direction, the jungle loomed, and beyond the jungle the peaks of the Sierra Maestra penetrated the clouds, remote and forbidden. You could hide an army up there and no one could get you out.
“What did you do today?” Papa demanded. Papa loved to fight. It was his amusement. He worked, he fought, he made children and then ignored them. That was his way.
“Papa, I told you, it’s a vacation. I relaxed.”
“You could have helped the boys weed around the cane.”
“I am a lawyer and a thinker. I am not a sugarcane worker.”
“Your mother says you swam in the morning and played beisbol in the afternoon.”
“I am a superb baseball player. Why should I not do what pleases me? The children love me.”
“You tell them lies, and you are always the hero in those tales but in no other.”
“I will be the hero, father.”
“Bah, heroes.”
“Tomorrow I will fish and in the afternoon, I will borrow a rifle and hunt. Tomas tells me there are boar by the Sierra de Mayari.”
“Meanwhile, I worry about the price of sugar and the campesinos and the health of their families and whether or not the generator will last another year and what to do if the price of fuel goes up and the North Americans develop a cheaper chemical sugar, and all you do is sleep and hunt and drink! God himself would be ashamed of such a son.”
The old man spat into the fireplace, but missed.
He fished, he hunted. He caught sixteen sea bass with the old campesino Jose, who’d been there so long he claimed to have witnessed the Americans running off of San Juan Hill and used to amuse the kids with those stories when they’d been young. In the afternoon, he hunted, and the dogs drove a boar into a bog and he shot it with an old cowboy rifle. It squawked and shivered and shat while it died, but die it did, and rather swiftly too, for the young man did most things with casual elegant precision, and shooting was but one of them.
The boar butchered by he himself: knifing and peeling, and reaching into the bloated guts and pulling them out with his fingers so they oozed with shit and food and blood and filled his fingernails as he yanked. The gutpile abandoned for others in the jungle, he brought the hollowed thing home slung over his shoulder, like a cape that oozed blood down his body. He was a magnificent red god, man as savage, gone to jungle, killed in jungle, and returned with meat. His papa did not look twice at him as he trudged with the animal’s carcass into the farmyard. But that meat fed the family one night and the fish another, not that there was any shortage in the larder, because Angel Ruiz Castro was a man of importance and substance, even if he browbeat anyone who came within his range, unless they were North American.
And then the boy took a trip. His destination was Cueto, the railroad town that ran up to Antilla and was larger than the muddy shanties of Biran. He knew a certain lady in this town. If she was not there, he would visit her sister. It wasn’t that he wanted to do this thing, it was that he had to. A man has certain needs and they can’t be satisfied always in matrimony. What is a man to do when he is far from his home and waiting for the clarification to set in?
She was not there; nor was her sister. But a neighbor was. He was big and handsome with that Spanish nose and those imperial ways that all commented upon. He moved gracefully, and had once been elected the greatest high school athlete in Cuba. Had not a war and then a political awakening occurred, he might have been a great beisbol player. He could use the money to finance a fight against the North Americans who paid him; what a wonderful idea!
Anyhow, this lady’s husband was away in Santiago for his American-owned company, Dumois-Nipe, a subsidiary of United Fruit, and so the young man’s dalliance had a double-meaning: he was screwing her and he was therefore screwing Dumois-Nipe. In bed, he was magnificent, a tiger, an athlete again, and the sheets grew heavy with the sweat of his labor and the woman sang, and the birds fluttered and the clouds parted. Like a matador, he worked her slowly, turning her this way, then that, encouraging her, partaking in her power, until the two were joined in a dance that was both spectacular and tragic. He rammed in for the kill.
“Oh,” she said afterwards, “I had forgotten what a young man can do. You look so tender with those warm eyes and that soulful smile, and yet you are so strong. What a man you are!”
He sat back, lit a cigar and loved the wonderful warm wash of afternoon light, the smell of sex and sweat and cigars, the nearness of the jungle with all its savagery, the farness of the Sierras, cool and remote and vast and beckoning, as if they knew secrets.
“Will I see you again?”
“Of course. But only for a while. Soon I must go back to Havana where a destiny awaits me.”
“I assume you will marry a rich girl and join the country club and learn to play golf and drink with the Americans.”
“That is where you are wrong. I will take the rich girl’s money and give it to many poor girls, I will turn all the golf courses into agricultural collectives and I will frighten the Americans back to America.”
“Don’t let them hear you talk like that, my hero. They don’t like it, and they have their ways.”
“I have my ways, too,” he promised.
And that is how he waited for his clarification. He played the beisbol with the youngsters in the morning and fished or hunted in the afternoon. Then he wandered to Cueto and had a coffee and read the Havana papers. The furor over the violence of El Colorado and the swiftness of the justice had worn down somewhat, he determined, and he wondered how soon he could head back, with his many new ideas. He was ready for action.
Then, being ready for action, he went and found that action at the Señora Fugolensia’s, and a good time was had by all. If the neighbors knew, they never told, for that is not the Cuban way. And if Señor Fugolensia, the assistant district manager for Dumois-Nipe, ever found out, there was no drama, no gossip, no fury. Everything was pleasant and relaxed, because everyone understood how it was in these matters. So the young man had a wonderful time, really, growing fat and sleek and lazy, until Havana seemed just a bad dream. He knew he would go back but, well…maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not until next week or the next, and when it came to pass that he was discovered, the agent of his betrayal was not a spy or a snitch or a traitor or an American gofer, but simple chance. One day the next week, Captain Latavistada and Frankie Carbine happened to be driving through Cueto, as they had been driving through all the dusty towns around Ma
yari, including Guaro and Alto Cedro and Felton and Antillas, and it was Frankie who happened to be looking a certain direction. He saw the young man sitting in a cafe.
They followed him.
Who could have predicted it? And the young man was laughing and tickling his older lady and wondering also when all this would be finished, and he didn’t even notice the captain getting the Mendoza 7mm light machine gun out of the trunk of his car, while Frankie checked the magazine in the Star machine pistol. The young man was too busy thinking of love and destiny.
Chapter 31
It took a while, going through several operators and various connections and then, finally, she was not there. So he waited up in his room, feeling unpleasant about all this. He knew it was both right and wrong at once and that’s what he hated so much about it. He knew this was an opportunity, that it could lead them to a better life, a life undreamed of, seen only in magazines. Yet he did not trust these men at all, not even a little bit. They wanted something too much. He hated that sense of the pressure against him, their wills, expressing themselves in small ways. It wasn’t like the service. In the service you had orders, in the highway patrol you had procedures, and everything was what it was and no other thing, not really. This was different. Maybe what one boy said was the right move and maybe what another said, and if you guess wrong it all blew up in your face. It was all part of a world he’d never quite trusted, expressed in a secret language of gesture and pause and hint that he never quite understood. He didn’t see how he could be comfortable in such a place. But there was the issue of family, too: if he could make a certain kind of success for himself and for them, if he could give his son opportunities, didn’t he oweit to the boy? His old man had never given him shit for opportunities, and he wouldn’t be like that. He’d die before he was like that. If nothing else, he would give the boy some opportunities.
He tried again, though it was too soon. Back in Arkansas it would have been about 6:00 P.M.; she should be back home now, making supper for herself and the boy. But it was summer. The boy was out of school. He’d been in school when all this had begun, now he was out, as it was getting into late June. Who knew where they’d gone? Maybe they’d gone out for a little picnic or over to the Blue Eye drive-in, where the boy had the hot dogs and root beer that he loved so much. Maybe it was a church gathering or a—
But she answered.
The operator explained to her that it was long-distance from overseas and clicking and snapping filled the wire and then it was just the two of them.
“Oh, hi,” he said, “it’s me,” as if it could be anyone else.
“Good lord, Earl, I jump six feet every time the phone rings. I was in the garden the last time and couldn’t get here in time.”
“I’m sorry. It’s these operators. She hung up too fast.”
“How are you? They called from the congressman’s office and said you’d been hurt a little, but they didn’t have any details. They said you were a hero and would get another medal. But they didn’t say anything else. So I called Colonel Jenks and he didn’t know either.”
“Sorry, I should have called. Yes, I was hurt some, but it wasn’t a thing. I’m fine. I’m out of the hosp—”
“The hospital!”
“It’s all better. I have a limp, but it’ll go away.”
“Good lord, Earl, what happened?”
“Oh, it was a law-enforcement situation, there was a little shooting, and I got nicked. It’s nothing.”
“Earl, you never learn. Now you are risking your life for less than nothing, meaning that braying toad Harry Etheridge, whom I wouldn’t trust any further than I could throw the Frigidaire.”
“Boss Harry is nothing to take home, you are right on that score.”
“Earl, you get back here. Your boy misses you terribly. He just looks out the window like a sad sack. I can’t get him to play ball or anything. The last time you were gone for so long, he was so young he didn’t really understand. Now he knows you’re gone and I can see him hurting inside. He’s getting quieter and quieter.”
“Well, see, that’s the thing. As you know, Congressman Harry’s gone home. But see, I have an opportunity here.”
“Oh, lord.”
“It’s with the government. There’s some work they think I can do for them. They like me, they’ve made me what looks like a right fine offer.”
“Earl, you are happy in Arkansas and so am I. You don’t need anything from the government. Last time you worked for the government, you were shot seven times, all over the Pacific. I thought that was over, but now you’re with the government and you’ve been shot again. And all so soon after the last time you were away—and it took a full year before you were fully yourself on that one, and God knows what you did, and not even Sam will tell me a word about it. You just say, as you always say, ‘It was nothing.’”
“Junie, it’s the boy I’m thinking about. If I got a big job in Washington we could live in a much nicer place, he could go to better schools and have a life we can’t dream of.”
“Yes, that’s wonderful, it’s all for Bob Lee, but it involves some kind of helling around and there’ll be more shooting and in your heart of hearts that’s what you love. You’re an old dog so used to blood sport you still go all slobbery at the thought. I know you, Earl, but I also know that as big a hero as you are, you will run dry on luck one time out. Maybe the next time out. That boy doesn’t need a hero, he needs a father. No boy can live up to a hero. He’ll die trying and you’ll already have died being one.”
“Junie, I have to take this chance. I’d be no good to myself if I didn’t, honey. I won’t wait so long to call the next time.”
“Oh, Earl,” she said, “you never change. Not a bit, not in all these years. I love you.”
“I love you too, Junie.”
She hung up and the click sounded loud and far-off at once.
He looked around, trying to chase the black dogs that nipped at him and made him hunger for a drink, because that was the sure thing that would chase them off. Only then they’d come back, meaner than ever. He knew he couldn’t stay in the room, since it was still early and he could feel Havana somehow happening outside the walls.
So he told himself he needed some air. He took the elevator down, just a big crewcut American in an old khaki suit and a white shirt and old Marine Corps brogues, and walked through the lobby, filled up with louder duplicates of himself, and out into the streets. Across the way, the Parque Central was jammed up with people who mingled this way and that or argued baseball or drank beer. They sure seemed happy. The Cubans loved to talk and drink and hug and smoke. He never saw a people that knew how to have a better time. He wandered a bit through the crowds and under the trees, thinking he might mosey over there to that Hotel Inglaterra where a party seemed to be going on, but then the crowd seemed to push him in a different direction, he left the park, he wandered down busy streets drawn by the sound of the jivey, fast-stepping Cuban music. Who could deny the magic of that stuff? All kinds of little bars and clubs seemed jammed up and swinging hard, full of revelers, and he tried to pick a one that he’d feel comfortable in. He wandered along cobblestones and didn’t feel like going as far as the Bodeguita del Medio, and after a while he found a clean, well-lighted place called La Floridita that looked less Cuban than the other places, more big-city America.
In he went, finding himself in a dark hall that was all bar at one side and all people everywhere else, while a mambo crew wandered about, paying out that blood rhythm of the Cubano music. Earl took a reading and divined that he liked the place, that it was too crowded for problems and that there were enough Americans here so he would feel pretty much at home. He slipped through crowds of merrymakers until he found space at the bar. Some kind of party was going on and the place was full of action; he could feel whatever it was pounding in the air, loud as the music, a hum of drama. It was as if ballplayers were here, but they couldn’t be, because it was the end of June, the season
had been running near to three full months. Maybe movie people, but Earl didn’t know anything about movie people, so none of the faces were recognizable to him. He turned his back on it, and when the barkeeper came up, in his red jacket and black tie, so fancy, Earl tried out his brothel Spanish to get a gin and tonic with no gin, but plenty of tonic. The cooling of the liquid helped some, and he had another pretend-drink, just minding his own business. Everyone seemed to be drinking milkshakes in cocktail glasses and behind the curved bar there was some kind of highly idealized view of the harbor as it must have looked from a conqueror’s ship heading inward. It was somewhere along in here when he became aware that a new person was next to him, and that she was staring at him.
He looked over.
Well, sometimes it happens. She was what the boys would call a knockout. She was dark and brown, and he saw not Cuban, but some sort of Asian—Filipina, maybe. But she had white in her too, and something fierce in her eyes that he’d only seen in Japanese field-grade officers, a kind of bravado and swagger that just drew you in.
“You’re a big one,” she said.
“I happen to be, yes, ma’am.”
“Are you tough?”
“What?”
“I said, are you tough?”
“Not really.”
“Damn.”
“What’s the problem.”
“I’ve got this big guy pawing me. He won’t take no for an answer. Coming here was a big mistake, but I can’t seem to get away.”
“Ma’am, I can’t fight him for you. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t need the trouble and people get hurt bad in fights. Best bet is call a cab and walk fast for it and he’s probably too drunk to come after. Or have the barkeep call the cops.”
“You’re a cop yourself, I can tell.”
“That’s true. But I’m not on any kind of duty here. I’m just telling you what I think would work for you.”
“Yes, that would work in Manhattan. But this is Havana and this guy’s a god around here. These cops and the barkeepers all love him.”