“I’m not sure,” the man said. “I must take the watch apart and look at each piece.”
“I understand that,” Joe said. “How long?”
“If the pieces need reoiling and nothing more? Four days.”
“Four,” Joe said and felt a flutter in his chest, as if a small bird had just flown through his soul. “No way it could be quicker?”
The man shook his head. “And, senor? If anything is broken, just one small part—and you see how small these parts are?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
“I will have to send the watch to Switzerland.”
Joe looked out the dusty windows to the dusty street for a moment. He took his wallet from his inside suit pocket and removed a hundred American, placed the bills on the counter. “I’ll be back in two hours. Have a diagnosis by then.”
“A what?”
“Tell me if it’ll need to go to Switzerland by then.”
“Yes, senor. Yes.”
He left the shop and found himself wandering Old Havana in all its sensual decay. Habana, he’d decided on his many trips here over the past year, wasn’t simply a place; it was the dream of a place. A dream gone drowsy in the sun, fading into its own bottomless appetite for languor, in love with the sexual thrum of its death throes.
He turned one corner and then another and then a third and he was standing on the street where Emma Gould’s brothel was.
Esteban had given him the address more than a year ago now, on the night before that bloody day with Albert White and Maso and Digger and poor Sal and Lefty and Carmine. He supposed he’d known he was coming here since he’d left the house yesterday, but he hadn’t admitted it to himself because to come here seemed silly and frivolous, and very little of him remained frivolous.
A woman stood out front, hosing the sidewalk free of the glass that had been broken the night before. She sent the glass and dirt into the gutter and it ran down the slope of the cobblestone street. When she looked up and saw him, the hose drooped in her hand but didn’t fall.
The years hadn’t been horrible to her, though they hadn’t exactly been fond either. She looked like a beautiful woman whose vices had failed to love her back, who’d smoked and drunk too much, and both habits had found a way to manifest themselves in crow’s-feet and lines around the edges of her mouth and below her lower lip. Her lower eyelids sagged and her hair was brittle, even in all this humidity.
She raised the hose and went back to work. “Say what you have to say.”
“You want to look at me?”
She turned toward him but kept her eyes on the sidewalk, and he had to move to keep his shoes dry.
“So you had the accident and you thought, ‘I’m going to take advantage of this’?”
She shook her head.
“No?”
Another shake of the head.
“Then what?”
“Once the coppers started chasing us, I told the driver the only way to get away was to drive off the bridge. But he wouldn’t listen.”
Joe stepped out of the path of her hose. “So?”
“So I shot him in the back of the head. We went in the water and I swam out and Michael was waiting for me.”
“Who’s Michael?”
“He’s the other fella I was keeping on the hook. He was waiting outside the hotel the whole night.”
“Why?”
She scowled at him. “Once you and Albert started getting all ‘I can’t live without you, Emma. You are my life, Emma,’ I needed some kind of safety net in case you blew each other up. What choice did a gal have? I knew sooner or later I’d have to get out from under your thumbs. God, the way you two would go on.”
“My apologies,” Joe said, “for loving you.”
“You didn’t love me.” She concentrated on a particularly stubborn piece of glass that had lodged itself between two stones in the street. “You just wanted to have me. Like a fucking Grecian vase or a fancy suit. Show me to all your friends, say ‘Ain’t she a dish?’ ” She looked at him now. “I’m not a dish. I don’t want to be owned. I want to own.”
Joe said, “I mourned you.”
“That’s sweet, pumpkin.”
“For years.”
“How did you carry such a cross? Gosh-golly, you’re some man.”
He took another step back from her, even though she’d pointed the hose in the opposite direction, and he saw the whole play for the first time, like a mark who’d been grifted so many times his wife didn’t allow him out of the house unless he left his watch and his pocket change behind.
“You took the money out of the bus locker, didn’t you?”
She waited for the bullet she feared was behind the question, but he raised his hands to show they were empty and would stay that way.
She said, “You did give me the key, remember.”
If there was honor among thieves, then she was right. He’d given her the key; from that point, it was hers to do with as she saw fit.
“And the dead girl? The one they kept finding pieces of?”
She turned off the hose and leaned against the stucco wall of her bordello. “Remember Albert talking about how he’d found himself a new girl?”
“Not really.”
“Well, he did. She was in the car. Never got her name.”
“You kill her too?”
She shook her head, then tapped her forehead. “Her head hit the back of the front seat during the crash. Don’t know if she died then or later, but I didn’t stick around to find out.”
He stood on the street feeling like a fool. A fucking fool.
“Was there a moment when you loved me?” he asked.
She searched his face with growing exasperation. “Sure. Maybe a few moments. We had laughs, Joe. When you stopped mooning over me long enough to fuck me proper, it was really good. But you had to make it something it wasn’t.”
“Which was what?”
“I dunno—something flowery. Something you can’t hold in your hand. We’re not God’s children, we’re not fairy-tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can’t grow under our feet. That’s our creed.” She lit a cigarette and plucked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, gave it to the breeze. “You don’t think I know who you are now? You don’t think I’ve been wondering when you’d show up over here, among the natives? We’re free. No brothers or sisters or fathers. No Albert Whites. Just us. You want to come by? You have an open invitation.” She crossed the sidewalk to him. “We always had a lot of laughs. We could laugh now. Spend our lives in the tropics and count our money on satin sheets. Free as birds.”
“Shit,” Joe said, “I don’t want to be free.”
She cocked her head and seemed confused to the point of genuine sorrow. “But that’s all we ever wanted.”
“It’s all you ever wanted,” he said. “And, hey, now you have it. Good-bye, Emma.”
She set her teeth hard and refused to say it in return, as if by not saying it she retained some power.
It was the kind of stubborn, spiteful pride you found in very old mules and very spoiled children.
“Good-bye,” he said again and walked away without a look back, without a twinge of regret, with nothing left unsaid.
Back at the jeweler’s he was told—delicately and with great care—that the watch would need to make the trip to Switzerland.
Joe signed the release form and the repair order. He took the jeweler’s scrupulously detailed receipt. He placed it in his pocket and left the shop.
He stood on the old street in the Old City and, for a moment, couldn’t think of where to go next.
Chapter Twenty-eight
How Late It Was
All the boys who worked the farm played baseball, but some were religious about it. As the harvest came upon them, Joe notic
ed that several had covered their fingertips with surgical tape.
He asked Ciggy, “Where’d they get the tape?”
“Oh, we got boxes of that, man,” Ciggy said. “Back in Machado’s days, they sent in a medical team with some newspaper writers. Show everyone how Machado loved his peasants. Soon as the newspaper writers leave, so do the doctors. They come, take all the equipment, but we hold on to a carton of that tape for the little ones.”
“Why?”
“You ever cured tobacco, man?”
“No.”
“Well, if I show you why, then will you stop asking dumb questions?”
“Probably not,” Joe said.
The tobacco stalks were now taller than most men, their leaves longer than Joe’s arm. He didn’t allow Tomas to run in the tobacco patch any longer for fear he could lose him. The croppers—mostly older boys—arrived one morning and picked the leaves from the ripest stalks. The leaves were piled on wooden sleds and then the sleds were unhitched from the mules and hitched to tractors. The tractors were driven to the curing barn on the western edge of the plantation, a task left to the youngest boys. Joe stepped out on the porch of the main house one morning, and a boy no older than six puttered past him on a tractor, a sledful of leaves piled high behind him. The boy gave Joe a big smile and a wave and kept puttering along.
Outside the curing barn, the leaves were pulled from the sleds and placed on stringing benches under the shade trees. The stringing benches had racks affixed to them. The stringers and the handers—all the baseball boys with the surgical tape on their fingers—would place a stick in the rack and begin tying the leaves to the sticks with twine until the leaf bunches hung from one end of the tobacco stick to the other. They did this from six in the morning until eight at night; there was no baseball those weeks. The twine had to be pulled tight while retaining pressure on the stick, so cord burns to the hands and the fingers were common. Hence, Ciggy pointed out, the surgical tape.
“Soon as this is done, patrón? All this ’bacco hung, one end of the barn to the other? We sit for five days while it cures. Only man has a job is the man tending the fire in the barn and the men checking it don’t get too moist or too dry in there. The boys? They get to play the baseball.” He put a quick hand on Joe’s arm. “If that’s okay with you.”
Joe stood outside the barn, watching those boys string tobacco. Even with the rack, they had to raise and extend their arms to tie off the leaves—raise and extend them for pretty much fourteen hours straight. He gave Ciggy a foul look. “Of course it’s okay. Christ, that fucking work is unbearable.”
“I did it for six years.”
“How?”
“I don’t like starving. You like starving?”
Joe rolled his eyes.
“Mmm hmm. Another man,” Ciggy said, “don’t like starving. Only thing the whole world agrees on—starving is no fun.”
The next morning, Joe found Ciggy in the curing barn, making sure the hangers spaced the leaves properly. Joe told him to pull himself away, and they crossed the fields and walked down the eastern ridge and stopped at the worst field Joe owned. It was rocky, it was blocked from the sun by hills and outcrops all day, and the worms and weeds loved it.
Joe asked if Herodes, their best driver, worked much during curing.
“He’s still working the harvest,” Ciggy said, “but not like the boys.”
“Good,” Joe said. “Have him plow this field.”
“Ain’t nothing going to grow here,” Ciggy said.
“No shit,” Joe said.
“So why plow it?”
“Because it’s easier to build a baseball field on level ground, don’t you think?”
The same day they constructed the pitcher’s mound, Joe was walking with Tomas past the barn when he saw one of the workers, Perez, beating his son, just clouting his head like the boy was a dog he’d caught eating his supper. Kid couldn’t have been any older than eight. Joe said, “Hey,” and started toward them, but Ciggy stepped in front of him.
Perez and Perez’s son looked at him, confused, and Perez hit his son in the head again and then in the ass several times.
“Is that necessary?” Joe said to Ciggy.
Tomas, oblivious, squirmed for Ciggy, to whom he’d taken a shine lately.
Ciggy took Tomas from Joe and held him high above him as Tomas giggled and Ciggy said, “You think Perez likes to hit his boy? Think he woke up, said I want to be a bad guy, make sure the boy grows up to hate me? No, no, no, patrón. He woke up saying I got to put food on the table, I got to keep them warm, keep them dry, fix that roof leak, kill the rats in their bedroom, show them the right path, show my wife I love her, have five fucking minutes for myself, and sleep for four hours before I got to get up and go back into the fields. And when I leave for the fields, I can hear the littlest ones crying—‘Papa, I’m hungry. Papa, there’s no milk. Papa, I feel sick.’ And he comes back day after day to that, goes out day after day to that, and then you give his son a job, patrón, and it’s like you saved his life. Because maybe you did. But then his son fails at this job? Cono. That son gets beat. Better beat than hungry.”
“What did the boy fail at?”
“He was supposed to watch the curing fire. He fell asleep. Could have burned the whole crop.” He handed Tomas back to Joe. “Could have burned himself.”
Joe looked at the father and son now. Perez had his arm around the boy, the boy nodding, the father speaking in low tones and kissing the side of the boy’s head several times, the lesson delivered. The boy didn’t seem to soften under the kisses, though. So the father pushed his head away and they both went back to work.
The baseball field was completed the day the tobacco was moved from the barn to the pack house. Preparing the leaves for market was a job left mostly to the women, who walked up the hill to the plantation in the morning as hard-faced and hard-fisted as the men. While they sorted and graded the tobacco, Joe gathered the boys in the field and gave them the gloves and fresh balls and Louisville sluggers that had arrived two days before. He laid out three base pads and home plate.
It was as if he’d shown them how to fly.
In the early evenings, he’d take Tomas to watch the games. Sometimes Graciela would join them, but her presence often proved to be too distracting for a couple of the boys entering early adolescence.
Tomas, one of those kids who never sat still, was rapt in the presence of the game. He sat quietly, hands clasped between his knees, watching something he couldn’t possibly understand yet, but which worked on him the way music and warm water did.
Joe said to Graciela one night, “Outside of us, there’s no hope in that town but baseball. They love it.”
“That’s good then, yes?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Shit on America all you want, honey, but we export some good things.”
She gave him a flash of wry brown eyes. “But you charge for it.”
Who didn’t? What made the world run, if not free trade? We give to you, and you give something back in return.
Joe loved his wife, but she still seemed unable to accept that her own country, while undoubtedly beholden to his, was far better off for the transaction. Before the United States had pulled their asses out of the fire, Spain had left them languishing in a cesspool of malaria and bad roads and nonexistent medical care. Machado hadn’t improved on the model. But now, with General Batista, they had a surging infrastructure. They had indoor plumbing and electricity in a third of the country and half of Havana. They had good schools and a few decent hospitals. They had a longer life expectancy. They had dentists.
Yes, the United States exported some of its goodwill at the point of a gun. But all the great countries who’d advanced civilization throughout history had done the same.
And when you considered Ybor City, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she? They’d built h
ospitals with blood money. Pulled women and children off the streets with rum profits.
Good deeds, since the dawn of time, had often followed bad money.
And now, in baseball-crazy Cuba, in a region where they would have been playing it with sticks and bare hands, they had gloves so new the leather creaked and bats as blond as peeled apples. And every evening, when the work was done and the rest of the green stems had been removed from the leaves, and the crop had been sheeted and packed, and the air smelled of the remoistened tobacco and tar, he sat on a chair beside Ciggy and watched the shadows lengthen in the field, and they discussed where they’d buy the seed for the outfield grass so it would no longer be a scrabble of dirt and loose stone out there. Ciggy had heard rumors of a league near these parts, and Joe asked him to keep looking into it, particularly for the fall when the farm duties would be at their lightest.
On market day, their tobacco sold for the second-highest price at the warehouse, 400 sheets of tobacco, weighing an average of 275 pounds, went to a single buyer, the Robert Burns Tobacco Company, which manufactured the panatela, the new American sensation in cigars.
To celebrate, Joe gave bonuses to all the men and women. He gave two cases of Coughlin-Suarez rum to the village. Then on Ciggy’s suggestion, he rented a bus and he and Ciggy took the baseball team to their first movie at the Bijou in Viñales.
The newsreels were all about the Nuremberg Laws taking effect in Germany—footage of anxious Jews packing up belongings and leaving furnished apartments behind to head for the first train out. Joe had read accounts recently that claimed Chancellor Hitler represented an authentic threat to the fragile peace that had held in Europe since ’18, but he doubted the funny-looking little man would go much further with this lunacy, now that the world had sat up and taken notice; there just wasn’t any percentage in it.
The shorts that followed were forgettable, though the boys on the team all laughed a lot, their eyes as wide as the base pads he’d bought them, and it took Joe a moment to realize that they knew so little of the movies they’d thought the newsreels about Germany were the feature.
Then came the main event—an oater called Riders of the Eastern Ridge starring Tex Moran and Estelle Summers. The credits flashed quick across the black screen and Joe, who never went to movies in the first place, couldn’t have cared less who was responsible for making it. He was, in fact, starting to look down to make sure his right shoe was tied when the name that popped on the screen snapped his eyes back up: