Stabs at Happiness

by Todd Grimson

  “I don’t know about any of that.”

  “What happened to her, your original mom?”

  “Sir, she lives in prison.”

  We turned, and were speeding up, getting on the highway now.

  “In Tutwiler?”

  “Yes sir. That’s just for women. But Sivanderbilt… he grew up in North Carolina.”

  “Did he now? I spent some time up there myself. I was in Azalea, North Carolina.”

  “I don’t know that town.”

  “Just up the road from Valley Springs.”

  “Oh,” he said, Young Axl, pretending this was meaningful to him.

  A little more than a half hour ago I’d been sitting down next to the kitchen table, there with my so-called friends. Some of them were folks I’d met up in North Carolina while they were paying their debt to society. I guess I might have been paying some kind of debt myself. Some would call it that. It’s too damn easy to judge.

  People have a way of doing things, little things maybe, that show how they really feel… underneath their phony smiles.

  “And Donnie Ray here, hey, Donnie Ray would like a drum-stick, isn’t that right?” Jimmy said. I did not want a drumstick. I never said I did. Those are for children.

  Jimmy was smiling, red lips pulled back to show his snaggly old yellow teeth.

  Sure, he and Sivanderbilt were pretty brave now, in the kitchen, drinking bourbon while Sivanderbilt’s woman fried us up something to eat. It was a different story, I’m telling you, an hour previous at the bank in downtown Mobile. But now I could see these motherfuckers looking at each other, real sly, like they’d come up with some way to cheat me on the count.

  Numbers, you see, man, numbers have a kind of life of their own. And when you get into dividing shit up, it’s like, well… divided by three, divided by four… that’s a whole lot different than divided by one. There’s a lot of good sense in divided by one. That’s what I was thinking there, drinking a Coke. If I didn’t trust them, they could probably see this on my face, and then they didn’t trust me, and you can’t leave things like that.

  Sivanderbilt’s woman, Olga, she stayed over by the stove. There was some kind of a bandage on her bare foot. She didn’t want to come over to the table or even let me look in her eyes. That was cool. I understood Olga good enough. She had a puffy lip.

  It was hot out, and there were some flies there in the kitchen, past the hole in the screen door, and I was sweating, we all were, sweating while smelling the chicken grease, and if I got greasy fingers I’d never get nothing done.

  I took a bite off a fork and said, “Olga, this is some fine potato salad.” She nodded, I could see her face, but she didn’t say nothing back.

  It was about then that I pulled a gun out from under my jacket.

  “Hey kid—” began Jimmy—he was always talking, always had some expert opinion—and then, after I’d shot him in the face, Olga swung the skillet of hot grease in my direction, but kinda slow, almost in slow motion, so I shot her twice and then Sivanderbilt, once good. He caught himself most of the chicken fat and was beginning to object. I shot him dead.

  I could always shoot. It’s a gift.

  Olga didn’t seem too bad. She got up off her knees taking an old butcher knife and just about stabbed me. I put some more bullets in her then. They weighed her down. She just let out a deep sigh while she fell down on her face.

  Goddamn. There was all this noise stuck in my ears. I was trying to avoid tracking blood on my shoes, ‘cause it was streaming all over the tile floor.

  I never had nothing against Olga. She made me a sandwich once when I came over and no one was home. She couldn’t speak English real good. I don’t know where in the hell Sivanderbilt got her from. I felt sorry for her. But there was nothing to discuss, no way I could leave her be.

  Everything was pretty quiet now, except for a few flies. Some fool dog kept barking a few backyards away.

  I got what I needed: some weaponry, the money, some good pills I found that might come in handy, and when I came back to the kitchen I picked a piece of chicken up off the floor. I was hungry as hell just from all that cooking smell.

  I used the salt shaker and then took a bite. The skin was crispy, the white meat just right. That Olga could sure cook.

  The burner on the electric stove was some real bright orange, on high, it just kept getting brighter and brighter and hotter all the time.

  I was pretty hungry now in the car. I had been just about to eat a meal before Fate intervened. Now I was troubled, sliding my eyes over at Axl, my foot on the gas. His presence complicated shit.

  It felt like he knew.

  “You missed the turn.”

  “What?”

  “Back there. For Pascagoula.”

  “Oh, don’t worry man. Hey. I just thought we’d go up here a little further, stop and get something to eat. Some Coca-Cola or maybe a Dr Pepper.”

  This was getting hard.

  “Axl, you have this look on your face.”

  “I don’t mean nothing, sir.”

  “You look concerned.”

  “I’m a little worried we missed the turn.”

  “Everything will be all right. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “You promise?”

  “Do I promise? Well. Axl, you ever visit your original mom in prison?”

  “No sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have a better mom now.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking it over. “She made a sandwich for me one time.”

  BATISTA’S LIEUTENANT

  ON 9 APRIL, 1958, the general strike is repressed, and about eighty revolutionaries or suspected revolutionaries are arrested, interrogated in the usual manner, and variously put to death.

  Leonora Christina’s hair is light as straw, and she’s wearing a dress which leaves her shoulders bare. A gold wristwatch.

  She stretches out her legs, sitting at an umbrella table in the outdoor courtyard of the restaurant, in the shade of a palm tree, smoking a cigarette. Lucky Strikes. She orders a hamburger, french fries, and a Coke.

  Her father, who was a chemist, thought that Pepsi would pay him a million dollars if he could figure out the secret formula of Coca-Cola. A couple of times he came close, close enough so that his blindfolded family could not tell the difference, but the Pepsi people turned him away again and again. “Keep trying,” they told him, but in the process he went crazy. On the way to the doctor’s office, his wife made the mistake of letting him drive, and he turned into the oncoming lane when he saw a big enough fast truck. The head-on collision left Leonora an orphan, but since it couldn’t be proven suicide she collected insurance money, which well-tempered whatever grief she might have felt. She thought that her father must have known all along about the affair her mother had been having with Diego, the shoe salesman who lived just down the street. Her father hadn’t been so crazy that he’d also gone deaf and blind.

  Coca-Cola remains Leonora’s favorite drink. She sips it through a straw. The sun above is hot, bright as an atomic dime. The ice in the drink is nearly all melted. The only respite from the heat comes from a fitful breeze that blows in from Havana harbor, cooling and soothing one now and then, the more now than then as the afternoon goes on. She could have waited until Justo arrived before ordering, sure, but she doesn’t like this habit he has of always being fifteen minutes late. He has many faults, she thinks, and she would not put up with any of them if her real boyfriend, Lieutenant Angel Santamaria, would get rid of his North American mistress. Leonora picked up Justo to get even, to make Angel jealous. So far, though, the strategy has not worked.

  She says to the waitress, “I don’t like sweet pickles. Would you bring me some dill?” She’s starting to feel cross.

  Then Justo arrives, wearing sunglasses, a white shirt, light blue pants, the scraggly beard he’s been trying to grow for more than a month without success. He acts like he’s in a hurry, like he’s just come from some importan
t errand. She thinks he’s probably made up some lie to explain why he is late.

  “I’m going to the Sierra,” he announces, dramatically, temporarily removing the sunglasses to reveal the courage in his eyes.

  “I’m going to join Fidel.”

  “Oh, I see. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No, I’m not kidding. I’m going to join the guerrilleros.”

  “Why? What for?” She’s scornful, widening her eyes.

  Justo shrugs. “Ask your lieutenant,” he says.

  “He’s not ‘my’ lieutenant. I told you all about that.”

  “I wish you’d never have anything more to do with him.”

  “It’s not your business. Besides, he’s never done anything to you.”

  “He’s a Batistiano,” Justo says. “He’s done things to my brothers. That’s as good as doing things to me.”

  “Your ‘brothers.’ That’s such shit.”

  Justo doesn’t really want to argue with her. She should have acted like she took him more seriously when he said he was going to join Fidel. He smokes a cigarette, sunglasses on again, and then, after a sufficient pause, he changes the subject.

  Saying, in a lighter tone of voice, “I heard that Batista paid a witch doctor to throw the seven shells for him… you know, to tell the future. He thinks his voodoo might be changing, going bad on him: he needs to sacrifice some more chickens or something. Hey, just wait—in about a month there’ll hardly be a chicken left in all of Cuba. They’ll all have run to the Sierra; Fidel will be the only one on the whole island who’s able to make chickenhead soup.”

  Leonora laughs, and Justo is happy. He’s smitten with her. He tries to resist it because he’s so afraid of Santamaria. He only said that he was going to the Sierra to see if Leonora’d be impressed. He doesn’t think she respects him enough as a man.

  The North American woman is insatiable. After hours of love-making she remains avid; orgasms do not seem to tire her or drain her in the least.

  Angel wonders if he’s being slowly devoured. In order to demonstrate, even if only to himself, that he’s the one in control, he enacts small cruelties and perversions so that she must bend, even if only superficially, to his will. It’s not a question of love. It never has been.

  She’s ten years older, thirty-eight, but still tender and firm. Her husband, an executive in the United Fruit Company, married her for her looks. To Angel, of course, the idea of cuckolding such a Yankee is delicious. All he had to do was snap his fingers: there she was, spread for him, wanting him, needing it bad.

  “You’ve got such beautiful skin,” she says, caressing him, and he takes the compliment for granted, although once upon a time, growing up in Santiago de Cuba, he had been thin and awkward and shy.

  His mother, Elena, who was widowed at nineteen (through the agency of a knife fight over dice), had had a difficult time of it for a while, until she met a susceptible mafioso named Gino, a simple heart, who worked at one of the big casinos in Havana. He fell for her hard. If it had not been for Gino, with his money and influence, Angel and his brother Miguel might well have ended up, like so many others, cutting cane out in some hellishly hot field, having nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

  Even after Gino was killed, falling prey to the ubiquitous machine-gun, his boss and friends continued to look out for Elena, to help her with her boys. When he was of age, Angel got a commission in the army, impossible without influence, while Miguel was given a job as a school teacher—the best deal of all, because he’s never actually had to teach a class. Since teachers appointed by the Minister of Education have lifetime tenure, he can never be fired. All he has to do is kick back a portion of the salary they pay him to do nothing. Miguel is supposed to be a math teacher: the only numbers he knows are the ones on money or dice.

  “Roll over, Romeo,” says Sally. “I want to see what you’ve got there. Are you hiding something from me? You’re a bad boy, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t call me Romeo.”

  “Yes sir. Is that how I should address you from now on, Lieutenant-sir? Shall we keep things military?” She speaks to him in a babyish ‘love-voice’ that Angel finds unsympathetic. That last daiquiri has made her drunk.

  He sighs. His fingers are in her hair. He shuts his eyes tight, and thinks of Leonora Christina. Then Brigitte Bardot. Then Leonora Christina again, helpless, in distress. It excites him. He doesn’t know why, but it does.

  He opens his eyes. Sally seems lost, her own eyes closed, in a devotion that Angel, rightly or wrongly, identifies as greed.

  “Pancho Villa was drunk all the time,” says Fidel, drinking from a bottle of white rum. “And look what he got done.”

  Che laughs, and says then maybe they too should be drunk all the time—who knows? He’s only kidding, he hastens to add. Fidel laughs again, in another of his unpredictable moods.

  Next to the campfire, they talk about the French Revolution of 1789. It’s interesting because of all the actions and reactions, each victory lasting only a couple of months before the next coup and associative purge.

  Che speaks of Robespierre’s ‘Republic of Virtue,’ which he admires as the first big attempt to found a secular religion. Fidel interrupts him by making a joke, he can’t resist.

  “In Havana, we already have our Virtue Street. It’s where all the whores hang out, you know, waiting for gringos.”

  Che laughs, but he wants to continue with his point.

  Justo goes to see his friend Ulpiano, who makes bombs. Some of these don’t do any damage or kill anyone, they just make a lot of smoke and noise. Ulpiano, who is black, offers Justo a warm bottle of Coke. They talk for a long time then about all of the things they’d like to see changed.

  Betting eleven eleven eleven, eleven eleven eleven, seven and then six, always red, according to a system based on the astrology of the Mayan Empire, I lose again and again, in the black of bluest night, trying to hang on to the shreds of my cool.

  “It’s painless,” I say to myself, only the briefest flicker of disappointment betraying me, as I watch some American woman bet on zero, like an asshole—and win.

  I can read a sign. I turn away from the baize and go to the bar.

  I order a drink, mentally calculating my finances. It would not be cool to take my money out and add it up in public, so I try to remember all of my bets. Obviously, I missed noticing an omen.

  Behind me, the bitch shrieks again, as if having an orgasm. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “Tell me, is there anything worse than a Yankee?” I say to the bartender, who gives me a slow-developing, collaborative smile.

  “Two,” he says, and I agree.

  The music, that music… echoes and is magnified inside of Lieutenant Santamaria’s head. His body is flushed with warmth. He’s high.

  The air-conditioning isn’t working very well, and Leonora Christina is perspiring, in her blue x-ray dress. Tan nylons that Angel knows are held up by a garter belt, lacy panties, and—oh, he wants her, there’s never been any doubt about that. But lately their lovemaking has been contaminated and corrupt. Something is wrong. Where they used to share secrets, now they conceal them.

  The saxophone shrills, like some kind of exotic talking bird. In black and white and then, in a spurt of musical blood, the deepest of reds.

  The moment passes. Some girl begins to sing, in English, “Fly Me to the Moon.” She was hired for the size of her breasts; her dress is made to show them off.

  “Look,” says Angel. “See that guy with the little mustache? He’s the biggest pusher of reefer in the world.”

  “Does he pay protection?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your cut?” asks Leonora, looking at Angel half-mockingly, as though she knows the score but will put him through his paces nonetheless.

  “Three reefers a week,” he says, keeping a straight face. “Sometimes four.”

  Fulgencio Batista is having a hard time getting
to sleep. He can’t stop thinking about the horror movie he saw tonight. It really scared him. The girl in his bed, who has luxurious dark red hair, tries to console him.

  “Sweetie,” she says, “You worry too much.”

  “I’m just thinking,” says ‘El Hombre’. “Tell the truth, will you? Do you believe in vampires?”

  Yes, she does. To reassure him, however, she says no.

  Oh Jesus the bomb goes off so loud it breaks the windows of the shops across the street: all you can see is smoke, all you can hear is the big echo of the explosion and then the screams of the wounded, horrible cries—or maybe you’re deaf, and it’s all inside your head. Maybe your screams are the loudest, the most abandoned of them all. Or you’re dead and you don’t know it. Come on then, amigo. Try to run away.

  Mariarosa and her friend Leonora Christina go for a drive down Fifth Avenue, looking at the surf off to the right. The car is a Thunderbird, given to Mariarosa as a gift by her lover, a fifty-three year old vice president of some American company that imports or exports something—she never listens to him talk. His wife finds Cuba too humid, she’s always tired. While he likes to have some fun.

  “One week Justo wants to be a poet,” says Leonora, “And then the next week he wants to play the trumpet in some band. If he can ever decide what he really wants to do, and stick with it, I think he’ll be okay. He’s not so complicated as Angel, but Angel’s too complicated for his own good. He’s moody; he won’t talk about what’s on his mind…”

  Mariarosa frowns. She’s only met Justo once, but she was not impressed. Angel is so handsome: to her mind there’s no comparison.

  “At least,” she says, remembering an intimate confession, “Angel knows how to make you happy.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Justo gets too excited. He wants to please me so bad… Maybe I can teach him. I don’t know.”

  There’s nothing she can teach Angel.

  Jagged streaks of theatrical lightning tear apart the sky, followed closely by several basso profundo roars of thunder, which some people mistake for explosions. The rain attacks the island in a fury, only gradually losing its concentration and getting lazy, slacking off.