Havana Noir

by Achy Obejas

  “What you say, you little white shit?” the black guy asks, then hits his jaw with the gun’s butt.

  Alexis doesn’t say anything. The other black guy has a knife in his hands and is looking around at everybody else. The two black guys laugh. Nobody moves. Should I do something, given that Alexis is my friend? I make my move.

  “Let it be, bro,” I yell at the black guy. “Alexis, forget the cash.”

  “Fine, big guy, you win,” Alexis says, and the black guy pushes him and laughs. The other black guy joins him. They leave without turning their backs. I like black guys less and less all the time. I swear to God that’s true.

  Alexis talks even less than usual. And he drinks more. Between him, me, El Cao, and Yovanoti—that’s what we call Ihosvani now—we’ve downed two liters and a third’s almost gone. There’s one more. Here, on El Cao’s roof, there’s no fear: We’re encircled by a Peerless fence and, even if we get drunk, no one can fall off. Then somebody calls El Cao from the street corner.

  “Richard, Richard!” a woman shouts. Or two women.

  It’s two: Niurka and Betty. El Cao tells them to come up. They come up. They already know the black guys hit Alexis, cuz the whole neighborhood knows. They’re thirsty so we start the fourth liter.

  “Either of you got anything?” I ask, but they play dumb. These two love to play dumb. “Don’t play dumb,” I tell them.

  “I’ve got two parkisonil left,” Betty says, so I ask her for them. They’re two little white pills. I think I wanna have one. But I give them to Alexis, who swallows them with a gulp of liquor.

  “Stop thinking about those black guys,” I say.

  “I’m gonna get them back,” Alexis says, then lays down on the ground, closes his eyes, shakes a little, and starts to fly. That little parkisonil is a rocket when it’s fueled by liquor.

  It’s nighttime and, since there’s no sun, I stare at the moon. I don’t like it as much, but it’s better than nothing. Betty is still sucking me off, and though I’m hard and the head is red hot, I don’t feel like coming. Sometimes it’s like that: It just feels swollen. Alexis is still sleeping on the floor while El Cao is sticking it up Niurka’s ass and Yovanoti rests. I think he’s singing, softly. I have the seventh bottle from our ordeal in my hand and I take another swallow. Suddenly, I don’t wanna be sucked off and I take it out of Betty’s mouth.

  “Get on all fours,” I say, and I start to fuck her up the ass, and I think about movies in which men are sticking it up the ass of some woman. But nothing happens anyway; I’m not gonna come tonight.

  “Here, my man,” I say to Yovanoti, and he comes over and Betty sucks him.

  I start to look at the moon again, take another swallow, and fall asleep.

  When I open my eyes, I see the sun. I’m alone on the roof.

  I don’t know why there are days I like to come to church. Not to pray or to think about God, cuz I never learned to pray and I was spared the whole speech about God and the saints and the angels. I just like to come. My parents don’t care anymore if I come, cuz it’s not seen as a bad thing anymore. A few years ago it was really bad, and they didn’t like it when I came here. You don’t believe in squat, they said to me. Don’t you know that could get us in trouble? What the hell do you think you’ll find in church anyway? they asked. I just shrugged: I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Well, I do know one thing: I like it cuz I feel calm. But I don’t pray or think about God. I just look at him, nailed up there.

  This car runs really well. El Kakín spends the whole day cleaning it, tuning it up, putting little things on it. Whenever El Kakín’s father’s abroad, he gets the car all day. Sometimes he lets us know. Everybody, go to the beach, and then we all go to the beach. Like today. Alexis is still pissed off about what happened with the black guys. He doesn’t even wanna get in the water. He just drinks rum and every now and then mutters, Fuck those black guys. Me, El Kakín, Yovanoti, and El Cao all get in the water. The water’s wonderful today. We get out and drink a little rum, and then I go back in the water and shit and the turd follows me around. But we go back in. Then we go back out, drink more rum, and Vivi and Annia show up. Since we’ve been drinking so much, we talk for a while. Annia says she’s leaving for La Yuma1, her and her entire family. Some people from a church—Jehovah’s Witnesses—got them the visas. They go to that church once a week. They sing, they pray a lot, and everybody thinks they really believe in all that, now that they don’t smoke, or drink, or curse, or harbor ill will in their hearts, as Annia says. But my brother’s always losing his temper, she says later. Well, it doesn’t really matter that they don’t believe in Jehovah, since what they want is to get to La Yuma, just like a bunch of other people I know. Not me, though. They say there’s everything over there, but you have to work like a dog. El Cao says he doesn’t wanna go either; he does fine with moonshine and pills no matter where he’s at. El Kakín wants to go: He wants his own car, with five-speed transmission, four-wheel drive, eight cylinders, diesel motor, hydraulic suspension, cruise control. He knows that car like he already owns it. Alexis says he wants to go too: He says you kill a black guy over there and they give you a thousand dollars. He’s obsessed with black guys.

  But the one who likes La Yuma most is Yovanoti. He’s always talking about it, about how well everybody lives over there, about his brother who owns the racing track in Miami, and that other cousin who, just two months after arriving, was already sending his mother a hundred dollars a month, and about his ex—brother-in-law who has a restaurant, I think, in New Jersey. He says if he ever gets there, he’ll give up alcohol and pills and marijuana, even cigarettes, so he can earn a lot of money. Then he takes another chug of rum. And he talks some more.

  Since I haven’t taken any pills in two days, I’m gonna have fun now. Vivi has a very narrow little ass. At first, you don’t think you can get it in, but she opens up good, tickles herself with her finger, and then takes a deep breath and says, “Put it in me.” And then you just push a little and it goes in all the way. The downside is that I wanna go a little longer before coming but I come really fast, and then I can’t get it back up. El Cao always gets it up: He’s come twice in Vivi and once in Annia. I don’t know how El Cao can come so much. He hardly ever eats. Alexis didn’t wanna do anything. He wants a pill. It looks like he jerked off and drank some rum so he wouldn’t get bored.

  “Look,” Alexis says, and he shows me a strip of pills.

  “Where’d you get that, man?” El Cao asks, dazed.

  “I stole them from my grandmother.”

  El Cao cracks up. “Man, what if something happens to the old lady?”

  “She can die, for all I care,” Alexis says, and he takes two with a chug of liquor.

  He gives me two and hands two over to Richard El Cao and two for Yovanoti and he keeps two more for himself.

  The good thing about pills is that you really don’t have to keep drinking. They multiply what you already have in your belly, I think, by, like, ten. They’re also good cuz if you’re not drunk, then you wanna talk, fuck, listen to music. Well, for a while at least. Alexis starts talking.

  “I need you to lend me your old man’s piece,” he says to me.

  El Cao cracks up again. “You’re gonna kill those black guys over one hundred shitty pesos?”

  “Yeah, one hundred shitty pesos and cuz they’re mothafuckas, those shit fuckin’ black faggots. I need the gun,” he says.

  “You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say.

  “Fuck crazy. You gonna lend it to me or not?”

  “Trouble, man.”

  “No trouble. Bring it tonight and in three hours I’ll have it back to him.”

  “You don’t even know where those black guys live.”

  “I’ll find out—where they live, where they drink their beer, where they bet on cockfights, where they play the lottery, where they smoke pot, where they steal hens. They’re two dead black guys. Just lend me the fucking gun. Look,” he says, and he stic
ks his hand in his pocket and pulls out six bullets. He takes another chug of the rum with the last two pills.

  “You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say, but I don’t think he hears me.

  Yovanoti got a movie and we’re gonna watch it in his room on the VCR. First, there are two blondes. It looks like they just got home from work, cuz they’re carrying purses and that sort of thing. But they start undressing each other right away and they get a really good lezzie thing going. Just when they’re getting hot, a mulatta comes in, pushes them apart, and joins them. The mulatta has a red pussy which is practically hairless and must weigh about ten pounds. The two blondes lick the mulatta all over, until one of them pulls out a dildo and straps it on. She sticks it in the mulatta until she comes. While all that’s going on, El Cao is the first to take out his dick and start jerking off. Then me. Then Alexis. Then Yovanoti. Then the other blonde in the movie, so she’s not left with nothing to do, starts jerking off too. The worst part of all this is how it smells like jism in the bedroom now.

  I keep thinking about the mulatta’s pussy. Just for a while. Cuz now another movie has started and El Cao has brought out a bottle of liquor. I wake up during the night. I think I’m still in Yovanoti’s room. Alexis is still sleeping, on the bed now. Vanessa is naked and sleeping too. El Cao and Yovanoti are gone. Vanessa, the blonde, is between Alexis and me. That seems odd cuz Vanessa never fucks us, much less without protection. She says we’re savages, that we’re all gonna die from AIDS and that we leave bruises and what she wants is a Yuma to give her dollars and let her live in Paris. I don’t know what her deal is with Paris. But that’s Vanessa, and the truth is she’s hot. She’s got a little lock of blond hair on her fat pussy and two tits that are even hotter. All of a sudden, I get a hard-on. I touch Vanessa but she doesn’t even flinch. I stick a finger inside her and realize her crack is all slippery. It seems to be jism. I rub my finger on my dick, to get it wet. Then I shove it in her. She remains the same. How’d she get like this? I keep on fucking her until I get bored and then I pull out. I suck her tits for a while. She laughs, asleep, and I stick it back in her and this time I come. But not much.

  I look out the window and see that it’s raining. I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know what time it is. It must be very late cuz there’s no one on the corner and I’m a little hungry. There are some burned papers on the floor. Of course, we must have smoked some pot. But I don’t remember. There’s a liter bottle with three fingers of rum left. I drink it to calm my hunger then lay back down. But beforehand, I suck Vanessa’s tits again for a little while, thinking the whole time about the mulatta’s pussy.

  Since El Kakín hasn’t shown up, we take off for the coast, where the water’s just fine. The drag here are the rocks on the bottom. One time, I almost cracked my head open. Of course, I dove in drunk. You can still see the scar: They gave me sixteen stitches, and since I was so drunk, the anesthesia didn’t take. Better to forget about all that. I drink some more rum and listen to El Cao, who just yaks on like a fucking parrot.

  “So I go up to the Yuma and say, Míster, guat yu guan? Girls, rum, tobacco, marijuana? And the guy’s a little scared. Since he was blond and pink, he got red. Nosing, nosing, he tells me, and I say, No problem, míster, yo tengo lo que yu guan. And the guy, Nosing, nosing, but by then Yovanoti was right behind him and I just landed one, and Yova got one in behind his ear, and I grabbed his backpack and kicked him in the balls so hard, I think one came out his ear…I swear! So we took off and when I turned around about a block later, there’s the guy still shaking on the ground, so we slowed down a little. We went through the backpack and trashed all the crap, until we found his wallet and realized the sucker was German. And you know how much money he had? Ten miserable dollars. Yovanoti had to hold me back, cuz I just wanted to go back and give him two more kicks. What the fuck is that, all the way from Germany with only ten dollars on him? That’s what we used to buy these liters…”

  We laugh, a lot. And we drink more rum.

  Then Yovanoti says, “Let us drink to the solidarity between the German and Cuban peoples!” And we drink some more.

  Alexis doesn’t drink this time. He says, “So you gonna get me your father’s piece?”

  “You’re still tripping on that?”

  “Are you gonna get it for me or not?”

  “Fuck, Alexis, you know he doesn’t let it out of his sight, not even when he’s taking a crap.”

  “He sleeps with it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then…”

  Alexis laughs when he sees the gun. It’s a Makarov and it’s so clean, it looks new. I hand it to him and he just stares at it. He really does like pieces like that. Not me.

  El Cao and Yovanoti also look it over. “That’s a nice one,” they say.

  Alexis takes out the clip and empties it. He puts in his own bullets, one by one.

  “Tomorrow, the whole world should pay me tribute,” he says. “There are gonna be two fewer black guys. Let’s go,” he says, and we leave.

  But first we take a couple swallows of rum. Or three.

  “I’m sure they’re there,” Alexis says, and he shows us the house. “That’s where they go to drink beer.”

  And so we wait at the corner. No one speaks. While we wait, I look at the moon. Tonight, it’s round and very bright. This corner’s shitty, I like mine better. It smells of piss here. Yovanoti is smoking cigarette after cigarette. Richard El Cao is sitting on the ground; he’s singing, softly. Alexis just stares at the house.

  “That’s where those mothafuckas are,” he finally says.

  The two black guys come out and head for the other corner. We go after them, unhurried. We turn the corner and see them make like they’re looking into this one house. They’re probably gonna pull something there. All black guys are the same. Well, almost all. My father says not all black guys are thieves but that all thieves are black. And he says black people have five senses, just like whites. Except that they have two for music and three for stealing. He should know, since he’s a cop. That’s why he laughs so hard when he tells these jokes and when he talks about the black guys they’ve arrested. When they’re in jail, he says, those black guys aren’t so tough.

  We continue along the sidewalk and when we get near the black guys, they feign indifference and light cigarettes. Even though there’s so much moonlight, they don’t seem to recognize us. As soon as we’re in front of them, we jump them and Alexis shows the piece. The black guy who held the knife sees it first. What a black rat he is. He takes off and that costs him his life: Alexis lets fly some lead and the guy falls to the ground. He starts thrashing, like a rabid dog, and Yovanoti and I kick him and yell at him, Black faggot, you got scared, huh, you black faggot. We do that until he shivers really weird and gets stiff, with his tongue hanging out. The other black guy’s just standing there, frozen, seeing how his buddy’s dead as a doornail. Alexis stands in front of him.

  “Now you’re gonna pay me my hundred pesos, aren’t you?” he says, and hits him on the nose with the piece.

  “Fuck, white boy, no need to be this way,” the guy says, and shoves his hand in his pocket.

  “Careful!” screams El Cao, and Alexis doesn’t think: He shoots him right in the head. The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots. Then the black guy falls and Alexis leans down to talk to him, though I don’t think the guy can hear him anymore.

  “See what happens to tough little black guys like you and your buddy?” He takes the guy’s hand out of his pocket. The black guy doesn’t have a gun today, just a roll of bills: more than five hundred.

  Since everybody on the block’s already looking and screaming, we start running. That’s when everything gets fucked up: Two cops appear on the corner and Alexis doesn’t even give it a thought. He never gives anything a thought. And with the aim he’s got. He shoots and downs one, and the oth
er one flees. We run off and no one else comes after us.

  If you kill two black delinquents, you get in trouble. But if you kill a cop, then things go from bad to the very worst. We know this, which is why we all agree when El Cao speaks up.

  “Let’s steal a boat from the river and head for La Yuma, cuz this is really bad now; this is what happens when you hang out with punks like this,” he says, taking the gun from Alexis. When Alexis starts to say something, El Cao interrupts him: “Shut up or I’ll shut you up.”

  It’s been two hours now I’ve been staring at the sun. I like looking at the sun. I can look at the sun without dropping my lids, with my pupils intact, and without tears. It’s been two hours since the boat ran out of fuel and more than four that we’ve been without water. It’s been at least an hour since Alexis slipped off the side, when he went to drink some sea water and never came back. Yovanoti says a shark probably got him. Then he starts to cry and babble, “I’m glad, I’m glad,” and to spit in the water. I don’t like that. I think Alexis was my best friend.

  I’ve never worried so much about time passing. Richard El Cao says it’ll be dark in two hours, and that this is good. I don’t know if it’s so good. The best thing would be to be on the corner, listening to the bitching of the old women, singing a little, and staring at the sun. Without water, without food, without rum in the middle of the ocean, yeah, there’s nothing better…It stinks of vomit and shit. If an American coast guard doesn’t show up, we’re fucked. And if one does show up, we’re even more fucked. I ask myself, What the fuck am I doing on this boat? I wanna throw myself in the water like Alexis, but I control myself.