Ruins
Page 19
Usnavy rolled the sheet around his right wrist and hand. The blood underneath was coagulated and black but oozed a bit.
“Let me see that,” Lidia said the instant she got a glimpse of the red blotch.
Usnavy shook his head. “At the hospital.”
As they crossed the courtyard and the funnel of flies, a party of tourists exploring the derrumbe met them midway. Usnavy thought he recognized the guide from the day Diosdado had refused to have his picture taken.
“Look at that,” said one of the tourists—suddenly, Usnavy understood her English perfectly. He followed her eyes to something in the remains: It was a nugget of rainbow—ruby, emerald, imperial gold—there amidst the broken walls, rusted steel spokes, shredded paperback books, and the inevitable orange slush from the tenement’s fluids.
“A light in the ruins!” barked a man with a camera.
Usnavy cringed.
The tourist snapped a photo, delighted with his find, looking right through Usnavy as he trudged by, held between Lidia and Jacinto.
At the hospital, an emergency room crew unveiled the injury—Lidia gasped and immediately opened a new cascade of tears when she saw it. The wound was black, almost green, its odor salty and pungent, like rotting mollusks.
The surgery to save Usnavy’s hand was executed under a portrait of Che with the legend Until victory, always and a long frosty tube of fluorescence, without anesthesia because there simply wasn’t any. Instead, the doctors had Lidia, Jacinto, and a couple of volunteers hold Usnavy down while they treated him. Their fingers dug into his skin, leaving strings of blue-green bruises like ancient beads. All the while, his teeth bore into a piece of black rubber—maybe the remnants of a fan belt from a still vibrant Ford or Buick.
After the operation, a drained Usnavy, his mouth open and maroonish, was put to bed as Lidia and Jacinto took turns watching over him. Jacinto’s mother dropped by, now in the full glow of health. Minerva from the bodega read him the headlines from Granma. Even Frank and Diosdado, on good behavior for their friend’s sake, showed up with Oscar Luis, the cab driver, retelling favorite stories from the domino game on Montserrate.
They knew about Nena but talked only obliquely about her absence. And they had some news too: The autistic boy, it turned out, had also left the island on a raft, the winds pushing him every which way so that he landed in Haiti, just as the U.S. marines were setting foot on Boukman’s native soil.
“How salao is that, huh?” asked Frank in his slightly chagrined voice.
As his friends watched over him, Usnavy rested under a thin sheet, the future of his fingers uncertain, his pulpy palm a nest of scars like Virgilio’s fingertips. He tossed and turned, his eyelids fluttered.
“I need some rest,” he said, barely audible and to no one in particular. His lips were dry and sticky, his tongue stabbing at them with its parched tip. “We all need some rest.” He could see himself greeting those who stayed and those who left, Nena too.
Abruptly, Usnavy turned, rearranged his body—numb and heavy—to face the wall on the other side of the bed.
I want to die old and contented, he dreamt, in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.
Also available from Akashic Books
HAVANA NOIR
edited by Achy Obejas
360 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95
Brand new stories by: Leonardo Padura, Pablo Medina, Achy Obejas, Carolina García-Aguilera, Ena Lucía Portela, Miguel Mejides, Arnaldo Correa, Alex Abella, Moisés Asís, Lea Aschkenas, and others.
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CHICAGO NOIR
edited by Neal Pollack
270 pages, trade paperback original, $14.95
Brand new stories by: Achy Obejas, Bayo Ojikutu, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Adam Langer, Joe Meno, Peter Orner, Claire Zulkey, Daniel Buckman, and others.
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HAVANA LUNAR
a novel by Robert Arellano
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a novel by Daniel Chavarría
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*Winner of a 2001 Edgar Award
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THE AGE OF DREAMING
a novel by Nina Revoyr
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ACHY OBEJAS is the author of various books, including the award-winning novel Days of Awe and the best-selling poetry chapbook This Is What Happened in Our Other Life. She is the editor of Akashic’s critically acclaimed crime-fiction anthology Havana Noir, and the translator (into Spanish) for Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize—winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer in Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana and continues to spend extended time there.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter: I
Chapter: II
Chapter: III
Chapter: IV
Chapter: V
Chapter: VI
nbsp; Achy Obejas, Ruins