City Beasts

by Mark Kurlansky

  Baldito told him that he had been bitten by a tarantula and Conky Rojas had told him to talk to him.

  With the sunglasses on Baldito could not tell what Romeo’s reaction was, but he yawned, showing excellent white teeth, and scratched his head and asked Baldito to come back in about an hour.

  When Baldito returned, Romeo still had his sunglasses on but was wearing a lavender cashmere sweater and blue jeans. Baldito thought that Romeo’s living room was the coldest place he had ever been in his life. Maybe the freezer on the dock was this cold, but he would go in there for only a minute.

  Romeo dramatically stuck a long, thin finger straight up, as though demanding silence. “What should I offer you . . .” After a long pause he smiled and said, “Papaya juice.”

  He walked over to a large glass bowl of papayas in the dark, cold room. He held several, squeezed and caressed and sniffed them and chose the one he wanted and disappeared into the next room, from where Baldito could hear the clanging of equipment. “I just got a new papaya juicer,” Romeo shouted.

  After several minutes in which Baldito was shivering alone in the dark, Romeo reentered, holding out a large glass with a baby-flesh-pink liquid. Baldito started to take the glass and jumped backward.

  “Don’t drop it.” Romeo laughed. On his lavender cashmere arm was a tarantula making its way toward the drink. Another one was crawling up the side of his head, making its way to the top of his thick black hair. “Meet Rico and Pepito,” said Romeo. “They’re pets.”

  “Pets?” Baldito was considering the possibility that he had lost his mind and none of this was real. “Do they ever bite you?”

  “We have our little disagreements. Especially Rico. He has a bad temper.”

  “What happens when they bite you?” Baldito asked, but he knew the answer.

  Romeo smiled. “You go crazy.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?” Why am I asking? thought Baldito. It was already too late. Besides, everyone knows that Romeo is crazy.

  Romeo went to a cabinet and started playing a merengue very loudly. It was Tempo Dominicano’s “Confusiones.” He began swaying his hips, moving his feet to the music, smiling with his eyes closed, Rico and Pepito clinging to him. “Come on, Baldito. No time to waste. When were you bitten?”

  Baldito began moving to the music. It felt good. He was smiling, too. He had never danced very much, and in fact had preferred sad bachata about broken hearts to the fast-paced merengue. But it would not have surprised anyone that he danced well. He could feel how good he was. How his body expressed the music. How the rhythm carried him. By the time they got to Benny Sadel’s “Yo Soy Así,” he seemed to be in a trance. After several hours of dancing, Romeo drove them to a club on the Malecón.

  Baldito noticed that Romeo also danced very well and the most beautiful women wanted to dance with him, their dark satin skin taking on a moist sheen as the night wore on. It was one of the things you got for being a Major Leaguer, Baldito thought, like a Mitsubishi Montero.

  But soon it was noticed that young Baldito was also an incredibly good dancer, in fact getting better with each merengue, and so young women wanted to dance with him, too. But really he was dancing with himself, feeling nothing but an upbeat rhythm—without stop until daybreak.

  * * *

  Fortunately Dante had brought no scouts that day because Baldito did not get a single hit, missed a number of fly balls he should have chased after. He went home and slept and the next day he was playing well again. The tarantula was back with its missing legs, angrily hissing at him, and a week later it bit him again.

  Baldito knew what to do. He felt good when he was dancing. Better than when he played baseball. As long as there was merengue he did not have to worry about anything. Of course, dancing merengue would not get his family their boat or him his Montero.

  His family was worried. They all went to sleep at sunset and woke up when it was still dark to go fishing, so on nights when Baldito was dancing they never saw him.

  He was no longer playing as well as he used to, and the scouts could see that he was not the hot prospect that they’d heard he was. But Dante accepted his disappointments, he had many, and on February 29 he signed him to the Cubs for $300,000, a respectable bonus that he reported to the Gils as $200,000, from which their share was $140,000, which was more money than they had ever imagined possessing. Dante made $160,000. Elvio had to admit that Dante was a genius.

  The fishermen threw a party for Baldito by the water in Punta de Pescadores, and Dante and Elvio came. Rosalia was going to make her special fish and dumplings, but they had no electricity in the house that week so she cooked the fish with roots and coconut in a big pot outside on an open fire as in the old days. Baldito played merengue on a player with powerful speakers—his first purchase with his signing bonus, playing Gran Manzana’s “Cuando Llegara” over and over and dancing to it with his eyes closed as the brass notes bounced over the quiet water and the fishermen sipped little glasses of sweet and strong guavaberry.

  The Gils bought their boat and a big enough engine to go to sea and brought back to market long carite with angry faces, and roundheaded dorado that died with foolish grins, and sleek marlin, long and shiny silver and blue, looking like they dressed for the occasion, and smaller oval bonito only two feet long but bringing high prices. These big sea fish were the ones that brought money. Two or three of them could bring in more money than an entire boatload of cabriles.

  Life was good again. Baldito was sent to the Cubs training camp in Boca Chica, where there was a lot of very good food and no tarantulas in the outfield. But there was also no merengue. He missed that.

  MIAMI

  The Alligator Teeth of an Unknown God

  A mise meshune oyf im.

  May a strange and ugly thing come his way.

  —Old Yiddish curse

  Finally Yoni had nailed this son of a bitch. The rabbi scratched his beard rabbinically and Yoni couldn’t help but smile. The rabbi who knew everything was caught. Yoni was two points ahead and Herschel was stuck with one last tile and he couldn’t use it.

  It was a K, and that was five points, and if he couldn’t use it Herschel would lose five points. Yoni smiled. Why didn’t the rabbi give up? He had him. There was no open spot for the letter K. But Herschel smiled. He even laughed. He slapped the tile on the board the way the Cubans did when they played dominoes.

  What had he done? He had used the word “harmony,” Yoni’s word, and placed the K next to the A.

  “Ka?” said Yoni. “What’s a ka? There’s no such word.”

  “Look it up,” said Herschel.

  The big, thick book was sitting on the table in front of Yoni. He quickly stroked the pages with his index finger and there it was.

  Ka: an unknown god.

  “You can’t outsmart the rebbe,” said Rifka, the bulbous macaroon monster that was his wife, popping another Israeli chocolate-covered macaroon in her mouth. She had chocolate on her fingers and a little on her ample jiggly white cheek. Yoni looked at his wife with disgust, the round, round body, maybe over the three-hundred-pound mark by now, that wig that looked like the dead straw of a plant that wildly went to seed and died, the dull, dark hair under it looking even worse. With pain Yoni reflected, as he often did, on the absurd fact that this was the only woman to whom he had ever made love—a popular euphemism—whom he had ever touched.

  “Anyone want the last macaroon?” she asked cheerfully as she ate it. They imported the macaroons by the case for her and she pointed out that it was a good thing that she ate so many because that made it possible for her to get a wholesale price.

  Her bloated flesh held in its tight white and blotchy pink skin like a foam-rubber pillow shoved in a too-small pillowcase—or at least he imagined it would feel like that. He hadn’t touched her in almost ten years and a hundred pounds. It was an arranged marriage, an
d the night after the wedding when they were alone for the first time was the worst night of either of their lives. They tried a few more times, but not many, and then they made up medical myths about why they didn’t have any children.

  “Macaroons are gone. Let’s go,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to be funny. She never was very funny. He never knew why his parents picked her for him. You weren’t supposed to ask. He had mentioned the possibility of a divorce once and all her white flesh turned red. She was furious and would not even discuss the possibility. So was she happy? Yoni didn’t know. Maybe as long as she had enough macaroons she was happy. He had talked to Herschel once about a divorce and he said that it would be extremely difficult if she would not cooperate.

  They went home after the Scrabble game, parked the car in the driveway, went into the house. Rifka went to the cabinet where they were kept and took out a flat box of macaroons. Yoni watched the way the fat on the back of her upper arms jiggled like ripples in soup being stirred.

  “Want some?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer, sinking into the couch, jamming two in her mouth with her left hand while her right was waving the remote control as though conducting a symphony.

  Yoni watched and thought, This is my life.

  Then, almost as though in sympathy, he heard an odd deep, soft grunt from outside. Was it an owl? There were ravens that settled into the treetops at sunset and screeched, and there was a parrot with a scream so loud and grating that Yoni had tried to chase it away by throwing rocks. Once, he even hit it and it shouted indignantly while it recovered its balance. But it wasn’t hurt and it didn’t leave.

  He took a flashlight and wandered into the backyard. It was supposed to be a backyard, but his home had been arranged by the same people who’d arranged his marriage and it turned out that the backyard where his future children were to play was really more of a swamp. You put your foot in it and a puddle formed. Children could never play there. But there were no children. Rabbi Herschel always says, “God finds unexpected solutions.”

  Through the tropical night sounds of insects he could hear Rifka’s television program; it was about chefs who hated one another’s food. Why did she care? It was all traif that she couldn’t eat. His shoes made sucking noises as he made his way through the “yard.” Then he almost stepped on it.

  He jerked back quickly and froze, not daring to move. It was only a long series of bumps and ridges in the glow of the flashlight. And an eye that was looking at him. It was an alligator. He estimated that it was twelve feet long—about twice his height—but it might be bigger. It had wriggled in the gaseous mud and created a pool for itself and only the top half was exposed.

  Suppose he ran? How fast are alligators? Probably faster than he was in this muck. He looked at his feet and saw that they were sinking into the ground. But for some reason Yoni didn’t want to run. He was not afraid. He was oddly certain that this alligator had not come to harm him. Rabbi Herschel always says, “God always comes in the form that is needed.”

  This was a god. It was Ka—an unknown god. The alligator seemed to smile at the thought.

  * * *

  Yoni stood in the yard, his black shoes sunk to his socks in mud, his white tzitzit blowing in the breeze, the sacred fringes that were to remind him every day of what he longed to forget at least one day. Like every day of his life, he was wearing black pants, white shirt, black hat.

  He was carrying a bag of raw chickens. He took one out and lobbed it toward the alligator, imagining that the creature would rise up with his enormous jaws and swallow it. Instead he remained motionless and halfway submerged. The chicken made a slapping noise as it landed on his head, right between his eyes. It didn’t make him angry. The chicken rolled down to the mud next to him. He curled his neck and got his large mouth around it and swallowed. Wasn’t that interesting.

  The next one Yoni landed in front of the alligator, which splashed him. Again, no particular reaction. But then the beast moved forward, putting the chicken in his mouth, and swallowed it whole. Yoni fed him a dozen chickens—glatt kosher, specially ordered. Tomorrow he could get a shipment of kosher steaks.

  All the while he was feeding the alligator, Yoni kept asking why it was here in his yard. He understood that the alligators were leaving the Everglades because of a lack of water. He had a client who owned some sugar fields and the opposing counsel had claimed that his client was sucking water out of the Everglades for his fields and this would drive the alligators out of the swamp. Yoni had, of course, argued that this wasn’t true, but even if it was, why had the alligator come to him? There must be a reason—“a purpose,” as Rabbi Herschel would say—why this alligator came to Yoni Friedman at this particular time.

  Religious people hate alligators because they so clearly descended from dinosaurs. This meant that dinosaurs had existed and there was evolution, Darwin was right, and the Book of Genesis was a fairy tale that children should outgrow or—as Yoni liked to say in silence to himself but never uttered out loud because it could bring bad luck—“the Book of Genesis is bullshit.”

  Had the alligator come to Yoni Friedman’s house just to tell him that his life was a lie? He already knew that. There must have been something more—more of a purpose. He noticed that the alligator did not chew his food. He grabbed it with his teeth and then swallowed it whole. To be eaten by an alligator—say, for Rifka to be eaten, for example—would not be the painful experience that you might imagine.

  * * *

  To replace the kosher meat he was feeding the alligator he would buy unkosher chickens or steaks at the Publix supermarket on Miami Beach. Though there were some orthodox in that neighborhood, it was far from South Miami and he was not known there. Once, on leaving the store, a black man carrying a trash bag of empty cans and smelling slightly overripe in torn and stained khaki clothing said to him, “How’s the kashrut going, man?” Kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—was not a word you expected to hear from homeless black people, but still, there was nothing to worry about. Besides, maybe after six months of traif he would tell Rifka and she would divorce him. Probably not, though. Feeding her to an alligator might be a far more reasonable solution.

  Rifka liked the traif. Of course, she didn’t know it was traif. He told her that he found that if he removed the kosher meat from those thick plastic bags and wrapped it in aluminum foil it would taste better. She agreed. Both the chicken and the steak were much more flavorful this way.

  The alligator had some reservations. Sometimes he would grunt and moan after steak and Yoni realized it had too much fat and he had to trim it off.

  But this was not the traif that interested Yoni Friedman. It was something else entirely, and her name was Acacia Bras. Acacia was a young Cuban attorney whose client was involved in a case with his firm. It was an unusual event for him because he had few dealings with people who were not Jewish. Mostly he helped Israelis invest in Miami. In the thirty-seven years he had been on this planet he had seldom had contact with non-Jews. Even the waiters at the restaurants he patronized were Jewish. But he had a client from Tel Aviv who was trying to buy some property in Hialeah who had a conflict with the seller, who had Acacia for a lawyer. Normally Yoni was known for his fast settlements, but he was in no hurry to settle this one. In fact, it dragged on for months and might never have been settled were it not for the issue of overbilling his client.

  Acacia stared at him in a way that was inappropriate for a woman. And Yoni returned the favor. He was enthralled with every detail of her—the wrinkles on her knuckles, the bumps on her knees. He dreamed of seeing the rest of her, but he could not even imagine what that would be like. He had never seen a naked woman.

  What drew her to Yoni, what fascinated her about him, was the depths from which he desired her. No one had ever wanted her so badly. He never said so. He would never talk about such things, but Acacia could feel him wanting her, caressing her wildly
with his eyes. This man would give up his friends, his religion, his god, even his wife to have her. She was a little surprised at how exciting she found this.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered what traif tastes like?” Acacia asked him.

  Of course he always had. “Is pork really good?”

  Acacia took his right hand in both of hers. “Two important Cuban words for you: media noche.”

  He liked the sound of it. He also liked the touch of her hands. He was never touched by women. “Media Noche. What is it?”

  “Que sabroso, mi amor.”

  Why is it, Yoni asked himself, that everything Cuban women say is so sexy? Just “The food is delicious,” and you are in love. “What is it?”

  “A sandwich.” She laid one hand on top of the other as though making the sandwich. “A slice of pork.” She paused to see his reaction. “A slice of ham.” Still no response. “Some melted cheese and pickles.”

  “Oh my God,” he said with a little-boy smile. “Triple traif. ”

  “That’s right. Want to get one?” Her smile seemed almost like a wink.

  He nodded eagerly. “Where do we go?”

  “Calle Ocho—but you can’t go like that.”

  This was a huge triumph for Acacia. She was going to rescue this man. Not only was he going to eat forbidden food, but he was going to change his way of dressing. He trimmed his beard from the long scraggily one he had always worn to fashionably close-cropped. He bought blue jeans and a blue checked cotton shirt and brown loafers, the first brown shoes he had ever worn. He got them all on sale at Burdines. Fifty percent off on the shirt. He did wear his kippot, but not a hat. And he flipped it in the backseat when he picked up Acacia.