Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

by Gonzalo Barr

  After that, Charlie kept a bat hidden behind the bar. Caine disappeared for a while, but now, with business picking up, he had returned.

  From the café entrance, Roig watched El Loco at the corner across the street, holding out his hand and begging for money. Two women stopped. One reached into her purse and dropped a coin into his palm. The other woman held a video camera and taped him dancing.

  Roig walked to the back of the café. Every stool at the bar was taken. Other people stood with their drinks. Charlie poured vodka into a shaker, put the lid on it, and shook it so vigorously that several people turned to look at him.

  “How are we doing?” Roig asked Charlie as he poured the frothy drink into a martini glass on the bar.

  “We cleared two thousand.”

  “I told you it would be a good night.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “When you get to be my age, you can tell.”

  “You talk as if you were an old man.”

  Manolo interrupted them with an order for six drinks. Charlie started to work on the order.

  “How is table twenty-seven doing?” Roig asked Manolo about the bald man.

  “They are only two sitting at a table for four. We have a full house. And they have been nursing the same drinks for almost an hour. Complimentary drinks, I should add.”

  “Let me worry about that. You worry about your tip.”

  “Europeans don’t tip,” Manolo said and went back outside.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Charlie said.

  “He’s old.”

  “Lately it’s gotten worse.”

  “Lately he’s gotten older.”

  Charlie prepared another order of drinks. Roig served himself a glass of soda water.

  “Don Estefan!” A customer who was a regular waved at Roig with both hands from the other end of the bar. His name was Richard, but he called himself Ricardo and spoke Spanish. In the eighties and nineties, he had lived in Managua and married a Nicaraguan woman. He carried a picture of his young boys in his wallet. One looked mestizo, the other had lighter skin. He never told Roig what he did in Managua.

  “My friend.” Roig forced a smile.

  “Looks busy tonight. I’m glad,” Ricardo responded in Spanish. He put his cigarette out in an ashtray.

  “Why don’t I order you a couple of tapas? You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.”

  “Better not. I’m on the South Beach diet—vodka and cigarettes. To busy nights and lots of money.” Ricardo raised his glass. Roig raised an empty hand wrapped around an imaginary glass.

  “I’ve never seen you drink,” Ricardo said. “How can you run a bar and not drink?”

  “That is the only way you can run a bar. I work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. My father had no patience for haraganes.”

  “Must be tough on your family.”

  “You know I have no family.”

  “Have I shown you the picture of my boys?”

  Roig nodded.

  “I must bore the hell out of a lot of people, but I’m proud of them.”

  Roig knew that Ricardo had not seen his children in five years. Since their mother remarried, she had kept them from having any contact with him.

  “Don’t you feel alone, though, without a family of your own?” Ricardo said.

  “I am happy to have this,” Roig said, opening his arms.

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Ricardo said in English. “This is your work, your daily bread, hombre. It is a good place, but a man needs more.” He slurred the last words. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he said, looking at his glass and drinking from it. “You should find yourself a beautiful young girl,” he said in Spanish.

  “What would a young girl, beautiful or not, have to do with a man my age? Besides, I prefer having them as customers. Then if something is wrong, all I have to do is serve them a round of drinks on the house and everything is all right again.”

  Roig felt someone tapping on his shoulder and was grateful for the interruption. It was the bald man asking him for the men’s room. He walked him to the door. When he returned, Ricardo was busy talking to a man sitting next to him. Let drunkards comfort each other, he thought.

  Roig stepped behind the bar and found a cigarette butt in his glass of soda water. He emptied the glass into the sink. The water fizzed like acid. Lying on a shelf over the sink was the bat Charlie kept hidden.

  Who the hell was Ricardo to talk? Roig thought. He wouldn’t recognize his sons if they walked into the café and sat next to him. What gave him the right to dispense advice? Of course Roig could have done a few things differently, but he harbored no illusions. He had failed as a son and failed as a husband. And if Estefan was really his son, as he suspected after examining for hours the picture Emilio had sent him, then he had failed as a father as well. Life offered no second chances. Why did he listen to Ricardo anyway? Talking to him always put him in a foul mood.

  One of the guitarists walked in front of the bar. Roig caught his attention and tapped his wristwatch. The guitarist smiled, called his partner, and they sat down to begin another set.

  Roig didn’t want anything else. He had the café and that was enough. He arrived early in the morning to receive the deliveries and opened the front doors at noon. The café owner, a silver-haired man in his seventies, came by every weekday around 1:00 to go over the numbers. After the owner left, the café was quiet until sundown. Then people started to come in and Roig was busy until closing time. He usually went home at 3:00, when the surrounding streets were quiet, except for an occasional motorcycle or a car playing hip-hop so loud that the windows buzzed. It was a short walk to his apartment, and he was grateful for the solitude. On some mornings, the city was so still that when he opened the window, he could hear the ocean.

  Manolo ran to the bar. “Chief, we’ve got problems,” he said. “It’s El Loco. He’s molesting a customer.”

  Roig ran out from behind the bar. Charlie followed behind him with the baseball bat.

  They found Caine sitting next to the blonde, pinning her against the wall. Two men at the next table stood ready to confront him. Roig motioned for them to sit down, but they remained standing. He told Manolo to call the police.

  “You like my girlie-friend?” El Loco said. He raised his stump and placed it across the blonde’s arm when the baseball bat slammed the table and sent the drinks into the air. People screamed. Caine ducked under the table. The blonde jumped out of her chair and ran into the crowd.

  The music came over the speakers so loud there was feedback, a frenzied strumming of chords that made everything vibrate.

  Charlie struggled with the bald man for the bat. The bald man pushed Charlie away. He pushed Roig too. The manager fell to the pavement and scraped the palms of his hands.

  Caine looked out from under the table. The bald man swung again and almost hit him on the head. He raised the bat for a third swing. An arm holding an open straight razor sprang from under the table and slashed the bald man on the leg, tearing his pants. Caine leaped out and slashed the bald man on the arm and across his cheek.

  The bald man dropped the bat, fell to his knees, and covered his face with his hands. Before anyone could react, Caine pushed through the crowd and ran down the street. Only Charlie ran after him.

  Someone must have disconnected the speakers because the feedback stopped and the guitars sounded faint and ineffective.

  The police arrived, so did the paramedics. They treated the bald man and put him on a gurney and into the back of their truck. The blonde was sobbing.

  Roig gave a statement to a police officer, who later handed him a card with a number written on it where he could call to find out about the case.

  “What do you think will happen?” Roig asked the officer.

  “You want the truth?” the officer said. “If we find him, we’ll take him in. But he’ll get out again. Life goes on.”

  Manolo brought a mop and a bucket of water to
wash the sidewalk. Charlie returned panting. When Roig looked at him, he shrugged his shoulders.

  People at the surrounding tables asked for their checks and soon there was no one left outside and a new crowd arrived to take their place. Roig fired the two guitarists, paid them off, and played CDs instead.

  The café remained busy until closing. The staff stayed behind and retold the story, acting out the different parts, until Roig said enough and told everyone to go home.

  Charlie helped him count the money and put it in the safe. Half an hour later, they turned off the lights and locked the doors.

  “Wait,” Roig said. “How about if we go somewhere for a drink?”

  “Since when do you drink? Anyway, we have all the drinks we want in the café.”

  “Not there. And I don’t want to go home. Not yet.”

  “Because of what happened tonight?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  If he went home, he would start to think, and he did not want to do that. Leave the philosophizing to the likes of Ricardo. Roig had the owner to keep happy, customers to please, and the employees to manage.

  “Lead the way, then,” Charlie said.

  There was a small bar two blocks away that stayed open until sunrise. It belonged to another Spaniard, named Juan Carlos, an isleño from one of the Canary Islands. Roig had met him during the slow months and stopped by sometimes after closing the café.

  “Hombre, how are you?” Juan Carlos called out. He came around the bar to shake Roig’s hand and saw that they were scraped badly.

  “What happened?”

  “A long story,” Roig said.

  “At our age, all our stories are long.”

  Roig introduced Charlie.

  “What would you like?”

  Roig told him. Charlie ordered the same. Juan Carlos went behind the bar and talked.

  Roig pretended to listen, but his mind started to think about Emilio again, even though he promised himself that he wouldn’t. You let yourself think and soon you start to imagine what could have been, when the only real thing is the present. It is the only thing that counts.

  Juan Carlos filled three small cordial glasses with chilled dry sherry. He placed the glasses on the bar in front of them. The cold sherry made the glasses cloud.

  There is the now, Roig thought, and there is only the now. Nothing else matters.

  Juan Carlos placed two small plates with green olives and slices of Manchego cheese cut into triangles and a shot glass full of toothpicks on the bar.

  Roig would forget. He would burn Emilio’s letter and the photograph and throw out everything else that he did not use. He would reduce himself to the present, accept who he had become without thinking about how he had arrived there.

  He reached for the glass of sherry. It felt cold and thick. The bar lights shone on the rim and through the base. He raised it.

  “¡Salud!” Juan Carlos said, raising his own glass.

  The Sleepless Nights of Humberto Castaño

  Humberto Castaño couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw his daughter talking to boys, flirting with them, kissing them, having sex with them. Humberto saw Dodie letting boys into the house after school, while he and his wife were still at work. He imagined her lying in bed, the boys on top of her, backs arched and shiny with sweat.

  When Dodie turned sixteen, he and his wife threw a big party and let Dodie invite her friends. There were a few girls, but mostly there were the boys, drunk on hormones.

  Dodie was beautiful. One Sunday afternoon on Lincoln Road, an agent gave Humberto her card and said that he should let his daughter model. Last year, Dodie was first runner-up for Miss Calle Ocho. She would have won if the winner’s father were not a bigwig in the Little Havana Kiwanis Club. Everybody said so.

  A few weeks ago, after dinner, Humberto picked up the phone and heard a boy crying. His wife told him that the boy was Dodie’s friend from school. He’d been calling her cell phone and getting voice mail. His wife felt sorry for the boy so she put him through to Dodie.

  Our daughter’s a heartbreaker, his wife said.

  The next morning, Humberto asked Dodie about the boy, but she cut him short.

  He’s just a person, she said.

  On weekends, Humberto took Dodie and her girlfriends to the mall. He pretended to drive away. Instead, he parked nearby and ran back. Inside the mall, he followed them from a distance, jumping behind columns, running into stores, mingling with the crowds of shoppers to avoid being seen. In the movie theater, he sat in the back and hid his face behind a family-sized tub of popcorn. He was convinced that Dodie and her friends had agreed on a time and place where they would meet boys, go to the house of one of the less vigilant parents, and have sex. Thoughts like that kept Humberto awake.

  In the middle of the night, he would slip out of bed and walk on the tips of his toes down the hall to stand outside Dodie’s bedroom, listening for any sound of movement, voices, bedsprings. Once, he heard a woman’s voice, opened the door, and caught Dodie talking on her cell phone. Humberto took the phone back to his bedroom, turned on the light, and scrolled down the list of calls received. His wife recognized the name on the screen. It was the crying boy.

  As punishment, Humberto prohibited Dodie from meeting her friends, talking on the phone, and going online. For a week, she came home from school, completed her assignments, ate with them, and went to bed early. Humberto was happy.

  A week later, when Dodie could go out again, she told her parents that she was meeting her girlfriends on South Beach to see a movie. She said one of the moms would be there to chaperone. Humberto dialed the woman’s phone number. Each time, he got an answering machine. He wanted to follow Dodie and the girls, but he could not break his promise to take his wife out for dinner on their anniversary.

  When Humberto and his wife returned home, a squad car was parked outside the house. A police officer sat on the living room sofa. He introduced himself and told them that their daughter was upstairs with his partner, a woman officer who had kids about the same age as Dodie.

  She’s in good hands, the police officer said.

  Humberto’s wife ran up the stairs.

  The police officer told Humberto what had happened. Dodie called 911 after her date jumped into the ocean and drowned.

  Humberto recognized the name of the crying boy.

  The sequence of events is unclear, the officer said, but around 8:30, Dodie and the boy were at the end of the pier on South Beach when he climbed the rail and screamed that he was going to jump. People tried to talk him out of it. The water’s full of boulders there, stuff left over from when they made the jetty. The boy jumped anyway and broke his skull. Good thing your kid’s taking it so well, the officer said.

  Humberto did not look in on his daughter until after the police left. He found his wife rearranging the pillows behind Dodie, who was sitting up in bed, pointing the remote control at the TV.

  From then on, Dodie withdrew to her room. Some weekends, her girlfriends slept over. They watched movies and listened to music. The house vibrated with the sound of hip-hop, but Humberto didn’t complain.

  When Dodie left to attend college, he and his wife drove her to the airport. They were silent on the way back home.

  That night, Humberto slipped out of bed and walked on the tips of his toes to Dodie’s bedroom, as he had done many times before. He did not turn on the light. He knew where everything was. He felt his way to the bed and brought her pillow to his face. He took a slow, deep breath and held it. Dodie’s scent was not there. He lay on the bare mattress and buried his face in the pillow. He almost did not hear his wife.

  The ceiling light blinded him for a moment. His wife stood in the doorway, looking very small. Her eyes were closed tight and her hands were cupped over her nose and mouth. It was a long time before she said anything.

  Bay at Night

  After dinner, the doctor and his wife walked through the colonial city to the boulevard th
at skirts the bay. Everything was dark because of the blackout. The only light came from the moon, passing cars, and the lanterns off the sides of the shrimper boats. The fort at the entrance to the bay, usually lit for the tourists, cut a black square against the night. Couples sat and kissed on the low concrete benches next to the boulevard. Boys and young women offered their wares and services to the tourists. The doctor’s wife found an empty bench and sat. He stood behind her. The moon lit a strip of water from the horizon to the rocks below them. Each time the water crashed against the rocks, the sidewalk trembled under their feet.

  “Are you scared?” she asked him.

  “Let’s not talk about that tonight,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  A car with one headlight stopped next to the curb. Loud dance music played through the open windows. Two men and two girls stepped out and sat on a bench a few yards away. The headlights of a passing car caught them. One of the men was thin and young and looked like a local. The other was middle-aged and looked Slavic-short blond hair, beefy. The girls were bony, in their teens.

  The doctor’s wife closed her eyes and raised a hand to her face.

  “Want to take a cab back to the hotel?” the doctor said.

  “I’m OK.”

  “It’s not too late, you know.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it. Besides, we talked about it in Miami. It was too late from the start.”

  “I hate it when you talk like that. You didn’t used to,” he said.

  “It hasn’t been easy for you, has it?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  The music sped up. The girls pulled the beefy man off the bench and danced with him. One girl raised her arm for the man to duck under before she passed him to the other girl, faster and faster, until the man was unsteady on his feet.

  The music stopped and started again, but the beefy man stood panting. His shirt was dark with sweat. He tried to bow and stumbled. The girls applauded. Then they helped him sit.