A Pagan's Nightmare

by Ray Blackston

DJ Ned, in an effort at leadership, told everyone his name and what he did for a living. “Who else is in here?” he inquired.

  Three more drips. “It’s me, Nute. Crackhead… I used to call your talk show.”

  “You the guy from the trailer park?”

  “You got it, man, and I still ain’t never done no drugs. But I really miss online poker.”

  A hipper, baritone voice said, “I used to play some poker myself.”

  Lanny listened to the dripping for a moment and shivered from the cold wall. “ Who was that who just spoke?”

  “MC Deluxe, rapper from Harlem. Original gangsta. Rhymin’ king of 128th Street. And I, um, I miss my momma.”

  The Former Donald spoke next. “And what’s your story, MC?”

  A sigh was followed by a curse, as if MC Deluxe was halfway between grief and outrage. “Man, I was doin’ my thing, ya know? Out on the street with my neighbors, blasting my beats and spoutin’ my rhymes. There’s this part in my song when I scrunch my eyes shut and punch the air, you know, to show my strength and power. But when I opened my eyes all my homies was gone and my whole street was empty. Sooo, white dude, what’s yo story? Tell us yo story. Don’t everybody wanna hear white dude’s story?”

  “Yeah, uh-huh, tell it,” came the chorus from the far end of the room.

  The Former Donald elbowed Lanny, who elbowed Ned. “You go first.”

  “No, you go.”

  MC Deluxe grew impatient. “Will one of you white dudes please tell us yo story?”

  Lanny volunteered. “I was on my knees, on hardwood floors, in a Baptist church, in northwest Atlanta. I was kneeling in front of a baptismal and—”

  “Man, don’t be tellin’ us no conversion story. You ain’t in here ‘cause of no conversion.”

  “If you’d shut up a minute, I’ll explain,” Lanny replied.

  “Then go ahead, temperamental white dude—tell us yo story.”

  Lanny sighed and began again. “I was on my knees, in front of a baptismal, with my cordless drill and my hammer, when I hit my thumb. I forgot where I was and so I cursed. Then I went to the men’s room, and beside the sink there was—”

  “Tell it, man! You done saw a sign, dintya? Yep, he saw a painted sign, too. I know it.”

  “You’re correct, MC. The sign said ‘Someone Always Hears.’ The paint was still wet.”

  A fifth voice, this one deeper, came from the corner. “I got that sign, too.”

  “I saw one in a Denny’s bathroom,” said a younger man. “Right after I slapped my cousin for stealing my fries. Now he’s gone, too… and I really don’t miss ‘im.”

  Lanny coughed loudly. “Do y’all want to hear the rest of my story or not?”

  “Ain’t like we goin’ anywhere, man,” MC said. “This here must be some kind of religious reform school.”

  “Hogwarts for pagans,” said Crackhead.

  The room went silent for a moment. Then MC spoke again. “Tell it, white dude. Tell us yo story.”

  Lanny almost quit talking, so frustrated was he by his circumstance. Yet, he had nothing better to do. Plus he’d always heard that prisoners can best keep their sanity by being social.

  “After I left the church, I stopped for gas at a BP station because I had to get to south Atlanta to install a kiddie commode. So after I finished pumping the gas, I looked at the price and saw—”

  “Six dollars and sixty-six cents per gallon,” MC said. “They gouged Harlem, too.”

  “Same price in Eugene,” Freddie offered. “Even for diesel.”

  Lanny continued. “So I left the BP station and stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s. I walk in and see that they have—”

  The teenage voice rang out. “Crosses on the uniforms! Same at Burger King, only they were on the hats.”

  Everyone in the room chimed in. “Same at Hardees.”

  “Jack in the Box, too.”

  “My waffles at Cracker Barrel were shaped like little angels.”

  That was the last thing anyone said for a long while. The sporadic dripping from the pipe continued, and soon Ned leaned over to whisper to Lanny. “I think we’ve made some new friends.”

  Lanny had a brain flash. Suddenly he did not want to tell any more of his story to the dark room. What if Miranda is in Cuba too, blindfolded in some other dark room?

  “Is there a Miranda Timms in this room?”

  Silence. Surely she would have spoken if she were here.

  He asked again. “I need to know if a Miranda Timms from Atlanta is here in Cuba.”

  MC Deluxe spoke first. “Naw, man. Ain’t no Miranda here. No one here has any loved ones. It’s just us. Bunch o’ strangers who stank bad.”

  The Former Donald spoke in his best duck voice: “But I don’t stink, Mr. Rapper.”

  Everyone laughed. But just briefly.

  Then there was only the dripping sound from the leaky pipe, followed by the door swinging open, light pouring in, and Marvin the Apostle entering triumphantly in a flowing gold robe.

  “Thou shalt keepeth quiet in my presence,” he announced, raising a finger to halt questions. “All thy need knoweth is that tomorrow, thy reform shall commence… eth.”

  Marvin stepped out the door and slammed it behind him.

  Then he opened it slightly to loose the trailing edge of his flowing gold robe.

  The Former Donald laughed and pointed a finger. “Thy robeth got a runneth in its threadeth.”

  Marvin slammed the door, and the room went dark.

  17

  LOW-RANKING GUARDS entered the room the next morning and informed all prisoners that reform school included a work detail.

  The prisoners were led out into the Cuban sunlight, right into the heart of downtown Havana. This was the bad side of the city—graffiti everywhere, spray-painted walls, and worn wooden doors.

  “This will not be hard labor,” said the burliest guard, flanked on each side by comrades in black fatigues. He squinted into the morning brightness. “Whitewashing this graffiti will allow you to develop feelings of teamwork before you join Marvin’s big team. And we all want to join the big team, don’t we?”

  No one spoke. No one nodded.

  DJ Ned let his mind wander to more attractive demographics. “Can you tell us if there are any female non-zealots left?”

  The guard blushed and motioned with his head toward the rising sun. “If there are, they’re in a, um, different place than Cuba.”

  “Could you expound on that?” Lanny asked.

  “No. We will not talk about females. All we want you to do is take this white paint and cover up the graffiti. You can work on the shady side of the street first if you wish. Work in groups of four. I’ll bring back more paint at the top of every hour. Oh, and we’ll have TraitorAde, too. Who wants orange and who likes cherry flavor?”

  Seven hands went up for orange, thirteen for cherry.

  DJ Ned, Lanny, the Former Donald, and MC Deluxe quickly formed a work team and selected the shady side of a two-story brick building for their first project. Each was issued a roller, a brush, and a five-gallon bucket of white paint. MC complained of the heat, saying nothing like this ever hit Harlem. DJ Ned pulled the top off his paint bucket and explained that a Cuban sun was much like a Cuban cigar—both pack a wallop.

  The four men spread out at ten-foot intervals and began slapping white latex over the graffiti. “This isn’t right,” said Ned, looking pained as he leaned down to re-dip his brush. “I did nothing wrong.”

  Lanny covered and slathered Spanish words he could not read. “I knew we should have gone to Canada or Mexico instead of Deity World. I felt spooked as soon as we got stuck in traffic.”

  “Did you just call someone a name?” asked MC Deluxe. He raised his roller in a threatening manner. Paint dripped and splattered on the sidewalk.

  “Chill, man. I said Orlando had me spooked.”

  Everyone seemed on edge—twice they flung paint at each other—but by noon they had covered two s
ides of the building. Except for one small, three-foot square in the corner, where MC had written his own graffiti: My rhymes rock Cuba.

  After five of the guards brought lunch, everyone sat on the curb to eat six chocolate-covered locusts, which Ned claimed tasted like bad calimari. The guards then surprised everyone by loading Freddie from Oregon into a van. One explained loudly that this man had had his sentence cut short due to good behavior and a ‘transforming of his mind,’ and was thus on the next flight back to the States. Freddie boarded the van with a big grin and waved out the back window to the rest of the captives, a blue plastic WWMD wristband fashioned to his wrist. Then the guards reminded everyone that there would be no more early outs for good behavior. that everyone could expect to be in Cuba for at least a month, and that there was to be no talking during work detail.

  The van had just departed when the guard in the passenger seat looked out his window and saw MC’s boastful scribble on the side of the building. He ordered MC to whitewash the entire wall again and added two days to his sentence.

  MC complained of racial profiling and refused to eat his last locust. “That dude better not show his face in Harlem,” he whispered to Lanny.

  Lanny told MC that he doubted Harlem was nearly as dangerous as it was in the past, given how things had changed. Soon they were alone again, painting away, and with the tip of his brush Lanny rewrote on brick his four possibilities for Miranda’s whereabouts:

  1) She’s still looking for me, maybe in Atlanta.

  2) She’s hiding somewhere in the Caribbean.

  3) She’s held captive, but she’s safe.

  4) She’s already captured and converted, and is now a zealot. (Is there a potion to reverse this condition?)

  By 4:00 p.m., one city block of Havana’s graffiti had been covered. Well, almost. Though Lanny had whitewashed his possibilities, one of his team members had slacked off. With only one more wall to go, the Former Donald remained curiously quiet—and uncharacteristically slow. He stood on the sidewalk at the end of the building, a good ways down from the others, pretending to paint but repeatedly glancing around the corner.

  DJ Ned saw the Former Donald’s strange behavior and went over to paint beside him. “You okay, duck?”

  “I’ve been here before, man. After they wear us down with work, they’ll try to brainwash us. I lied last time so that I’d get sent back to Orlando.”

  Ned thought, Great, now I have two guys to cheer up. One obsessed with finding his girlfriend, the other afraid of brainwashing. Though his brush held no more paint, Ned kept stroking the brick wall, just to appear busy. “You still haven’t told us what you did to get sent here.”

  The Former Donald dipped his brush in the paint bucket. “I’d rather not say.”

  “C’mon, I won’t tell.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  The Former Donald painted slowly but spoke with haste. “I wrote my own proverb on a bathroom wall. I was just having a bit of fun. It starts out with ‘Do not visit theme parks on a Sunday.’ They said the meter is an exact copy of one of Marvin the Apostle’s King James proverbs, and that to parody Marvin in such a manner is sacrilegious. Therefore I had to be punished. There, that’s what happened.”

  Disappointed, Ned frowned and went back to painting. He told the Former Donald that he held little interest in a duck proverb, or any other kind of proverb, for that matter.

  “Wanna hear the rest of it?” the Former Donald asked. He dipped his brush again and sloshed the excess on the wall.

  “No,” Ned replied. “I don’t wanna get caught talking and have days added to my sentence.”

  He turned to check behind him and saw at the far end of the block Marvin the Apostle huddled with the guards. Marvin donned purple fatigues and matching armbands, and in his hands he held a glossy-covered book. He flipped its pages and was overheard instructing the guards on the subtleties of brainwashing. After observing this spectacle for another minute, the Former Donald stopped painting and began peeking the opposite way again, around the corner of the building.

  DJ Ned stopped in mid-stroke and said, “Don’t tell me you’re gonna try to escape.”

  The Former Donald had his back to Ned, still peering around the corner and scanning the streets of Havana. “I can’t take any more of the brainwashing, Ned. I’m just a poser, ya know.”

  Ned sloshed some more paint on the brick wall and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Ease up, Big D. We’ll think of something.”

  The Former Donald knelt beside the paint bucket and pretended to tie his sneakers, which were already tied. “That’s why I’m nervous. I’ve just thought of something.”

  Ned saw three guards huddled far behind them, still listening to Marvin’s instructions and nodding with regularity. Ned knelt beside the Former Donald and pretended to tie his own shoes. “What’d you think of?” he whispered. “Tell me.”

  “Last time I was here, I was working on the roof of the building across the street, cleaning off pigeon droppings. And from up there I saw his estate.”

  “Whose estate? The pigeon’s or Marvin’s?”

  The Former Donald leaned close to Ned and whispered, “Castro’s.”

  Ned untied and retied his left sneaker. “What’s so important about that? I figured Castro would have an estate somewhere.”

  Their whispering grew louder, and from fifty feet down the sidewalk Lanny whistled at them and held a finger to his lips. Quiet.

  The Former Donald could not restrain himself. He moved to within inches of Ned’s ear. “The estate is on the waterfront, man.”

  “So?”

  “So, the zealots haven’t touched his boat yet.”

  Ned tied his right sneaker for the third time, and now a trace of a smile formed on his lips. “Castro left a boat?”

  “A huge one.” The Former Donald spread his arms wide. “It’s actually more like a yacht.”

  Ned and the Former Donald picked up their paint buckets and toted them over beside Lanny and MC Deluxe. Quickly the foursome huddled together while the Former Donald explained his plan—to sneak into Castro’s compound after dark, steal the yacht, and be back in the U.S. before the zealots woke the next morning.

  “We’ll rename it the Cuban Conversion,”he continued, “just so the Coast Guard won’t suspect us.”

  All nodded their approval.

  One of the guards looked up from the curbside lecture, pointed at them, and said, “Shhh.”

  MC Deluxe, whose arms were by now polka-dotted with white droplets, lowered his voice and informed the others that he was hip to any escape plan. He then boasted that he’d be the perfect guy to drive the vessel, given that one of his rap songs was about a drug dealer who owned a big yacht.

  This last point resulted in a brief argument from DJ Ned, who claimed his flight-school experience as justification for captaincy. After a push and a shove, MC and Ned agreed to split the duty.

  “Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves?” the Former Donald asked, kneeling to paint the bottom of the wall.

  “Way ahead,” Lanny replied.

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes and checked over his shoulder for the guards. Across the street Marvin the Apostle now brandished a leather whip, and his face grew stern as he instructed the guards in how to properly make it crack. One by one, each guard practiced cracking the whip against a metal dumpster, and the sound of punishment echoed through Havana.

  The Former Donald winced at each crack. “We gotta go for it, guys. Maybe even tonight.”

  MC snuck two more glances at the guards flailing away at the dumpster. “Man, I say we bolt the first chance we get. They look serious ‘bout them whips.”

  Paint droplets dotted Lanny’s face, but he ignored his appearance and sloshed more latex on Cuban brick. Around him the whisperings came frequently now—almost as frequently as the crack of whips that frightened them—and he listened as a plan came together.

  By the time the sun
dropped behind the buildings and the day’s work detail was nearly complete, a tired DJ Ned and a sweaty MC Deluxe had resumed their argument. Still facing the wall, they whispered harshly back and forth about why each should be the one to captain Castro’s yacht—one man anxious to return to Harlem and his street rhymes, the other itching to return to the airwaves and his Margaritaville contentment.

  And then, of course, there was Lanny, a man bent on finding his own lost shaker of salt.

  She had to be somewhere.

  18

  AT DUSK THE GUARDS ushered everyone back to the long, dark, dank room. Tired captives carried with them their makeshift beds—lawn chairs. During the work detail someone had discovered a stash of reclining lawn chairs in one of the graffiti-stained buildings, and these nylon chairs were doled out for each prisoner to sleep upon.

  Arranging their chairs along the left wall were, in order, DJ Ned, the Former Donald, MC Deluxe, and Lanny. The guards then distributed burned fish sandwiches and TraitorAde, telling the captives that they had but five minutes to finish dinner. The door shut and the captives ate in darkness.

  DJ Ned had just taken his second bite when the door pushed open again. This time Marvin’s robe was purple, and he shined a flashlight around the cavelike walls and across imprisoned faces. “Tonight thou seeth only this beam… but soon thou shalt seeth light that thou not yet knowest thou crave.” He pulled his beam across each face a second time. “Thou doth understandeth?”

  MC Deluxe swigged his TraitorAde and said, “Dude, I’m from Harlem, and you talkin’ religious smack.”

  Marvin raised his head high and peered down his nose at MC. “My smacketh shall overcometh thy stupidity.”

  “Oh yeah? Then why you wear a gold robe one day and purple the next?”

  “Monday Wednesday Friday I weareth the gold;Tuesday Thursday Saturday I weareth the purple.”

  Crackhead spoke up from across the room. “What about Sunday?”

  “Thou art not yet prepared to seeth me on that day.”

  “Try us,” Lanny shot back. “Thou art psychedelic?”

  MC snickered. DJ Ned spewed TraitorAde on the floor.