Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  How outraged Hubert would be if he knew what she thought about. He’d come to believe that he and Mr. Gonzalez were fighting some sort of war. He said Gonzalez was scheming to drive them all out and take control of the plant. “He wants my job,” Hubert said, “and he’s not getting it.” Charmaine couldn’t help but feel that none of it was about the nickel company, or Gonzalez hating Americans, as Hubert insisted. She sometimes believed that it was about her they were really fighting over.

  She took off her party attire and put on something plainer, more appropriate for a neighborly visit, a cotton dress that she thought looked vaguely Cuban because of its cheerfully romantic print—huge, floppy red hibiscus flowers—and the white, nubby sweater she’d been wearing that first day, when he’d rescued her from the bakery. That was years ago now, but he might remember the sweater. She was daubing on a tiny amount of perfume when she heard the deafening screech of a low-flying plane passing over the house, and then the staccato yap of Mrs. Billings’s poodle.

  On her way to Mr. Gonzalez’s, more planes flew over, so low they rang her ears and stirred up the dust on the road. She looked up but couldn’t see any lights. They usually had those lights on the wings. Maybe clouds were blocking them. But the sky was a black velvet carpet littered with stars. There was no cloud cover. These mysterious low planes were flying with their lights off.

  At his door, she did as she’d rehearsed, announced herself to the butler and asked for him.

  He looked surprised to see her, not happily surprised. “Why aren’t you at the club in Preston?” he asked.

  She felt a moment of doubt. He wants me to be at the club—why aren’t I at the club? “I didn’t feel like going. My husband is there, and I thought perhaps you and I could talk—”

  “Mrs. Mackey, did you hear the planes?”

  “Yes, I heard them.”

  “It’s the Cuban military. They’re strafing. This is extremely dangerous. It’s not safe to stay in town.”

  She could barely focus on what he was saying. Partly because she didn’t understand this word “strafe,” what it meant. Something to do with weapons. She could only concentrate on what she had come to say to him. It had dominated her thoughts for a long, long time. Her hands shook every time she thought about him, every time she thought she might run into him in town. She was overflowing with the need to confront him. It had taken weeks of rehearsing and storing up courage. She couldn’t back out now.

  “Mr. Gonzalez, I don’t love Hubert. I don’t love him. And I would be willing to leave him if you think that you and I—”

  “Mrs. Mackey,” Mr. Gonzalez said with a smile, but she immediately saw that it was not a friendly smile, “you’re a foolish person. I don’t hold it against you. If I believed, as you say, that you and I could be together, don’t you think you would know? Don’t you think I would have told you?”

  “But…maybe I thought you had let me know. We have been intimate, after all—”

  “In a car—years ago. Behind a squalid pool hall. Is that how a man treats a woman he hopes to marry? You come from a strange culture, Mrs. Mackey. If I wanted you to leave your husband for me, that’s not how things would have gone.”

  Her heart felt like a heavy person was standing on it. Her throat was closing in. She told herself to be brave. “But I thought maybe because of Hubert…that you didn’t want to—”

  “You think I actually care about your husband? What Mackey thinks? It only takes one incident, and a husband is humiliated. One incident, of another man with his wife, and he is a, how do you say it in English? A cuckold. You should go and pack now. They’re going to evacuate—I heard just before you rang, on my shortwave.”

  A plane thundered over, low and deafening.

  “Why are they ‘strafing’ us, Mr. Gonzalez?”

  “Because the rebels have taken over the town. They have endangered American lives, and the military has no choice but to respond. Their planes are being shot at by rebels.”

  She hadn’t seen any rebels. Or heard any shots. She’d heard only the planes. “But Mr. Gonzalez, there are no rebels in town—”

  “You should go, Mrs. Mackey. They’re evacuating all Americans, and you and Hubert will have to leave.”

  “Oh,” she said, almost laughing, and then shook her head emphatically. “Oh, Mr. Gonzalez, Hubert isn’t going anywhere. He’s convinced that you want to replace him. He says it won’t happen over his dead body. He will not go. I can promise you that.”

  “It isn’t safe to stay.”

  “He’ll risk it. He’s said over and over that if every last American goes, he’ll stay to run the plant. You don’t know Hubert, Mr. Gonzalez.”

  “It won’t be a risk. It will be a certainty that something happens to him, Mrs. Mackey. A certainty. It won’t matter how it happens, because there are so many possibilities. Shot, accidentally, in rebel cross fire. Or shot, accidentally, by the Rural Guard. In any case, shot. That’s what he chooses if he stays.”

  She could feel that she was about to cry, and once she started she wouldn’t be able to stop. Gonzalez hated them and wanted them gone. It didn’t make her appreciate Hubert any better, it just carried her to a new depth of loneliness and misery. Nothing was ever how she thought it could be. She turned around, her hands dug in the pockets of her sweater, and walked down his porch steps and out of his yard. She heard an airplane, invisible above her, scraping against the black sky.

  24

  Pepé Le Pew was joining the French Foreign Legion. It was Duffy’s turn to pick the television program, and she always chose cartoons. She lay on the couch, sick with a cold. It didn’t seem so serious, but Marjorie Lederer thought they better stay home and keep an eye on her, especially after people said the Allain girl was walking around with tuberculosis.

  “Just because we’re staying home doesn’t mean you have to,” Marjorie Lederer told Everly. “Mrs. Stites called. She and K.C. are really looking forward to seeing you. Val is going. Why not go on over with Val and have a bit of fun?” Everly didn’t want to go, wasn’t in the mood to put on a dress and have Mrs. Stites tell her she looked lovely and coerce K.C. into agreeing. Lately, despite all the worry and the way her parents talked at home about the situation in the mountains, the tension up at the mine, the adults all seemed overly gay, almost hysterical, insisting on throwing parties and having a good time regardless of whether they actually were.

  Everly was on the floor, reading and watching television at the same time, a skill she’d been working on. Willy said it was possible to do two things at once as long as you decided which was the rhythm and which the melody. Your mind would sort out how to organize and absorb two different activities as long as you labeled one of them major and the other minor. He listened to music and read Popular Mechanics and said he could sing and write a letter at the same time, do addition and subtraction while making corn bread. He said if Everly practiced, she might get to where her mind could absorb two melodies or two rhythms—things of equal value—and lose nothing of either. But that this was an advanced level.

  “I want to forget,” Pepé Le Pew said, disconsolate about something. Everly and Duffy had missed that part. Pepé Le Pew was in a Foreign Legion enlistment office. He signed on the dotted line. Then he was stinking up the bunks, and men with anchor tattoos and little French hats with pom-poms were running for their lives with clothespins on their noses. They left him to defend the fort all by himself. Poor Pepé Le Pew. He couldn’t smell himself, but who really could? And no matter how the story changed, the object of Pepé Le Pew’s affection was never real. Not once did they give him an actual skunk to be in love with. She was always an illusion, a cat that had somehow gotten a white stripe of paint down her back. But if he ever did catch the skunk-disguised cat, he would see that she wasn’t what he’d thought, and that all along he’d been running after an illusion. Maybe by dodging him, the cat and the people who made the cartoon were saving Pepé Le Pew from an awful discovery, possibly worse tha
n heartbreak—

  An airplane roared over the house, rattling the window shutters and the liquor bottles on the cart in the living room. There was a loud plunk on the veranda. It sounded like something metal.

  “What on earth?” Marjorie Lederer said, coming out of the kitchen.

  A three-foot bomb had dropped right on their veranda, then rolled down the steps and into the yard, without detonating.

  It looked like a smaller version of the laughing-gas tank at the dentist’s office, drab and metal and tapered on one end. They weren’t to go anywhere near the front door.

  George Lederer called the security office at the plant. The rebels had apparently come into town to steal gasoline, and Batista was strafing them. Right in Nicaro, he was bombing and strafing them. They could hear the planes flying over and out to the bay, turning around and flying over again. “If only we had a basement,” Marjorie Lederer kept saying. “There’s no basement—where do we go?”

  “This is American property,” George Lederer yelled into the phone, “and we’re being attacked by the Cuban military? How can they bomb us? We’ve got goddamn ammonia. They hit those tanks by the bay and this place will go sky high.”

  Mr. Billings, the head of company security, instructed everyone to seek shelter in the mine. Mrs. Carrington, who hadn’t gone to the party in Preston, either, fetched the Lederers in her husband’s Cadillac, which the company was allowing her to drive while they sorted things out. A compassionate gesture, Everly’s mother had said, in the wake of Tip Carrington’s disappearance at the hands of the rebels.

  When they got to the mine it was already crammed with people—Cuban nickel company employees and their families, the guajiros who squatted in burned-out Levisa, Jamaican servants, even the Chinese vendors. She didn’t see Willy, and heard someone say that the servants who slept in the navy barracks had been told to stay put.

  So much of it was a blur, the false alarms that the mine was under attack and they would all have to relocate, followed by announcements that they were to remain where they were. In the early morning, a ship’s horn sounded over and over, a U.S. Navy vessel taking them to safety.

  “Only Americans,” a plant security officer announced. “Solo Americanos.”

  They needed to get from the mine to the dock, but the Cubans panicked and tried to prevent them from leaving. Pushed and shoved them and blocked the road. “What about us!?” they shouted. Everly knew so many of them—the women who worked in the bakery, and the men from the ice factory near the bay, Lumling, who came by with his cart every afternoon selling little pineapples. One of the gardeners from the club slashed the tires of Mr. Carrington’s Cadillac as they tried to get in it.

  “If you leave they’ll bomb us!” a woman cried, grabbing Everly by the shoulders. “There’s nothing here for them to protect if you go. You can’t go.”

  They were taken out in dinghies to a giant ship. To board it, they had to climb a tall ladder. The United Fruit people, and those from Nicaro who’d been at the party in Preston that evening, were staring from along the ship’s railing like zombies, bloody and stitched up and wrapped in surgical gauze like boxers after a fight.

  Everly’s mother struggled on the ladder. She slipped and almost fell. Mrs. Carrington, the next person down, caught her. Later, Everly’s mother said that Blythe Carrington was as strong as a man.

  The navy ship moved out toward sea slowly, waiting for mines to be removed from the mouth of the harbor. It was morning now, but the fog on the bay was so thick it sopped up the rays of the rising sun and cast a gloomy, opaque white light. As the ship moved out of the harbor, the mountains above Nicaro began to fade, purplish-gray apparitions dissolving in a sea of milk.

  There was no red haze of nickel oxide, Everly realized, as she watched Nicaro recede. The chimneys were cold, the plant shut down. The town was clean of its usual coating of dust. The clouds weren’t stained and dirty. There was no fine silt on the surface of the water. It’s so nice, she thought sadly, without us.

  On the open ocean, she could see an aircraft carrier in the distance. It shadowed them all the way to Guantánamo. Duffy cried and said she forgot something. Everly’s father asked her what could be so important. “My corals,” she said through tears. Duffy collected things and put them in old cigar boxes that the bartenders from the club gave to her. Pieces of coral, shells, dead insects. Even a decomposing bird, which the Lederers insisted she remove from her bedroom. She buried it in the yard but then dug it up a week later, telling Everly she wanted to see what had happened. There was almost nothing left of it, eaten by the teeming, tropical earth.

  Something about the opaque fog, the disorienting experience of being on that drab and enormous ship, the bandaged survivors from the bombing in Preston, made everyone dazed and quiet. Even the Allains, the loudest people on earth, were silent and grim. They huddled around Panda, who was laid out on a navy cot, sick and coughing. Her feet stuck out from the end of the blanket they’d wrapped her in. She was wearing Giddle’s old tap shoes, the black patent leather scuffed and dull, the metal plates bolted to the soles ground down unevenly. It must have been a privilege of illness to wear the coveted tap shoes.

  Only Mr. Mackey was speaking. He was outraged, he told Mr. LaDue, who kept touching a cut on his forehead. Mr. Mackey shouted angrily that it was Lito Gonzalez they had to thank for this, that he’d orchestrated the whole thing, called in the Cuban army to drive them out. Mr. LaDue nodded, but it seemed as if he’d already given up, and that Mr. Mackey was just filling the air with irrelevant facts. Mrs. LaDue stood quietly by, holding Poncho in her arms. Poncho was dressed in one of the white double-breasted jackets that the bartenders wore at the Pan-American Club. Someone must have put it on him during the rescue. Maybe he was cold.

  Poncho climbed down out of Mrs. LaDue’s arms. He came across the deck toward Everly and Duffy and peeked down between the ship’s rails at the water. “Hi, Poncho,” Everly said tentatively, hoping he wouldn’t stay long, that he would lose interest and pay attention to someone else. He gazed up at her, hanging on to the railing with both hands, like a bored child. Then he began to swing back and forth from the railing. “No, Poncho,” Everly said. She tried to pull him away from the rail, but he was too fast. He was on the outside of the rail now. Everly grabbed his furry, warm arm and tried to pull him back onto the deck. When he lunged to bite her, she let go. She’d forgotten that Poncho didn’t have teeth. He slipped from the rail.

  Luckily, he landed in a lifeboat that was strapped to the side of the ship a few feet below the deck. He stood up in the lifeboat. They were traveling at full speed, and the ocean, far down below him, moved swiftly past, greenish-black in the early morning light. Standing in the little boat wearing just the bartender’s jacket, he looked like a small, hairy man nude from the waist down. People ran to the rail to see what had happened. Mrs. LaDue pleaded with him in a cracked and desperate voice. Mr. LaDue rushed off to get the purser for help. “Sweety, please come back up here. Can you climb up the rope? Mommy loves you. Please, Poncho, please.”

  He was so close, just a few feet below them, but he refused to climb back up. He looked out at the horizon, as if in a moment of great contemplation, or faking a moment of great contemplation, knowing he had a rapt audience, keeping them in suspense as he stood there, balanced in the lifeboat. He did not look at Mrs. LaDue, though she pleaded with him. Not until the very last moment, when he looked up at her and smiled a broad, gummy smile. Then, in one swift movement, he knocked his head against the side of the ship, forcefully. It made a loud smack! Everyone gasped. Mrs. LaDue screamed. Poncho took a wobbly step toward the side of the lifeboat. Like a sleepwalker, or a drunk, he was leaning over the side. He leaned farther and farther until he went over, headfirst.

  The whole episode was so seamless and precise—the smack, those shaky steps toward the edge, then going over and plunging into the water. Almost choreographed, Everly thought, but a terrible choreography.

  He was
facedown, floating on the water. The ship was moving fast, and Poncho was almost behind them. They all watched, Mrs. LaDue in hysterics, as the white bartender’s jacket ballooned with air. Then the white jacket began to fade into the depths of the greenish-black water.

  Mrs. LaDue was screaming for them to stop the ship and turn it around. Everly remembered that it would take several miles for a large ship to stop when it was going full speed, something she’d read, though she couldn’t remember where.

  Afterward she kept imagining the feel of Poncho’s gummy mouth on her hand, if only she’d kept it there. If she’d held on to his arm as he’d bitten her she could have pulled him safely back onto the ship. She closed her eyes and saw the scene and felt his mouth clamping onto her hand, that lunge when she’d known he would bite her, leaving the hand there and letting it happen. Over and over she imagined it. Just leave it there and let him bite. Knowing he couldn’t puncture the skin, couldn’t hurt her, didn’t have teeth. Still, every single time she wanted to pull her hand away.

  They had a modern medical facility in Guantánamo, and Panda was admitted and put under the care of an American doctor. Mrs. LaDue also was seen by an American doctor, who gave her a sedative. They were placed in plain, almost barren guesthouses across from a dusty baseball diamond, and ate American hamburgers and American-style soft-serve ice cream that evening at a military mess hall. The Guantánamo street signs were in English. The commissary sign, too, where they had Playboy magazine on a display rack. One of the Nicaro boys stole a copy. There were American sailors everywhere. By the second day, Val Carrington was already dating one.