by Paul Monette
Her head rested on his chest. He could feel his own heart beating. For a moment he thought she was asleep; for a moment he thought he was. Then she suddenly drew in a gasp of breath, for no reason at all. Then the bedroom door flew open, and Tony looked over without surprise, as if fate would always break in unannounced and always find him naked.
He didn’t get a very good look. It was a military man, bearded and dressed guerrilla-style, so there was no telling what rank he had. Somehow the woman slipped away. She didn’t seem to be in the room at all. Tony leaped to his feet and grabbed a lamp, and the two men began to circle. The bearded soldier was spitting curses at him, but Tony hardly listened. He was amazed to see the man wasn’t armed, not with a gun anyway. He must be very high up, Tony thought. He must be used to bodyguards. It was the first time Tony understood that fate itself could be unprepared. With the oddest sense of anticlimax, he saw he was going to survive this thing.
He swung the lamp back and forth as he edged to the door. He lifted it over his head to throw it, when the soldier suddenly ducked into the bathroom. Tony bolted. He crossed the hallway and leaped down the stairs, but he landed wrong on his ankle and pitched headlong. In a moment he lay in a heap at the bottom, one arm twisted beneath him. By the time he scrambled to his feet, he could hear the boots thundering down the stairs. Tony made it to the door, but he couldn’t unlock it fast enough, his fingers were like jelly. He felt the soldier’s hand clamp down on his naked shoulder and spin him around. He had no idea what the weapon would be, but he clenched his teeth because this was it.
Still gnashing his teeth with curses, the soldier drew his free hand behind his head. Tony saw the long curve of the razor. Instinctively he clamped his hands about his genitals. His blank, astonished face was the clearest target a jealous man could ask for. The razor whizzed in the air and sliced into his upper cheek, just missing the eye. It hit the cheekbone with a sickening clunk and went zigzag as it swept toward the chin. The pain was so intense, the gout of blood so thick, Tony could not even open his mouth to scream.
That was all the soldier wanted. As soon as he saw the gash he flicked the razor shut in its case and turned and walked heavily down the hall, as if it was past time for his whiskey. Tony stood in a daze with his hands to his face, trying to hold his cheek together. He knew the duel was over. He staggered back up to the bedroom and retrieved his clothes, snatching up the towel she’d dried his hair with to staunch the flow of the blood. He walked out without a backward glance.
And he staggered home on foot, hiding behind a hundred trees so he wouldn’t be stopped for vagrancy. It was dark by the time he got back to the alleys. He crawled beneath his mother’s shack to nurse his wound alone. When he woke next morning, an infection had already furred the edges. He needed forty stitches, and he was stuck two weeks in a hospital ward, his face so badly swollen he could only see out of one eye.
But he didn’t care, and he didn’t complain. All he knew was that he could kill now. It was as if he’d waited all his life to try the limit of his power. He finally understood what final act was needed before he could break away and claim his kingdom. The day he was released, he bought a forty-five automatic and a sawed-off shotgun.
He spent a day and a night high up in a coral tree directly across the road from the mansion gates. The soldier was driven away at seven A.M. and didn’t return till five in the afternoon. The woman went out twice in the loud Mercedes, once in the morning to go ride her horse, then again at three P.M., as if there was still a chance that Tony Montana might yet be waiting behind the stables. She returned alone. About nine o’clock the army car emerged through the gates, with a soldier driving who was scarcely older than Tony. The woman and the bearded officer rode together in the back seat. Once they had sped away Tony shinnied down from the tree and went home, satisfied that he knew their every move.
Still, he waited a few days before he acted. It was almost as if he had put the revenge out of his mind as he went about the alleys with Manolo, catching up on business. He began to negotiate with one of the fishermen at the harbor, arranging to have a shrimp boat ready on a day’s notice. They would take him halfway across the Florida Straits and drop him in a rowboat. The outboard motor alone would cost him twenty-five hundred dollars. He spent several evenings with the gang, who stood in awe of the lightning scar and didn’t dare ask how he earned it. Manolo was relieved. He thought Tony had finally come to his senses. He knew none of the details, only that it was a woman and it was over. They were in business again, he and Tony. They swaggered like pimps down the alleys, and everyone knew who they were.
Then, one evening about sundown, Tony got dressed up fancy, in a white linen suit and a black silk shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone. No Panama hat, but even so he looked like he planned to spend the night playing baccarat, with a mink-draped chorus girl breathing in his ear. He stowed the two guns in the gunny sack he usually carried his weed in. He walked the whole way to the mansion gates, because he was too proud to borrow a car.
He waited beneath the coral tree till he saw the lights sweep down the drive. Then he walked across the street, pulling the forty-five out of the sack. The army driver must have seen the pale figure glimmering at the gates, but he kept on coming. As he slowed to make the turn, Tony walked right up and crouched as if he meant to ask some innocent question. The driver smiled, secure in the power that radiated from the general just behind him. He felt so safe he didn’t even see the gun that Tony was raising in the darkness. If the woman in the back seat hadn’t screamed he would have felt no terror at all. In any case, he was dead a second later.
At the first report of the forty-five, the bearded general began to scramble across the car, climbing over the screaming woman. Tony dropped the revolver into the sack and pulled out the sawed-off shotgun. He leaned in at the driver’s window, pointing it into the back seat. There was the smallest pause as he watched them squirm and clamber to escape. It was as if he hadn’t decided even yet who was meant to die here—her or him or both of them. As if he couldn’t know till he’d come to the moment how to make his vengeance perfect.
His face went blank. He blew the general’s head off.
Next morning he made his rounds the same as always. He and Manolo had breakfast in a rancid cafe, dealing reefer to kids and old servants, the latter left high and dry by the revolution. Then Tony picked up nine kilos at a cannery near the railroad yards, since he was now in a position to have a month’s supplies forwarded to him. He stored them in the crawl space under the porch, beside his biscuit tin. Then he took a bus so as not to be late at the barracks, where he made his regular transfer with the corporal. As the corporal sniffed the goods and dipped a pinch under his tongue, Tony stared through the fence at the empty ring, completely dispassionate. He hadn’t expected a rider, but he didn’t care. He would have looked through her if she’d been there.
He turned back to the corporal with an automatic hand out. The price had been settled for months; payment was always in tens and twenties. But the corporal only grinned at him. Then his eyes flicked once over Tony’s shoulder, and Tony understood right there that fate was never finished. He was grabbed from behind, one at each arm, and dragged across the pavement to a police car, its red light blipping sullenly in the morning heat. Before two hours were up he was standing in front of a judge. The sentence was brief: six years at hard labor.
Tony never wasted a moment’s time trying to second-guess it. He’d been wrong to assume that revenge was an end to anything. The war of passion was a war of attrition. Luckily, Tony was blessed with a gift for shedding the past. He worked like a stevedore on the chain gang, till he naturally assumed the position of lead dog. He slept hard, like a laborer, ignoring all the indignities of prison life. It had no psychic effect on him, because he managed to live in a state of suspended animation. No wonder he grew strong while the others weakened and went mad. He was asleep inside. Yet he waited for the next chance with a pure fury in his heart, but hidden a
nd protected. All the while he was mesmerized, he was ready to spring like a cobra.
He had friends among the guards of course, who had served as his well-heeled middlemen in getting the dope to the cell blocks. They kept an eye on him, especially since Manolo had doubled their piece of the action. They made sure Tony Montana got a little meat every now and then. They kept him out of solitary. They made sure he wasn’t one of the dozen men who died every week in the purges and rapes and interrogations.
Tony had been in for a year and a half when he got the word through the captain of the guard that he might have a chance at a transfer. Tony didn’t care. One prison was like another. He didn’t even want to work less, because hard work kept him numb. Then he found out that this other program would cut a year off his sentence, and he volunteered right away, without even asking what it was. Two nights later, the guard woke him up around midnight and led him through the yard to an armored bus. Thirty other convicts dozed inside.
They were driven to the northwest end of the island, to a vast tract of untouched country, swamps and grassy plains and rugged sawtooth mountains. The convicts were issued guerrilla fatigues and put through a course of basic training, a month of crawling on their bellies and hacking their way through pest-ridden jungle. Two men tried to escape. They were caught and used for a torture demonstration, then put out of their misery with a bullet in the brain. The convicts were not issued guns of their own till the final days, when they no longer dreamed of running away. All they wanted now was an enemy.
Tony didn’t mind the rigors of training. He liked getting tougher and tougher. But he kept the same distance he’d always kept from the politics they fed him. To the commandos who ran the program, the whole world was a search-and-destroy mission. Dozens of governments needed pulling down. The fascist colonial powers must be slaughtered in their beds. Tony paid no attention at all as the imperialist conspiracy was blocked out on the map. He knew it was all crap. He figured in a couple of weeks he’d be doing guard duty down at Guantanamo and sleeping in a jail. He planned to cause no trouble at all—not till he had a chance to make a break for it.
It was midnight again when his unit was roused and hustled out to a grassy field. They were bundled into the bus with all their gear. About dawn they came out to a quiet harbor pocked with Russian gunboats. They were led down a pier to a sugar tanker. Then they were lowered into one of the holds, which stunk of molasses and hadn’t quite been cleared of rats. The tanker groaned and shrieked at its fittings as it made for the open sea. The thirty men crouched in the darkness. Nobody told them anything.
Eighteen days they were prisoned there. Food was lowered in a basket, and water six times a day. Nobody came even close to dying, in spite of the heat and the reek of vomit and the rats that chewed through their sleeping rolls and nipped at their feet. They endured it as if it was some kind of final examination, at the end of which they would be certified at last. Tony had no problem with the discomforts of the voyage, but his heart sank when he realized they were a million miles from Miami. This far away, was there any place left to escape to?
They landed in Angola in the deep midsummer. After a day’s briefing in the open air in the port city of Luanda, they were transported inland, six hundred miles by train to the high plateaus and coffee farms along the lush eastern ridge. They were billeted in a makeshift camp near the Zaire border and issued Russian rifles. Tony never really understood who was fighting whom. His own men were allied with the government forces, against an enemy in the north and another in the south. In any case it was civil war and none of Cuba’s business, or so it seemed to Tony anyway.
Rumor had it that upwards of twenty thousand Cubans were now in place, fighting hand-to-hand in the bush. Tony’s unit was meant to patrol the railroad, the so-called Benzuela Link, which carried Zaire’s copper to the ocean. The revolutionary party in the south had taken to sabotaging the railroad line, effectively stopping the copper traffic for two or three months at a time. Most of the work was sentry work, but now and then one of the Cubans would step on a land mine, blowing himself to bits along with fifty feet of track. There were sneak attacks and skirmishes. Tony blew away four men one Sunday morning, as they knelt to poison the water hole that the government forces drank from.
There was no escape. They were too far inland. Tony grew less and less political, feeling more strongly than he had in Cuba that all parties were meaningless. He heard the propaganda from the north and the propaganda from the south, and it all sounded the same. He did not defend that two-mile stretch of track for a minute. He defended himself. He wished he would wake one morning and find they had all slaughtered each other, so he could walk untouched across the wild hills to the ocean, and there find a ship that flew no flag and sailed for plunder and nothing else. He began to think it was the distance he kept that kept him alive. Within six months, only nine of the thirty convicts were still alive.
Abruptly, one afternoon, they were herded together and bussed to an airfield. An Angolan colonel shook their hands as if they were heroes, while they filed into the belly of a B-52 that looked like it couldn’t make it above the treetops. It almost didn’t. It strained to stay aloft as it flew directly south along the veldt, the grass gone summer-gold and starred with galloping herds of zebras. The plane rattled its fastenings, like a Quonset hut in a hurricane. They landed that night on the bank of a river, and as they walked away from the plane toward the camp, a shell came singing out of the air and exploded across one wing. The plane keeled over.
They woke to a sneak attack. The fighting went on all day, all night. Tony understood even less what the sides were here. They were right on the border of Namibia. Angolan rebels, under the banner of UNITA, made raids across the whole belly of the country, as far north as the Benzuela Link. But there were Namibian rebels as well, based in the thick forests of the southern Angolan foothills. These made forays against their own government when they weren’t fighting side by side with UNITA. Tony killed twelve men the first day. He was scared for the first time.
Four days in, it was clear that the Cuban losses were very heavy. Tony considered walking away from the combat and hiding out in a cave. Then he got lucky. A government lieutenant he’d saved from an ambush when they were all up north suddenly had the young Cuban summoned out of the field. He handed Tony a packet addressed to a colonel stationed a hundred miles downriver. As soon as it was dark Tony hopped a raft and began to pole his way along the current. By dawn he was out of the main area of battle, though he still had to keep a lookout for the stray renegade. Cubans were the white-faced enemy. It seemed everyone was out to kill them.
He landed at dusk at the government camp, where they ushered him blindfolded to the colonel’s tent in the forest. Tony presented his packet, and while he waited beneath a monkey tree, an old woman brought him a bowl of stew. He could hear the colonel and his men arguing in the tent, but as he’d never yet got a grip on the Portuguese patois, he could only guess he had brought them a packet of trouble. About an hour later, the colonel appeared outside and beckoned Tony over.
“Tell him,” he said in his tortuous Spanish, “he’ll have his replacements within two days.”
Perhaps it was the nakedness of his accent. Perhaps it had something to do with a black man facing a white man five thousand miles from home. In any case Tony could tell he was lying. There would be no replacements.
They ushered him back to his raft and watched while he poled away upriver. Of course he had no intention of going back. The lieutenant would learn soon enough that he and his men were backed in a corner, without any hope of rescue. Tony went about a mile and beached the raft, pulling it into the trees. Then he doubled back and waited at the edge of the camp. He was too good a guerrilla to be detected. When he had calculated that the night guards were an hour from the end of their watch, their heads nodding over their rifles, he snuck around to the water’s edge where the boats were roped. He slipped away in a rowboat.
It took him two days
to reach the coast. For the longest time it was all jungle, with snakes dangling out of the trees above the current and fat macaws bellowing in the branches. At last he came out into a tidal plain where the water buffalo dozed in the eddies. Scarcely a sign of human life, except here and there a village on stilts in the marshes, looking the way it must have looked a thousand years ago. Tony hated it all. He longed for the noise of a city, the crowds and the risks and the scramble for power. He hated this empty virgin land.
The port at the mouth of the river was only two streets deep, barely civilized compared to Luanda. Yet even here the architecture was a kind of colonial gingerbread, improbable and charming. Tony walked about with a giddy sense of freedom, even though he had to keep one eye peeled for the army police. From his days on the docks at Mariel, he knew his way around a harbor. By midday he’d talked with a Spanish sailor who told him the lay of the land. Most of the ships in the harbor had been waiting clearance for months, while the paperwork piled up in the customs office. The customs men had all been recruited into the army. Trade was at a standstill. His own ship had finally received permission to sail for the Mediterranean, full to the gills with hardwood and copra.
That night Tony rowed his boat across the harbor to the Spanish freighter. He monkeyed up the anchor chain, slipped onto the deck, and crabbed across to the aft hold, where he lowered himself into a labyrinth of mahogany logs. Exhausted, he fell asleep against the rough and fragrant bark—and woke up two hours later with a little scream, as a spider six inches across sank its teeth in his shoulder.
He lay delirious with fever for three days, unable to move. The heat was brutal in the hold, and he sweated ten pounds and went into shock. The water was choppy in the mid-Atlantic, so the logs were always shifting and rumbling. A hundred times he was nearly crushed. He would have been dead for certain the night of the third day, except for a quirk in the transport of hardwood. They had to vent the hold a couple of times a week, so the wood gases wouldn’t build up too much pressure. Rot would set in if the cargo was kept sealed. So they lifted the hatch.
