Cuba Straits

by Randy Wayne White

  The woman kept her head down as she worked. Paused only once to look at something lying at the base of the tree—his satellite phone. The American had left it behind for some reason. He couldn’t deal with what that meant, not while he was staked out like a sacrificial goat.

  The old woman . . . He still hadn’t gotten a clear look at her face. Vernum waited, hoping the truth would be revealed by her eyes.

  “Figuerito had the brain of a turtle,” she said finally. “At night, he fouled my father’s house with the smell of marijuana, and he would rather play baseball than eat. Not that I cared—there’s been no cook in my home for thirty years—but, come time to pay his rent, he had no money. The ungrateful son of a slut. A filthy slut who bedded baseball trash and . . . and others above her station. And what good is a man if he has no money?” Bitterness required her to look up for understanding . . . but Imelda Casanova did not look up.

  Vernum felt a chill.

  She reached into the bag and placed a thimble next to three tiny cups. “I loathed Figueroa. All through his whining childhood, then his pimple-faced teens, I loathed him. I would have put him in an asylum years ago, but for one thing”—her head tilted, but then she reconsidered—“Figueroa knew . . . something about me. So I tolerated the brainless bastard. But . . . I suppose even stupid boys have useful qualities. He did whatever I told him to do. Very obedient, that child. He protected me, my personal privacy, which is important to someone like myself. Tell me”—she dealt four small white shards onto the cloth as if dealing cards—“do you know what these are?”

  For a moment, Vernum strained against the wire, then went limp. Yes, he knew. Four pieces of coconut rind, each sliced as round and white as a coin. Coconut represented Earth’s own flesh. Life fed on life. In the little cups would be ground cowrie shells, turpentine, and powdered bluestone. This was a purification ceremony.

  “Do you feel guilty about the things you did here—and in the cane fields?” The woman’s voice different now, purring like a young girl in love.

  Vernum nodded eagerly.

  “Do you believe in redemption? Or justice? We can’t have it both ways . . . Or can we?”

  Vernum had to think about that before he nodded again.

  “The guilt in your head, late at night,” she asked, “does it pound like it’s trying to escape through your eyes? Do your thoughts cut flesh and scream for purity? Do they ask what you might do to make yourself pure again?”

  The body voids excess liquids when panic overwhelms. Vernum’s head tilted up, then down, and he began to cry.

  The woman removed an empty gourd from the bag, a sunflower . . . a fillet knife. Then she suddenly turned to look at the chimney as if surprised by an old friend. She beckoned with her hand. “Chino Rojo,” she called. “¡La Chino! Come . . . it is time.” Laughter in her voice, as if summoning her lover to the picnic.

  Chino—a “Chinaman.” That, at least, wasn’t part of the ceremony. But then she added, “Hurry up, Raúl.”

  In Cuba, there was only one Raúl.

  Insanity.

  The woman approached with the knife in her hand and placed the gourd between his feet at the base of the tree. By then, Vernum knew that the truth didn’t matter, but he struggled and wept and finally looked into her face—a face layered with wrinkles and the skulls of seven dead girls.

  “When Figueroa was bad”—she smiled—“I always gave him a choice.” Her fingernails sparked like flint as they struggled with his zipper, then stretched him like a chicken neck. “Why don’t you sing while you make up your mind? You know the words.” Her smile showed fangs. “Your favorite song. I’ve heard you sing it many times here.”

  Oggún shoro shoro, the verse went.

  The knife had been cleaned and specially sharpened. When she offered the knife to Vernum, he screamed through his nose.

  Tomlinson was startled by the bellow of an animal in the distance. He fumbled the canister and loops of film came peeling off in his hand. Black-and-white Kodak celluloid from the 1950s. He recovered and rewound the spool, careful to handle it by the ratchet tracks so as not to smudge the frames.

  He took a last look at a moment in time, held the film to the light: a soldier on his ass, hat askew and embarrassed but still holding the bat after attempting to hit a . . . softball?

  No. That couldn’t be. Tomlinson was so disillusioned, his sense of justice demanded a replay. He stripped through four previous frames.

  Damn . . . it was true. Just as Raúl had hinted in a letter a few years before this film was shot—and probably later letters. Brother Fidel, instead of a major league prospect, had been a spaz on the baseball diamond.

  Correction: softball field.

  But so what? It didn’t matter when compared with the achievements of a visionary leader who had done his best to help the world change its profit-drunk, thieving ways.

  The animal bellowed again. It was a sound so primal that Tomlinson grimaced while he tapped the canister closed. A cow, probably. Certainly not Figgy, who had been gone only a few minutes. Or was it Figgy’s next victim, some poor bastard who had wandered into Imelda Casanova’s web of madness? Gad, what a sickening turn of events. If the film hadn’t riveted his attention, he would have been on the shortstop’s trail already. Now he had to hurry to catch up.

  There were two candles on the chair and a trusty Bic lighter in his pocket. He went up the root cellar steps and outside, where there were stars and a Gulf Stream breeze but no longer a distant flashlight to mark Figgy’s destination. When his eyes adjusted, though, the chimney was visible, a black spire against a tropic sky. Behind him, the village of Plobacho slept.

  Tomlinson went down the hill with the canister tucked under an arm, alternately fretting about his friend and the film’s contents.

  The hell it doesn’t matter, he thought. Baseball wasn’t just a part of Cuba’s history, it was a keystone. An unrealized triad was implied by the era—Mantle, Maris, and Fidel—icons of a generation, but one of those icons had sacrificed every man’s dream for the betterment of everyman.

  Damn this film. The footage unmasked a lie, a generational fraud that would wound fellow travelers to the bone. It would loose a pack of right-wing hounds, a visual blood track that would craze them until they had savaged and befouled a legend who had lived the truth, a truth brighter for the flame of one small deception.

  Flame.

  Film burns fast, Figgy had warned him.

  Tomlinson felt for the lighter in his pocket.

  Why not burn it? Imelda Casanova wasn’t the victim of a tragic love story. She was nuts. A child abuser who had perverted her own grandson into slavery and made him a lackey who killed on command. And for what? To protect letters and film that gave her power over the past and guaranteed her future. This was political extortion, nothing less. What other damning secrets did the crazy lady have hidden in her arsenal?

  Why not, indeed?

  On a path that wound along the river, he didn’t stop but imagined himself stopping as he flicked a flame to life. The film canister was leaden beneath yellow foliage. For the first time, he noticed a date written in pencil: 12 Nov. 1958.

  Gad. Only weeks before Fidel and Che had led a peasant army into Havana, they had been eating hors d’oeuvres and playing slow-pitch. The context took the wind out of Tomlinson. It was the equivalent of Bob Dylan pirating lyrics, or Hendrix commuting from suburbia to fake guitar riffs.

  History. He held it in his hand. He wasn’t naïve. He knew that minions of the future often revised the past to fit the needs, or fears, of the present day. But destroy history? That, he could not do.

  Well . . . he might, but later. There was a possibility he would need this film to buy Figgy’s freedom a second time.

  In Cuba, apparently, it all depended on who he had killed.

  • • •

  SWEET LORD ABOVE . .
. the mad shortstop had struck again.

  Tomlinson, for the first time in his life, hoped he was suffering the horrid flashbacks a counselor had warned him about decades ago, but this was no hallucination. He stood among bricks, a long throw to the chimney, and watched Figgy’s silhouette pull a lifeless body away from a tree. Then he dropped the body as if it were a sack of potatoes and swiped his hands together like a workman congratulating himself on a job well done.

  Reason enough to yell, “If he’s not dead, don’t kill him, for god’s sake. Figgy . . . ? I mean it.” Tomlinson set off at a run but soon slowed because it was dark. A lot of holes and bricks to trip him. He stumbled anyway, and the film canister went careening down a grade into more darkness, where there were bushes and god knows what else in a place where the air had the weight of illness. He had to use the lighter and hunt around on his knees. By the time he found the canister and confirmed the film was okay, the shortstop was close enough for Tomlinson to speak in a normal voice. Impossible to sound normal, however, under these conditions. “Is he still alive? I know CPR, if he’s alive. But if he’s dead . . . Christ, I don’t know what to do. What’s the plan? Take him to your usual spot and throw him off a cliff?”

  Figuerito cast a long shadow in the lighter’s flame. “There are nice mango trees on the way to the sea,” he said, “unless you have a better idea. I hope you do. At the house, I didn’t see the donkey, so it won’t be so easy this time.” He paused, staring down at Tomlinson. “Brother, I warned you about lighting matches around old film. You trying to get us in trouble?”

  The Bic went out. Tomlinson got to his feet. He walked toward the body, which was hidden by distance and weeds. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  “Oh yeah. Anyone lose that much blood, they gonna die. Two big gourds full, plus what the earth drank as an offering.”

  Tomlinson stopped. “Gourds?”

  Figuerito’s mind was on something else. “Did you watch the film?”

  “What do you mean, ‘gourds’? Oh. Well . . . I held it up to the light. Just a few dozen frames, but I know why your grandmother wants the footage protected.” On tiptoes, he got a glimpse of one dead hand. “Any idea who that person is?”

  “It’s the bad Santero,” Figgy said. “I didn’t kill him, she did. But I took his phone and his money. His phone was next to the tree.” He patted his back pocket to confirm both were safe.

  “The guy, his name’s Vernum, you said. Vernum attacked you, right? Self-defense. You had no choice in the matter. An open-and-shut case. I mean, no one in their right mind would . . . Well, you know what I mean.” Tomlinson felt faint.

  “In Key West, sure, that was true. You don’t remember? His face is still a mess from my baseball shoe. Lots of stitches. It made me happy, seeing that. I wanted to kill him, but my abuela is still very quick for her age.” Figgy started toward an open space between the chimney and a crumbling brick wall. “Come on. You can help me look for her since you understand about the film.”

  Tomlinson hurried after the little man. “You’re telling me your grandmother—she’s, what, seventy, eighty years old?—that she murdered the guy?”

  “Either her or the spirits came out of the ground. That happens in this place sometimes. The Egun spirit, she can inhabit a human person to, you know, do her bidding. Have sex with a man, if she wants. Or steal his shit or even kill him. My abuela was a Santería novia in her youth. Ask her, but”—the shortstop turned to stress his point—“do not make her mad.”

  Tomlinson thought, No shit, Sherlock, while his brain debated Are they both nuts? No jury in the world would believe the little Cuban’s spiel. But he also remembered hearing gunfire. “Oh . . . Oh! She shot him, you’re saying. Okay. It’s a little easier to picture a woman that age—”

  “Brother,” Figgy interrupted, “what she did was cut off his rooster. I always wondered if she would do it. Now I know.” He turned left past the wall and angled down a hill shaped like a bunker. “The place I’m going to show you I promised I never would, but I’m worried because you’re right. Even three years ago, she had lost a few steps. Her bad leg, you know? They built it for her back when she could dance.”

  “Built her . . . a prosthetic leg?”

  “I don’t know what this is, prosthetic. I’m talking about the place I’m taking you. There were bombs in those days. Like a shelter, you know? This was before I was born and before my mother left for Moscow because I was so much trouble.”

  “Whoa! amigo. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “If it’s true, why not? Stupid boys get what they deserve. The shelter, though, they built that back when there were bombs.”

  They, Tomlinson translated, were the Castros. The cruelty of Imelda Casanova was equally apparent. “No child deserves to be called stupid. That was a shitty thing for her to say, Figgy.”

  “My mother? She didn’t say anything. How could she? They don’t have telephones in Moscow where she lives.” Figuerito stopped. “Strike a match,” he said.

  Tomlinson used the lighter and watched his friend descend into a trench lined with bricks that was more like a ramp, bushes all around. Beneath camouflage netting was a metal gate with a chain and padlock, the gate open. “Wait here,” he said, then looked back after opening a steel door. “If she comes out holding a knife, don’t ask questions, just run. You’re faster, but she might make me kill you anyway.”

  • • •

  FROM WHERE Tomlinson stood on the side of the hill, he couldn’t see a road, but he knew a road was there when he noticed headlights ricocheting between the trees and sky. A bad road with lots of bumps, for a car traveling so fast. Beyond, to the southeast, distant flames were a candle in the darkness. A peasant’s house on fire, it looked like.

  Shit-oh-dear. The Russian came into his mind. The Santero’s Key West wingman in the black Mercedes. But what was he, or anyone else, doing out here in Fumbuck, Cuba, at this hour?

  Tomlinson didn’t need a watch to feel the starry weight of midnight.

  His logician brain shifted to the phone in Figgy’s pocket while his extrasensory powers probed the horizon. Not easy because, first, his receptors had to pierce a veil of agony; a century of pain lingered here. His lens soon broke free and there was contact: heavy . . . very heavy—a human presence out there. A gelid void: intelligence with a functioning heart.

  Was it Ford? The biologist, in certain moods, transmitted a similarly scary vibe. Possible. The message Tomlinson had left with the hotel doorman read En route biggest house in Plobacho to return what was taken. Meet there or No Más anchored Cojimar. PS: Giant Russki chasing us. Float on and watch your ass.

  Tomlinson concentrated on the road and fine-tuned his reception. No . . . it wasn’t Ford. The biologist drove like an old woman, even in a rental. Yet, Ford was out there somewhere—a green aura, blue-tinted—and seemed to be pressing closer.

  The cell phone, his logician mind reminded him. That’s the problem, dumbass. The phone Figgy’s carrying has a GPS in it.

  Something else he noticed: the odor of woodsmoke, sudden and fresh. Very close. He changed angles and saw a spark spiral out of the bushes not far from where he stood. The chamber within was vented, and someone had lit a fire. Once again: shit-oh-dear.

  Tomlinson tapped at the steel door, then opened it a crack. “Figgy . . . ? Oh, Figuerito, I think we might have company.”

  No response. He flicked the lighter and went through into a hall made of rebar and concrete, walls three feet thick, with a ceiling so low he had to duck. It actually was a bomb shelter. A second steel door was open. Down a ramp, along another hall, where a light allowed him to pocket the Bic before his thumb blistered.

  “Figgy? Uhh . . . Miz Casanova? I’m not armed, just a decent man trying to help a shipmate.”

  He exited into a room that was a small office. A steel desk, military green, maps on two walls, ker
osene lamps on hooks in the ceiling, only one lit. On a table, a portable shortwave radio next to a battery-operated phone, the old kind with a crank. Wire snaked through a hole in the wall—antennas. Another steel door at the back of the room was closed. The rivets reminded him of a watertight hatch on a ship.

  Damn. No wonder Figgy couldn’t hear him. This was more than a bomb shelter. It was headquarters for a few high-ranking survivalists. Only two names came to mind—or three, counting Imelda Casanova. But why, during a nuclear war, would the Castro brothers sequester themselves with only one mistress?

  They wouldn’t. In a space this small, mayhem could be guaranteed.

  He placed the film canister on a chair and sniffed. Faint odor of lavender, and woodsmoke from the fire that had to be in an adjoining room. It was quiet down here below ground. A good spot for a nervous man to breathe deeply while his heart slowed to normal. On the desk by the radio was a logbook, pages yellow with age. He removed a lantern from its hook and flipped through a few entries, then several more. Ham radio gibberish, mostly, but one grabbed his attention:

  25-10-62. Radio SWAN Island. Pro-fascista tráfico. U.S./CIA 19:23 hrs. Putas mentiras . . . All entered in a flowing, feminine hand.

  Putas mentiras meant “lying whores.” The date was in transposed Latino: 25 October 1962. A dangerous period. The Cuban Missile Crisis. It was the Kennedy-Khrushchev era, when the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear holocaust.

  Tomlinson considered the concrete fortress. Hell, no wonder they had built this place. There were probably similar bunkers spaced around Cuba in case bombs fell while the Castros were on the road. The logbook entry explained the letter Fidel had written on the day JFK died. Swan Island, as sailors who had transited the Canal knew, was off Honduras. Tomlinson hadn’t made the connection. Apparently, the CIA had transmitted radio propaganda from there.

  The SWAN lies.

  So what else was new?

  Fidel had also instructed his mistress—perhaps his former mistress by then—to destroy everything. Imelda Casanova had obviously ignored those orders. Tomlinson closed the book and moved around the room. It was a small space, cluttered but orderly, and a treasure trove of Castro memorabilia. Somehow, Juan Rivera had learned that Figuerito had access to such things. He had bartered freedom in trade for blue-chip collectibles to be sold on the Internet.