Home Front Lines

by Brenda Sparks Prescott

  He looked down at his own shoes. American, not new, but not too worn. They were like the pair he’d had on recently when a woman down in old Matanzas had beseeched him for help. No money, he had said. She peered at his shoes and made a suggestion. He followed her into an alley, leaned back against a wall, and unzipped. She knelt and put her mouth on him. He emerged from the alley barefoot a few minutes later. When he got home, he told his wife he had been robbed. He felt guilty about the lie. What stories footwear could tell. He nudged his brother’s leg. “Where’d you get the shoes?”

  Guillermo stirred and drew the empty bottle closer. “These days one shouldn’t ask too many questions, hermanito.” He slurped spit back into his mouth and pushed up to a sitting position. “You might follow your precious Quique to the bottom of the sea.”

  Guillermo’s venom was no surprise. He should have been the shining light of the Fernandez family, but he was eclipsed in their youth by Quique Mendoza. The three of them had been holed up in the brothers’ bedroom when their juvenile experiment with matches and rum had gotten out of hand and set one of the beds afire. Guillermo, at ten, the oldest, was nearest to the door and ran out screaming for their mother. The room rapidly filled with black smoke. Ramón, only five years old, was trapped by the scorching heat of the fire, so he crawled into the closet and pulled the door closed. Seconds later Quique flung open the closet door, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him toward the fire. He pulled Ramón’s shirt up over his head and rushed him through the line of flames and into his mother’s arms. Ramón had burns on his arms and legs, but he healed well. Quique had more extensive injuries and a long convalescence. He emerged from the ordeal with tight bands of scars pulling at the features of his face and restricting the swing of his left arm.

  Ramón’s mother always treated Quique as one of her own after that. She called him her favorite son, and often cited his bravery while giving him a piece of candy first, or later, when carving out a choice piece of pork for him. Those moments remained clear in Ramón’s memory, the ones clotted with smoke and compressed with heat, when his brother had run away and their best friend had stayed to save him.

  Quique grew into a man of daring. Until the previous week, he had been the only Cuban who Ramón would trust to make the run to the Florida Keys, away from the madness engulfing the island. In only a short time, unthinkable by the hopeful supporters of Batista’s overthrow three years before, sons had betrayed fathers and husbands had stolen away with their children without a word to their wives. Quique had navigated the treachery of the post-revolutionary period and the Caribbean waters equally with the sureness of God’s chosen ones. He knew the waters better than any of Castro’s boys and had made dozens of trips under their very noses. Ramón added to his friend’s mystique by mangling tips about him from tattletale neighbors before he passed the information on to his CDR comrades. Quique was known to the authorities, but he was known to be invincible.

  Then God chose someone else. Quique made a run to the North during a moonless night, even though he, along with everyone else, knew the patrols were tripled then. Somewhere at sea, soldiers strafed his trawler, no questions asked. Most of the bodies were recovered, but not Quique’s. At first, Ramón joined in his mother’s hope that his boyhood savior had survived and swum to safety. Not anymore. The most he hoped now was that Quique had regained his smooth skin and joyous smile as an angel.

  Some of the patrol boasted that a good source had led them straight to that worm’s boat. Ramón stared at his brother’s feet, shod in shoes that would be excellent pay for an informer. Sure, you turned people in, but not your own, at least not for profit. Would his brother stoop so low? He forced the question from his mind, banishing it to the same far corner as Tomasito’s demise, and looked at his watch.

  “Lucky for you it’s after six,” he said. “You’re too drunk to go back to work.”

  His men took a nip now and then but knew better than to drink too much. The tannery was a stern mistress with many evil tricks. She was full of poisonous gases, boiling vats, sharp edges, and greasy floors. A man had to keep his wits about him or risk becoming a victim of her murderous ways.

  They stood and headed for the exit. Guillermo palmed the rum bottle against his leg, hiding it from no one. As they passed a container of sulphuric acid, he looked around, then lifted the lid. Ramón whispered a warning, but his brother ignored him and slipped the bottle into the drum. Despite the rules, many of life’s little irritants disappeared this way. It was routine to strain the acid to catch the few materials, like the glass bottle, that didn’t dissolve to keep them from clogging the hoses.

  They passed a vat set in the floor where Guillermo spent many of his days. A catwalk stretched above the steaming surface of saltwater and lime, its one rail high enough to let a worker hang over the grated floor and reach the hides below. A man wouldn’t last long if he were completely submerged in the caustic solution, but Guillermo and his comrades thought nothing of reaching down from the catwalk, barehanded, and plunging in an arm up to the elbow to untangle a stubborn clump of hides. Working without protection earned them boils on their hands and arms, which, along with a characteristic raspy cough, distinguished the tanners from their compañeros.

  The factory’s stench followed them outside, but the wind was blowing in from the bay and within a block, Ramón inhaled the fresh sea breeze. They came to the corner where they parted to go to their own homes, Guillermo to the two-room apartment of a man whose wife had left him, and Ramón to the tidy home, bought with Montero money, near the bay. Ramón grabbed his brother’s large bicep.

  “Enough of the drinking at work,” he said, separating the words into a distinct command.

  Guillermo easily threw off Ramón’s grasp. “What will stop,” he said, thumping Ramón twice on the chest, “is me going to that stinking factory. You’ll see, hermanito.” He turned and walked away.

  Ramón watched his brother weave down the sidewalk, his feet tapping out an uneven rhythm. The failing light dimmed the rich tan of the shoes but didn’t obscure their possible connection to Quique’s fate. Ramón tried to remember anything he may have said in front of Guillermo about wanting to leave the island. He had to tell Rosita his suspicions.

  The Pattern Man 1

  RAY JOHNSON WAS a pattern man. When his black man’s dream to be an architect smashed into a whitewashed wall, he moved on to improvise to the rhythms of the newly birthed Air Force. His training as a draftsman housed visionary talents. He could look at a plan in two dimensions and walk through the building as if it had been built in three. He could see in a thickened line the snafus it would cause as if it were an actual cinder block wall in front of him. He claimed he heard a wrong note and immediately knew the frequency of the right one. Move that one there, he would say, stabbing at the plans. His instant insight met with suspicion at first, but when he pulled over an adding machine and talked through the savings in time, money, and effort, even the most entrenched lard butt rushed to agree.

  Ray read purchase orders and schedules and saw the storage, movement, and use of supplies as if he were watching a Technicolor movie. Shipments arrived at destinations before they were needed via means that were dismissed as impossible by lesser minds. A miracle worker, more than one CO called him. A few years before, back in the fifties, when Ray and Betty Ann arrived at his assignment on the outskirts of Washington, the base was rapidly expanding. Major Hamilton “Ham” Stone was in charge of doing it right. Ray was a pattern man, always was, but the major didn’t believe in his patterns at first. He had commanded too many airmen who wrote their own copy. And Ray talked crazy. Talked about hearing with his eyes. Answered “why” questions that way. Stone barked out strings of curses impressive in their crudeness, even for a soldier. Only then would Ray explain in proper logistics speak, in dimensions and distances and quantities per box.

  Besides, Stone was a Dodgers fan who still grieved over their traitorous move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Ray
was a Yankees man, proud of his Bronx Bombers, with little sympathy for a fellow New Yorker who backed the wrong team. As the two sought a working groove, the 53rd Wing was dropped into their laps. They had to execute plans to house the incoming group at the southern end of the base. Pronto. Neither of them had any say in said plans. They were drawn upstream by someone given a terrain map and a deadline. Someone who had never visited the actual site. The drawings of the south side arrived crisp and clean, the two required hangars set near the hills and the location of two more suggested by dotted line footprints.

  Ray and the Major drove out there for the first time, out to the point where the air strips outran the last buildings and stretched past the scrub that foretold the rise of the surrounding hills. Ray sensed trouble right away in the steady buzz of the drawings, but he had no words yet to tell exactly what needed to change. So he yanked off his boots and socks and left them in the Jeep. One, two, unbuckle my shoe. His feet needed to see, he said. Stone strode away, his boots leaving a line of heel marks. Ray followed. He left no footprints at all. The crunch of Stone’s impatient step outranked the snick of his bare feet.

  They traced a wide arc up to the base of the hills and returned to the Jeep to roll out the plans. Three, four, bomb the Corps.

  That was it.

  “Don’t build the hangars up against the hills,” Ray said. “Leave some space, I’ll tell you how much. Some will be like quarter rests; others will be whole bars of silence.”

  “Nonsense,” Stone said. “You’re speaking in tongues again. The hills—”

  “Are regular. So it’s not a straight line like Pearl Harbor. So what? Any pilot able to take off could hit every last one of them in one run. Take me up and I’ll show you if you don’t believe me.”

  Stone pressed down on the plans laid out on the Jeep’s hood. Chances were that any attack that reached this base would be by nuclear missile—it wouldn’t matter how far apart they spaced the hangars since the whole installation could be destroyed in one strike. Even so, the military’s cumbersome logic always fought the last war. And plenty of people had lost friends or family at Pearl Harbor. It was just too fresh not to be a political force, even at the scrub end of the Maryland countryside. Stone turned his face upward, his gaze rising high and then swooping down over the field. Ray was right, he always was.

  Stone conceded the point with a quick nod. “Okay. What do we do about it?”

  “A little syncopation is all we need. Leave it to me.”

  Ray devised, and the major fought. The higher ups, that is. Usually, he would be sloughed off as a pain in the ass. Couldn’t he see the box marked complete with permanent ink? But he knew how to play in the big leagues. “Don’t want another Pearl Harbor,” he remarked more than once while stalled in some outer office. Somehow the message got passed along, a door opened, and he carefully steered the ensuing conversation to the point where he was congratulating the desk jockey for catching the subtle flaw. The duo worked this out-of-date danger well and wound up slipping in extra storage space and a south-side field station for their own use. When the installation was complete, even General Hepplewhite could see that the modifications, while utilitarian, had a spare logic that rivaled that of Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.”

  Ray received his due, even got a promotion to master sergeant, and Stone soon depended on him to see motifs that no one else did. As they dug into other projects and bonded over their favorite sport, Stone found creative means of compensating him for his unusual talents. It was a time when an enterprising Air Force officer could find military business near most Major League Baseball cities. The officer, if shrewd, would develop these opportunities in such a way that he would practically be commanded to take along an NCO as an assistant, and not just a tag-along but a logistical expert.

  Stone took him to Cuba once, to Havana and out into the countryside. They went to a local baseball stadium where every single fan seemed to have a passion that reached infinitely deeper than his, and he a man hopelessly in love with the game. But that was an eon ago. Before the Revolution.

  Stone’s roving schemes and fixation on baseball meant that for several seasons Ray left Betty Ann alone many a night to attend urgent “duty” near Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston. She pouted, pretty dimples ringing her full lips and pocking her apple-round cheeks, when he announced the latest off-base excursion.

  “You have plenty of gentlemen friends to keep you company,” Ray said, as if she had voiced a complaint.

  The Pattern Man 2

  A MAN HAD to be confident to stay married to a woman like Betty Ann. To let her out of his sight. To sit deathly still in the face of a petty informant until the waspish report of a party disappearance dwindled away. To watch another man’s gaze follow her backside until she and it disappeared into the kitchen. To fend off the sloppy kisses of a drunk wife who claimed she was only doing what Betty Ann always did, given half a chance. To believe her when she said she was working late in her studio with the girls.

  Ray wasn’t always that man, but he was a pattern man, ever since he was a child.

  As a teenager he stood on the rubble of an ancient office building, gone before he was born. Up there, a story above level ground, he found tough plants that grew only in the cracks of pavement and abandoned buildings. Some called them weeds. He called them homeboys. He imagined the broken granite blocks beneath his feet when they were upright and whole, somber in their austerity, ten stories high. His uncle had worked in this building, riding an elevator up and down all day long. Ray imagined the columns of broad windows his uncle knew only from the outside and the men in dark suits who strode through the tall lobby. They formed a rough circle that squared off when it pushed into his uncle’s elevator. A gaunt man with quick eyes and mobile lips greeted his uncle, called him “Jack,” even though that wasn’t his name. Not even close. Ray heard the bells of the passing floors.

  Uncle Alonzo never visited the site of his former job. Said he had already spent far too much time there in a small cab or idling in an underground room, which since then had become the repository for wrecked file cabinets, disintegrating folders, and other debris of past glories. Ray asked once if a colored man had ever had an office above the basement. Uncle Alonzo had not answered.

  High above ground, Ray rocked a granite jag with his foot while he dreamed of developing this plot of land. He loved the open sky, and a garden would go, right here, but it would never be. A young lady clipped toward him on the broken sidewalk below, her dark, slender legs slipping in and out of the kick-pleat of her gray wool skirt as she walked. He thought of the bare steel legs of a carport. Wondered how big they would have to be to hold up ten stories, if they could tilt like that girl’s legs now beneath him. “Hey, baby,” he said, but the girl never noticed him up on his heap of rubble. Only a plant had caught his line, and it wasn’t impressed. You gots to speak up if you wants to be heard. Ray looked down on the only greenery this lot would ever grow. “You’ll never get out of the Bronx talking like that,” he told the plant.

  At tech school, he drew his building with its bare legs of steel. It had diamond windows and an entrance set back under a second-story overhang.

  “Nice drawing,” his drafting teacher said.

  “What about the design?” Ray asked.

  “Boys like you don’t have to worry about design,” the teacher said.

  “Architects do,” Ray said.

  His teacher moved on to the next drafting table as he pushed the rolled up sleeves of his white shirt further up his skinny arms.

  “Architects do,” Ray said louder. In fact, it was the loudest he had ever spoken in class. Heads popped up while hands held circle and triangle templates in place against T-squares.

  The teacher turned to stare at Ray. “Who here is going to architecture school?” he asked. He didn’t bother to look around as heads dropped and mechanical pencils continued their arrested movement.

  Ray’s tablemate nudged him in the back. “
Better get back to work,” he whispered.

  Ray did. Kept his grades up for the rest of the year too. But something worked itself to the surface. It started with smokes. His older brothers had always told him not to take them up. “Don’t do as I do,” Phinn, the oldest said, cigarette arrowed at him between index and middle fingers. Then, about two weeks after the architecture knockdown, Ray ran into his brother outside the printing company where he worked. Phinn, coatless in the late winter gloom, hunched over a cigarette in his ink-stained hand. After a “What’s up?” Ray plucked the lit stick from his brother’s fist and took a drag. Didn’t even cough. Inhaled as if he had been smoking since he was five. Looked at Phinn straight in the eye—he had grown tall enough to do so—and asked, “How do you blow it out your nose?”

  His brother pulled back and crossed his arms, then rubbed his shoulder, as if to warm it up. He started to say something but stopped when he looked Ray full in the face. “Baby boy’s growing up.” He shook his head and reached into his shirt pocket for another cig. He lit up and exhaled smoke through his nose. When Ray tried it, his eyes watered, but he shed the tears of a young man grown unhappy with the meager rewards of being good.

  Next it was an encounter with the doll with the inspirational legs. He was the quiet one, but still a Johnson boy. He had absorbed more from his brothers than anyone thought. When the girl next hurried past his favorite pile of rubble, he was balanced at eye height. “Say, Miss.” The two syllables intoned as if by a respectable customer at a perfume counter. She turned her head without slowing. He jumped from his perch, smooth and agile, and landed near her.