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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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Betts had been the first girl he'd gone to bed with, and the only one till after the divorce. Closing his eyes, he saw her again … hair dark as oiled walnut … legs tanned dusky, breasts with a hint of saffron. Compared with her, other women still seemed oversized and hairy. Other men took advantage of being overseas. He never had. Instead, he'd done what he had to do; done it thinking about her, eyes fixed on her picture, pinned to the bunk above his. There hadn't been much emphasis on chastity at the Academy, but there was on honor. And if a wedding vow wasn't giving your word, then what was? Back then, he'd thought that if he did what was right, nothing bad could ever happen … .
You fucking fool, he thought, draining his beer. Right or wrong didn't make any difference. They fucked you one way or the other. His hands shook as he fished out another brew, cocked it, and put it to his head.
Since then he'd become like everyone else. If you could get it, take it. And it seemed like you could. That changed everything, the heady prospect of sex with every woman you met.
“Excuse me, friend, can I get to the beer?”
He yanked his tie down and strolled through the rooms, drifting from picture to picture, looking over the women more than the art. They glanced back boldly or dropped their eyes; he imagined each naked. Then his eyes, flicking around the walls, suddenly froze.
At first glance, it was crude, angular and stylized. But its misshapen figures huddled in the corners of blank white spaces conveyed alienation and fear. It looked like something drawn by a battered child. A short woman in a green dress was standing in front of it. He looked around, saw no Beverly, and walked over. “That's quite a piece,” he said.
When she looked up, he saw she was drunk, breasts falling out of her dress. Green velvet and soft white flesh, lost eyes that attracted him instantly. Flushed cheeks, a hand that trembled as it held a martini glass. Or maybe not
drunk
—she had a hand-rolled cigarette in one hand.
“You like it?”
“It's grim.”
“‘Grim' is good. I like ‘grim.' So you like it?”
“I guess so.”
“I did it.”
“Did what?”
“This.”
He realized she meant the painting, and he looked at it with new eyes. “You're an artist?
This
artist? Wow. You're”—he leaned to read the signature—“S. Bond?”
“Baird. Sibylla Baird. I was probably stoned when I signed it.” She chuckled and swayed. “I know who you are. Saw you with Beverly. I know Carl, her ex. Isn't that his jacket?” She touched his lapel.
“Uh-huh.” He looked at the painting again. The figures were childlike, stick trees, a round yellow sun with lines coming out of it, a corkscrew of smoke spiraling out the chimney of a house. But there was no comfort, only alienation and loneliness and horror. “It's not fun to look at. But I can't look away.”
“You know why, don't you? Because that's the way you feel inside.”
“I guess,” he said slowly, still staring at the stick figure in the corner. It was a child, he was pretty sure. “It makes me feel … like I did when my dad would come to beat me. I hid under the bed once. I thought it'd be too narrow for him to come in after me. But he just lifted up the whole bed and pulled me out from under it.”
“You know what it reminds me of?”
“No.”
“Looking in the mirror when I was fourteen. Lying on the bed, with my stepfather fucking me from behind.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
“I saw you by the beer tub. You looked like you wanted to kill somebody. Was that who you wanted to kill? Your father?”
“I was thinking about my ex-wife.”
“What did she do to you?”
“It's a long, boring story.”
“She fucked somebody else. And you can't forgive her.”
“I pay too much alimony,” he said bitterly, looking away. Why was he telling her this?
“If she fucked around, why does she get alimony?”
“It was simpler no-fault. There's a kid involved, my daughter.”
“You do sound bitter. What about Beverly? Are you in love with her?”
“No.”
“Sleeping with her?”
“I don't understand why you're asking me all this stuff.”
“You don't screw and tell. That's unusual. Interesting. A closemouthed type.”
He looked down at her breasts, and she said, “They're a lot bigger than hers. Is that what you're thinking?”
“Well … yeah.”
“You ever read Erica Jong?”
“No.”
“She has a fantasy. A man she's just met—she doesn't even know his name. They have what she calls a ‘zipless fuck.' Because there are no zippers, no buttons, everything just falls away. Do you have fantasies like that?”
“I'm having one now.”
“Oh my God. We have to do something about this.”
She glanced around, then drifted toward the exit. He hesitated, looking after her. She didn't look back, just went slowly up the steps, holding the wall for support.
He followed her up, out into the garden.
It was late now. The flambeaux were guttering low and the bar was empty except for elderly men. He followed the green shadow of her dress back and back, along a path between the live oaks, until it faded away into leafy, cricket-racketing blackness. His heart began to pound, making him feel breathless.
For a moment, he wondered if he should turn back, find Beverly. Then anger and contempt for himself and her and the woman ahead, for everything human, made it impossible to look back. The world held no faithfulness. Why should his heart? Between the wandering beacons of fireflies, he staggered, hands extended, till they found her, leaning against something that glowed white in the starlight. His fingers tightened on her shoulders and she pulled his head down to kiss her.
The white gridwork was a trellis. As he lifted green velvet, her outstretched arms twisted into it like ivy. A little later, it began to shake, raining down fragrant petals in the warm and windless night.
Dorchester County, South Carolina
I
N the night, the highway rolled down across the flat land like a concrete river, leaping impatiently over the narrow country roads with immense wide-legged overpasses. Straight as a ray of light, paved with moving light, the interstate arrowed down from Washington, Richmond, Fayetteville, Florence on its way to the cities of the south. Along it in the darkness roared a torrent of metal a hundred yards wide. Each driver intent only on the vehicle ahead, the trucks and cars and huge tractor-trailers bored blindly past the pine forests and palmetto swamps around and beneath them, as if they had moved beyond the need for anything but the next fuel stop, the next rest stop, the next Exxon or Days Inn or McDonald's.
On a forest road not far from an exit, a dark-colored car rolled quietly, lights off, to a halt along the berm. Its tires whispered on sandy soil just past a curve, engine murmuring beneath the black masses of the tall straight pines.
The door swung open to admit a windless heat. Footsteps hissed through pine needles, kicked aside the cones that littered the road.
The beam of a flashlight stabbed out under the stars. It touched the rusting shell of a gas pump, gleamed off the shattered windows and sagging tin roof of a long-abandoned service station. Swept around, then steadied on the reflective letters it pulled out of the dark ahead.
The call of an owl, the chirp of peepers were joined by the faint hollow shriek of thin metal being penetrated.
The figure moved back, and a momentary burst of light illuminated an empty Dr. Pepper can impaled on the post of a bullet-punctured NO HUNTING sign. A moment later, the note of the engine rose. The car lurched back onto the pavement and moved off, headlights flashing on a few hundred yards away.
Half an hour later, another set of lights separated themselves
from the stream of southbound traffic. They swept down the off ramp, hesitated at a crossroads, then turned left. They probed into the forest, pausing occasionally as the driver flicked on a courtesy light and consulted a map or checked his watch. At last, they rounded the curve. They swept over the abandoned building, the sign, the bent can. Then, as the first car had, the second rolled to a halt.
The driver, a large, heavy man, got out hurriedly. Despite the heat, he wore a dark overcoat and a hat. He ran back to the sign, lumbering through the undergrowth that bordered the woods. Sweetbrier and blackberry thorn cut at the legs of his trousers.
Then he stopped. He looked searchingly for several seconds into the shadows of the trees, wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of his coat.
Finally, he decided. Reaching up, he seized the can, crumpled it with a powerful grip, and thrust it deep into a pocket. He bent and groped around at the base of the signpost.
Returning to the sedan, he unlocked the trunk. The sudden brilliance of the interior light made him squint. Under it, in the clean empty trunk of the rented car, lay a plastic trash bag, full and taped shut. He jerked it out and laid in its place the neatly wrapped package he'd just retrieved, then slammed the trunk closed and ran back to the sign. Bending, he nestled the bag carefully against the base of the metal post, then brushed the tall grass up to conceal it.
Straightening, he peered around again, listened to the strange creak and whirr of hidden insects from the darkness. He wiped his face once more, then pushed himself back into motion, back to the car.
When the growl of its engine faded, the woods lay in silence and darkness for an hour. No other vehicle passed. An owl hooted occasionally, questioningly, and a faint wind began to ghost through the treetops.
Then the first car returned, this time with headlights on. It passed the curve and the abandoned shack. Its lights steadied on the sign. The brakes locked and the tires skidded a few feet in the soft sandy ground.
The door made a soft thud as it opened, creaked faintly on its hinge, coming to rest; then it creaked again and closed with an echoing slam.
The car moved off. It made a sharp right at the next road, then a three-point turn. It doubled back and made two more abrupt turns before passing beneath Route 95, heading east.
 
 
THE rental car was thirty miles to the north before it turned off the interstate at a roadside rest outside Manning. The man in the overcoat carefully slit the masking tape and peeled the white wrapping back from the stack of paper beneath.
The topmost sheet—a photocopy, but perfectly legible—was labeled TOP SECRET. SPECIAL CATEGORY. Along the left margin was a list of dates, one line for each day of the month. The rest of the sheet consisted of column after column of numbers, closely ranked.
The heavy man nodded slowly, as if satisfied, but no hint of a smile touched his mouth.
 
 
THE other car doubled back and made two more abrupt turns before passing beneath Route 95, heading east. A mile farther on, it crossed a state highway. At this point, it swung off the road, losing itself in the crowded parking lot of a truck stop.
Walled in, surrounded by trucks and vans, its driver tore open the green plastic membrane of the trash bag with an eager swift motion. In the dim yellow glow of the lot's lights, empty bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers spilled out onto the seat. But the bottles had been washed and carefully recapped and the wrappers were clean, free of food detritus. Beneath them was a brown paperwrapped bundle. As a tank truck snorted and grunted past, his hands hovered for a moment over it, then tore down one side, revealing the green-gray edges of a stack of currency. He ran a thumbnail down it, as if preparing to cut a deck of cards. Fifties and hundreds—all used.
There were four more identical stacks in the bag, each wrapped the same way. He didn't open these, just pushed them aside. One fell off the seat onto the floor. Beneath it was a floppy disk in a white paper jacket—unlabeled, unmarked.
As if it could be read by sight, the driver held it up, peering at it in the dim light filtering through the windows.
A few minutes later, the seat had been cleaned up. The bottles and cans lay at the bottom of a Dumpster at the truck stop. The disk and the bundles of cash lay locked in the glove compartment. The jeep swung out of the lot, flicked on its lights again, and pulled up at last onto the road that led back to Charleston.
Alcorcón, Cuba
T
HE windless night spread over the land, turning the stars to shimmery blurs. Voices murmured from rectangles of yellow light as men and women squatted on the stoops of
bohíos.
From the dark around them came the endless vibrating song of insects, the tapping of a
bongó,
the far-off roar of the generator at the
central
.
Graciela listened to the summer night as she sat beside the pallet where her husband lay. Three flies circled under the bare electric lights. They landed in turn on the table, the floor, the sleeping man. When they brushed his face or hers, she moved a hand abruptly and the buzzing resumed, endless, thoughtless, a mindless futile searching through the dark.
She'd nursed him since the night Miguelito led him home across the fields. For the first two days, she'd stayed in, but on the third she'd been forced to act by the realization they had nothing more to eat. The tin box was empty; the rice sack hung limp from its nail; the last
malanga
had been boiled. She'd dressed him, then helped him up. Armando didn't walk well. It wasn't just that he couldn't see; he couldn't make his legs go the way they had to. He'd leaned on her arm as he had on Miguelito's. She cut him a stick to grip, and together, with many pauses to rest, they'd walked the dusty road down to the
central
.
Cooperative Number 176 had its own dispensary, actually one room in the long steel-roofed building that held the offices. She took him there first, signed him in, and told him to wait until the
médico
came in.
Then she went into the deputy superintendent's office to explain why she wouldn't be able to work for a while. She hadn't looked forward to this—he was not a warm man—but it went off all right. The cutting was over; there was slack time now before
planting began. But he wouldn't give her an advance on her wages and refused anything at all for Armando, since he was no longer officially attached to the cooperative. She started to argue, but he turned away. Graciela picked up her pay for the two days she'd worked that week—ten pesos, the worn bills with the picture of José Martí—and stopped by the cooperative store for rice, dried beans, a little cornmeal. Then she went back to the dispensary.
When the
médico
came in, she helped her husband into the office, then waited, looking blankly at an old map on the wall as he examined Armando, peeling back his lids and peering into his eyes with a flashlight. Finally, he washed his hands gravely in a sink and dried them on a threadbare towel.
“Well, señor? What is it, do you know?”
“Don't call me ‘señor,' I'm a comrade like you,” said the man. To Armando, he said,
“Compañero,
I will have a word with your wife, if that is all right with you.”
In the corridor, he put his hands in his pockets. “How long has your husband been unable to see?”
“Since he returned from prison. I told you that.”
“But there was a loss before that, no? As if there was a part of the world that to him, was no longer there?”
“No. He could see perfectly when he went away—like a hawk, miles away.”
“In that case … The paralysis of the eye muscles, lesions … I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. He's blind.”
“I can see that, but why? Have they beaten him so badly?”
“I see no evidence of trauma,” said the doctor uncomfortably. Then, seeing that she did not understand the technical word, he added, “Of beatings. Much of what they say about prisons is exaggerated … . At any rate, I don't think—”
“Then what causes it?” She cut him off angrily, looking down the hall to where two of the managers were talking with the secretary. All three were smoking. They glanced at her and chuckled.
“It's what we call
neuritis óptica.
It's a disease of malnutrition. The nerve damage leads to blindness. Why did your husband go to prison?”
“He stole a sack of ground corn to feed his family,” Graciela said, loudly enough that the managers stopped speaking. “They caught him and sent him away. They fed him nothing, so he went blind. So they let him go. How merciful they are.”
“Comrade,
por favor . .
. You are upset, but remember yourself, no?”
“I'm sorry. You're right, I'm upset … . I didn't mean to speak against anyone … . What medicine are you going to give him?”
“This disease is not well understood.”
“There must be a medicine. Tell me what it is. I'll get it if I have to walk to Neuvitas.”
“We could give him thiamine, if we had any. But that wouldn't help his heart.” The
médico
shrugged. “It's plain he cannot work. I'll give you a sick pass. He'll get the ration for the sick, and some dried milk.”
“Should he go to the hospital?”
“It can be done, but not right this minute. You can leave him here if you like. Then when transport is available, we'll take him in to Camagüey.”
She turned her face from the
médico'
s and said, “I'll take care of him at home till you're ready to take him.”
“Whatever you say,” he said. “I will arrange for transport, the hospital … . Now, if you please, others are waiting. Is that a machete cut,
compañero?
Come in. Don't drip blood there; that is clean.”
 
 
BUT of course he never had arranged any transport or any care. And he didn't come to the house, not once.
So there'd been nothing for her to do but go back to work, walking behind the harrow that disked up the fields where the cane had to be replanted, pulling up the uprooted stumps and piling them for burning, or digging out irrigation trenches with shovels and hoes. And in the nights, she would sit up with him, and pray when she could. He's always been strong, she told herself. He wasn't old. He was only fifty-five.
But he had become weaker and finally took to the pallet. She fed him as well as she could, but now he didn't seem to care whether he ate or not. He complained of pain in his legs and couldn't bear to have a blanket over them. Then he'd say he was cold, although she was sweating in the closed hut. Sometimes she got angry, but then she'd catch herself. As long as he complained, he was alive.
The light flickered and a second later she heard the falter in the far-off drone of the generator. Then it stopped. The filament faded to orange and then red and then the darkness flooded in all at once through the door and window, and the silence echoed out over the land.
 
 
A tap on the door made her sit up from her drowsing, catch her breath. The hinge creaked. She half-rose, reaching above her head, then dropped her arm as a voice whispered, “Mamá. Mamá?”
“Coralía. What are you doing here?”
“Uncle Tomás wrote me that Papa was sick. Oh, poor Papi.”
“Close the door, child,” said Graciela in a low voice, feeling her way to the table.
A match scratched and a candle sketched the interior in flickering shadow. The girl hesitated, then came into the light. She smiled uncertainly at her mother, then knelt by the bed. When she looked up again, her expression was frightened. “Oh, Mama. Was he really released?”
“What do you mean? He's here. Of course he was released. How other?”
“But are his papers stamped? If he escaped—”
“The police would have come days ago. You know that.” Graciela slumped back into the rawhide lacing, looking at the daughter she'd borne seventeen years ago.
Her firstborn was lighter than her mother but unmistakably mestizo. Coralia wore a uniform; blue trousers, blue shirt, blue cap with a little red star.
“I'm surprised you came.”
“Why should you be surprised?”
“You never write.”
“I have to study, Mama. All the time.”
“How are you doing at school?”
“It's tough … very difficult.”
“You look thin. Are the studies hard?”
“I don't mean that. I can learn anything they put in front of me. You know that. But to know your father's a criminal, a
plantado
—”
“He accepted the revolution long ago.”
“Not if he stole from it. You don't know how humiliating that was, when they called me in to tell me. I had to stand before the others and confess my father was in error.” She raised her head in the candlelight. “Mother, there is something I must tell you. I had to renounce him.”
“You renounced your father? Then what are you doing here?” Graciela got up suddenly, and her arm went up into the thatching. With a hiss, the machete slid out.
“Put it away, Mamá,” said the girl, sighing. “You always have to make everything so dramatic. It doesn't mean anything, only words. It wasn't easy to get here. You don't know.”
“I know you put on airs, but you're a
negrita
like me.”
“How old-fashioned you are. Why do you say things like that about yourself?”
“Because they're true.”
“And you reject the revolution, even though it's all for you.”
“For me? All for
me
? Oh my God! What have they given
me
?” Graciela waved the blade wildly around the hut. “
¡No hay nada!
What do you see that we have but hunger, work, fear? It was bad under the old regime, but there was always something to eat—even if it was nothing but sugarcane during the
tiempo muerto.”
“Put the machete down, Mamá. You'll hurt yourself.”
“I'll hurt someone else first!”
“And don't make threats. I would give my life for the revolution tonight if they asked me.”
“Why not? You've already betrayed your family. Why not give them your life, as well.”
“You sound so bitter. You don't love me anymore, Mamá?” She looked at her daughter for a long time, then sighed. She sat down at the table and put her face in her hands.
Coralía stood above her, fists on her hips.
“You see, you have it backward. You wanted me to stay here and swing a machete with you and Father's relatives, live in huts, and never go anywhere and never see anything. I can't live like that, Mama. I can't live like a campesino.”
“And your father, what of him?”
“He made his choice. If the camps couldn't reform him, what can I do? As a person, I feel sorry for him, but I won't throw away my life for some futile gesture. It's not good that I come here again. My home's in Havana now; that's where I'll live when I graduate.”
Graciela sat at the table. Bitterness like a wall was rising in her heart. She hadn't wanted this wall. She didn't think she was the one who'd built it, but it was there.
A mutter from the bed interrupted their whispers. Coralia knelt again. “Yes, Papi? It is I; I am here!”
“I remember the day Raimondo died,” Armando murmured in a voice scarcely louder than the scorpions rustling overhead. “Do you remember Raimondo?”
“No, Papi. Papi, it's Coralia … . Does he know me, Mamá?”
“He's confused,” said Graciela. “He speaks to his brother, his grandmother. His mind goes back to the past. Yes,
mi vida,
I remember him, your brother.”
The man on the pallet murmured, “The Batistiano soldiers surrounded the village. The officer announced that they were looking for enemies of the regime. Then they began going from house to house. They pulled the people out and lined them up on the street. They shot into the air. Then some of the people, they began setting their houses on fire.
“Now the village echoed with shouts and screaming. They shot the pigs, the chickens, burned the houses. It was then we realized they were not looking for enemies of the regime. This was to terrify us.
“But Raimondo was one of the revolutionaries. He had been with Fidel in the mountains and was back home trying to persuade the
young men to go back with him, to join Che in the Sierra Maestra. So he knew that they would kill him, and he tried to hide. We wanted him to hide in our house, but he said no, they would kill us, too, if they found him there. So he ran into the house of a neighbor.
“Yes, my brother tried to hide, but the soldiers saw him running. And they came and looked, and when they did not see him, they set the house on fire and waited outside with their guns. And finally the heat was too great and he ran out.
“When they saw him, they seized him and dragged him out into the square so all the village could see. They beat him with the whip they call the ox's prick. They broke his joints with the butts of their guns, then drove over him with their jeep. They killed Raimondo in the street like a dog. Then again they shot their guns, and I heard the bullets go
whick, whick
through the walls.

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