A Pagan's Nightmare (18 page)

Two steps below, Ned began shaking as he faced a lifelong fear. “Is Castro still in power?”

“Nah,” said the Former Donald, waddling down the stairs in his duck attire. “From what I heard during my prior trip here,
he was first to disappear.”

“You get sent here often?”

“My second time. I’m a poser.”

Ned and Lanny were overcome with dueling emotions. Fear of being held by zealots, but relief that Cuba was likely no longer
communist.

Out on the tarmac, the security guards lined up the captives shoulder to shoulder. Lanny sensed that the Former Donald was
a possible ally, that somehow he was in the same predicament as DJ Ned and himself. The lean young man with the red hair stood
next to Lanny, downcast and silent. The guards removed the blindfolds dangling from each of their necks. Then, a brief frisking.

The three were loaded into a red van and driven into downtown Havana. En route, the Former Donald complained of being hot
in his costume, so the guards issued him a pair of khaki shorts, an old Miami Dolphins T-shirt, and a pair of orange sneakers
one size too big. The Former Donald changed his clothes right in front of Ned, who snickered at the sight of boxer shorts
screen-printed with little ducks.

“They made us wear these,” the Former Donald explained.

In downtown Havana, the van screeched to a stop. The three prisoners were led into a large, one-story brick building and ushered
down a hallway of cheap tiles. They were then taken into a long, dark, dank room. The guards left them there, slamming the
door behind them.

Ned, Lanny, and the Former Donald touched cool bricks and sat on the floor, backs to the wall, in total darkness. Lanny kept
thinking back to the parking clerk’s factoid, the “seventy percent water, thirty percent land” comment.
Was he referring to Cuba, or to some other place?

Ned’s voice boomed into the darkness. “Who else is in here?” He was sure he’d seen other people sitting at the back of the
room just before the guard slammed the door.

At first there was silence. Then a dripping sound from a far wall.

“What’s that dripping?” Lanny asked.

“Just water from an old pipe,” came the voice. The voice echoed against enormous, cavelike walls. And it wasn’t the Former
Donald’s voice. He still sat directly to Lanny’s right.

“Who are you?” Ned asked the stranger.

“Freddie from Oregon,” was the emotionless reply.

A pause. “Are you a zealot?”

“No. I tried to teach evolution to some fourth graders in Eugene. I’ve been here for a week now.”

More dripping. Lanny cleared his throat and asked, “Do they feed you here?”

“Depends. Yesterday we had blackened sea bass and some key lime pie, which was likely a bribe. They do that sometimes. For
the next week it’s locusts, maybe some wild honey. Oh, and they argue amongst each other a lot, mostly over whether to serve
us real wine or grape juice with the locusts.”

Lanny squirmed against the wall, too overwhelmed to speak again.

DJ Ned, in an effort at leadership, told everyone his name and what he did for a living. “Who else is in here?” he inquired.

Three more drips. “It’s me, Nute. Crackhead… I used to call your talk show.”

“You the guy from the trailer park?”

“You got it, man, and I still ain’t never done no drugs. But I really miss online poker.”

A hipper, baritone voice said, “I used to play some poker myself.”

Lanny listened to the dripping for a moment and shivered from the cold wall. “ Who was that who just spoke?”

“MC Deluxe, rapper from Harlem. Original gangsta. Rhymin’ king of 128th Street. And I, um, I miss my momma.”

The Former Donald spoke next. “And what’s your story, MC?”

A sigh was followed by a curse, as if MC Deluxe was halfway between grief and outrage. “Man, I was doin’ my thing, ya know?
Out on the street with my neighbors, blasting my beats and spoutin’ my rhymes. There’s this part in my song when I scrunch
my eyes shut and punch the air, you know, to show my strength and power. But when I opened my eyes all my homies was gone
and my whole street was empty. Sooo, white dude, what’s
yo
story? Tell us yo story. Don’t everybody wanna hear white dude’s story?”

“Yeah, uh-huh, tell it,” came the chorus from the far end of the room.

The Former Donald elbowed Lanny, who elbowed Ned. “You go first.”

“No, you go.”

MC Deluxe grew impatient. “Will one of you white dudes please tell us yo story?”

Lanny volunteered. “I was on my knees, on hardwood floors, in a Baptist church, in northwest Atlanta. I was kneeling in front
of a baptismal and—”

“Man, don’t be tellin’ us no conversion story. You ain’t in here ‘cause of no conversion.”

“If you’d shut up a minute, I’ll explain,” Lanny replied.

“Then go ahead, temperamental white dude—tell us yo story.”

Lanny sighed and began again. “I was on my knees, in front of a baptismal, with my cordless drill and my hammer, when I hit
my thumb. I forgot where I was and so I cursed. Then I went to the men’s room, and beside the sink there was—”

“Tell it, man! You done saw a sign, dintya? Yep, he saw a painted sign, too. I know it.”

“You’re correct, MC. The sign said ‘Someone Always Hears.’ The paint was still wet.”

A fifth voice, this one deeper, came from the corner. “I got that sign, too.”

“I saw one in a Denny’s bathroom,” said a younger man. “Right after I slapped my cousin for stealing my fries. Now he’s gone,
too… and I really don’t miss ‘im.”

Lanny coughed loudly. “Do y’all want to hear the rest of my story or not?”

“Ain’t like we goin’ anywhere, man,” MC said. “This here must be some kind of religious reform school.”

“Hogwarts for pagans,” said Crackhead.

The room went silent for a moment. Then MC spoke again. “Tell it, white dude. Tell us yo story.”

Lanny almost quit talking, so frustrated was he by his circumstance. Yet, he had nothing better to do. Plus he’d always heard
that prisoners can best keep their sanity by being social.

“After I left the church, I stopped for gas at a BP station because I had to get to south Atlanta to install a kiddie commode.
So after I finished pumping the gas, I looked at the price and saw—”

“Six dollars and sixty-six cents per gallon,” MC said. “They gouged Harlem, too.”

“Same price in Eugene,” Freddie offered. “Even for diesel.”

Lanny continued. “So I left the BP station and stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s. I walk in and see that they have—”

The teenage voice rang out. “Crosses on the uniforms! Same at Burger King, only they were on the hats.”

Everyone in the room chimed in. “Same at Hardees.”

“Jack in the Box, too.”

“My waffles at Cracker Barrel were shaped like little angels.”

That was the last thing anyone said for a long while. The sporadic dripping from the pipe continued, and soon Ned leaned over
to whisper to Lanny. “I think we’ve made some new friends.”

Lanny had a brain flash. Suddenly he did not want to tell any more of his story to the dark room.
What if Miranda is in Cuba too, blindfolded in some other dark room?

“Is there a Miranda Timms in this room?”

Silence.
Surely she would have spoken if she were here.

He asked again. “I need to know if a Miranda Timms from Atlanta is here in Cuba.”

MC Deluxe spoke first. “Naw, man. Ain’t no Miranda here. No one here has any loved ones. It’s just us. Bunch o’ strangers
who stank bad.”

The Former Donald spoke in his best duck voice: “But I don’t stink, Mr. Rapper.”

Everyone laughed. But just briefly.

Then there was only the dripping sound from the leaky pipe, followed by the door swinging open, light pouring in, and Marvin
the Apostle entering triumphantly in a flowing gold robe.

“Thou shalt keepeth quiet in my presence,” he announced, raising a finger to halt questions. “All thy need knoweth is that
tomorrow, thy reform shall commence…
eth.”

Marvin stepped out the door and slammed it behind him.

Then he opened it slightly to loose the trailing edge of his flowing gold robe.

The Former Donald laughed and pointed a finger. “Thy robeth got a runneth in its threadeth.”

Marvin slammed the door, and the room went dark.

L
OW-RANKING GUARDS
entered the room the next morning and informed all prisoners that reform school included a work detail.

The prisoners were led out into the Cuban sunlight, right into the heart of downtown Havana. This was the bad side of the
city—graffiti everywhere, spray-painted walls, and worn wooden doors.

“This will not be hard labor,” said the burliest guard, flanked on each side by comrades in black fatigues. He squinted into
the morning brightness. “Whitewashing this graffiti will allow you to develop feelings of teamwork before you join Marvin’s
big team.
And we all want to join the
big team,
don’t we?”

No one spoke. No one nodded.

DJ Ned let his mind wander to more attractive demographics. “Can you tell us if there are any female non-zealots left?”

The guard blushed and motioned with his head toward the rising sun. “If there are, they’re in a, um, different place than
Cuba.”

“Could you expound on that?” Lanny asked.

“No. We will not talk about females. All we want you to do is take this white paint and cover up the graffiti. You can work
on the shady side of the street first if you wish. Work in groups of four. I’ll bring back more paint at the top of every
hour. Oh, and we’ll have TraitorAde, too. Who wants orange and who likes cherry flavor?”

Seven hands went up for orange, thirteen for cherry.

DJ Ned, Lanny, the Former Donald, and MC Deluxe quickly formed a work team and selected the shady side of a two-story brick
building for their first project. Each was issued a roller, a brush, and a five-gallon bucket of white paint. MC complained
of the heat, saying nothing like this ever hit Harlem. DJ Ned pulled the top off his
paint bucket and explained that a Cuban sun was much like a Cuban cigar—both pack a wallop.

The four men spread out at ten-foot intervals and began slapping white latex over the graffiti. “This isn’t right,” said Ned,
looking pained as he leaned down to re-dip his brush. “I did nothing wrong.”

Lanny covered and slathered Spanish words he could not read. “I knew we should have gone to Canada or Mexico instead of Deity
World. I felt spooked as soon as we got stuck in traffic.”

“Did you just call someone a name?” asked MC Deluxe. He raised his roller in a threatening manner. Paint dripped and splattered
on the sidewalk.

“Chill, man. I said Orlando had me spooked.”

Everyone seemed on edge—twice they flung paint at each other—but by noon they had covered two sides of the building. Except
for one small, three-foot square in the corner, where MC had written his own graffiti:
My rhymes rock Cuba.

After five of the guards brought lunch, everyone sat on the curb to eat six chocolate-covered locusts, which Ned claimed tasted
like bad calimari. The guards then surprised everyone by loading Freddie from Oregon into a van. One explained loudly that
this man had had his sentence cut short due to good behavior and a ‘transforming of his mind,’ and was thus on the next flight
back to the States. Freddie boarded the van with a big grin and waved out the back window to the rest of the captives, a blue
plastic WWMD wristband fashioned to his wrist. Then the guards reminded everyone that there would be no more early outs for
good behavior. that everyone could expect to be in Cuba for at least a month, and that there was to be no talking during work
detail.

The van had just departed when the guard in the passenger seat looked out his window and saw MC’s boastful scribble on the
side of the building. He ordered MC to whitewash the entire wall again and added two days to his sentence.

MC complained of racial profiling and refused to eat his last locust. “That dude better not show his face in Harlem,” he whispered
to Lanny.

Lanny told MC that he doubted Harlem was nearly as dangerous as it was in the past, given how things had changed. Soon they
were alone again, painting away, and with the tip of his brush Lanny rewrote on brick his four possibilities for Miranda’s
whereabouts:

1) She’s still looking for me, maybe in Atlanta.

2) She’s hiding somewhere in the Caribbean.

3) She’s held captive, but she’s safe.

4) She’s already captured and converted, and is now a zealot. (Is there a potion to reverse this condition?)

By 4:00 p.m., one city block of Havana’s graffiti had been covered. Well, almost. Though Lanny had whitewashed his possibilities,
one of his team members had slacked off. With only one more wall to go, the Former Donald remained curiously quiet—and uncharacteristically
slow. He stood on the sidewalk at the end of the building, a good ways down from the others, pretending to paint but repeatedly
glancing around the corner.

DJ Ned saw the Former Donald’s strange behavior and went over to paint beside him. “You okay, duck?”

“I’ve been here before, man. After they wear us down with work, they’ll try to brainwash us. I lied last time so that I’d
get sent back to Orlando.”

Ned thought,
Great, now I have two guys to cheer up. One obsessed with finding his girlfriend, the other afraid of brainwashing.
Though his brush held no more paint, Ned kept stroking the brick wall, just to appear busy. “You still haven’t told us what
you did to get sent here.”

The Former Donald dipped his brush in the paint bucket. “I’d rather not say.”

“C’mon, I won’t tell.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The Former Donald painted slowly but spoke with haste. “I wrote my own proverb on a bathroom wall. I was just having a bit
of fun. It starts out with ‘Do not visit theme parks on a Sunday.’ They said the meter is an exact copy of one of Marvin the
Apostle’s King James proverbs, and that to parody Marvin in such a manner is sacrilegious. Therefore I had to be punished.
There, that’s what happened.”