Havana (4 page)

“Does this mean—unlimited access to cockroaches?”

“Absolutely. Now listen. There is a county, Speshnev, that has long been oppressed. Its trajectory is toward chaos, crime, filth, degradation. It is owned lock, stock and barrel by American criminal and business interests, who use it as their whorehouse, shitter, and sugar factory.”

“Actually, it sounds delightful.”

“It is. Quite. The señoritas!
Muchas bonitas!
”

“I take it this is a Latin country?”

“The island paradise known as Cuba.”

“Excellent señoritas.”

“As there were in Spain. Same stock, actually, though with a tinge of negro blood for that extra paprika in bed.”

“In my mind, I'm there already.”

“Speshnev, there is a boy. We have him spotted. He is clever, committed, ambitious, unbearably courageous. He could be the leader.”

“I see.”

“You will study the documents on the train back to Moscow with me. But you already see where this is going.”

“I see where I am going.”

“This boy. He must be seduced, smoothed, trained, aimed, disciplined, taught to expect success. As he is currently situated, well, it's that Latin temperament. Romantic, unrealistic, too quick to act, too slow to think. He needs a mentor, a senior fellow of wisdom and experience. Speshnev, with your magic ways, your charm, your ruthlessness, I think this is a task for you. It was made to order. It is your redemption, your future, your rehabilitation.”

“So I'm to help the regime that imprisoned me twice. Eagerly, willingly, aggressively?”

“Of course. There's only a paradox if you build it yourself. You can have a model contradiction in which we punish you unjustly, almost to the point of death, certainly to the point of misery, then we demand heroic service of you. A lesser man might find a source of resentment somewhere in the equation. It takes a great man to make the contradiction irrelevant on the strength of his will alone. Speshnev, I won't even ask you. Because of course I know the answer.”

“There's really not an alternative, is there? Not after tea and showers and American tobacco. Who could say no?”

“No one, little 4715. No one.”

The deer hovered between shadow and light. It was almost not there. The boy blinked, to make certain again that he had it fixed. There was a magical quality to it: the way it seemed to disappear, lose its lines among the blend of darkness and illumination, then to materialize, then again vanish.

He felt his heart pound. He was eight. He had worked his father's deer camp for three years now and had seen them many times before, in the trees, or thrashing in fury as they were hit, just a second of rebellion against the steel message of the bullet, shot above the shoulder, or gutted skinless and hanging to bleed out from a rack. Nothing about it frightened him, except that he himself had not killed a deer yet. But he was ready.

He had hunted squirrel with a Remington single-shot .22 until he hit what he aimed at every time. He had learned stillness. He had learned to sink to nothingness, until only the animal in him breathed, but only barely, yet at the same time he saw and heard so clearly.

Now, cradled in his arms was a 94 Winchester, the .30–30, which he had just grown strong enough to shoot. He was eager, he was ready, the hunter's bloodsong pounded in his ears.

“Let him come out into the light, Bob Lee,” his father said.

His father's presence loomed behind him, calm and imperturbable. That was his father. Whatever he was, no one could take that from him ever: he was a man among men. Bob Lee had begun to pick up the signs, the subtle ways others deferred to him, the coming of silence when he walked into a room. It wasn't just that his father was a state policeman or something they called a hero in the war. There was another thing. Something, well, hard to know what to call it. Just something else.

Now the animal moved fully into the light. It turned. It seemed to look right at Bob Lee, with dark eyes as calm and intense as anything he'd ever seen. He looked right into Bob Lee's eyes.

Or that's the way it seemed. They were like that: watchful for a bit, concentrated, and then forgetful. The entire animal tensed, its ears pricked, its nose sampled the air. It was about seventy-five yards away.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the animal forgot that something hunting it could be out there. The thought vanished and, without a care, the deer returned to its eating, picking at the tender shoots in the shadow of a pine tree at the edge of the cornfield.

“All right, Bob Lee,” his father whispered. “Easy up, hold that breath, see that front sight, head down and steady, tip of the finger against the trigger and then the squeeze. The gun will fire when it wants to fire.”

“Make your daddy proud,” came the voice of Sam Vincent, his daddy's best and possibly only friend.

Bob Lee took a breath.

He was nestled against the trunk of an elm. It supported him and absorbed his trembling. He drew the rifle to his shoulder, let it point naturally to the animal, and the sight, steady as a brick, went to the beast's tawny shoulder where the bullet would strike and take its life.

He knew the rifle. It was cocked, but he'd thumb-lowered the hammer for safety. Now his thumb flew back to that hammer, and notched it back where with an almost inaudible click it seated itself. His thumb returned to the rifle's grip, locked on, steadily, and his trigger finger went to that instrument, and began ever so gently to press against it.

Steady now, just easy pressure, without disturbing the stillness of the sight, not a problem, something he had done in the fields and in his dreams for years.

But—

Maybe it was the sun, the way it lit the deer's white withers. Maybe it was the spring smell of flowers alight in blossom. Maybe it was the buzz of some kind of insect life, or the chirping of some dim bird or other.

He could not say. It wasn't that he could not kill. The boy had killed before, understood that it was somehow man's work, necessary, and it was what a fellow did, without complaint or doubt.

But today, in the sunlight, in the warmth?

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Bob Lee.”

“I don't know. I just—I don't know.”

“It is your call. You are the hunter. You may take the shot, and we will eat good tonight. But I cannot make the decision for you, Bob Lee. It's a serious thing to take the life of something so beautiful. So you must decide.”

The boy decided.

“Maybe not this time. Maybe in the fall again, when it's cold. It's spring now. It's all green, everywhere. Maybe not when it's green.”

“If that's what you've decided.”

“It is.”

“Then that's what it shall be. We'll let Mr. Deer have his summer and his fun. Then we'll come back for him in the fall.”

 

“You know what?” Sam whispered to him, on the long trudge back, “I think you did make your daddy proud. You felt it, you did what was right. You didn't do what someone said, and your daddy respects that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bob Lee. His father was a bit ahead of them, broad across the shoulders, bristly across the head where his hair had gone iron gray with age and been forced back with a stout brush. He still carried the marine discipline with him.

The father was a man with scars. His son had seen them: streaks, where something long and sinewy had bit him, puckered clusters from bullet holes, more ragged ridges of dead tissue where the Japanese shrapnel had torn through him. His fists, too, were a latticework of dead white. A bitter mark or two also flecked his jawline. He was a man who'd seen a lot of what the world can do to flesh.

“Come on, you two,” he turned now and called. “If we don't get back by supper, Junie's going to be plenty teed off.”

They reached his brand-new used pickup, with the gray fender and the cracked rear glass, but still an upstanding vehicle, if cheap after much bargaining.

“Daddy, what we gon' tell Mr. Nelson?”

“The truth, Bob Lee. That's all. He can handle it.”

“Best way,” confirmed Sam.

Mr. Nelson, who farmed a spread seven miles the other side of Blue Eye, had a deer problem. The young bucks had grown brazen as they nibbled his corn. He was a man of law, and so didn't shoot, as so many might have, out of season. But he'd applied for a special dispensation from the state game agency, had gotten it, and asked Earl, the best shot in the county, to handle his problem in exchange for the meat to be harvested. It was a generous offer. Earl, who was not rich, could use the free meat. But that was before Bob Lee had decided not to shoot.

Another father might have ordered the son to shoot, or shot himself. But Earl wanted his son making up his own mind about things, and tried never to order him toward conclusions. He alone in Polk County would not permit his son to call him sir, as all the other boys did to their dads on pain of a mighty licking. Earl in fact could not bring himself to strike the boy, even when he was bad. Why was a mystery that he never communicated to anybody; it's just the way he was, and when Earl Swagger was set in certain ways, then those were the ways they would remain.

“I'll call him and explain,” Sam said.

“No, I will,” said Earl. “Actually, I know a fine hunter named Hitchens, a colored fellow, who could come out and take the deer, and that meat'd do him and his'n right fine in the months to come.”

“If I know Ed Nelson, he'll not want colored shooting on his property.”

“I'll make him understand.”

The drive was not long, though they stopped and bought the boy an RC Cola. But when they got home to Earl's place off Route 7 this side of Board Camp, and saw the house that had been his own daddy's set a mile off the road, on a bit of a hill, painted freshly white and nice looking in the now failing light, they were amazed at what they beheld, as it was so completely unexpected: three state police cruisers and a Cadillac Fleetwood limousine, black and big and gleaming in the sun from somebody's fresh labor that very morning.

“Oh, Lord,” said Earl. “I do wonder what's up.”

“Can't be much,” said Sam. “We drove on through Blue Eye, and there was no sign of a commotion.”

They approached.

“I'll be damned,” said Earl. “Lookie that.”

What he gestured toward was the white-and-black license plate on the Caddy, not green and tan like Arkansas's; this one bore a low number with no letters and the identifying inscription U
NITED
S
TATES
C
ONGRESS
.

They pulled in, climbed from the pickup, and went quickly to the steps. Through the windows, Earl could see Junie inside, slightly nonplussed, and Colonel Jenks, who was his commanding officer, two or three other state police sergeants known to him as the sort that hung close to headquarters in Little Rock and thereby prospered, and two men in black suits.

“Good lord, Earl,” said Sam, “what does this mean?”

“Daddy, what is—”

“You just no never-mind, Bob Lee. It ain't a thing to worry about.”

He picked up his son, for the boy's fear upset him, and meant to give him a hug of reassurance, because he himself had never been hugged as a child. But immediately they were discovered on the porch, and en masse, the visiting party rose, abandoning poor Junie, and headed eagerly to him.

Earl knew in a second this was no lynching party.

“Well, Earl, by god,
there
you are,” said Colonel Jenks in a way far heartier than his normal dour style. “Why, Junie said you and the boy and Lawyer Vincent had gone hunting south of Blue Eye.”

“We came back early.”

“No luck? I don't see no animal on the fender.”

“The best luck. It worked out fine.”

He put his son down.

“You run off, Bob Lee. Seems these boys come to talk to Daddy. Junie, can you get the boy some lemonade?”

“You come, Bob Lee,” sang Junie, taking the boy in her sheltering presence.

Earl turned to face whatever this would be. They stood, all of them, on the porch, in the pale twilight. “Now what is going on here, sir? You don't come to call with a Cadillac every day.”

“Earl, may I introduce Phil Mackey of Governor Becker's office and Lane Brodgins, on the staff of Congressman Harry Etheridge himself.”

The two men stepped forward behind large smiles and pushed hands at him; Earl shook each numbly. He looked behind them to see that Junie had been pressed to prepare for whatever this would be: A suitcase, the nice one he'd bought for her when she went on a trip to Cape Girardeau for her mother's funeral last year, lay on a table. In it he saw neatly folded clothes: shirts, socks, slacks—his own. He also saw his new Super .38 Colt, wrapped in a cotton cloth, nested in his undercover shoulder holster. It was the right gun to pack, whatever was coming up. Junie knew.

“Earl—may I call you Earl, Earl?” said the governor's man.

“Earl, you know how highly Fred Becker thinks of you. We all know you may have put him in the governor's mansion.”

“That was some years ago,” said Earl.

“Yes, sir, it was. Now—well, you tell him, Lane.”

This Brodgins, the Washington version of the slickster of which Mackey was only a rural prototype, stepped forward now, and put a well-manicured hand on Earl's shoulder.

“Earl, you know how Congressman Etheridge—hell, Harry—how highly Harry thinks of you, too. You're one of three Arkansas Medal of Honor winners. Harry thinks of you as his boys.”

Earl just nodded. He knew enough of Boss Harry to go on edge, for he didn't trust the man: a speechifying, deal-making politician who rose to power through old Ray Bama's organization in Fort Smith. But Boss Harry—who came originally from Polk, moved up to Fort Smith, and made his way from gofer to secretary of the Democratic party to city legislator to mayor to congressman—had far exceeded his mentor. He was a man who, getting to Washington in record time, and quite young, had mastered its lessons, solved its system, and learned how to get himself into key positions. He'd been there so long he was a power, now especially, as chairman of some big moneybags committee.

“The governor always says, ‘That Earl, he's the most capable man in Arkansas,'” said Phil.

“Earl,” said Sam, “I'd keep my hand on my wallet. These boys are reaching for something.”

“Now, Mr. Sam,” said Phil, “you may be Polk County's prosecuting attorney, but you are still Earl's best friend, so you advise him to listen to us, because we come with some damned good news.”

“Let's hear it,” said Earl.

“Earl,” said Phil, “you've seen gangsters. You've seen how they take over, how they make things their own, how they kill what gets in their way. You know that truth well,” said Phil.

“The point is,” Lane said, “as Senator Kefauver has exposed, crime ain't just home-grown no more. It's national. You saw the hearings, Earl. They're everywhere.”

“It was on the television, Earl.”

Earl didn't watch television much.