King of Cuba (24 page)

Goyito pushed a button in the passenger armrest and watched his window glide open. The wind filled the car with a disorderly sound and the smell of blood, summer wildness, and shit. Rudy barked maniacally in the backseat. Goyito pulled a hunter’s knife from who knew where and held its glittering tip to the meaty pink of his outstretched tongue.

“Coño carajo!” Goyo saw a tawny flash and hit the brakes hard. The Cadillac twisted off the road with a sickening thud. They’d struck something big and heavy. His eyes ached, but he was relieved, at least, not to be dead.

His son dropped the knife and stuck his head out the window into the diminishing light. “Jesus Christ, you hit a deer! You hit a goddamn deer!” Goyito flung open his door and fell to the ground. He scrabbled up and, fumbling, opened the back door and let Rudy out. The whimpering dog shot off into the darkening woods, streaking through the keen grass. “A fucking deer, a fucking deer,” Goyito muttered as he, too, disappeared into the woods.

It took twenty minutes for Goyo to find his son hunched over Rudy’s dead body in a firefly-lit clearing. Goyo stood perfectly still, leaning on his cane and breathing hard. The fireflies seemed a dazzling frippery of nature, pointless and purposeful, like so many dancing lies. Or perhaps they were a manifestation of his son’s twitching misery. Goyo traced the fireflies’ paths, ribbons of hopelessly entangling light, crisscrossed now and then by the ropier trajectories of flycatchers and jays. The sky was immense, more immense now that Rudy was gone.

Goyo sighed. He was growing tired of these constant derailments to his plans. It’d taken him a lifetime to make up his mind to do the right thing. He needed to focus on getting ready, not waste time lamenting the death of a deer and a dog.

“Rudy shouldn’t have run,” Goyito choked out. “His stomach got b-b-locked.”

His son wanted to blame him even for this, to have Goyo eat his heart out and cry right beside him. But what were their tears worth? Goyo wasn’t made for such histrionics. He’d had to parcel out his grief judiciously, or he would’ve died from it long ago. A part of him wanted to be sympathetic, but a bigger part wanted to get as far away from this disaster as possible. It wasn’t enough that in his worst dreams, he couldn’t have pictured a crazy drug addict for a son. He gazed over at the sad bulk that was Goyito, filthy and on his knees, his tattered cummerbund coming undone. (Goyito
never went anywhere without it, as if it magically kept cinched his top and bottom halves.)

“Come, hijo, we have work to do.” Goyo led his son back to the Cadillac and popped open the trunk. They could use the tire iron to break the ground and maybe the base of the jack to scoop out the dirt for a shallow grave.

Goyo watched as his son dug, scraped, sweated, and cursed, all the while crying out to the luminous moon for pity. “Remember how he used to chase rabbits in his sleep?” Goyito’s legs shook as he worked. The air was slippery hot, as if saturated with cooking oil. The bees, the birds, the ants did their day’s last chores. It took Goyito an hour to dig the two-foot hole, disturbing the earth to bury his dog’s giant, tender body. Goyo was overcome with a sense of futility as he and his son finally dragged the 150-pound beast to his resting place. His flanks were dank with flies, teeth still bared, as if in self-defense, the stubby tail inert and sad.

When they were done shoveling the earth over Rudy’s stiffening corpse, the moon was high in the sky. A few drops of rain fell from a wayward cloud. Goyito stretched out on the grave and settled in for a nap. It was useless to argue with him. His pale face looked almost peaceful; the gray tufts of his hair stuck up in every direction. His breathing was normal and deep, and Goyo remembered the few times he’d gotten to tuck his son into bed when he was a boy; a beautiful boy he’d been, too, before the madness kicked in. Sí, Goyito had slept like a baby. The problems began when he woke up, restless for adventure. But to love what was lovable wasn’t truly love, Goyo thought; only suffering made love worthy. By the time his son stirred from his nap, Goyo’s joints were painfully stiff.

Goyito yawned and announced that he wanted to go to a motel to “grieve in private,” but Goyo was nervous about dropping him off anywhere but a hospital. They were just seventy-five miles from New York City, and he wanted to get there without delay. As they
cruised up I-95, Goyito began pounding on the passenger door to be let out. What choice did Goyo have? His son would be sixty years old in two months. There was nothing he could say to him that he hadn’t said a million times before. If Goyito wanted to be dropped off at a motel in the middle of New Jersey, then Goyo was helpless to stop him.

The next exit had several choices of accommodations. Goyo handed his son the $220 in his pocket and wished him good luck. He noticed Goyito spying the bar on the frontage road with the blinking, half-lit neon martini. Diesel fumes from the passing trucks poisoned the air. Goyito seemed impatient for him to leave. If only he could kiss his son’s eyes, wash his feet, take away his suffering, ease his inexhaustible heart. But Goyo knew none of it would do any good. Goyito had endured prison, watched men raped and shanked, and somehow managed to survive. Nobody had dared touch him, Goyo didn’t know why. He held his son for a moment before letting him go. It was all too sadly familiar. Who knew? Maybe the best of Goyito was yet to be born.

The sun rose as Goyo crossed the last stretch of New Jersey, its foliage a blinding, end-of-summer green. In his heyday, this would’ve been a normal time for going home after a night of drinking and whoring with his brothers in Havana. Once in 1957, Goyo had spotted Senator Kennedy at the Palette Club cozily nuzzling Bobby de Milanés, the notorious drag queen. If only Goyo had had a camera, he might’ve changed the course of history, singlehandedly stopped that traitor from becoming president and sabotaging the Bay of Pigs.

He called Víctor Ticona, his employee of twenty-seven years, Ecuadorian and reliable as day. He spoke an amalgam of Spanish and Quechua that nobody but Goyo understood. Víctor had put nine children through high school in Cuenca, where he’d also built a palatial home. In New York he mopped hallways, changed
lightbulbs, and took out the garbage, but back in Cuenca, Víctor Ticona was a king.

“Víctor!” Goyo shouted into his cell phone. “I’m arriving this morning.”

“Bueno, Jefe. I’ll have your apartment ready.”

The early commuters were out in force, sensible men and women going to their sensible jobs in the suburbs—employees of banks and insurance firms, optics laboratories, the telephone company. How many other lives he might have led . . . rancher, chemist, singer, clarinetist. He’d wanted to marry Adelina Ponti, too, but that hadn’t happened either. Goyo toyed with the idea of wooing back Carla Stracci, his sexy mistress from the United Nations. How might he impress her after all these years? It was for women like her that men went to war, behaved like fools.

The Holland Tunnel was a nightmare. Goyo sat in its rush-hour fumes for over an hour. He scanned the news stations again but turned the radio off in disgust. In an age of continual information, who really knew a goddamn thing? He concentrated on ignoring his bladder and his fear about what Goyito might do next. When he emerged onto Canal Street, Goyo ran smack into a circus parading up the West Side Highway. Elephants in feathered headdresses lumbered along the Hudson, as if this were their natural habitat. Goyo was careful to avoid the bicyclists and skateboarders, the homeless man trying to wipe his windshield with a filthy rag. A gigantic coffin rolled down the middle of the avenue, narrowly missing his Cadillac.

It was just another day heating up in New York.

Island Blogger 2

I want to bring your attention, Dear Readers, to an editorial in
The New York Times
regarding the fate of Arab strongmen. The argument, applicable to our own situation, is that despots stay in power only when they can continue rewarding the loyalists entrusted with carrying out their regimes’ repressive tactics. Decrepit, bankrupt leaders are particularly vulnerable to being overthrown. Why? Because their henchmen can’t count on the bribes lasting indefinitely. Citizens, our resources have run dry. Cerraron la bolsa. The time has come for revolt . . .

TROPICAL FORECAST: Skies mostly cloudy in the western and central regions, with showers, electrical rains, and storms. Maximum temperatures between 30 and 33 degrees Celsius, higher in the eastern south portion. Marine breezes in the afternoons with speeds up to 20 kilometers. Depressions, disturbances, and cyclones are still possible. We’re in the dangerous season, compays, so stay tuned. Tu Capitán de Corbeta, el último meteorólogo en La Habana.

Eighty-six years old and he could still get it up good and hard when the occasion warranted—and without pharmaceutical help. But what occasion was this? Goyo closed his eyes and tried to coax back the dissipating dream. He flipped his pillow to the cooler side and pressed it against his forehead. No luck. He wanted to squeeze in another hour of sleep, but a panoply of bodily torments prevented it: raging hemorrhoids (a souvenir from his long drive north), a crippling pain in his neck, his aching lower back. Goyo threw off the pillow and sheets and opened his window shade onto the hallucinations of Second Avenue: the corner newsstand floating off the curb, squabbling pigeons swollen as overfed geese.

Today was his sixtieth wedding anniversary and the feast day of Cuba’s patron saint—La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Before her untimely death, Luisa had been planning another party, more
extravagant than their fiftieth. She’d even been toying with the idea of hiring Enrique Chia to play at their bash. At least Goyo had dodged that exorbitant bullet. He looked up at the ceiling, hands positioned for prayer:
Perdóname, mi amor, I’m merely relieved, given my many expenses, that
 . . . Oh, never mind. He’d stuck his foot in it and might not get out of this alive. The last thing he needed was to take on the dead as well as the miserable living.

A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling onto his bed in a puff of dust. Goyo sighed. His work here was never done. The brownstone might look sturdy from the outside—geraniums on the windowsills, an unimpeachable air of permanence—but below the surface, all was decay. Cockroaches and rats infested its deteriorating walls and had overrun the basement, where Goyo kept his archives: letters his father had sent to him at boarding school; a photo of Adelina Ponti playing piano; his moldering clarinet music; the birth certificates of relatives near and far; and, most important, the titles to the Herrera properties in Cuba.

Twenty-three years ago, he and Luisa had sold their old apartment, a spacious three-bedroom in Turtle Bay, and crammed the bulk of its contents into these thousand square feet of now-collapsing building. His wife’s devotion to the baroque was evident everywhere—in the gilded Florentine boxes and porcelain figurines, in the crystal decanters half-filled with watered-down scotch. Every overpriced knickknack and silk-upholstered chair, every chandelier and lamp, down to the fringed one on the nightstand to which a spider had attached its web, murmured: “I am Luisa Miyares de Herrera . . .”

A flock of sparrows rushed in a slanting mass toward the East River. A jogger, probably from another time zone, pounded his way north. Goyo reached for a tissue and trumpeted away the night’s accretion of mucus. How his younger self would’ve recoiled at the hoary vision of him now, with his back brace and bifocals,
his bruised and bleeding gums, his lamentable sag of balls. His eyes felt sticky, too, as if they’d been smeared with honey. Sometimes he pictured himself growing wild in old age: his shoulders upholstered with mold, his lungs wheezing like a leaky bassoon. Only infirmity or impending death truly showed people what tedious organisms their bodies could be.

Goyo hoisted himself out of bed, steadied his cane, and hobbled past his wife’s bric-a-brac to the bathroom. He kept a shelf of Marcus Aurelius and José Martí above the toilet paper dispenser. Goyo could always count on them to provide a modicum of solace. He’d memorized many of Aurelius’s most famous quotations: “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” “And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou does every act of thy life as if it were the last.” “Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.” Aurelius had died at fifty-nine after ruling the Roman Empire for twenty years. Martí was even younger when he perished, saddling up in the name of Cuban independence and charging into his first—and only—battle at forty-two.

Twenty minutes later, the toughest part of Goyo’s day was done. He took extra care with his morning ablutions, maneuvering his tongue to plump out his cheeks and upper lip while shaving his face to an impeccable sheen. He brushed his teeth—they were holding up better than the rest of him—and doused his solar plexus with cologne. What was left of his hair he smoothed back with a soft-bristle brush. Goyo was fond of his old mutt’s face, no matter its devastations, particularly his chin with its still handsome, beckoning cleft. How the ladies had loved that cleft!