But for the time being I was safe, there at the back of the diner, watching the three or four regular kids dance to the jukebox, the two girls, their wide mouths popping the spearmint tang of gum, their rah-rah skirts over firm brown thighs, their flats and ponytails and rubber bands and the men’s wristwatches they wore, and me wondering what it would be like to fuck one of them, wondering what it would be like to dissolve my tongue in that spearmint tang, or maybe to fuck two of them together, to lose my hands beneath those spinning skirts, to touch the very heart of whatever they believed their lives really were.
For now, they were safe.
I believed that if I had read novels I could have talked, but I did not read novels, merely facts from encyclopedias.
To talk of such things would have made it all too obvious that I had no life at all.
Perhaps if I had read those things that were named in my volumes – books called Flight To Arras, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, To A God Unknown, Narziss and Goldmund, Altona, Men Without Shadows, A Very Easy Death – names such as these, then perhaps . . .
And if I had known the names of the authors as well it would have been taken for granted that I had read these things, and I would not have mentioned the titles, but merely the names of the characters, and people would listen and know that I knew all these things from the tone of my voice, the expression in my eyes, the way I half-smiled my own thoughts that were nothing but my own.
Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.
But I had not, and did not, and never would, I felt.
And so I killed things.
What else could a poor boy do? I watched the tight-thighed girls, their whirling skirts, the way they glanced at me arrogantly, the way they dared each other to speak to the weird kid in the corner with the M&Ms when they first started coming here an age ago. They took the dare, one or two of them, and I was shy and pleasant, and I blushed, and they giggled, but now they have grown some and they don’t bother with dares, they just think I’m weird, and they dance all the more with their thighs and their skirts and their peppermint tang.
I hated them for their smooth brown skin. I wondered what their sweat would taste like straight from the skin. Beads like condensation down the glass walls of chilled bottles. Like rain against glass.
I sat alone, there in Montalvo’s Diner, and perhaps the only person who did not think I was weird was the crazy halfbreed cook with the forgotten name who carried a smell that should not have had to be carried by any human being.
He did not worry that I had nothing to say, for I bought my Cokes, popped my M&Ms, sat and looked and breathed and existed.
I did not speak.
I would think to speak, but all I could come up with was ‘Well-uh-I-kinda-killed-some-things-one-time . . .’, but seeing as how that wasn’t really the polite kind of talk folks were looking for, I did not say it.
And, as such, had nothing to say.
Perhaps if I had been caught . . .
Perhaps then, and only then, would I have had something of which to speak.
Sometimes I would challenge myself, dare myself to walk up to one of those girls, those tight-skinned teenage tornadoes, and ask their name, and say ‘Hi, I’m Bill or “Doc” or “Lineman” or “Swamper,” ’ and feel them blush a little, and smile, and say ‘I’m Carol or Janie or Holly-Beth,’ and ask me how I came to be called something such as that. I would shrug noncommittally, as if it didn’t really matter, and tell them it was the war, back a long time, honey, a long time ago that you wouldn’t want to be hearing about. And we would dance then, and she would give me gum, play some records I liked maybe, and then later as I walked her home, she would ask me again how I came by my name, and I would tell her, in small, measured emotional phrases, and through the spaces between my words she would feel the depth, the strength, the power of self-control needed for someone to return from such a place and still be able to smile, to laugh, to say ‘Hi’ and dance in Montalvo’s Diner with someone such as herself.
She would fall in love, and I would feel the pressure of her hand in mine, the way her shoulder rubbed the side of my chest as she leaned to stroke my cheek, to kiss my face, to ask me if maybe, somehow, possibly I might consider seeing her again . . .
And I would have said, ‘Sure honey, sure thing,’ and I would have felt her heart leap.
Or maybe not. Maybe I would hold a Coke bottle in my hand, and as they pulled me close I would break the base of the bottle against the wall, and then turn to face Bobby-Sue or Marquita or Sherise or Kimberley, and say, ‘Here, a little of something cool and hard for the pleasure of your company . . . ,’ and grind the glass teeth deep into the solar plexus, through the vagus nerves, and feel them tighten and twitch, dancing like a headless chicken through the scrubbed backlot behind a busted trailer, feeling them close up against the broken shards like the hands of hungry, shit-faced kids, the blood pumping, sweating out through the aperture, glowing over my hands, warming them, filling the pores, finding my prints like narrow channels and filling them . . .
And then lean them against the wall, fuck them in the ass, comb my hair and go home.
Perhaps then, and only then, would there be something of which I could speak.
Before Carryl Chevron I had killed a dog. Before that I had set a cat in a pen with three chickens and watched them run their little hearts out. Before that I killed some other things, but now I cannot remember what they were.
We were all essentially children, and some of us never seemed to be anything else. I understood this, as now I understand many things, and I see now that my own depth of understanding is even greater than I am aware. I know it all comes from the heart, right from the very center of the heart, and I know that if you do not listen to what it has to tell you then it will kill you.
Time rolled onwards like some unspoken darkness, and within it there were sounds and motions that even now I cannot bring myself to recall.
Eisenhower was inaugurated as president.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in Sing Sing.
Fidel Castro Ruz was jailed after a failed coup.
Rocky Marciano retained his world heavyweight title when he K.O.d Jersey Joe Walcott. My father said he could have done the same. My father was a drunk. A liar. A failure of a man.
I was sixteen years old, and New Orleans was in my blood. St James the Greater, Ougou Feray, the African spirit of war and iron. The driving rhythm of drums and chants and people pouring red wine, rice and beans, meat, rum and soft drinks into a pond, and then those same people writhing in the mud and sharing their special powers by touching bystanders. Serpent and cross in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, and summoning the most powerful of all spirits, loa-Damballah-wédo, the spirited festival of Vyéj Mirak, the Virgin of Miracles, and her voodoo counterpart Ezili, the goddess of love. Washing a bull, applying perfume, dressing it in a cape, and then slaughtering it, its blood collected in a gourd and passed to those possessed by the loa. They drank to feed the spirit. Sacrificing white pigeons to the Petro loa, a spirit that demanded birds and hogs, goats and bulls, sometimes bodies from tombs. All Souls’ Day, Baron Samedi, loa of the dead.
I was sixteen years old. I was almost a man, but still I couldn’t stand and take the beatings my father delivered. Not only to me, but to my mother – she of the graceful, artless, silent hope.
It was the end of 1953.
I think back and images merge and blend together, faces become the same, voices carry a similar tone and timbre, and I find it difficult to place events in their correct chronological sequence. I think of Cuba, my father’s homeland, the things that happened there, and then realize that those things came later, much later. My own past challenges me with forgetfulness, and this scares me, for to forget my past is to forget who I am, how I became such a person, and to forget such things challenges the very reason for living.
Perhaps the saddest thing about my own death will be
my life.
Some of us live to remember; some of us live to forget; some of us, even now, make ourselves believe that there is some greater purpose worth working for. Let me tell you, there isn’t. It isn’t complicated, it is almost too simple to be believed. Like faith. Faith in what? Faith in God? Greatest thing God ever did was fool the world into thinking that He existed. Look into a man’s eyes as he dies and you’ll see that there’s nothing there. Just blackness reflecting your own face. It’s that simple.
I will tell you now about the death of my mother. Though it would not come for another four years I will tell you of it now.
Through 1954, through the eras of McCarthy, the Viet Minh occupation of Hanoi and the very inception of the Vietnam War, through the release of Castro and his brother Raul on General Amnesty in May of 1955, through all these things.
Beyond Castro’s departure to Mexico where he organized his exiles into the 26 July Revolutionary Movement, how he led eighty-two men to the north coast of Oriente Province, where they landed at Playa Las Coloradas in December of ’56, how all but twelve survived who retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains and waged a continuous guerrilla war against the Batista government, how those twelve became eight hundred and scored victory after victory against the dictator in the hot madness of revolution and spilled blood that was as much a part of history as anything that might have happened in Europe . . .
Until finally Batista was defeated and fled to the Dominican Republic on New Year’s Day 1959, and we were there – my father and I – there in Havana when the victorious Castro entered the city, and the people believed, the people really believed that things would be different now.
And all I could think of was how my mother should have been with us, but by then she was dead, and how we had fled America, land of my birth, and made our way here to the country of my father’s birth.
So I will tell you about that night – a Friday night, 19 December 1958 – and you can ask yourself if what happened to my father could really be called anything but justice.
When the men came down to drag the body from the yard I remember thinking something.
What will happen to his wife? What will happen to his children?
For I knew all of these men had wives and children, just like my own father. Just like the Havana Hurricane.
Less than a week to Christmas, and the dead man’s wife and children would be home even then, waiting for him to return. But that night he would not come stumbling through the door, red-faced, his fists bloody, his vest drenched with sweat. That night he would be dragged from a yard by three men, his body hefted with no more grace or respect than if it had been a side of beef, and bound tightly within a length of torn sacking, and thrown into the back of a flatbed truck. And men with callused hands and callous faces, men with no more soul than a stone, no more mercy or compunction than a lizard bathing itself on a sun-bleached rock, would drive that truck away, and for ten dollars, maybe less, they would strip the body and burn the clothes, cut the flesh and let it bleed some, and then sink it into the everglades where alligators would swiftly dissemble everything that could be identified.
And my father, the Hurricane, staggering home, his own vest spattered with a dead man’s blood, and roaring drunk in the doorway, and challenging the world to defy him, to tell him he was not the master of his own house, and my mother scared, pleading with him not to hold her so roughly, not to be so angry, so violent, so insatiable . . .
And me, crouching there behind the doorway of my own room, tears in my eyes as I heard her scream, and listening as she rallied all the prayers she could muster, and hearing her voice and knowing that such sounds would only incense him further, and feeling that somewhere in amongst all this madness there must be something that made sense.
But I didn’t find it – not then, not even now.
And then the silence.
Silence that seemed to bleed out from beneath the doorway of their room, and walk its soundless footsteps down towards me, and feeling with it the shadow of cold that could only be translated one way.
And the silence seemed to last for something close to an eternity, perhaps longer, and knowing that something was wrong.
Dead awful wrong.
And then the wailing scream of my father as he burst from the door of their room, and how he staggered down the corridor as if something had taken ahold of his soul and twisted it by its nerves into torment.
The vacancy of his eyes, the whiteness of his drawn, sweat-varnished skin, the way his hands gripped and relaxed, gripped and relaxed. Fighter’s fists. Killer’s fists. And waiting for him to open my door, to look down at me, and recognizing something in his eyes that I had seen only an hour before as he stood over the beaten body of a slain man, and seeing something else, something far worse, something akin to guilt and blame and regret and shame, and horror and despair and madness, moulded into one unholy indescribable emotion that said everything that could ever need saying without a single word.
I rose to my feet and pushed past him.
I ran down the corridor and heaved through the door of my mother’s room.
I saw her naked, more naked than I had seen her since my birth, and the blackened hollowness of her eyes, the way her head was twisted back upon itself at the most unnatural, awkward angle, and knowing . . .
Knowing that he had killed her.
Something rose inside me. Alongside the hatred and panic, alongside the revulsion and hysteria, something came that was close to a base impulse for survival. Something that told me that no matter what had happened here, no matter how this thing had come about, I had to escape. Murder had been committed, murder of my mother by my own father’s violent hand, and irrespective of my feeling towards him in that moment I was certain that to stay would have been the end of my life as I knew it.
Perhaps, in some dark way, it was everything I had been waiting for; something that was sufficiently powerful to drive me away.
I stepped forward.
I looked down at her.
Even as I stared at her cold and lifeless face I could hear her voice.
Could hear the songs she sang to me as a baby.
I turned back towards my father, his back towards me, his body rigid and yet shaking uncontrollably, his fists clenched, every muscle inside of him taut and stretched and painful, and I knew that I had to leave. Had to leave and take him with me.
I ran from the house. The street was deserted. I ran back without any comprehension of why I had left.
I shouted something at him and he looked at me with the eyes of an old man. A weak and defeated man. I hurried to my room and gathered some clothes, stuffed them into a hessian sack; from the kitchen I took what few provisions remained, wrapped them in a cloth and buried those in the sack also, and then I took a shirt and forced my father’s arms through the sleeves, buttoned it to the neck, and then walked him out, walked him as if I was marching with two bodies, and I took him down to the side of the road and left him standing there, gaunt and speechless.
I returned to the house, and after standing over the dead form of my mother for a minute further, after kneeling and touching her face, after leaning close and whispering to her that I loved her, I backed up and returned to the kitchen. I took a kerosene lamp and emptied its contents in a wide arc across the floor and the table, trailed it out through the doorway and down the hall, and with the last inch and a half of fuel I doused my mother’s body. I backed up, I closed my eyes, and then took a box of matches from my pocket and lit one. I stood there for a moment, the smell of sulphur and kerosene and death in my nostrils, and then I dropped the match and ran.
We had run a quarter of a mile before I saw the flames make their way to the sky.
We kept on running, and ever-present was the urge to run back, to douse the flames and drag her charred body from the ruins, to tell the world what had happened, and ask a God I didn’t believe in for forgiveness and sanctuary. But I did not stop, nor did my father beside me
, and in some strange way I believed that that was the closest I had ever been to him, the closest I would ever come.
It was December of 1958, a week before Christmas, and we headed east towards the Mississippi state line, and when we reached it we headed still east towards Alabama, knowing full well that to stop was to see our destiny slip from our hands.
Seventeen days we walked, stopping only to lie at the edge of some field and snatch a broken handful of hours’ rest, to share the few mouthfuls of food that remained, to rise and ache through yet another day of passage.
Into Florida: Pensacola, Cape San Bias, Apalachee Bay; into Florida, where you could see the island of Cuba, the Keys, the Straits and the lights of Havana from the tip of Cape Sable. And knowing that we were merely a handful of miles from my father’s homeland.
We hid for three days straight. My father said nothing. Each day I would creep away at night and walk down to the beaches. I talked with people who spoke in broken-up Spanish, people who told me they could not help me time and time again, until finally, on the third night, I found a fisherman who would take us.
I will not tell you how I traded for our passage, but I closed my eyes and I paid the price, and I still believe that I carry the scars of my own fingernails in the flesh of my palms.
But we were away, the wind in our hair, the sea air like some cleansing absolution for the past, and I watched my father as he clung to the edge of the small craft, his eyes wide, his face haunted, his spirit broken.
That was my mother.
Her life and her death.
I was twenty-one years old, and in some way I believed my own life had come to an end. A chapter had closed with a sense of finality, and if ever I believed I could recover from what had happened, if ever I believed that there was some way back from the events of my childhood, from not only the murder that I had now committed, but also the murder I had witnessed, then I was mistaken.
R. J. Ellory Page 16