The Troubles of Johnny Cannon

by Isaiah Campbell

  The air wasn’t nothing you could smell in Cullman, or in Alabama at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t smell it anywhere in the country. There was only one place where you could smell bananas and fish, mixed with gasoline and wood smoke. Havana, Cuba. And smelling that brought back a whole mess of memories, memories that had been dead and buried for a real long time.

  Memories of life before I had my scars.

  They was memories of playing in the sun, under the palm trees. Memories of walking down the streets of Havana, carrying a stuffed dog, holding hands with the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.

  Memories of Ma.

  And I remembered how it used to be, how she and I would fly to Havana from our home at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base so she could meet her friend from New Orleans for a weekend every couple of months. And I realized why Pa had said the friend was a girl, ’cause the name was a girl’s name if you said it, though when you spelled it, you saw it for what it really was.

  Gene, a doctor who Ma was having a relationship with.

  Of course, if I’d seen him now, I would have called him by his full name.

  Captain Richard Gene Morris.

  But back then, he was Uncle Gene, and me and Ma met him at his favorite club in Havana, where they’d let me sit by the band while they danced. They even got me my own special drink, called Batido de Trigo. It tasted like the milk after you ate three bowls of shredded wheat with five scoops of sugar in it. It was great, and I’d drink it and watch my ma be five times happier than she ever was back home with Pa.

  And I remembered them meeting Uncle Gene’s business partner, Dr. Vega. They had a private practice together there in Havana. Uncle Gene and Ma would have dinner with him and his wife. And I remembered the night Dr. Vega and his wife got in a big fight ’cause he’d seen her kissing the bandleader, Dr. Vega’s cousin. And Uncle Gene had lost a ton of money at the poker table, and he was rip-roaring drunk, and he snuck me and Ma out the back door so he wouldn’t have to pay his money.

  And as he drove off, he was so drunk, he didn’t see the truck that was coming up on the intersection he was crossing. I remembered looking out the door and screaming, but Ma was asleep and Uncle Gene wasn’t paying no attention.

  And the next thing I knew, I was in the hospital. And I couldn’t remember nothing.

  And Ma was dead.

  Some water splashed on my face and woke me from all them memories.

  “Hola, chico. Bienvenidos a La Cabaña,” somebody said. I bolted up and realized I was in a heap of trouble.

  I was on a dirt floor, surrounded by yellow-brown rock walls. There was bars on anything that was opened to the outside. Sunlight was shining through, making shadows that danced on the walls with the movement of the palm trees outside. And the air was filled with that intoxicating Havana smell.

  The fella that had thrown water on me was sitting next to a bowl on the ground. He was real dirty, his clothes was tore up and had bloodstains on them. One of his arms was in a sling, and both of his hands was all bandaged up. He had a beard that was long but matted to his face, which was all swollen and puffy. But his eyes was piercing through the puffed-up slits they had to look through, and somehow I recognized him.

  “You’re the bandleader, ain’t you? From the club?” I realized he probably didn’t speak no English. “I mean, You el bandleader-o from el club-o?”

  He grinned, and some of his teeth looked like they’d been freshly beaten out of his mouth.

  “Sí. But that was a long time ago.” He laughed a little and started coughing. “You must have a very good-o memory-o.”

  “It ain’t so good, it’s just fresh.” I wiped my hands off on my pants, which didn’t do nothing to clean them, and I held one out to him. “My name’s Johnny.”

  He showed me them bandages and didn’t take my hand.

  “I’m Carlos. Carlos Martí.”

  That name rang a bell.

  “Hold on a minute. You was Mr. Thomassen’s fella, wasn’t you?”

  Now he looked really surprised.

  “Sí. I worked in his club.”

  “So that was Mr. Thomassen’s club where you was kissing Dr. Vega’s wife?” I shuddered. “You was kissing your cousin? Dang, I heard that kind of thing only happened in Arkansas.”

  “Raúl is my cousin, and I would never kiss him,” he said, and wiped his mouth off with his bandage. “But, how do you know all these things?”

  I told him all about my memories, and he looked like he was reliving a part of his own life that he hadn’t remembered in a while.

  “Those were wonderful days,” he said.

  We didn’t get the chance to talk no more about it, though, ’cause a couple of big fellas dressed in green uniforms carrying big guns came over to our door. One of them pointed his gun in our general direction while the other one unlocked and opened the door.

  “¡Levántate!” the one fella with the gun said.

  “He wants you to stand,” Carlos whispered to me. “And he’s very serious about it.”

  I got up. I figured it was a good idea to listen to him since his gun was so big.

  “Sígueme,” he said.

  I looked at Carlos for the interpretation.

  “Follow him,” he said. “And then, maybe later on, learn some Spanish.”

  I walked behind the fella and we went out into a real big open space that was surrounded by rock walls. There was a mess of other fellas with guns and green outfits on, and I was starting to realize they must be the Cuban soldiers that worked for Fidel Castro. I figured I was right when I saw who they was taking me to.

  They was walking me up to Fidel himself. Next to him was a fella with a wild beard and a hat on, next to him was a fella with glasses, and next to him was someone who made my heart almost stop.

  It was the Captain. And the way he was laughing with them fellas, it didn’t look like he was a prisoner.

  The fella walked me up to them and I shot the Captain a death glare.

  “You was the fella on the other side of Pa’s phone call, wasn’t you?” I said.

  “I can explain,” he said. “And I will, trust me. As soon as I can.”

  The guard poked me in the back with his gun and made me step toward Castro. He nodded at the Captain.

  “He wants you to pledge your allegiance,” the Captain said. “Do that and you won’t have to go back to that cell. You can stay with me.”

  I thought about it for a bit. Didn’t seem too hard. Did it all the time at school. I put my hand over my heart and I started.

  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of—”

  The fella with the wild beard backhanded me right across the face. The Captain winced. Don’t know why, ’cause it was me that got hit. I could taste the blood in my mouth to prove it.

  Castro put his hands on the sides of my face.

  “To Cuba,” he said in English. Didn’t know he knew English. He had an accent, but still, he was understandable.

  “You want me to pledge allegiance to Cuba?” I said. “After he just walloped me like that? You got to be halfway to crazy-town.”

  Castro looked at the Captain, confused. I guess he wasn’t as good at English as I thought.

  “Él quiere una disculpa del Che,” the Captain said.

  Castro looked at the fella with the wild beard and nodded at him. Didn’t seem to sit too well with that fella.

  “Lo siento,” the wild-bearded fella said.

  Castro smiled.

  “Che Guevara apologizes,” he said. “Now. Pledge to Cuba.”

  I nodded. I knew what to do. What Tommy’d do.

  I put my hand on my heart.

  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of apple pie, and Superman, and girls like Martha Macker, and heroes like my brother, Tommy. To the dadgum United States
of dadgum America. And if you think I’m going to change my mind, you can all go—”

  This time Che punched me right in the nose. I fell down on the ground, my face, jacket, and pants getting soaked from the gusher of blood I was producing. But it was all right. It was for God and country.

  The Captain dropped down next to me and started poking at my face.

  “I think your nose is broken,” he said. He yelled at Che, “Se rompió la nariz.”

  The fella with glasses got down and looked at me with Captain Morris. He grabbed my nose and snapped it back into place.

  I might have screamed a little.

  Okay, I screamed a lot.

  In fact, the guard that had his gun pointed at me took to giggling at how bad I was screaming.

  “Gracias, Dr. Vega,” Captain Morris said, and shook his hand. So that was Dr. Vega. Saved my life and saved my nose. I’ll be.

  “If you’ll pledge your allegiance to Cuba,” the Captain whispered in my ear, “then you can be free. We can be free together. It’s just words.”

  “No it ain’t,” I said. “It’s blood. And it’s loyalty. Something you don’t know nothing about. How could you sell out my pa like that? Especially after you was having an affair with my ma? You tricked him real bad.”

  He looked real surprised by that.

  “How did you know about that? The affair, I mean. Did Tommy tell you?”

  “Nope, he didn’t. He knew?”

  He was watching Castro and Che like he didn’t want them to hear nothing we was saying.

  “Not important. Now, listen, Pete Cannon is an idiot. Always was, even back in the war. Your mother knew it, and she wanted out. She wanted to be with me. Which would have been fine if he had died in the hospital like he was supposed to, but he didn’t. He got better and she stayed with him. I had to settle for having her on special occasions.”

  “And you hated my pa for it.”

  “I did,” he said real matter-of-fact-like. Cold-blooded. “But I respected your mother. No, I loved your mother. Then she had you, and I loved being with you. I hoped, someday, that she’d finally get the courage to leave him and marry me. Then she and I could raise you together.”

  “But then you drove us into a truck.”

  He winced.

  “Yes. And then I lost you both.”

  Dr. Vega was talking to Castro now. He was pointing at me, but Castro was shaking his head.

  “So, what, you reckoned you’d just go betray your country out of spite or something?”

  “No.” His eyes looked real concerned. “I did it for you. You deserve a better life than what you had in Cullman. So, if I had to pledge to help Cuba to get the life for you that you deserve, I was willing to do it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “You betrayed your country for me?” I thought for a bit. “You betrayed all them exiles? For me?”

  He nodded. “When Castro heard that the Cuban exiles were planning an invasion—”

  “How’d he hear about it?”

  “Oh, he reads the New York Times,” he said, “Anyway, when he heard about the invasion, he wanted to make sure he could crush it decisively. To make a point to Cuba and the world that his regime was not one to be taken lightly. So, I volunteered to acquire that information for him.”

  “Why’d you use Pa?”

  “That I did out of spite,” he said. “But, in helping Castro, I negotiated for a new life for myself. For us. It’s what your mother would have wanted. She loved you so much.”

  That made me mad.

  “Tommy was her boy, too. And now he’s dead ’cause of what you did. ’Cause there wasn’t no air support besides him during the invasion. I’ll bet Ma wouldn’t have done that.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” he said. “But she wouldn’t have saved Pete Cannon’s life in the hospital, either. She begged me to let him die, to end his suffering when she saw how bad he was in New Orleans. And I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I was the idiot who saved his life. And she cried the day he survived. Because that was the day our dream together died.”

  That was awful romantic talk about my ma, and it was making me sick.

  “I didn’t even get to say good-bye to my brother,” I said. “Didn’t even see his body. So you want me to thank you ’cause you didn’t kill my pa, even though now you got him in a heap of trouble? Ain’t happening.”

  He looked a mite bit hurt from that. He hollered over to them fellas.

  “El primer ministro, tengo que mostrar el cuerpo del piloto a este muchacho.” He shot me another glance. “Es su hermano.”

  Fidel Castro came back over to us and looked me square in the eyes. He seemed like he was looking for something he might recognize. Finally, he nodded at the Captain.

  “Sí, every boy should see his brother one last time.”

  Before I could ask what he meant by that, he’d motioned for a couple of soldiers to come over, and they took me and the Captain out through a great big archway to a yellow car that was parked among a mess of military vehicles. We got in—one of the soldiers kept his gun trained at my head—and we drove off.

  We made our way through the streets lined with buildings that looked like they was still suffering from whatever battles had been fought around them. We drove past folks riding old cars and horse-drawn wagons. Everybody moved out of the way for us, like they knew that we was automatically more important than they was, and we went straight to the heart of the city. It was weird, ’cause I remembered it being the perfect place full of money and music. And it used to have a whole mess of white folk everywhere. Not anymore.

  “Where are we going?” I asked the Captain.

  “To see your brother.”

  That sort of made my heart skip.

  “So he ain’t dead?”

  He didn’t answer.

  My heart went back to beating its normal way, pumping blood, pain, and suffering through the carcass I called my body.

  We pulled up in front of what must have been the capitol building and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I swear, it looked just like the Capitol building in Washington, except with palm trees. We got through the security and went inside the most amazing entrance I’d ever walked through. Great big golden chandeliers and shiny tiled floors, it looked like the opposite of everything else I’d seen there in Cuba. If I squinted my eyes, I might have thought I could see President Kennedy coming around the corner. Except, what with all them Cuban guards that was walking around, I don’t think it would have been good for the president’s health if he did.

  We made our way all through the building, down hallways and past rooms that was decorated real nice. We got to a big metal door that was near what I figured was the kitchen. One of the soldiers opened it and a blast of cold air hit my face from the hallway that was behind it. He motioned for us to walk down it.

  This hallway was made of concrete and steel, and the further we walked down it, the colder I got. I was getting goose bumps so bad they was goose mountains by the time we got to another door. There were some thick snowsuits hanging on a hook outside of it.

  Captain Morris picked one of them snowsuits off the wall and handed it to me.

  “What is that, a door to Antarctica?” I said.

  “You want to see your brother? He’s in there.”

  I put on the snowsuit. I also had to put on gloves that was thicker than a catcher’s mitt and a scarf that would cover my face. He did the same, and so did the soldier that was with us. Then the Captain opened the door.

  Didn’t matter that I had all that extra clothes on, I started shivering.

  We walked into a room that was covered in ice. It looked like we’d stepped into a deep freezer, only there wasn’t no meat or nothing in there. There was just the walls of ice, the floor of ice, and a box the size of a coffin.

&nb
sp; I had a bad feeling I knew what was in there.

  The Captain motioned for me to come over to the box. It didn’t have no lid. I walked over and looked in.

  It was Tommy.

  He was lying in the box still with his uniform on. He had blood matted all on him, frozen like red ice-cream stains. His skin was blue. His lips was split open, but there wasn’t nothing coming out.

  “When they shot down his plane,” the Captain said, his words making clouds in the room, “they went and recovered his body from the wreckage.”

  I couldn’t barely talk. I didn’t feel much of nothing yet, ’cause it was too much for my little brain to take in. Like algebra.

  “Why didn’t they bury him?”

  “They wanted to preserve it so that he could be buried by his family.”

  I nodded. Not ’cause I understood what he was saying, but because I was accepting it.

  “So he is dead, then,” I said.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  I pulled the glove off my hand. Dadgum, it was so cold it started hurting almost instantly. But I didn’t care. I reached down and touched my brother’s cheek, right next to his mouth. I didn’t care if it was sappy or nothing, I needed to be close to him. I wished I was alone so I could tell him how crappy of a job I’d done with taking care of things. And there he had been, doing an amazing job taking care of them Cuban fellas in the invasion. He’d always been a billion times better than me at stuff like that.

  I noticed a lump in his chest pocket. I opened the flap and pulled out what was in there.

  It was that Superman action figure I’d given him.

  He’d promised he’d give it back.

  I’d promised myself in Cullman I wouldn’t do no crying until I saw the body. Now that I saw the body, there wasn’t nothing stopping them tears.

  The Captain let me cry, and it was awful good of him to do it. Then he pulled me away after a few minutes, and that was good of him too, ’cause my tears was starting to give me frostbite on my face.