by Tom Pow
“Check out Test Drive, I suppose.”
“Yeah, you do that. You’ll love them.”
“You?”
“I think I’ll get myself a tattoo.”
“Like a little bluebird on your arm or something?”
“No. More like a huge set of wings across my back like Tony Kurlansky has.”
“Wild. Angel wings?”
“Could be. Oh, I don’t know. It’s like, you know, Marty, life’s just more … more…”
“More what?”
“Jesus, I really don’t know how to say it—just more everything than I thought it was.”
“So?”
“So, I guess I want more than I thought I did, that’s all.”
“Like a bigger tattoo.”
“Yeah. You got it. A beast of a tattoo.”
They lay in silence, staring at the black thatch. Martin felt he might catch fire no matter what—whether he continued to lie in his own space or whether he stretched out and touched Louise. But he knew he must not touch her. That would only lead to a shame he could not bear. Though there was a chance that perhaps, in some corner of her heart, Louise might know what he was feeling and how painful the restraint was and recognize in it the love he had to give. He hoped this might be so as he lay and waited for her to make her move.
A bird he had not heard before sang softly in the night.
“Marty?”
“Yes.”
“You still awake?”
“Yes, I’m still awake.”
“I’m going out of the shelter. I don’t know for how long.”
“Eduardo?”
“Like I say, I don’t know for how long. Marty, you know, I could’ve ended up with all kinds of complete assholes on this trip. It’s one of the luckiest things in my life that I ended up with you. I want you to know that I just feel we’re always going to be friends. But I need you to promise me something.”
“What?”
“That no matter what happens from now on, this remains a secret between us.”
“You and Eduardo?”
“Promise me, Marty?”
How could it be that her eyes shone so in the darkness as she knelt over him in the shelter?
“OK, I promise.”
“No, Marty—the promise, it’s got to sound more.”
“More what?”
“More like you really mean it. I want this to be our secret—a secret that only I can break. Take my hands and promise.”
“I, Martin Phillips … promise.” It was true: one touch of her and he was burning.
“Now go,” he said. “Please.”
Louise dipped down and kissed his cheek, then turned and crawled out of the shelter. She walked quickly to the edge of the encampment where Eduardo was waiting.
Miguel watched her from the shadows. He shrugged. Eduardo, young Eduardo, let him live while he is young, while he can. Let a young woman run her hands over his smooth back. El Taino’s hands, he thought sadly, were probably the last hands he would feel on the welts of his own back.
* * *
She loved the way his top lip came to a small point in its middle like a tiny beak, and that when he smiled it disappeared completely. She loved how his teeth were so straight that if a ruler were placed against them there would be no gaps. She loved the way he grew so serious, so suddenly that his eyes became, as some poet she’d read in high school had described them, “windows to his soul.” She loved the life she sensed in him—its darkness and its loss and its blinding Test Driving light. His fingers were long, and he used his hands like punctuation marks whenever he spoke. He ran them back over his loosely curled hair. And, when he thought she wasn’t watching, used them to scratch between his legs.
And what could he love about her? she wondered, aware of how little they wore and of how few were the secrets they could keep, living day by day so close together. But she could not bear to think of her own question.
“I love your boy’s hair,” he said.
“Thank you very much.”
“It is, as the French say, gamin.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Youthful or something like that. It’s one of the untranslatables.”
“And that’s all you like?”
“No, that’s only the beginning. But it is hard to find these untranslatable words.”
She nodded, feeling both of them were now speaking in a foreign language—and for a moment she stood on the edge of something, as she had paused at the edge of the pool—it seemed so long ago now—scared of what unfamiliar creatures might inhabit the water.
“Then don’t use words,” she said finally, and lifted her face to his. And so he told her how he loved her eyes, just as they were closing, and how he loved her skin, in parts still so white that anything could be written on it—anger, frustration, desire. And he loved the arms that came around him and the hands that entwined themselves in his hair, determined to hold on to this world she had discovered for each and every day she could. And he loved the hunger in her that was as fresh as his was for her and yet that already knew what would satisfy it.
“Now you know,” he whispered breathlessly.
“Yes, oh yes, I’m getting the messages loud and clear.”
Across the clearing she caught sight of Miguel’s silhouette, his hand raised in greeting. Eduardo waved back. Louise, flustered, began to rise from his chest.
“Here,” he said, “it’s all right. Miguel is all right with us.”
Louise eased herself back down beside him.
“Eduardo?”
“Yes.”
“You said once you’d tell me the story of what happened to Miguel’s back.”
“Ay, preciosa, it’s a long story. And it’s hard to tell Miguel’s story without telling El Taino’s too, for that’s where the story begins.”
“Well, I’m going nowhere and I’d like to know.”
[CHAPTER 8]
not anyone’s slave
Before he became El Taino, he was known simply as José or José the Thief. He used to say, “It’s the tourists that make me do it. They are locos, simplemente locos. Locos maybe, but they had what José wanted more than anything: dólares. With dólares José could buy leather boots, and sometime he could buy a heavy gold chain for his neck, like a baseball star, and a couple of gold rings too. With dólares José could make himself a man to be reckoned with.
He had begun as a confidence trickster, pitting his wits against the tourists.
“Hello, my friend,” he’d begin, almost walking backwards as he spoke, so there was no avoiding him. “‘You new in town? You Americano, yes? Inglés? Frances? Deutsch? You see, we welcome the world.”’
Louise remembered such characters in the first days they’d spent in the capital. Her father had tried to brush them off, but her mother and she had responded at first to the feigned warmth of the greeting, the humor there seemed to be in it: you know I’m faking it and I know you know, but, hey, I do know places to go, and you are a little bit lost in the narrow streets that can turn so quickly into darkness, into shadows in doorways. She found it easy to picture El Taino turning to the tourists and smiling a fake smile.
“What you want? You know the bars? I take you to the famous bars. I know them all—where all the most famous mafioso dons drank. You want to see? To hear the story of when Don Rosselli was killed? There is still blood on the restaurant walls. This is a crazy country, you are thinking, where they leave the blood of dead men on the walls.”’
A story, the tourists would think. Well, why not? They’d sit in some small dingy bar with a faded newsprint photograph framed on the wall, somewhere a splash of red paint. Someone would sing for them—one of those island songs that spoke of endless longing—and they’d be served cocktails at inflated prices. The minute the notes were handed over—dólares, only dólares—a chill entered the conversation. The energy seemed to go from their guide, and the naïve tourists wondered whe
ther any place could match one’s imagining of it. Louise’s father was irritated to find himself among their number.
“Come on, Jacques,” she remembered her mother saying. “It’s hardly worth getting upset over—a few dollars.”
“I just hate getting ripped off. I told you he wasn’t right. You’ve got to listen to me, Melanie.” And he walked on ahead of them both into a well-lit plaza.
José’s cuts from these affairs afforded him his first gold ring—not as heavy as he would have liked, but enough to catch the light. And he was able to buy good food for his family—sausages, fish, and cheese. Still it did not placate his father.
“It’s not a job,” his father raged at him. “You bring me shame.”
“No,” José said, “I bring food for our table. I bring more than rice and beans.”
“Oh yes, oh yes, you do. And do you know the flavor that is missing from all this food you bring? The taste of pride is nowhere in it.”
“You wait,” José had shouted at him. “You wait and see.”
He saw the city teeming with possibilities for him, with more money than he could ever earn as an unofficial tourist guide.
Again it was the tourists’ own fault, really. Locos. Simplemente locos. They left wallets on bar tops. They wore trousers and waistcoats and money belts that said: Money’s in here. You’ll need to be quick, you’ll need a certain sleight of hand, but we’ll be careless or flustered and our anxiety will help you.
Louise remembered the city, its sense of danger, and her mother’s endless zips and secret pockets. As she had stood in her T-shirt and shorts, swaying to the music that was everywhere, she had felt a sense of irresponsibility distance her from her mother.
Of course, what allowed it all to happen was not the Saint of Pilfering. There was no special agent like that looking out for José. What was letting it happen for as long as it did was luck. Lady Luck, if you like—José did like the ladies—and a certain local admiration for a rogue, someone with balls enough to fleece these dim tourists with their loud voices and their fat wallets.
José’s love affair with Lady Luck finished when the police force was told that such behavior was putting off tourists coming to the island. They were taking their precious dólares elsewhere. A clean-up was what was required.
* * *
The short truncheon that broke two of José’s fingers on his right hand was protecting a wallet lying on the scarred bar top of the popular harborside bar of El Marisco. As José bent to cradle his hand, the man in T-shirt and shorts, who had whipped the truncheon from a beach bag, declared himself to the astonished tourists as their protector. He then apologized for the disturbance caused and presented the wide-eyed husband with the wallet, as if it were a medal on a velvet cushion.
“Why—uh, thank you,” said the man.
“And him?” said his wife, pointing to the thief, one of whose wrists was already padlocked to the bar.
“Señora, please not to trouble yourself. Let us take care of him. And enjoy your stay in Santa Clara. You will find all the rest of us, I hope and pray, to be honest.”’
* * *
“It was the gold flashing that gave him away,” the policeman announced at the reception area to of the prison, “so he’s better off without it, don’t you think?” There were whoops of agreement. He wrenched the ring from one of José’s broken fingers—his finger a living flame that made him gasp. He threw the ring in the air, caught it and pocketed it with a smile. If only that had been the end of it. But no, blows had rained down on him from all the policemen there—“Flashy little shit,” “Only one crappy ring”—so that when he woke up the next day in the cold stone cell, it wasn’t only his fingers that throbbed. So too did his ribs, and one of his eyes had almost closed, gummed with blood.
His swollen hand looked naked to him. He was the nothing they said he was. He was the nothing his father always said he was destined to be. When he had been hauled through the streets, those who had once looked at him with admiration now looked on him with pity or shame. He was the nothing they’d always seen behind the shiny surface.
What was time to a nothing? He had no idea how many days he’d spent in the cell, eating the slop they threw in to him, binding his broken fingers as well as he could with strips of T-shirt he’d torn off with his teeth. At night he lay on the fouled mattress with his hand across his chest and felt his fingers throbbing. They would knit in their own way, but he knew light-fingered José the Thief was no more.
On one of these nights his cell door opened. A figure filled the light and then was thrown into the cell with the same care that a side of beef might be thrown onto a truck. José could only make out the black shape of him in the darkness.
The new prisoner moaned. It was the eeriest sound—a creature-in-suffering sound—and José thought perhaps the only way to quell it was to approach the creature, to see what might be done for it.
“My … back.” The words erupted from him as if they’d been pushed up from the depths of his chest. José put an arm around him tentatively, but quickly withdrew it. As it came into contact with his wet, clammy back, the man had made a high-pitched animal sound. José too was now in shock, not simply at the sticky wetness but at the fact that his fingers had momentarily felt the runnels in the flesh that held the blood.
“Jesus,”’ José sighed. What had this man done? And what was to be done for him now in the cold dirt of the cell, lying on his front, his head twisted, his mouth gasping for air?
José reached out his hand again and stroked the man’s brow and ran his palm back from the broad forehead, over the tightly curled hair. Then, in the darkness, he could make out the white of an eye turned to him. “Gracias, hermano,” came gargling from the man’s throat.
Early the next morning a bucket of salt water was brought to their cell.
“Put it on his back before the scabs form or it could be over for your new friend,” said the guard.
“But he needs—” José began.
“Look, this is the best I can do. Don’t ask for more or there’ll be three of us in there.”
By the thin daylight that filtered into the cell from a window too high to give them its view of the rocks and the sea, José examined the six deep welts in the man’s back for any foreign bodies that might threaten infection. Then he paused—memories of how as a child he’d grazed his knee on a rock and how the sea had stung.
“Por favor,” the man said. Then, “Mi nombre es Miguel.”
“José.”
“José.” Miguel nodded.
“I’m sorry,” said José.
“De nada.”
Miguel gripped the sides of the mattress and José poured the salt water into the sluiceways of his back. Two forces were at work in Miguel then. In one, he fought to turn away from the water, to rise up from the mattress, to escape from José, to curse him with all his might. In the other, he fought as if the mattress were a demon that must for his survival be pinioned to the cell floor. His shoulders rippled with the ferocity of his struggle; in his arms, veins like ropes pumped the necessary blood, and only occasionally did he emit that animal sound José had first heard from him. It was a fight of great intensity, but short-lived. Miguel’s breathing evened and his eyes closed in exhaustion.
In these first days there was little conversation between the two, for this was a place they’d come to that somehow obliterated all others. Of course they’d known of its existence—the regime made no secret of where its deviants would end up, be they political, sexual, or criminal. Their pasts would be washed from them here. They would be numbers, units of suffering: time would abandon them at the gate. José and Miguel became familiar with neighboring screams of pain, but also with screams of anger and despair. They tried as best they could to pay them no attention. At first they paid little attention to each other either, except as physical presences, in the way that animals at opposite ends of a field will sense the company of one another and gain some blind comfort from
that.
Soon the wounded man began to heal: the blood congealed and huge scabs formed, beneath which the skin began to stretch over the trenches the flails had made.
“What did you do to deserve such a torture?” José asked one day.
“Union,” said Miguel.
“Union?”
“Workers’ rights.”
There was silence. José had heard of those who campaigned for workers’ rights. He had even skirted one of their demonstrations on his way to the tourist marina. Passionate men and women with megaphones speaking of their burdens, their obligations to their families, to the future generations “who will live on our beautiful island.” But he had also heard how the government opposed the movement, portraying its leaders as leeches, stirrers, puppets of foreign governments.
“And what do they want?” Quitano had asked once more. “What would give them the greatest pleasure? I tell you—to see our island divided, our progress stalled. On behalf of our people, I, we, this government, will not tolerate it!”
“Why you?” José asked.
“I led a strike the day after the ordinance banning demonstrations against the state.”
“You are a brave man—or a foolish one.”
“I am not anyone’s slave,” Miguel flashed back with the first anger in his voice. “No, not a slave, though my blood comes from those who came to this island in chains.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all right, amigo. Do not think I am a particularly brave man. I am rather one who tests the waters, who wants bread for the workers, decent pay for families to live on, an end to corruption.”
“And look where it’s got you.”
“I tell you, it’s got me thinking. Quitano has shown his hand. I know now the way is not through workers’ shows of strength. They will be mercilessly crushed.”
“There is another way?”
“There is. But it is not so direct.”
“What is it?”
“Basta ya, compañero. All these questions for me. What are you in this shit hole for? Come on, don’t be shy. Are you a maricón? Do you dress up in women’s clothing? Did you piss on a statue of General Quitano?”