The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  They returned to the stable and the father stated that Eduardo would begin the next morning. He would ride over to the doctor’s house by horse so as not to upset Armando’s routine and would wait outside. He would follow Armando every day thereafter, and in half a year he would help with his last harvest, see his last cane fire, and go off to university.

  The men shook hands once more, and when Armando made it home an hour later, he found another three pounds of sugar on his doorstep. Lifting his bounty off the ground, Armando believed, however foolishly, that diligent study and his own patience might somehow prepare Eduardo for the primary exams, maybe even for the college of dentistry.

  But that had been April. It was September now, and Armando awoke in bed next to a woman he’d cooked plantains for the previous night. The sheet was pulled down to their waists, and the woman’s breasts were exposed. Armando looked at the clock and saw that it was early still, so he touched the woman in the ribs. When she sighed, he bent over her chest and kissed her right nipple. He put a hand at her navel and with his long middle finger tickled the hairs growing up from her crotch. She opened her eyes and smiled. She kept them open the whole time, and she bit his ear when they were finished.

  Everyone here is hungry, Armando thought.

  Her name was Mercedes, and she had a sweet tooth, the same kind as Armando, weak and malleable. She was the fourth woman in a month he’d invited over for dinner and the third to have slept with him after dessert. She was the first he’d made advances upon the morning after, and he had not minded her sour, waking breath. Her sugary gums were gone from the night before, but Armando found her dry lips just as pleasant, their taste a mixture of sweat and stale fruit, and he wished he had the strength and time to touch her again. He wondered what other desserts he could make.

  Armando left her in bed for a cup of coffee that was gritty from too much sugar. Alone in the kitchen, he contemplated the economy of sugar, which, since that first sack in April, had become the economy of women and the economy of sex. Eduardo’s father plants a crop and waits for rain. A few months pass and the state laborers arrive. They burn the fields and harvest the stalks. The cane is bundled and shipped west to the processing plant. The sugar is refined and then it is bleached. It is sent to the Soviets or someone else, anywhere but north, and only the worst of it stays, given out in cups once a week to the farmhands, to the doctors, to the army, to everyone. Long live the state. I retrieve my cup every Saturday morning, along with rice and beans, perhaps some fish, a little salt, just enough for one good meal. I come back to my house and there is another sack of sugar for me, milled privately by the plantation manager. It is mine because I teach his son. We exchange food for thought. I take my sugar and grow fat on it. Every cup of coffee is a meal. When I realize there is too much and that I am losing my taste for it, I invite a woman over. She comes not because I am a handsome man, but because I am a doctor. I cook her dinner, and then dessert, which is when she decides to stay, because no one has enough sugar for candied plantains, or they have been saving up for a month. The woman is delighted, and we exchange food for sex. When I taste my sugar on her lips, it mixes with her spit and makes a syrup. My tooth aches once more, and I spend another week with Eduardo, waiting happily on another bag of crudely milled crystal. The system plays again.

  Mercedes walked into the kitchen wearing the light blue dress from the night before. The hem fluttered across her knees, and Armando remembered her walking into his room the same way, weightless and airy.

  “Where is your student?” she asked. Armando had told her about Eduardo over their salted fish and pinto beans.

  “It’s too early still.”

  “What will you teach him today?”

  “Bones.” It would be a start.

  Armando thought back to his own primaries twenty-one years ago. He tried to recall what they asked of him and how specific they were. He remembered naming the bones, identifying the muscles, marking tendons. Plenty of Latin.

  Mercedes poured herself a cup from the metal percolator and sat across from Armando at the table. Her hair was up, as it was at the tailor’s shop where Armando had found her. She was a seamstress, and she sipped the black water without adding any sugar.

  “You like it plain?” Armando asked.

  “I’ve gotten used to it this way.”

  “I have plenty.”

  She waved him off and then touched her cheek, which was red.

  “Perhaps you should shave this morning.”

  Armando blushed and felt his chin. The stubble was coarse and he could only imagine how gray. Thirty-nine was not so old, but he was an ancient bachelor. Mercedes could not have been more than thirty-six, and she had been the youngest so far. The others were forty-five, forty-seven, even fifty. Armando had been lucky, because there were not so many of them left, the women his age. Not enough, at least, for all the men who remained to marry, so he wondered how Mercedes was in Cuba.

  “Your family stayed?” he asked.

  “We had no money, and my uncle was a police officer. We thought he would join the army.”

  “He did not?”

  “They wanted only new men, no Batistianos. My uncle now runs our shop. We are from Camagüey but move between Cienfuegos and Guayabal. We follow the harvesters. Their denim always needs mending.”

  “Gypsies,” Armando teased. “How do you like these hills?”

  “They’re pretty at dusk.”

  “The rest of the time?”

  “Like any other hills,” she told him.

  “You would leave?”

  “Patalón?”

  “The island.”

  She answered quickly, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the days here are all the same,” she said. “They believe monotony is stability.”

  “You travel across the country.”

  “Going nowhere.”

  She looked down and sipped her black coffee. Armando nodded. Mercedes was not sad when she spoke, and there was a blank detachment in her voice. She was unlike the older women whose faces darkened when he asked them why they hadn’t left with relatives. It was as if she had not yet judged her circumstance fixed or fleeting, so why feel anything? Or perhaps she still believed she was going and that the journey was just long, circuitous, and one had to travel the island before finding a way out.

  “And you?” Mercedes asked.

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Everyone thinks about it.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “You have enough money?”

  “Some,” he answered, “but they would never let me go.” He showed his hands. “I am a good doctor here.”

  “You could be that somewhere else,” she chided. But then, politely, “You are also a good cook.”

  “Then we can eat again?” he asked.

  “Will you make plantains?”

  “If you like. If I can find some.” Armando had not tried to please a woman in a long time, and he hadn’t asked any of the other women to return. He felt his brow twitch. You attract flies with honey, but once they found it, would they stay?

  “To be honest, I like them for the sugar.”

  “It’s precious now.”

  “I don’t remember anyone, even my mother when I was a child, using it with such carelessness. It was criminal how you burned it in the pan.”

  “I have plenty,” Armando said.

  “Where do you get it from?” she finally asked. She added, “I won’t tell.”

  “You can’t tell. You’ve eaten some. You are my accomplice.”

  “So you steal it? From who? Your patients? How cruel!”

  She feigned disgust and Armando laughed. “Eduardo’s father. He is the plantation manager.”

  “A retired escopetero then, fed by Ortodoxo cane farmers.”

  “I was not a rebel.”

  “But you are now,” she joked.

  “Not quite,” he answered. She pressed her lips tog
ether and Armando wished he had played along.

  “But then you must be a wonderful teacher,” Mercedes offered.

  “The father hopes so.”

  “But you said the boy is not smart.”

  “No. He will probably fail.”

  “Then what becomes of your sugar?”

  “I have enough for one cup of coffee a day for three months.”

  “You would ration it like that?”

  Armando thought for a moment and said, “No. I would eat it all in a night and then tell stories of it for the rest of my life.” He had grown bold in the last month.

  She leaned across the table and kissed him.

  “I will come,” she said.

  “For another meal?”

  “For another dessert.”

  In the jeep Armando tried to quiz Eduardo on the bones of the body. “The humerus,” he said.

  “My arm.”

  “Which part?”

  The boy tapped near his elbow.

  “You will have to be specific,” Armando shouted over the engine.

  “The muscles are easier.”

  “Peroneus brevis?” Armando asked.

  “My leg,” Eduardo replied.

  Just outside the base, which was higher up in the hills, Armando stopped the car to put on his barracks coat. The ranking colonel had given it to him to wear when working at the infirmary, and it served as his army attire. He would see the colonel that morning. Armando had received a phone call at his office in town that the man was feeling ill and to come as soon as possible. Armando canceled two early appointments and prayed for a pregnant patient’s contractions not to get any closer. He’d told Eduardo to hurry and grab the travel kit.

  “You look like a recruit in your green jacket,” Eduardo said.

  “I am just following the rules.”

  “You also walk taller when we visit the barracks.”

  Armando looked at the boy before turning the ignition. He was slightly taller than his father, but had the same broad shoulders and the same coal-dark eyes. Eduardo had been born after 1959 and had no recollection of anything but his father’s sugarcane and the edges of this town. He was the first generation after the lost generation, the men and women who’d mostly left with their families before the coup.

  Armando had himself been in medical school, was almost done, and if he’d gone to Spain with his uncle, what would he have become? Maybe a paltry line cook like his uncle (who’d had his own restaurant in Colón), but more likely some laborer. A farmhand. The boy was a farmhand. He would have become Eduardo. And by the time he was a doctor, it was too late. But still he found himself thinking, I’d rather be a doctor in Cuba than a vagrant in Spain. Eduardo blinked his black eyes and Armando thought, he will never leave. He will never think to leave.

  “When you work with the army,” Armando said, “you will need to be as determined as they are.” Lies.

  Armando spun the tires out and raced toward the gate.

  The colonel was a large-nosed man who chewed on the end of an unlit cigar. He sat on an exam table with his shirt off and spoke to the ceiling. Armando walked up next to him, but Eduardo stood back near a table upon which he placed the travel kit.

  “It’s my carrot, Doctor. I can taste the leaf inside, and it keeps me going. Always more to be done for the state.”

  “Noble work,” Armando answered.

  “Yes,” the colonel said heavily, and he bit down on the cigar as if to reassure himself.

  His face sagged at the cheeks, and Armando thought, all the soldiers look the same. It must be tiresome to talk like that all day.

  “I hope I did not inconvenience you by asking you here so soon.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. I told the lieutenant to fix the window screen in my quarters yesterday, but he neglected to do so. When I woke this morning, my arm was covered in mosquitoes, and now I feel like the plague. Malaria, I suspect.”

  “A reasonable conclusion, sir.” Armando leaned over the prostrate colonel. “May I take your temperature first?”

  The man grunted.

  Eduardo brought out a thermometer and carried it to the examination table. Armando took it from the boy and placed it inside the colonel’s mouth. He checked the man’s forehead. The skin was dry and cool. He felt the man’s throat, pushing his thumbs into the brown skin. But the colonel was thick in the neck, and Armando had to search for the glands.

  “Excuse the pressure, sir.” There was no swelling, and Armando took his hands away.

  “How did you sleep last night?” he asked.

  “Fine,” the colonel mumbled. “Better than I should have, considering the bugs.”

  “No tossing or turning? No trembling?”

  The colonel shook his head.

  Armando examined the eyes. The colonel looked left, right, down, and up. The sclera were clean and white.

  “Blink, please.”

  The pupils expanded and retracted nicely. With his chin so close to the colonel’s mouth, Armando could smell his breath. Salt and fish. He stood back up and took the thermometer out from under the colonel’s tongue. His temperature was normal.

  “The pain is more abdominal, Doctor.”

  Armando quickly prodded the man’s girth. His hands slid from the sternum down to the navel. He pushed down on the bowels, and when the colonel let out a small sigh, Armando stopped.

  “It might be malaria, sir, but it is impossible to tell just now. You are right to worry about the mosquitoes. I will leave some medicine, just a few pills, and should you take them tonight and tomorrow, you will be fine. As I said, it might or might not be malaria. Too soon to tell. But the pills—two today, four tomorrow, two the next morning—and some rest will ensure that if it is indeed malaria, we will take it out before it gets underway.”

  “Fine, Doctor.”

  Armando walked over to his travel kit and spoke to Eduardo. “Fix a bottle for the colonel. Eight capsules of Diocyclin.” Eduardo stared a moment but then did as he was told.

  “We will check with you tomorrow morning and then again the day after,” Armando told the colonel.

  On the road Armando drove as fast as he could up the hill toward town. He checked his watch and determined that his pregnant patient would be fully dilated in about an hour. Eduardo had been quiet since leaving the barracks.

  “Does the colonel have malaria?” he asked.

  Armando could not hear him. “What?”

  “Is the colonel really sick?”

  “No,” Armando shouted, then, “sort of. He has a loose stool. Two months ago he complained the same way after attending a fishing competition and eating grouper. He cannot stomach fish oil. He had something on his breath, probably sardines. He was not really sick. Just suffering from bad digestion.”

  “Then why did you pretend?”

  “The man would not believe me if I told him his pain was just indigestion.”

  “But you are the doctor.”

  Armando could see then what Eduardo thought of medicine. It was like the boy and his mule. One held the secret knowledge. One was stupid. One led and one followed. Eduardo would be the master and his patients would listen, mindful of the curb chain.

  “My job is to make people feel better.”

  “Even if it is a lie?” Eduardo asked.

  “It is not a lie.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Armando thought of his maxim: better to be a doctor in Cuba … No, a doctor helps people however he can. “Never mind. You can’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Tell me,” Eduardo demanded.

  “Enough!” Armando shouted. He put his hand up, and the boy sank into his seat. “You can’t understand,” he said, and the jeep lumbered back down the hill toward Patalón.

  Armando’s pregnant patient had already miscarried twice before, and it was a small miracle she’d come to full term. He ordered Eduardo to arrange
the back room as quickly as possible, and when the boy lagged, Armando did not hesitate to raise his voice.

  The woman was twenty-seven, and her husband worked at the post office in town. He used to deliver the mail, but now he sorted envelopes. The woman was a schoolteacher, and she would have two weeks after their child was born before returning to work. Armando told the woman she would need more time. She’d shrugged at him.

  When Eduardo called that the room was ready, Armando and the woman’s midwife, an aunt perhaps, lifted her onto the bed and the clean sheets Eduardo had drawn. The boy watched from a corner of the room as Armando undid the woman’s gown and positioned her on the mattress, pushing her legs up into the stirrups and propping her head against an old pillow.

  “Lots of towels, Eduardo, and two basins of clean, warm water. Then go to the rations house and ask for ice.”

  Armando prepped a side table with forceps, retractors, clamps, and a scalpel. Before pulling it up to the bed, he draped a towel across the top and hid the knife. He did not want to frighten the woman. Since the morning, her contractions had peaked, coming in quick waves. The midwife squeezed the woman’s hand and pressed down on her forehead. The woman’s breaths were short, but when Armando tested her pulse, it held. The child’s head was turned by the time Eduardo returned.

  Armando had not asked the boy if he’d wanted to see this. He had never asked him what he did or did not want to see, and Eduardo had never shied away from a procedure or sick patient. You could see as much on the plantation: farm accidents were not uncommon, and machetes cut fingers off every season. Sows were slaughtered, mares gave birth to foals, and this arrangement had been the father’s idea anyway.

  But the boy moved off to the side of the bed, and he did not stop to look. In his hands the bag of ice shook. Armando thought, the boy has not had sex yet. He is a nervous virgin.

  “Good,” Armando said to him. “Put the bag in the sink and bring a cup of ice to our patient.”