Every first friday of the month Justo came at dawn to kneel before the sweet-faced angel guarding his family’s plot. He brought fresh lilies to match the angel’s stone bouquet, and prayed. He prayed for the souls of his loved ones, dead and living. He prayed for the strength to hold himself steady as a family man in the disturbing winds of change. Someday he and Rosella would rest beneath the angel, forever holding hands throughout eternity. Justo wondered if his daughters would join them. Everything was happening so fast now. Who knows if they would keep the connection. Justo tried to instill in them the connection, the pride. Maybe, if they had been boys, he could have done better. He didn’t know. He thought himself a failure with his own women. He knew how to love and protect them, but did he truly know how to guide them? Justo felt his daughters respected far more their own female charms than their family past. Maybe that too was his fault. Lately he doubted his masculine purpose. The women had done that to him. Would they ever understand Abuelo as he had? Could they conjure Abuelo whacking his metal-tipped tamarind cane on the grocería floor, raging about the betrayal of General Narciso López’s ragtag army training to invade Cuba from America? Would they remember that López’s army was ordered disbanded by President Taylor, and when López’s ill-trained men landed at Cardenas in the 1850s they were devoured by the Spanish jackals? Abuelo had stormed in the back room of the grocería that America would again betray Cuba. Abuelo knew this in his bones. Cubans had to rely on Cubans. That was the history lesson. Justo wondered if his daughters would ever understand their old grandfather, dying of grief and hacking a cancerous cigar cough one week after the Bay of Pigs invasion proved his prophecy of America’s betrayal correct. Abuelo’s tamarind cane rested now in Justo’s living room, next to a statue of the Virgin Mother beneath which Rosella always kept the flame of a novena candle burning. Would his daughters remember they were Tamarindos, carved from the tree of Cuban liberation? Justo always asked himself these questions as he came upon the small family plot with its neatly lined rectangles of aboveground whitewashed graves.
Ocho stopped again, tipping his long nose in the air, sniffing at uncertainty, then moved slowly toward Abuelo’s grave at the center of Justo’s family plot. A tall stone cross was affixed atop the plain headstone with the chiseled words: MANUELO DIEGO ROSA TAMARINDO ??—1961. Ocho looked back at Justo. Justo grabbed the dog’s collar, yanking the surprised animal away from the grave. Two streaks of blood, crossed in the shape of an X, had been slashed across the white rectangle of Abuelo’s grave. The blood had come from the slit belly of a South American bufo toad perched dead and drained in the center of the X. The warty five-pound blob’s bulged eyes were crudely sewn shut with fishing line, its mouth closed by a nail hammered through the head and out the lower jaw. At the foot of Abuelo’s grave a sheet of white paper was weighted down by a rock. Justo turned cautiously, looking back up the long avenue behind him. No one there. Far across the horizon of tombstones, at the entrance to the cemetery, there was only the distant silhouette of a lone bicyclist. Probably someone pedaling a shortcut path through the cemetery on his way to work downtown. Justo turned back to Abuelo’s grave. He held Ocho’s collar tightly. The milky substance which had foamed from the toad’s mouth and coagulated on its fat lips contained a poison which could send a big dog into convulsions, drop a small dog dead. The blood on the grave glistened, still fresh. Someone knew Justo’s habits, knew he would be at the cemetery this first friday of the month. Justo slipped the white paper from beneath the rock on the grave. He held it up to read words written in elaborate cursive flair:
OLD FILOR’S SLY AS DE MOUSE
LOCKED DEM NIGGERS IN DE MARKET HOUSE
KEPT DEM DERE TIL HAF PASS NINE
FIVE DOLLAHS WAS DERE FINE
RUN, NIGGER, RUN! FILOR WILL GIT YOU!
WISH I WAS IN FILOR’S PLACE
TO GIVE DEM NIGGERS A LONGER RACE!
The name Zobop was signed at the end with a purple felt-tip pen. Beneath the name was sketched a slinking snake with a man’s face, a hissing snake’s tongue extended from the human lips. The creature wore a jaunty black top hat.
Ocho lunged at the toad. Justo dragged the dog further back. He looked around among the weeds and plastic flowers for a stick to knock the ugly creature from Abuelo’s resting place. There were no sticks, just skink lizards skittering away from the disturbance. Justo made the sign of the cross, then stepped onto Abuelo’s grave, kicking the dead weight of the toad with the toe of his shoe. He crushed the sheet of white paper into a tiny ball, hurled it over the right wing of the sweet-faced angel guarding his family. He remembered the words Casa mala nunca muere. Abuelo was so fond of saying these words as he leaned on the handle of the tamarind cane looking into Justo’s young eyes. A bad thing never dies.
Justo turned his back on the bad thing and clutched the gold wishbone at his throat like a man gasping for life-giving air. The veins of his thick neck swelled as he strode down Third Avenue in the city of the dead. In the tumult of his mind two lines of poetry came up from the past to carry him far and away from this evil, a revelation in repose only now awakening to true meaning.
When in the white pooh of Europas rose
The virginal and naked hunting tribe …
Some things are best left undisturbed.
THERE is the buzz of heat, scuttle of crabs, creak of deceit, cracking light. There is the steady scurry of decay, the slow hum of tropical time. Thump-thump, it beats a two-step reality in the hurricane dance of my many minds. Soon the furious Eye passes through dead hearts, stirs stormy rebirth. I await. You must pay the band if you want to dance. I above all am the Devil Dancer if nothing else, nothing else except uneasiness, uncertainty honed to edgy anticipation. I am the bee in your ear, the scorpion in your bed, the rat clawing in your belly, scratching in the palm tree outside your window, watching through amber eyes. My mind throbs like the scarlet blow-bubble throat of a chameleon caught on a tin-rusted roof after hiss of rain. Beware your history does not escape me, for I existed here before Ponce de León touched these shores in 1513, that great greedy man himself, all feathered pomp and powdered cheeks, discovering not land, not ocean, but a bastard world of both, from sun to shining sea, a humid hole in the middle of the New World, a martyred universe of twisted knife-sharp coral jutting through tepid brine, a limbo de León named Los Matires, then abruptly left to his nightmares, setting quick sail for luminous youthful vistas, toward visions of waterspouts towering on the distant horizon, filled with the honey of other men’s money, and the promised milky rape of eyeless daughters. I existed before other forms of life on these Pleistocene rocks of the swampy Florida Keys. Existed when stone crabs were embryonic ghostly shadows, before their crusted shells turned yellow, before their pinching claw tips turned black to hook unsuspecting prey from briny sleep. I am a Devil Wind born in the Sahara, a destined swirl of dust rising from Africa, breathing the Atlantic’s hot breath as I whirl my course toward you across water. No ancient reef of coral can protect you, nor modern highway bridged across the sea offer you escape. No painted plaster Virgin planted in a man-made grotto of cement will miraculously stand up to protect you against my vicious velocity. The winds of scorn fill my sails. I spit on your castrated creations, your puny world of microchips, the Bible and Moby Dick. When I talk to Jesus I call him collect. I am what is least in your world and foremost in mine, a proud beast. I am a lactating drama with breasts bound. I am every generation suckling. I rut with flies and dine with fleas. I allow fish to lament and bats to copulate with hummingbirds. I have seen your Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, have slept under the thumb of your dissatisfactions. If I throw my hat to the tides it will burn a hole through to China. So when you see me, beware that it is not me, for you see me in yourself. Always after the passion of a passing tropical storm an unearthly air settles over my island, leaden clouds descend to fill this brazen melting pot. The azure sea becomes mute and sighs a blank, unforgiving stare at the exposed heavens above.
> Take my hand. I will not hurt you. You should know me well enough by now. We are friends, you and I, less than brother and sister, more than lovers of pig bone and haters of green monkey blood. Take my hand. You need me. You need my comforting wasp tongue. I am the one who stands vigilant at the gate of waters. Without me there is no purity, all would be waste, your soul would be so much mold on rancid breadfruit cake. Take my hand to where it leads you. Follow me to your own history. You don’t know your own history, do you? That is why you are doomed without me. You don’t know the history of your world, cannot remember from day to day what happened in your own life. You are human, less than animal, for a dog never falls in the same hole twice. You need me now more than ever, take my hand. Does it feel moist? You need my moist hand to guide you. This is the end of the road, this is your way out from the past. Your future begins here, on this mute coral rock, this splayed backbone of calcified dreams. Yes, you will need a guide for this journey through the fractured present. You can’t go somewhere from nowhere, so I will light the way. Does my moist hand feel like an unhatched leatherback turtle egg, newly oozed from the sphincteral release of its thirteen-hundred-pound holy mother? Be careful with my hand, it is fragile and uneasy, as are all turtle eggs tucked into sandy nests beyond high tideline, eggs abandoned by a mother in full moonlight, who only departs the sea in the whole of her life to instigate new life. The rocking sea cradles creation, the shore steadies the consequence. Is my hand warm, like the sunbaked membrane of an unhatched leatherback egg? What do you care? You don’t. That is why you build condominiums and shopping centers where the turtles are given their first shot at survival, freshly cracked from their eggs, and in their moment of stunned originality they mistake your beams of man-made light for the reflective lure of rocking mother ocean. They head into your false light toward crushing doom of automobile tires, toward domestic cat’s claws and rats crazed on eating domestic trash, toward the doom of your modern tundra. The turtles are like Boteros, the refugee boat people lured to your shores by bright promises, by beacons of get rich quick schemes, get so rich your children won’t have to work schemes. Lured by a brightly lighted universe of falsity, where your sullen young are pampered and exalted. You don’t believe me? Listen to your own radiowaves, bearing in the air spores of indolence, crackling with cranky adolescent mewings, an atmosphere of arrogance rife with pimply cravings, lust born of boredom. The insides of your ears have been chewed out by this perpetual rot. You no longer hear the sound of your own ignorance, no longer abide by laws of Nature, deny the wisdom of age. Your mind grows younger as you grow older. You think you are the second coming of Ponce de León, have discovered your personal Milky Way of eternal juicy fruit. Go ahead, take a bite of your perverse produce. You bite down on a big lie, its swallowed pit of decay will grow to a wasp in your gut, bees will bleed from your ears. Hush. Don’t cry. My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don’t you? You don’t like my chat, are fearful of fact. You can hear me but can’t see me. You feel only moisture in your palm, sweat on the back of your neck. You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t know what thoughts rush through my stillborn brain. My brain is like the Gulf Stream twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater than the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thoughts flowing within society’s surrounding sea, a stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury, stalking like a submerged caged beast with no tail or head, like the Gulf Stream stalks, between Africa and the Americas, its great muscular force pacing incessant circles between Old and New Worlds, without beginning, without amens. I have no history because I am stillborn, laden with prescient knowledge. But I refuse to be born into your world, a hapless turtle blinded by condo parking lot glare, my centuries of blood instinct confused, thinking my fins are pushing me toward full moon luminescence. In your world birds and crabs are no longer the sole predators of my turtle’s soul, for it is not the lunar pull at all which guides me now, but falsity of light.
Don’t go. Come back. I promise to be good. If you stay I will tell you a secret. Do you like secrets? Of course you do, all greedy children love secrets, and you are nothing if not a perpetual adolescent. Isn’t that what your society breeds in you? Is not that what is reflected in the rearview mirror of your soul, for is not the soul of your universe the automobile? The automobile is what brought you down here, driving into an ocean larger than Europe on a slot of concrete highway bridged between forty-three islands. Or did you come by aluminum wing, by airplane? You are lucky you have wings to fly with, for you have destroyed the beautiful West Indian doves that once migrated here. Now only the white-crowned pigeon survives, to chart its atavistic course once a year across the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to Florida. The first scheduled airline flights over water from a foreign country to America followed the course of the defunct West Indian dove, from Havana to Key West. Your pilots did not have sophisticated radio communications then. They had only carrier pigeons, which they took aloft with them in small wooden cages, ready to be released, to fly to Key West with messages of help banded around their fragile legs. You have destroyed nearly all of Nature’s winged wonders which once flew over these waters, the rest you have caged and perverted to sustain your murderous existence. Yes, I do mean murderous. You exalt your killers, like that son of a slave-dealing sea captain who headed here in the first half of the last century, your Mr. Audubon, who slaughtered fabulous feathered creatures, wing-shot hundreds of great marbled godwits and great white herons, all for the vanity of painting his version of their image. This son of a dusky Dominican slave mistress likened himself to an Egyptian pharmacopolist embalming the Pharaohs, and counted among his closest friends American firearms dealers and aristocratic European perverts who coveted their egg collections of endangered and extinct birds. Yes, your beloved folk hero trekked a lifetime in search of ornithological splendor with the thumping elephantine desire of killing life to preserve it. This obsessive scribbler, whose very name rings with ecological righteousness, was a wanton destroyer of the very thing he sought to salvage. So you see, I am not the morally bent, stubby creature you make me out to be. I am upright; it is your heroes who are face down in the slime of revisionist history, bubbles of lies exuding from their nostrils. If you do not cling to my truth you too shall unravel. Do you think I tell only things you don’t want to hear? Do you think I keep you here only on pretext of letting you in on my little secret? Are you beginning to believe I don’t have a secret? Ah, you know me well enough by now, don’t you? You know enough to understand I am special, like a queer feeling in your throat, a pain in your heart, a dead bird in your hand.
You have a fascinating problem. Because you don’t know your own history you are headed for a downfall. Even though you are repelled by me, you know you need me to catch you when the fall comes. That is why you are pleading with me to tell you something other than unsettling truth, soothe you with something pretty, coo over flight of yellow-crowned night herons, sing of brilliantly hued angelfish, moo about saving the manatees from speedboat propellers, tittle your sense of injustice by flapping about nearly extinct Florida panthers being slaughtered on alligator highways cutting through the last Everglades. You desire I slither like a barracuda, slink like a sand shark, dart like an egret, soar like an osprey over red mangroves. You desire anything except what I am, truthsayer. For generations you have been pumping three to eight million gallons a day of your filth through a two-foot pipe into the ship channel no more than four thousand feet offshore of this island you call home. Your human waste floats and beckons to diving gulls and greedy bottom fish, a dark stain on pure waters, a gaseous floating wreath your children call the Shit Slick. While you chuckle and clink the ice in your cocktail glass beneath a dimming sun-pricked sky, oceans die all around, dolphins weep, flying fish scream. It wasn’t enough for you whe
n one man fishing alone could catch a thousand pounds of king mackerel a day, jigging his bright lures to attract excited flash of schooling fish. No, handlining was too slow. Now you chase the excited schools from overhead in spotter planes, sending your diesel-powered prowling posse of big boats out to corral with nets in hours what has taken Nature an infinity to produce. Soon you shall have fished the seas dry. Then you will be reduced to jigging your own Shit Slick. Forced to dine on flesh fed by your own excrement. And you ask me to talk pretty to you. To tell you comfortable lies about progress being your only business. You are disappointed because I won’t rhapsodize about Jamaican dogwood in bloom, recount the fifty-two color patterns that recur in the Keys tree snail. Why should I tell you about illusive tree snails which feed on tree-bark lichen, knowing that as I speak you charge their minute domain with bulldozers and poison their insides with insecticides? You have transformed these martyred rocks of the Florida Keys into profane monuments. To guide your maritime commerce of plunder you have built lighthouses one hundred feet above sea level, their beckoning beams penetrating nocturnal ocean wilderness, cutting counterfeit paths across the passage of migrating birds which fly from night, winded creatures, bewildered as they crash into brilliant traps, frail bodies smashing against hot orbs of false light. The spring and fall tides of the Gulf of Mexico are littered with the feathered kill of your insensitivity.
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