by David Poyer
Dan looked out the window. “Yeah?”
“My friends all knew. I finally opened my eyes and saw what had been right in front of me. That’s what made me realize that I had to get out. For my own sanity and for Bartholomew—for Billy’s.” She paused. “Is that what your wife did? Have an affair?”
“I told you that.”
“Not till tonight.”
“I told you that first time I met you.”
“So you know how it feels,” she said in a faint voice.
He thought, What is this? He jerked the curtain closed, went over to her, ran his hands down her back under the robe.
“I locked his door,” she murmured.
He uncovered her long pale body, her hollow thighs. He thought of Baird’s heavy white breasts, of Little Mary’s dark nipples. He pushed her down on the rug and plunged into her, riding the bone at the bottom of her belly with his weight till she tightened in a choked, shuddering murmur.
THEIR clothes were scattered over the couch and the coffee table. They lay together on the floor.
She whispered, “Have you been seeing Sibylla?”
“What?”
“I said, have you been seeing Sibylla Baird? The artist?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She stretched out a blue-shadowed arm for her wine. She sounded cool, but her hand was trembling. “Where did that come from?” he asked her.
“She’s a friend of mine. Have you been dating her?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me. I’d like the truth, please.”
“Well then—yes.”
“How many other women have you been seeing, Dan? Since you started dating me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know, Dan. You must keep score. In your head, at least.”
“Holy shit.” He sat up. “What is this? Do you want a list?”
“Yes. Why don’t you make me a list, Dan. Just so we both know.”
“All right. Jesus. Three.”
“That you dated?”
“Yes.”
He saw her ribs rise and fall as she took a deep breath and let it out. Her fingertips gripped the skin of her belly into faint pale wrinkles. “Did you go to bed with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh God. Did you, Dan?”
“ … Yeah.”
“With Sibylla?”
“Yeah.”
“And the others …”
“Yes.”
“Do I know them? The others?”
“No.”
She reached out suddenly and he flinched, but she only grabbed at her robe. She shook a cigarette out with quick nervous motions and lighted it, and he saw that she was weeping.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to know.”
“Is that supposed to be thoughtful? Am I supposed to thank you for that?”
He didn’t answer. She went on, “I know. You didn’t promise anything. Maybe I’m being naïve about all this. I guess that’s the way things are these days … the dating scene … .” She tilted her head back and breathed smoke into the empty air. “Maybe I’m the trouble. I need a man as part of my life. And Billy does, too … . Believe me, I know I shouldn’t love you. But I’m afraid I do. Maybe it’s my fault that you felt like you needed the others. If I’d said it sooner, maybe you wouldn’t have needed to look elsewhere for whatever—whatever it is they gave you.”
He felt sorry for her, but it was irritating, too. He’d never promised her a damn thing, and she was acting like it was the end of the world. “I don’t want you to love me.”
“Why not?”
He couldn’t tell her what the real reasons were, that he just didn’t like her enough. She was too clinging; she smoked; her accent, the ugly dress shields … “I don’t know. I just don’t want to love anybody anymore.”
“Didn’t it feel good, what we just did? Don’t you want to keep on doing it?”
“Sure, but now you’re talking about something else, okay? It’s just not on my list of priorities right now. You’re acting like my mother—”
“Your mother? What just happened was not exactly maternal, Dan.”
“The way you want to know every little detail of what I’m feeling.”
“Oh my God. When you love somebody, you want to know. You don’t want to just be bodies rubbing in the night.”
“Cute. But I don’t feel like being owned, Bev. Can’t we just enjoy each other?” He rolled over and got up, looked around for his shorts, found them under a cushion. “That was what I liked about you. That we could just be together and you wouldn’t start demanding stuff.”
“I knew that before you told me, Dan—that you didn’t want me to love you. You’re right, sex is good, but I can’t leave my feelings at the door. I might as well go to an aerobics class.”
“Well, you’re not getting any more out of me than that,” he said, knowing it was too blunt and too coarse, but she just wasn’t getting it.
“But I can offer you more, Dan. Companionship. Friendship. Billy needs a dad. And I can offer … what your ex-wife didn’t. I won’t do what she did to you.”
Something huge and painful was welling up deep inside, something that wanted to tear its way out, but he couldn’t let it. He kept getting dressed. He was crying, too; he couldn’t tell why, whether from her pain or his own. “But I don’t want that,” he said. “Not now.”
“What do you want, then? Whatever it is, I can do it. You don’t have to leave. Dan? Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer, just pulled the door closed. He slammed his boot down again and again on the bike, kicking it into life as if he was kicking something else to death.
HE ran the dark streets as fast as he dared, gunning through yellow lights and red, too, if he didn’t see anyone coming. After several miles, the wind dried his tears to itchy trails of salt. At the gate he flicked the lights off, held up his ID as he rolled through; the guard gave him a bored wave. He headed down to the dry docks and turned right. He slowed when he came opposite the football field, lighted and empty under the stars, then gunned it again. Instead of turning, he headed down Hobson, shifting up and booting it till the engine boomed back from the slab concrete of the enlisted quarters and engineering buildings.
The Fleet Bar was almost empty. He hung his helmet and jacket and got a seat. His mind was a foam of self-loathing and anger, so seething that he couldn’t tell how the hell he felt. Fuck her! What did she expect from him? He’d never promised her a thing; then suddenly, surprise, time for the prostate examination! “Double martini,” he grunted, and the bartender pulled the bottle of already-mixed off its bed of ice and topped him up till the clear liquid bulged. Dan slapped a dollar on the wood and the guy went away, came back, left two quarters shining beside his glass.
He took his time sipping it, sitting there looking out the window, letting himself cool off.
Below was the river. The Fleet Bar was out on the point where Naval Base, Charleston, poked out into the curve of the Cooper. Beyond it was nothing, just low marsh and spoil that at night was only a black void smelling of dead fish. After a while, he got bored with it and swung around on the stool and looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar.
Looked at his beard.
He’d grown it during the divorce, when he didn’t like what was happening, who he was, or anything else and wanted to change everything. He remembered when he’d stopped shaving, the standard Navy razz: You look like a movie star with that beard; do you smoke cigars? No, why? Too bad, you’d look just like Lassie taking a shit.
He contemplated it now from between the stacks of shot glasses, the hangers of Beer Nuts. It looked all right, looked good, in fact. A couple of people had said it made him look older, but most women liked it. Little Mary liked it.
“Another, friend?”
He nodded. A basket of popcorn rocked to a halt beside him and he reached out for a handful
, chased it with cold gin.
He could refuse to cut it.
Sure, and then what? Like somebody had said—he forgot who—the Navy didn’t care about big fuckups. But a little thing like not shaving … Was it worth losing his career over?
Career, he thought viciously, what career? He’d made it this far, but how much chance did he have of making the cut for lieutenant commander? Or screening for XO? Not much, with the lousy fitness reports from Sundstrom in his jacket and the letter of reprimand he’d gotten—that he’d demanded—after Ryan went down. Now, looking back, he couldn’t believe he’d done that. He’d really shot himself in the foot on that one.
It was time to get serious.
And if he wasn’t going any further, maybe he ought to think seriously about what came next.
FINALLY, he’d soaked up enough that he didn’t give a shit about Beverly Strishauser or the Navy or anybody else. He staggered outside and fumbled with the key. It wouldn’t go into the ignition. He forced it, then heard a snap. When he held it to the light, the break gleamed. “Fuck,” he said, and kicked the bike. It wobbled, then fell over, and he heard the crash and tinkle as the other turn signal went.
A long storm-tossed time later, he came to in front of his mirror, in his stateroom. What was this, the world was made of fucking mirrors? His roommate stirred. Dimly, he remembered slamming the door open. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
He stared at himself in the harsh light from the fluorescent a foot above. Black shadows half-erased his face. It seemed to shift from moment to moment, as if there were another, deeper visage beneath what shimmered in the silver surface. Through the roar of alcohol, he dimly knew and dimly feared what he’d feel like tomorrow.
That bitch. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
He leaned, staggering, over the stainless bowl and hit the tap. Air sucked in an expiring hiss, then water stammered out. It was spring-loaded like all shipboard taps and he had to hold it open till the bowl filled. As he searched through the cabinet, bottles fell out, clanged on the sink. His roommate turned over. “Hell you doing,” he grunted.
“Don’t care,” he mumbled. “Go back ta sleep.” He found what he wanted and sprayed his hand full, then rubbed the cold foam over his chin.
He didn’t feel anything when he dragged the razor savagely through the beard. It didn’t want to come off. He had to go over and over the tender unexposed skin. He didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t till someone naked and unfamiliar stared back at him that he noticed the blood. All the blood.
13
Alcorcón, Cuba
THE palms clashed restlessly in the gusty wind and small animals scuttled frantically away through the leaves. A full moon blinked through tumbling clouds. Palmetto fronds slashed like living machetes at her hands. It had rained heavily that day; the dry season was over. As she followed the other shadows, Graciela breathed what was less air than a compound of water vapor and marsh stink. And millions of mosquitoes, she thought. They droned and whined as boots and bare feet scuffed over the wet leaves. They brushed her face like the webs the great crab spiders wove between the trees, across the footpaths that threaded the canebrakes and thickets and broken unfarmable salt ground that bordered the edge of the Bahía Jigiiey.
As she stumbled after the vanishing forms ahead, gasping for breath, she remembered burying Armando.
They’d put him in the ground behind the abandoned church, near his grandparents. There were no prayers. It had been a long time since there were priests at Alcorcón. So in the end, they’d just stood at the grave in silence, then placed their flowers and left.
Her bare foot stepped on something that jerked and writhed to escape her weight. The snakes of Cuba weren’t poisonous, but it startled her. “Quiet,” someone muttered, and she collected herself and shut her lips firmly and went on. How much farther? Her legs were growing heavy. She’d worked all day planting cane, and now the baby kicked and it was hard to breathe.
“Estoy cansada”, she murmured. And the whisper came back, “Tell those who are tired to keep quiet; we’re almost there.”
And in truth, they came out into the open only a few hundred meters farther on. The moonlight silvered a grassy hillside above a darkness that could have been a brush-filled ravine. Then the clouds slid closed again and the world was only sound: the trickle of water, the throaty baying of frogs. She sank to her knees, gasping shallow breaths around the other body within her own. Maybe she shouldn’t have come. But she couldn’t have stayed away, either.
She knew what they were going to discuss tonight, far from those who listened and punished.
Around the clearing, the others settled to their haunches or sat, brushing the grass first. The moon emerged, fingering their faces with swaying palm shadows, then waned again.
“Have the policía talked with you?” a man said from the far side of the circle. Those were the first words.
“They came to my house.”
“Colón spoke to me at the store. Took me aside there and spoke to me.” Ramón Colón was the head of the committee of vigilance for the batey.
“Of the guitar?”
“Yes.”
“What is this guitar of which they are speaking?”
“It must be a code. They want to know what it means.”
“Why ask us? We’re peasants. There’s no place in the world farther from anything than Alcorcón.”
“All we know is to work and stand in line for beans, meat every nine days. A man can’t live on that.”
“It’s not healthy for the children,” said a female voice. Good, she wasn’t the only woman. It was strange, this circle of the shadows, like the old stories of the assembly of spirits, the unhappy dead … but these were living voices—neighbors, relatives, people she’d worked beside for years in field and mill and warehouse.
The first voice, the one that had mentioned the police, said now, “Something’s going to happen. What have we done, that they’re afraid? Nothing, right?”
“Right, Tomás.”
“Tomás” was Tomás Guzman Arredondo, her husband’s younger cousin. He’d been in the army, had fought in Angola under the famous general Arnaldo Ochoa, had left a hand behind in Ethiopia.
“Don’t use names. Just say ‘man,’ all right?”
“Perdón.”
“Like I was saying, we haven’t done anything, but here they are trying to frighten us. They don’t come around like that unless they’re getting something ready.”
The men talked on, the low voices of a card game or a life-and-death discussion. Graciela rocked, wincing as the baby dug its heels into her ribs. It didn’t know that hurt her. It didn’t know there was anything beyond the warm dark that surrounded it. But one day, it would be driven out, angry, screaming, terrified, into a world that would kill a child without remorse, that rewarded with survival only those who were willing to fight for it every second of their lives.
“So we talk, and talk. That doesn’t change anything. He talks, too, the bearded one. Eight million tons of this, forty thousand hectares of that. Four hours you listen, then when he’s done, you wake up and say to yourself, ‘What mierda.’ If everything’s so great, how is it we still have nothing? Can every grain of rice be going to the stinking Russians? But still you have to stand and clap just like you believe such garbage.”
Someone said, “Remember Silvio? I wonder what happened to Silvio.”
“He left, chico.”
“Disappeared.”
“He ran.”
“What do you mean, ran? He escaped, that’s what he did.”
“I will explain the difference, amigo. If a young man leaves, a person without ties, to make himself a better life, that’s escaping, no? But if someone like Silvio Padrón leaves his family here for us to feed, five kids, his pobre wife too sick to work—that’s running. What kind of man would leave his family at the mercy of wild beasts?”
“I disagree. Who is to say what was in his heart? Maybe he just couldn’t take it
anymore.”
“Elisa’s right. Why judge him? He had to leave, and maybe we do, too.”
No one spoke for a while, then someone murmured, “You’re right. I say so, too. ¡Irnos para el carajo de aquí!”
“It’s all very well for you to say let’s get the hell out of here, but what about those of us with families?”
“We take them, too—unless we are truly worms.”
“I don’t know about you, but my kids are little. They shoot people trying to escape. I hate the fucking Colons, too, but I’m a father.”
“So what, you son of a bitch? We’re all fathers.”
“What do you think, abuelo? You’ve seen all this before, with the Batistianos.”
An aged voice, whispery as the wind in the palms: “Us old people, our lives have been lived. But Tómas is right. It’s never been this bad before. If you young people can find a way, go.”
“You’re all crazy. How are we going to leave? Grow gossamer wings and fly away? There’s no way out of here.”
“Oh yes, there is. By boat.”
“That is evident, my friend. It is also evident that we have no boats,” said someone else sarcastically.
“They have them at the playa. I saw pictures—”
“We are not permitted to visit the playa. That is for foreigners only, and those in the Party. My son worked at the power plant there one summer, at Nuevitas, and they took him to the beach at Santa Lucía. They scrutinize your documents and take you off the bus at once if you do not have the proper pass. During the day, airplanes fly up and down the coast. At night, the guards patrol with dogs. If they catch anyone on the beach, they shoot to kill.”
“Forget the beaches. If people could leave from there, Fidel and his fucking brother would be the only ones left in Cuba.”
“Anyway, how can we do anything? The Colons probably have a chivato here right now. When he gets back, he’ll slip them a note and we’ll have to explain all this to the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.”