Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  When she woke, the ship was calm and there was no sound of rain. The quiet seemed especially so for having followed the stormy night. She could see a thin line of colored light feathering the horizon, a peek of the sun’s red petticoat. The ocean had a dullish shine like something that had been glazed in butter and then chilled in the refrigerator. She pitched herself up against the window to see the water better, looking for some indication that they had passed through that dashed line and into the tropics, but it was hard to know what to look for. After all her daydreaming in front of the globe, peering like a giant over the tiny letters of “Tropic of Cancer,” she was in the place that the globe depicted. And yet the globe seemed more real. A map illustrated relationships among islands and seas and continents. The water she could see from the ship porthole illustrated nothing—just water, with no daisy chains or markers of any kind. She’d read about a woman from Guernsey who threw a bottle into the ocean with a message inside. It floated all the way to Africa and was tossed up on the beach at Dakar. The man who found it wrote to the woman from Guernsey. Upon receiving his letter, she invited him to dinner. The newspaper article didn’t say whether he was planning to attend. It seemed like an awfully long way to go.

  The clock read 5:00 A.M. What now?

  It was early, but there was nothing to do but get dressed—quietly, or someone would tell her to go back to bed. She put on the new outfit she’d gotten at the Miami Sears, a brown, dotted Swiss dress with a white pinafore. She hated dresses. She wanted to wear denim pants with rolled cuffs and checked Western shirts like Hopalong Cassidy. Her father sometimes called her Tex instead of Everly. He meant to tease her, but she enjoyed the nickname and sometimes thought of herself as Tex, Tex Lederer. It had a ring. She’d once seen real cowboys. They came to an Oak Ridge square dance, government-hired construction people who lived beyond the security fence in Clinton. “Hillbillies,” her mother had called them. They showed up in pointy boots and cowboy hats and Western shirts, the fancy kind with white piping. They got drunk and acted rowdy and started a fight. The hillbillies weren’t invited back, and at the next dance an armed security guard sat by the door. Her mother said they’d only been included to make the dance, with its hay bales and Western band, seem more authentic. “Authenticity,” she’d said, “is not always a good idea.”

  At the Sears in Miami, everyone got to pick out something special for Cuba. Her father, a stack of short-sleeved Dacron shirts. Stevie, a white leatherette tambourine bag. And Duffy, a doll called Scribbles that had a blank face and a pack of special colored markers for drawing one onto it. Everly knew immediately what she wanted: a knife from a display case in the camping department. It was the knife she needed for going to an island, like Jim Hawkins would have worn looped onto his belt. But her mother insisted she get a dress. There was a showdown in the children’s department. She wanted a knife, just like Stevie wanted a purse. She didn’t want a stupid dress. Her mother was too tired to fight and struck a deal. They left Sears with the knife, in a brown leather case, and the dotted Swiss dress.

  “Everybody up and washed and ready for customs. Everly? Stevie?” her mother called from the adjoining room.

  “I’m dressed, Mother,” Everly said.

  “Then wake your sisters and remind them to comb their hair. Let me see you.”

  Everly stood in the doorway.

  “Oh, Everly, can’t you go without the glasses, just for today? They make you look cross-eyed.”

  “I am cross-eyed, Mother.”

  “But it’s so much more noticeable with those Coke bottles over your eyes. You can see without them, and it won’t kill you. Just until we get through customs.”

  Their mother had talked about customs like they’d get tipped the black spot if they weren’t careful. Everly imagined stern men in uniforms with holstered guns, looking them over. If she and her sisters were unkempt, poorly dressed, if their hair wasn’t parted straight, if she felt like Tex instead of Everly and insisted on wearing filthy dungarees and a ratty boy’s shirt, they’d be turned away and have to go back to Oak Ridge. A city of mud and barbed wire, where her father was a low man on the totem pole.

  Everly and her sisters pressed up against the passenger rail as the ship readied to dock. A deep, resonant horn sounded, and the ship moved toward the shore, kicking up a thick wake as it slowed. A stone castle towered on one end of the curve of land. On the other end, a massive factory jutted out into the bay, a miniature city of blinking white lights and enormous silver tanks with ladders on their sides. Chimneys emitted orange flames against a plume of black.

  “That must be Shell’s new refinery,” her father said.

  It looked just like Oak Ridge, big industrial buildings with smokestacks that shot puffs of steam and plumes of smoke. Steam and smoke were different, and she enjoyed observing the difference between them. Steam came off a cup of hot coffee, and Tennessee roads after summer rain. Smoke poured out of Gamble Valley, the Negro neighborhood in Oak Ridge, always on fire, and hovered in the air near K-25, the secret facility where her father worked. Air that was sour if you breathed through your mouth, and poisonous-smelling. K-25 hummed and crackled with electricity. There was a giant magnet somewhere inside the complex of buildings, and people said if you got too close to the fence, the force of the magnet would pull the hobnails out of your shoes and knock you flat on the ground. Everly’s Brownie leader had made the girls all take their shoes off when their troop walked past. They picked through the mud in their socks, single file.

  They were getting close to the Havana waterfront, and she could see church spires and three- and four-decker buildings in pale pinks and yellows and blues. The harbor was a cloudy brown, with bits of garbage floating in it, empty bottles and soap bubbles and wood scraps. Cuban boys, thin and shirtless, with smooth chests and skin that was a chocolaty purple, gathered along the dock. One of them, taller than the rest, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted in English, “Throw down a quarter!”

  The ship was getting close enough that she could see the boys’ faces. They waved, smiling as if she and the other American passengers were their personal friends.

  “Throw down a quarter!” the tall boy yelled again, louder this time.

  Someone threw a coin. It sailed over the deck railing and plunked into the water. The boys cheered, and three of them dived in. They emerged from the dark, oily, and iridescent-skinned water, treading with their arms and legs, bobbing up and down in the water, which rose up in waves and slapped against the dock. Drops of water glinted like stardust in the boys’ kinky hair. They shouted up at the deck, gesturing for more coins. Someone pitched another over the railing. The boys shot toward it. There was a scramble, bodies splashing wildly, right near the ship’s giant propellers, which churned up soft and water-bloated garbage. One of the boys popped through the murk, his face the same dark color as the mush-strewn water, almost indistinguishable if it weren’t for the tinsel of drops glinting in his strange halo of hair. He smiled, and a coin flashed from between his teeth.

  “Look at them!” her mother said. “Performing like seals!”

  They did look like seals, with their smooth, purple-skinned bodies, diving into the water, then skimming under the surface in fluid motions.

  The gangplank went down, and people streamed off the ship. Workers in gloves and grease-streaked clothes unloaded the ship’s cargo. Crates swung on huge cranes, then were lowered slowly to the dock. The men stood in a line, yelling to one another in Spanish and tossing boxes from hand to hand, then stacking them on dollies. More men took the dollies and wheeled them into the customs building. They all wore a crude sort of rope shoe and moved cargo with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They were all Negroes, with darker skin than the boys on the dock, a blackish-purple like the powdery black center of a tulip’s cup. Everly thought of Mavis, their maid in Oak Ridge, the only colored person she knew. Mavis looked at the floor and said Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am when Everly’s mother gave ord
ers. Told her to turn off that God-awful gospel radio. Mavis’s husband waited in the backyard when he came to fetch her. He kept his eyes on the ground and stood far from the house. These men on the waterfront laughed and shouted, and when a pretty woman in a clinging dress passed along the gangplank, they all stared at her bottom, which jiggled as she walked. One of them whistled.

  Everly’s mother yanked her arm. “Don’t stare, young lady!” The men were allowed to stare at the lady’s bottom. Everly was not.

  They sat in customs for hours, in a dimly lighted room with mint green walls and fans that hung down from a high ceiling, the rotors spinning so slowly they created no breeze. Duffy drew various faces on Scribbles, and Stevie read from what their father, teasing, had called a dime-store romance. When he first said it, Everly thought it meant the book was about people who fell in love in a dime store. Everly sneaked stares at a pair of twins, teenage daughters of another family who were also moving to Nicaro. They were big-boned, horsey-looking girls with oversized teeth like white Chiclets, wearing identical blue dresses and matching ribbons in their hair. They were blond, the sort that people seemed to find pretty for the reason that they were blond, even if their faces weren’t particularly nice. Everly got away with staring at the horsey twins because her mother was busy filling out forms and couldn’t tell her not to. She didn’t understand how it was that some people resisted the urge to stare. Where did they put their eyes? Hers locked onto other people’s faces. She had to look, and only when someone returned her gaze did she look away.

  The twins walked over and introduced themselves. Their names were Pamela and Val. Pamela said their father was in charge of construction at the Nicaro plant.

  “My father’s in charge of nickel,” Everly said.

  “Your father can’t be ‘in charge’ of nickel,” Pamela said. “Maybe he’s running some aspect of it.” She turned to Val and said something in French. Val said something back, also in French.

  A customs official in a beige military uniform and amber sunglasses approached and asked the twins something in Spanish. Pamela answered, speaking in the same rapid-fire manner as the man in the amber glasses, her shift from English to Spanish completely natural. Everly asked where they were from.

  “Hmm. Let’s see. Tela, Limón, Buenos Aires,” Val said, counting on her fingers, “Bogotá, Panama City—”

  “Our father built the port in Limón,” Pamela said. “Last year we were in Bolivia. But then troublemakers started rioting.”

  “Daddy tried to help the government,” Val added.

  “But the troublemakers ended up taking over, and all the good people had to get out of there fast.”

  “And now we get here and there’s practically a revolution.”

  “Or whatever they’re calling it.”

  “Father says it’s a coup d’état,” Pamela said, “because they gave President Prio the boot.”

  “What’s a cootay-tah?” Everly asked.

  “Oh, God, there’s Mom,” Val said. Both girls quickly stood up.

  A woman was rushing toward them through the crowded room. She had a broad, ruddy face and the same lank blond hair as her daughters, her scalp blushing pink from underneath.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you girls.” Her voice was loud but hoarse, like she’d been yelling too much. She looked like someone who might yell a lot.

  “Your father is ready to sell you both to the circus,” she wheezed.

  There weren’t any twins in the circus. They would have been too ordinary. Triplets, maybe.

  She was thinking about the circus, about the paper cones that were dipped in a drum and came out wrapped in turbans of pink cotton batting, and the machine where you could record your own voice, when Pamela and Val dutifully followed their mother away.

  Pamela turned back and said, “See you in Nicaro, kid.”

  She stood with her family under the sun’s stabbing heat in front of the port building, waiting for the car to be rolled out. Beyond the building, a boardwalk stretched as far as she could see. Large waves crashed against the boardwalk and shot into the air like saltwater confetti, then slopped onto the pedestrian walkway. A man standing on the corner yelled “Lotería! Lotería!” and waved a long pole with strips of paper attached, printed with rows of numbers. The air was hot and moist, like fevered human breath wafting around her. Stevie fanned herself with the menu from dinner the night before, another souvenir for her scrapbook. The street and all the buildings seemed coated in a combination of auto soot and ocean brine. A stench of urine rose from the sidewalk, an anonymous insult. Her mother took a bleached cotton handkerchief out of her pocketbook and held it over her nose. All that fuss, Everly and her sisters with scrubbed faces and combed hair, in their froufrou dresses. She felt like a tea doily, damp and frilly and out of place.

  A man missing an arm was rooting through the garbage can near them. He pulled a paper food container out of the trash, leaned his head back, and tipped the container to his mouth. Rice spilled out over his face. None of it made it into his mouth, but the man chewed frantically, then dumped the container and began walking in circles. Clever-looking women milled around, shooting one another mysterious looks. The women were purple-skinned like the boys who dove for coins, but their hair wasn’t like the boys’ hair. It was pressed flat and pulled back like a white person’s hair. One of the women blotted her underarms with what looked like pages from a book. They were pages from a book. The woman retrieved a paperback from her purse, ripped out two more pages, and blotted her forehead. Boys carrying wooden boxes filled with tins of shoe polish, brushes, and spit rags roamed around like stray dogs looking for scraps. A man stumbled among them, his hand clamped to a bottle in a creased and grease-splotched paper sack. The soles of his shoes were coming unglued, flapping as he walked.

  Everly looked up and saw an enormous rat jumping from a palm tree. It landed on the oily sidewalk and charged toward a woman who was sleeping in a doorway. Someone whistled a watch-out whistle, and the woman stirred awake and pulled up her legs just before the rat darted past. She wore no shoes, only a ripped dress that was the grayish dinge of the rags Mavis used to polish their good silverware.

  “Wow, look at that,” Stevie said, pointing at a poster mounted on a kiosk, a large color photograph of women in elaborate sequined costumes, wearing chandeliers on their heads, draped in strings of pearls. THE CABARET TOKIO—THE PLACE TO BE IN HAVANA! the poster announced. And underneath, VISIT OUR FAMOUS PAM-PAM ROOM, FEATURING, FROM PARIS, ZAZOU DANCER RACHEL K!

  “Daddy, can we go there?” Stevie asked.

  The answer would, of course, be no. Their parents were too cheap for that, but Everly admired her sister’s optimism.

  Their father stepped closer and stared at the photograph. “It’s for adults,” he said.

  “How come?” Stevie asked.

  “Because it’s a burlesque.”

  A burlesque. Everly thought she might have seen one, when she and Stevie sneaked into the wrong movie one Saturday afternoon. On the screen, a woman was dancing in a saloon, singing in a high, breathy voice. You can touch my cherries, but you cannot touch my plums. The audience was all adults, and mostly men. She whispered to Stevie that they were in the wrong theater, but Stevie shushed her. They watched the woman perform her song, her white breasts practically falling out of the top of her dress, which seemed more of an undergarment, like their mother’s merry widow. But this woman had a different kind of body than their mother. When the song was finished, she and Stevie ran out of the theater. They pushed the double doors and were pitched into the flooding light and noise of the lobby, where kids stood in line to buy buckets of popcorn and paper cups of cola with crushed ice. Everly felt queer, like she had done something naughty that she couldn’t reverse. Stevie kept singing the song as they walked home. You can touch my cherries, but you cannot touch my plums.

  A dockworker pulled up in their Studebaker. Their familiar car had crossed the Tropic of Cancer, too, and h
ere it was in this dirty and exotic, underwater-feeling place. It looked the same, with its forest green paint and shiny, bullet-nosed grille, except that a purple-colored man was driving it, his arm hanging casually out the window. He slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched to a stop. Her mother winced. The man got out. He stood leaning against the driver’s side. Her father thanked him, but the man wouldn’t step aside until her father produced a coin.

  As they were driving away, someone called after them, “Excuse me—sir! Americano!” Her father put on the brake.

  “George, do not talk to these people!” her mother said. “Keep the car moving!”

  They bumped down the street. Two men ran behind the car yelling, “Americanos! Americanos!” Her mother put her head out the window, looked back down the street. “Drive faster!” she said. One of the men running after them yelled, “Hey, lady, take me with you!” The others running beside him all laughed. “I’m very good!” he shouted. “I’m very nice!”

  Everly watched out the back window. People running on foot can’t keep up with an automobile for long. Not even a dog can keep up with a car. The men were getting smaller. They were a block behind them now, but still running and laughing. The car picked up speed, went through a yellow light, and the men faded out of view.

  4

  Blue lights flip on. Smoky haze drifts above the tables.

  “Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

  Rachel K steps from behind a Chinois screen. She is draped in black chiffon and a cascade of rooster tail feathers that glint metallic green under the lights.

  The Frenchman remembers zazou. It was a jazz thing during the war. Girls in chunky heels and fishnets, with dark lipstick and parasols. Or maybe it was berets—he can’t recall. Boys in zoot suits, an unseemly glisten of salad oil in their hair. They were bohemians who struck poses near the outdoor tables at the Café de Flore, begging cigarettes and slurping the soup people left in the bottom of their bowls. The point of it was more than just poverty. It was a form of protest. But by the time the zazou were being rounded up by German patrols, he was far away from Paris. Marching waist-deep into a cold apocalypse with a panzerfaust over his shoulder.