Sometimes wears glasses
Personal habits: drinks occasionally
Is given to frequenting low resort
Mr. Mazierre has been known to travel repeatedly between Havana, Santiago, Port-au-Prince, and Ciudad Trujillo. There is evidence he has been on the northeast coast of Oriente. Be on the lookout for him and any other roguelike individuals attempting to agitate among our employees. If you see anything suspicious, report it directly to management.
Yours truly,
Hubert H. Mackey
He didn’t look dangerous, Everly thought, with his boyish and mischievous face. Dressed in a coat and tie, with shiny prep-school hair perfectly combed but curling slightly upward—not subduable with hair cream, like he might not be subduable by the men who were supposed to be on the lookout.
There were two photos, a side and a front angle. He looked handsome and agreeable from both angles, and what, anyhow, was “low resort”?
She stared at the photos, taped on the wall outside the company’s executive offices. She and the other students milled in the hallway as Miss Alfaro spoke to Mr. Carrington, who was guiding their class field trip around the nickel operation.
“Looking fresh as a daisy, Miss Alfaro,” Mr. Carrington said.
Miss Alfaro blushed. She was unmarried, and Everly’s mother said she didn’t get invited to parties because unmarried women were a problem.
“What kind of problem?” Everly had asked, but her mother hadn’t answered.
“Always so exquisitely put together, Miss Alfaro,” Mr. Carrington said. “I’m curious where you shop, so I can tell my wife. You travel to Havana?”
“You tease me, Mr. Carrington.”
“No, really. You renew my faith, Miss Alfaro. In the educational system. I had no idea schoolteachers could be so…chic and attractive.”
He was flirting with her in front of the whole class, and Everly suspected Miss Alfaro was enjoying it, even if it embarrassed her. She was certainly pretty, or at least she had all the signs of prettiness, what Everly’s father called “vavoom.” Bleached blond hair with a beauty parlor flip on the ends. Red lipstick, narrow skirts, and high heels—as high as the ones Stevie had put on that morning. Their mother had said to turn right around and change into something more appropriate for a field trip to the mine. No one said out loud that the high-heeled shoes—and the seersucker dress and the rouge Stevie had on—were for Tico Leál, who worked at the mine. There were kids in Everly’s class who said that Miss Alfaro’s curtains matched her carpet, meaning she dyed the hair between her legs the same platinum blond as her head hair. Everly didn’t believe it. It seemed impossible that any of the kids would have seen it in order to know. And if an adult saw it he wouldn’t say “curtains” and “carpet” and he wouldn’t tell a kid about it.
They rode in an open ore car, Everly bouncing along under the hot sun, thinking about the man with the shiny hair and small mouth, chanting to herself.
Given to frequenting low resort. Low resort. Low resort. Given to frequenting low resort. Low resort. Low resort. Given to—
The mine was so high above Nicaro that they could see the whole town. Mr. Carrington pointed out the nickel plant on the bay, and the sugar mill smokestacks across the channel in Preston. Cayo Saetía in between, where they went for company picnics, and beyond the fence around Nicaro, the shantytown of Levisa. It was huge compared to Nicaro, with soft-looking huts made of palm leaves, jammed in together and leaning in all different directions. Smoke rose up here and there from between the huts. Willy lived in Levisa. He came to Nicaro on foot and every day Everly watched for his familiar gait, slow and rhythmic, as he turned onto their road. Willy said everybody in Levisa cooked their meals outside, over wood fires. Or with alcohol, if it was raining. But the alcohol stoves, he said, were dangerous. They could blow up and burn your face or burn your hut down if you weren’t careful. All the servants lived in Levisa, except for the ones who lived in servants’ quarters, like Flozilla, whose room was off the Lederers’ kitchen with its own tiny bathroom—a toilet and a tiny sink. The people from Levisa came down to the river by the main highway to bathe and wash their clothes, the women rubbing wet, soapy clothes on rocks, boys and men fishing from the banks without poles, just line wound on spools. It looked so close to Nicaro, right across the main road at the edge of town. She had never been there.
Beyond the nickel plant, she could see the roped-off area of Levisa Bay where they swam. There was a mesh wall around the swimming area, which had been Mr. Carrington’s idea. One day Portuguese man-o’-wars had floated in, hundreds of them slopping over the rope on a high wave, everyone screaming and splashing their way out of the water. Everly had seen a photograph of a fish caught in the tendrils of a man-o’-war. The caption said the tendrils grew to be sixteen feet. The fish was paralyzed and would be eaten, but it looked so relaxed. Sometimes you didn’t want to be able to move. You just wanted to be held. The same book had illustrations of parrots that were native to eastern Cuba. But they’d been extinct for four hundred years, the book explained, because a Spanish conquistador and the men of his court had eaten them as a delicacy. It seemed that “delicacy,” the way the book described it, meant not rarely, like on a special holiday, when you’d eat a Dubuque ham or a pot roast, but as often as possible until there were no more parrots. They were conquistadors. They’d come a long way and were ready to gorge themselves. Everly couldn’t imagine that anything so showy and beautiful would be tasty. The metallic blue and emerald green of a parrot’s feathery coat made her think of something bitter and not meant to be eaten, like talcum powder or pencil erasers. The delicacy hadn’t been so much about taste. The point was to eat a bird that talked. She imagined the Spanish teaching the parrots to repeat cruel and offensive phrases. The parrots squawking, “Get out of here! You’re ugly and stupid! I hate you!” The Spanish would then get so angry they’d kill the parrots. “Take that, you rotten bird. Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?” And then they would eat them in revenge. It was terrible to think about, but it was interesting, too. Because it meant that eating was no longer about filling up. Making hunger go away. It was more like a court proceeding, with punishment and justice.
They could see a huge ship coming into the Nicaro dock. Mr. Carrington explained that it was there to pick up the nickel ore and take it to Louisiana for processing. Men were rolling carts down the seatrain track—a track that led to nothing, until a ship was docked, and the carts rolled from the track onto the ship.
No children were allowed on the dock when shipments were coming in. It was dangerous, her mother said. A grapple iron could swing around and kill you, just like that. Once, Everly and K.C. had sneaked onto the dock to watch an enormous ship anchoring. Workers from the ship began unloading heavy-looking bags of something, the bags sending up clouds of dust as they whomped into piles on the wooden dock. There was funny, blocky writing on the ship’s side, an unreadable alphabet that looked like barbed wire. The workers were shouting in a language that was all consonants crushed together. They had big, muscley arms and hoisted the heavy bags hand to hand, one to the other in a chain. Some of them were wearing head scarves tied under their chins, which seemed peculiar until Everly realized they were women. With large, heavy breasts, hanging low like they weren’t wearing brassieres. Her mother said if women didn’t wear brassieres their breasts would drop. Everly guessed this had happened to the foreign women on the Nicaro docks. Everly was eleven and flat-chested, but her mother made her wear a training bra so her breasts would learn, from early on, not to drop. Her mother said she might just develop overnight, the way Stevie had. She said Everly was “making progress” and she might just yet turn out to be a looker, against all odds. Everly wasn’t sure if her mother was complimenting her or hurting her feelings. Stevie wore a woman’s-sized dress now, and had a woman’s-sized bust and hips. The Lederers, who still didn’t know about Tico Leál, said they better watch her, because it was that age for trouble. St
evie saw Tico in secret. Once she came home and told Everly that Tico had pressed himself against her and she’d felt his thing. What thing? “If you don’t already know,” Stevie said, “you’re too young to find out.” Once she thought about it, of course she knew. But when Stevie said it, Everly didn’t realize. You can know something but not the codes of when it’s being referred to. When their parents finally did learn about Tico Leál, two years later, they talked about “nipping the situation in the bud.” But by then it was too late for that.
Everly and K.C. had watched the foreign women tossing the bags hand to hand. They were all women, even the captain. K.C. said they were Russian. Where were the men? He said they all died in the war.
That night, the Russian women had come into town. They were at Las Palmas. The Lederers’ house was close enough to the club that Everly could hear faint shouting and laughter and stomping. Her father returned with a cube of smoked pig’s fat wrapped in newspaper that the captain had given him.
“Did all the Russian men die in the war?” Everly asked.
“A lot of them,” her father said.
Mr. Carrington made them put on hard hats for the tour of the mining area. He took extra-special care to fasten the chinstrap of Miss Alfaro’s hard hat. Miss Alfaro said she felt like a tomboy in the hard hat, and Mr. Carrington assured her that nothing could make Miss Alfaro look like a tomboy. Everly’s hard hat was too big. It smelled like the sweat of a grown man and kept slipping down over her eyes. Four hundred men, Mr. Carrington told them, worked the mines. Seven days a week. A different shift of men worked at night. They saw men shoveling ore into railcars, rags tied around their heads to protect them from the sun. Not under their chins, like the Russian sailor women—more like Ali Baba, rags tied around and around, the ends tucked in. They bent over and struck at the hard earth with axes that had a sharp tooth on the end. Chink, chink, chink. “This is called strip mining,” Mr. Carrington said. It seemed a gargantuan task, to scoop out the earth by hand. The workers glared at Miss Alfaro in her tight skirt and hard hat. Stevie had prepared for the field trip as if it would be a date with Tico Leál, but there was no sign of him. The operation was huge, bigger than any of them had imagined.
A labor boss sat in the shade of a tree, watching the workers. A single tree, the rest of the land rust-colored and sun-baked and treeless. Maybe they left the one tree there just for the labor boss. He wore green-tinted eyeglasses, and a gun in a holster hung from his belt. He sat perfectly still, holding a glass of cane juice. He looked awake and asleep at the same time, like a lizard.
She lay in bed that night moving her mind around the features of the agitator D. L. Mazierre. The adults said “troublemakers” about people who were causing problems for the company. But Willy made it sound like the troublemakers were the good guys. They just wanted to be paid fair wages and to live in decent conditions. He said unions were legal in Cuba, a tradition, part of the way things were run. But if you worked for an American company, you were not allowed to organize a union. He said that people were organizing anyway. It was a secret that he was confiding in her. Everly was so thrilled to be trusted by Willy that she never would have told anyone, no matter what.
D. L. Mazierre was involved. Maybe he was coming to organize the workers so they could have fair wages. In the photograph, there had been numbers on his shoulder. They looked like a military stripe, but they must have been for identification, like the numbers men held up in post office wanted posters. In Oak Ridge, it had been her hobby to look at the wanted posters and scan the people in line to see if there was a match. Whenever she had a fever, she dreamed the same dream, that she was in a prison that doubled as a mausoleum, with human bones lodged in its sandy floor. Real prison was probably even worse than her fever mausoleum-prison, and she couldn’t blame the men in the post office photographs for escaping. “Wanted” on the posters did not mean desired.
Given to frequenting low resort. Low resort. Low resort. Given to frequenting low resort—
Outside, wind stirred the banana leaves beyond her bedroom window. The leaves brushed against one another and cast a papery sound. The wind gusted, and the banana plants made shadows on her bedroom wall like mad puppets. Willy said that after a soaking rain, if you stood under the leaves and listened carefully, you could hear the bananas growing. What sort of sound did they make? A damp pop and creaking, he said. He explained how they grew, that you planted an “eye,” and then the eye bore fruit for several seasons. He knew all about gardening and tropical species of flowers, even their Latin names. He ordered seeds from catalogs and planted them in tidy rows that alternated in color. A pale, salmon-colored trumpet vine next to deeper orange heliconias and flamingo flowers, which were like Valentine hearts cut from shiny red patent leather. Along one flower bed edge, white butterfly jasmine as an accent. He pruned the flamboyán tree that grew outside the Lederers’ dining room windows so that it bloomed longer than anyone else’s on the manager’s row. Vermilion sprays of color flocked the windows and formed a carpet of brilliant leaves on the ground below. When the sun shone into the tree, the windows were ablaze in orange flames. The women who came to tea at the Lederers’ were envious. “Where on earth did you get him?” they asked. “He speaks French and he’s handsome—that smile, it’s practically like a drug—and he’s got the greenest thumb.” “Not to mention,” the lady from French Guiana said, “those beautiful hands.” Willy planted a night-blooming cereus in the Lederers’ yard, right underneath Everly’s bedroom window. It wouldn’t bloom for several years, he said. But eventually it would produce an enormous ivory flower with a strange, sweet smell. One evening, it would open at dusk, bloom until dawn, and then close, never to open again. Years from now its first bloom would open and fill her room with fragrance, he said, but Everly would be gone by then. “I’ll be here!” she protested. “No you won’t. You’ll be in college, a university, getting your degree.” “Maybe I’ll stay in Cuba,” she said. “Maybe I won’t want to go.” “That’s silly,” Willy said. “You have to go.”
The wind gusted like a personality, quieted, then gusted again. Duffy was snoring gently in her bed across the room.
Everly thought she might like D. L. Mazierre to come and agitate them, even if she didn’t know what was involved. She felt sure he was one of the good guys that Willy talked about, on his way to help.
Maybe low resort meant rough areas, the kinds of places her mother would tell her she wasn’t allowed to go. Like Gamble Valley, where the Negroes lived in Oak Ridge. Timothy Hodgkiss had said his father went to Gamble Valley to buy splo. “What’s splo?” Everly had asked. “You know, moonshine.” But she was only eight, and didn’t know what that was, either. “My father says the county is dry,” Timothy Hodgkiss had said, as if to explain. She didn’t press on, although she knew that what she imagined was wrong. Moonshine, something too bright, like a metal car-door handle hit by the sun. They didn’t need moonshine in Cuba because everyone drank rum. “Ron,” the Cubans said, the Spanish word making the drink seem somehow thinner and more watery, with an “n” rather than an “m.” Anyone could buy rum, even a kid. Just walk up to a bar and order it. And there was marijuana growing everywhere, which K.C. had pointed out, to roll into cigarettes that the cane cutters smoked. She’d seen them smoking marijuana cigarettes, she could tell by the smell, the cane cutters whetting their machetes with a rock and molasses, sitting on the side of a road that Everly was not supposed to go down because there were shacks along it where adult things went on.
When they’d first arrived in Nicaro, her mother said that Everly and Duffy’s bathroom, with its pink and black tiles, looked like a bordello. “What’s a bordello?” Everly had asked. “A bathroom with pink and black tiles,” her father said. The first time she was invited to Val and Pamela’s, she pointed out to Mrs. Carrington that they, too, had a bordello.
“Excuse me, child?” Mrs. Carrington said.
Everly’s face went hot. “The tile pattern in your bathro
om, isn’t it bordello?”
After Mrs. Carrington excused herself “to powder her nose in the bordello,” Val explained that it wasn’t tiles. It was a place where men paid money for certain services. “What kinds of services?” “Sex,” Val said. Now she was older and knew what sex was. It was possible her sister had tried it with Tico Leál. But back then, she’d pictured a thing that came in a box, like something you purchased from Sears, folded and wrapped in tissue.
She supposed that if Gamble Valley were low resort, a bordello could be low resort. But buying sex didn’t seem like something D. L. Mazierre would do. He’d be busy agitating.
13
Charmaine Mackey was near the ice factory when she saw Lito Gonzalez coming up the road in his white Cadillac. She felt a strange rise in something—her heart rate, maybe—when she realized his car was slowing, and that he would stop to speak with her.
His window went down. Did she need a lift?
She explained that she was out walking on purpose, for exercise, which suddenly seemed like a ridiculous activity. The Cubans didn’t walk anywhere unless they had to.
Another car pulled up behind Mr. Gonzalez’s, the driver honking impatiently. It was Mrs. Carrington. Probably stocking up on ice.
Charmaine felt caught. Doing what, she wasn’t sure, but in a perverse instinct to prove that she had nothing to hide, and hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking to the greasy Cuban millionaire, she put her hand on the passenger side door handle and opened it. Said she’d take a ride after all, and got in next to Mr. Gonzalez.
They proceeded up the road, Mrs. Carrington, behind them, turning left onto the manager’s row. The interior of Mr. Gonzalez’s car was enormous, white leather upholstery that reminded Charmaine of the sleek, plush lining of coffins. But what a waste, to line a coffin in white leather. This was an interior you could actually enjoy. Mrs. Billings was wrong about Mr. Gonzalez’s taste in cars. It was a wonderful car, and she wished she could tell him so, but she couldn’t think of how to say it without relaying the insult, in order to pay him the compliment.
Telex From Cuba Page 17