One morning, at dawn, Garcilaso and Eduardo sneaked into the captain’s quarters. “Garcilaso had heard there were M&M’s in there,” Eduardo told me. “We look around, and we find the M&M’s. At that exact moment, we see the Cuban jets. Flying low, coming straight at us.”
He laughs. He’s been laughing softly the whole time.
I ask Eduardo if he and Garcilaso got to eat the M&M’s. He tells me they did not.
It seems that this is the full extent of his anecdote. Only in response to my questioning does he disclose that the bombing sank the ship. Eduardo had to jump overboard, into the Bay of Pigs, and swim to the shore.
“Anybody die?” I ask.
“Sure,” Eduardo says.
We’ve reached the end of the block. “I’m headed uptown,” I say.
Eduardo indicates that he’s also headed that way. We set off.
In the morning rush, this bit of Eighth Avenue is barely manageable on foot. The problem is that an almost impenetrable pedestrian mass, discharged by buses from New Jersey and the Times Square subway exits, hurries south in a kind of stampede. The sense of a great flight—of crops put to the torch, of a ruined and shaken hinterland—is only heightened by trains booming underfoot, by the bleeping klaxons of reversing box trucks, by the disorderly shoving of food carts between the stopped cars, and above all by the strangely focusless expressions worn by the oncoming commuters, who seemingly are devoid of ordinary consciousness. It all bodes ill. Either the barbarians are at the gates or we ourselves are the barbarians.
What I’d give for a green and silent lane. What I’d give for a woodland’s leopard-skin light.
In short, Eduardo and I can go forward only in starts: we advance a few yards, wait for a gap in the crowd, and advance again. I notice that he’s trying to tell me something.
“Say again?” I shout.
An ambulance siren is shrieking. Eduardo waits for the shriek to pass. “I’m going in there, to get a coffee,” he says.
It feels natural to follow Eduardo—even though I’m averse to this particular deli, which I know to be a busy, cavernous, impersonal establishment with an offhand staff. When Eduardo sits at the little countertop by the window, I join him but I don’t get myself anything to drink. I listen when he tells me that a small group of them, a handful of the survivors of the sinking of the Houston, walked for a day and a night through the swamps. On the second day they surrendered to Castro’s forces and, en route to Havana, they ran into Che.
“Che Guevara?”
The prisoner-transport vehicle had come to an unexpected halt. Che Guevara and a woman comrade appeared. They examined the prisoners and conferred in French, so as not to be understood. Finally Che said to Eduardo, Who are you, young man? Eduardo answered, Eduardo Sanchez de Cadenas. Che said, Are you a relation of Captain Cadenas? I have no idea, Eduardo said.
I was relaxed, he tells me. My attitude was, they were going to shoot us or they weren’t.
The older prisoners were not so relaxed. Unlike Eduardo, they’d recognized Che. Shut up, kid, they said.
Nobody got shot. The truck drove on. Eduardo never saw Che again.
“What about your friend?” I ask. “What about Garcilaso?”
Eduardo shakes his head—or rather, he moves his head in such a way that I don’t know what he’s signaling. I’m afraid to know.
Then Eduardo says, “Garcilaso was OK,” and by God that’s a very beautiful thing to hear.
For a minute or two, we watch the world go by.
“You want another coffee?” I say. “I’m getting myself one.”
“I’m OK,” Eduardo says. “You don’t need to be anywhere?”
Do I need to be anywhere? What kind of question is that? Of course I need to be somewhere. There is no end to the places I need to be.
I buy myself a coffee. Then I regain my stool next to Eduardo.
Tell me more, I want to say to Eduardo, but don’t say, because he seems ready to leave. Tell me more about Garcilaso and about how things went well for him.
The stories in this book previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications:
“Pardon Edward Snowden,” “The Referees,” “The Poltroon Husband,” and “The Sinking of the Houston” in The New Yorker · “The Trusted Traveler,” “The World of Cheese,” and “The Mustache in 2010” in Harper’s Magazine · “Promises, Promises” in The American Scholar
* * *
—
“Ponchos” was originally published in Dislocation: Stories from a New Ireland, edited by Caroline Walsh (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003) · “The Death of Billy Joel” in The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, edited by David Marcus (London: Faber & Faber, 2007) · “Goose” in New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O’Connor (London: Faber & Faber, 2011) · “The Trusted Traveler” also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, edited by Laura Furman (New York: Anchor Books, 2017) · “The Poltroon Husband” in Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Didn’t Write, edited by Philip Horne (London: Vintage Classics, 2018)
A Note About the Author
Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life; and of a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He teaches at Bard College.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Good Trouble Page 14