King Bongo
Page 8
Bongo also knew the lush smell of success, the fragrant scent of a new stack of peso bills. He knew the look of well-fed cologne-slapped cheeks, the faces of those who held those stacks of cash in their tight fists. Cash was piled up in the Capitolio, in the casinos, in the fancy Art Deco office buildings and banks of Vedado, in the beach mansions of Miramar, in the four-hundred-year-old palaces of Old Havana. Bongo understood: A man was either a prince or a pig, born on the right side or the wrong side of the law. A man was either holding the shit end of the stick or someone else was.
Shielded by the Plymouth’s windshield, Pedro and Paulo didn’t give a thought to the fact that they were passing through one of the worst slums in the world. It was nothing unusual to them; even rich countries have poor people. Why scratch your ass about it? Why go up into the mountains and fight to change it? In the end it was all going to be just like it was in the beginning, haves and have-nots. So thank the blessed Virgin if you had a little of the action. And if you had a lot, thank God you didn’t have a conscience.
Inside the Plymouth it was hot. Outside it was hotter. The car made an arc around the southern neighborhoods of Havana Bay, then turned east through the colonial town of Guanabacoa, a former center for trafficking in African slaves. As the Plymouth passed through the town, holy women, dressed in white with white bandannas around their heads, stood guard. They tossed water from pans onto the street where the car had intruded, magic intended to cleanse away the evil spirit passing by and to keep it from setting its evil eye on the locals. The women were responsible for stopping the evil from breathing its malignant fire into houses, preventing it from forcing worms into children’s bare feet; worms that would eat through hearts and explode livers, blast the eyeballs out of heads. There was no evil that the people of these humble homes hadn’t witnessed or suffered over the generations. Strangers had invaded their family villages in Africa and sailed their ancestors here in chains. This time the women had the protection of the gods, the magic water of the Orishas.
The Plymouth kept going, making for the open road, then picked up speed and crossed the Rio Cojimar bridge toward the Atlantic. The road swerved, following the shoreline past bungalows bunched at the sea’s edge, and finally ending at an ornately tiled bathing pavilion aspiring to be a Cuban Taj Mahal. A festive crowd of people in bathing suits milled around the pavilion among stalls where hawkers called out delicacies for sale, deep-fried churros, cold colas and syrupy pineapple chunks.
Pedro and Paulo in the front seat of the Plymouth were rubbernecking in all directions, trying to take memory snapshots of every shapely girl they passed. The car pulled to a stop in front of the bathing pavilion. A crowd gathered around it, admiring the svelte American lines and heavy chrome fixtures flashing in sunlight.
The men got out. A uniformed policeman appeared, saluted Zapata, and requested that he follow.
Zapata immediately gave orders. “Pedro and Paulo, stay with the car, in case I get any more urgent messages.”
“Yes, Captain,” barked Pedro and Paulo in unison. They were happy to be left alone with the pretty girls in the crowd who might happen to think it was they who owned the Plymouth.
Bongo followed Zapata and the policeman to the back of the pavilion, where the sea licked the shore with lazy waves and a rickety boat had been pulled up onto the sand. The boat’s once brightly painted hull was chipped and sun-faded. The letters across its prow half spelled out the name of a woman.
Next to the boat was a scrawny fisherman wearing a pair of ragged shorts. He appeared to be an old man, but he was no more than thirty, a man who had been fishing for a living under the broiling sun since he was old enough to crawl to the sea. He feared Zapata, a suit-wearing city man with a hat and dark glasses who walked with the self-righteous air of an executioner.
The policeman pointed at the fisherman. “Show the Captain!”
The fisherman started trembling, then stepped up to the boat. Inside were two battered oars, a rusty bailing bucket, a crumpled casting net with bits of glistening sea slime clinging to it, and an old piece of canvas.
The policeman demanded, “Go on!”
The fisherman reluctantly reached a trembling hand inside the boat. His fingers touched the edge of the canvas.
“Pull it back,” the policeman ordered.
The fisherman was sweating. He pulled the canvas away.
At first, in the glare of the sun, the object in the hollow of the boat looked like an odd-shaped fish that had been yanked up from the depths. Then it seemed to resemble a grotesque sea monster, like those drawn on the edges of ancient mariners’ maps, bizarre creatures that rose up from below to scare the sea biscuits out of a sailor.
Zapata bent over the hull and looked closer. He could make out a large rectangular piece of flesh. It was the torso of a man but without head, arms or legs. A pair of underpants, once white, now a putrid gray, clung to what was left of the torso’s mauled lower half.
The fisherman lowered his eyes apologetically. “It came up in my net.”
“When?” Zapata asked.
“Near noon.”
“You reported it then?”
“Yes, sir. I rowed to shore and reported it right away.”
Zapata gazed at the torso’s chest; an iron bar pierced straight through it.
“Where were you fishing?”
“Up by Cojimar, below where the river comes into the sea.”
“Somebody chopped him up good,” Zapata whispered.
“No, sir,” the fisherman meekly disagreed. “He was held underwater by the weight of the bar, then the sharks got to him. I know how sharks eat. They rip at the flesh. Everything was torn off. You can see the teeth marks.”
“Shark bait,” Zapata whispered. “Maybe this is the beginning of a new Pineapple Field.”
“Pineapple field?” The fisherman shook his head. “No, sir, I’m a fisherman, not a farmer. This came from the ocean.”
“Of course it did.” Zapata knew the fisherman didn’t understand what Pineapple Field he meant.
Zapata nodded to the policeman. “Wrap the victim in the canvas and put him in my trunk. I’m headed to the morgue, I’ll give the stiff a lift.”
“What about him?” The policeman grabbed the fisherman by the arm. “Should I throw him in the slammer?”
Zapata ran a finger over his mustache as he contemplated the fisherman’s fate.
Bongo looked at the fisherman’s terrified face and said to Zapata, “Let this poor fellow go.”
Zapata swung around and turned the glare of his sunglasses on Bongo. “Stay out of it.”
“If he’d killed the other guy,” Bongo said, “he never would have brought the body in and reported it.”
Zapata sneered at Bongo. “Little fish don’t eat big fish.”
“Damn right,” Bongo said.
Zapata ordered the policeman, “Let the little fish go back to the sea.” He turned and walked away.
The policeman wrapped the body in the canvas and carried it off.
The fisherman was still too terrified to move.
Bongo took a five-peso bill out of his wallet and offered it to the fisherman. “At least you can go home to your family with something.”
The fisherman shyly took the money. A grateful smile spread on his sun-blistered lips as he mumbled, “Strangest day of my life.”
4.
Rhythm in the Rain
The Plymouth headed back to Havana with four men inside and half a man in the trunk.
When the car crossed the bridge over the Rio Cojimar, Zapata ordered, “Turn off here and go into town.”
“Okay, Captain.” Pedro wheeled the Plymouth off the highway onto a narrow road.
The town of Cojimar was on a small bay where a sluggish river reluctantly gave up the fight to the much larger ocean. It was a simple place where women and children huddled in the shade of wooden houses waiting for the men to come back from the sea. Piers poked up from the water where fishing boats moor
ed. At one pier there were big, fancy boats, vessels not meant for those who worked the sea for a living, but for those who made a game out of fishing, measured their prowess by how persistent they were in plowing through deep waters hoping to blindly snag a big fish. To them a fish was a trophy to hang on a wall, or a reason to buy another self-congratulatory round of drinks.
Most people from Havana took their holiday farther up the coast, in the resorts of Playas del Este, where the beaches were broad and sandy and the water gentle. Cojimar was a working fishermen’s refuge, but it had a few places where visitors with limited means could stay. And there was La Terraza, a no-nonsense fishermen’s restaurant at the edge of the bay.
The Plymouth pulled to a stop outside La Terraza. The four men got out.
Zapata pointed at Pedro and Paulo. “Stay here with the car.”
“Please, Captain,” Pedro complained. “It’s hot out here.”
“We need a cool drink,” Paulo whined.
Zapata turned the glare of his sunglasses on Pedro and Paulo. They lowered their heads and resentfully slumped back to the Plymouth. They didn’t like this. When they had stayed with the car at the bathing pavilion, they got to be big shots from the city, flirting with giggling girls in skimpy bathing suits. One of those girls had a broad sugarcane-fed bottom and she was eager to let the sun shine on it. They got her phone number. Now they had to wait in the hot sun with no human in sight, standing guard over a rotting, half-eaten corpse that was starting to smell fishy.
Bongo and Zapata walked into La Terraza and sat down at a table. They were the only customers. There was never much action in the late afternoon. Late afternoons were for siesta; a person didn’t want to move much, it was too hot and sticky. Finally a waiter appeared through a beaded curtain that separated the main room from a back kitchen. He took their order and quickly brought the drinks, long-necked bottles of Hatuey beer accompanied by glasses of dark rum. Outside, through the open window, the flat ocean was turning from blue to white, more like the surface of a mirror than water. On the mirror was reflected a pile of dark clouds getting ready to rain.
Zapata took a sip of rum, running his tongue along his lips to savor the sugar-tart taste. He pulled out a cigar, bit off one end, and put the cigar in his mouth. He struck a match and held it to the cigar. As he sucked, the flame fired up the cigar’s tip in a red circle. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled. A plume of smoke rose into the thick humidity, hovering above him like an improbable halo.
Bongo drank his rum in silence. He’d be damned if he was going to be social with this man. He turned away and watched through the window as the clouds ganged up on one another.
Zapata puffed on his cigar and drank his chaser of Hatuey. He had come into La Terraza to reflect. Having Bongo across from him jarred his memory. He let his memory flow, fluid as a river of rum, drifting away to twenty years before.
Back then Zapata was a young policeman in Havana, a real green yucca. He was the lowest man in the pecking order, and having a rough go of it because he believed policemen should be good guys. Most of his cohorts were stealing from parking meters, shaking protection dough from small businesses, or taking bribes from busted pimps. These cops had an easy life on the sugarcane train of corruption. They were promoted while Zapata was passed over. One day, he decided to get away from the grind where everybody was taking a bite out of everyone else’s ass. He had to find a cheap place, since big money was for the higher-ups who got their split of payoffs and kickbacks. So he went to Cojimar. He wanted to fish and think.
The place he rented was in a group of five tiny bungalows gathered around a patio that sprouted a straggly, sunburnt palm. From the window of his bungalow Zapata could see around the curve of the harbor to the old stone Spanish watchtower on a hilltop.
Zapata’s first day was relaxing. He had time on the water in his small rented boat to think while his fishing line bobbed. He wondered whether he could make it as a policeman. He wasn’t naive; he knew the game. Did he want to play it?
By the second day of his holiday, Zapata decided to turn in his badge. He had a friend who was an accountant at the Coca-Cola factory. His friend told him there was big opportunity at Coke. Cuba had the sugar, Coke had the formula.
On the third day of Zapata’s vacation, everything changed. A woman with two children checked into the bungalow next to his. Something about the trio compelled him to figure out their story. As a policeman, he was trained to discreetly observe.
The woman seemed happy enough, always fussing over her children. The girl was the same luscious licorice color as her mother, but the boy was white. Different fathers? But how could that be? They appeared to be exactly the same age, about seven, a black-and-white photo of identical sexual opposites. Except that the black girl had white hair; not blond hair—white. She also had the feline grace of her mother, moving with the agility of a jungle cat. Her brother never left her side. He always had a big grin on his face, as if he had just been given a birthday present.
The children loved to swim off a little fishing pier. They kept each other happy and amused. On hot afternoons idle tourists would stroll by, usually Americans who had stopped at La Terraza for lunch. For fun, the tourists would toss a coin off the end of the pier and the children would immediately dive for it in intense competition. They would pull themselves back up onto the pier, gazing raptly at the coin held out in one of their open palms as they laughed and water dripped down their bodies. Their bathing suits were identical, just white cotton underpants. The boy’s minimal maleness was outlined at the center of his wet underpants when he stood up. When the girl stood, her white underpants clung to her wet black skin, making the cotton material transparent in the bright sunlight. When Zapata watched her he couldn’t help but see, through the soaked cotton stretched around her waist, the pout of the budding flower between her legs.
The girl had no inhibitions. The very first time she saw Zapata watching her on the pier she waved back at him and laughed, then dove into the water. At that moment it was as if an arrow shot from a bow flew up from the sea where the girl disappeared and struck Zapata in the heart. When the girl resurfaced, his world changed forever. How carnal she looked, beyond her years, already aware that she was the stalker, a stealthy jungle cat, the Panther.
Zapata tried to grasp the meaning of the arrow that had pierced his heart, to pull it out before it did fatal damage. He recalled the words of a Spanish poem he had memorized years before:
Nobody understood the perfume
of your belly’s dark magnolia.
Nobody knew how you tormented
a hummingbird of love
between your teeth.
After this Zapata became restless. At night he couldn’t sleep, for which he was thankful, for if he had not been awake he would not have witnessed what he had.
Zapata had wondered for some time why the woman with the radiant licorice skin was always alone. Was her husband dead? Was she divorced? On the run from a wife-beater? Then one night Zapata heard a loud racket from the bungalow next door. He went to the window and peered through the wooden slats. He could hear the voices of a woman and a man arguing, followed by the sound of things being thrown. Should he intervene?
The noise and shouting intensified. Zapata opened his door and walked out, but just as he did the door of the other bungalow banged open. A man staggered backward out of the doorway, as if drunk or reeling from a punch.
Zapata quickly slid into the shadows.
The mother of the children chased after the man—a white man, dressed in blue jeans and a rayon shirt printed with Hawaiian hula girls. The mother wore a clinging red dress. She moved steadily ahead on high-heeled yellow shoes. She raised her hand and smacked the man across the face. He lurched backward, banging up against the pathetic little palm tree in the center of the courtyard. He rubbed his hand across his mouth where she had hit him and stared defiantly back at her. She smacked him again. Blood trickled from the corner of his lip.
“You bastard!” She charged, slamming into his body.
The man threw his arms around her and she leapt up, hooking her legs around his waist. Her red dress rode high, exposing her smooth black bottom in the moonlight. With one hand she reached down and unzipped his pants, grabbing his stiff member as deftly as a black eagle snatching a white rabbit that had popped from its hole. He groaned while she moved furiously up and down, determined to break his manhood. She rode him as tears flowed down her cheeks. He crushed her lips with a tongue-ramming kiss. Their bodies banged against the pathetic palm. His manhood was planted in her center; she was going to tear it out by its root, or they were going to rip the palm tree out of the earth. Gasps of exasperation burst simultaneously from their lungs as they slid down the trunk of the palm, entangling at its base like writhing black and white snakes.
The next morning was very quiet. Zapata was surprised to find himself waking from a sound sleep. It was noon. The blades of the fan over his bed made the humidity worse, thwacking away at the salt-heavy air until it dripped in a light perspiring rain down onto him. Groggy, he staggered to the washbasin. The heat was so oppressive that even the cold water tap was spewing hot water. He remembered the night before. Did that really happen? Or was it one of those dreams he had when the heat and humidity were stifling, dreams that were like startling hallucinations?
Zapata quickly threw on his clothes and opened the front door, half expecting to see the two lovers from the night before coiled at the bottom of the palm tree in spent ecstasy.
The palm looked more pathetic than ever in its solitude. Its sunburnt fronds hung down in utter dejection, not even an idle breeze was interested in touching it. Zapata walked over and stroked its trunk. Last night had been only a dream, gone now.