King Bongo

by Thomas Sanchez

  “A bigger country, a bigger president.”

  PayDay looked down nervously at Shines. Lizard had a big mouth, and a big mouth leads to a big downfall.

  Lizard grinned. “I told you not to worry. Monkeys like him can’t even read a comic book in Spanish, let alone speak English.”

  “I’ve got the details. Let’s cut it.”

  “Here comes your wife, anyway. What’s she doing with those strings of peanuts wrapped around her neck?”

  “She’s having fun. She’s on vacation. Relax.”

  Lizard wasn’t relaxed. Betty’s buns looked great wrapped in the tight zebra skirt, and her big boobs flounced beneath the flimsy halter top. She looked dumb and blond and oblivious, just the way Lizard liked it. He wanted to slap the sultry pout on her lips and jump her bones. He remembered seeing her coming out of the Nacional with the Actor, stumbling on her high heels, her skirt hiked up. Lizard was ready to bet anything that that slick Hollywood shit had been fucking her so hard that it woke up the Pope in Rome, fucking her so hard that the penguins in Antarctica felt the ice shake beneath them. Just by the way she was walking now, it was clear she had been fucked up one side and down the other. Lizard would fuck her harder than the Actor. That was the best thing about his job, he got to fuck everything.

  Betty flapped the wreaths of peanuts slung around her neck in front of PayDay. “Look at what I got for your dollar!”

  “That’s great, babe.”

  “You could have bought twice as many for fifty cents,” Lizard snorted sarcastically. “You got poked by those Cuban Petes.”

  The Cuban boys had followed Betty, hoping to make one last sale.

  Lizard snarled at them, “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The boys all pulled back, except one, who held a bucket of pineapple slices in ice.

  “I love that shit,” Lizard barked. “Give it to me.” He grabbed the bucket and shoved a dollar at the boy. The boy snatched the bill and ran away.

  Lizard slurped a pineapple slice, smacking the cold yellow fruit between his duck-bill lips. Splashes of juice rained down onto his shoes.

  Shines wiped off the syrupy drops as they fell onto Lizard’s shoes, attempting to preserve the gleam on the leather he had worked so hard to achieve.

  Betty smiled at PayDay. “Hon, those kids are so cute.”

  PayDay nodded. “Glad you got what you wanted.”

  “Know what I want now?” Betty cooed.

  “What’s that, babe?”

  “To eat Moors and Christians.”

  “Eat what?”

  A cruel gurgle came from Lizard’s throat as he choked and spit out a half-chewed piece of yellow goo. “Moors and Christians,” he blurted. “That’s just beans and rice shit, cooked in pig lard. It’ll give you a fat ass. You want a fat ass like a Cuban mama?”

  Betty didn’t think Cuban mamas had such fat asses, most of them were teenagers anyway, they looked sweet. But she wasn’t going to answer Lizard. Instead, she encouraged her husband. “Hon, buy me some Moors and Christians.”

  PayDay shrugged. “I don’t know where to go.”

  Lizard butted in. “Not all the restaurants serve it. In the Right Guys’ restaurants we’ve got Italian pasta, not Cuban slop.”

  Betty gave her husband a helping smile. “My guidebook says that the Floridita restaurant is right around the corner and that famous people go there. Maybe we’ll see someone famous eating Moors and Christians?”

  “All right, babe,” PayDay said. “I’ll take you.”

  Betty took his arm. “Let’s go have lunch.”

  “Wait a minute, sister!” Lizard jabbed a finger in front of Betty like a mad traffic cop stopping a line of cars. “The Floridita’s a piss-hole filled with wall-to-wall tourists, trust-fund babies and pretend big shots. Me and PayDay are going to the Hotel Plaza to have some oysters and continue our man talk. This is no holiday, this is business.”

  PayDay could definitely see Lizard as a dead man with a PayDay candy wrapper shoved in his mouth. He gave his wife a mournful look. “Sorry, babe.”

  Betty frowned, then quickly brightened, giving PayDay a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll go to the Floridita and eat some Moors and Christians. Don’t worry about me. I love this country, everybody’s so cute.”

  PayDay grinned. “I’ll bring you back here someday when it’s not all work.”

  Lizard nudged PayDay approvingly. “Now you’re talking, pal. Bring the little lady back when it’s all play.” He turned to Betty. “You’ll like that, won’t you?”

  Betty looked Lizard right between the eyes and trilled one of her Broadway show tunes. “From this happy day, no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-do songs, from this moment on.”

  Lizard scratched his head and looked at PayDay. “What the fuck is she crooning about?”

  PayDay didn’t answer.

  “Girly,” Lizard said to Betty, “just go away. I’ve got to talk to your hubby.”

  Betty gave PayDay another peck on the cheek. “See you back at the hotel, hon.” She walked away with a little wiggle in her zebra skirt.

  Lizard fished out a quarter from his pocket, flipped it in the air with a flourish, caught it in his open palm and slapped it into Shines’ upturned hand. “Here you go, boy.”

  Shines stared at the silver coin.

  Lizard advised PayDay, “I never tip these guys, ruins it if you do. We don’t want to dampen their entrepreneurial spirit.”

  “Sometimes a tip is a good thing.”

  “Not here. It’ll put ideas into their heads. Next thing you know they’ll have egos bigger than French waiters. Come on, let’s go over to the Plaza.”

  The two men walked across the square, past a group of men shoving and shouting, preparing for a fight.

  PayDay asked, “What’s going on?”

  “That’s the so-called hot corner of the square. It’s where these Cubes come to talk about their true passion, and it ain’t women or politics, it’s baseball. Baseball’s more of a life-and-death blood sport here than bullfighting is in Spain.”

  “So what’s to argue about?”

  “Everything,” Lizard smiled.

  “Like what?”

  “Like whether or not Hurricane threw yesterday’s game. Whether he’s a national hero or a cokehead on the take.”

  “They could be right either way.”

  “Chumps.”

  In the hot corner fists started flying, honor was on the line.

  “About the Big Race hit”—Lizard lowered his voice and looked around suspiciously to make certain he wasn’t being overheard—“the President won’t be seated in front of the Maine monument.”

  “Where’s he going to be?”

  “In front of the Nacional. The Right Guys wanted it kept secret until the end. Not even you could know.”

  “Is the shooter still going to be in the same place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then nothing’s changed for me.”

  “One thing. No fucking candy bars.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t leave one of your goddamn PayDay wrappers rammed into the shooter’s mouth after you finish the job.”

  PayDay smiled a fake expression of sincerity. “You’ve got my word on it.”

  Monkey Shines watched the two Americans as they walked off across the square, almost getting themselves mixed up in a fistfight over baseball in the hot corner. Shines glanced down at the thin slice of silver in his palm; twenty-five cents for an hour’s worth of work. That big American had kept talking and talking and Shines had kept shining and shining, and all he was left with was twenty-five cents and no tip. Shines tucked the coin into his pocket and grinned. He might have been born on a street named bitterness, but he was an eternal optimist. He wasn’t going to let anything get him down. Life was good, and he had the only shine spot beneath the great Martí, the father of the country. All the other shiners had to work the sidewalks or in the stone arcades. He was in the center of every
thing. He liked watching kids hustling strings of peanuts, eager guys offering lottery tickets, and old fellows playing dominoes as they talked about life in Spain. He liked to hear the portable radios that were tuned to heartthrob love songs, big-band rumbas, baseball games at El Cerro stadium or horse races at Oriental Park. Shines especially loved the names of horses being shouted as they raced: General Fang, Mysteria, Brass Kid, Captain Flares, Dancing Doctor, Guerra Fria. Those names were a magic carpet offering adventurous rides. What great battles had Captain Flares fought? How cold was the war of Guerra Fria? What mysterious worlds did Mysteria haunt? The radios also played the news. When Shines heard a captured rebel in Cienfuegos say that Cuban men shouldn’t be on their knees shining shoes, Shines shook his head in wonder. What was that rebel talking about? Nobody would join people who thought like him, he was fighting a lost cause, because being a shoe shiner was a noble tradition. Shines was grateful for the fact that he had work, and that his work was in the heart of Havana.

  Shines was grateful that, if he had the money, he could travel anywhere. And if he didn’t have money, he could still say whatever he wanted, as long as it wasn’t against the government. What freedom! It was a crime that some were trying to tear this all down, to smash what Shines could see all around him—people moving freely, doing business, buying whatever magazines and newspapers they wanted, listening to whatever they chose on the radio. Shines didn’t want revolutionaries telling him what to believe. He loved his job and where he was, right on the Prado with its palatial buildings. Shines was in the center of the world, he was the architect of grandiose dreams.

  Colorful parrots flew overhead, circling the Martí statue. Shines looked up and waved as the birds flew toward the immense Capitolio dome, then he bent back to his work. A steady stream of customers propped their feet up on his battered shoe box. He prided himself that he could observe the world of men without raising his head as he shined. Shoes told the story of the famous fight for love and glory. When the shoes had their laces undone, their leather tongues started wagging. When the shoes weren’t talking, they exposed revelations deep in their leather grain, like the creases of destiny in a hand. The shoes of Havana passed under the spell of Shines’ rag. He shined politicians, thieves, priests, pimps and even the great Cuban boxer Kid Chocolate. But it made no difference if he was shining a bishop or a canecutter, every man got the same elbow grease, the same respect.

  Shines didn’t have to go anywhere to keep up with important news, the news found him, for not only did the shoes of the customers talk, their owners talked too. He heard that Cuba’s Labor Ministry was purging Communists from the Telephone Company. He heard that President Batista had been named honorary chief of the Sheriff Air Patrol of Florida. He heard that the new 1957 Pontiac was the greatest road car in history and it could be seen at Villoldo Motor Company at Calzada and Twelfth Streets in Vedado. He heard that two innocent passersby, an elderly man and a young woman, were seriously injured by a bomb blast at the corner of Concha and Fabrica. He heard another bomb went off at the Trust Company of Cuba Bank. He heard that the great Negro singer Nat “King” Cole was coming to the Tropicana. He heard that Little Cyclone, the pet dog of the Magoon Fire Station, who had been to every important fire in Havana for twelve years, died beneath a speeding car and was buried by a forty-man honor guard at Saint Francis of Assisi pet cemetery. He heard that one hundred young Cuban beauties were competing to be Carnival Queen, and they would parade in skimpy bathing suits before judges. Shines heard so many things, a river of information washed over him. And to think the rebel on the radio wanted to liberate him from his job. He would rather die first.

  Life was good. Shines made up for the money he had been cheated out of by the loudmouthed American who had stiffed him. He sat with his head down and his rag poised over the box waiting for the next man. But the shoe that slid onto the box now belonged to a woman, a spike-heeled shoe in three different colors of leather. This would require some real finesse and the steady hands of a surgeon.

  A honey-coated voice floated down to Shines from above.

  “You do women, don’t you?”

  The fact was, in Cuba, women didn’t get their shoes shined in public. It was considered unseemly for a woman to expose her leg on a shoe box, and no husband or boyfriend would tolerate his woman’s feet being touched in such an intimate way by another man. But it wouldn’t be proper to turn a lady’s request down, even if the request was improper. And since the request was made in English, perhaps that meant the code of impropriety didn’t apply. Shines stared at the shoe on the box, its top slit provocatively, exposing vulnerable white skin. Above the slit was an elegant ankle with a thin gold chain around it.

  The woman’s voice floated down again. “Do you speak English?”

  Shines felt his tongue was tied in a knot and he struggled to untangle it. “Gracias. Thank you much. English, yes.”

  “Good. I wore these shoes dancing on New Year’s Eve. They’re Ferragamos, I adore them. Don’t you think the turned-up toe tip looks like the turned-up nose of a snobby boarding-school girl? It’s called the Oriental-toe, only Salvatore Ferragamo does it, he’s a genius. Wearing Ferragamos is like being in an Italian opera and Caruso is singing just to you, sublime. Have you ever had your hands on Ferragamos?”

  Shines tried to unwind his tongue to answer, but she didn’t wait.

  “So, on New Year’s Eve I was dancing at the Tropicana, and you know how people are, they don’t watch where they’re stepping, especially if it’s a rumba. My poor little Oriental-toes took a terrible beating. I couldn’t bear leaving them in a dark closet crying because they were no longer pretty. They deserve another chance to dance. Don’t you think?”

  This time Shines had his tongue unraveled and was prepared to answer, but she beat him to it.

  “I’m on my way to meet my husband at the rooftop lounge of the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel. I don’t like the bar downstairs, just stuffy Brits with sunburnt faces. We’re going to watch the cannon-firing ceremony across the bay at the old fortress. BOOM! BOOM! I love those big guns thundering over the city, makes me feel like I’m back in Colonial times. Isn’t that fun?”

  Shines thought, no, it wasn’t fun if your people were brought here in chains. And besides, the cannons always frightened the parrots in the trees along the Prado, sending them screeching into the sky. He wanted to tell her that he had never been to the Sevilla Biltmore. Even if he had the money to go there, he wouldn’t be allowed in, he was the wrong color. But his most pressing problem about color now was how to shine this woman’s shoes, since he didn’t have any gold, blue or red polish. Maybe, with some spit and fancy rag work, he could work what color was left in the shoes back up, raise it from the dead so the shoes could dance again.

  “Are you going to shine me or not?” the woman asked.

  Shines slid his rag gently across one of her shoes; he didn’t want her to think he was trying to feel the delicate outline of her toes underneath.

  “Oh, that feels good,” the woman said as Shines’ rag slipped back and forth across the leather with more force. “I’m sure you’ll bring them back to life.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s nice that you’re talking. I was beginning to think you had just fallen off of the sugarcane train.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Shines could see that the men and boys in the park were transfixed by the sight of a woman having her shoes shined in public. It was their lucky day, two spectacles in just hours—first the American woman in the zebra skirt, and now this. Above his head Shines heard the silk swish of the woman’s dress hem as it swayed from the vibration in her body caused by the rhythm of his shining.

  “I love this time of early evening,” she sighed. “This purple light is gorgeous.”

  He wanted to look at her knees, but he didn’t dare look higher than her ankles. He was a professional man and had his standards.

  “And I love the way the light makes the Capitol over t
here look like it’s on fire. They say your Capitol dome is bigger than ours in Washington. Is that true?”

  Shines didn’t want her to know that he wasn’t well traveled, he’d never been out of Havana. But he knew his job, and his main concern was to keep her from seeing him use spit instead of polish on her precious shoes. He nodded a distracting hip-hop-bop of his head as he raised one hand to his lips and cupped a cap of spit into his palm. He slapped the palm onto the shoe, massaging spit into leather, giving a shine slicker than an American dime.

  “What kind of man would take money from a woman to spy on her husband?”

  The abruptness of the question caught Shines by surprise. He recalled that Captain Zapata had asked him a similar question, but he couldn’t answer the woman the way he had answered Zapata; he couldn’t speak of triumphing over love devils, that was men’s talk. Maybe, if he didn’t answer, she would change the subject.

  “I used to fly every year to Rio for Mardi Gras. But one time a friend of mine from Newport said, ‘Oh, you must go to Carnival in Havana, it’s ever so much more authentic.’ And that’s how I met my husband. We fell in love in the middle of all that wonderful dancing. Do you make lots of money during Carnival?”

  Here was a place Shines felt he could speak, but he kept his voice low and humble, as was his station.

  “During Carnival people drink and dance. They forget to pay for their shines. I don’t make any money.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Carnival is when you let your angels and demons out to play, that way they’ll be happy for the rest of the year.”

  “You’re a smart one.”

  Shines didn’t know how to react to a compliment from an elegant woman, it wasn’t in his experience. He smelled a fragrance coming off the skin of her bare legs. Roses and vanilla? Honey and money? As he shined he felt beneath his fingers something ill-defined, preventing him from reading the foot’s vibration. This had never happened before. When it came to the human foot, Shines was a diviner, he could tell where a person stood in the struggle between good and evil. But not now. These feet had been places Shines couldn’t imagine, and perhaps they had never touched the ground at all.