Выбрать главу

“Spare me.”

The Police Superintendent turned and headed back for his car and left Ward to the snow and wind. Ward vowed to take away with him some memory of the man. However, the weather being what is was, he was already having trouble remembering exactly how the man’s features fit together. So much so that Ward considered calling out to him and requesting a quick but comprehensive physical inventory, fully aware that, in all likelihood, the Police Superintendent would not even rebuff him with an insulting refusal. So he looked through the neutral and colorless distance and saw an old five-story walk-up building slanting away from the ground at a precarious angle, snow swirling around the leaning structure as if to lasso it upright. His appointed destination. What was keeping it standing? He turned for a final look at the Police Superintendent, who was now leaning against the car, white derby snugly atop his head. The two young officers were huddled over sharing a cigarette while uniformed men from supporting vehicles worked to cordon off the street with brass barricades they took from the trunks of their own cars.

Ward reached into his coat pocket for the ring of keys but fumbled them against his chest into the snow. At once he dropped to his knees, biting at the ends of his gloved fingers until his hands were free of the leather. He stuck his bare fists into the snow and began clawing about, reacting to the cold in an almost clinical way. The snow both surprising and mundane. He scooped up two fistfuls and weighed them in each palm. Snow was actually rising up from the street and fleeing into the heavens, but the domed sky would allow no escape. That thought took hold of him while he was kneeling at the very center of the world, its cold icy navel. He trembled to shake himself free.

No sooner had he done so than he noticed twenty feet ahead a familiar figure trudging through the snow toward him. He stuck his hands back into the slushy mounds and worked more frantically after the keys. Heard the snow-crunching approach of the two young officers behind him. Looked up and turned his head to see them bobbing forward with pistols drawn. He thought about shouting, “The keys! I dropped the keys! ” Instead, he burrowed down, trenched in this place that had already started to corrode beneath him, to melt and puddle around his knees.

DESTINY RETURNS

BY ACHY OBEJAS

26th & Kedvale

Destiny scratched the back of her neck with her left hand, the glistening pink nail on her index finger digging into the skin until it almost hurt. With the other hand she held a short, slim, and brown Romeo y Julieta to her thick, rubbery lips and breathed in. The tobacco indulged her, sweet and vaguely spicy, and she rocked for a moment, savoring her refuge from the freezing Chicago winds outside her window.

The tiny coffee maker, stout and metallic, hissed, cradled by fire on the stove. Destiny shot up from her kitchen table to extinguish the blue and orange flames before the crude sprayed all over. No one at the bodega where she’d bought it would ever consider it was anything other than Cuban, certainly not provident from the island but from Cuba nonetheless: diasporic, exiled, absolutely imaginary. Using an oven mitt to hold the hourglass-shaped coffee maker, she poured herself an exact thumbful in a wee cup that sported a raised pink and green floral pattern. Destiny lifted the cup to her lips and let the heat rise like a wet, gentle fog around her mouth. She stuck her tongue out, a marsupial peeking from its pouch, then tucked it back in a flash.

“Fuck Cuba,” she said aloud, in shamelessly accented English. She paused to regard the coffee’s approachability. Fuck fucking Cuba—and Mexico too.

Then in one cranelike swoop, she snatched up the demitasse, opened her wide mouth even wider, and tossed the scorching black bracer down her throat.

It had been twenty-five years since Destiny, a/k/a Dagoberto Fors Arias, a/k/a Dago Fors, had landed on American shores. He arrived in South Florida from Cuba on a blistering summer day in 1980 in a small yacht named San Dimas which carried a beneficent Catholic dissident to Key West and was piloted by the meanest-looking priest Dago had ever seen, a bulldog of a guy named Mariano Delgado. It had been a lifetime since that journey and Destiny was in no mood to look back. But the Mariel boat lift had been both historic and controversial and, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, she was one of its stranger success stories.

Now a newspaper reporter, a young Cuban-American dyke with misplaced nostalgia and a predisposition to all things Cuban, had tracked her down and wanted an interview. Destiny had tried to demur but the girl was insistent. She’d seen her on TV, an intense but pretty tomboy, disarming in a way but with the ferocity of those small dogs who clamp on and never let go. Somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to the interview; somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to meet her at the one place in all of Chicago Destiny had vowed never to return, La Caverna Club on 26th and Kedvale, so deep in the heart of the Mexican barrio that it seemed, but for the cruel cover of snow, that it wasn'’t in a northern enclave at all but at the very center of some lawless border town.

Destiny sighed and ground out the Romeo y Julieta on an ashtray in the shape of the island, a long pink caiman, hollow inside.

***

Dago Fors had gotten out of Cuba because in 1980 Cuban authorities let open the island’s borders, causing a gush of refugees to force their way north on anything that would float. Almost immediately, hundreds of exiles had begun racing boats south to pick up their seafaring relatives. When the avalanche of refugees was so great that it embarrassed the socialist government, the Cubans emptied their jails and mental hospitals and forced the exiles to take along former inmates and other undesirables. It was their “lacra social,” their catch-all category. Indeed, the snarling priest who’d brought Dago to safety had been promised the release of the Catholic dissident, who was his brother-in-law, as it turned out, only if he agreed to take a bunch of fairies back with him on his roomy boat.

Dago Fors, café au lait, pouty-lipped, a catlike twenty-four-year-old drag queen, was doing his best to be one of them. When word got out about the goings on, he put on the trashiest orange blouse he could find, the tightest, most worn jeans (with nothing underneath, naturally), and immediately set himself to slapping his flip-flops up and down the Malecón in the hopes of getting arrested. Within twenty-four hours, he found himself with an itchy crust of salt from the sea spray on his skin but at last standing in an official line of so-called “social scum.”

By his own calculations, Dago knew it might be days, if he got out at all, unless the official system was interrupted in some way. A bribe was impossible for him, with a life’s fortune of less than forty pesos in his pocket. So Dago screeched, his back arching each time. And the more he began to loudly comment on this or that part of the guards’ anatomies, the more irritated they became, and the more anxious they were to get rid of him. When Mariano the priest pulled up, the guards figured they could exact a double price: rid the revolution of the insufferable fag and make him pay for his unrelentingly bad behavior by sticking him with somebody big and mean and morally imposing.

To their surprise, Mariano sternly shook his head and touched his clerical collar every time one of the Cubans signaled for him to let Dago on his boat, but the brother-in-law, already on the deck and perhaps delirious from his prison trials, beckoned otherwise with his hand. That’s about when Mariano threw open the throttle, sans scum aboard.

Immediately, the guards started swearing, shouting and waving frantically, the dissident brother-in-law began to scream at the taciturn priest, and in the confusion Dago Fors gritted his teeth and threw himself, or was pushed by one of the guards (it was hard to say), into the froth, his fingers urgently gripping one of the yacht’s dangling ropes. At that, the brother-in-law whooped with joy and began to reel him in, Mariano now gunning the yacht’s engines as it roared its way out of Cuban waters.