“What was the call?” Uncle Arturo asked.
“Aldo got sick, my stand-in. They want me for the morning.”
Arturo was appalled. “You can’t go back. You only just got here. The kids haven’t had any time to play with their cousins. We haven’t even been to the beach.”
Dad shook his head. “No, no, everyone will stay. I’ll get the ten o’clock train back tonight.”
“Can’t they get anyone else? Why is it always you?” Mom asked.
“I’m the only one they trust,” he said, then walked over and kissed her on the forehead. Mom frowned, wondering, I suppose, if it was really Aldo or some hussy from the Vieja that Dad had been planning to see the whole time.
Sundown.
Games of canasta and poker and my favorite, twenty-one.
Uncle Arturo told a stupid joke: “What do you call a French sandal maker? Answer: Philippe Flop.”
Dad told a subversive joke: “What are the three successes of the Revolution? Answer: Health care, education, and sport. What are the three failures of the Revolution? Answer: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
Supper of nutella on toast.
The bed. Ricky on one side, me on the other.
The fields alive with insects and huge colonies of Jamaican fruit bats blotting out the moon.
Dad in for the goodnight story and the kiss.
Rum breath. Tears in his eyes. No story. Nothing. Not even goodbye.
Next day.
The beach. The tide out and the sand wet, freezing. Kelp on the dunes, see-through jellyfish. My hands blue. A cut on my right thumb hurting in the wind.
There was nothing to do. The others had gone on ahead and I was too late to catch them. I walked along making trails with my feet and wrote my name in the sand with a piece of driftwood. I picked up a length of seaweed and popped some of the float pods on the strands. They went snap and briny water came out of them, trundling down my fingers onto Aunt Isabella’s white shawl.
Farther along the shore I noticed a dead gull. Its wings were covered in what looked like a thick gray film but was really dozens of little crabs.
Drizzle, clouds.
Flocks of birds heading for South America. Other lands. Other countries. No one I knew had ever been to another country, but Ricky and Dad had once seen Haiti from the headland at Punta de Quemado.
More beach.
A dead shark with its black eyes pecked out. Its belly had swollen. I found a stick and cut it open to see if there were other fish inside. I poked, guts spilled. The perfume of death. Intestines. Stones. No fish.
I walked on. It started to rain. Now I was wet and alone. I cursed my stubbornness. Uncle Arturo had gotten everyone up at nine, for baseball and a day at the beach, but I woke in a huff about Dad, furious that he had gone back to his stupid job, ferrying stupid people across the stupid bay in his stupid boat. I refused to go. Mom begged me and was embarrassed but Aunt Isabella pretended I was sick and brought me moors and christians and soup and a shawl and a book of poems by José Martí.
After they all had left, guilt finally got me out of bed. I rummaged for clothes, found a green dress and the shawl-no shoes, no underwear-and went after them, but I couldn’t find them. And now I was a little lost.
Rain. Sand. Black clouds. A dog came bounding over. Black labrador, sandy paws, floppy ears. “Good boy,” I said, grabbing him by the collar. His tag said he was called Suerte-Lucky.
I patted him. “Are you lost too? Are you? Where did you come from? Do you want to be my friend?”
I didn’t see many dogs in Havana-you had to get a special permit to own a dog and often they caused resentment. Dogs ate meat, and for many people that was rubbing it in.
“Lucky, I like that. Lucky you met me.”
A boy walked over the dune. Black, a little older than me, wearing shorts, a yellow T-shirt, no shoes either.
“Your dress is soaked, I can see through to your papaya,” the boy said.
“You shouldn’t be looking,” I replied, my cheeks burning.
“I, I was only joking.”
“I don’t find that joke very funny.”
“That’s my dog,” he said.
“You can have him,” I said, pushing the dog away from me.
“Hey!” someone called up from the dirt road beyond the dune.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “But I know you.”
“Oh yeah? Who am I?”
“You’re staying with your cousins in the Hacienda Mercado.”
“That’s right.”
“Your uncle is a very bad man,” the boy said, taking his dog and keeping it close to him.
“Why?”
“He beat me for talking to Juanita.”
Uncle Arturo was an important official in the regional government. He had every expectation of his daughters marrying well and moving to Havana. It didn’t surprise me that he’d beaten this poor black kid from the village for talking with the lovely Juanita.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Patrice.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Haitian, I mean French.”
Ricky ran down from the road. He was breathless. “We should go, there’s some kind of trouble. Uncle Arturo got a tipoff that the police are coming. He sent me to look for you.”
Patrice, Lucky, Ricky, and I ran back together.
It was almost dusk when we made it to the village. The rain had eased and there was a helicopter. My mouth went dry. In Cuba only the army flew helicopters. What kind of trouble meant the army? We walked closer until we saw police vans and cops blocking the roads in and out of the village.
“Get down,” I said and pulled Ricky to the ground. Lucky ran back to his house and Patrice followed him. “Hey!” I called after him, but some instinct told Patrice to get away from us.
To one side of the settlement were three big fields that had been zoned for a new coffee plantation, which for one reason or another had never materialized. The fields had been left to grow wild and palms and mangrove trees and tall grasses had sprung up. Excellent cover. We ducked off the road and into the undergrowth, crawling toward the hacienda. Scores of police and troops and plainclothes DGI and DGSE men. The helicopter, a huge Russian thing, was shining a spotlight down onto the village.
We got on our bellies now and slithered all the way around to Uncle Arturo’s yard.
A confusion of soldiers, cops, civilians. The street had been blocked off by army jeeps manned by troops toting enormous machine guns. The police had their guns drawn and there were still more soldiers in green fatigues with black armbands kneeling and pointing rifles at the hacienda. The villagers were congregating behind the jeeps-almost everyone in the little hamlet had come out to enjoy the spectacle. The helicopter came lower and its spotlight began scanning the house, the yard, and the fields beyond.
“We’re going to be seen here,” I whispered to Ricky.
“What do we do?”
“The palm tree,” I said. “In the break between the beams. Stay with me.”
We scrambled into the yard and climbed the palm tree at the back of the house. From up here we could see everything better. All told there were about fifty soldiers and as many police fiercely surrounding Uncle Arturo’s house as if it contained lost survivors from the Bay of Pigs.
A lead policeman in a civilian suit was trying to speak into a megaphone but he couldn’t get the thing to work.
The big helicopter was landing. It was probably running low on gas.
The noise was incredible. We watched it until it went behind the trees, thundering, shaking coconuts out of the branches. Other cops had set up a generator and when they turned it on arc lights flooded the scene.
I hadn’t stopped shivering since the beach and six meters up a palm tree was no place for a fainting fit.
“What do you think Uncle Arturo did?” Ricky asked.
“Maybe this is about the American cigarettes and those magazines.”