North of Havana
Randy Wayne White
1
Tomlinson telephoned at three minutes before ten Friday evening, December 20, to tell me that he was stranded in Havana, broke, frustrated, sailboat impounded, seriously discommoded, wholly bummed out and if I wasn't too busy, if I wasn't right in the middle of boxing a shipment of sea anemones or if my manatee research project could be conveniently interrupted, maybe, just maybe, I could get my butt to a neutral country and catch a plane to Cuba.
I thought: Cuba? Nope; no way. I will not go back to Cuba.
Tomlinson was talking: "You heard of a person being held against his will? I'm being held against my bill, man. Like they're holding No Mas hostage until I can float the nut, plus charging me storage to boot! As in muchos si-moleons, comprende?"
"The government?"
"These guys dressed in baby shit brown. Like storm troopers-"
"Who confiscated your boat, I mean." I was beginning to get a sick feeling in my stomach.
"Aren't you listening? Yes. The cubano-damn government. Man, it pains me to admit it, but socialism has gone to hell since I left the loop. I just thank the good Lord that Chairman Mao isn't alive to see it. Talk about a reality check! These pud duckers give me any more crap, I'm going to contact my old comrades from the SDS, Boston cell, and raise a serious stink. Who do they think came down here and cut their goddamn sugarcane in nineteen seventy-one? Wouldn't you think they had my name on file? Jesus Christ, we ate nothing but beans. We slept in barns. They had donkeys that bit like dogs! A machete scar meant something in those days."
Tomlinson was ranting-conduct out of character. Lately, though, he had been doing many things out of character. As his neurosurgeon, Maria Corales, had told me, "You can expect some odd behavior. He's been out of the hospital only what? A year? The beating he took, his brain was so traumatized that it could be another year-or more-before he's back to normal. So be kind to him. Be understanding."
So I listened kindly. And I tried to understand. But I kept thinking: Jesus, Cuba…
Tomlinson was calling, he said, from the Hotel Nacional, the old Meyer Lansky casino and brothel in downtown Havana, built during prohibition to service America's thirsty leisure class. It was his fifth night in the hotel, but he was thinking of switching to the Havana Libre up the street. At a rack rate of two hundred bucks a night, neither he nor his female companion could afford the Nacional much longer, and it had taken him that long to figure out a way to contact me.
"The phone system here," he said, "is not unlike whacking off. It's a hell of a mess and leaves something to be desired."
Not long ago, an American communications conglomerate received a lot of press about opening direct-dial phone service to Cuba. It was one of those hands-across-the-water events that implied a new relationship with our island foe of the old Cold War years. It also implied that Cubans had the freedom-never mind the financial means-to reciprocate. Not so, according to Tomlinson. You couldn't just pick up a Havana pay phone and dial your friendly AT amp;T operator. So what he'd finally done was find a guy who helped him work out a phone patch through the Vancouver British Columbia Marine Operator, a bit of satellite pinball that now had our digitized voices ricocheting through the ionosphere, then back and forth across the continent Person-to-person. Collect.
"Did I mention bring money?" Tomlinson asked. I could hear the muted equipment clatter and conduit roar of the Third World communication system; Tomlinson's voice sounded as if he were yelling to me from the bottom of a stone well. "Lots and lots of money, cash American," he said. "Ten thousand, minimum."
I told him, "You keep me on the phone much longer I won't have any money left to bring," not because I meant it, but because saying it seemed a necessary courtesy to the woman who waited a few feet away, lying on my bed. With the phone against my ear, I looked at her, smiled, then I made a great show of being patient to illustrate my impatience with Tomlinson… an act that a perceptive, tough-talking woman such as Dewey Nye wasn't likely to buy.
She didn't. Dewey rolled gray-blue eyes heavenward, used a lopsided, cynical smile to accuse me of stalling, kicked off the covers, stood, and released a lanyard of butterscotch hair that fell heavily across her bare shoulders before she froze me with those sled dog eyes and mouthed the word "Coward!" Then she began to survey the room, searching for her shirt and jogging bra, which I had folded neatly over the Celestron telescope by the north window of my little house that stands in water, Dinkin's Bay, Sanibel Island, Florida.
A peculiarity of the intimate male-female relationship is that each small gesture is a specific communication which, in sequence, creates a discourse so constant and telling that words do little more than outline what is expected or reaffirm what has already occurred. When one partner says, "We don't talk enough," it is usually much, much too late for talking. So I watched Dewey to see what she had to say. Watched her glide to the telescope, ropy thigh and calf muscles contracting like cables with each stride; a tall, big boned, slim-hipped woman who, naked except for bikini panties, moved with the lazy immodesty of the shower room jock. Noted that she turned her back to me before toweling off the body oil I had been using on her neck and shoulders-less a gesture of modesty than of rebuke. But just when I was beginning to read that she was genuinely peeved, she did a casual quarter-turn so that she was illuminated by the reading lamp: face, pale sweep and weight of breasts, the muscle-patched symmetry of abdomen as she wiggled into the jogging bra and latched it tight, a performance designed to be shared. When she caught me staring, she used long fingers to comb hair from her eyes and mouthed another word: "Asshole!"
Through the phone, I heard Tomlinson say, "Look'a that- cockroach the size of a damn chipmunk just tried to hump my shoe. Dirty little bastard! Hang on… Hah! Killed it!"
I thought: Killed it? Tomlinson?
Then he was barking at me: "Yoo-hoo! I know you're there 'cause I can hear you breathing like a bear… or maybe it's… hey, wait a minute. How could I be so stupid!" Inexplicably, his tone became guarded, his enunciation careful, as he said, "Mother of God, it just dawned on me! The ucking-fay ommie-cays got the phone bugged, right? We're being ape-taed? The proletariat scum!"
"Pig Latin? For Christ's sake, Tomlinson."
"Don't make it easy on them. Let the pink bastards wrestle with the code books. What gall! I was fighting for the collapse of capitalism when these twerps were abusing themselves with bootlegged Sears catalogues. Who do they think organized the Berkeley Expeditionary when Che Guevara was nabbed in sixty-eight? Was it my fault the Bolivian pigs shot him anyway? Is that what this's all about! Okay! Okay! Boycotting alpaca sweaters didn't carry the political juice I'd hoped. Turned out the whole firing squad owned llamas. But who knew with those Bolivians? Their sphincters are so tight, it'll be another ten generations before they can actually walk upright. Even howler monkeys consider Bolivians a bad risk as breeding stock! AM I GOING SLOW ENOUGH FOR YOU, COMRADE?"
I raised my voice: "Tomlinson! Take a deep breath and calm down." Paranoiac tangents were, in Tomlinson, a symptom of heavy stress… or of long-gone drug binges… or it could be the residue of the beating he had received at the hands of goons on an island called Sulfur Wells a year earlier. With him, the borders were always clouded. Nothing could be assumed. Even though I knew the conversation was probably being monitored, I said, "Nobody's listening. We're not being bugged. Relax. Okay?"
"You sure?"
"Why would they bother? Look, you sailed too close to Cuba and had your boat confiscated. It happens all the time. Take a deep breath and tell me about it, then I'll see what I can do."