Cuba Straits

For a moment, Vernum strained against the wire, then went limp. Yes, he knew. Four pieces of coconut rind, each sliced as round and white as a coin. Coconut represented Earth’s own flesh. Life fed on life. In the little cups would be ground cowrie shells, turpentine, and powdered bluestone. This was a purification ceremony.

“Do you feel guilty about the things you did here—and in the cane fields?” The woman’s voice different now, purring like a young girl in love.

Vernum nodded eagerly.

“Do you believe in redemption? Or justice? We can’t have it both ways . . . Or can we?”

Vernum had to think about that before he nodded again.

“The guilt in your head, late at night,” she asked, “does it pound like it’s trying to escape through your eyes? Do your thoughts cut flesh and scream for purity? Do they ask what you might do to make yourself pure again?”

The body voids excess liquids when panic overwhelms. Vernum’s head tilted up, then down, and he began to cry.

The woman removed an empty gourd from the bag, a sunflower . . . a fillet knife. Then she suddenly turned to look at the chimney as if surprised by an old friend. She beckoned with her hand. “Chino Rojo,” she called. “¡La Chino! Come . . . it is time.” Laughter in her voice, as if summoning her lover to the picnic.

Chino—a “Chinaman.” That, at least, wasn’t part of the ceremony. But then she added, “Hurry up, Raúl.”

In Cuba, there was only one Raúl.

Insanity.

The woman approached with the knife in her hand and placed the gourd between his feet at the base of the tree. By then, Vernum knew that the truth didn’t matter, but he struggled and wept and finally looked into her face—a face layered with wrinkles and the skulls of seven dead girls.

“When Figueroa was bad”—she smiled—“I always gave him a choice.” Her fingernails sparked like flint as they struggled with his zipper, then stretched him like a chicken neck. “Why don’t you sing while you make up your mind? You know the words.” Her smile showed fangs. “Your favorite song. I’ve heard you sing it many times here.”

Oggún shoro shoro, the verse went.

The knife had been cleaned and specially sharpened. When she offered the knife to Vernum, he screamed through his nose.

Tomlinson was startled by the bellow of an animal in the distance. He fumbled the canister and loops of film came peeling off in his hand. Black-and-white Kodak celluloid from the 1950s. He recovered and rewound the spool, careful to handle it by the ratchet tracks so as not to smudge the frames.

He took a last look at a moment in time, held the film to the light: a soldier on his ass, hat askew and embarrassed but still holding the bat after attempting to hit a . . . softball?

No. That couldn’t be. Tomlinson was so disillusioned, his sense of justice demanded a replay. He stripped through four previous frames.

Damn . . . it was true. Just as Raúl had hinted in a letter a few years before this film was shot—and probably later letters. Brother Fidel, instead of a major league prospect, had been a spaz on the baseball diamond.

Correction: softball field.

But so what? It didn’t matter when compared with the achievements of a visionary leader who had done his best to help the world change its profit-drunk, thieving ways.

The animal bellowed again. It was a sound so primal that Tomlinson grimaced while he tapped the canister closed. A cow, probably. Certainly not Figgy, who had been gone only a few minutes. Or was it Figgy’s next victim, some poor bastard who had wandered into Imelda Casanova’s web of madness? Gad, what a sickening turn of events. If the film hadn’t riveted his attention, he would have been on the shortstop’s trail already. Now he had to hurry to catch up.

There were two candles on the chair and a trusty Bic lighter in his pocket. He went up the root cellar steps and outside, where there were stars and a Gulf Stream breeze but no longer a distant flashlight to mark Figgy’s destination. When his eyes adjusted, though, the chimney was visible, a black spire against a tropic sky. Behind him, the village of Plobacho slept.

Tomlinson went down the hill with the canister tucked under an arm, alternately fretting about his friend and the film’s contents.

The hell it doesn’t matter, he thought. Baseball wasn’t just a part of Cuba’s history, it was a keystone. An unrealized triad was implied by the era—Mantle, Maris, and Fidel—icons of a generation, but one of those icons had sacrificed every man’s dream for the betterment of everyman.

Damn this film. The footage unmasked a lie, a generational fraud that would wound fellow travelers to the bone. It would loose a pack of right-wing hounds, a visual blood track that would craze them until they had savaged and befouled a legend who had lived the truth, a truth brighter for the flame of one small deception.

Flame.

Film burns fast, Figgy had warned him.

Tomlinson felt for the lighter in his pocket.

Why not burn it? Imelda Casanova wasn’t the victim of a tragic love story. She was nuts. A child abuser who had perverted her own grandson into slavery and made him a lackey who killed on command. And for what? To protect letters and film that gave her power over the past and guaranteed her future. This was political extortion, nothing less. What other damning secrets did the crazy lady have hidden in her arsenal?

Why not, indeed?

On a path that wound along the river, he didn’t stop but imagined himself stopping as he flicked a flame to life. The film canister was leaden beneath yellow foliage. For the first time, he noticed a date written in pencil: 12 Nov. 1958.

Gad. Only weeks before Fidel and Che had led a peasant army into Havana, they had been eating hors d’oeuvres and playing slow-pitch. The context took the wind out of Tomlinson. It was the equivalent of Bob Dylan pirating lyrics, or Hendrix commuting from suburbia to fake guitar riffs.

History. He held it in his hand. He wasn’t naïve. He knew that minions of the future often revised the past to fit the needs, or fears, of the present day. But destroy history? That, he could not do.

Well . . . he might, but later. There was a possibility he would need this film to buy Figgy’s freedom a second time.

In Cuba, apparently, it all depended on who he had killed.

•   •   •

SWEET LORD ABOVE . . . the mad shortstop had struck again.

Tomlinson, for the first time in his life, hoped he was suffering the horrid flashbacks a counselor had warned him about decades ago, but this was no hallucination. He stood among bricks, a long throw to the chimney, and watched Figgy’s silhouette pull a lifeless body away from a tree. Then he dropped the body as if it were a sack of potatoes and swiped his hands together like a workman congratulating himself on a job well done.

Reason enough to yell, “If he’s not dead, don’t kill him, for god’s sake. Figgy . . . ? I mean it.” Tomlinson set off at a run but soon slowed because it was dark. A lot of holes and bricks to trip him. He stumbled anyway, and the film canister went careening down a grade into more darkness, where there were bushes and god knows what else in a place where the air had the weight of illness. He had to use the lighter and hunt around on his knees. By the time he found the canister and confirmed the film was okay, the shortstop was close enough for Tomlinson to speak in a normal voice. Impossible to sound normal, however, under these conditions. “Is he still alive? I know CPR, if he’s alive. But if he’s dead . . . Christ, I don’t know what to do. What’s the plan? Take him to your usual spot and throw him off a cliff?”