Cubop City Blues (12 page)

RAINING
BASEBALLS

J
ust as you fix your sight on a ball leaving your father's bat, another reaches the apogee of its arc and begins to descend a few feet away. You run to that, hoping you'll have enough time to catch it and come back to get the other. Then a whack sounds and there is a third and almost immediately a fourth coming out of the sun, then several more in quick succession, followed by an old typewriter, a twirling pig, three flapping chickens, a statuette of the Virgin Mary and a flügelhorn, a coffeepot, dozens of books, a machete glinting in the sunlight, an automobile tire, a tricycle, a wife, many lovers, one infant enjoying the ride, a grandmother playing solitaire, another grandmother stuffing sausages, thousands of pages darkened by a language that isn't yours, a black panther, a school of yellow fish, a telescope for looking out, a microscope for looking in, fishhooks and harpoons and Captain Ahab and Emma Bovary and Maritornes the wench, no Don Quixote but a Humbert Humbert, an Úrsula Iguarán, a Père Goriot, a duck, an inkwell, a feast of cannibals, a pot of beans, angels and demons fighting for your soul, a boy building sand castles in the make-believe beach of his wanting, where an island boomerangs around his head.

When it is all done, the field is steaming from all the objects, the names, the melting memories. You wind your way to where your father was standing. Now only the bat is left next to home plate. You feel defrauded. Who could ever catch so much in a lifetime, let alone fifteen minutes? You pick up the bat and go in search of him. He has his back to you, urinating in some bushes behind the dugout. He turns, but he is not your father. His face the indeterminate face of Don Nadie, a nobody. You ask him the meaning of this. You were simply fun-going at first, catching balls he batted out to you, and suddenly the world rained down. His answer comes slowly, as if he were searching for the right words. You wanted to play, he says. Baseball, you say, not life. What's the difference? he asks. Where's my father? you ask. You have no father, there never was any father. You made him up in order to play the game. How about my mother? She's out in the field, in triplicate.

You ask him who he is and all you get in response is a half smile. He walks out of the bushes and into a car that vanishes down the road. Now you look over the mess on the field and wonder if you should clean it up. You decide that while it may be your life, it is not your responsibility. You step down into the dugout and put the glove into the bag. Somehow you missed your mother coming at you. You look back at the field one last time and there she is, as the man said, in bed retching with pain, in the hospital gurney surrounded by curtains, in the hot night soaping herself in her bath.

BENNIE ROJAS AND
THE ROUGHRIDERS

T
he morning Bennie Rojas boarded the plane for Las Vegas, Cuba was already beginning to fade, and all his troubles were but flickering specks in a distant predawn sky. In the seat to Benny's right was one of the cooks from Tropicana, the grandest nightclub in the world, where Benny himself worked as a twenty-one dealer. To the left was a taciturn man with a scar that ran from his ear to his chin. He'd gotten on in Miami, where the plane stopped on its way west, and said nothing for five and a half hours. Naturally, Bennie assumed he did not speak any Spanish. Tough guys, Bennie thought. There's nothing you can do about them. And so he spent the whole trip talking to the cook, a fellow with a pencil-thin mustache and a head shaped like an eggplant.

Orlando Leyva was from the city of Matanzas, which he insisted on calling the Athens of Cuba.

There are more poets in Matanzas than in the rest of the island combined, he said. They are like songbirds, and on Sunday you can hear them in the park reciting their verses at the pretty women passing by. Many of them commit suicide because they are unhappy in love. Many others are homosexuals in disguise.

Bennie asked him if that was also part of the glory of Matanzas.

No, hombre. But it is the truth. The city has that name because the Spaniards killed a lot of Indians there. It is also called the Venice of Cuba because there are seventeen bridges crossing over three rivers. Havana has nothing like that. Havana is too big and dirty. It's a piece of shit.

Bennie wanted to ask him why he had gone to Havana in the first place, why he didn't stay in Athens listening to all the songbirds, but just then the plane began bucking.

Orlando clutched the armrest and began sweating. Rivulets ran down his face and moistened his collar.

Ay, Dios, he said. We're going to fall.

Bennie tried to comfort Orlando by patting his hand. The man with the scar was like a sphinx. After a few minutes the turbulence subsided. Orlando stopped sweating and settled back into his seat.

The only reason I'm going to Las Vegas is that they promised me a job, he said.

They promised me a job, too, Bennie said. I'm told Lansky is a man of his word.

Unless he isn't.

Unless he isn't, Bennie repeated. If it weren't for politics, Havana would be paradise, he added. Maybe Las Vegas is paradise.

Las Vegas is in the desert.

Where do you think the Garden of Eden was located, chico, in the Caribbean?

Waiting for his bags in the claim area, Bennie concluded that Las Vegas was not paradise, but it was better than being unemployed in Havana with a wife who was always barking at him. He met her after his previous fiancée broke off their engagement and ran off with a man who owned three hardware stores and a house in Miramar. María Cristina was the first woman who showed any interest in him after the breakup and so he married her. In one month he realized he had made the biggest mistake of his life. First, María Cristina complained about the heat, as if it were Bennie's fault. Why don't you buy me an air conditioner? All the neighbors have them. Bennie thought that was a good idea and got an air conditioner from one of the neighbors who was leaving the country. Next María Cristina complained that her clothes were out of style. Bennie took her to El Encanto, the most luxurious department store in Havana, and bought her expensive dresses imported from New York and Paris. Then she asked for a late-model car. Bennie took out a loan and acquired a 1955 Oldsmobile owned briefly by a corrupt politician. It was a beautiful red and white machine that turned all the neighbors' heads. When María Cristina saw it, she refused to get in it, saying she didn't like the color scheme. Soon Bennie was staying up nights worrying about how to please her without going bankrupt.

It occurred to him that he should skim some chips or pass cards or take a hit. Only once in his ten-year career had Bennie cheated a customer, a German businessman who was up thirty thousand dollars on the house. The floor manager gave him a certain look and Bennie used his considerable dexterity with the cards to take back the money, plus an additional twenty thousand dollars in a note. His bosses gave him a gold watch for his performance, but for Bennie the watch was a symbol of his dishonesty, and so he sold it to a friend for five hundred dollars. He still remembered the poor German's face as it went from ruddy ebullience to pallid defeat in two hours. Other than that, Bennie was an honest man, given to simple pleasures. After work he had a Cuba libre with the other dealers and went home to his wife, such as she was.

No one had anything on him, except that the revolutionaries who had driven Batista out considered all casino employees to be worms feeding on the dung heap of capitalism, as Fidel himself had said. Individual ethics counted for nothing. It was only a matter of time before the revolutionaries came after Bennie and put him in one of their decrepit jails.

After Fidel took over, the casinos remained open for some time. Tourists were still coming to Cuba, suckers willing to have their money taken while they drank themselves silly on daiquiris. Bennie would see an Americano at the table with a couple of gorgeous Cuban redheads wrapped around him and say to himself, Man, if only I had the money, I'd be right there next to him. Then one day two men came around asking if anyone wanted to go work in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas? Where is that? Bennie asked. In the middle of nowhere, one of the men said. But soon it's going to be the next Havana. You schmucks want to stay here and rot?
Schmuck
was a word Bennie had never heard. The man talking kept straightening his tie as he spoke. He looked like a twenty-year-old version of John Garfield except that he spoke in a gravelly falsetto.

I have a wife, Bennie started to say. Then he remembered his crazy wife. This was the perfect opportunity to escape his lousy marriage and all that he feared was coming to the island. When he told María Cristina that night about the job offer, she yelled, I'm not going to Las Vegas or anywhere else! You don't have to, he said meekly. As soon as she heard he'd be making three times his Tropicana salary, her mood changed. She became excited and started making plans for all the money he'd be sending home. Bennie nodded. He said not to worry. He'd be home in a year. For a brief moment she looked at him. Then tears welled in her eyes and she threw her arms around him.

Two weeks later Bennie was at Las Vegas Airport, waiting for his bags with Orlando and three of his culinary colleagues. The man with the scar led the five of them to a Ford station wagon and drove them to a motel off Ranch Drive. It was mid-July and the heat rose visibly from the asphalt. Bennie complained, but the cooks, used to the infernal atmosphere of commercial kitchens, went on with their chatter. Paradise indeed. Another man met them at the motel and gave each of them a room key. Bennie's was number 207.

Good number to play, he said to Orlando. Number two is butterfly. Number seven is seashell.

Mine is one twelve. One is horse. Twelve is whore, Orlando said. Not too good. That Chinese system is foolishness. There are better ways to make money.

Then the man announced that someone would be by the next morning at seven thirty and left.

For seven years Bennie lived in that motel, caught between a dead-end present and a useless nostalgia for a truncated past. His one friend, Orlando, spoke only of the perfect demi-glace he'd concocted that morning or the bread he'd baked for lunch or the celebrity who'd entered the kitchen and offered his compliments on the salmon mousse. When Bennie tried to inspire him with more expansive topics, such as baseball or women, a distant look came over Orlando's face and he switched the conversation back to kitchen matters. Bennie worked the graveyard shift because nights were hardest for him to spend alone. He'd sleep mornings as much as he could, until noon or so. He'd shower, pick up the local paper, and go to a cafeteria on Sahara, where he'd have two eggs fried over-easy, bacon, toast, and bad American coffee. The rest of the time was his to do as he wanted. He napped, read the paper again, and, in the cool months, walked streets that led nowhere but back into themselves. He began at 11
pm
but often worked a double, starting at three o'clock and going straight through until seven the next morning. The summer was too hot to do anything but sit in air-conditioning; the winter was high season, and Joey, his pit boss, threw as much work at him as he could handle. María Cristina, who had since moved to Miami, sent him divorce papers, which he signed and sent back.

Las Vegas would never be another Havana. There was no ocean to look at, only desert and fancy casinos where the tourists dropped their money. Mostly there was a lot of dust, which got in his eyes and made him teary, as if he wasn't teary enough already. There were plenty of women, beautiful ones, but none was accessible to him, a simple dealer from the tropics with a thick Cuban accent—like Desi Arnaz chewing on a raw steak, Joey once said—and the looks of a Galician grocer. The way to attract women, an uncle of his told him long ago, was to impress them with your power and your wealth. You don't give them money, the uncle had advised. You shower them with it. The woman needs to see you as a god, and those attributes are the closest we humans have to divinity. Just when Bennie had resigned himself to a life of celibacy, he met a woman, a round Mexican who cooked him fiery dishes and made sex like a Zapotec beast. She always brought enough food—enchiladas, tacos, moles—for him and Orlando, who lived downstairs. Her name was Mercedes. She took care of both of them, but she had her eye on Bennie.
Barriga llena, corazón contento,
she would say with a sparkle in her eye, expecting any moment that he would say back to her the magic words.

A
s he sat outside his room on his day off, Bennie heard a commotion on the first level of the motel, followed by a woman's voice that sounded very much like Mercedes screaming, ¡puto, cabrón, hijo de la chingada! He rushed down the steps and saw Orlando the cook on the floor, leaning against the brick wall outside his room with a butcher knife stuck halfway into his chest. His eyes were glazed and bloody saliva hung from his lips. Orlando babbled something about someone taking twenty thousand. He looked up at Bennie before letting out a long sigh like a train coming to its final stop, and then his head drooped softly to the side.

Bennie's first instinct was to go back inside and pretend he'd seen nothing. Instead, he looked around to make sure no one else had witnessed the killing, maneuvered Orlando away from the wall with great difficulty, and dragged him back into the room. Bennie shut the door and turned the air-conditioning as high as it would go, figuring it would help preserve Orlando. He sat on the unmade bed and tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking, so it took four tries before he could bring the match to the tip and take the first drag. Sure, he'd seen plenty of people die, like his mother and her sisters, and a cousin who died of leukemia, but never like this, with a knife sticking out of them and their last words about money. This would never happen in Cuba, he thought, then thought again. Of course it would. Still, at the moment he wanted to be back there in his old apartment on Virtudes Street, where his parents had lived and their parents before them, now occupied by his revolution-crazed cousin, Leida.

Bennie surveyed the room and spied a half-full bottle of DonQ rum on the dresser, which he could reach without having to stand up. Two healthy swigs and he considered the situation. Calling the police wasn't an option. They'd snoop, and his bosses weren't fond of snooping. So he called Joey, his pit boss, at the casino—he'd know what to do—and waited for him.

When Joey showed up at the motel three hours later and saw the cook lying on the carpet, his first words were
holy fucking shit
. Orlando's face had turned gray and rigor mortis was setting in, no matter that it was damned cold in the room. Those were Joey's second words: It's damn cold in here, followed by, What were you fighting about?

Fight? Bennie kept to himself the fact that he heard Mercedes screaming just before he found the cook. Joey, he said, I didn't kill Orlando. He was my friend.

Friends kill each other all the time. Why didn't you take the knife out of him? The longer he's dead the harder it's going to be. And next time you put a shower curtain under him. That way blood doesn't go on the rug.

You do it, Joey. You take the knife out. I couldn't even watch my mother kill a chicken.

Didn't they teach you anything in that damn country of yours? Fucking Latin lover can't get his hands dirty.

Joey looked long and hard at Bennie; then he kneeled next to Orlando and jiggled the knife handle. Blood's pretty much set. We won't be needing the curtain. Before he'd finished saying the word
curtain,
he had the knife out and was holding it next to his head. It was a huge, nasty thing. For an instant, Bennie had the image of the blade entering Orlando and causing massive damage to his inner organs. The thought made him swoon.

This is a job for the roughriders, Joey said and made a call from the hotel phone. In thirty minutes two men showed up. One was tall and slim and wore a gray suit. The other, short and heavyset, was wearing a purple shirt and beige pants. Bennie noticed that the short man had a tomato-sauce stain on his right pant leg. The men looked at dead Orlando on the floor and proceeded to ransack drawers, pulling them out of the dresser and upending their contents on the body. When they were done with the drawers, they took the bed apart, then started on the closets and rifled through Orlando's clothes, discarding them in every direction. Finally one of them turned to Bennie, who was now standing in a corner of the room and said, Where's the money?

Money? Bennie asked innocently.

Now the three men were looking at him waiting for an answer.