Cubop City Blues (6 page)

I don't want to suffocate to death.

What?

I had a dream last night that I was drowning. When I woke I couldn't breathe. I called the nurse and she gave me oxygen.

Angel didn't know at the time, nor did Pedro, that the cancer had spread to his lungs and he was, in effect, drowning in his own fluids.

Today, I want you to take me out to breakfast.

Once he was done shaving Angel helped him with his pants, which he held up with suspenders over a blue long-sleeved shirt.

They drove to a Cuban cafeteria on Calle Ocho whose owner Pedro had known for six decades. The owner sat behind the counter smoking a cigar.

Come in, come in and drink a chair, because the water zero's coming, he said, translating a Cuban phrase into thickly literal English.

Albenio, Pedro said. This is my grandson. He is a famous writer and he's writing a story about me.

Not exactly, Angel wanted to say but he didn't have the opportunity.

Your grandfather, Albenio said, was the best cop in Havana. He caught and killed Manolito Rivas and received a ten-thousand-dollar reward. In those days that was a fortune.

Angel looked at Pedro. It was the first time he'd heard about the reward.

I want fried eggs, bacon, Cuban bread, and café con leche, Pedro said. I'm sick of that shit they feed me in the nursing home.

What about the reward? Angel asked. Grandmother must have been happy about that.

Pedro shrugged his shoulders and ordered a cold beer. That was something Angel had seen his father do, drink beer in the morning.

I bet she was, Albenio said, speaking through a half smile as if he were keeping a secret.

Pedro waited for the beer and drank some of it looking out the window at the traffic going by. He and Albenio spoke of other matters, friends they had in common in Havana, most of them dead or dying—Panchito Cantera, who had owned a car dealership and was now a living corpse; Alberto Torres, the artist, who'd lost his legs to diabetes; Humberto González, who sold pharmaceuticals and had more bypass surgeries than you could count; and others in wheelchairs, on life support systems, bedridden, under the ground—a catalogue of morbidity that made Angel's hair stand on end.

There is Miami, Pedro said. And then there is an underground city where all the old Cubans are buried with their memories and dreams. That is where the real Havana lies. Upside down. One hundred years from now, when all the Cubans are gone, that city too, will disappear.

Unless the memories are written down, Angel said stupidly.

Written memories are ossified memories.

Have you heard the one about the Galician couple whose baby falls out a third-story window? Albenio asked.

A thousand times.

Just then the food arrived. Pedro picked at his eggs and ordered another beer. He was done in fifteen minutes. Albenio refused to accept payment, claiming sixty years of friendship was payment enough.

In the car on the way home Angel asked Pedro again about the reward money. He admitted that Zoila never saw a penny.

What happened to it?

I gave it to Manolito's mother. The only good thing Manolito Rivas ever did was take care of his mother. I killed him. The least I could do was make sure she was provided for.

How about Zoila? Angel said, his temper rising. After his grandfather left her, Zoila suffered one privation after another, living in tenements across Havana and working as a washerwoman and maid for several well-to-do families.

What about her? In the end we all wound up broke and in exile. That's the way things are. Pedro grew pensive and looked out the window.

In the realm of the heartless the generous man is a fool, especially he who gives blindly. Angel understood two things then: First, his grandfather was a generous man; second, his grandfather had been heartless. The two qualities had somehow joined in him and become one, or, better yet, both lived in him simultaneously. Nothing else could be said about that, despite any familial allegiance Angel had for his grandmother and father, who had suffered so much at the hands of this heartless, generous man.

When they got to the nursing home, Angel parked on the front driveway. He went around to the passenger side and helped Pedro walk to the door.

I'll go from here, he said, waving his hand in a way that was both a dismissal and a farewell.

Leaning on his walker he took small shuffling steps to the elevator and waited there until the door opened. He looked quickly in Angel's direction and offered a smile that came from the depths of his misery. Then he disappeared.

THE MAN WITH THE HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE

T
wo months after meeting her, Angel moved in with Amanda. He was tired of bony females and jagged angles, tired of their clacking as they turned over in bed. He wanted the softness of clouds, the keening of inner organs trapped in flesh, a body like laughter, the breeching of whales in an icy fjord. Amanda wore caftans and heavy silver jewelry on her arms that jangled loudly when she moved. He could hear her in the kitchen, he could hear her in the bathroom, and he could hear her in the hallway outside the door even before he could see her. She was devoted to necromancy and had a gift for communicating with the dead, asking them questions the answers to which came in code. If she asked, Will I be able to pay the rent next month? the answer might be, The effervescence of golf balls afflicts a pretentious entity. Which might mean yes or no depending on the position of the stars at the moment the question was asked and on the amplitude of her imagination, which matched her body's.

When Amanda spoke, underground springs burst from her voice, and when she breathed she blew a hot southern wind that brought with it the nostalgia of tropical forests. She was the best lover Angel ever had. She had no scruples, and the word
no
did not exist for her in bed. Once, after a particular session in which the firmaments blew open and the oceans parted, she told him that his mother had communicated with her and told her the name and address of the man who had knifed him. He laughed, not believing her, in any event, not wanting to know so many years after the incident who it was who had almost caused his demise. Vengeance has its statute of limitations. He nodded and stared at the ceiling, thinking about muse spiders. She added that the attacker had a handlebar mustache and five daughters and lived in their neighborhood. He nodded again and pretended to fall asleep.

What was he supposed to do, find the man, confront him, and seek retribution of some sort? Not worth the effort. He had healed fully, the only evidence of the knifing a small scar on his belly where the blade slipped through. Amanda liked to lick the scar. Like a little worm, she once said, a slimy sugar worm floating on the milk of his belly. He was lucky. It could have been an anvil dropped on his head from a fifth-floor window. It could have been a drunk driver jumping the curb and crushing him against the liquor store. It could have been something less obvious but no less lethal—an aneurism, a massive coronary.

For a long time he wished the knifer would die a horrible death. That wish was still hiding in a recondite part of his mind, but he was no longer willing to act on it. His will had been diverted to other pursuits. So when Amanda told him what his mother had revealed to her, he was upset, not because it brought back that awful night and the months of recovery, but because he was expected—expected himself—to act on the information.

He sat up in bed and said, I won't do it.

Amanda asked, Do what?

Find the man with the mustache and the five daughters. There must be more than one man in this city who wears a handlebar mustache and is the father of five daughters.

Who lives in our neighborhood? Amanda asked.

How do we know you weren't dreaming.

I was dreaming, she said.

How do we know the information is reliable?

It came from your mother, she said.

It could have been a demon in disguise. You've said sometimes demons trick people by assuming the identity of a loved one.

This was no demon. It was your mother.

Are you sure?

Her maiden name was González.

He left the house that morning and walked around
the neighborhood reluctantly with the word
retribution
stuck in his head like an iron spike. What is a neighborhood, anyway? Three, four, five blocks? He walked ten and saw no one with a handlebar mustache, except for Isidore, the eighty-year-old former waiter who lived on the sixth floor of their building.

He could have done it, Amanda said.

Isidore is a sweet gay man, Angel said, his exasperation rising, and he walks with a cane.

That day Angel went about his business—he'd promised Amanda he would wash the windows and do the laundry while she attended her necromancy meeting. Nevertheless, the matter stayed with him if for no other reason than to heed his mother's message to find his attacker. He didn't have the faintest idea what he would do once he confronted him. He went to the Tenth Precinct and asked for a copy of the police report, which he read carefully twice. It said nothing he didn't already know, except that given the uneven edges of the wound, the perpetrator most probably used a serrated knife with a one-inch-wide blade. He filed away the paperwork along with other documents relating to that night and went to sleep, too tired to wait up for Amanda.

Waking the next morning he saw that Amanda had slept next to him and then left the house early. On her pillow was a note saying she had gone in search of the man with the handlebar mustache. He dressed quickly and went outside without so much as a cup of coffee. He walked around the neighborhood until he found her staring through the window of a phony French café on Ninth Avenue. All French cafés in Cubop City are phony. The real ones are in France.

That's the man, she said looking through Angel's reflection on the glass.

Inside were several youngish couples seated at the tables closest to the window, and at one of the far tables by the counter was a middle-aged man, alone, reading a book.

What are you talking about? He doesn't have a mustache, he said.

Your mother appeared to me again last night and said that he'd shaved it off. She said that two of his daughters lived in the city, and the three others, whom he'd lost touch with, were spread all over the country.

But how do you know it's that particular man? Angel asked, letting his irritation get the better of him. I'd got over all this and you had to bring my mother into it.

I didn't call her, Amanda said in a calm voice that thinly disguised her condescension. She came to me. I'll tell you how I know that's our man.

Angel threw his arms up over his head and started walking away. His mother was dead. He, his sister, and father had had her cremated and dumped her ashes into the Gulf Stream. Amanda caught up with him and grabbed him by the arm.

You should have seen him handling the butter knife, like a bona fide killer. What I didn't get to say to you because you left so abruptly was that your mother told me we would find him in that café, sitting just where he is.

Amanda, he said almost pleading with her.
You never knew my mother.

I know her better than you think. What harm can there be if we follow that man and find out where he lives?

They waited across the street for the man to finish his coffee and watched him as he left the café and walked south on the avenue. He was slim, almost delicate, and had thinning blond hair. He looked to be in his late fifties, hardly the attacker type. They followed him at a safe distance to Twenty-third Street, where he turned east, then to the Eighth Avenue subway, which he entered going uptown.

Hurry, Amanda said. We're about to lose him.

No way, he said.

Amanda said they'd gone too far to stop now and went down the subway steps. He went home. He had windows to wash.

Three hours later she showed up at the apartment, disheveled and sweaty. Subways will do that to you. He watched her as she drank a glass of water, went to the bathroom, and came back to the living room to sit on the sofa. She let out a long breath, closed her eyes, and let her head rest on the back cushion.

He's an actor, she said finally.

He lowered the newspaper he was reading and made a question with his face.

I knew there was something familiar about his face, she said. I thought I had seen it in a dream. Then, as he was getting off the subway on Fifty-ninth Street, he turned toward me and I got a frontal view. It was the guy on the Electrolux commercial on the television. We got the wrong man.

There was nothing Angel could say, nothing at all. Maybe now they could put this whole thing to rest and resume their lives as normal people. They did for a time. Two weeks later as they were having supper at their favorite neighborhood diner, she said in a barely audible register, as if she were trying to keep him from hearing it, We have to start over.

He stopped chewing and looked at her. He could feel his eyes squinting.

Your mother has been appearing to me every night. She's very insistent, you know. The only way to quiet her is to find the man with the handlebar mustache.

He grew it back? Angel asked.

He never shaved it. I misinterpreted some symbols.

He took another bite of his turkey club sandwich and at that moment an important question occurred to him. His mother could barely speak English when she was alive and Amanda's Spanish was rudimentary at best. What language were they communicating in? How do you say
handlebar
in Spanish? Or is that not a relevant question in the spirit world? He kept these matters to himself and continued eating. A few minutes later he felt a kick to his shin, which he ignored. He felt it again. Amanda was pointing behind him and raising her eyebrows. He turned around, trying his best to be discreet, and a few tables away was a man with a handlebar mustache. He was dark haired and muscular. His face was long and bony and his cheeks were covered with acne scars. There was something hard about him, something criminal.

Angel couldn't finish his sandwich. Suddenly he wanted to be out of the diner, safe at home watching baseball, his favorite pastime in those days. Amanda was scrunched in her seat, hiding behind him as she spied the man, who had by now noticed he was being watched.

Slowly the man with the handlebar mustache stood and walked over to their table, all six and a half feet of him. He loomed over them and squinted amorally like Lee Van Cleef looking into a western vastness. A cold liquid ran through Angel's veins, and he readied himself to protect Amanda, perform the ultimate sacrifice for honor's sake, and be torn asunder by this Chelsea desperado.

Amanda smiled up at him. She had a knowing, innocent smile that would disarm the most determined killer—yes, even Lee himself at his meanest.

Are you Rollie Fingers? she asked him.

Bless her, Angel thought. Bless women who know baseball.

The Chelsea desperado's meanness dissolved and he showed them a set of nicotine-stained teeth. Sweetheart, you got the wrong jockey.

For quite a while Amanda busied herself with other things and dropped the matter. He was liberated and was able to concentrate on his work, which he'd neglected in order to pursue the handlebar chimera. It was around this time that he began to feel a twinge in his belly, not pain exactly, but what Spanish speakers call una penita, a small sorrow. He ignored it, as one does with such things, hoping it would go away by itself, but one night the pain was piercing enough that it woke him. He sat upright in bed sweating and still in the thrall of a dream in which it was not a knife that was thrust into him but a hot poker that twisted itself around his intestines. He shook Amanda awake and told her about the pain but not the dream. She called the surgeon who took care of him the first time, and he urged them to go to the emergency room.

While they waited for the surgeon Amanda said the recurrence of the pain was a wake-up call. Now he had to find the attacker for sure or he would suffer forever. Angel was on intravenous morphine at the time, floating in a plane where everything made sense, or nothing made sense but it was too much trouble to unravel it: a skein of cause and consequence. Morphine takes you to the edge, and it's amazing how clear things are from there. He looked at Amanda and saw concern shadowing her face. He wanted to kiss her. He couldn't remember if he already had. He was absolutely certain he could fly and she could fly with him. He remembered the doctor coming. He remembered a CAT scan, blood tests, X-rays. He remembered the doctor saying he had an abscess—fairly common in these cases—that he would have to drain. He remembered nodding out, a tube in his stomach, nasty nurses and nice nurses, a spot of blood that seeped onto the sheets, the fellow next to him whose stomach had been taken out. He hadn't eaten in three weeks. His eyes were sunken and his lips were gray. According to Amanda, he'd be dead soon. His aura was diminishing.

While Angel was home recovering, he asked Amanda what language she and his mother used to communicate. No language, she said. What do you mean? he asked. The spirit world is beyond language, she said. We use signs and and we use thoughts. He dropped the subject and fell asleep on the sofa. He dreamed of a river on which words floated and sank and floated again. He dreamed of being dizzy with loneliness. Finally he dreamed of the man who knifed him, who lived in his neighborhood and was waiting for the right moment to knife him again, this time aiming better and deeper so that he would die miserably on the dirty chewing-gum-splattered sidewalk.

Angel survived the abscess without complications or need of major surgery, due in no small measure to the surgeon who treated him, one of the best in the city, and he went on about his life as if he'd never been knifed. Few cities allow for that sort of continuation and Cubop City is one. Then he received a call from a detective in the Tenth Precinct. They had a suspect in hand and wanted him to identify the perpetrator that same afternoon. He and Amanda rushed to the station house, and, as the six suspects were lined up before them, she grabbed his hand and pressed it. One of the men had a handlebar mustache. He asked the detective, who was sitting next to them, if the man lived in their neighborhood, and he nodded his head yes. Police procedure prevented him from answering out loud. I think that's him, he said. You sure of that? the detective asked. Angel could sense Amanda's eyes boring into him. Yes, he said.

After that it was only a matter of time. He testified at the trial a year later. The man had by now shaved off his mustache but it didn't matter. He identified him and the court-appointed defense lawyer offered a weak and ineffectual cross-examination. He was found guilty. Then the judge discovered some inconsistencies in the prosecutor's papers and the case was thrown out. The man was let go. Justice had been done. Amanda wasn't so sure.