'I don't tell stories, Mr. Evans.'
'I know, Earl. It was just a figure of speech.'
The car drove through Havana's busy traffic, where the cars all seemed to date from the thirties. The men wore straw boaters and linen suits and the women high heels and bare shoulders. Spanish in its most riotous form filled the air, and the sun slanted through palms and dust and beeps and squawks. Kids sold lottery numbers on the street, bananas, coffee, carvings and their sisters.
But then the car passed through gates, under the dark glade of well-nurtured and — tended trees, and up to a house that had once been a palace or at least a mansion. Earl saw the brass plaque next to the mahogany doors, and knew what he was in for.
They went up steps and of course the place was deserted. It was not a tourist hangout nor of much interest to the Cubans themselves. It spoke only of a kind of national vanity and the nation in question wasn't Cuba.
MUSEUM OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
They entered to church-like silence, and the presence of ghosts. Behind glass, manlike forms without faces stood in khaki uniforms, with hats upturned jauntily, speaking of vigor and mission and courage. They wore gold piping and puttees and carried bigflapped cavalry holsters crosswise on huge belts that were marked with cartridge loops.
Earl walked, with the aid of his cane, down the aisles, to more displays: medals, maps, a papier-mache model of a hill outside Santiago, with forces identified by tiny flags and color-coded: blue for American, red for Spanish. Cooking utensils, newspaper front pages, pocketknives, compasses, all un-dusty, under glass, which was dusty.
'See, Earl? There are other islands where Americans died. Iwo, Saipan, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, terrible islands. But there were other islands.'
Saddles, well-worn and burnished, and other horse gear appropriate to a cavalry unit at the turn of the century. Boots and saddles. A beat-up old bugle. Quirts and whips. Spurs, jingly-jangly tack, saddlebags, rifle scabbards, all preserved under the dusty glass in the darkness, untouched for years.
'Here, Earl. This one should interest you.'
The guns. Colt revolvers, single-action armies, six-shooters, Peacemakers, whatever you wanted to call them. They were familiar to him because his father had buckled one on every single day of his life, and Earl's job had been to clean it. He knew the old man was good with it, because in 1923 he'd shot it out in a Blue Eye bank with three wild brothers, and killed them all, and been a hero. Earl couldn't remember clearly, possibly because he didn't want to.
The guns were beautiful orchestrations of balance and harmony, of circles and curves, of the precise melding of steel and wood in the brilliance of design.
'Ever shoot one of these old Colts, Earl?'
'Of course I have,' said Earl.
At least twenty-five of the guns that the Rough Riders had carried up San Juan were displayed in the case, most with long, elegant barrels, the 71/2-inch models that Teddy Roosevelt himself carried. But there were a few others brought in by western lawmen who'd joined the Rough Riders in San Antonio, men who preferred the shorter length of the 45/8 for its quickness in maneuver and deadliness at short range. They were gunfighters, the men who carried those guns, not soldiers.
And ammo. What museum would be complete without the old boxes with their quaint nineteenth-century printing, the cardboard now delicate, the boxes slightly distended for their loads of cartridges inside, huge as robin's eggs, weirdly dense, weirdly serious.
And holsters, too. Of course. Those big flapped things for the cavalry, with the leather over top securing the revolver against the jostle of the animal beneath. But that was not all. Being gunfighters, many of the Rough Riders had their own private rigs, shoulder holsters many of them, to tuck the shorter-barreled Colts away from prying eyes. Earl saw several of fine leather, basketweave-stamped, complex nests of strap and stay and loop and buckle, built to hold the gun just so out of sight that a dexterous man could get it into play in less than a second.
'Okay,' said Earl. 'I see what you're up to.'
'Earl,' said Roger, 'I just want you to know that men came here, American men, with guns, and fought and died and bled to make this island into something. They were young men, they probably didn't want to die, but they did. And I'm not even going to take you into the disease room, the yellow fever room, and that particular horror. We'll stay here, where we don't have to think about all that dying.'
'This ain't right,' Earl said. 'You are fixing it so that if I say no to you, I'm supposed to be saying no to the men that carried these guns and died on this island. But you ain't them. They are them, and you and Frenchy are something entirely different.'
'That is true,' said Roger, 'and I know you don't care for us and would never see us as their inheritors. You're their inheritor; we're merely little bureaucrats to whom fate has given a responsibility that we hope to hell we can live up to. Well, maybe we can't. I know we can't without your help, Earl.'
'Time to stop horseshitting around. This ain't a place for doubletalk. You tell me straight out what you want.'
'The island is in play. You've almost gotten killed twice on account of it. Someone sees a destiny for it that isn't free and isn't American. That destiny will grow and grow and maybe sometime down the pike, more American boys with guns will have to land on this island to take it back. You know how many times bigger Cuba is than Iwo Jima?'
'A hell of a lot bigger.'
Now Frenchy spoke.
'We have a lot invested in this place. A lot of men died here. It's our blood in the soil as much as anybody's. So we have a moral right to protect it. Now there's a force on the island that means to steal that away and make it something different and foreign. Suppose now, while it's early, we could stop it. Stop it with the big noise of a single shot. Would you have fired a shot in 1938 to kill Hitler? Or in 1940 to stop Tojo?'
'It's always this way, ain't it,' Earl said. 'Some college kids dream up something and convince themselves it's so right. Then some poor jerk with a gun has to make it happen.'
'It is always that way, Earl,' said Roger. 'That is it entirely. But as annoying as you find us, Earl, you have to admit that we are right.'
'You bastards,' said Earl, knowing that he had no choice but to sign on, for better or worse.
'It's your call, Earl. We can still make the plane.'
'You bastards. Take me to the goddamned hotel. I have to call my wife and make her cry again.'
Chapter 27
'You see,' explained Ramon Latavistada, 'it's not a question of stuff. I can get stuff. I can get any stuff. This is a talent of mine. Excuse, please.'
With that he turned and inserted the tip of a scalpel into the eyelid of a prisoner named Hector. Hector was chained to a wall in the bowels of the Military Intelligence Service's Havana location, which was the Morro Fortress. He had been picked up on the recommendation of the political section as a well-known agitator, subversive, pamphleteer, speechmaker and confederate of 'Greaseball,' as Fidel Castro was known to the SIM.
But Ramon did not plunge the blade into the eye, thereby blinding Hector. What would that have proven? Nothing. Merely that blades cut, blood flows, eyes are vulnerable to violence and the result is exceedingly messy and painful.
Instead, with a deft flick of his wrist, he incised just deep enough into the eyelid to open a small cut that would nevertheless bleed profusely. Since Hector's eyelid was taped open, he could not blink; the blood would flood his eye, and he would have the sensation of drowning in a pool of his own blood, while at the same time facing, by implication, a forever of blindness.
He commented, in Spanish, ' Aieeeeeeeeeeee!!!!'
