“You put him in the rehab and that was it?”
“That was it.”
“But you bought off the cops.”
“No. That was later. Somehow Sheriff B-Briggs f-figured it out. He shook us d-down for fifty grand.”
“Fifty thousand dollars?”
“Fifty grand. It was n-nothing. We were relieved it was so l-little. He d-didn’t even take it for him- himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“He p-paid it into the p-police b-benevolent fund.”
Fifty thousand for a dead Mex. Fifty thousand for my father’s whole life.
An insult. Horrible. But… but no reason to kill him.
At least not reason enough.
At least not for me.
“Oh no,” I say to myself. “No, no, no.”
“What are you g-going t-to d-do?” he asks.
“Fuck!” I yell out loud and put down the gun.
Going to have to lift you out, you bastard. Going to have to try and save you.
How? Under the armpits, drag him. “Put your arms out,” I tell him.
But in the last minute hypothermia has started to set in. His eyes are fixed. The cigarette is burning him and he doesn’t even notice.
“
I rip the cig from his mouth.
I kneel behind him, shove my hands under his wet, frozen shoulders, and try to heave him out backward.
I can’t get purchase.
I pull again.
Distracted, I don’t notice, behind me on the hill, Jack Tyrone, Deputy Crawford, Deputy Klein, and Sheriff Briggs get out of the black police Cadillac Escalade. I don’t hear Sheriff Briggs talk about the panic button on Youkilis’s house phone or the homing GPS in his BMW. I don’t notice them examining Youkilis’s car or see them as they follow the footsteps that lead down to the lake. I don’t see any of them look up, startled, when they hear me yell.
And what do they see?
POV shift to the main man, Briggs. Furious. Jubilant. A rifle in his hands. Like John Wayne at the end of all those Yuma flicks. Here with the Seventh to save the day.
“Let’s go, boys,” and they run through the trees to the water’s edge.
Briggs sees me trying to pull Youkilis out of the hole, but it can’t be obvious that I’ve changed my mind, that I’m trying to save him. Probably he thinks I’m administering the coup de grace.
Maybe he doesn’t care what I’m trying to do.
He unslings a high-velocity.270 elk-hunting rifle with a manual sight. The sight is set for a hundred meters and I’m a little closer than that.
Aim a tad high, he thinks.
He’s never shot a woman before. But he doesn’t feel that that’s an issue. He’s calm, focused, professional.
He fixes my skull in the T of the manual crosshair.
He sniffs the breeze, adjusts for it, and moves the T to the back of my head.
“Yes,” he says, and just like that, the whole of the sensual world goes-
18 CITY OF HEROES
The bullet struck me on the head.
And that was good. That was as it should be.
I shouldn’t be here. I need to be elsewhere. Across America, across the sea. Back to the island of the crooked mouth. Over the forests and plantations. Over the jungle. Across the years.
Smell is the most basic part of memory. What is that smell? The aroma of cigars and mangrove and somewhere bacon soldering itself onto an unwatched pan.
A lazy day in autumn. A school holiday.
We’d taken the train to Santiago de Cuba. That long, long train. No matter how much you pack, all the food runs out and the water runs out and it breaks down and you think it’s never going to get there. You could walk faster than that train for much of the journey.
Ricky and I do, slipping out of the last carriage and running behind and jumping on again.
My uncle’s Arturo’s house. A large, white two-story sugarbeet overseer’s place from the twenties. An American UFC man built it and my uncle took it after the Revolution. I say Santiago but it’s not really in the city at all. An unnamed village on the edge of the mangrove forest and the sea. Four streets. A road. Swamp.
Country cousins. And every other kid a friend.
Hot.
Very hot…
Some of the kids were playing hide-and-seek at the far end of the road, where the neighborhood was almost swallowed up by abandoned plantations. Halfhearted attempts were being made to look for people and there were halfhearted attempts to hide.
Ricky and I were lying in the yard, watching everything from under the shade of the big warped palm tree. Palm trees curve up at thirty degrees but this one had a gentle slope that bent back on itself, as if it had been designed for climbing. Even toddlers could get halfway up it-there had been accidents.
It was 1993, right in the heart of the “special economic period.” Communism had collapsed in Russia, and Cuba had no friends. This was before the Venezuelans or the Chinese or the roaring comeback of the sex trade. Blackouts were common in Havana and there was no traffic anywhere.
A nice day.
Some of the older people had brought chairs to catch a few rays of the sun before it vanished behind the stone wall of the graveyard. Mostly women, knitting, repairing clothes, talking. Mrs. Ramirez and her sister in the street in front of us saying things about the decline of morals among kids today. Mrs. Ramirez reckoned that a decent haircut would improve the behavior of most of the unruly boys in Santiago, whereas her sister favored a good kick in the ass.
When they began talking about what was wrong with girls today I stopped listening.
“Come on, little guy, come on.”
I looked up sleepily. Ricky was trying to coax one of the swamp iguanas to come into the garden with a ropey string of sausage. But all the iguana wanted was to be left alone.
“Where did you get those ’izos?” I asked Ricky.
“Kitchen.”
“Aunt Isabella will kill you.”
“She’ll never know,” Ricky said.
“Iguanas only eat insects,” I said.
“Not so, Dad says they eat mice. Meat,” Ricky said.
“Kids, are you outside?” Dad’s voice.
“Get rid of those sausages, Dad will go crazy. You know what he’s like about wasting food,” I hissed.
“They’re not from the ration. Aunt Isabella has half a dozen strings like this in the pantry.”
“Get rid of them.”
