about that Cuban bitch. She let this pass. When she told him about Cooksey’s plans and Scotty’s shotgun he said, “Big deal. I got a gun, too.”
“No you don’t.”
He reached quickly under the mattress, yanked out a big blued semiautomatic pistol, and waved it in her face. “Then what the fuck do you think this is? A pamphlet?”
“Where did you get it? And don’t wave it around like that.”
“Never mind where I got it. And fuck this pissy little operation anyway. I got something major going on.” He hopped out of bed and struck action-hero poses with the gun, crouching, whirling, pointing it clutched in both hands. She stared at his antics and with a part of her mind registered that he had obviously never had a pistol in his hands before. Jenny herself had been raised among a population rich in guns of all kinds.
“What do you mean, major?”
“You’ll read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you can’t read the papers.”
She let this slide by. In fact, although she didn’t read the papers, her reading had improved a good deal over the past months. “Kevin, you’re so full of shit. Did you ever even shoot a gun like that?”
“Fuck you, yes! And you know, the best thing about pulling this thing off is after tonight I am gone from here, baby, and I won’t have to listen to you putting me down anymore.”
“What thing, Kevin? What are you pulling off?”
He grinned and stuck the pistol in the waistband of his cutoff jeans. “A disciplined revolutionary never discusses operations with outsiders.”
“And probably doesn’t smoke dope all the time either. What’s the operation? This is something that skank Kearney thought up, isn’t it?”
“He’s not a skank,” said Kevin, “and Kearney’s not his real name.”
“Kevin, I don’t care what his name is. He’s nuts. And besides, you can’t go out anywhere now. Cooksey said there’s a bunch of gangsters watching the place.”
“Fuck Cooksey and fuck you. He’s an old lady anyway. I’m going.”
Jenny had another and stronger line of invective in her mouth, when she suddenly realized that she was not Kevin’s mother, and that scenes like this had undoubtedly played out while he was at home, with no good outcome. So she walked out of the cottage without another word and started for the tin-roofed shed where Scotty kept his workshop. Halfway there she stopped, turned on her heel, and walked back to the little parking area, where she opened the engine compartment of the VW van and deftly removed and pocketed the distributor rotor. As she walked past the pond, she saw that the surface was dotted with leaf-fall. Scotty hadn’t been skimming them lately. Nor, she recalled, had Rupert been keeping up with feeding offal to his piranhas. She paused to throw in a scoop of fish food from the big can placed there and watched the water boil as the population attacked the morsels. The piranha would have to wait. In fact, she found she didn’t much care about them; let the sneaky bastards starve, she unecologically thought.
In the work shed she saw that Scotty was at his pipe cutter dropping short pieces from a length of two-inch irrigation pipe. Cooksey was mixing something in a washtub, a pink jellylike substance with a sweet stink.
She wrinkled her nose and asked, “What is that stuff?”
“A kind of napalm. Soap flakes and gasoline and a little diesel. Would you like to help?”
She nodded. Under his direction she began to disassemble twelve-gauge shotgun shells, placing the shot and the gunpowder into different containers and snipping out the primers with an aviation shears. Cooksey poured his mixture into bottles, which he stopped with rags. Then he began to construct small objects out of lawn mower throttle springs, strips of sheet metal, epoxy glue, and small nails. After she finished with the shells, she watched him work. It was obvious from the way his long brown fingers moved over the materials that he had done this kind of work before.
“What’re you making?” she asked.
“Booby traps. Scotty, have you one of your pipes ready yet?”
Scotty handed him without comment a length of capped pipe with a small hole drilled through the center of the cap. Cooksey unscrewed the cap and glued a shotgun shell primer into the opening with quick-drying epoxy, and then, using the same adhesive, attached one of his springed constructs to the side of the pipe. He replaced the cap and locked the pipe into a table vise. He attached a long piece of flower wire to the device and handed the free end to Jenny. “Go over there and pull on this,” he ordered.
She pulled, the catch snapped, and a nail came down on the primer, producing a satisfying small pop.
“Splendid,” cried the Professor. “I see it’s like riding a bicycle.”
“Where did you learn how to do this kind of stuff?” she asked.
“Ah, as a youth I ran off to join the Royal Marines, over my mother’s strenuous objection, I might add. I ended up in the Special Boat Service.”
“Simply messing about in boats?”
“Yes, but at a very elevated level. They teach one how to mess about with this sort of thing as well. As I will now teach you.”
Margarita Paz lived in a low-rise condo near Marti Park, a building old for Miami, and inhabited by respectable, elderly Cubans. She had once owned a house near her restaurant but had sold it a few years ago and moved here. This was vaguely attributed to Paz’s lax progenitive abilities. Who needed a house when it was clear it would never be filled with grandchildren? Her condo was on the top floor, with a nice view of the park, and she had purchased it for cash, because it was the kind of building that no savings and loan in Miami would have financed for a black woman. Literal cash: she had seen the ad, determined over the phone (in Spanish) that it was still available, and had within the hour walked into the real estate office with a small suitcase from which she had extracted neat bricks of one hundred $100 bills, thirty-one in all. The white Cuban person behind the desk had grown somewhat whiter at this display; if a comic-book thought balloon had appeared over her head at the time, it would have contained the word narcolista. The papers got signed without delay.
Paz directed Morales into the small parking lot, observed that his mother’s pale blue ’95 Coupe de Ville was in its stall, and bid farewell to his supervisor-companion. He rang at the outer door. No answer. He used his key. At her apartment door he rang again with the same result, and after a brief wait, he let himself into the small foyer. He called out, “Mami, it’s me.” Nothing. Now a little prickle of concern.
In the foyer, on a small wooden stand was a half-life-size clothed statue of a black woman holding a paler infant. The woman wore an elaborate silver crown, and there were silvered metal rays emanating from behind her gown of blue brocade, which was covered with silver embroidery depicting shells, fish, and other marine life. Below her feet tossed plaster sea waves, from which emerged a miniature steel anchor. When Paz was a little boy, this image had been a cheap framed poster; later, that had been replaced by a plaster statue, and then another more elaborate one, and finally this one, probably the most luxurious available image of La Virgen de Regla, aka Yemaya, the orisha of maternity and of the sea, to whom his mother was dedicated in Santeria. As a little boy he’d imagined it was a representation of Mom and himself.
The living room, which he now entered, was furnished in pale pink velvet and mahogany, heavy, expensive pieces-a tall breakfront, a long couch, armchairs, a coffee table inlaid with a marine scene in pale woods. The lamps on the side table were plaster sculptures, whose pale silken shades were protected by clear plastic. Mrs. Paz, in a flowered blue robe, was lying on the couch like a corpse, one arm and one foot resting on the floor, a copy of People en Espanol fallen from her slack hand, reading glasses dangling from one ear. Her breath came in snorts and hisses.
Paz had not seen his mother asleep all that often, despite having lived in her house for eighteen years. In his mind she was always up and pushing, often pushing Paz as well, full of angry energy focused on never, ever, falling back into the nothing from which she had finally emerged. Here was the consequence: utter exhaustion. Paz was struck by a tender compassion and was wondering whether to tiptoe out and leave the poor woman in peace when she suddenly awoke. A lightning flash of fear appeared on her face when she knew that she was not alone, and then, when she observed who her visitor was, she quickly reassembled her normal stern mask. She made her glasses vanish, sat up, and said, “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what?’ I’m your son, I’m visiting you on your day off.”
“Do you bring Amelia?”
“No, she’s still at school. Look, Mami, the reason I came is I need your help.”
