A Quiet Vendetta

NINE

And so I tell you of these things, not because I believe they are important, though in some ways they are, but because I am tired, I am growing old, and I feel that this is perhaps the last time that my voice will be heard. These things go back a great many years, back almost to the start of the last century, and the way these things began perhaps contributed to the way they ended. Cause and effect, no?

These words from my mother. My mother. The sound of her voice even now resonant in my ears. It was she who told me of my father’s land, and his father before him; how the history of that land had borne a people that were strong-willed and unafraid of dying. Death was as much a part of life as anything else, she would say, and it was because of this lineage that I became who I am. Of this I am sure, but to comprehend all I will tell you, it is necessary that we retrace steps that were made by people long before I was born.

I was a small child, and she sat with me, and this story she told me to help me understand some of the passion and violence that were held inside my father. I would listen to the sound of her voice, and when she paused I could hear her heart beating as I laid my head against her chest. Through the window I would feel the breeze from outside, the warmth of the air, and believe that never could someone feel so secure and safe.

‘It was a day that began much the same as any other,’ she said, ‘and yet – almost as if history itself had wrenched open a wound – the blood of men would be spilled before the sun set. Voices would be raised, families would be ruined, and amidst all of this something would begin that has influenced and directed so much of your father’s life. Your father, Ernesto. He comes from these people I speak of, and because of these things he is a strong-willed and decisive man.’

She paused and stroked my hair. I listened to her heart.

‘¡Hijos de Puta! they screamed,’ she said. ‘¡Hijos de Puta! But the words all blurred together like they were one word, and that one word carried hatred and venom and despair and anguish, and beneath that a sense of frustrated desperation, and beneath even that there seemed to be a sense of abject hopelessness, because they knew – each and every one of them – that no matter how many times they shouted, and no matter how loud their collective voice, and no matter how much spirit they managed to muster as they gathered in a raggle-tag disheveled crowd, they couldn’t change the inevitable.

‘There were men on horses, Ernesto… men with guns on horses. Smoke billowing out from the narrow wooden huts that gathered along the edge of the trees like children crowding for warmth.

‘It was in a place called Mayari in Cuba, out near Biran in the Oriente Province. Immigrant laborers lived there, one of them a man called Ruz, hailing originally from Galicia in Spain. He came to Cuba for the future it promised. Grew sugar, harvested it, sold it for meager profits, and watched while government men came down to rout out the instigators of a local protest and burned their houses to the ground.

‘February of 1926, and Ruz stood on the border of his land and prayed to a God he barely believed existed, and trusted that his faith would stop the government men from burning his property too. His prayers were heard, it seemed, for within an hour the government men rounded their horses and carried away towards the horizon, and left behind them families without livelihoods, families who knew nothing of the protests, and had they known would not have had the strength to raise their voices. But when it came to their own homes, well then they did find the strength, but it did no good. No good at all.

‘Ruz turned and walked back the way he’d come, and when he reached his own house his wife was waiting for him. Concern lined her face, and when he pulled her close, when he pressed his hand gently against her belly, when he told her that nothing, nothing in this or any other world, would come to harm her or their child, she believed that she could not have made a better choice in marrying this man.

‘For Ruz was a good man, a man of honor, of principle, and come August he would watch as his wife bore a son, and they would watch that son grow, and the son’s name was Fidel Castro Ruz, and he would work alongside his father in the sugar canes, and when he was six years old he would convince his parents to send him to school. And they would talk in hushed voices when Fidel Castro Ruz was sleeping, and they would agree that an education gave a child a future. So they sent him – this brave, bright, wide-eyed child – and Colegio Lasalle would take him in Santiago, and then Colegio Dolores, and through the years to come, as Hitler came, as Franco declared victory against the Republicans in Catalonia, as the Nazis marched on into Czechoslovakia, the child Ruz would study hard and well.’

My mother paused. I looked up at her, her face bright and passionate, but with a passion so different from that of my father. My mother was passionate about living, about making everything good for us, whereas my father was somehow frightening and violent and angry. It was as if he carried all the burdens of the world upon his shoulders and the weight of those burdens was killing him.

‘He was a fine student,’ my mother went on. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything he didn’t want to know. He worked hard through those years that saw Europe at war. In January of ’39 Franco entered Barcelona. He was allied to General Yague’s Moors, and from the north the Nationalist troops moved forward and cornered the Republicans. By March Franco had taken Madrid and ended the Spanish Civil War. Six months later Germany and Russia invaded Poland, and within forty-eight hours the war had begun. Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway and France, Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor… and Fidel Castro Ruz, now a young man of sixteen entering the Jesuit School of Colegio Belen, would watch the world in turmoil. It was as if a hurricane rose up from the heart of Europe, and somehow it drew the rest of the world into its own breed of madness. Castro would survive all of this, and he would eventually give Cuba back to her people. He is an important man, Ernesto, a man you should learn about. You have it in you to be as powerful and wise as Fidel Castro Ruz.’

My mother stopped. She pulled me tight. ‘And what of you? You were alive even then, Ernesto Cabrera Perez. Born not in Cuba, though that was your father’s homeland, and even though you and Fidel Castro Ruz had the same date of birth, 13 August, you were all of five years old, oblivious to what was happening on the other side of the earth. You were here in America, in New Orleans, state of Louisiana…’

She turned away then and smiled, as if remembering me as a small child gave her some sense of comfort and solace. I listened to every word she said. She had been the child of a poor family, but she was intelligent and perceptive, reading all she could find, listening to her own parents as they told her about the world. Time and again she instructed me to pay attention to everything around me, to learn to read, to read everything as she had done, and to recognize that life was there to be understood. She wanted me to survive. She wanted me to escape the world within which she had found herself, and make something of my future.

My father was a boxer, a fighter born and bred, a man who had for some reason left Cuba behind him for the bright lights and brash shallow promise of the New World. My father, the ‘Havana Hurricane’. A powerful man, both in physique and temperament; his wife, my mother, a Southern American-Hispanic girl from the poorest of backgrounds, and between these two – the wild fury of manhood that was always my father, and she the brooding, dark-haired, emerald-eyed southerner that tempted all other men like Delilah – I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I was an only child, and perhaps suffered for it. If there was violence to be displayed it was displayed towards me and me alone. If there was affection and sympathy, then I was there also, and between these wild swings of emotional exuberance I began my life understanding that nothing was certain save uncertainty itself. Within a moment my father could turn into a rage of passion and punishment, sweeping his bruised knuckles wide and flooring both my mother and me. He would drink, drink like a man from the desert, and when he won a fight, when he carried home fistfuls of sweat-stained dollars, we knew that those same dollars would disappear through the neck of a bottle of cheap sourmash, or between the legs of some seventeen-year-old hooker.

Only later would I see those girls for what they were. These girls were like no other girls in the world. They possessed that wide-mouthed inbred look, chewing gum, slutting some illegitimate Creole twist when they walked, and when they talked their voices came up through their legs, their ample hips, their swollen breasts. They acted cheap and trashy, believing perhaps that this was the way they were supposed to act, and when they slanted by, tilting their eyes out beneath thick brunette bangs, you could sense in their expression how they felt about you. They ate you with their eyes, sucked your root with their arrogant and conceited lips, rolled you over backwards across wide rhythmic shoulders and buried you in the belief that to lie with them beneath some clammy, sweated sheet was the closest you would ever come to Heaven. Perhaps they were fathered in Hell, fathered by brothers and cousins, and abused before they realized there were differences between men and women.

This was a town called Evangeline, down south along Lake Borgne, and it was a small broken-up town that ran by its own rules, and those rules were laid down, branded in iron, and it would have taken more than any number of men to change them. The people were strong-willed, resentful of strangers; they clutched their secrets to their chests like unwanted gifts, things they wished to shed but could not. They carried a myriad burdens, and even as a small and frightened child I could read it in their cracked faces, their sun-bleached hair, their worn hands, their open hearts. For this, for me, was where life began and ended; this was where I found all that was significant about life – fear, anger, hatred, power and pain. Love and betrayal too, for love and betrayal walked hand-in-hand, cater-cousins, blood-brothers, echoes of the soul. My father, the Hurricane, did not sleep with these women because he did not love my mother; he loved her the only way he knew how. He loved her enough to beat her when she badmouthed him, to hold her afterwards as her eye bruised, to wrap cracked ice from the cooler in a towel and hold it against her swelling face, to calm her tears, to whisper his gentle platitudes, and then to coax her into taking his cock into her mouth, breathing life into him sufficient that he could turn her onto her side and bury himself inside her, to hold her shoulders hard against the floor while he emptied his rage out the best way he knew how. And she would scream his name, and shed tears as he hurt her, but she was blind enough to believe that now he would love her like the man she wanted, and not the man she had married.

Later I would think of my father. Later I would dream. Even as a child I dreamed, but my dreams were not of cotton candy and fairgrounds, of childhood as some warm and secure hiatus before adulthood… No, no such things as these. My dreams were of my father, and how one day I would see him undone.

He continued to fight, my father, his bare-knuckle madness displayed for the world to see most every Friday and Saturday night, and by the time I was eight, as I heard of the death of Roosevelt, as the Second World War finally collapsed beneath the weight of its own insanity, I would go with him to the brutal and sadistic tournaments held in backlots and car parks behind sleazy bars and pool halls, where for twenty-five dollars a time grown men would beat each other senseless and bloody. I was given no choice in the matter. My father said I should go, and so I did. On the single occasion that my mother expressed some vague disagreement in the matter he merely had to raise his hand and she was silenced, never to protest again.

So, as Fidel Castro Ruz graduated from Colegio Belen in Havana with a Ph.D in Law, as he went on to enter the University of Havana, I stood and squinted, with barely opened eyes, through the chicken-wire fencing that separated the back yard behind some broken-down moonshine haunt, squinted and grimaced and dared myself to go on looking as my alcohol-reddened father brought his callused and brown fists down repeatedly on some poor challenger’s head. He was the Hurricane, the Havana Hurricane, and there was no-one, not one single man, who ever walked unaided from a fight with my father. On three occasions – once when I was nine, the second time when I was eleven, the third when I was twenty-one – I saw him beat men to death, and once the death was confirmed I saw money exchange hands, the body drawn up tight in a hessian sack, and then dark-faced men with leather coats lifted the cadavers and carried them to the back of waiting flatbed trucks. I heard those bodies were sawed up like a jigsaw and hurled piece by piece into Lake Borgne. There the fish and the snakes and the alligators would remove any evidence that those men had existed. Their names were left unspoken, their faces forgotten, their prayers unanswered. One time I asked my father about them, and he turned to me and breathed some whiskey-fueled challenge that included the phrase comer el coco. I understood little Spanish at that time, and did not know what he meant by ‘eating his head’. I asked my mother, and she told me that he did not wish to be interrogated and brow-beaten.

Later, I would think that the saddest thing about my father’s death was his life.

Later, I would think a great many things, but as a child growing up in a small run-down four-room adobe house on the edge of Evangeline, the sour smell of Lake Borgne ever-present in my nostrils, I believed the world to be nothing more than a bruised and bloody nightmare spewed from the dark imagination of a crazy God.

My life came in staggered jolts and paragraphs, it came from the depth of the heart where the birth of love and pain shared the same bed. To understand me, both as a child and man, is to understand some things of yourself that you could not bear to face. You shy away from such revelation, for to see it is to relinquish ignorance, and to relinquish ignorance is to know that you yourself are guilty of the recognition of possibility. We all possess our darker aspects; we are all capable of acts of inhumanity and degradation; we all possess a dark light in our eyes that, when ignited, can incite murder and betrayal and infidelity and hatred. We have all walked to the edge of the abyss, and though some of us might have lost our balance, it was only the few – the vital and necessary few – who fell into its shadows.

Perhaps I was such a child, one of those who walked, who looked, who reached towards the promise of the unseen, only to find myself without equilibrium and grasping the air ahead of me, feeling the tightness in my chest as fear erupted throughout my fragile body, and then the sense of certainty that all was lost as my feet slid from beneath me and I began to fall…

And fall I did, all the way down, and even now – these many years later – I have yet to reach the lowest depths.

I was born out of poverty and grew beneath the shadow of drunken brawls between the two people who I believed should have loved one another the most. It was a birth of regret, both my mother and father believing until the very last moment that I should have been aborted, and though this was not for the lack of trying – she on her knees, he kneeling behind her holding her shoulders, giving all his strength and support, with Lysol douches, with orangewood spikes, with prayers In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti Mary Mother of God it hurts… Lord forgive me, it huuuurts… Oh God, look at all this blood… Still I came.

There, among the bloodied and dirty sheets, within the crowded and broken shell of a Ford trailer home, the windows cracked, along their edges the filth and grease of a hundred years, and the whole frame tilting to the left where the tires had sagged, finally believing that to protest decay and dilapidation was to protest the passage of time itself, and that was something that could not be done, I was born.

And screaming voices moving from broken trailers to tarpaper shacks to this battered and religiously dirty adobe and plank-wood house on the Zachary Road. And later, sometimes having to carry my mother, barely able to make it to the small and shadowy bedroom, but I did carry her, diligently, cautiously, knowing that if I stumbled and fell, if I lost my balance, then she would fall too, and in falling would shatter like a porcelain doll.

Such things as these are my life, my memories, my past. I walked these steps, one foot patiently following the other, and sometimes slowing to ask myself if perhaps there was another way I could have walked, another path I could have taken, but realizing that I would never know, and even if I did what point was there in asking such a question, for I would never be able to take it. I had made my choice. I had made my bed. I would lie in it now, even until death.

The world went by me unnoticed. Gandhi was assassinated, Truman became president of the United States, the North Koreans invaded the south, and Fidel Castro Ruz graduated Havana University’s Faculty of Law and went into practice in the city of my father’s birth. My father talked of the life he could have led. He told me names like Sugar Ray Robinson and ‘The Bronx Bull’ Jake La Motta, spoke of Randolph Turpin and Joe Louis, of Rocky Marciano and a dozen more that even now I cannot remember.

He told me also of his homeland, the Cuba that he had left behind. He told me stories of Castro, of his intention to campaign for parliament in the election of ’52, how General Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government of President Carlos Prio Socarras in a coup d’état. Castro went to court and charged the dictator Batista with violation of the Cuban Constitution, but the court rejected Castro’s petition, and then before the fall of 1953 Castro organized an armed attack with one hundred and sixty loyal followers against the Moncada Barracks in Oriente Province. This attack, alongside a second against the Bayamo Garrison, failed. Half of Castro’s men were killed, and Castro and his brother Raul were taken prisoner.

I listened to these things, listened to them with half my mind elsewhere, for I did not care for my father and even less for the history of his country. I was an American, born and bred. I was no more Cuban than Eisenhower, or so I believed.

But violence was in my blood, it seemed, perhaps hereditary, carried in some airborne virus that my father exhaled, and though many years later I would see a pattern, a series of smaller, less significant events that preordained what was to come, it was a single defining event that ultimately dictated the course of my life.

The month was September of 1952. I was home alone. My father was drunk in some bar, wagering what little money he had on some senseless and grievous harm he intended to do to someone, my mother in the market collecting provisions, and the man came to our house. The salesman. He stood there on the porch, his yellow-checkered pants, his short-sleeved shirt, his tie hanging around his midriff, his hat in his hand.

‘Hi there,’ he said as I drew out from within the shadows of the hallway. ‘My name is Carryl Chevron. Know that sounds like a lady’s name, but it ain’t, sure ain’t a lady’s name, young man. Is your folks home?’

I shook my head, all of fifteen years old, standing there in shorts and shoes, my chest bare, my head wrapped in a damp towel. The spring had been a bitch, the summer worse, and even as it dragged its sorry ass towards fall the heat was still oppressive.

‘I’m lookin’ for some folks who’s int’rested in learnin’ here,’ Carryl Chevron said, and then he turned his head back towards the road as if he was looking for something. His eyes glinted, glimmered like the moon, and I wiped my hand beneath my nose and leaned against the door jamb in the shady porch of that beat-to-shit house.

‘Lookin’ for some folks that might be tempted towards wisdom, know what I mean?’ Again the tilted head, the glimmering eyes, his face glowing something that I had only seen in my father’s face when he sat in his chair, his bottle in his hand. Somewhere a dog started barking. I glanced towards the sound, but even as I turned I knew I was interested in what this man was saying.

I turned back. The man smiled.

‘Is that real gold in your teeth?’ I asked, as I peered into the shadow that filled the man’s mouth.

Carryl Chevron – a man who’d spent much of his life telling folks that he didn’t have a girl’s name, who’d been bruised and burned emotionally for this one parental curse, yet who’d never had the foresight and logic to change it – laughed suddenly, abruptly, nodded his head and reddened his face. ‘Why yes, sure it’s real gold. You think someone such as me, someone who carries such wisdom across the world, would have anything but real gold and diamonds in his teeth?’ And then he leaned forward, and with the hand that wasn’t balancing him against the jamb, he tugged back his lip and showed me a gleaming gold canine, in its center a small glassy stud that seemed to shine with the same light that beamed from his eyes.

‘Gold and diamonds,’ he managed to say with half his mouth moving. ‘Real gold and real diamonds and real wisdom right there in the back of my car. You wanna see them?’

‘See them?’ I asked. ‘See what?’

‘My ’cyclopedias, my ’cyclopedias, young man. Books so filled with wisdom and learnin’ you’ll never need to look any other place than right between the leather covers, right there, packed like smart marching soldiers in the back of my vee-cule. You wanna see?’

‘You’re selling books?’ I asked, and for a moment I could see my mother’s face, the way she pleaded with me to read, to learn, to absorb everything that the world could offer.

The man stepped back, looked suddenly amazed, offended even. ‘Books!’ he exclaimed. ‘Books? You call them volumes of genius books? Boy, where the hell did you get yourself growed up?’

‘Zachary Road, Evangeline… why, where did you grow up?’

Chevron just smiled. ‘I’ll bring one,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring one right up here and show you.’

He walked back to the dirt road, to his car, and from the rear seat he lifted out a box and balanced it on the edge of the fender. From the box he took a large black book that appeared to weigh many pounds, and even as I saw it, all of fifteen years old, I knew that that was the kind of place where folks got their smarts. I watched Carryl Chevron walk right up onto the porch carrying that book, and though I couldn’t really read worth a damn, could only just manage to write my name, and even then some of the letters being backwards, I just knew I had to have them. Had to. I believed it was what my mother would have wanted. She would be proud if I managed to obtain and own such things.

‘Here we are,’ Chevron said. ‘Volume One. Aardvark through Aix-La-Chapelle to Canteloupe. In here we find Abacus, Acapulco, the Aegean Sea, Appalachian Mountains, Athlete’s Foot, Milton Babbitt, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Congress of Berlin, Boccherini, Cadiz, Catherine De Medici, Cherokee Indians, China… everything, just everything right here that a young man such as yourself might ever wish to know.’ He leaned forward, held out the opened book, the smell of crisp paper, the tang of new leather, the print, the pictures, the wisdom of it all. ‘Everything,’ Chevron whispered, ‘and it could all be yours.’

And me, standing there with my skinny arms and my bare chest, the damp towel wrapped around my head like a turban, reached out to touch the understanding that seemed to ooze from the pages. The book was snapped shut, withdrawn immediately as if on elastic.

‘Buy… or be stupid for the rest of your life. Wisdom is priceless, young man, but here we have wisdom going for nothing, driven here from the heart of the world for you. For you, young man.’

I heard what the man was saying, and in some way it could really have been my mother. The world was there to be understood, she had told me, and this man appeared to have brought that world to my doorstep.

Chevron held the book tightly between his hands and leaned towards me. ‘You know where your folks keep the money, huh? You know how mad they’d be if they learned I’d been out here giving such things away and they missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Where are they? Out working?’

‘They’re out,’ I said. ‘Won’t be back for a little while, I reckon.’ I kept glancing at the book Chevron held in his hands. There was something magnetic about it, something that drew me towards it. ‘My dad has money, but I don’t figure he’d be interested in some books though,’ I said, and already I was trying to work out what I was going to do, how I was going to make these books my own.

‘Aah,’ Chevron sighed, as if he understood something that could only be understood by the two of us. ‘We know, don’t we? Young man… we know what’s here even if no-one else has the brains to figure it out. This can be our little secret, our little secret, just you and me. Maybe you should just go get some money and then you and I can make a deal, okay? You and I can make a deal, I’ll drive away, and then when your folks come back they’ll be so grateful that you took advantage of the opportunity that I’m giving you here.’

I hesitated for a moment, closed one eye and looked at Carryl Chevron, looked once more at the book he held in his hands. I could hear the sound of my mind working overtime; I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something.

‘How many are there?’ I asked.

‘Nine,’ he said. ‘Nine books in all. All of them just like this one, right there in the box in the back of my car.’

Again I hesitated, not because I was in doubt about what I wanted but because I was uncertain of what I was going to do to get it. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘bring them in. I’ll get you some money, but you’re not to tell anyone, right? You don’t tell anyone you came here and gave me the books.’

Chevron smiled. A dream, he thought, another dream; the right place, the right time of day, another dumbfuck kid who knew where the money was kept and could be worked like a bellows.

Chevron walked back to the car and retrieved the box from the rear seat. He lumbered back, his cheap shirt chafing his shoulders and elbows, sweat running down his chest like a river. Times like this he didn’t care, times like this it was worth it. The trip had been good. Here a week in this Godforsaken shithole of a territory, and this would be his fifth sale, one of them to an old guy who seemed too blind to read, and sure as hell hadn’t managed to see the difference between a ten-dollar and a hundred-dollar bill, the rest to kids such as this one, kids old enough to know where the cash was stashed, young enough to be fascinated and think nothing of consequences. Work fast, dump this crap, drive on, lose yourself out there in another worn-out dustbowl of a town where no-one knew who he was or would ever see him again. He’d be back in New Orleans within three or four days, out of the state inside a week: fat through a goose.

He reached the porch, stood there for a moment, and then shoved on the screen door, stepping through it before it banged back against the jamb. He stood in the cool darkness of the hallway, his nostrils twitching at the rank undercurrent of alcohol and piss and body odor. It never ceased to amaze him how people could actually live like this. He dropped the box of books on the floor, nothing more than a deadweight meal-ticket as far as he was concerned, and waited for the kid.

‘Hey!’ I called from out back, and already I had decided that there was no possibility I could not have those books. With those books, with everything inside them, I could be the boy my mother wanted me to be, and then – one day – I’d be a man like Fidel Castro Ruz, a man who made a difference. ‘Money’s here… come get it.’

Chevron stepped through the hallway into a small corridor that led to the back of the house. The kitchen, he thought. Always the kitchen, inside a kettle, in a sock inside a pan buried at the bottom of a cupboard. Jesus, I’d make a helluva thief. These people are so goddamned predictable.

Into the kitchen indeed, and there he found me shuffling through a drawer.

‘Come help me,’ I said. ‘Hey, maybe you wanna beer or something?’

‘Well, that’s mighty fine of you offerin’ there, young man, but I really must be on my way, have a lot of folks to see before I leave this here town of yours.’

Chevron could hear the shit oozing from his own mouth, talking like some hick farmhand laborer, and tonight he’d be holed up in some dusty highway roadhouse, some brassy act who could suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch doing her thing in his lap, in his hand a bottle of something cool and sweet, laughing to himself about this here routine he’d pulled so many times it’d gotten to be corny.

He crossed the room and stood a foot or so behind me and waited for the money to show its pretty face.

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘Anyways, how much d’you want? You want all of this?’

‘That’d be fine,’ Chevron said. ‘You just find all you got in there, just keep it comin’ and we’ll make out just fine an’ dandy.’

‘Think I got all of it here,’ I said.

I turned then, and Chevron stood there, his hand out ahead of him, his eyes glinting greedily, and the strength of my grip as I held his wrist surprised him, and the power that pulled him suddenly forward into a handful of kitchen knives, tugged him all the way forwards until his cheap cotton-covered belly met the handles of those blades, seemed to surprise him more than the pain they delivered.

The shirt perforated effortlessly, as did the man’s gut, and from his midriff, through his pinioned tie, out over his belt and down the front of his pants, came a river of blood more suited to the slaughter of a pig.

And then the knives were twisting, and through his gaping gold and diamond-decorated mouth came a desperate sound, a sound like rattling, as if his lungs were attempting escape through the tortured confines of his throat, lodging somewhere against his trachea, against the palate and the roof of his mouth. Blood came with that sound, I could smell its earthy bitterness, and when his bulging eyes cast downward he saw my face, the face of a child, white and deathly-pale, and I was leaning up towards him, smiling, twisting away out of his line of vision as his eyes rolled up to their whites in the back of his head.

He staggered back against the edge of the table. The table rocked but didn’t give, and when I released his wrist he just continued to stand there, off-balance, everything gone wild inside his head, colors and sounds and the bursting sensation in his lower gut all rolled up tight into something indefinable. I’m sure he felt his bladder give, felt the warm issuance tracing a narrow and rapid line down the inside of his leg, and then he toppled forward onto his knees, his face now beneath mine, the knives exiting his flesh like the slow grinding teeth of some huge mechanical cog, spitting sideways across the dirty linoleum as his life bled out before him. Inside he slumped, his innards twisted up and glued together, his hands scratching frantically on the greasy floor… and I stepped away, picked up one of the knives from the floor, and then took a handful of hair at the back of Chevron’s head, tugged hard until I could feel the muscles straining in his neck, and then with one movement, a movement so deft it seemed natural, I sliced his throat from ear to ear.

This was my first kill. My first real human being, and to feel that sudden warmth bursting between my fingers, across my wrist, my forearm, to hear the spattering of life as it showered from mortality into dust was something unreal, something profound, disturbing.

Something almost perfect.

I was my father perhaps. For some brief moment I was my father, and afterwards I stood there and looked at what had happened. I looked at this strange man lying on the floor of the kitchen, and then I knelt down beside him. I reached out my hand and touched the skin of his face – his cheek, his lips, his eyelids, his nose. I felt the moisture of sweat on his brow, the coarseness of his hair, the rough unshaven folds of skin above the wound in his neck.

There was a smell, something earthy, like rust and damp corn, like… like someone had died. That was the smell. Unique. Unmistakable. Once you inhaled that smell there was nothing else it could be. I believed, perhaps, that this would be a defining moment, that this would be the point where I became the man my mother wished me to be, where I would take these books and read and study and learn all there was to learn about this world, and with that knowledge I would step forward with certainty, with confidence, and become something. Become someone.

Things had changed. I had changed. I was not aware of how much the killing of the salesman would change me. During those seconds that I kneeled beside his slowly cooling body, I imagined that all I had done was engineer a way to obtain something that I would have otherwise been deprived of. That was how I rationalized and justified my action. But there was more, much more, and it would only be later that I understood the insidious shadow such an action would cast across my entire life. Wanting to please my mother I had become my father. Only for a moment, perhaps, but nevertheless I had become him. Desiring of the one true thing in my life, I had become the one thing I could never have hoped to understand. I felt panic, apprehension, confusion, a sense of imbalance, and yet at the same time I believed that I had accomplished something of which my mother would have been proud. My father killed people for no reason at all. I had killed someone for a good reason, a very good reason, and with the knowledge that was now going to be mine I would become the person she wished me to be.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I was a child then, possessing a child’s eyes and a child’s mind. I had done something I did not fully understand, but I had done it, and thus I was someone.

I washed up first, and then I carried the books two at a time from the box on the floor to my small bedroom. I stacked them on a blanket, folded the blanket over them, and then pushed them all the way to the wall beneath my cot.

I returned to the kitchen, stood there for a moment with a sense of mild frustration. How could something so brief be so damned messy?

I removed all the money from Carryl Chevron’s jacket, the bills thankfully unsoiled with his blood. I took cloths from the cupboard beneath the sink, wet them beneath the faucet, and then started working along the linoleum floor from the door towards the prostrate body. When I had reached the body from all sides and cleaned up the blood I returned to my room. I took a sheet from the bed, carried it back to the kitchen and spread it out on the floor. I rolled Chevron sideways until he lay awkwardly in the middle, and then I folded the edges over his legs and arms, over his torso and his dumb, senseless face. I tied the sheet at each end, knotted it well, and then dragged the body out of the kitchen and along the hall towards the front door. The man was heavy, he moved inch by incredible inch, and I heaved and gagged with the exertion. I convinced myself that it had been worth it, worth every struggling, breathless, choking moment it took to haul the carcass to the inner porch. I acted swiftly, mechanically almost, and with an almost complete absence of emotion. The thing was done. It could not be undone. I did not see the point of being any more afraid or confused.

I took Chevron’s keys and walked out to his car. I opened it, released the handbrake, started the engine, and then reversed the vehicle back towards the front of the house. From there it was a mere three or four steps to where the body lay inside the front door. The man’s weight was remarkable to me, but once I had lifted the upper half of his body over the lip of the trunk the impetus folded him in all the way.

I drove east no more than a mile or so, parked the car at the edge of a deserted and narrow road that ran out towards the swamplands and everglades beyond Lake Borgne and the canal intersections, family territory I was familiar with. For a while I rested. The heat pressed in at me from all sides. I even turned on the radio and listened to some Creole music from a station out of Chalmette District. It came to me after about half an hour of no thought. I knew that that was the best way – to think nothing at all, just to plant the idea right there in the middle of my mind and let it grow of its own accord. It took seed, it grew, it blossomed and flourished like wisteria in the vague breathless humidity. I backed the car up and let it roll in amongst the hickorys and water oaks. A hundred yards, the tires already shredding up the loose fermented undergrowth, spitting it out in healthy brown gobs like chewing tobacco from beneath the chassis, and then I killed the engine. From the back seat I took a jack, and with something akin to Herculean effort I hitched the rear end of the car a good foot high. With the trunk now close to chest height I had some difficulty rolling out Chevron’s body, but I managed it, sweating furiously, my fingers stuck together with the man’s blood, my hair stuck to my face like paint. I let the body drop, removed the sheet, and then with the side of my foot I shoved the body back beneath the rear wheels, the head directly under the right, the waist and upper legs beneath the left. I stepped back, kicked the jack, and heard the crunching demolition of bone and feature as the heavy rubber tires ground their way back to earth through Carryl Chevron’s mortal frame. I cleaned my hands off on the sheet, threw it into the trunk, and once inside the car I started the engine and rolled the car back and forth over the body a few times for good measure. I wound up the windows, locked the door, returned to where Chevron’s battered body lay half-buried in the loose earth inside the boundary of the trees. I took each hand in turn, and using the jack lever I smashed Chevron’s fingers against a rock so no fingerprint identification would ever be possible. I did the same with his jaw and lower face. The jack, the rock, the sheet, even the shirt I was wearing – I took all of them and walked until the waterlogged earth started to suck at my feet. I pushed these things beneath the surface and felt the ground hungrily devour them. I watched them disappear, the mud closing over them like slow-motion oil, and then I turned and ran back towards the road. Ran like a kid to a birthday party.

I stopped beside the unidentifiable body of Carryl Chevron, a forty-seven-year-old confidence trickster, born in Anamosa, flunked out of high school, dishonorably discharged from the army for theft, survivor of two wives, three ulcers, a suspected coronary condition that turned out to be a gargantuan case of heartburn, and I smiled.

It had been different – the killing, the disposing of the body, the small moments of chilling panic, the cleverness, the deceit, the perfection of it all. I kicked the battered head once more, watched an angry arc of gray-scarlet matter jet from the toe of my shoe, and then I walked back to the car. There was a certain magic to it all, a certain power, its beauty and simplicity matched only by the stars I could see from the narrow window of my room during clear-skied winter nights.

That was my first and original sin; a sin I committed in an effort to become something of which my mother would approve, and in doing so I had perhaps allowed my father to infect and inhabit my soul.

Carryl Chevron was never found, never reported missing, perhaps – truth be known – never even missed. Maybe some brassy act in high heels with too much rouge and too little class was still waiting for him in a dusty roadhouse someplace down the stateline. And maybe some of the kids who bought his books were still sore from their beatings.

Who the hell knew, and who the hell cared?

The car I drove a mile further into the swamplands, and then I watched as it slid effortlessly, silently, gracefully into the everglades, never to surface.

I had my books, and I learned to read them, and I read as if my life depended on it. Hard-earned volumes of wisdom where I found the heart, its workings, the subclavian and vena cava, where I found Da Vinci, Einstein, Michaelangelo, Dillinger, Capone: the many geniuses the world had offered and then greedily taken away. They were my one true possession, all my own, worshipped and tended with care, for they had cost me dearly, both me and the man who had brought them. And my father, too drunk or too bruised to see what was there in front of him most of the time, and my mother, cowed and quiet in his presence, never thought to ask or enquire how I had come by such things. I kept them safe, there beneath my bed, and I walked through every word on every page and then started over again.

Those nights, cool and loose, the sky clear, peppered with stars and constellations I could identify and name, the heat somehow eased by the breeze that came north from the river, feeling alive, anxious…

Feeling there was so much I wanted – needed – to know.

Later, many years later, when time had unfolded and I had learned so much more of the world beyond my home, I would think these things:

Perhaps if I had been someone, if I had really been someone, then these events would not have happened.

Perhaps if I had fought in Vietnam and come home a hero, my breast painted with ribbons, the girls from Montalvo’s Diner crowding my arms as if they could all be enveloped in one fell swoop. And bearing a scar across the cheek, above the eye maybe – visible, but not so visible as to be ugly.

Perhaps if I had walked out through the mud and blood and shit of Da Nang or Quang Ngai or Qui Nhon, shouldering a rucksack heavy with C-Rations, Kool-Aid, salt tablets, ammunition, lucky mascots, a flak jacket rolled tightly between my burden and my spine. Things you could close your eyes and still feel the weight of.

Perhaps if I had been there to carry some wounded comrade through the thigh-deep water of a raining napalm nightmare, the vegetation crumpling around me, falling, dissolving, staggering breathless and burned, my hair scorched to my scalp, my arms bloody with the red sweat of my load.

Perhaps if I had walked a hundred miles to the back-lines, the rear, where the medic tents stood white and clean and filled with the smell of anaesthetic and morphine, where fresh-faced first tour medical students turned their eyes away from the carnage, where I had to stand and bind and weave and amputate and stem the heavy flow of blood from the gutted stomach, the jagged wound, the missing eye, the greenstick fracture leaping from the surface of the skin like some winter-silhouetted teeter-totter…

Perhaps if I had lost a finger. A toe. The lobe of an ear.

Perhaps if I could have worn a tee-shirt bearing the legend IF YOU WEREN’T THERE SHUT THE FUCK UP, and know that I had been there, that I could talk, and possess every right to talk and tell people what it was like – the night, the fear, the ghost-gray image of moving troops, their symmetry, their identities merged one into another and back again as the mud and blood and shit of the war blended their uniqueness into one great slow-motion, breathing, vacant, beyond-questioning machine…

Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.

And thus would not have felt empty.

It was I – who wished folks would called me Six or Lineman or Doc, or some other well-earned nickname, a name that people would hear and ask of its origin, and in being told they would understand what a deep and perfect human being I was, flawed, yet brave and bold, and experienced, and rich in something few possessed – it was I who was in some way nothing, and yet so afraid of being nothing I imagined that everything I wanted could be taken from others.

And so I did.

I remembered times I would sit back in the corner of Evangeline’s only diner, Montalvo’s, popping peanut M &Ms, snapping them back against the roof of my mouth and feeling them thunk against my teeth, and grinding up their bitty sweetness, and finding the candy shrapnel tucked down inside my gums… and it was late evening, and soon Montalvo’s would close, the warm-faced Creole-Irish halfbreed cook whose name I could never recall would turn me out into the depth of the night, wishing me well, laughing in that broken Americanized twang that sounded like no accent I had ever heard, or would ever hear again. He rolled, that man did, rolled across the greasy linoleum floor, rubbing his hands through a greasy towel, wiping the back of his greasy hand across the lower half of his greasy face, and he smelled of fried onions and fried eggs, of fried fries and tobacco. Like a roadhouse on fire. A unique smell that no human being should ever have to carry, but he did, and he carried it effortlessly, the smell a part of him in everything he said and did and thought.

But for the time being I was safe, there at the back of the diner, watching the three or four regular kids dance to the jukebox, the two girls, their wide mouths popping the spearmint tang of gum, their rah-rah skirts over firm brown thighs, their flats and ponytails and rubber bands and the men’s wristwatches they wore, and me wondering what it would be like to fuck one of them, wondering what it would be like to dissolve my tongue in that spearmint tang, or maybe to fuck two of them together, to lose my hands beneath those spinning skirts, to touch the very heart of whatever they believed their lives really were.

For now, they were safe.

I believed that if I had read novels I could have talked, but I did not read novels, merely facts from encyclopedias.

To talk of such things would have made it all too obvious that I had no life at all.

Perhaps if I had read those things that were named in my volumes – books called Flight To Arras, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, To A God Unknown, Narziss and Goldmund, Altona, Men Without Shadows, A Very Easy Death – names such as these, then perhaps…

And if I had known the names of the authors as well it would have been taken for granted that I had read these things, and I would not have mentioned the titles, but merely the names of the characters, and people would listen and know that I knew all these things from the tone of my voice, the expression in my eyes, the way I half-smiled my own thoughts that were nothing but my own.

Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.

But I had not, and did not, and never would, I felt.

And so I killed things.

What else could a poor boy do? I watched the tight-thighed girls, their whirling skirts, the way they glanced at me arrogantly, the way they dared each other to speak to the weird kid in the corner with the M &Ms when they first started coming here an age ago. They took the dare, one or two of them, and I was shy and pleasant, and I blushed, and they giggled, but now they have grown some and they don’t bother with dares, they just think I’m weird, and they dance all the more with their thighs and their skirts and their peppermint tang.

I hated them for their smooth brown skin. I wondered what their sweat would taste like straight from the skin. Beads like condensation down the glass walls of chilled bottles. Like rain against glass.

I sat alone, there in Montalvo’s Diner, and perhaps the only person who did not think I was weird was the crazy halfbreed cook with the forgotten name who carried a smell that should not have had to be carried by any human being.

He did not worry that I had nothing to say, for I bought my Cokes, popped my M &Ms, sat and looked and breathed and existed.

I did not speak.

I would think to speak, but all I could come up with was ‘Well-uh-I-kinda-killed-some-things-one-time…’, but seeing as how that wasn’t really the polite kind of talk folks were looking for, I did not say it.

And, as such, had nothing to say.

Perhaps if I had been caught…

Perhaps then, and only then, would I have had something of which to speak.

Sometimes I would challenge myself, dare myself to walk up to one of those girls, those tight-skinned teenage tornadoes, and ask their name, and say ‘Hi, I’m Bill or “Doc” or “Lineman” or “Swamper,” ’ and feel them blush a little, and smile, and say ‘I’m Carol or Janie or Holly-Beth,’ and ask me how I came to be called something such as that. I would shrug noncommittally, as if it didn’t really matter, and tell them it was the war, back a long time, honey, a long time ago that you wouldn’t want to be hearing about. And we would dance then, and she would give me gum, play some records I liked maybe, and then later as I walked her home, she would ask me again how I came by my name, and I would tell her, in small, measured emotional phrases, and through the spaces between my words she would feel the depth, the strength, the power of self-control needed for someone to return from such a place and still be able to smile, to laugh, to say ‘Hi’ and dance in Montalvo’s Diner with someone such as herself.

She would fall in love, and I would feel the pressure of her hand in mine, the way her shoulder rubbed the side of my chest as she leaned to stroke my cheek, to kiss my face, to ask me if maybe, somehow, possibly I might consider seeing her again…

And I would have said, ‘Sure honey, sure thing,’ and I would have felt her heart leap.

Or maybe not. Maybe I would hold a Coke bottle in my hand, and as they pulled me close I would break the base of the bottle against the wall, and then turn to face Bobby-Sue or Marquita or Sherise or Kimberley, and say, ‘Here, a little of something cool and hard for the pleasure of your company…,’ and grind the glass teeth deep into the solar plexus, through the vagus nerves, and feel them tighten and twitch, dancing like a headless chicken through the scrubbed backlot behind a busted trailer, feeling them close up against the broken shards like the hands of hungry, shit-faced kids, the blood pumping, sweating out through the aperture, glowing over my hands, warming them, filling the pores, finding my prints like narrow channels and filling them…

And then lean them against the wall, fuck them in the ass, comb my hair and go home.

Perhaps then, and only then, would there be something of which I could speak.

Before Carryl Chevron I had killed a dog. Before that I had set a cat in a pen with three chickens and watched them run their little hearts out. Before that I killed some other things, but now I cannot remember what they were.

We were all essentially children, and some of us never seemed to be anything else. I understood this, as now I understand many things, and I see now that my own depth of understanding is even greater than I am aware. I know it all comes from the heart, right from the very center of the heart, and I know that if you do not listen to what it has to tell you then it will kill you.

Time rolled onwards like some unspoken darkness, and within it there were sounds and motions that even now I cannot bring myself to recall.

Eisenhower was inaugurated as president.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in Sing Sing.

Fidel Castro Ruz was jailed after a failed coup.

Rocky Marciano retained his world heavyweight title when he K.O.d Jersey Joe Walcott. My father said he could have done the same. My father was a drunk. A liar. A failure of a man.

I was sixteen years old, and New Orleans was in my blood. St James the Greater, Ougou Feray, the African spirit of war and iron. The driving rhythm of drums and chants and people pouring red wine, rice and beans, meat, rum and soft drinks into a pond, and then those same people writhing in the mud and sharing their special powers by touching bystanders. Serpent and cross in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, and summoning the most powerful of all spirits, loa-Damballah-wédo, the spirited festival of Vyéj Mirak, the Virgin of Miracles, and her voodoo counterpart Ezili, the goddess of love. Washing a bull, applying perfume, dressing it in a cape, and then slaughtering it, its blood collected in a gourd and passed to those possessed by the loa. They drank to feed the spirit. Sacrificing white pigeons to the Petro loa, a spirit that demanded birds and hogs, goats and bulls, sometimes bodies from tombs. All Souls’ Day, Baron Samedi, loa of the dead.

I was sixteen years old. I was almost a man, but still I couldn’t stand and take the beatings my father delivered. Not only to me, but to my mother – she of the graceful, artless, silent hope.

It was the end of 1953.

I think back and images merge and blend together, faces become the same, voices carry a similar tone and timbre, and I find it difficult to place events in their correct chronological sequence. I think of Cuba, my father’s homeland, the things that happened there, and then realize that those things came later, much later. My own past challenges me with forgetfulness, and this scares me, for to forget my past is to forget who I am, how I became such a person, and to forget such things challenges the very reason for living.

Perhaps the saddest thing about my own death will be my life.

Some of us live to remember; some of us live to forget; some of us, even now, make ourselves believe that there is some greater purpose worth working for. Let me tell you, there isn’t. It isn’t complicated, it is almost too simple to be believed. Like faith. Faith in what? Faith in God? Greatest thing God ever did was fool the world into thinking that He existed. Look into a man’s eyes as he dies and you’ll see that there’s nothing there. Just blackness reflecting your own face. It’s that simple.

I will tell you now about the death of my mother. Though it would not come for another four years I will tell you of it now.

Through 1954, through the eras of McCarthy, the Viet Minh occupation of Hanoi and the very inception of the Vietnam War, through the release of Castro and his brother Raul on General Amnesty in May of 1955, through all these things.

Beyond Castro’s departure to Mexico where he organized his exiles into the 26 July Revolutionary Movement, how he led eighty-two men to the north coast of Oriente Province, where they landed at Playa Las Coloradas in December of ’56, how all but twelve survived who retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains and waged a continuous guerrilla war against the Batista government, how those twelve became eight hundred and scored victory after victory against the dictator in the hot madness of revolution and spilled blood that was as much a part of history as anything that might have happened in Europe…

Until finally Batista was defeated and fled to the Dominican Republic on New Year’s Day 1959, and we were there – my father and I – there in Havana when the victorious Castro entered the city, and the people believed, the people really believed that things would be different now.

And all I could think of was how my mother should have been with us, but by then she was dead, and how we had fled America, land of my birth, and made our way here to the country of my father’s birth.

So I will tell you about that night – a Friday night, 19 December 1958 – and you can ask yourself if what happened to my father could really be called anything but justice.

When the men came down to drag the body from the yard I remember thinking something.

What will happen to his wife? What will happen to his children?

For I knew all of these men had wives and children, just like my own father. Just like the Havana Hurricane.

Less than a week to Christmas, and the dead man’s wife and children would be home even then, waiting for him to return. But that night he would not come stumbling through the door, red-faced, his fists bloody, his vest drenched with sweat. That night he would be dragged from a yard by three men, his body hefted with no more grace or respect than if it had been a side of beef, and bound tightly within a length of torn sacking, and thrown into the back of a flatbed truck. And men with callused hands and callous faces, men with no more soul than a stone, no more mercy or compunction than a lizard bathing itself on a sun-bleached rock, would drive that truck away, and for ten dollars, maybe less, they would strip the body and burn the clothes, cut the flesh and let it bleed some, and then sink it into the everglades where alligators would swiftly dissemble everything that could be identified.

And my father, the Hurricane, staggering home, his own vest spattered with a dead man’s blood, and roaring drunk in the doorway, and challenging the world to defy him, to tell him he was not the master of his own house, and my mother scared, pleading with him not to hold her so roughly, not to be so angry, so violent, so insatiable…

And me, crouching there behind the doorway of my own room, tears in my eyes as I heard her scream, and listening as she rallied all the prayers she could muster, and hearing her voice and knowing that such sounds would only incense him further, and feeling that somewhere in amongst all this madness there must be something that made sense.

But I didn’t find it – not then, not even now.

And then the silence.

Silence that seemed to bleed out from beneath the doorway of their room, and walk its soundless footsteps down towards me, and feeling with it the shadow of cold that could only be translated one way.

And the silence seemed to last for something close to an eternity, perhaps longer, and knowing that something was wrong.

Dead awful wrong.

And then the wailing scream of my father as he burst from the door of their room, and how he staggered down the corridor as if something had taken ahold of his soul and twisted it by its nerves into torment.

The vacancy of his eyes, the whiteness of his drawn, sweat-varnished skin, the way his hands gripped and relaxed, gripped and relaxed. Fighter’s fists. Killer’s fists. And waiting for him to open my door, to look down at me, and recognizing something in his eyes that I had seen only an hour before as he stood over the beaten body of a slain man, and seeing something else, something far worse, something akin to guilt and blame and regret and shame, and horror and despair and madness, moulded into one unholy indescribable emotion that said everything that could ever need saying without a single word.

I rose to my feet and pushed past him.

I ran down the corridor and heaved through the door of my mother’s room.

I saw her naked, more naked than I had seen her since my birth, and the blackened hollowness of her eyes, the way her head was twisted back upon itself at the most unnatural, awkward angle, and knowing…

Knowing that he had killed her.

Something rose inside me. Alongside the hatred and panic, alongside the revulsion and hysteria, something came that was close to a base impulse for survival. Something that told me that no matter what had happened here, no matter how this thing had come about, I had to escape. Murder had been committed, murder of my mother by my own father’s violent hand, and irrespective of my feeling towards him in that moment I was certain that to stay would have been the end of my life as I knew it.

Perhaps, in some dark way, it was everything I had been waiting for; something that was sufficiently powerful to drive me away.

I stepped forward.

I looked down at her.

Even as I stared at her cold and lifeless face I could hear her voice.

Could hear the songs she sang to me as a baby.

I turned back towards my father, his back towards me, his body rigid and yet shaking uncontrollably, his fists clenched, every muscle inside of him taut and stretched and painful, and I knew that I had to leave. Had to leave and take him with me.

I ran from the house. The street was deserted. I ran back without any comprehension of why I had left.

I shouted something at him and he looked at me with the eyes of an old man. A weak and defeated man. I hurried to my room and gathered some clothes, stuffed them into a hessian sack; from the kitchen I took what few provisions remained, wrapped them in a cloth and buried those in the sack also, and then I took a shirt and forced my father’s arms through the sleeves, buttoned it to the neck, and then walked him out, walked him as if I was marching with two bodies, and I took him down to the side of the road and left him standing there, gaunt and speechless.

I returned to the house, and after standing over the dead form of my mother for a minute further, after kneeling and touching her face, after leaning close and whispering to her that I loved her, I backed up and returned to the kitchen. I took a kerosene lamp and emptied its contents in a wide arc across the floor and the table, trailed it out through the doorway and down the hall, and with the last inch and a half of fuel I doused my mother’s body. I backed up, I closed my eyes, and then took a box of matches from my pocket and lit one. I stood there for a moment, the smell of sulphur and kerosene and death in my nostrils, and then I dropped the match and ran.

We had run a quarter of a mile before I saw the flames make their way to the sky.

We kept on running, and ever-present was the urge to run back, to douse the flames and drag her charred body from the ruins, to tell the world what had happened, and ask a God I didn’t believe in for forgiveness and sanctuary. But I did not stop, nor did my father beside me, and in some strange way I believed that that was the closest I had ever been to him, the closest I would ever come.

It was December of 1958, a week before Christmas, and we headed east towards the Mississippi state line, and when we reached it we headed still east towards Alabama, knowing full well that to stop was to see our destiny slip from our hands.

Seventeen days we walked, stopping only to lie at the edge of some field and snatch a broken handful of hours’ rest, to share the few mouthfuls of food that remained, to rise and ache through yet another day of passage.

Into Florida: Pensacola, Cape San Bias, Apalachee Bay; into Florida, where you could see the island of Cuba, the Keys, the Straits and the lights of Havana from the tip of Cape Sable. And knowing that we were merely a handful of miles from my father’s homeland.

We hid for three days straight. My father said nothing. Each day I would creep away at night and walk down to the beaches. I talked with people who spoke in broken-up Spanish, people who told me they could not help me time and time again, until finally, on the third night, I found a fisherman who would take us.

I will not tell you how I traded for our passage, but I closed my eyes and I paid the price, and I still believe that I carry the scars of my own fingernails in the flesh of my palms.

But we were away, the wind in our hair, the sea air like some cleansing absolution for the past, and I watched my father as he clung to the edge of the small craft, his eyes wide, his face haunted, his spirit broken.

That was my mother.

Her life and her death.

I was twenty-one years old, and in some way I believed my own life had come to an end. A chapter had closed with a sense of finality, and if ever I believed I could recover from what had happened, if ever I believed that there was some way back from the events of my childhood, from not only the murder that I had now committed, but also the murder I had witnessed, then I was mistaken.

My soul was lost; my destiny was closed and sealed and irreversibly decided; the world and all its madness had challenged me and I had succumbed.

If ever there was a Devil, I had accepted him as my bedfellow, my compadre, my blood-brother, my friend.

I had at first followed in my father’s footsteps, and then rescued him from justice for the killing of my mother.

In my mind was a darkness, and through my eyes I saw that same darkness everywhere I looked.

What was once within now became all that was without.

We landed at Cardenas. I brought with me a shadow that I carry to this day.