A Quiet Vendetta (18 page)

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.’