A Quiet Vendetta (25 page)

‘Where we going?’ I asked.

‘See when we get there,’ he said, and I watched as his hands tightened on the steering wheel. He had on a wedding band, a plain gold hoop, and I wondered where his wife was, what his children were doing right that second, and I asked myself how these sick-minded motherfuckers ever believed there wouldn’t be some night when they would be nailed for what they were doing.

We drove for no more than five or six minutes, and then we turned left down a driveway ahead of a roadside motel. I could feel the tension in every sinew, every nerve, could feel the muscles tensing in the backs of my legs and my shoulders. I was frightened, I cannot deny it, but I was also excited. How many times we had pulled this scam I could not recall, and experience had proved that I could do this thing alone. Ruben was somewhere back near the Nacional; he would wait for me there, wait for me to return with as many dollars as I could take from this trick, and then we would party. On my side was fear. It was that simple. These guys were frightened of discovery, frightened that something would be said, frightened that they would be found out for what they were, and it was that fear that caused them not only to give in when faced with a youth with a knife, but also to say nothing of what had happened. Where would they go? Who would they report this to? The police? Their Mafia contacts? Somehow I didn’t think so.

The man drew the car to a halt back of a motel cabin. He killed the engine, took the keys and tucked them inside his jacket pocket, and before he exited he offered me a cigarette from a gold cigarette case. I took one and the man lit it for me, one for himself also. I followed him as he walked from the car to the front door of the cabin. With the same key chain he unlocked the door, stepped aside to let me enter, and then followed me in. It was a plainly-decorated room, the lights dimmed, ahead of me a double bed, a dresser with an oval mirror on top of it, and to the right a deep armchair facing a small table with a TV on top.

The man removed his jacket. ‘What shall I call you?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Anything you like,’ I replied.

‘Francisco,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I shall call you Francisco.’

I nodded, but inside I was smiling. I thought of the next five minutes, perhaps the five minutes after that, and how much money I would run from this motel cabin with and the night that would follow.

‘And what shall I call you?’ I asked.

The man smiled. ‘You can call me “Daddy”,’ he said quietly.

In that second I felt sick to my stomach. I could only begin to imagine what kind of crazy fuck would request such a thing. I wanted to stab him through the heart right there and then. I wanted to make him kneel on the floor and beg for his life before I drove my shiv through his eye. I wanted to make him pay for all the many times he must have done this before.

And then I thought of my own father, the expression on his face as he staggered through the door after a night of fighting, the deadlight eyes, black and emotionless, with which he looked at my mother. They were all the same, these people. Give them a name, give them a nationality – it didn’t matter. These animals were all the same.

The man kicked off his shoes and then, unbuttoning the top of his pants, he let them drop to the floor. He stood there in his socks and shorts, and then he loosened his tie and took off his shirt.

I looked at his face. He had that same hollow emptiness of expression. The expression that would so frighten my mother.

I could see the man’s erection straining its way out of the middle of his body, and when he eased down his shorts and let them drop to his ankles, when he started to massage his own cock until it stood upright, when he looked across at me and smiled and opened his mouth, and said ‘Come to Daddy, Francisco . . . come and take care of your daddy . . .’ it was all I could do to take a step towards him.

Revulsion filled my chest, revulsion and anger and hatred for him and his kind. I eased my right hand around to the back of my pants, I felt the handle of the shiv between my fingers, and even as I reached him, even as he raised his hand and placed it on my shoulder, as I felt the pressure he applied to bring me down to my knees so he could force his cock into my mouth, I remembered that night on the beach in Florida, the price I had paid for my passage to Havana.

I was quick, quicker than his eye could follow, and with my right hand clenched tight I brought the shiv around like a tornado and drove it forward into his balls.

His eyes wide, sudden, unexpected, his body instinctively arched, a rapid and shocking rigidity that crushed him back against the dresser, and then down onto the floor as he tried to force himself away. I felt the man’s hand grip my waist, my shoulders, the tops of my legs, felt them relax as I pulled out the blade and once more brought it home into the side of his neck. He opened his mouth to scream, and his mouth was filled with the taste of blood, his nostrils with the smell of sweat. And then he could not breathe as his throat filled up, could not think, and the ceaseless grinding motion of the steel in his neck brought bright splashes of gray and scarlet into his eyes. He struggled, kicked his legs, his elbows flapping, but I had a hold on his throat, and I tightened that hold until he knew he would suffocate.

Images against his face, right up against him as if forcing their way inside. His breathing halted, he tried to say something, choked, eyes filled with water, with pain, with colors, his ears screaming with sounds, with pressure, the unrelenting violence of each fractured maniac second. He could not move, and then I sensed the moment he realized that his body was giving up, and in that moment of nervous relaxation I pushed him back onto the floor.

I punctured his throat once more with one swift and silent sweep of the knife. He felt the last moist warmth of his life enter the back of his throat, the top of his chest, felt his heart choking up whatever laid inside him and give it up to the world, this place, this dark and hollow cabin room, the strange crazy eyes that pressed against him from all sides.

His body shuddered violently, it shook in rapid consecutive motions, his throat pumping jagged red slashes across his chest, across the carpet, his stomach, the front of the dresser. I looked down as he rock-and-rolled through spasm after spasm of reluctant death, as he shivered and clawed and arched his back away from the blood-soaked matting.

I closed my hands over my ears, I bit my bottom lip until I too could taste blood, and then he collapsed.

Still and silent.

Like someone had deflated him.

His hand swung wide and banged against my knee. It rested there, its weight against my own sweated leg, and for some moments I just stared at it, at the blood-covered fingers, at the way they curled up accusingly, pointing towards me, the tension of the skin, the manicured nails, the sheen of polish, the lines in his palm – heartlines, lovelines, lifelines . . .

I moved my leg and the hand hit the carpet soundlessly.

Somewhere a dog barked, and then the sweep of brights as a car passed in the street, seeing everything for a split second and then disappearing into the night.

There was silence but for my own labored breathing, the sound of something building in my chest, the sound of some huge emotional release as I surveyed what I had done.

Condensation ran its fingerprints down the inside of the windows. I could smell cigar smoke, old and bitter, the tang of cheap alcohol, of diesel wine brewed in oil cans and gasoline drums, the ethyl haunt of late nights, gagging, retching into nowhere, into blind-eyed foolish wisdom, thinking that life begins at the base of a bottle or between a hooker’s thighs. I would be reminded of that smell the better part of four decades later, a warm night in Chalmette district, heart of New Orleans.

I was somewhere aloft, somewhere outside of myself looking down. Up there was Aix-La-Chapelle to Canteloupe, Cantata to Equation of Time, Equator to Heraclitus, Heraldry to Kansas, Kant to Marciano, Marconi to Ordovician Period, Oregon to Rameau, Rameses to UFO, Unified Theories to Zurich. Up there was wisdom, the very heart of hearts. Who was I really? The child of a lesser God? I thought not. More so a God from some lesser child.

I leaned back on my haunches and breathed deeply. I closed my eyes and centered myself. What I had done was right there in front of me. What I had done was indelibly painted across the carpet, across the dresser, across the back wall of the cabin. I thought of all those who had been here before me and I asked myself if justice had not been seen to be done.

I smiled.

An eye for an eye.

I
had done this.
I
had made this happen. Was I not now someone? Surely I was; surely I was something that so many others were incapable of being. I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, a man capable of killing other men, a gifted man, a dangerous man. I was someone special.

I breathed deeply. For a moment I felt dizzy, a little sick. I raised my hands and looked at the blood that was drying on my skin. I could feel the tension it created, and when I clenched my fists I believed I could hear the blood cracking and splitting in the pores and wrinkles of my fingers. I turned them over. These were the hands that had lifted my mother when she could not walk by herself. These were the hands that had defended me against the railing fists of my father.

I was scared. I asked myself what was inside me that made it possible for me to do these things.

I looked into nothing – an abyss, a hollow – and when I closed my eyes I felt the dizziness and disorientation grow even worse. I opened my eyes and shuddered. Whatever was there I did not want to know.

I stood up, stripped off my clothes, and hurried through into the small adjoining bathroom to wash the blood from my hands.

I dressed in the man’s shirt and suit, put on his shoes, bundled my own clothes together and tied them in a ball. In the inside pocket of his jacket I found the car keys. In the other pocket I found a bankroll close on a thousand American dollars. I looked down once more, and as to serve no purpose other than adding insult to injury, I raised my right foot and stamped down hard on the man’s face.

I turned and walked to the cabin door. I glanced back one more time.

‘Sleep tight, Daddy,’ I whispered, and stepped out into the night.

I climbed into the car, started the engine, and drove out into the town, a town known only by those who lived there, a town that was none the wiser and would not be for some hours.

And those hours passed in a haze of alcohol-induced lust and heated passion. With the better part of a thousand dollars between us, Ruben Cienfuegos and I trawled the lower-life end of
La Habana Vieja
, and there we found girls who would do indescribable things for less than ten bucks Americano. We drank as if we had walked from the desert, and as morning ached its bruised and sallow way towards the horizon and color returned to the monochrome haunts of the darker underbelly of the city, we staggered half-blind and incoherent to our rooming house where I found my father sleeping the sleep of the dead. I remember stepping over him, hearing him slur and mumble unintelligibly, and I thought for a moment how easy it would have been to kneel across his chest, wrap my hands around his throat, and choke the last pathetic breath from his body as payment for what he had done to my mother. I stood over him for some time, the walls bending every which way they could, and I withheld myself. I believed it would have been too easy to kill him then, for the penance he had delivered to himself, of a broken-spirited man, a shell of whatever he once was, was far worse. I decided to let him suffer his own pains a while longer, and I crossed the room and lay down on my own mattress.

When I awoke it was late afternoon. I thought to call on Ruben and venture out once more into our hedonist’s paradise, but I stayed a while and spoke with my father. I gave him some money and told him to go out and get himself cleaned up, to buy some new clothes, to find some seventeen-year-old hooker and do his worst. He took my advice, once again pathetic and obsequious, and from the window of our room I watched him stumble away from the building towards the end of the street. I cleared my throat and spat after him. I turned my face in disgust. I could not bear to think that he had been the one to bring me into this world. I was better than him. I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, son of my mother and of no-one else.

As the sun slipped beneath the skyline I left my room and walked down the stairwell to Ruben’s room. I knocked loudly, waited for a while, and then noticed that the door was not only unlocked but off its latch. I stepped inside. The lights were out, and where Ruben should have been, lying on his mattress, there was nothing but the sweat-stained tussle of sheets.

Perhaps he had come up to find me, and seeing me asleep had left. I knew where he would be. Down the block and across the junction was a narrow-fronted bar where he and I would meet when we became separated. I wandered down there, appreciating the feeling of freedom that so many dollars in my pocket produced, sufficient to fuel me through another week of such a lifestyle. Not a care in the world. Not a thought.

When I found no evidence of Ruben in the bar I became puzzled. I considered where he might have gone. I asked one or two of the older men if they had seen him.

‘He had many dollars,’ one of them said. ‘He was here some time ago, an hour, perhaps two, and then he left. He did not say where he was going. I didn’t ask. What you people do is none of my business.’

I left the bar and walked towards downtown. Perhaps he had gotten drunk and made his own way out to find some entertainment for the evening. I did not really care. Ruben could take care of himself. I thought to go back and get the car, the Mercury Cruiser I had driven from the motel the night before, and parade my way through the old city, pick up some girls, maybe drive out to the coast and make out on the beach. I decided against it. It was a conspicuous car, quite unlike any I had seen down here, and I did not wish to draw attention to myself.

For three hours I wandered through Old Havana. I paid a hooker to give me a blowjob in a back street but my body was so tired and replete with liquor I could not respond. I gave her money anyway, and she asked me to come visit her next time I was around. I said I would, but minutes after she had walked away I would have been unable to recognize her face. After a while they all started to look the same.