Her Mother's Daughter (91 page)

Somebody at
World,
a senior editor, had been contacted by a man representing Cuban refugees attached to Alpha 66, a revolutionary force intent on overthrowing Castro, who had ousted Batista a couple of years before. In April, a group of Cuban refugees backed by the United States, by the CIA I guess, had landed at Bahia de Cochinos, and been wiped out in three days. It was a humiliation for the new president—an unfair one, I thought, since Eisenhower had planned the whole thing and the guy I had voted for only continued his policy—but it's true Kennedy had promised not to send U.S. forces to Cuba….

Anyway, a new invasion was being planned, and…well, the way it happened was, I was sitting in Russ Farrell's office, finishing our examination of a layout of some pictures I'd taken of a new bridge in Oregon, when Ron Bulstrode came tearing in, and blurted out, “We've got it! State Department approval to cover the Alpha 66 invasion!” Russ leaped up, sent a fist crashing upward in air, and whirled around and saw my face.

“Oh no,” he said.

“Oh yes,” I said, standing.

“No. We can't. They'd never approve a woman.”

I stood up. “Russ, who could do it better! Who's better at showing heroism?” I was embarrassed at selling myself that way, but the truth was I'd been dreaming of being a war correspondent since I was young, when Margaret Bourke White was my idol. It was a dream I'd never allowed to crystallize into words, knowing how unrealizable it was. But the whole dream was glowing out of my face then, and Russ saw it and couldn't resist it. Besides, he knew I was right: I think that the guys at
World
felt odd in giving such masculine assignments to a woman, but that something about it pleased them—my pictures were like testimony to women's adoration of heroic men. Still, if I hadn't been there at that moment I'd never have gotten the assignment, I know that, but I was and I did.

I did a bit of thinking about how to present this assignment at home. I would minimize the danger, and in fact, I wasn't sure I'd be in danger. I had little notion of what it would be like. I just
hoped
there'd be danger. And of course, I had to glide over the possibility that I might be pregnant, and the fact that I'd be away from home on New Year's Eve—our first New Year's Eve together. Luckily, Toni wasn't sentimental, and he got as excited as I about the trip. So on December 27, after the best Christmas I'd ever spent, I took off for Miami with my camera case and a knapsack.

Woody Hedgecock was the commander of the group I was to cover; I was to meet him at the hotel we would stay in, La Fonda del Sol, in western Miami, in the Cuban section, far from the water. The hotel was a white stucco building, five stories, with wrought-iron balcony railings at some of the windows along its facade. Rust from the wrought iron stained its front in long tear streaks. The lobby was equally shabby, despite its high-backed wicker chairs and potted trees. The carpet, once brilliantly colored, was worn and faded; ceiling fans circulated the hot humid air. There was no one in sight anywhere, and I had to call out “hello!” several times before a small man in a dirty white suit emerged from a back room wiping his greasy mouth on a paper napkin, the thin kind that come with take-out orders.

It all felt exactly right, even the note the man handed me with his greasy fingers after I'd registered.

“Where is Mi Tierra?” I asked after I'd read it. He gave me directions to a bar on the next block.

Then he led me to a wide staircase—the elevator was not working—and up to the second floor, to a bare, whitewashed room, its walls stained with damp patches, and I set my things down. I went into the bathroom to wash my face and hands, and a giant cockroach darted for a crack between the tub and the floor. The sink was the old-fashioned type, with two taps. The towel was the color of dirty water. Even though there was no one else in the room, I tried to conceal my smirk of satisfaction.

I walked down the street and found the bar—dark, smelling of beer, with cheap metal-legged tables and chairs in the middle, and red plastic benches in booths along one wall. The walls were plastered with colorful ads, all in Spanish, and plastic grapes and bananas and pineapples hung from the ceiling. It was a true dive—something I hadn't seen before, even during my time with Sonders. I looked around. An old man hunched over a drink at the bar; and two men in work clothes were drinking beer at one of the tables. They eyed me when I walked in, kept eyeing me. I was uncomfortable. (That was right too.) I walked farther into the room and saw some men in a booth at the back. I approached them nervously, and one—a big man with thick red arms and face and a ginger beard—looked up and raised one ginger eyebrow.

“I'm looking for Woody Hedgecock. I was told to meet him here.”

The red man stood up. “Yeah. I'm Hedgecock.”

“I'm from
World
,” I said, knowing which name would be important around here. I moved forward, hand outstretched, my professional face on. “Stacey Stevens.”

He didn't take my hand. He looked horrified. “A
girl
? They sent a
girl
?”

“They sent one of their best photographers, Mr. Hedgecock,” I said confidently in my best brittle tough voice. “Do you want your mission covered or not?”

He glared at me, sat down, motioned curtly with his head, directing me to sit down opposite him. I did.

He looked me in the eyes, hard. “This is a dangerous mission, miss. Too dangerous for a girl.”

“I'm not a girl, Hedgecock,” I said in my deepest voice. “I'm thirty-two, experienced, and terrific. I've been in dangerous situations before—I was in Algeria during the revolution,” I lied. “And it's me or nobody,” I threatened.

He stared at me. The man sitting beside him stared at me. The man sitting beside me stared at Woody.

Woody raised his eyebrows. He looked questioningly at the others. They shrugged. He shrugged. “It's your funeral,” he said.

Woody Hedgecock had a thick neck and a thick, muscular body. His skin, roughened by weather and sun, was permanently red and wrinkled. His eyes were pale blue, the eyes of a visionary or fanatic; and his stiletto speech, comprised mainly of facts and figures, emerged from between barely opened lips. He was past his prime, but still good-looking—very. He was my very image of a soldier of fortune.

He nodded his head toward the bar, and miraculously, the bartender appeared beside us. “What'll you have?” I looked at the table. They were drinking beer. “A beer,” I said.

“This is Alex, and that's Noel.” Again, he indicated them with a mere nod of his head. A man used to command, I thought.

“You know the gig?”

I nodded.

He turned to the others.

“Fourteen letters probably means seven shows. Tomorrow's the deadline; by the day after we'll be able to blueprint it. Doesn't matter—we only need five six guys.”

“If they're good,” put in Alex, speaking in the same tight-lipped way.

Woody nodded. “We got weapons for a dozen—four BARs, eight M-14s, and some satchel charges.”

“And the bazooka,” Noel grinned. He had a British accent.

They began then to talk a language I didn't understand, although I knew they were referring to weapons. They longed for M-16s, and things called Mark Twos, and Mac Tens, and more satchel charges, whatever they were. They talked about laws, which laws I don't know, they didn't seem like men who worried about laws. And clips and belts and mortars and Colts (well, I knew a Colt was a kind of gun). I dearly wanted to know what they were talking about but felt I could not interrupt to ask questions without losing face—or what is nowadays called “credibility.” I figured a man might know these things. And it was bad enough they had to have a “girl” photographer, without my emphasizing my “girlish” ignorance. So I pulled out a pad and a pen—I was to do the reportage on this story—to take notes. I figured that would give me the clout I needed to ask questions. But when he saw the pad, Woody stopped dead.

“What's that,” he said in a cold voice. His eyes were slits. Had he practiced looking like that?

“What does it look like? I'm writing this story, you know.”

“No notes!”
he ordered. “Nothing written down! You'll have to remember what's important and write it later.”

“Okay,” I conceded with irritation. “But it would help if you guys gave me a little information.”

In a monotone and with an expressionless face, Woody told me that he'd placed an ad in
Hero
magazine two months ago, asking for men who wanted to help overthrow Castro. In response to my questions, he explained with exaggerated patience that no, Castro couldn't trace them through the ad because the reply was to a PO box in Dallas, a crowded post office in which it would be hard to isolate his “contact,” the person who picked up the mail. Replies were carefully screened (How? I wondered, but was too intimidated to ask), and those that seemed legit were asked for further information. Twenty-two men had replied; nineteen were asked to send more data. Sixteen of these did so, and of those, fourteen were chosen and told to meet here, at this café on December 28. Tomorrow they would know who their cohorts would be.

“But you have arms only for a dozen.”

“These guys are pros, like us. They have their own.”

I stared at him: A BYOB war! Bring your own bullets!

Woody returned to his former conversation. It seemed that although it was indeed a BYOB war, these guys had arms hidden on some tiny islands off the coast of Florida; and that they knew a man, whose name or code name was Luna, who had a boat big enough to transport us all to Cuba.

After a couple of hours, Woody nodded to the bartender. (I wondered if the man kept his eye on Woody so as to see his slightest gesture. He seemed to. I wondered what Woody did to earn this kind of attention.) The man came over, announced a figure—in Spanish—and Woody nodded to Alex, who pulled some wrinkled bills from his pocket and threw them on the table.

“Okay, let's go see a man about a boat,” Woody said as they stood up. I stood too, and lingered.

“Not you.”

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“You can know after. After,” he said emphatically, and strode out of the bar, Alex and Noel trailing him.

I felt like a child left behind when the grown-ups go to the movies, but I tried to pull my dignity around me, and I followed them out. They were getting into a red convertible parked in front—hardly a car for a secret mission, I thought. I stood beside the car.

“So what's the next move? When and where shall I meet you again?”

“You're at the hotel? I'll be in touch,” Woody said curtly, and drove away.

I walked back to the hotel. My room was hot. Nylon curtains the color of soot blew wildly into the room, but the wind was from the west, hot, humid, and dusty as the miles of Florida scrublands beyond. I closed the windows, pulled down the greasy yellowed shades, and turned on the ceiling fan. I lay down on the bed. It was five o'clock, too early for dinner, and I was tired, having gotten up at six to finish packing and say good-bye to the kids and get to the airport for a ten o'clock plane. I thought I'd have a nap before dinner, if it wasn't too hot for sleep.

But I can't sleep. I feel uneasy, not sure why. I'm pumped so full of adrenaline from excitement and fear of an entirely unfamiliar situation that I can't feel anything very strongly; I have to relax my mind and body to discover the source of my disease.

I don't mind the grunginess, the shabbiness, the ugliness, the lack of luxury. I wouldn't mind it getting worse, getting hard. I want to experience hardship; to see what it feels like to be in danger, in a war, situations I've only read about. I want to see what hardship is like and whether I can take it. So it isn't the physical unpleasantness that is bothering me.

The men. Yes, something about the men, my heart starts to beat a little faster when I think about them. Am I afraid of them? Whoops!

I get up, search through my knapsack for my journal, and throw myself back on the bed. I will write it out. I discover things more easily by writing than by trying to think or feel. My hand knows more than my head does.

The men. No, it isn't fear. Not exactly. It's…it's…outrage. At the way they look at me, or don't look at me, as if I were invisible, well they look at each other the same way, it has nothing to do with me, but…But what?

I can't stand it, that's what! It's hateful, it's inhuman, oh it's intolerable and I won't stand for it!

Really, Anastasia.

And the way Woody spoke to me, ordered me around as if I were one of his hired help, how dare he!

I put down my pen and light a cigarette. I wish I had a drink. No room service in this dump and I don't feel like going down stairs and sitting in that disgusting bar and besides the men might be there….

Yes, Anastasia, go on.

Yes, the way Woody speaks to me. He makes an easy assumption of command, as if he has never known anything else. And that turns you on, Anastasia, doesn't it, just the way the guys did when you were in college, the older ones who walked around as if they had the secret of control in every situation, you would like to believe they did, wouldn't you, it would be thrilling, oh, ravishing, to give yourself up to someone who really was that powerful, like surrendering to god….

Yes, the way Clark Gable acts in the movies, wonder what he's like in life, certainly not in control all the time, but that's his movie role, that hateful knowing smile, one raised eyebrow that claims he knows every man's price and every woman's desire.

This assignment would make a great movie. Maybe when I get back, I'll tell Toni the story—the whole story, with all the psychological and emotional overtones, their hostility toward me, my ambivalent attraction and repulsion toward Woody—could I tell him that? I could say I was making it up, and he could turn it into a movie script. Plucky girl reporter (who hides the fact that she's occasionally near tears) wins over tough soldiers of fortune (who hide the fact that they find her attractive and likable). Starring Rosalind Russell and Clark Gable. Or Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper. (Or had they already made that one?) Or—oh, yes!—Burt Lancaster, beautiful tough tender Burt Lancaster, and me, Stacey Stevens! Ahh…