The Four Corners Of The Sky (62 page)

R
afael Rook hugged his guitar to the dancing alligators on his shirt as the Cessna Amphibian plane moved away from its moorings and bounced across the choppy waves. “Your papa astonishes me,” Raffy called up to Annie in the cockpit. “There he is, dying in Golden Days. Then kazaam he’s stealing Skippings’s car. Then he’s drowned in the bay. Then kazaam here he is today, standing in Plaza de Armas in Havana, Cuba. All of a sudden, I hear Jack’s voice. I turn around and he shoves me forward. ‘Flop that taxi now, Rafael, now, do it!’ And I do it, I don’t think and think and think and worry. I just do it. That’s how we’ll be in paradise. We’ll just do it the way with your dad somehow I could just…do things.”

Dan sat in the plane seat beside the Cuban grifter as they motored away from the harbor rocks to where they would get take-off clearance from a Ramirez relative in the harbormaster’s station. “So,” Dan asked, “Raffy, you little bastard, flopping was Jack’s idea?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, kazaam times two. I’m standing in the Plaza and there he is. ‘Hi, Dan,’ he says. ‘Take care of her,’ he says. And he shoves this damn leather bag here at me. He shows me this FedEx. It’s from Sam, he says, and it’s all the insurance he needs. And poof he’s gone while we’re all watching you rolling around on the hood of an old cab. Willie spots him and gives chase. But you can just imagine who won that race.”

The Cuban nodded. “Jack was the wind. You never know what he’ll do next.” Annie heard that she was cleared for take-off. As she opened the throttle, she yelled at Raffy that he should look to see what was in the bag. “It’s going to be money,” she predicted to distract him.

Raffy unzipped the soft brown leather bag. He was so focused on the fact that he was staring at what would prove to be, when they counted it, a million dollars, that he forgot to be terrified that Annie was taking off into air. “
Madre de Dios!”
he shouted. “Whoever saw so many dollars? We did it! Jack, we did it!”

Dan thumbed one of the stacks of bills like a deck of cards. “Yep, if you’ve got to be left holding the bag, this is the way to do it,” he agreed.

As Annie came out of their climb and headed North by Northwest, Dan and Raffy counted up one hundred bonded stacks of one hundred hundred-dollar bills,

Annie burst out laughing. “So he did leave me a million dollars?”

Rafael’s enthusiasm overwhelmed him and he had to pat his chest to calm himself. “I told you, Annie! I told you! It was never the money with Jack. See how he gives away the money. Easy as a smile. He always said, ‘I’ll leave Annie a million dollars.’ Of course, if you could see your way to sharing say maybe a quarter, okay, a tenth, with me? That would be very kind. With Jack, it was, well, with Jack—” The small man pulled at his ponytail, trying to think of the right way to say it.
“
Jack’s ‘nature is subdu’d to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’
] That happens to be the Bard of Avon’s view on art and if the Bard tells you something, you can definitely take it to the bank.”[
The slender Cuban put down the money and picked up his guitar. “Art. It’s a little past the wit of man.” He played a melody softly.

Los amigos me olvidaron
Sólo mi madre lloraba
A Dios pedía y rogaba
Que salvara su hijo.

While the Cuban sang, Dan told Annie that he had forced Raffy to go see his mother in the goldsmith shop and that Raffy’s reunion with her had been “a calamity, more or less,” that Mrs. Ramirez had called him a criminal ne’er-do-well musician and had shut the shop door in his face. In fact, on learning that Raffy would be returned to prison in Florida (which unfortunately he’d told her was absolutely true), Mrs. Ramirez had called him, in comparison with his older brother, the shame of the family name.

Slumping over his guitar, Raffy sighed to Annie that Dan was right. His mother had thrown him out of her life as a failure; for a Communist, Maria Ramirez really seemed to care only about what the Bard would call, putting money in her purse.

“You’re going back to Havana right now!” Annie abruptly turned the Cessna TU206 around in a high-banked 180-degree curve.

“What are you doing?” Both Raffy and Dan were shouting at her.

Annie steered the plane back toward the coast and over the Viñales Valley, so low she could see fields of tobacco. The bumpy flight at low altitude sent the two men in the rear seats falling against each other. “I’m taking you back,” she told Raffy.

“Are you crazy?” shouted Dan. “He’s in my custody.”

“I’m sorry,” Annie told him. “Raffy’s going home to Havana. Give him half of the money in that suitcase, $500,000. Come on, Dan. Do it!”

Raffy shouted, “What?” He was torn between his horror at the flight and shock that she was giving him half Jack’s money.

Annie yelled, “You’re going to tell your mother you made all that money playing guitar. That you’re not a failure, that you’re a great big success, a musical star, in America.”

At first stunned, Raffy pulled himself together enough to protest vehemently. First of all, Annie couldn’t re-land the plane at Puerto Esperanza! Raffy had only been able to guarantee that one tiny time when his relative was on duty at the harbor. That time was past. If they tried to land now, they’d be arrested!

Annie called back, “Then I’ll fly you to a drop-point over land and you’ll have to, as my dad used to say to me, ‘Jump!’ Put a parachute on him, Dan.”

Raffy grabbed Dan by the jacket, “Save me. To tell you the truth, Annie’s more like her dad than I thought. I mean, crazy. Do something.”

Dan pried loose Raffy’s cinnamon-colored fingers from his jacket lapels. “I don’t think she’s joking about this. Have you ever jumped before?”

“No! And I never will!”

Annie yelled, “Work it out fast, guys.”

While she made a large loop over the mountains, Dan located the parachute. He told Raffy he was a practiced skydiver and could talk Raffy through the process. Piece of cake. Annie said she was going to circle back and put him down right over a little beachy area they’d passed. She could see a road not a mile from the beach. He could hitch a ride.

Raffy absolutely, definitely refused to put on the parachute. As much as he dreaded returning to a U.S. prison, as much as he knew a coward dies a thousand deaths, as much as he would love to see his mother’s face if he showed her $500,000—Annie’s offering of which, coincidentally, showed, as Shakespeare would tell her, a giving hand—as true as all these things were true, there was no way in the entire history of the infinite and eternal universe of the God of all creation that Rafael Ramirez Rook was going to jump out of an airplane in the middle of the air.

“For Christ’s sake,” Dan said finally, exasperated as Raffy kept slipping away from his efforts to attach the parachute. “Annie, just get us as close to the sand as you can and I’ll jump out with him!”

Annie twisted her head around. “What?”

Dan said he was serious. “I’ll jump out with the little bastard myself just to shut him up. Come back for me! I’ll swim out to you! Can you do that?”

Dan tossed about half of the packets of hundred-dollar bills out of the suitcase onto the floor of the plane. He zipped the rest in the bag.

Annie was circling again, flying low away from the western sun, heading for a lagoon with a small sandy crescent beach. She called back, “Dan! There’s a little boat moored to a buoy. See it?”

Dan looked out the plane window. “Got it.”

“Swim out there. I’ll pick you up!”

Dan stripped off his clothes to his boxer shorts. Then he strapped the parachute on. He thrust the bag of money hard into Rafael’s arms.

Raffy was shouting that Annie couldn’t seriously be planning to put him down in the middle of nowhere in Cuba?

“It’s your country,” she said. “There’s no place like home. When we get to Key West, we’re going to say you pulled a gun on us and jumped out of the plane.”

“I would never do that!” the musician cried.

Dan told him, “We’ll make you sound like Jimmy Cagney. They don’t know what a wuss you are.” He shouted up to the cockpit, “Annie, it’s looking good down there. So, okay, Raffy, I’m going to count, we’re going to jump, just like in the movies, right?”

“Go limp when you land, Raffy,” Annie yelled. “Bend your knees. Run with the chute. Trust Dan. We’ll swing by once more, get the feel, then we’ll do it.”

Annie was calculating just how much open sand there was, how slowly she could go, how close to the beach. Dan opened the seaplane’s door.

“Noooooo!” Rafael kept shouting.

Grabbing the small Cuban to his chest, Dan yelled, “Rook, you little cocksucker, hug me!” Rafael fought back but Dan clutched him tightly. “Hug me like I was the fuckin’ greatest love of your miserable life!”

“Leave me alone!”

“Think of the Love sign lady.
Ame a su familia!
”

“Leave me alone!”

Annie swung the plane back toward the beach. “On one, guys. Good luck, Raffy! Five, four, three, two, one, jump!”

“Get personal, Raffy!” Dan squeezed the Cuban tightly and leaped with him out of the airplane, above the sandy beach.

When Annie looped back over the beach, she saw Dan swimming strongly below her, closing in on the little rocking boat at the white buoy. Her main worry was that they were losing the light. Get as close to the boat as you can, she kept telling herself, but do it safely. Safely. Close. Safely. Closer. Closer.

Dan swam splashing to the old white buoy, reached, grabbed its rusted ring and raised his other arm, waving at Annie.

A
t the Navy testing site in Patuxent River, Maryland, in the cockpit of the new experimental plane, Annie felt the speed flatten and shake her. She opened the throttle, faster, faster, the jet shaking, her heart too fast, the plane too fast. She made herself breathe by saying over and over, “You’re going to break the record. You’re going to break the record.”

She shouted aloud when the odometer hit the mark that she’d been speeding toward since she was a child: 3.4567. Three and a half times the speed of sound.

After her test flight, after all the follow-up and medical examinations and debriefings and all the congratulations and photographs and film footage, Annie drove home to her condominium in Chesapeake Cove.

She found her fiancé Dan in her kitchen, cooking Asian food. Pots and pans sat out everywhere. He was chopping ginger. “Welcome home,” he said to her. Her cat Amy Johnson circled his feet. “Now here’s something I never thought I’d say to my future wife. How did your test flight go, baby?”

“3.4567.”

“That’s the record! Isn’t it the record?” He lifted her, spun her in a circle.

She kissed him, smiling her incandescent smile. “Yep, it’s the record! In ’99, Brad did 3.4498 once. So this was faster.”

“Call him and tell him. And thank him for divorcing you.”

“Hey, thanks for threatening him with jail if he didn’t.”

She picked up her phone to call Sam and Clark. They were thrilled for her. Clark added, “Okay, honey, now you can slow down.”

When Annie returned to the kitchen in her robe after a shower, Dan was stir-sautéing lobster with the ginger. He tossed a tiny bamboo steamer at her. She caught it in one hand, opened it, filled it with the dumplings he’d made.

As they ate them, side by side on her couch, overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, he handed her a wrapped present. Inside was an Afro-Cubano folk-art sculpture, a little red airplane made from old tin Coca-cola advertising signs. She loved it.

“Look inside,” he told her.

In the cockpit, there was a small leather jeweler’s box. Gold letters spelled

Ramirez

Plaza de Armas

Habana, Cuba

Inside the box was a beautiful, ornately worked gold ring with a blue sapphire. Dan slipped the ring on Annie’s finger. It fit. “Raffy’s mother made this. I bought it while you were talking to Ruthie. I had it sized in Key West. You like it?”

“Yes. The answer’s yes.”

“Good. I know you’re marrying me for my cooking. And my singing.”

“It’s awful. But your marriage proposals are good.”

“I’m marrying you for your cash.” He followed her into the kitchen. “Your dad’s cash from Feliz Diaz. Least the part of it you didn’t give Raffy.”

Annie tasted a piece of ginger. “That money goes in the bank for our kids.”

He spooned rice into bowls. “So we are getting married? Or are we just having the kids?”

Annie took the plates of lobster back to the table. At her neatly arranged desk in a corner of her living room, her divorce papers sat. She brought them to the table and signed them.

Dan called to her. “Is that a yes? We’re getting married?”

“That’s a yes,” she called back.

“Because, Annie, we’ve got to make some plans.” He brought the rice to the table. “I’ve got to go back to Miami before they fire my butt for letting Raffy get away. So once we’re married, do you move nearer Miami or do I move nearer Annapolis? We need to figure this all out. This is a major problem.”

She lit the candles and poured two glasses of wine. “Oh, you’re starting to sound like me. Stop planning. Everything’s going to be okay.”

T
his time, every detail of Annie’s wedding would turn out, Sam vowed, perfectly, just the way a bride’s wedding should, which was just the way the bride wanted it—classic and beautiful, nothing gaudy. Oh, maybe a little cheerfulness, like the hand-painted banner that Dr. Sarah Yoelson had helped Sam hang across the porch posts of Pilgrim’s Rest:

Congratulations!

Annie Goode and Daniel Hart

August 16, 2001!!!

Clark tried to persuade Sam that the banner’s neon-glitter letters didn’t fit in with the pale gold satin bows they’d tied on the linen tablecloths at the tables in the white tent or with the pale gold rosebuds twined with dark ivy that looped down the stair rail to the newel post and around the carved peregrine hawk. Or the garlands of small white orchids, cone flowers, and daisies on the mantels. Or his own ascot and gray cutaway.