14.

Fireflies

Nuevo Jersey

The dog’s hot, humid panting was driving Goyo crazy. For the last two hundred miles, Rudy had been the subject of Goyito’s avid conversation. The life expectancy of Great Danes was approximately seven years (Rudy was six and a half). The dogs suffered from severe hip dysplasia (ditto Rudy). Many could not exercise immediately after eating because of their torsion-prone stomachs, the details of which Goyo didn’t have the mental stamina to review after his son’s exhaustive tutorial. And according to Goyito, these gentle behemoths were, by temperament, the biggest lapdogs ever. On this last leg of their trip, Rudy had refused to sit alone in the backseat (as evidenced by his vengeful assault on the upholstery) and rested his massive, drooling head on Goyito’s thighs.

Goyo checked the rearview mirror. Rudy grinned back, his tongue lolling to one side. He’d just happily devoured a sack of chicken strips. The stench of two semiwashed men and one colossal, flatulent dog—even in a vehicle as capacious as his Cadillac—was suffocating. It was a miracle they’d gotten as far as New Jersey without killing each other. So much had deteriorated in the state since Goyo had last passed through: abandoned factories; shuttered Main Streets; unsightly, sprawling malls. For years Goyo had regularly crossed the George Washington Bridge to practice at shooting ranges alongside other relatively normal gun owners—deer hunters and law enforcement types who enjoyed exercising their Second Amendment rights.

“Stop. Dad.”

“What’s the matter?”

“My legs are asleep.” Goyito’s chin bobbed to a rhythm only he could hear. “I have to sit up front.”

“What about Rudy?”

“I spoke to him. He’ll be okay.”

Goyo pulled off at the next exit and into a gas station. His son sprang out the back door and into the convenience store, emerging moments later with several hot dogs smothered with condiments, a jumbo-size bag of spicy chips, and the biggest cherry Slushee this side of the Greenwich Meridian Line. Goyito slipped into the passenger seat, fed one of the hot dogs to the hypersalivating Rudy, then did the unthinkable: he removed his sneakers and put his bare, sore-infested diabetic feet on the dashboard.

Goyo tried to keep his eyes on the road, but his son’s feet were mesmerizing—the thick, corrugated nails rising off the toes; the grilled-meat look of the flesh; the open, deeply crimson wounds. It was evident that poor Goyito was dying from the bottom up. His feet reminded Goyo of the photographs of lepers that had scared him senseless as a child. Without preamble, Goyito started to cry. The tears ran down his cheeks and neck, soaked into his junk food. His face shone with suffering.

“What is it?” Goyo asked. “Do you need me to stop again?”

His son carried despair like a set of car keys, losing and finding it almost at random. Goyo wasn’t sure what to do. He’d already backtracked to North Carolina to pick Goyito up, losing a whole day’s driving. Rudy barked in sympathy, his immense head canted toward the roof of the car. The barking felt like sledgehammer blows to Goyo’s cranium. Soon the Great Dane lapsed into moaning arias that, combined with Goyito’s wails, forged a mournful, synchronous duet. Still sniffling, Goyito reached into his pants pockets and pulled them inside out in a hobo’s gesture of “broke.”

“You’re worried about money?” Goyo felt a tightening wreath of pain around his skull. The stress of driving with these two was taking its toll. They cruised past a run-down town fluttering with American flags. His daughter had once theorized that if three or more flags were flying on any given suburban street, Republicans were preponderant.

Both Goyito and Rudy scratched behind their ears. Please, God, Goyo prayed, don’t let his Cadillac be infested with fleas. Or ticks.

“I’m, uh, uh, trying to remember,” Goyito stammered.

Goyo understood this. Memory could be a plague sometimes, corroding one’s soul with all that was lost and unforgotten. Who could have imagined their fates? At times Goyo felt madly in love with his loss, painful as it was. His lifelong devotion to Adelina was a testament to that. He didn’t know a single Cuban of his generation who wasn’t besotted with the past. But his son’s regrets were of a different order altogether.

“I’m very sorry, hijo,” Goyo said, anticipating a fresh volley of accusations: how he’d abandoned him as a boy; surrendered him to a cruel, mercurial mother. These were the recurring themes of his psychotherapy.

Dusk was falling, and the sun seemed no more powerful than a lightbulb. The passing trees whistled the same B flat. Goyo felt the beauty of impending evening, something he hadn’t noticed much before. He barely remembered the years he’d worked at the diner, recalled only a few of his extramarital affairs. (Where were all those gorgeous, soft-eyed, wet, breathy mistresses now?) Alina and Goyito both claimed he hadn’t been around when they were kids except for their annual Easter Sunday expedition to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes.

Goyito had a photographic memory of his childhood, especially the hurts and degradations of which he kept an interminable tally. Now he was tearfully refuting his mother’s assertion that he’d never worked: he’d cleaned offices at night; worked as a hospital orderly, a job he loved because when anyone asked him what he did for a living he could retort: “I save lives”; selling men’s clothing at a suburban Nordstrom, not far from here, in fact. When he disappeared from that job, his manager said that Goyito had been the best damn salesman they’d ever had. Later, when Goyo had to break down the door of his son’s apartment in Brooklyn, he found a hundred dress shirts still in their plastic wrappers, a carton of Italian silk ties, and thousands of hours of videotaped pornography.

Goyito also had worked at the diner, against Luisa’s will. It hadn’t lasted long. Goyito made off with a freezer filled with hamburger meat. The next thing Goyo knew, his son had turned himself over to a chicken farm in the Florida panhandle run by missionaries who bragged success with men like him. Shoveling shit in the hot sun would leave him too tired, they promised, to want to use drugs. Goyito hadn’t understood “hardscrabble” until then: the unyielding earth, the vicious pecking order of the South, the heat and bugs that nearly killed him.

Another crime spree landed him in a county jail with a new set of missionaries, who got him praising the Lord for a while. But his son’s last “Hallelujah!” expired on his first day out.

“Dad, are you listening to me?” Goyito gave him a psychotic stare. His hands looked lumpy and mutilated.

For a moment, Goyo thought his son capable of strangling him to death, but he shook off the thought. This had been Luisa’s fear, one she masked behind her unrelenting disdain.

“Díme, Goyito.”

“Is it true that Mom refused to touch me when I was a baby?”

“We’ve been over this, hijo. There was no name for what she suffered then. No treatment. Now it is common for women to be depressed, to reject their children. Allow me to say this with deep love and empathy: you are not the only tragedy in the world.”

“Did she ever touch my penis?”

“How should I know?” Goyo felt a jolt of disgust. He had his doubts about how useful such psychological delving was to anyone.

“Did you?”

Goyo looked over into the great pity of his son’s eyes and tried to feel remorse. He wasn’t sure he had any more to spare. What he really wanted to do was focus on killing the tyrant without further interference. He needed to check in with his friend, the Russian security guard, who always admitted him to the UN with barely a cursory inspection. Had the protocols changed? Could he sneak in his handgun? Might he trust Goyito enough to tell him his plans?

“She hated me even before I was me.” Goyito looked forlornly out the window, then turned the dial on the radio, which whined like an espresso machine. “I . . . don’t . . . like women.”

Goyo snapped off the radio. He felt a certain expertise on the subject. If his son wanted to discuss women, Goyo was all ears.

“Remember that girl I was engaged to?” Goyito asked.

Goyo remembered her well. A good-looking redhead, big-boned, with a strained expression. Aileen something-or-other. She’d been studying to be a nurse and sometimes wore a black patch over one eye. His son had met her at an AA meeting. Everyone in her family was a drunk. Goyito had stolen the girl’s credit card to buy her the diamond ring and pay for a trip to Miami to meet everyone at Christmas.

“She used to tie me up.” His son extracted a handful of pills from his shirt pocket, popped them into his mouth, swallowed. One of them was the size of quail’s egg.

Goyo didn’t know which of his son’s pills were legitimate—there were so goddamn many of them—and which were not. “Are you sure you want to—”

“Whipped me. Pissed on me. Stuck metal up my ass.” Goyito coughed into the back of his hand and looked straight ahead.

Goyo was speechless. He reached over and patted his son’s shoulder as if it were the edge of some vast mystery. He’d known about the woman in the projects who gave him blow jobs for a percentage of his disability check. But this?

“Ballbreakers. Bitches. That’s what gets me off.”

It had been excruciating for Goyo to picture his son homeless, or smoking crack, or more recently submitting to fourteen sessions of electroshock therapy in a Tallahassee mental hospital. But trussed up like a pig for a woman to abuse? This was more than he could stand. If someone had taken a hot poker to his brain, Goyo thought, it might feel something like what his son felt every day.

Goyito pushed a button in the passenger armrest and watched his window glide open. The wind filled the car with a disorderly sound and the smell of blood, summer wildness, and shit. Rudy barked maniacally in the backseat. Goyito pulled a hunter’s knife from who knew where and held its glittering tip to the meaty pink of his outstretched tongue.

“Coño carajo!” Goyo saw a tawny flash and hit the brakes hard. The Cadillac twisted off the road with a sickening thud. They’d struck something big and heavy. His eyes ached, but he was relieved, at least, not to be dead.

His son dropped the knife and stuck his head out the window into the diminishing light. “Jesus Christ, you hit a deer! You hit a goddamn deer!” Goyito flung open his door and fell to the ground. He scrabbled up and, fumbling, opened the back door and let Rudy out. The whimpering dog shot off into the darkening woods, streaking through the keen grass. “A fucking deer, a fucking deer,” Goyito muttered as he, too, disappeared into the woods.

It took twenty minutes for Goyo to find his son hunched over Rudy’s dead body in a firefly-lit clearing. Goyo stood perfectly still, leaning on his cane and breathing hard. The fireflies seemed a dazzling frippery of nature, pointless and purposeful, like so many dancing lies. Or perhaps they were a manifestation of his son’s twitching misery. Goyo traced the fireflies’ paths, ribbons of hopelessly entangling light, crisscrossed now and then by the ropier trajectories of flycatchers and jays. The sky was immense, more immense now that Rudy was gone.

Goyo sighed. He was growing tired of these constant derailments to his plans. It’d taken him a lifetime to make up his mind to do the right thing. He needed to focus on getting ready, not waste time lamenting the death of a deer and a dog.

“Rudy shouldn’t have run,” Goyito choked out. “His stomach got b-b-locked.”

His son wanted to blame him even for this, to have Goyo eat his heart out and cry right beside him. But what were their tears worth? Goyo wasn’t made for such histrionics. He’d had to parcel out his grief judiciously, or he would’ve died from it long ago. A part of him wanted to be sympathetic, but a bigger part wanted to get as far away from this disaster as possible. It wasn’t enough that in his worst dreams, he couldn’t have pictured a crazy drug addict for a son. He gazed over at the sad bulk that was Goyito, filthy and on his knees, his tattered cummerbund coming undone. (Goyito never went anywhere without it, as if it magically kept cinched his top and bottom halves.)

“Come, hijo, we have work to do.” Goyo led his son back to the Cadillac and popped open the trunk. They could use the tire iron to break the ground and maybe the base of the jack to scoop out the dirt for a shallow grave.

Goyo watched as his son dug, scraped, sweated, and cursed, all the while crying out to the luminous moon for pity. “Remember how he used to chase rabbits in his sleep?” Goyito’s legs shook as he worked. The air was slippery hot, as if saturated with cooking oil. The bees, the birds, the ants did their day’s last chores. It took Goyito an hour to dig the two-foot hole, disturbing the earth to bury his dog’s giant, tender body. Goyo was overcome with a sense of futility as he and his son finally dragged the 150-pound beast to his resting place. His flanks were dank with flies, teeth still bared, as if in self-defense, the stubby tail inert and sad.

When they were done shoveling the earth over Rudy’s stiffening corpse, the moon was high in the sky. A few drops of rain fell from a wayward cloud. Goyito stretched out on the grave and settled in for a nap. It was useless to argue with him. His pale face looked almost peaceful; the gray tufts of his hair stuck up in every direction. His breathing was normal and deep, and Goyo remembered the few times he’d gotten to tuck his son into bed when he was a boy; a beautiful boy he’d been, too, before the madness kicked in. Sí, Goyito had slept like a baby. The problems began when he woke up, restless for adventure. But to love what was lovable wasn’t truly love, Goyo thought; only suffering made love worthy. By the time his son stirred from his nap, Goyo’s joints were painfully stiff.

Goyito yawned and announced that he wanted to go to a motel to “grieve in private,” but Goyo was nervous about dropping him off anywhere but a hospital. They were just seventy-five miles from New York City, and he wanted to get there without delay. As they cruised up I-95, Goyito began pounding on the passenger door to be let out. What choice did Goyo have? His son would be sixty years old in two months. There was nothing he could say to him that he hadn’t said a million times before. If Goyito wanted to be dropped off at a motel in the middle of New Jersey, then Goyo was helpless to stop him.

The next exit had several choices of accommodations. Goyo handed his son the $220 in his pocket and wished him good luck. He noticed Goyito spying the bar on the frontage road with the blinking, half-lit neon martini. Diesel fumes from the passing trucks poisoned the air. Goyito seemed impatient for him to leave. If only he could kiss his son’s eyes, wash his feet, take away his suffering, ease his inexhaustible heart. But Goyo knew none of it would do any good. Goyito had endured prison, watched men raped and shanked, and somehow managed to survive. Nobody had dared touch him, Goyo didn’t know why. He held his son for a moment before letting him go. It was all too sadly familiar. Who knew? Maybe the best of Goyito was yet to be born.

The sun rose as Goyo crossed the last stretch of New Jersey, its foliage a blinding, end-of-summer green. In his heyday, this would’ve been a normal time for going home after a night of drinking and whoring with his brothers in Havana. Once in 1957, Goyo had spotted Senator Kennedy at the Palette Club cozily nuzzling Bobby de Milanés, the notorious drag queen. If only Goyo had had a camera, he might’ve changed the course of history, singlehandedly stopped that traitor from becoming president and sabotaging the Bay of Pigs.

He called Víctor Ticona, his employee of twenty-seven years, Ecuadorian and reliable as day. He spoke an amalgam of Spanish and Quechua that nobody but Goyo understood. Víctor had put nine children through high school in Cuenca, where he’d also built a palatial home. In New York he mopped hallways, changed lightbulbs, and took out the garbage, but back in Cuenca, Víctor Ticona was a king.

“Víctor!” Goyo shouted into his cell phone. “I’m arriving this morning.”

“Bueno, Jefe. I’ll have your apartment ready.”

The early commuters were out in force, sensible men and women going to their sensible jobs in the suburbs—employees of banks and insurance firms, optics laboratories, the telephone company. How many other lives he might have led . . . rancher, chemist, singer, clarinetist. He’d wanted to marry Adelina Ponti, too, but that hadn’t happened either. Goyo toyed with the idea of wooing back Carla Stracci, his sexy mistress from the United Nations. How might he impress her after all these years? It was for women like her that men went to war, behaved like fools.

The Holland Tunnel was a nightmare. Goyo sat in its rush-hour fumes for over an hour. He scanned the news stations again but turned the radio off in disgust. In an age of continual information, who really knew a goddamn thing? He concentrated on ignoring his bladder and his fear about what Goyito might do next. When he emerged onto Canal Street, Goyo ran smack into a circus parading up the West Side Highway. Elephants in feathered headdresses lumbered along the Hudson, as if this were their natural habitat. Goyo was careful to avoid the bicyclists and skateboarders, the homeless man trying to wipe his windshield with a filthy rag. A gigantic coffin rolled down the middle of the avenue, narrowly missing his Cadillac.

It was just another day heating up in New York.

Images

Island Blogger 2

I want to bring your attention, Dear Readers, to an editorial in The New York Times regarding the fate of Arab strongmen. The argument, applicable to our own situation, is that despots stay in power only when they can continue rewarding the loyalists entrusted with carrying out their regimes’ repressive tactics. Decrepit, bankrupt leaders are particularly vulnerable to being overthrown. Why? Because their henchmen can’t count on the bribes lasting indefinitely. Citizens, our resources have run dry. Cerraron la bolsa. The time has come for revolt . . .