MUELLER HEARD Liz’s loud call to dinner, the repetitions separated by the chime of a struck cowbell. His clothes had become infused with red dust after a day driving in an open jeep, and he’d put on pants and a shirt borrowed from Jack, which fit poorly. The call was a summons to the feast Liz had prepared to belatedly celebrate his visit.
Mueller was at the writing table when he heard Liz’s call. He looked at what he’d written, trying to hold a fleeting thought against the distracting chime. He’d been prompted to write the details he’d witnessed, trying to reconcile opposing impressions of Graham—the man carrying a holstered pistol when he drove his jeep, eyes alert and wary, like a hawk, and the other man, the Graham who dispensed food, succored a sick child, found outrage in sudden executions. Mueller recorded these impressions, but he made no judgment, took no position. And yet Mueller felt the tug of evidence pull him to commit more than facts to the page. His fingers gripped his pen, his mind working with a feverish clarity to coax the shy thought that would make sense of the contradictions.
And then the chime. He looked up. The thought vanished. He pushed aside the journal. Mueller had been skeptical of the director’s estimate of the time he’d be in Cuba, and now Mueller had exceeded by half even his own pessimistic view. He saw no way to reach a quick conclusion. He looked to the open window. The flat tableland was dotted with tall palms, and the air drifting in carried hints of squatters’ fires clearing land. Night’s coolness brought with it the sounds of insects. A full moon rose low on the horizon and it bewitched the sky like a glowing dragon illuminating the savanna. Stars were blighted by the approaching weather.
“The hurricane is approaching,” he wrote. “I don’t know what that means to my time here.”
• • •
Mueller had been seated at the dinner table when he saw Jack lumber in, arriving late, he said, after working at the dipping vats where a prize bull had stubbornly refused to enter. Jack was in a foul mood that he promptly sedated with a double scotch. His boots thick with red dust, his shirt stained with perspiration, he sat slumped in his chair while the interrupted conversation revived, but everyone at the table was aware Jack stared at Katie. His sudden appearance and his sullen mood put off the group. If he had something on his mind, or a gripe, he kept it to himself. Katie, Liz, Graham, and Mueller sat across from one another at the long table in the courtyard, while Jack was in his usual position at one end. The sky overhead had deepened and a flickering candle had burned down.
“You destroy the film?” Jack asked suddenly. He refilled his not yet empty glass.
“The camera is safe,” Katie said aggressively.
“I’m sure it is. But that’s not what I asked. What’s on the roll?”
Katie was quiet, defiant.
“What other pictures are there?” Jack asked. “Any of us? Any of Liz? These people are not sophisticated but they are clever. You won’t know the mood of the man who pulls you over until he is cruel or arbitrary. There is no appeal.”
“We should get her to Havana,” Mueller said. “Then to Miami.”
“When?”
“Soon,” Liz said.
“How soon? Not with the storm that’s coming.”
“Why are you in such a foul mood, Jack?” Liz asked.
“I’m not in a foul mood. Those photographs are dangerous. I asked her to get rid of them. She’s a guest in our house and she is putting us at risk. She can come and go from Cuba, but we have this ranch. We aren’t about to leave.”
Katie took four film canisters from the equipment bag at her feet. She opened one and exposed the long black strip of negatives against the flickering candle. She did the same with the second, third, and fourth rolls, dropping the curled strips to the patio. She glared at Jack. Her voice was violently polite. “That should buy me time, shouldn’t it?” Katie looked at the stunned faces around the table. “I’m not being weak or compliant,” she said. “There are other things more important than photos of faces, beaches, or a blood-stained bathroom. But now there is none of that.” She smiled hostilely at Jack. “You’re safe. All this is safe.” Her hand swept the courtyard.
No one noticed what Mueller had noticed. The others were astonished by her dramatic performance, and Jack looked satisfied, and Mueller was the only one who saw that Katie had destroyed her unexposed rolls and not the ones with the incriminating images, which were in a different side pocket of her bag. Mueller clapped at her bravado maneuver, but said nothing.
The incident brought the evening to a premature end. Jack rose in a righteous huff and lurched forward to Mueller. “George, can we talk?” He looked at Graham. “Alone, if you don’t mind. You’ve got a room on the second floor, I understand. Ask Maximo if there is anything you need.” He called the short caretaker, who came hobbling from the kitchen. “Ayuda el señor, por favor.”
Jack led Mueller by the arm to the courtyard’s gate. “He’s a good caretaker. Funny man. Good humor can make a big man out of anyone.”
Mueller walked beside Jack on the gravel road that led past the outbuildings and moved along the pastures that surrounded Hacienda Madrigal. Mueller knew that Jack’s brooding silence trapped thoughts that were waiting to spill out. When he did speak, they were already away from the house, and his words came quietly, his feelings modulated to a flat note that revealed nothing, so Mueller had to listen closely. But he detected in Jack’s voice a tentative quality and a hint of something he thought he’d never heard—vulnerability? Or was it fear?
“A pair of catastrophes,” Jack said quietly, not so much declaring himself as musing.
Then his mood changed again. He pointed toward the east, where the evening sky was darkened by a weather front. High cumulus clouds rose in a black mass and deepened the sky’s gloom.
“Hurricane Ella crossed the leeward islands two days ago,” he said. “It’s headed toward us.” He added, “Here in Cuba even the hurricanes have English names.”
He smiled and then was silent again. “It started as a tropical depression and strengthened to a tropical storm six hours later. By the end of the week it was a hurricane and it will make landfall in two or three days.” He kicked the dirt. “Flooding will be the biggest danger.” Jack swept his hand across the dark shapes of his herd and then said, “A big hurricane, which is what they are predicting, will flood the river over there.” He shook his head. “It will take people’s minds off the war.” He nodded vaguely. “The rebels have moved out of the mountains and they’re coming west toward us.”
Jack was quiet for a long time, lost in thought, but they had the durable bond of youth, which held them together through long periods of separation, and it made them tolerant of each other. And with that came casual trust. Jack, with his intimate relationship to the land, had taken the lead and was a few steps ahead of Mueller. Jack stopped and stared placidly at the cattle’s motionless shapes. He seemed to Mueller unusually meditative. They stood in silence looking toward the western sky, a beckoning intensity without a speck to tarnish the dark canvas, but to the east, the dark clouds were an ominous harbinger.
“A pair of catastrophes,” Jack repeated. He looked at Mueller. “I don’t mean the hurricane, although it will be brutal and there’s work to prepare for it, and I don’t mean the rebel who fired on the house yesterday with his squirrel gun.”
Jack swept his hand across his holdings. The worst that could be said of him, Mueller thought, was that he’d grown up with an idea of himself that was out of step. He wanted land, but inside that sedentary man there was the spirit of the wanderer who was never satisfied to be in one place, or stay at home.
“I’m in a fix, George.”
Mueller was at his side now.
“That girl came to the ranch today. The foreman turned the taxi away. He told me about it when I came back from town.”
Mueller’s confusion provoked Jack’s response.
“The girl you met. The dancer. She came here today. Demanded to see me and made a big scene. Thank God Liz wasn’t around.”
He kicked the dirt. “She seems to think I promised her a new life, a Shangri-La in Miami.”
The gruff dismissive tone of his voice gave his comment an angry edge.
“She has these ideas in her head.” Jack’s voice trailed off and he gazed into the night. “Did I lead her on? I don’t know. I might not have objected, so who knows what her mind concocted. That girl has been a bit of trouble.” He looked directly at Mueller. “I have no intention of hurting my marriage.”
Mueller gave a choked laugh. Mueller pitied Jack’s confident ignorance. It had always been that way in their relationship—Mueller the one who stepped in to help save Jack from the mess he’d made. Paid bail after he was arrested for drunken driving senior year. Arranged for a doctor in Harlem after Jack got a girl pregnant. It was George who rescued Jack from his self-inflicted wounds.
“I need a favor.”
George heard the request and in a way he expected it. In an old friendship the patterns don’t change, only the stakes are raised.
Mueller looked at Jack and thought him pathetic. Jack had always been that way. It was locked in his character. Liz had seen it too, Mueller knew, and yet she’d been drawn to him. The Protestant minister’s daughter in her had seen a case to reform, and she thought she could change him. Mueller had admired that about her. She thought she could make things right—a do-gooder, Jack called her, but he didn’t intend it as a compliment. That was who she was. She’d found in Jack in the months before they married a young man confused about life, angry, lonely in the way you are when you get out of college staring with diminished ego at the hostile landscape of an adult world—and she’d taken him on as her project. And somewhere along the way in their marriage Mueller had seen Liz begin to weaken, to give up, defeated by the depressing cycles of anger and forgiveness that accompanied Jack’s recidivism. And Jack, so full of himself, didn’t see the change in his wife.
“Liz doesn’t know about her, George.”
Mueller stopped himself from saying all that he thought. “You’re a coward, Jack.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
Mueller stopped and stared.
“Will you visit the girl?”
Mueller was suddenly aware that Jack had not used her name, hadn’t dignified her with a name, so she was denied the human face that came with a name, and she was just some mess he needed to clean up—and not a human being with needs, regrets, feelings, attachments. Mueller said the name: “Ofelia.”
“Yes, that’s her. Will you do this for me, George? Will you explain things to her?”
“Explain what? That you’re a bastard?”
“Explain that I will get her to Miami. But she can’t come running over here. I’ll get her out without a visa. No one is getting visas now. I’ll fly her out. There’s a private airstrip outside of Miami.”
Mueller saw Jack struggle the way he’d once done on the football field when he scrambled to recover from a disrupted play, ball in hand, thinking whether to pass or to run. He pondered his way out of a tight spot.
“She thinks I’ll leave her behind. She wants to get away. She can’t be happy here, married off. She has her dreams too, you know.”
Mueller thought that was the most empathetic thing he’d ever heard Jack say.
“I’ll give you the address. She’s in Camagüey.”
Mueller shook his head. “The town is a warren of alleys.”
“Have Toby drive you. He knows the place. You can take the Land Rover. Calm her down. Tell her I’ll fly her out after the hurricane. Will you do that for me, George?”
Mueller felt his contempt rise. “Yes, I’ll do it, but I won’t be doing it for you.”