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RAMÓN DIDN’T WORK well with his hands. He had finished school in the States but returned with more interest in comfort than in hard work. “What will he do?” the Monteros wondered back when Rosita accepted his proposal. He knew numbers, Rosita said, and that was that. They gave him a job as manager at one of their tanneries. He kept the books and rode herd on the workers. Though he never bared his arms or stirred the stinking potions, he learned to thwart the tricks men tried to make factory life easier. He understood, but he didn’t let his tender feelings get in the way of production. The Monteros thought he managed well. What their employees thought didn’t matter. At first, more experienced workers threatened him, but Guillermo, his older brother whom he hired as soon as he could, planted his feet and balled his fists. Soon the workers sulked but left Ramón alone.
Lucky for him, the Revolution rewarded his skill in curtailing unacceptable behavior by giving him a prominent position in the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Neighbors grew to fear his knock on the door, as fellow citizens suffered dire consequences from his reports. He sighed and apologized while he crushed dreams and splintered families. He came to be known as the Velvet Enforcer. No one called him that to his face, but when he found out, he was pleased with the respect (non-existent) he assumed was for one considered a ruthless man. Meanwhile, his friends and family continued with clandestine activities to move valuables and eventually themselves out of the country. Even he had possible plans. Or rather, the Monteros did, and he was one of them. He saw no irony in the punishment of the less privileged for activities his own people pursued. Things had always been done that way.
The business about Tomasito was too bad, but his hot-headed brother-in-law had been about to make trouble for the whole family. Yes, Ramón had arranged his disappearance, but it was only to prevent the ultimate disappearance against the wall if he hadn’t interfered. He made sure Tomasito was sent to a work farm in the province of Sancti Spiritus that had a better reputation than most. It was the one thing he couldn’t tell Rosita about. He hated to see her so forlorn when he told her there was no word from his CDR connections, but if he had told her the truth she would’ve blabbed to those sisters of hers, and then no telling what they would do. He was thinking only of her in his silence, but he missed her full-throated laugh.
The days crept by as Ramón attended the repetitions of summing figures and yelling at the workers. Then he received terrible news. A typed envelope from Sancti Spíritus arrived for him at the office. He closed the door and sat at his neat desk to open it. Inside, a terse letter informed him that Tomasito had died from an infection that set in after he injured himself through his carelessness with a farm machine. There were no words of apology or condolences, just the fact that his body had already been buried. He panicked at first, wondering what he would tell the family now. And what awful deeds had been shoveled under with a quick burial? Were there bullet holes in the body? He shuddered and rummaged in this desk for a bottle of clear liquid he had taken from a tanner. His eyes watered as he drank, but the sear of homemade liquor helped him to focus on this latest catastrophe.
Slowly he calmed as he reasoned that he couldn’t possibly feel responsibility for Tomasito’s death—that boy had brought it on himself with his unpatriotic activities and careless ways. Perhaps his hasty burial was for the best, as he had now truly disappeared. Another gulp of fire decided him. One day he might relieve Rosita of the burden of uncertainty, but for the time being he would keep quiet. And he would find her a treat, maybe some perfume he’d confiscated from a smuggler and had been selling at a good price. He could spare a bottle for his wife. Yes, that’s what he’d do.
Once he made the decision, he busied himself with work details and put all the unpleasantness out of his mind. Early that evening, when his crisp white shirt had long gone gray, he made his customary rounds of hidden spots where workers relaxed for a snooze. Behind the big boiler, in the cool pocket of air beneath the grueling heat, Ramón found Guillermo curled around a bottle. Not much rum was left, and he could tell from his brother’s bloodshot eyes where most of it had gone.
Ramón slumped down against the cinderblock wall and shook his head. His brother roused to flick his eyes at him, then went back to staring at nothing. His mouth worked, spittle at the corner, but he said nothing. Even in this recess, the stench of dead flesh and sharp chemical odors assaulted the nostrils. Ramón noticed his drunk brother’s shoes. Fine brown leather, Spanish, not from the factories down the street or the cardboard fakes the Russians passed off as footwear. Only a large wad of cash could secure such a luxury on the black market. An illegal transaction, or an even darker crime had bought those shoes.
He looked down at his own shoes. American, not new, but not too worn. They were like the pair he’d had on recently when a woman down in old Matanzas had beseeched him for help. No money, he had said. She peered at his shoes and made a suggestion. He followed her into an alley, leaned back against a wall, and unzipped. She knelt and put her mouth on him. He emerged from the alley barefoot a few minutes later. When he got home, he told his wife he had been robbed. He felt guilty about the lie. What stories footwear could tell. He nudged his brother’s leg. “Where’d you get the shoes?”
Guillermo stirred and drew the empty bottle closer. “These days one shouldn’t ask too many questions, hermanito.” He slurped spit back into his mouth and pushed up to a sitting position. “You might follow your precious Quique to the bottom of the sea.”
Guillermo’s venom was no surprise. He should have been the shining light of the Fernandez family, but he was eclipsed in their youth by Quique Mendoza. The three of them had been holed up in the brothers’ bedroom when their juvenile experiment with matches and rum had gotten out of hand and set one of the beds afire. Guillermo, at ten, the oldest, was nearest to the door and ran out screaming for their mother. The room rapidly filled with black smoke. Ramón, only five years old, was trapped by the scorching heat of the fire, so he crawled into the closet and pulled the door closed. Seconds later Quique flung open the closet door, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him toward the fire. He pulled Ramón’s shirt up over his head and rushed him through the line of flames and into his mother’s arms. Ramón had burns on his arms and legs, but he healed well. Quique had more extensive injuries and a long convalescence. He emerged from the ordeal with tight bands of scars pulling at the features of his face and restricting the swing of his left arm.
Ramón’s mother always treated Quique as one of her own after that. She called him her favorite son, and often cited his bravery while giving him a piece of candy first, or later, when carving out a choice piece of pork for him. Those moments remained clear in Ramón’s memory, the ones clotted with smoke and compressed with heat, when his brother had run away and their best friend had stayed to save him.
Quique grew into a man of daring. Until the previous week, he had been the only Cuban who Ramón would trust to make the run to the Florida Keys, away from the madness engulfing the island. In only a short time, unthinkable by the hopeful supporters of Batista’s overthrow three years before, sons had betrayed fathers and husbands had stolen away with their children without a word to their wives. Quique had navigated the treachery of the post-revolutionary period and the Caribbean waters equally with the sureness of God’s chosen ones. He knew the waters better than any of Castro’s boys and had made dozens of trips under their very noses. Ramón added to his friend’s mystique by mangling tips about him from tattletale neighbors before he passed the information on to his CDR comrades. Quique was known to the authorities, but he was known to be invincible.
Then God chose someone else. Quique made a run to the North during a moonless night, even though he, along with everyone else, knew the patrols were tripled then. Somewhere at sea, soldiers strafed his trawler, no questions asked. Most of the bodies were recovered, but not Quique’s. At first, Ramón joined in his mother’s hope that his boyhood savior had survived and swum to safety. Not anymore. The most he hoped now was that Quique had regained his smooth skin and joyous smile as an angel.
Some of the patrol boasted that a good source had led them straight to that worm’s boat. Ramón stared at his brother’s feet, shod in shoes that would be excellent pay for an informer. Sure, you turned people in, but not your own, at least not for profit. Would his brother stoop so low? He forced the question from his mind, banishing it to the same far corner as Tomasito’s demise, and looked at his watch.
“Lucky for you it’s after six,” he said. “You’re too drunk to go back to work.”
His men took a nip now and then but knew better than to drink too much. The tannery was a stern mistress with many evil tricks. She was full of poisonous gases, boiling vats, sharp edges, and greasy floors. A man had to keep his wits about him or risk becoming a victim of her murderous ways.
They stood and headed for the exit. Guillermo palmed the rum bottle against his leg, hiding it from no one. As they passed a container of sulphuric acid, he looked around, then lifted the lid. Ramón whispered a warning, but his brother ignored him and slipped the bottle into the drum. Despite the rules, many of life’s little irritants disappeared this way. It was routine to strain the acid to catch the few materials, like the glass bottle, that didn’t dissolve to keep them from clogging the hoses.
They passed a vat set in the floor where Guillermo spent many of his days. A catwalk stretched above the steaming surface of saltwater and lime, its one rail high enough to let a worker hang over the grated floor and reach the hides below. A man wouldn’t last long if he were completely submerged in the caustic solution, but Guillermo and his comrades thought nothing of reaching down from the catwalk, barehanded, and plunging in an arm up to the elbow to untangle a stubborn clump of hides. Working without protection earned them boils on their hands and arms, which, along with a characteristic raspy cough, distinguished the tanners from their compañeros.
The factory’s stench followed them outside, but the wind was blowing in from the bay and within a block, Ramón inhaled the fresh sea breeze. They came to the corner where they parted to go to their own homes, Guillermo to the two-room apartment of a man whose wife had left him, and Ramón to the tidy home, bought with Montero money, near the bay. Ramón grabbed his brother’s large bicep.
“Enough of the drinking at work,” he said, separating the words into a distinct command.
Guillermo easily threw off Ramón’s grasp. “What will stop,” he said, thumping Ramón twice on the chest, “is me going to that stinking factory. You’ll see, hermanito.” He turned and walked away.
Ramón watched his brother weave down the sidewalk, his feet tapping out an uneven rhythm. The failing light dimmed the rich tan of the shoes but didn’t obscure their possible connection to Quique’s fate. Ramón tried to remember anything he may have said in front of Guillermo about wanting to leave the island. He had to tell Rosita his suspicions.
