Her Mother's Daughter (95 page)

Still, when he put his arm around me again, I let him, and I was relaxed enough that I was drifting off when Ettore appeared above him and cried in a whisper, “Woody, Woody, they come back, they come back!”

Woody leaped up, reached for his gun. Alex was already waking the others. They sat up swiftly, reached for rifles, guns, loaded cartridges. We all strained our eyes gazing out to sea. A group of small boats was approaching the island from the northeast, coming fast. Our boat was anchored to the south, hidden from them by a curve of the shore.

“Jesus!” Woody exclaimed. “Now's our chance to get them! Get our weapons too!” He darted forward, from tree to tree, waving his arm wildly to the others to follow his example. They did, a covey of bodies leaping in the dark night, scurrying, grunting. The boats anchored near the shore; some men leaped out and waded to land, guns held above their heads.

“Get back among the trees!” Woody hissed at me. But I was rooting around by feel in my camera case to find my camera and flash. I had brought my Nikon, because I could hold it above my head and look upward when I was shooting—something I thought might be an advantage. Adrenaline was pulsing blood through my veins, my hands were shaking as I loaded the film in the dark, praying that I'd get it in fast enough to get some photographs. A skirmish! We were nowhere near Cuba. Who were these invaders?

“Save your ammo,” Woody whispered loudly. “Wait till they're closer.”

But someone hadn't heard—or panicked—and a shot rang out, then several, then there was the swift sound of bullets from a repeating rifle. I edged back into the grove ready to shoot
my
weapon. I stood beside a tree and held the camera as high above my head as I could, and peered up. I wanted to shoot above the heads and bodies and capture the shape and fire of the invaders. The sights were eerie—like flashes of lightning penetrating the darkness. I kept shooting. I heard something thwack into a tree near me; and I felt something sharp, as if I'd been stabbed in the arm. Then a submachine gun strafed the ground around our camp, and someone shouted, “Hands up! Throw down your weapons!” The accent was clearly American.

“Identify yourselves!” Woody commanded.

What a guy! I thought. Even with his hands in air he gave orders. I edged away from the tree: it seemed, in the darkness, that our men were all standing with hands in the air facing an uncertain number of men carrying much larger weapons.

“Alpha 66,” the enemy replied, and our side howled and jumped in the air cheering and hugging each other.

So this was war.

The newcomers were really Alpha 66; they had been sent by the men in suits who came into Mi Tierra that day; except for the two in charge, who were CIA, these men were Cubans, but
trained
—unlike our guys. They had brought our group automatic weapons, dynamite, and grenades. Our team was overjoyed, they leaped in the air, they hugged their deliverers, they kissed their brand-new BARs, their “pineapples,” and the satchel charges, they held them against their bodies crooning the language of love.

Alpha 66 also brought booze, and Noel built up the fire again and everyone gathered around it to drink and talk, prepared, I thought, to get drunk again. Most of them had slept off their last drunk for the past hour, and were eager to start over. Now they could drink in celebration, because of course the weapons had saved their mission.

My arm ached; I thought I must have jabbed it against a sharp branch, too concentrated on photographing to notice. So this time I shared the passed bottle. One of the CIA guys came over and sat beside me, acting with professional curiosity about a female presence, but also turned on by it, I could hear that in his voice. And he couldn't even see me in this flickering light!

My head was aching too. After I told him what I was doing there, he told me he ran a used-car business in Miami, and that his buddy did a little business in dope, and when this mission was over I should come and visit his shop and he and his buddy and I would go out and get high and see the town.

I wanted to cry. My head was aching, my arm was aching, and something awful had happened, I didn't know what, but I didn't want to be there anymore, I wanted my mommy, I wanted my own cool clean bed, I needed to sleep. I swigged some more scotch. I felt myself swaying a little. The CIA guy put his arm around me and I cried out. Woody leaped up and came over, his face—even in that light I could see it—hard and mean, ready to pounce on this guy as if, as if…Then his face changed and he crouched in front of me.

“What is it, kid?”

“My arm,” I gasped.

I put my hand on my arm; it was wet. Woody frowned at me, and blew out a long whistle when he looked at my hand—it was bloody. He eased me gently closer to the firelight. My upper arm was covered with blood. He peeled away my torn shirtsleeve—there was a deep cut, like a stab wound except it was more jagged. Suddenly everyone was in motion. Noel was washing my arm, Philip was applying some kind of cream from our first aid kit, Alex was twisting some bandage into a tourniquet, someone was forcing some pills down my throat—only aspirin they said—along with some more scotch.

They wrapped me in several blankets and helped me to lie down again. Then they returned to drinking and talking, this time about me. The CIA men took flashlights, our guys tried to remember where I was standing during the shooting, I tried to tell them which tree it was, but my voice didn't come out loud enough. They beamed their lights all around the area where I'd been seen, then moved away from it in a circle. They found a tree that had been hit by a bullet, missing a big chip of wood and bark. They deduced that when the bullet hit the tree it sent a sharp shard of wood flying at high speed into my arm.

After they had found the cause, they returned to me. I felt hot and funny, a little dizzy. They examined my wound, announced it had stopped bleeding, and removed the tourniquet. Then Woody bound it in a bandage, very gently; and sat down beside me and cradled me in his arm. Noel brought me a tin cup with whiskey in it and I sipped it. My arm throbbed, and I was grateful for the whiskey. I was even grateful for Woody's arm. I leaned against him, listening to the guys talk. They were off again on the radio station versus the electric generator versus the barracks….

I fell asleep in Woody's arm, and woke up wrapped in three blankets—others had sacrificed theirs. I felt a little feverish, but I didn't let them know it. I didn't want to be sent back with those CIA guys. I had some aspirin in my knapsack, which I took with the coffee Noel served me. I said I felt fine, much better. We all packed up and trudged back to the boats. We said good-bye to Alpha 66, stowed our gear on the
Argo,
and set off for Cuba.

We reached it midmorning of the next day, in full light. We anchored in a cove that seemed uninhabited, and Noel rowed Ettore ashore. He had telephoned his wife from the ship; she was supposed to meet him at a spot beyond the rocks and trees that rimmed the cove. She was to bring a car, and lead a friend with another car: they would transport the guys and their weapons to Havana. The question was, would I accompany them?

I watched him go in a feverish daze. I fully expected a company of Cuban soldiers to charge out of the trees heaving grenades and firing at us. How could the Cubans not know our plans, advertised in every possible way? I took some pictures, then sat in the shade of an overhang, half-asleep, in so much pain that I didn't mind the thought of being killed. But nothing happened. Noel rowed back to the boat, Alex made sandwiches. We waited. Some of the men cleaned their new weapons; others dozed on the deck.

We waited into the night. Since I was well (I claimed), I was expected to cook dinner: it had become my job. (Once a woman waits on a man, that's it. There's some saying about elephant dung…) I opened cans of Spam and potatoes and green beans, although I could barely move my arm, it was red and swollen. We drank. We slept. We woke. We waited through the next morning. At eleven, an unmarked plane swooped over us. Everyone looked up, silent, pale. We all thought we were going to be bombed. But it hovered for a while, then flew away. We waited into the evening.

By then I knew I was in trouble. The swelling on my arm had spread, and a thin blue line showed on it. It was infected. I slathered disinfectant cream on it and swallowed aspirins every few hours. I slept on and off all day. It crossed my mind that I could lose my arm. I vaguely remembered that people died of blood poisoning. But there was nothing to be done.

On the morning of the third day, Philip spotted Ettore on the beach, waving his arms, and rowed out to fetch him. He was distraught, his face was dirty with tears. His wife had not appeared at the meeting place. He waited eight hours, then hitchhiked into the suburb outside Havana where his family lived. His wife was gone. His children were gone. His
house
was gone. None of the neighbors knew what had happened—the house burned down in the middle of the night, they said, no one saw his wife or the children. He crouched on a crate, holding his head in both hands and rocking it back and forth, weeping as he told us about it.

“Maybe they dead, dead! Where do they go?” he lamented.

Of course they're dead, you idiot, I thought. You signed their death warrant yourself, calling them on the phone and telling them to bring a car to pick up weapons. But at the same time I kept picturing his wife and his four children pronged with bullet holes, sprawled on some scrubby hillside; or even worse, not dead but in some prison being tortured. Horrible images kept invading my mind, and I wanted to hit Ettore, go over and pound him on the head in fury for his stupidity. And I wanted to hold him, he was so grief-stricken, I wanted to put my arms around him and assure him they were safe, healthy, happy.

It was all too much for me. I was sick and dizzy and I wanted to go home. The men held a conference. I slept. They concluded that if Ettore's wife had been picked up, Castro had anticipated them and there was no hope: this mission would fail. They decided to return to Miami, regroup, and try again. When Woody finally told me about this, I nodded. I was too sick to talk, but I wanted to tell him that was the first intelligent move he'd made in two weeks.

Sometime that afternoon we chugged out of the harbor and when we were far enough away from the Cuban coast, Woody telephoned for help. At dusk we were met by a Coast Guard seaplane, to which I, no longer conscious, was transferred on a stretcher. They flew me to a hospital in Miami. For days I lingered in delirium. When I woke one afternoon, Russ Farrell was sitting by my bed. He was smiling. “Great shots!” he said.

They told me later that because of the circumstances surrounding their rescuing me, the Coast Guard called the State Department, who sent a man to “debrief” me. He searched my bag, found my
World
ID, and called Russ Farrell. Russ flew down, collected the film I'd shot and had it developed. The pictures of the attack by Alpha 66 were dramatic. The sky looked purplish black behind dark hulking forms which seemed to emit by themselves flashes of light that burst at different rates, so had different sizes. They were not informative pictures—you would not know from looking at them what the scene was, who the men. But the mystery of it added to their power: they were simply terrifying, anonymously terrifying, like the invaders in Bergman's
Skammen,
a modern “Disasters of War.”

By the time I had recovered, Woody and the others had already left on another adventure. The State Department man, some FBI and CIA guys—and Russ—(that's the way secrecy worked) had heard Woody's and Alex's account of the mission. (For some reason, Noel did not appear with them and his name was never mentioned.) The story they told was that they had spotted several companies of Cuban soldiers dug in around the cove where we anchored, so they pretended to be a fishing party. They had landed Ettore at night, he had evaded the encamped soldiers and worked his way around them and into Havana to make contact with his wife, who would suggest another possible landing site. But she too had been discovered, was gone, the children were gone, the house burned down, etc., etc.

It was Russ who reported all this to me. “Somebody leaked, huh?” he whispered, crouched over in his chair, his mouth close to my ear, talking between his teeth exactly as Woody did. It was Russ too who told me that Woody's wife, who had inherited millions from her first husband, was the central figure in a right-wing group that financed his operations. And, laughing, that Woody had urged them not to send women on dangerous assignments in a way that suggested it was my presence that had ruined the mission.

“He said,” and Russ began to imitate Woody, talking between his teeth even more pronouncedly, “we were thirteen, and the thirteenth was a
woman
! Thing was jinxed from the start!”

World
never ran the pictures: the shots of the
Argo,
the islands where the weapons were supposed to be hidden, the cove where we'd anchored (photos the CIA blew up and studied microscopically for gun emplacements) might present a security risk, might endanger future expeditions to Cuba. I winced at the thought. But there were a couple of positive consequences to this assignment: my work impressed the editors at
World
; so did my wound, and what they called my “moxie.” Russ quoted Woody again (I could see Woody would be the font of stories Russ would tell for a decade): “That kid—she never shed a tear.” I was never again given a trivial assignment, nor was there any resistance in the future to my being given any assignment, no matter how dangerous.

So I suppose I should say it was a fruitful experience.
Fruitful
is a neutral enough word. There are cactus fruits that sting the lips, berries that poison. The Cuban experience curdled my mind. While I lay in the hospital moving in and out of delirium, I remembered things I should have paid attention to but hadn't because I didn't trust my own perceptions. I
had
recognized their sloppiness about the secrecy of their mission. But I had doubted my recognition because it seemed to me that secrecy would be the most important element to boys playing games: they would love the whispering, the sense of exclusivity, of knowing something others didn't. So why would they not observe secrecy, even if they were not embarked on a serious mission? I concluded that secrecy was inessential, that it figured so largely in spy movies because it added to suspense.