David Ferrie, a magnetic presence, a humorous master of games, was shooting at tin cans with a .22.
The swag-belly Cuban, Raymo, had a modified Winchester he liked to break down and reassemble, running a patch through the bore, sandpapering the stock.
The third man, named Leon, worked the bolt on an ancient carbine; sighted, fired, worked the bolt.
This was a new and hastily assembled camp, Ferrie explained, which is why the lack of creature comforts. The regular setup was at Lacombe, nearer New Orleans, where a number of anti-Castro factions had trained in guerrilla tactics until federal agents raided, grabbing a huge store of dynamite and bomb casings. This project would be kept small and restricted. Speak to no one. Respect the environment. Wait for the moment.
Wayne thought these were rules that verged on mystical.
He knew they weren’t here just to fire weapons. T-Jay wanted them sequestered. Raymo and Wayne especially. The business was sorting itself out and he wanted his shooters wrapped tight, where he could find them.
Wayne stood outside wearing Levis, his bare chest pale and veined. He was growing his hair down over his neck, a rat’s tail he painstakingly braided. He went barefoot over the moist ground. There was a storm hanging close, a stillness. and metallic light, pressure building. The bird noise was fretful and spooked.
Frank Vásquez was back in the Everglades spying on Alpha 66.
The others stood talking by a fallen tree. Wayne wore a hunting knife in a leather sheath clipped to his belt, just for the general look of it. Ferrie smiled at the sight of his bare feet.
“Here is a man who has no fear.”
“I never understand about people and snakes,” Wayne said. “Like what harm do they intend? They never touch me. I’ve had incidents with snakes where they never touch me.”
“It’s not they touch you,” Raymo said. “It’s stepping on them. Not seeing where you step.”
“Copperhead,” Leon said.
“I have the primitive fear,” Ferrie said. “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there.”
He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff. His car was parked on a dirt road about half a mile downstream and the skiff was the only way in and out.
They took turns firing at a silhouette target that was the one-time property of the FBI. Then they went up to the long shack for something to eat.
The first drops of rain hit the sheeting, well spaced and heavy. They sat around the table and talked about jobs, odd jobs, seasonal jobs. Wayne told them about his pool-skimming days in California. Leon described a radio plant somewhere, lathes and grinding machines, floor awash in oil, the workers’ hands stained black. Raymo talked about the hands of cane-cutters, seamed with cuts, sticky and black from the juice.
This was the first time Wayne had heard Leon say more than two words. He didn’t know where Leon fit in, except it was obvious he was some kind of special component with his own little twist or spin. He came and he went, carrying the Italian carbine. The others seemed to leave some space around him, like he was holy or diseased.
They talked about prisons they’d been in.
“I used to believe the great thing of Castro was the time he spent in prison,” Raymo said. “He went to prison in Cuba and Mexico both. I used to say this is the man’s honor and strength. He comes out of prison with authority if he is sent there for his beliefs. It is completely different in Castro’s own prisons. We came out of La Cabana with anger and disgust. We were the worms of the CIA.”
“They sent me to prison in the military,” Leon said.
“What for?”
“Politics. Just like Fidel. I spent a night in jail in New Orleans a month ago. Politics.”
“I sat in a lockup for three days,” Wayne said. “Our launch was intercepted about ten minutes out of the Keys. Violating the neutrality act. It was T-Jay that got us out. He fixed it somehow. The charges were dropped nicey-nicey.”
Raymo said, “Castro spent fourteen months in an isolation cell. He read Karl Marx. He read every Russian. He told us he read twelve hours a day. He read in the dark. Always studying, always analyzing. Years later I saw the executions of men who fought by his side in the mountains.”
“It’s clear in history,” Leon said, “that a man has to go to prison for his beliefs. It’s a necessary stage in the evolution of any movement that cuts against the system. Eventually he merges his beliefs in the actual struggle.”
“I thought about it a lot,” Raymo said, “and I’ll tell you my beliefs. I believed in the United States of America. The country that could do no wrong. It was bigger than anything, bigger than God. With the great U.S. behind us, how could we lose? They told us, they told us, they promise, they repeat and repeat. We have the full backing of the military. We went to the beaches thinking they would support us with air, with navy. Impossible we could lose. We are backed by the great U.S. What happens? We find ourselves in the swamps, lost and hungry, we are eating tree bark by this time, and the radio is saying, ‘Attention, brigade, the owl is hooting in the barn.’ ”
He looked from one face to the other, laughing.
“ ‘Tomorrow, my brothers, the crippled child climbs the hill’ ”
They were all laughing.
“They disarmed us and fastened our hands in one big looping chain and put us in troop trucks to go to the nearest militia camp and there’s a plane passing right overhead and I call out, I tell our men, ‘Don’t shoot, boys, it’s one of ours.’ ”
His eyes were fierce and happy. He looked from Leon to Wayne and back, laughing cockeyed, hitting the table hard. The tin plates jumped. When they were quiet again he looked at his home fries and eggs for two full minutes. He brushed his mustache with an index finger, then began to eat.
“We are actually eating tree bark,” he said again, without the wild-eyed glee this time, chewing his food slowly.
Later they saw T-Jay coming through the downpour, a wavy windblown rain. Behind him the trees were leaning. He had a duffel bag on his right shoulder and another under his left arm. Inside he worked the bags open. There were two leather cases in one bag, a single case in the other. Each case was lined in billiard cloth and fitted with a pair of high-powered rifles. The men hefted the guns, mumbling, and passed them hand to hand. The window sheeting billowed and snapped.
“Scopes are in the car,” T-Jay said.
They sat and talked about the guns. Wayne believed there was friendship in guns. This might or might not be a paradox. His experience in life and in the movies told him that peace can wear away the bonds of friendship. This was the lesson of the samurai. Action is truth, and truth falters when combat ends and the villagers are free to go back to their planting. Again we survive, again we lose, says a character in
Seven Samurai.
T-Jay had water still running down his face. He sat in a puddle. He had his right elbow on the table, arm up, and kept clenching and unclenching his fist. He was more talkative than Wayne had ever known him. Raymo was talkative. The guns were a language and a memory. Wayne happened to catch some sideline dialogue between T-Jay and Leon. To the effect that Leon would not be using one of the new rifles. To the effect that he would be using the Mannlicher he’d come into camp with. It was clear this was mutually agreed.
The wind was battering the shack. They talked for hours, telling funny and bloody stories. Wayne felt sweet and light as Jesus on a moonbeam.
Frank Vásquez was on the road in Mississippi driving Raymo’s Bel Air
decrépito
. Driving was not natural to him. He was literal-minded about speed limits and grew tense when road signs appeared, not always understanding the symbols and fearing he would enter upon misfortune. He’d had car trouble twice since Miami. He’d taken wrong roads twice. He spent a night in a motel where a fight broke out in the parking lot among four or five men, their feet crunching on the gravel, breath coming heavy, a woman crying in a white convertible, somewhere near Pensacola.
He was not used to being out here in the U.S., away from Spanish-speaking people, without Raymo by his side.
He had news for T-Jay. Alpha was planning a major operation. Miami, November. At first he could not guess the nature of the mission but it had to be unique if it involved an American city and not some Cuban port or refinery.
Frank had spent two and a half weeks in Alpha’s camp off Highway 41 along with men from other groups and factions, running obstacle courses through the slash pines. One day he was approached by Alpha’s secretary-general. This man wanted Mackey to take part in an operation that would go a long way toward paying back the failure of Playa Girón. Mackey was held in highest esteem. The mission leaders believed he should have a hand in this action.
No place or date was mentioned. Frank gleaned these things from the general run of talk. The fellowship oppressed him. He hated the drilling and shooting. The leaders of Alpha wore sunglasses, combat boots, berets, half-serious beards. If these men were so violently anti-Castro, why did they want to look like Che Guevara ?
He remembered what Raymo had told him, that after a battle in the Sierra here comes Che on a mud-spattered mule to talk to the captured troops. What is the first thing they do? They ask for his autograph. This is when everyone knew Batista was finished.
Frank thought of the mountains, the dense green cover, smoke rolling down from the heights, vanishing at a certain altitude, rolling down. The rain was total. They lived in camouflaged barracks and sometimes in mud and he thought about the idea he was fighting for. Full dignity for the people of Cuba. Justice for the hungry and forgotten. He knew from the first day he would not remain. He was not a rebel in body or spirit. He had an ordinary nature.
His mother, the author of his days, welcomed him back with a sad laugh.
Frank taught grades one to six, often at the same time, in a school at the edge of the company town. The company was United Fruit and he had two brothers who were foremen in the cane fields and lived with their wives and kids, each family in a ten-by-ten room in a row of ten rooms built back to back with ten other rooms, all set in one long building constructed on five-foot stilts. The cane-cutters and their families lived under the building in squat hovels made of cardboard and sacking.
One could not help noticing that the American executives of La United lived in well-staffed and graceful homes on streets lined with coconut palms. Frank blamed the government, not the company. He expected his brothers to get out of the fields and become skilled workers in the vast mill. La United was not blind to the notion of ambition. From mill workers they could advance to office staff or engineering. They could get two rooms each in a house on a street that was lighted at night. Americans respected those who worked efficiently, who got things done. A man could conceivably get ahead.
Then the rebels came, his former comrades, to burn the cane fields. This was consistent with Cuban history. Whoever rises in revolt, the first thing they do is burn the sugar cane. It is a statement about economic dependence and foreign control. Frank watched the fields bum and knew there were communists behind it. He’d feared this all along. There’s more to it, there’s something we don’t know about. The fires cut and jumped through the canebrakes. The private police of La United were long gone.
In Havana he stood in line with hundreds of others at the curbside outside the U.S. embassy, waiting to apply for a visa. And now he was on the road near the Louisiana border, driving into thunderheads.
On his fourth day with Castro he shot a government scout, aiming through a telescopic sight. It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.
Frank knew what Alpha was planning to do. He thought and he thought and it had to be that. Once he learned the President was going to Miami, there was nothing else to believe.
His brothers also fled Castro, later, dangerously, floating to Key West on an oil-drum raft. They went back in boats as well, one killed in the fighting on the beaches, one captured and taken to the fortress prison, where he was allowed to die quietly of starvation, his form of public prayer, a demonstration against the beatings and executions.
Fervent men, exiles, fighters against communism took off from the Keys in Cessnas and Piper Comanches to drop incendiary devices on the sugar cane of Cuba. The fields were burning again.
Here on the road in the Deep South he saw something that showed how strangely and completely a hatred for this President reached into certain parts of the culture, into daily lives. During, the first long day of driving he’d wandered into Georgia by mistake and passed a drive-in theater where they were showing a movie about young Kennedy the war hero. It was called PT 109 and under the title on the signboard there was a special incentive:
See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.
It scared him all right, the signs he saw on the road in the U. S. Here was Louisiana in heavy rain. He would tell T-Jay everything he’d seen and heard with Alpha 66 in the Glades. The conclusion wasn’t hard to draw, that Kennedy was the object of the mission.
Something in his heart longed for this murder, even though he knew it was a sin.