Cuba Libre (2008) (32 page)

He didn't stay for an answer or even hesitate as the druggist was questioning him, excited now, raising his voice. By now the clerk was around the end of the counter and running out to the street yelling, "'iEstd aquit. iEstd aquf.r'" Telling anyone who could hear him, "He's here!" as he yanked on a rope and an awning came down across the front of the shop.

Tyler got his horse from under it, slapped its rump and swung up on the saddle as the horse bolted, stretching its head to run. Behind him he could hear the clerk yelling, ""Chaulmoogra por los lazarinos!""

"I thought I'd die once Dr. Henriquez was gone. I said, "How can they take you? You're not even Spanish." It didn't seem to matter. When I think about it, it was only four months ago, during Mardi Gras when we met. Luis had been visiting the hospital at Carville? It's up above New Orleans--I'd heard of it, but of course I've never been there. Dr. Henriquez told me about his work here and I said, "Oh, Luis, please take me with you." I was prepared that moment to dedicate the rest of my life to these people."

They sat at the table in the yard cutting up squash and yucca for soup, both in sun hats and aprons, Miss Janes' hands in white gloves. She spoke in quiet tones, unhurried by her anguish. "Do you think I was foolish? My mother does. She can't believe I'm here. At least I keep busy--thank God for small blessings. I keep hoping I'll hear from Luis. I don't even know what I'd do. I can't just leave. Until you came I had no one at all to talk to. While you were ill Victor provided some company. You're so fortunate to have Ben. Do I envy you. I think, my Lord, just a few months ago my only concern, would my carnival gown be ready in time. This country, it's so primitive. I don't think I can stay much longer." "I love it," Amelia said. "It is pretty."

"It's beautiful," Amelia said.

"You're so lucky. How long, if I may ask, have you known Ben?"

It was the first time the woman had asked Amelia anything about herself.

"I've known him all my life," Amelia said.

It was a few minutes later the woman straightened, cocking her head in the sun hat, listening.

"What was that?"

Amelia was up from the table. She said, "Gunshots," running to the house where she stayed.

Chapter
Twenty-Four.

THEY SAW HIM. THEY RAN OUT to the street and saw the awning down and saw him swinging up on the horse and riding away from them. Tavalera looked toward the side street, waving for the horses.

Osma, his gaze holding on the horseman in white, was shaking his head.

"It's not the old one."

Now Tavalera was studying the figure becoming smaller up the street.

"Not Fuentes, no. It's the cowboy."

"That one rides a dun."

"It's the cowboy," Tavalera said. "Believe me."

Four Guardias came running with the horses and now Tavalera was deliberate in the way he mounted, careful not to appear eager. His troop behind him, he rode to the drug shop, where the clerk was in the street with his arms raised calling for them to stop. It slowed them to a dogtrot and now the clerk ran along close to the riders, pointing, telling them to go to San Lfizaro, the home of the lepers on the Imperial Road, two kilometers past the bridge, the clerk calling, repeating, "San Lfizaro!" as they rode away from him, Tavalera raising his voice to Osma: "What did I tell you. Under our nose."

So they would go to the leper home, not have to waste time looking up and down streets. They kept to a good pace and were coming onto the stone bridge when they saw him, the cowboy not more than a few blocks ahead of them. Osma pulled his pistol, a Broomhandle Mauser, extended it as he rode and began firing at the cowboy. He had little chance of hitting him, but it satisfied Osma to pull the trigger and hear the reports. Now they appeared to be gaining on him; he was looking back.

Saying follow me, Tavalera thought. Follow me and don't go to the leper home.

Now the cowboy was running hard again, continuing up the road past the grove of banana trees. Tavalera brought his troop to a halt at the entrance to the property, the leper home in there at the end of the lane.

He said to Osma, "You see what he's doing? He wants us to follow him, not go in this place. They're in there because no one searched it. Isn't that true?"

"I didn't sech it," Osma said. "Did you?"

"If I had knc/wn it was here," Tavalera said. "What is it, you're afraid to go in there?"

"It's not that I'm afraid," Osma said, "it's because I know better than to be among lepers. You have enough men, you can go in without me."

"Or I bring them out," Tavalera said, already knowing what he would do, certain the cowboy was close by and would try to come to the house. He might run away leaving Fuentes--what was Fuentes to him?--but he wouldn't leave Amelia and that hammock they risked their lives to steal. He said to Osma, "The cowboy will find a way to come around behind the property and approach the house from back there. I give you two men, you go in the banana trees and wait for him."

"I can shoot him?"

"Of course, shoot him. Go on, while I speak to someone at the house. Negotiate," Tavalera said. "Offer them a way to remain alive."

Amelia, holding a carbine, watched from a front window of the main house, her view: through the shaded porch to the lane that reached some fifty meters to the road. Miss Janes, behind Amelia and across the room, stood at the dining table where they had gathered the lepers.

Now Tavalera appeared in the lane, two Guardias with Mausers behind him. He came halfway to the house, stopped and called in English, "Send the lepers out!"

Amelia turned her head. "Did you hear him?"

Miss Janes said, "But why?" with that tone of anguish in her voice again.

"I suppose he'd like them out of the way."

"But what does he want?"

"The." Amelia's voice trailing off as she said, "And Ben and Victor... wherever they are."

She heard the woman ask, "How does he know you're here?"

And then Tavalera again: "Are they coming or not?" Amelia turned to Mary Lou. "We have to do it," and said to the frail black woman who had fed and nursed her, "Lourdes, take everyone outside."

For the twelve to get up from the table and file through the door took several minutes: Lourdes with a hand on her husband's arm leading them, her husband lifting his tree-trunk legs one and then the other, the lepers creeping along behind them, across the porch.

Amelia watched Tavalera wave at them to come on, hurry up. She raised the carbine and put the front sight on his chest, Tavalera standing in full view, hands now on his hips. She hesitated and now the twelve were in the lane, coming between Tavalera and the front sight. She could see him gesturing again, separating the lepers, some of them to one side of the lane, the rest to the other side, getting them out of the way mall but Lourdes's husband. Tavalera took him by the arm, pushing Lourdes away, and turned him to face the house.

Now the front sight was on Tavalera again as he called to the house in English, "Amelia? Come out now, dear, or I begin to shoot these poor people."

She kept the carbine steady as she aimed, the oiled-wood smell of the stock against her cheek, and his voice called out again:

"Do you believe me? If you don't, I show you." Tavalera drew his pistol and, still holding the man with elephantiasis ly the arm, shot him through the head. Amelia saw the man fall and saw Lourdes, crying out, try to throw herself on his body, but Tavalera caught her by the arm, pulled her over to him and placed his pistol at her head. This time there was a singsong air to his voice as he called:

"Amelia, dear, I don't see you."

She stepped out to the porch, unarmed. Tavalera released the black woman and came toward the house.

"Let them go," Amelia said.

Tavalera gestured with his hands. "Of course."

Tyler was back in the cottonwoods, at the hay barn they used for a stable. He was putting Amelia's saddle on the dun when he heard the pistol shot, that hard thin pop coming from the direction of the leper house. Tyler stood listening. He saw Amelia pull a gun out of her skirt and one of them shoot her. But then thought, No, she did that they'd all let go at her. Or she would've got one before they got her and that still would're been more than one shot.

He had recognized Lionel and the one called Osma, looking back to see the little drug clerk son of a bitch running along by their horses. Then on the road he was able to count six of them. Now some were at the leper house and some would've followed him.... Unless Lionel looked at it, couldn't see him leaving Amelia and Victor, and all that money, and knew he'd come sneaking back. So Lionelwouldn't he put some of his men in the grove to wait?

He might already have Victor.

But that little clerk son of a bitch said he saw Victor yesterday talking to another old man. It could're been some fella from the old days, up on what was going on. Tyler wondered if Victor might not've found out then the American army was in Cuba. But if he did, and that's why he acted like this business was about over... Yeah? Why didn't he mention it?

Tyler told himself that was enough thinking for one day. He slipped a sixth cartridge into each of his.44 Russians. He had two horses ready. But should he bring both of them? No, not with what he had to do. There'd be horses, all kinds of horses, if he did this right and didn't get shot first. This time heed his cutting horse, the dun, out of the shelter and mounted.

Amelia waited on the porch, the carbine inside the house. Tavalera came up, seemed to study her and said, "I understand you've been ill. I believe it, you don't look so good. But, I have to say, you don't look so bad either. Where is Victor?"

It caught Amelia by surprise. He had to notice it, the change in her expression.

"You don't know where he is?" "He left this morning." "To go where?" "He didn't say."

"You such good friends---he rides off, he doesn't tell you where he's going?"

Amelia didn't answer.

Tavalera stepped closer to the window to look in the house. "Who is that woman?"

"She manages the home."

"Lives with lepers--I have to admire her. Do you think she might know where Victor is?"

"She doesn't know anything about us. Miss Janes has her own problems."

"Yes, I wood think so, living here. You didn't show her what you carry-in the hammock? I was thinking perhaps you opened it to give her something."

Amelia said nothing.

"This hammock you have hidden someplace? Perhaps where you sleep?"

Amelia remained silent.

"You don't tell me there is no money. You don't say go ahead and search for it. Listen, what I'm thinking, you and I could share it. All you been through, you work so hard to get it I would be willing to give you some. Uh, what do you think?"

Amelia said, "Do you have Tyler?"

"The cowboy? We know where he is. Pretty soon you hear some guns? It means he's no more."

Amelia shook her head very slowly from side to side. "You don't believe me?"

"If you don't have him now you never will."

"I don't care about the cowboy. I'm thinking of my life, what happens to me after this war. And you must have been thinking what happens to you--am I right? The reason you took the money? Get it, Amelia, and we leave right now, go back to Havana."

She said, "Or what?"

"You mean if you refuse? Then I shoot another leper-take your pick. If they don't mean anything to you, that's all right, then I shoot that woman in the house."

Lourdes remained with her husband, kneeling over him, praying to Almighty God to take his soul, praying to St. Barbara to give her strength. Two flail women, mulattas, stood in the lane watching her. By the time Lourdes rose all the lepers had wandered off, all but these two women, waiting; and when Lourdes made the sign of the cross over her husband, the two women went into the house. Lourdes followed, walking past the two Guardias on the porch without looking at them. These were the two who had remained with Tavalera; they had brought all six horses to the porch rail and tied them there.

In the main house Miss Janes sat at the dining table with her hands folded. Lourdes thought she looked to be asleep with her eyes open. Or in a trance, having seen a man put to death.

One of the women who had waited brought a machete from the folds of her skirt. She told Lourdes that Amelia had taken the officer back to the house she was using. The second woman came out of the kitchen with a machete in one hand, a butcher knife in the other. Lourdes was fifty-two and loved her dead husband. She chose the machete.

She looked out the window to see the two Guardias on the porch undoing the front of their trousers. Now both were pissing from the end of the porch into a flower bed.

Osma, well into the grove now with the two Guardias Tavalera had given him, stopped to speak to them for the first time. He said, "The cowboy is close enough that he heard the shot. He doesn't know what it means, but it will make him more anxious to reach the house, from wherever he is back there."

The Guardias looked around them as Osma spoke, maybe listening to him, maybe not. They were both veterans of three years fighting mambis, their eyes dull, their full mustaches covering their mouths. One said to the other, "Who did he shoot, a leperH."