Fifty Grand

Uncle Arturo was bleeding into his shirt and his eyes were red and his hair was everywhere. I’d never seen him without even a tie before. Two policemen in riot gear hauled him to his feet. Uncle Arturo didn’t resist. He looked exhausted. Like us. Like everybody. I was staring at the blood on his shirt and wondering if he’d been shot or not. I’d never seen anyone shot before either.

The soldiers pushed Uncle Arturo toward one of the army trucks, but suddenly he stopped and looked up into the tree where the pair of us were hiding.

Ricky grabbed my arm and I grabbed him right back.

Uncle Arturo grinned. “I see you,” he said. “I see what you did with those sausages.”

One of the policemen looked up into the branches but he didn’t notice anything. He shrugged his shoulders and shoved Uncle Arturo from behind. “Come on,” the policeman said, and he led Uncle Arturo under the canvas flap of one of the trucks. After a couple of minutes, they transferred him to a police car and turned the siren on. Shortly after that the car drove off toward Santiago. Ricky was shaking and holding on to me tightly. We were both frightened and exhilarated at the same time.

“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.

“Now we climb down the tree,” I said.

We climbed down. I tapped the nearest cop on the back. He turned.

“We surrender,” I said.

Later, years later, I found out that Uncle Arturo had spent the night destroying papers that implicated him in dozens of bribery and blackmail schemes. He needn’t have bothered. The police weren’t interested in him at all. In fact, within six months he was back in the hacienda with his government salary and position restored.

No, the police had come because my father and some others had hijacked one of the Havana Bay ferries to Florida. Previous attempts had failed because the ferry had run out of fuel, but my father and his cronies had trundled in dozens of drums of diesel. They’d taken the fast ferry, a gift from the Japanese government, because it could do twenty knots. They’d gone on the very first run of the day, straight out of the harbor and north for Key West. It took the sleeping authorities an hour to realize what was happening and the hijackers confused them by saying that they had left the harbor only because the steerage was jammed. Then they reported a fire, and by the time the government realized it was a hijack they were halfway to the Keys.

Uncle Arturo was suspected of complicity but he knew nothing about it.

None of us did.

The cops reunited us with our cousins, and María told me the details at our grandmother’s house. “Your father is a dirty traitor. He has joined the Yankees in Miami.”

They took Mom to Havana and kept her in a DGI dungeon for a week and then let her out.

She had bruises on her back and thighs.

She never talked about what they did to her. She just got on with things.

The power cuts, the end-of-the-month scramble for food, mending our school uniforms, the TV repairman who would take payment only in dollars…

Eventually she got a job as a maid in the Hotel Nacional-one of the best jobs in Havana because of the tips-and saved enough so that Ricky and I could go to college.

Uncle Arturo denounced Papa in the newspapers and, of course, after that we never went to Santiago again. And nothing came from America. No letters. No money. We heard that he had remarried. He moved from Miami to New York.

And then he disappeared.

Drifted from our lives.

Dissolved, like he was never there.

Vanished like a dandelion on the curve of air.

And that’s all that needs to be said.

He isn’t here.

He isn’t anywhere.

He’s not a character in this story.

He’s a template. A tabula rasa. For me to write my narrative, for me to invent myself.

And now, dying, I understand why I came.

It isn’t for him.

It isn’t for justice.

It’s in spite of him.

It’s for truth.

I am the girl on the beach looking inside a shark for other fish.

I am the sleepwalker awakened. Awakened on the edge of the precipice.

I needed the bullet. I needed the bullet to show me that I want an end to the lies.

You betrayed us, Papa. You didn’t tell us. And I came here to show you that truth is important. The truth wipes everything away. All the forgotten birthdays. All the tears. All the hurt. You enjoyed that other world. The infidelities. The Cuban game. But it wasn’t a game to Mom. Or us. Is that what you liked most of all? The deceit? The deceit more than the conquest.

And now I see deeper still. It’s truth, but also pride. To show you that despite your lack of concern for your family we turned out well, Ricky and me.

Look at the pair of us, doing everything we can to discover who killed you.

Look at us, sticking our toes in the waters of revenge.

Risking everything for you. Dying for you.