Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“Made good time,” he said, peeking at his watch. “Sun’ll be up in three hours. May as well catch some zzzs while we’re here at the Mambo Beach Resort. Road’s right past those trees, but it won’t do us any good heading out on our little Tour de Cuba before we get some light.”

Cooper got busy doing some things behind the driftwood. When he was done, he poked his head over one of the upended stumps and saw that Laramie was seated in exactly the same place as before. Wordlessly, he came out from behind the logs, strolled down the beach, extended a hand and, when Laramie took it, pulled her to her feet.

He turned and let go of her hand once she was up, but Cooper thought he caught a glimpse of a hard-edged kind of stare as the pale moonlight glinted off the whites of her eyes. He wondered whether it might only have been the angle of the light. But if it hadn’t, and the glare had been real, it struck Cooper that he had seen that look before.

Laramie crawled out of her sleeping bag and found the backpack he said was hers. She dug through two compartments before finding the place he’d stored her toiletries. She withdrew a tube of toothpaste and her toothbrush and took them east along the beach with her, over where Cooper had hidden the boat. Still wearing the khaki shorts and sweatshirt she’d used for the voyage over, she stuffed the toothpaste and toothbrush in her pockets, made her way carefully into the brush, and pulled down her khakis to take a leak.

Then she came back down the beach and brushed her teeth. She brushed for a while. She thought about the things Cooper had told her he’d found, but she’d been thinking about those things, and what they might have meant, for most of the trip. Scraping the brush against her teeth, looking out at the Caribbean-or listening, at least, in the darkness-she thought about some other things. They were there during the darkest moment you found in the West Indies, the sky in that predawn, moonless state of blackness beneath the blanket of the morning cloud cover, and Laramie couldn’t see too far beyond her wrist. But she could hear the waves lapping and breaking in their relentless approach and retreat, and there was another sound out there too, a distant sound that resembled a gently clanging bell. Might, she thought, be nothing more than a piece of metal banging somewhere in the wind-maybe on a dock fallen into disrepair a mile or two down the coast.

As far as Laramie was able to tell, Cooper remained asleep in his sleeping bag.

When it became apparent her eyes would never quite adjust to the darkness, she closed them and let the sounds of the water, and the tradewinds, and the tapping piece of broken metal sing to her. It wasn’t, she decided, much different from the sounds of the trains she used to watch in San Fernando, back home, where she’d sneak up to a bluff and close her eyes while the freight trains rumbled by in a wash of hot wind.

Laramie supposed she should have expected what was occurring to her, sitting on this beach. She even supposed she’d brought it on herself by coming on this trip at all. She thought through some more things, then got sick of thinking through all the possible scenarios.

“Goddammit,” she said, and opened her eyes.

She stood and kicked off her khaki shorts. She was already in bare feet, and kicked off her panties next. Pulled her T-shirt over her head and flipped it onto the sand behind her. Standing there in the darkness and breeze, she first walked, then jogged into the water, feeling the sand squish beneath her feet with every step, and then, when the water had reached her waist, she pushed off and dove into the warm blanket of the Caribbean.

She swam around in the shallow water, mostly balancing on her knees or floating around on her back, the water feeling like a hot bath in the cool night. She might have swum for fifteen minutes, or half an hour, Laramie losing track by intention as, after a while, she stood erect, leaned forward against the drag of the water, and walked out of the sea and up the gentle slope of the beach. She flicked her fingers through her hair to shed most of the water from her head, but otherwise didn’t bother to dry off. The warm wind was already doing it for her anyway.

She passed by her rumpled mound of clothes, turned the corner past the driftwood, and, mostly without grace, located her empty sleeping bag by dropping down and feeling around on all fours. Once she found the soft mat of her own sleeping bag, she aimed left and kept crawling along until she encountered the bulky form of Cooper, hidden beneath the folds of his own bag. She found his zipper, opened the bag until she had enough room, then slipped in beside him and zipped the bag back closed behind her.

She knew from the way their skin touched that he had never actually fallen asleep.

In the tight quarters of the bag, she managed to get her arms around his chest. She rolled him over on his back, lay her body on his, and found his lips with a long, heavy, salty kiss.

It took them two and a half hours to reach San Cristóbal on the mountain bikes, the sun rising, then beating down and heating up the roadway beneath their wheels. Cooper thinking as he pedaled that if you wanted to see Cuba-the real Cuba-the trip was best made by bike. Spend your time in what was left of the old tourist havens, or the bustle of Havana, and you saw the propaganda, the illusion that the communist nation’s economy and overall health of its citizens were on the up-and-up. Put your ass on a bicycle seat, though, and head out on a country road, and you’d catch the real deal. The jovial but understated people who lived here, desperate for a few bucks from any and every wayward tourist, long since accustomed to the disaster that was the Cuban economy but still doing fine.

Keeping the Caribbean attitude alive, he thought: governments, conquerors, hurricanes, wealth, and poverty came and went, but the sun was always hot and the sand and sea and earth were always there. Live slow, mon-though they didn’t say it quite that way in Fidel’s homeland.

He pointed to the sign as they rode past-part makeshift billboard, part poster, the wooden placard set back from the road announcing to them in a cursive scrawl that they’d arrived in San Cristóbal. Palm fronds and a batch of weeds had grown to partially obscure the sign. Cooper had been here before; he had expected then, and found himself expecting now, to see some symbol of the past-a communist propaganda billboard, perhaps-advertising what the town had become world famous for: in aerial photographs taken in 1962 and 1963, an American spy plane had identified it as one of the main construction sites which Cuba and the USSR had been gearing up for the installation of Soviet ICBMs. Ground zero, as it were, of the Cuban missile crisis.

But this morning, same as during his first visit, Cooper found there existed no local clue that any such thing had taken place. The town seemed as ordinary as you got-another busy village at the junction of a few country roads, home to the usual farm-oriented bustle found in just about every such town south of Texas.

They steered off the road into a gravel flat, flipped down the kickstands, and looked directly at each other for the first time since they’d got themselves untangled from Cooper’s sleeping bag. Laramie handed Cooper her portable GPS unit.

“Here are Achar’s numbers,” she said, and pointed to the color screen. “And here’s where we are now.”

Cooper saw from the graphics on the screen that they were approximately four miles from the place Benjamin Achar had supposedly told them to go. Their destination was on this side of town, but judging from the GPS unit’s directional arrow, it would take finding a side road or two to get them there.