Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

George Lederer said he was pretty sure there wasn’t any trouble, that the American government would never have asked twenty-six men and their families to move to a place that wasn’t stable.

She said she hoped he was right. But that she planned to look up this word “golpe” as soon as they got to Nicaro.

“Golpe!” Duffy shouted.

“Golpe! Golpe! Golpe!”

“Okay, Duffy,” they said, “that’s enough.”

Del and I had just caught a hammerhead shark, and we were down on the dock cleaning it with cleavers when we first met the Allains. This was in the summer of 1951. That shark bled like a slaughterhouse cow. We’d caught him with a hand line, right off the pier in Preston. When he struck the line he almost snapped it. I figured we’d cut him loose, have the novelty of being able to say a shark bit our line. But Del starts struggling with the line, barking orders at me to hold on and slacken, pull and slacken. I couldn’t believe he actually thought we could catch that thing, or that it was worth trying. “Del, there’s no way — he’ll drag us in,” I said. But Del wasn’t listening. He was leaning against the line so hard I was sure it would break, frantically coiling it to one of the anchors on the dock as if nothing else in the world mattered. I didn’t think there was the slimmest chance we could catch the shark, but I did what he told me.

It took us most of the night to tire the shark out. Just before dawn, it seemed like it was giving up. I tugged on the line and it didn’t tug back. I remember feeling suddenly lousy. Sometimes you want something purely for the sake of wanting it, and when you finally get it, you only feel regret. Del said it was safe to go down. “Into the water?” I said. “Are you crazy?” There was no way I was getting into the water with a shark. Hammerheads have skin like ground glass. Just grazing against them, they can turn flesh to hamburger. Del said it was dying, and that he’d go down and get a rope around its tail so we could hoist it out. I imagined the shark summoning just enough energy to lash at the bastards responsible for ending its happy life. Del stripped his shirt off and dove in. I felt the shark tug, just a final soft wriggle, and then it was still.

By the time we pulled it out, the sun was coming up. Our hands were completely shredded from the line. Del whacked him with a mallet, and it was over. Later we got our picture in our company magazine, Unifruitco, with a little article about the Stites boys catching a shark off Preston dock. They wrote “kidney-headed shark,” but it’s the same thing as a hammerhead. Nipe Bay was crawling with sharks. A month before we caught ours, a Pan Am seaplane hit a log and busted apart as it came in for a landing. Those poor people. Some of them survived the impact, only to get ripped apart by hungry hammerheads. Afterward, a couple of Cuban fishermen caught one, and when they opened it up they found women’s jewelry in its gut.

As Del and I were cleaning the shark, a company launch pulled up to the dock. We were both delirious, and suddenly we hear these people shouting and carrying on — Americans, with southern accents, but not like Daddy’s people. These people talked like real hillbillies. I looked up and a rowdy family with maybe seven kids came scrambling onto the dock. I think every one of them was barefoot, wearing overalls like Tom Sawyer or something. They were yelling and chasing one another around as their bags were being unloaded from the boat. They crowded around us to get a look at the hammerhead, which are pretty weird-looking if you’ve never seen one. Sandpaper skin, a head like a forked tail, with these dull, cretinous eyes jutting from each side. There was a pile of innards next to me, organs and weird gunk we’d scraped out of the body cavity. One of the boys pointed and asked what we did with that stuff. I said toss it. He picked up what looked like a piece of intestine and started swinging it around as if it was seaweed. Tee-Tee was there, I remember because I’d never seen anyone with eyes like hers — ice blue, like a wolf’s eyes. She was barefoot like the rest of them, and she stepped right into the dark pool of blood around the shark. She looked down at us, her stringy hair falling into her face, and said we could attract more of them if we tossed a chunk of its flesh back into the water.

I was eight and Del must have been twelve, and we’d never met anyone like the Allains. United Fruit had hired Hatch Allain and his brother, Rudy, and the two of them brought everybody over, even Grandmother Pearly. Pearly, who weighed about eighty pounds soaking wet and kept a.32 Derringer in the pocket of her apron. Rudy was a fix-it guy, he ran the machine shop, and Hatch was the plantation boss. Hatch was a giant, with these huge hands, huge elbows. Daddy said the company hired him because he’d worked on Louisiana plantations and he knew how to handle black people. Daddy didn’t say it so politely, but you get the idea. Hatch had that name for a reason — I think it was short for Hatchet. The workers were scared to death of him. He’d killed a man in Louisiana, and that’s why the Allains came to Cuba. They couldn’t go back to the States, or Hatch would be sent to prison. It was supposed to be a secret, but everyone knew. It was part of what made Hatch, Hatch and the Allains, the Allains.

By the time Hatch and his wife, Flordelis, left Cuba, they had nine kids. When I think of Flordelis Allain I think of her pregnant. It seemed like she was the entire time I knew her. In Rudy’s clan there were six kids and his wife, Marthize — everyone called her Mars. Hatch’s son Curtis Junior was my age and he and I were buddies from day one. That’s how it is with kids sometimes. When you’re a good match, you’re best friends in a day. But then again, you can become enemies in a day, which is what happened later with me and Curtis.

Tee-Tee, Hatch’s oldest, was Del’s age. That girl must have been almost six feet tall, lanky, with these long, bruised, dirty legs. Pale skin, almost colorless, like a baby’s flesh. She was attractive in a sort of peculiar way. Del had a crush on her from that moment on the dock. As I was thinking what a weird girl she was, Del was falling in love. The first year the Allains were in the Preston school with us, Del gave Tee-Tee a heart-shaped box of candy on Valentine’s Day. He’d bought it with his own money at the almacén. We were all on the playground, and Del walked up to her and mumbled something like “here.” Del was shy. He was one of those people who once you found a subject he cared about, he livened up and had plenty to say, but otherwise he gave you almost nothing. Tee-Tee snatched the heart-shaped box out of his hands, sat down on the seawall, and tore it open. Poor Del. She didn’t even thank him. She ate all the candies, plucked them out of their pleated paper liners until the box was empty. Rooted around to make sure she hadn’t missed any, and wiped her hands on her skirt. Stared at him with this blank expression, licking chocolate off her fingers, rough and indifferent as an alley cat. I bought Valentine candy at the almacén, too, but I gave mine to Mother.

The Allains didn’t mix with the other Americans in Preston. They were different socially, you could say. They were Cajuns, from a small town in southern Louisiana, and they did things in their own style. They didn’t go to the Pan-American Club or play golf or polo or tennis or croquet or any of it. The Christmas pageant, the moonlit barge dances on the bay, yacht outings — there was always some sort of organized company fun happening, but you didn’t see the Allains at these things. I suppose they probably weren’t invited. But they wouldn’t have wanted to go to those events. They’d rather cook at the house or go fishing or hunting, camp out on the beach. Daddy had them in two squat brick houses down by the sugar mill and the hump yard where all the railroad cars sat. There were laundry lines strung between the two places, connecting them into one ragged compound, with diapers and kids’ T-shirts and Hatch and Rudy’s work coveralls flapping in the breeze that came over the seawall. Shredded clothes that didn’t look much different clean from dirty. I don’t know where they all slept — there must have been four or five of them to a room, so close to the sugar mill they were practically underneath it. The mill whistle was deafening down there, and during crushing season it blew on the hour every hour, twenty-four hours a day. This was how a lot of the Cubans kept track of time — not everyone had money to buy a watch. I think Daddy housed Hatch and Rudy down there to make sure there was no trouble. If something happened, they were two steps from the mill.