Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

After dinner they brought out the instruments. Curtis Junior and his cousin Mitty played fiddle and accordion, and Genevieve, Eglantine, and Tee-Tee took turns dancing on a piece of linoleum. Eglantine — or Giddle, as they called her — had tap shoes. The rest of the girls did a sort of fake tap dance in bare feet. I remember the metal taps on Giddle’s soles click-clacking on the playground blacktop — she wore them to school every day, like they were just normal shoes. Rudy’s littlest, Panda, she sang. Panda was maybe seven years old and she had this strange, beautiful voice, not in a conventional sense, but she had something special and they all knew it. Panda had long, dirty blond hair, always a big snarl right at the back of her head, a plum-colored birthmark around one eye. She once came to school in her nightgown. I have no idea why. Miss Sparks sent her home and told her to come back dressed properly. I guess kids wear what they want to, pajamas, tap dancing shoes, when there are a lot of them and not much supervision. Curtis and Mitty dressed like guajiros, pants cut off at the knee, a rope through the belt loops, no socks, canvas tennis shoes with holes in them. Even Tee-Tee, good-looking in her peculiar way, was just as dirty as the rest of them.

Panda sang, and Curtis and Mitty played accompaniment. Hatch kept time, slapping an enormous hand on an enormous thigh, and sipping from a bottle of Methuselah rum. Now, that’s what you call rotgut. Thirty cents a liter at the almacén. The United Fruit executives drank Dewar’s White Label scotch whiskey. It was the company’s official drink. A gentleman named Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father, ran the Dewar’s franchise in the States, and he was a friend of Daddy’s. It’s no secret that United Fruit people were involved in the Bay of Pigs. And the son of the CEO of the company that distilled our official whiskey is who they all later blamed for deserting them, for the missed opportunity to get the sugar empire back. Dewar’s White Label is what the younger guys drank as well, the bachelors who hung around at the Pan-American Club, sat on the terrace watching the dockhands load three-hundred-pound sugar sacks. This was United Fruit management, and there were rituals, ways of doing pretty much everything. You wore a white duck suit with the bejesus starched out of it; you lived in a house full of servants; your children were raised by Jamaican nannies; you listened to the company stock quotes on the portable; you sent your kids to bed when Lowell Thomas said “So long until tomorrow,” and you sipped your Dewar’s White Label scotch whiskey. The Allain brothers wore oil-stained coveralls; their wives did all the cooking and cleaning and laundry; their children ran wild; and Hatch drank from that jug of rotgut like it was an elixir from heaven.

That first night I had dinner there — supper, they called it — Daddy made me strip down in the garage, and Hilton Hardy hosed me off before I was allowed to come into the main house. Daddy didn’t object to my going down to the Allains. He just didn’t want me “traipsing it into the house.” “It” meaning lower class — not a thing you could catch. I think Daddy figured if I was going to be friends with Curtis, he wanted me to remain aware of the differences between us. Eventually I stopped having to strip down and hose off in the garage, and could just return home from the Allains like I’d been on a normal outing. Daddy would still pretend to grab lice out of my hair, or he’d tell Annie to check me for fleas, but he was only kidding.

Before we had the fight, Curtis and I did everything together, built forts, made slingshots, swam in the river, rode our bikes out to the airstrip to shoot doves. Rudy took us down to Mayarí in a company truck, to buy fireworks and shotgun shells. Every Sunday the Allains had a huge cookout — venison, oysters, lobster, you name it — and I was always invited. They treated me like one of their own, especially after I found Panda for them. Panda disappeared on a Saturday afternoon and Mars was a wreck, wringing her hands and crying. Rudy and Hatch got a search party together. I remember them loading shotguns in the kitchen. They were convinced someone had kidnapped her, and they went down to the cane cutters’ batey, did a sweep from shack to shack to see if someone had her down there. They combed the town and no one could find her, a seven-year-old girl, just plain disappeared. But Panda was a funny child, not at all like the rest of them. She was in her own world, and I had a feeling she might have just walked off, maybe for a little peace and quiet. The second day she was missing, I was walking through the hump yard, along the railroad tracks. Just ahead of me was Daddy’s Pullman car, the sun glinting off its dark green paint, with yellow lettering along its side that said United Fruit Company. Daddy used it for trips to Havana. The company had the DC-3s, and Daddy could have taken one and been there in an hour, but he was old-fashioned. All the old United Fruit gentlemen were like that. Occasionally he flew, but often, when Daddy went to Havana, they’d latch his Pullman car to the main line in Holguín, and from there it was an overnight ride. The car was elegant — red velvet drapery, velvet upholstery, a teakwood-paneled office, gold faucets in the washroom, a dining room with silver, Wedgwood china, white tablecloths. It was cleaned on a regular schedule, and sometimes the cleaning ladies forgot to lock it up.

As I walked along the side of the car, I heard this little voice through the closed windows. I opened the door, and there was Panda, hair all knotted and hanging in her face, that birthmark like a wine stain spreading out around her eye. She was singing and talking to herself, sitting on the floor playing with a doll, making it move around like it was talking to her. She’d brought a suitcase, and she had stuff strewn everywhere. She looked up at me. “We’re going to Havana!” she said. I told her everyone was worried, that maybe we ought to go see Mars and let her know Panda was okay. She told me she was sick of sharing a bed with Genevieve, that Genevieve kicked her in her sleep. I almost felt sad to have to take her home. Not every personality is suited to a family like the Allains.

Curtis and I did a lot of fishing, and we’d give what we caught to Mars and Flordelis for the Sunday cookouts. Sometimes it was me, Curtis, and Del. Saturday night we packed bedrolls, sandwiches, and fishing gear, a radio set maybe, and loaded them on a popshot, which is a little four-wheeled open car that runs on the railroad tracks, with a lever to control it. You put the popshot in gear by pushing the lever, and there were pulleys that slackened to slow it down, and you had a brake. We’d take it down to the end of the pier, put out crab cages, and spend the night down there. If we had the radio set we’d listen to Clavelito’s show, for kicks. It came on at 8:00 P.M., and they syndicated it all over the island. Sometimes, at dusk, I’d ride my bike along the access road between the cane fields and the workers’ shanties. You could hear this eerie echo, all the radios tuned to Clavelito’s show, his strange high voice coming from the dark bohios. They had batteries but no electricity. Clavelito cured people over the radio. I mean supposedly. He made predictions on winning lottery numbers — that’s the other thing the Cubans were addicted to besides Clavelito, the lotería. Sometimes he played the guitar and sang. We joked about Clavelito curing people by telling them to put a glass of water on their radio as he spoke. Then they’d drink the water. But there must have been something to the guy, a charisma, because why else would we have listened? The truth is I listened all the time. Everybody did.

The serious fishing was over at Cayo Saetía, and Hatch decided to organize a trip and take us boys. This was about a year after the Allains arrived, when Curtis and I had the fight.