Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

I don’t like to think of Hatch Allain as any kind of monster. You could feel his power, but he was nothing but kind to me. I beat up his kid and knocked him off a second-story balcony, and Hatch wasn’t angry about it. In the hospital waiting room, worried as hell about Curtis, Hatch was joking around and calling me “slugger.” In a lot of ways he was gentler with me than my own father. When I was six years old, Daddy dragged me out into the yard, by the servants’ quarters and the garage where we kept the two Buick limousines. There was a pig tied up back there, a gift from some of the sugar mill workers. At Christmas, the employees who got on well with Daddy would bring him a pig. Daddy hit the pig with a hammer. The poor animal squealed something horrible. I was just a little kid and I hadn’t seen anything so rough before. I started crying and begging him to stop. He had a grim expression, and he hit the pig with the hammer again, and again. There was blood everywhere. The obvious lesson is that pigs are food and not pets, and it’s a father’s duty to make his child understand this. But I think Daddy also wanted me to understand that life is violent and arbitrary and unfair — that it’s not easy, like a child might think, especially a child like me, living in a paradise, coddled by Mother and by Annie, no worries, always having a ball. He beat that pig to death with a hammer in our backyard, and he made me watch.

While Curtis was in the hospital that week, more Nicaro people arrived. The rains didn’t let up, and the Levisa River flooded the road up to Nicaro, so everybody had to come into Preston instead. They stayed at the company hotel and waited to be taken over to Nicaro in launches. These people and their kids were on the town square, they were at the almacén, at the Pan-American Club. Mother entertained some of them. Daddy was still in Havana, ironing things out with Batista and his new ministers. That’s when the Mackeys first came to our house. The Mackeys’ son, Phillip, was Del’s age, and those two hit it off immediately. Phillip was a class clown, an instant ringleader. We all went to the movies in a big group, and Phillip stood up in front of the screen, cutting into the projector’s beam and doing hand puppets. Someone threw a hot dog at him. He caught it with one hand and took a bite out of it. Everybody’s personality was on display, the talent show that happens when there are a lot of kids, and it became immediately apparent who was going to be most popular. Like at summer camp, there was a mad grab, social cliques forming, but Curtis wasn’t part of it. Eventually he and I made peace, but for a while the Nicaro kids were the new thing. A bunch of them, Phillip Mackey, the Lederer girls, and some others came to Preston every weekend. The boys would all go fishing, or we’d have cookouts at the swimming pool.

The week the Nicaro people were arriving in Preston, Mother invited the Lederers over for lunch. Annie made arroz con pollo, and the three Lederer girls wolfed it down and asked for seconds. Their mother said she was surprised they would eat anything besides a hamburger. After lunch, we all sat in the parlor, and Everly Lederer played piano. I remember that there was a tussle between her and her mother; maybe Everly didn’t want to play. What she played sounded nice, different from what Mother played on the piano. Mother played old show tunes, Tin Pan Alley — not classical music. I was enjoying it, and amused at this little girl who was so serious and dramatic, bent over the keys. But then she hit a wrong note, and then another, and got frustrated and stopped playing. She banged the keyboard with the side of her hand and ran out of the room. Mrs. Lederer said she had a temper, and that she was awfully sorry for the behavior. Mother ran after her. She told Everly Lederer that it was our old stupid piano, that it was out of tune. It was so humid in Oriente that the piano tuner would come, and by the next day the piano was out of tune and he had to come back again. “It’s the piano,” Mother said, “it’s not you.”

Afterward I took Everly and Stevie on a tour; that was my job with all the new Nicaro kids that week. I was going to just take a loop around town, show them the movie theater, the swimming pool, the mill, our school. But when we passed near Daddy’s Pullman car, I decided to take them inside. I showed the Lederer girls where Daddy slept, and the compartment where I slept when I went with him on trips, the little transom window that I could slide open above my single bed to get a breeze going if I wanted one, the worktable with flip-down seats where I did my homework, Daddy sitting across from me running company numbers. I told them how a porter would come in and bring me a cherry cola, serve Daddy his demi-demi. And how the porter never spilled anything no matter what, even when the train was rounding a bend and leaning over to one side. Daddy’s Pullman car was special to me. It felt like I was showing them something private — my own bedroom, or some other bedroom, almost more private than my real one, which I only wished for and thought about. The older girl, Stevie, was unimpressed. But Everly seemed to understand that it was a kid’s fort on wheels, a place where you could sit and enjoy the green landscape rolling past, and daydream.

Mother was gentle with all children, but she had a soft spot for Everly Lederer. I think I did, too, although I didn’t quite realize it at the time. I was nine years old, and at that age you’re not so aware, or reflective, when you’re drawn to someone. I think Everly was about eight, cross-eyed, with these thick glasses, fire-red hair, couldn’t be in the sun for thirty seconds before she burned pink as a boiled lobster, and feisty. At a kids’ pool party the next weekend, she saw me and Del and Phillip Mackey going off the high dive and insisted on doing the same. She landed flat on her belly — you could hear it when she hit the water. That poor girl. It must have hurt like hell, but she pretended everything was fine. Got out of the pool and limped over to her towel and wouldn’t let anyone come near her.

Everly had fibbed to some of the kids in Oak Ridge that she’d be getting a pet monkey in Cuba, but someone in Preston really did have a monkey.

Its name was Poncho and it belonged to Mr. and Mrs. LaDue. Everly’s mother said the LaDues were “empty nesters” and that Mrs. LaDue believed that the monkey was her child. But no one would keep a child in a big cage out in the yard, and especially not at midday, when the child would have nowhere to hide from the blazing sun. The LaDues had peacocks that were allowed to wander free, waddling and preening under the shade of the LaDues’ tree ferns, while Poncho hung from the bars on the roof of his metal cage, looking at Everly. He blinked just like people blinked, and let her know with his bloodshot eyes that he was suffering from boredom, like a person might suffer from boredom. His look was passive — as though he accepted his fate, a life of hanging from the roof of a cage — but also questioning. He was trying to figure out if Everly might be sympathetic, though whether or not he wanted sympathy, she wasn’t sure. He was bored and passive and questioning, but he seemed to know that he and Everly were different types of beings, and he wasn’t planning on letting the matter go.

Her family had arrived in Preston late the night before. After three days of dark country roads, they were suddenly on an avenue lined with old-fashioned streetlamps, frosted white globes arranged in clusters like grapes, huge homes with yellow-lit windows. They spent the night at the United Fruit Company hotel, in a large suite with old-fashioned four-poster beds that creaked when you got into them, and heavy cotton sheets that had been ironed, her mother pointed out approvingly, adding that the place was remarkably fancy for a company hotel. “It’s the United FRUIT Company,” Duffy shouted, “and there are pineapples on the bedposts!” “Last call for alcohol,” George Lederer said, picking up Duffy, who screamed and kicked her legs. “Last call” meant Duffy was in that crazed state just before passing out.