Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Beyond the nickel plant, she could see the roped-off area of Levisa Bay where they swam. There was a mesh wall around the swimming area, which had been Mr. Carrington’s idea. One day Portuguese man-o’-wars had floated in, hundreds of them slopping over the rope on a high wave, everyone screaming and splashing their way out of the water. Everly had seen a photograph of a fish caught in the tendrils of a man-o’-war. The caption said the tendrils grew to be sixteen feet. The fish was paralyzed and would be eaten, but it looked so relaxed. Sometimes you didn’t want to be able to move. You just wanted to be held. The same book had illustrations of parrots that were native to eastern Cuba. But they’d been extinct for four hundred years, the book explained, because a Spanish conquistador and the men of his court had eaten them as a delicacy. It seemed that “delicacy,” the way the book described it, meant not rarely, like on a special holiday, when you’d eat a Dubuque ham or a pot roast, but as often as possible until there were no more parrots. They were conquistadors. They’d come a long way and were ready to gorge themselves. Everly couldn’t imagine that anything so showy and beautiful would be tasty. The metallic blue and emerald green of a parrot’s feathery coat made her think of something bitter and not meant to be eaten, like talcum powder or pencil erasers. The delicacy hadn’t been so much about taste. The point was to eat a bird that talked. She imagined the Spanish teaching the parrots to repeat cruel and offensive phrases. The parrots squawking, “Get out of here! You’re ugly and stupid! I hate you!” The Spanish would then get so angry they’d kill the parrots. “Take that, you rotten bird. Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?” And then they would eat them in revenge. It was terrible to think about, but it was interesting, too. Because it meant that eating was no longer about filling up. Making hunger go away. It was more like a court proceeding, with punishment and justice.

They could see a huge ship coming into the Nicaro dock. Mr. Carrington explained that it was there to pick up the nickel ore and take it to Louisiana for processing. Men were rolling carts down the seatrain track — a track that led to nothing, until a ship was docked, and the carts rolled from the track onto the ship.

No children were allowed on the dock when shipments were coming in. It was dangerous, her mother said. A grapple iron could swing around and kill you, just like that. Once, Everly and K.C. had sneaked onto the dock to watch an enormous ship anchoring. Workers from the ship began unloading heavy-looking bags of something, the bags sending up clouds of dust as they whomped into piles on the wooden dock. There was funny, blocky writing on the ship’s side, an unreadable alphabet that looked like barbed wire. The workers were shouting in a language that was all consonants crushed together. They had big, muscley arms and hoisted the heavy bags hand to hand, one to the other in a chain. Some of them were wearing head scarves tied under their chins, which seemed peculiar until Everly realized they were women. With large, heavy breasts, hanging low like they weren’t wearing brassieres. Her mother said if women didn’t wear brassieres their breasts would drop. Everly guessed this had happened to the foreign women on the Nicaro docks. Everly was eleven and flat-chested, but her mother made her wear a training bra so her breasts would learn, from early on, not to drop. Her mother said she might just develop overnight, the way Stevie had. She said Everly was “making progress” and she might just yet turn out to be a looker, against all odds. Everly wasn’t sure if her mother was complimenting her or hurting her feelings. Stevie wore a woman’s-sized dress now, and had a woman’s-sized bust and hips. The Lederers, who still didn’t know about Tico Leál, said they better watch her, because it was that age for trouble. Stevie saw Tico in secret. Once she came home and told Everly that Tico had pressed himself against her and she’d felt his thing. What thing? “If you don’t already know,” Stevie said, “you’re too young to find out.” Once she thought about it, of course she knew. But when Stevie said it, Everly didn’t realize. You can know something but not the codes of when it’s being referred to. When their parents finally did learn about Tico Leál, two years later, they talked about “nipping the situation in the bud.” But by then it was too late for that.

Everly and K.C. had watched the foreign women tossing the bags hand to hand. They were all women, even the captain. K.C. said they were Russian. Where were the men? He said they all died in the war.

That night, the Russian women had come into town. They were at Las Palmas. The Lederers’ house was close enough to the club that Everly could hear faint shouting and laughter and stomping. Her father returned with a cube of smoked pig’s fat wrapped in newspaper that the captain had given him.

“Did all the Russian men die in the war?” Everly asked.

“A lot of them,” her father said.

Mr. Carrington made them put on hard hats for the tour of the mining area. He took extra-special care to fasten the chinstrap of Miss Alfaro’s hard hat. Miss Alfaro said she felt like a tomboy in the hard hat, and Mr. Carrington assured her that nothing could make Miss Alfaro look like a tomboy. Everly’s hard hat was too big. It smelled like the sweat of a grown man and kept slipping down over her eyes. Four hundred men, Mr. Carrington told them, worked the mines. Seven days a week. A different shift of men worked at night. They saw men shoveling ore into railcars, rags tied around their heads to protect them from the sun. Not under their chins, like the Russian sailor women — more like Ali Baba, rags tied around and around, the ends tucked in. They bent over and struck at the hard earth with axes that had a sharp tooth on the end. Chink, chink, chink. “This is called strip mining,” Mr. Carrington said. It seemed a gargantuan task, to scoop out the earth by hand. The workers glared at Miss Alfaro in her tight skirt and hard hat. Stevie had prepared for the field trip as if it would be a date with Tico Leál, but there was no sign of him. The operation was huge, bigger than any of them had imagined.

A labor boss sat in the shade of a tree, watching the workers. A single tree, the rest of the land rust-colored and sun-baked and treeless. Maybe they left the one tree there just for the labor boss. He wore green-tinted eyeglasses, and a gun in a holster hung from his belt. He sat perfectly still, holding a glass of cane juice. He looked awake and asleep at the same time, like a lizard.

She lay in bed that night moving her mind around the features of the agitator D. L. Mazierre. The adults said “troublemakers” about people who were causing problems for the company. But Willy made it sound like the troublemakers were the good guys. They just wanted to be paid fair wages and to live in decent conditions. He said unions were legal in Cuba, a tradition, part of the way things were run. But if you worked for an American company, you were not allowed to organize a union. He said that people were organizing anyway. It was a secret that he was confiding in her. Everly was so thrilled to be trusted by Willy that she never would have told anyone, no matter what.

D. L. Mazierre was involved. Maybe he was coming to organize the workers so they could have fair wages. In the photograph, there had been numbers on his shoulder. They looked like a military stripe, but they must have been for identification, like the numbers men held up in post office wanted posters. In Oak Ridge, it had been her hobby to look at the wanted posters and scan the people in line to see if there was a match. Whenever she had a fever, she dreamed the same dream, that she was in a prison that doubled as a mausoleum, with human bones lodged in its sandy floor. Real prison was probably even worse than her fever mausoleum-prison, and she couldn’t blame the men in the post office photographs for escaping. “Wanted” on the posters did not mean desired.