Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Pepé Le Pew was joining the French Foreign Legion. It was Duffy’s turn to pick the television program, and she always chose cartoons. She lay on the couch, sick with a cold. It didn’t seem so serious, but Marjorie Lederer thought they better stay home and keep an eye on her, especially after people said the Allain girl was walking around with tuberculosis.

“Just because we’re staying home doesn’t mean you have to,” Marjorie Lederer told Everly. “Mrs. Stites called. She and K.C. are really looking forward to seeing you. Val is going. Why not go on over with Val and have a bit of fun?” Everly didn’t want to go, wasn’t in the mood to put on a dress and have Mrs. Stites tell her she looked lovely and coerce K.C. into agreeing. Lately, despite all the worry and the way her parents talked at home about the situation in the mountains, the tension up at the mine, the adults all seemed overly gay, almost hysterical, insisting on throwing parties and having a good time regardless of whether they actually were.

Everly was on the floor, reading and watching television at the same time, a skill she’d been working on. Willy said it was possible to do two things at once as long as you decided which was the rhythm and which the melody. Your mind would sort out how to organize and absorb two different activities as long as you labeled one of them major and the other minor. He listened to music and read Popular Mechanics and said he could sing and write a letter at the same time, do addition and subtraction while making corn bread. He said if Everly practiced, she might get to where her mind could absorb two melodies or two rhythms — things of equal value — and lose nothing of either. But that this was an advanced level.

“I want to forget,” Pepé Le Pew said, disconsolate about something. Everly and Duffy had missed that part. Pepé Le Pew was in a Foreign Legion enlistment office. He signed on the dotted line. Then he was stinking up the bunks, and men with anchor tattoos and little French hats with pom-poms were running for their lives with clothespins on their noses. They left him to defend the fort all by himself. Poor Pepé Le Pew. He couldn’t smell himself, but who really could? And no matter how the story changed, the object of Pepé Le Pew’s affection was never real. Not once did they give him an actual skunk to be in love with. She was always an illusion, a cat that had somehow gotten a white stripe of paint down her back. But if he ever did catch the skunk-disguised cat, he would see that she wasn’t what he’d thought, and that all along he’d been running after an illusion. Maybe by dodging him, the cat and the people who made the cartoon were saving Pepé Le Pew from an awful discovery, possibly worse than heartbreak—

An airplane roared over the house, rattling the window shutters and the liquor bottles on the cart in the living room. There was a loud plunk on the veranda. It sounded like something metal.

“What on earth?” Marjorie Lederer said, coming out of the kitchen.

A three-foot bomb had dropped right on their veranda, then rolled down the steps and into the yard, without detonating.

It looked like a smaller version of the laughing-gas tank at the dentist’s office, drab and metal and tapered on one end. They weren’t to go anywhere near the front door.

George Lederer called the security office at the plant. The rebels had apparently come into town to steal gasoline, and Batista was strafing them. Right in Nicaro, he was bombing and strafing them. They could hear the planes flying over and out to the bay, turning around and flying over again. “If only we had a basement,” Marjorie Lederer kept saying. “There’s no basement — where do we go?”

“This is American property,” George Lederer yelled into the phone, “and we’re being attacked by the Cuban military? How can they bomb us? We’ve got goddamn ammonia. They hit those tanks by the bay and this place will go sky high.”

Mr. Billings, the head of company security, instructed everyone to seek shelter in the mine. Mrs. Carrington, who hadn’t gone to the party in Preston, either, fetched the Lederers in her husband’s Cadillac, which the company was allowing her to drive while they sorted things out. A compassionate gesture, Everly’s mother had said, in the wake of Tip Carrington’s disappearance at the hands of the rebels.

When they got to the mine it was already crammed with people — Cuban nickel company employees and their families, the guajiros who squatted in burned-out Levisa, Jamaican servants, even the Chinese vendors. She didn’t see Willy, and heard someone say that the servants who slept in the navy barracks had been told to stay put.

So much of it was a blur, the false alarms that the mine was under attack and they would all have to relocate, followed by announcements that they were to remain where they were. In the early morning, a ship’s horn sounded over and over, a U.S. Navy vessel taking them to safety.

“Only Americans,” a plant security officer announced. “ Solo Americanos.”

They needed to get from the mine to the dock, but the Cubans panicked and tried to prevent them from leaving. Pushed and shoved them and blocked the road. “What about us!?” they shouted. Everly knew so many of them — the women who worked in the bakery, and the men from the ice factory near the bay, Lumling, who came by with his cart every afternoon selling little pineapples. One of the gardeners from the club slashed the tires of Mr. Carrington’s Cadillac as they tried to get in it.

“If you leave they’ll bomb us!” a woman cried, grabbing Everly by the shoulders. “There’s nothing here for them to protect if you go. You can’t go.”

They were taken out in dinghies to a giant ship. To board it, they had to climb a tall ladder. The United Fruit people, and those from Nicaro who’d been at the party in Preston that evening, were staring from along the ship’s railing like zombies, bloody and stitched up and wrapped in surgical gauze like boxers after a fight.

Everly’s mother struggled on the ladder. She slipped and almost fell. Mrs. Carrington, the next person down, caught her. Later, Everly’s mother said that Blythe Carrington was as strong as a man.

The navy ship moved out toward sea slowly, waiting for mines to be removed from the mouth of the harbor. It was morning now, but the fog on the bay was so thick it sopped up the rays of the rising sun and cast a gloomy, opaque white light. As the ship moved out of the harbor, the mountains above Nicaro began to fade, purplish-gray apparitions dissolving in a sea of milk.

There was no red haze of nickel oxide, Everly realized, as she watched Nicaro recede. The chimneys were cold, the plant shut down. The town was clean of its usual coating of dust. The clouds weren’t stained and dirty. There was no fine silt on the surface of the water. It’s so nice, she thought sadly, without us.

On the open ocean, she could see an aircraft carrier in the distance. It shadowed them all the way to Guantánamo. Duffy cried and said she forgot something. Everly’s father asked her what could be so important. “My corals,” she said through tears. Duffy collected things and put them in old cigar boxes that the bartenders from the club gave to her. Pieces of coral, shells, dead insects. Even a decomposing bird, which the Lederers insisted she remove from her bedroom. She buried it in the yard but then dug it up a week later, telling Everly she wanted to see what had happened. There was almost nothing left of it, eaten by the teeming, tropical earth.

Something about the opaque fog, the disorienting experience of being on that drab and enormous ship, the bandaged survivors from the bombing in Preston, made everyone dazed and quiet. Even the Allains, the loudest people on earth, were silent and grim. They huddled around Panda, who was laid out on a navy cot, sick and coughing. Her feet stuck out from the end of the blanket they’d wrapped her in. She was wearing Giddle’s old tap shoes, the black patent leather scuffed and dull, the metal plates bolted to the soles ground down unevenly. It must have been a privilege of illness to wear the coveted tap shoes.