“I do. Very much.”
“Tell me about Wabmimi. Is it in the Far West?”
“No, it’s up north. In the part that’s near Canada.”
“I know Canada. I came into Montreal up the river once on a Princess ship. But it was raining and we could see nothing and we left that same evening for New York on the train.”
“Did it rain all the time on the river?”
“All the time. And outside, before we came into the river there was fog and part of the time it snowed. You can have Canada. Tell me about Wabmimi.”
“It was just a village where there was a sawmill on the river and the train ran through it. There were always great piles of sawdust beside the railroad tracks. They had booms across the river to hold the logs and they were almost solid across the river. The river was covered with logs a long way above the town. One time I had been fishing and I wanted to cross the river and I crawled across on the logs. One rolled with me and I went into the water.
When I came up it was all logs above me and I could not get through between them. It was dark under them and all I could feel with my hands was their bark. I could not spread two of them apart to get up to the air.”
“What did you do?”
“I drowned.”
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t say it. Tell me quick what you did?”
“I thought very hard and I knew I had to get through very quickly. I felt carefully around the bottom of a log until I came to where it was pushed against another log. Then I put my two hands together and pushed up and the logs spread apart just a little. Then I got my hands through and then my forearms and elbows through and then I spread the two logs apart with my elbows until I got my head up and I had an arm over each log. I loved each log very much and I lay there like that a long time between them. That water was brown from the logs in it. The water that’s like your drink was in a little stream that flowed into that river.”
“I don’t think I could ever have come up between the logs.”
“I didn’t think I could for a long time.”
“How long were you underwater?”
“I don’t know. I know I rested a long time with my arms on the logs before I tried to do anything else.”
“I like that story. But it will make me have bad dreams. Tell me something happy, Tom.”
“All right,” he said. “Let me think.”
“No. Tell one right away without thinking.”
“All right,” Thomas Hudson said. “When young Tom was a little baby—”
“¡Qué muchacho más guapo!” Honest Lil interrupted. “¿Qué noticias tienes de él?”
“Muy buenas.”
“Me alegro,” said Honest Lil, tears coming into her eyes at the thought of young Tom the flyer. “Siempre tengo su fotografía en uniforme con el sagrado corazón de Jesús arriba de la fotografía y al lado la virgen del Cobre.”
“You have great faith in the Virgen del Cobre?”
“Absolutely blind faith.”
“You must keep it.”
“And she is looking after Tom day and night.”
“Good,” said Thomas Hudson. “Serafín, another of these big ones, please. Do you want the happy story?”
“Yes, please,” Honest Lil said. “Please tell me the happy story. I feel sad again.”
“Pues el happy story es muy sencillo,” Thomas Hudson said. “The first time we ever took Tom to Europe, he was only three months old and it was a very old, small, and slow liner and the sea was rough most of the time. The ship smelled of bilge and oil and the grease on the brass of portholes and of the lavabos and the disinfectant they used that was in big pink cakes in the pissoirs—”
“Pues, this isn’t a very happy story.”
“Sí, mujer. You’re wrong as hell. This is a happy story, muy happy. I go on. The ship also smelled of baths you had to take at regular hours or be looked down on by the bath steward and of the smell of hot salt water coming out of the brass nozzles of the bath fixtures and of the wet wooden grate on the floor and of the starched jacket of the bath steward.
It also smelled of cheap English ship cooking which is a discouraging smell and of the dead butts of Woodbines, Players, and Gold Flakes in the smoking room and wherever they were dropped. It did not have one good smell, and as you know the English, both men and women, all have a peculiar odor, even to themselves, much as we have to Negroes, and so they have to bathe very often.
An Englishman never smells sweet as a cow’s breath does and a pipe-smoking Englishman does not conceal his odor. He only adds something to it. Their tweeds smell good and so does the leather of their boots and all their saddlery smells good. But there is no saddlery on a ship and the tweeds are impregnated with the dead pipe smell. The only way you could get a good smell on that ship was when your nose was deep in a tall glass of dry sparkling cider from Devon. This smelled wonderful and I kept my nose in it as much as I could afford. Maybe more.”
“Pues, it is a little more happy now.”
“Here is the happy part. Our cabin was so low, just above the water line, that the port had to be kept closed all the time and you saw the sea racing by and then you saw it solid green as the sea went past the porthole. We had built a barricade with trunks and suitcases roped together so that Tom could not fall out of the berth and when his mother and I would come down to see how he was, every time we ever came, if he was awake, he was laughing.”
“Did he really laugh when he was three months old?”
“He laughed all the time. I never heard him cry when he was a baby.”
“¡Qué muchacho más lindo más guapo!”
“Yes,” Thomas Hudson said. “Very high-class muchacho. Want me to tell you another happy story about him?”
“Why did you leave his lovely mother?”
“A very strange combination of circumstances Do you want another happy story?”
“Yes. But without so many smells In it.”
“This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots. How do you think frozen daiquiris would be if they were phosphorescent?”
“You could put phosphorus in them. But I don’t think it would be healthy. Sometimes people in Cuba commit suicide by eating phosphorus from the heads of matches.”
“And drinking tinte rápido. What is rapid ink?”
“It is a dye to make shoes black. But most often girls who have been crossed in love or when their fiancés have not kept their promises and done the things to them and then gone away without marrying, commit suicide by pouring alcohol on themselves and setting themselves on fire. That is the classic way.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “Auto da fé.”
“It’s very certain,” Honest Lil said, “They nearly always die. The burns are on the head first and usually all over the body. Rapid ink is more of a gesture. Iodine is au fond a gesture, too.”
“What are you two ghouls talking about?” Serafín the barman asked.
“Suicides.”
“Hay mucho,” Serafín said “Especially among the poor, I don’t remember a rich Cuban committing suicide Do you?”
“Yes,” Honest Lil said. “I know of several cases—good people, too.”
“You would,” Serafín said,
“Señor Tomás, do you want something to eat with those drinks? ¿Un poco de pescado? ¿Puerco frito? Any cold meats?”
“Sí,” Thomas Hudson said. “Whatever there is.”
Serafín put a plate of bits of pork, fried brown and crisped, and a plate of red snapper fried in batter so that it wore a yellow crust over the pink-red skin and the white sweet fish inside. He was a tall boy, naturally rough spoken, and he walked roughly from the wooden shoes he wore against the wet and the spillage behind the bar.
“Do you want cold meats?”
“No. This is enough.”
“Take anything they will give you, Tom,” Honest Lil said. “You know this place.”
The bar had a reputation for never buying a drink. But actually it gave an uncounted number of plates of hot free lunch each day; not only the fried fish and pork, but plates of little hot meat fritters and sandwiches of French-fried bread with toasted cheese and ham. The bartenders also mixed the daiquiris in a huge shaker and there was always at least a drink and a half left in the shaker after the drinks were poured.
“Are you less sad now?” Honest Lil asked
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Tom. What are you sad about?”
“El mundo entero.”
“Who isn’t sad about the whole world? It goes worse all the time. But you can’t spend your time being sad about that.”
“There isn’t any law against it.”
“There doesn’t have to be a law against things for them to be wrong.”
Ethical discussions with Honest Lil are not what I need, Thomas Hudson thought. What do you need, you bastard? You needed to get drunk which you are probably doing even though it does not seem so to you. There is no way for you to get what you need and you will never have what you want again. But there are various palliative measures you should take. Go ahead. Take one.
“Voy a tomar otro de estos grandes sin azúcar,” he said to Serafín.
“En
