Libra - Don Delillo [57]
He told Parmenter he would stay in close touch with Guy Banister. Banister’s detective agency was the. Grand Central Station of the Cuban adventure. Every type renegade passed through. Guy would help them locate a substitute for this kid who’d disappeared. Someone rated expert with a rifle and scope. A shooter who could blast a finger off a dangling man.
When Parmenter was gone, T-Jay sat in the bleachers watching the Vietnamese bounce each other around. The hot new station was Saigon. It was the talk around the base. They were putting Cuba in a box, which was okay with him. Let them forget. Let them find a new excitement. It would make the moment in Miami all the more powerful.
Some hours later Mackey was in his trailer in the woods outside Williamsburg. Light beams floated through the trees and then he heard the ghetto clank of Raymo’s ’57 Bel Air. He opened the trailer door and watched them get out, two men showing the stiff weighted movements of long-distance drivers.
Mackey said, “Just in time for dinner except there isn’t any.”
The words sounded abrupt and clean in the empty night.
“Maybe just a swallow. Un buchito,” Raymo said. “We ate on the road.”
The other man, Frank Vásquez, was occupied getting blankets and clothes out of the rear seat and then he backed out and stood erect and half turned, his hands occupied, and gave the door a rough shove with his hip and followed with a sweet kick, knocking it shut. Raymo, approaching the trailer, gave a little head-shake at the other man’s treatment of the once-gorgeous car.
“Plenty of coffee,” Mackey said. “Good to see you. How are things?”
“Good to see you. Long time. How are things?”
“Hello, T-Jay.”
“Hello, Frank. I thought you were getting your teeth fixed.”
“He never does it,” Raymo said.
They embraced, pounding each other on the back, abrazos, absent-minded collisions.
“How are things?”
“Long time.”
“Too long, my friend.”
Standing by the trailer door exchanging nods, looks, half sentences, everything so clearly shaped, their words sounding well made in the fine light air.
Mackey made room for their things in the trailer. Then they sat drinking coffee. Raymo was at the fold-out table, a thickset man with a wide mustache. He wore a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, fatigue pants, combat boots. His lounging outfit. Mackey definitely wanted Raymo in on this. Raymo could not light a match, walk his dog, scratch his head without infusing the act with the single-minded energy of his rage. It was a consciousness they shared unspokenly, Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, the Battle of Girón-whatever you wanted to call it. Even his stockiness, all that dense flesh, seeméd a form of energy and purpose. A flamingo was etched on his T-shirt. He was the one man T-Jay trusted completely.
“We spent part of April with the harvest.”
“Picking oranges in central Florida,” Frank said.
“We fill ten-box tubs. How many pounds you think that is?”
“He fell off the ladder,” Frank said.
“I’m telling you, man, it’s hard labor.”
“Then what, we go to Live Oak near the Georgia border.”
“We stack these huge bales of tobacco,” Raymo said. “Like in huge sheets they’re called. They work our ass, T-Jay.”
Mackey knew they were working every job they could, night work, spare time, odd job, to save enough money to start a business, maybe a service station or small construction firm.
“Then my wife calls us from Miami,” Frank said. “We drive up here right away.”
Drive through Georgia and the Carolinas to hear what news T-Jay has for them. It could only be a Cuban operation. Nothing else would make him get in touch with them and nothing else would bring them here.
Vásquez sat on the bunk bed. He had a thin sad face and would have seemed at ease in a cobbler’s smock in some dark narrow shop on a fringe street of Little Havana. There were two rows of teeth in his lower jaw, or maybe one