Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [55]
He said, “God, Frankie. God.”
She could feel his hard thingy against her leg. Little electrical currents ran through her.
“Do you really love me?”
“Yeah. Christ, Frankie.”
She pressed her fingers on his and showed them what to do.
“I love you, too.”
She was both relieved and surprised that she meant it.
AT THIS POINT I need to take you on a short detour. I’m very much a cause-and-effect sort of a fellow. I’m fascinated by the way things fit together (and come to pieces). And if we were to take what eventually happened to Frankie and me and drew something like a flowchart of how it came about, one of its arrows would lead us into the darkness of a Caribbean night: the night of February 15, 1898, in fact. Just off the north coast of Cuba, in Havana Bay.
The half-moon appears only fitfully among slow-moving clouds, and stars are few and far between. It is very quiet. The only scraps of sound are the clop and trundle of the horse-drawn carriages along the Malecón, Havana’s seafront boulevard, and snatches of brassy music. Apart from where the city’s lights spill into the harbor, the sea is black. In its vastness, tiny spangles bob, the lamps of fishing boats. But there is one larger concentration of lights, those of an American warship, the USS Maine.
It is nine forty p.m. There are few strollers or lingerers along Havana’s shoreline; the authorities, having recently crushed another revolution, do not encourage the populace to gather after dark. But for those who witness it, who stagger and scream or are momentarily paralyzed by it, who are physically rocked by it, the explosion will be unforgettable. A vast plume of fire erupts from the sea, then forms itself into a boiling globe of red and orange that recolors the city. The sound comes an instant later, a lumbering thunderclap that seems to last an impossibly long time, echoing, even though there is nothing for it to echo from. The Maine has blown up. The front third of the ship, where most of its crew were sleeping or playing cards or writing letters, has been transformed into fiery vapor. The sleepers, the gamblers, the writers, have disintegrated. Their bits, their atoms, are hurled into the sky, then rain down onto the surface of the sea, like the grains of an exhausted firework. Within minutes the remaining hulk of the ship has gone, gulped onto the floor of the bay. Two hundred and sixty-six men are dead.
(By one of those coincidences that make you wonder if there is in fact a Scriptwriter Beyond the Stars, my grandmother Winifred entered the world, red, slippery, and resentful, just a few minutes later. Perhaps even before the waters had regathered themselves above the wreck of the Maine.)
Pretty much as soon as they were united, the United States of America started hankering after Cuba. (And still do.) How could they not? It was the biggest island in the Caribbean. Tropical and lush, blessed with lovely beaches, it was so temptingly close: only ninety miles from the southern tip of Florida. Its capital, Havana, is the same distance from Miami as Washington, D.C., is from New York City. The island grew lots of sugarcane, and America had a very sweet tooth. Unfortunately, Cuba was part of the Spanish Empire. (Spain’s hired Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, had discovered it, much to the surprise of the people who already lived there.) In 1848 President James Polk offered to buy it. The Spanish declined, in no uncertain terms, and continued to treat the Cubans very harshly, which greatly distressed the freedom-loving and