The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [196]
As Trevor passed close to Annie, he leaned in to her and surprised her by whispering, “Trust Helen Clark. She’s with us. She’s got your back. Be careful, Annie.” He moved on as if he hadn’t spoken to her at all.
Lt. Commander Bok stopped Annie in the doorway. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir. With permission, sir, a question. If I can manage to get back to Key West in time, and make it to Patuxent River for the test flight, can I fly it?” She saluted him. “I would really like the opportunity, sir.”
A tiny smile escaped the edge of the lt. commander’s tightly compressed mouth. “Lieutenant Goode, if you can make it back to Sigsbee in time, the Navy will fly you to the test.”
“Thank you, sir!” Annie smiled so infectiously that even Officer Sims grinned back at her.
***
Dan fumed about McAllister Fierson as Annie and he followed a husky MP down a long corridor to the area where Raffy was being held. Fierson’s heading home to fish with his grandson on Jupiter Island struck Dan as “just right.” Jupiter Island, Florida, was the most expensive zip code in the United States; there were only about two hundred households there, most of them Duponts and Fords and Harrimans and the descendents of Prescott Bush and other Yale Bonesmen. “I guess he feels ‘comfortable.’”
Raffy sat crouched at the end of his cot in a neat, spare “confinement area.” His fingers laced around his knees and he was talking out loud to himself. He still wore the lime-green floppy trousers and yellow shirt with dancing alligators that he’d had on days ago and he looked dirty and tired. His voice was as soft and rhythmic as a rumba.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
So intent was the musician on Caliban’s poetry that he seemed not to hear their approach.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again…
The Cuban saw Annie and his face lightened, incandescent. “Annie! Can you believe what I just did?” He jumped to his feet, reached his manacled hands out to her. “I did a whole speech! Did you hear me do that whole speech?”
She took his hands. “I did.”
He was exuberant about his achievement. “It just all came into my mind! Just the way your papa would recite it for me in our cell. I could never do that before! I couldn’t retain the words. But now, just listen to me!
…And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
“A-plus, Raffy,” she told him.
“You look like shit, Rook,” growled Dan. “They haven’t messed with you, have they? Nothing nasty?”
Raffy pointed significantly at his ear, spun his finger at the ceiling of the room as if to suggest there were people up there listening. “Loneliness is the sum of my torture. As prisons go, it’s still America.”
Dan asked, “Then why’d you blab your guts? You gave it all up. I thought you were going to present that Jesus splinter to your mom in a big prodigal son number? But you gave it up to the Feds.”
The musician hunched his shoulders apologetically. “Annie, forgive me but I didn’t give up more than necessary to only serve eighteen months and I ask your pardon for what I did give up but if you’d done time in Dade County, well, all I can say is, if Hamlet thought Denmark was a prison, let him go to Dade County for eighteen months. I’d prefer no months at all, and losing la espina de la corona de Jesús Cristo to those s.o.b.s that was supposed to go to my mama, that is a deep, deep pain.” He sighed, his eyes large and sorrowful. “But vivamos nuestras vidas cotidianas.”
Annie explained to Raffy that he was about to be released into Dan’s custody. “And guess what? We are going to Cuba. You were right about that.” Annie told him