But it was the number fifty that began whispering in my ears and flashing behind my eyes. Trouble was coming.
“¿Que pasa, Jefe? Your face is white like una fantasma, a ghost!” mumbled Beto.
Chaki was busy making eyes with the big-breasted redhead who sat at the end of the bar. She was seductively dressed in a low-scoop black tank top, a tight red miniskirt, and black high-heeled strappy sandals. Her plump red lips pulled hard on the end of her cigarillo negro that she let hang from her clenched front teeth. An ethereal cloud of blue smoke filled the space all around her as she winked at Chaki.
“Jefe, Beto’s right. You really do look terrible!” Bobo squealed in his usual high-pitched tone. “You want something to drink? Maybe a malta?”
I shivered with a sudden unexplainable wave of paranoia. My fingers began to tremble.
“Come on, consortes. We’ve got to leave here, ahora! Now!”
“No way! We just got here!” argued Chaki. “I’m not going anywhere until I meet that redhead over there. Don’t you see how she’s looking at me?” Chaki’s chest inflated with immature, boyish pride and the dimples in his cheeks deepened in his smooth cheeks.
Beto and Bobo let out a pair of jealous chuckles at Chaki’s flirtations but kept their eyes focused on me. I couldn’t shake the dreadful feeling that we needed to get out of there as fast as possible. Over and over, the number fifty flashed like a neon sign behind my stinging eyes. The assembled band on the stage began pounding out the popular African beat, “Toque Oyo.”
My body began to shiver with chilly spasms. I scrambled quickly to the ground and managed to crawl on hands and knees, hiding under the tables and crossing the hardwood floors, toward the nightclub’s front doors. An odd feeling told me to take cover.
Just then, there was a burst of panicky movement and a crash of glass from behind the bar. The small crowd of patrons screamed and scrambled to the back corners of the smoky lounge. The women at the bar puckered their red lips and crunched their eyebrows. They jumped up nervously and pressed their way past their drunken suitors. Since the room was still pretty empty, I was more paranoid that I and my compadres were all the more noticeable. Just then, the police came crashing through the front doors and everything seemed to freeze.
From my prone position on the floor by the nightclub’s doors, I managed to reach the hotel’s main entryway, push through the heavy front doors, and sprint down the boardwalk that ran along the ocean’s edge. I raced past all the blaring sirens and the distant blasts and the commotion that was beginning to spill out of the hotel onto the street. It was a risk to be on the streets and in the nightclubs; the president’s authorities were prickly to make trouble for anyone found in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had to get out of there and back home as fast as possible. I couldn’t afford another drama in my life.
I kept running forward all the way down the seawall and broad esplanade roadway to the nearby neighborhood of my mother’s home. I was quickly winded and gasping for puffs of air that numbed the tip of my tongue all the way back to my throat, but I kept going.
My mother’s house was coming into view up in front of me. With no time to get to my grandparents’ place nearer to Centro Habana, I quickly decided that I would have to stop and stay with Mamá and Saul that night. Second mistake of the evening.
I tiptoed inside the familiar house and headed straight for my old bedroom. I was thankful to find Mamá and Saul both asleep, Saul snoring loudly in the still darkness. Dizzy and panting deeply, I felt a wave of relief slip over me, despite knowing Saul was there.
I got into my old bed, still fully clothed, and squeezed my eyes shut, the number fifty still flashing behind my eyelids. It was the undisputable Charada number for police. Lying on my bed, I shuddered with fear before my wheezing slowed and a fitful slumber finally overtook me.
7
I woke with the rising sun shining through the embroidered linen curtains that rustled softly in my bedroom window. Although I felt lucky that I had managed to escape all the chaos of the previous night, my chest was still sore and heavy, and my head pounded with the force of a jackhammer. I was dazed with the fatigue and panic that still filled my aching body. I was mentally and physically exhausted.
Did my buddies also make it to their homes safely? All this mess because of Bobo’s cabrón coconut scheme! I rationalized to myself. It was always easy to blame things on Bobo.
The dreadful realization hit me that I now had another problem to worry about. Yes, I had managed to dodge the police raid the night before, but this morning, it was my mother and Saul I would have to contend with. I jumped out of bed, my sweaty shirt still clinging to my pasty skin, and went to the bathroom to rinse out my parched mouth and splash cold water on my face. A little fresher but still drunk with panic, I walked slowly, cautiously, down the hallway to the kitchen.
Silence.
I could smell the strong, bitter aroma of coffee brewing. And then I saw it. A single passport laid out on the kitchen table right next to a bunch of blackening plantains.
Saul and Mamá couldn’t possibly know about last night already.
I stood there in the kitchen doorway, staring at the lone passport on the table, my body quivering with chills, despite the insidious tropical heat. Startled by the sudden sound of Mamá’s low voice behind me, my bony knee knocked into the kitchen table.
“You choose, Maxwell,” Mamá was saying. “It’s up to you, but today you will decide.” She emphasized the word today and continued in a quiet whisper, “Either you go to Israel to live with your father’s cousins on their kibbutz or…you can go to New York to stay with your Tío Daniel.”
A maddened grunt escaped from deep inside my mother’s heaving rib cage as she let the mention of my uncle and my father escape through her clenched teeth and thin lips.
There were options? My father had cousins in Israel? Mamá had contact with my estranged Tío Daniel? What the hell?
I figured I was in for some kind of heavy reprimand for getting caught sneaking into the nightclub. But this choice I was being given seemed overly drastic. I mean, what choice was I really being given? I would have to leave my friends and my home.
Who cares where I choose to go—I don’t want to go anywhere!
Mamá’s voice remained low and composed, but I knew her well enough to detect the seriousness of her tone. This time, she meant business, and I wasn’t feeling all that lucky at that moment.
My mother had never been a woman of many words. She didn’t talk or share much with others, especially not about the years before I was born and especially not about her brother Daniel. She had always maintained a wall of ambiguity around her—and more so since my father died, I had been told.
Everyone had noticed the change in my mother’s demeanor when she lost my father. Mimi Chekovski, they would comment, had become “aloof,” “introverted,” “lifeless,” “distraught”—characteristics that really began to weigh her down. She hardly ever left the house, even to go to the synagogue on Saturday mornings. More quiet and reserved than ever, Mamá never really ever got over the loss of her great love. She had grown detached and stoic.
And now she was offering me a choice that lay squarely upon the backs of my uncle and my father—the two biggest, most obscure, mysteries
