This Way to Departures E-Book

Linda Mannheim

• Herausgeber: Influx Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

What happens when we leave the places we're from? What do we lose, and who do we become, and what parts of our pasts are unshakeable? Linda Mannheim's second short story collection focuses on people who have relocated – both voluntarily and involuntarily. Opening with Miami-set political thriller, 'Noir', this exquisitely rendered set of stories will leave you reeling. This Way to Departures is a deeply affecting portrait of American society and the constant search for a place to call 'home'.

Leseprobe

Published by Influx Press

49 Green Lanes, London, N16 9BU

www.influxpress.com / @InfluxPress

All rights reserved.

© Linda Mannheim, 2019

Copyright of the text rests with the author.

The right of Linda Mannheim to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

First edition 2019.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910312-43-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910312-44-5

Editor: Kit Caless

Cover design: Jamie Keenan

Cover photo: Copie157

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For George

Noir

Missing Girl, 5, Gone Fifteen Months

Butterfly McQueen on Broadway

The Place That He Can Never Return To

This Way to Departures

Facsimiles

The World’s Fair

Waiting for Daylight

The Young Woman Sleeps While The Artist Paints Her

The Christmas Story

Dangers of The Sun

Acknowledgements

‘I’d do anything for you,’ Sam told me once, when we were making love.

We were in the apartment we’d just moved to in South Beach, and the late afternoon sun slatted through palm leaves and sparked shards of light onto the sheets. The air conditioner was old and loud, and Sam’s video camera lay on the floor, where he had put it just as he was about to leave for class. My editor believed I was on assignment at that moment. Sam’s and my courtship was still new, just out of the box. He thought I was beautiful, and I wasn’t, so he must have been in love with me.

Pelo malo, my Aunt Julia used to say as she stood over me, offended by the curliness of my hair. La judía was the nickname she gave me because of my nose.

Sam would come to kiss me goodbye when he was about to leave, trace the contours of my face with his fingertips, and stay. Sometimes his brazen displays of romance so unnerved me, I’d look sideways for a way out. ‘I’d do anything for you,’ he told me, staring into my eyes.

‘I want you to kill my husband,’ I told him. ‘He has an insurance policy. We can make it look like an accident and we can be together then.’

We collapsed into each other’s arms, laughing.

That was the dialogue that became our running joke, our secret language, the code of our commitment.

‘Tonight, darling. We get rid of my husband tonight.’

And Sam would ask, ‘Does your husband know you’re here?’

Over time I perfected the staccato desperation of a 1940s movie star. We’d continue the exchange in restaurants, at parties, in bars.

Once, an acquaintance overheard and misunderstood.

‘Laura’s not married,’ Sam said. ‘We live together. It’s a game we play.’

Reputability wasn’t our strong spot.

Sam had silky auburn hair that he wore tied back, and was widely known among my friends as the last hippie left in Miami. He had run away to Coconut Grove in 1978, when it was still filled with crash pads and hash parties, before the Grove’s downtown turned into a shopping mall. Sam had long since gone back to school and gotten clean, but still managed to evoke a certain shunting of the status quo. I was told when I first met him that he had never been seen in any clothes but t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. He’d had a brief career as a child actor and automatically tried to lighten every situation he walked into, make the producers like him. I appreciated his ability to improvise, his flashing hazel eyes.

When we were at the beach, we walked into the waves until the water made us weightless and Sam could lift me without effort as if I were a newlywed he was carrying away. I put my arms around his neck and told him, ‘I feel like I’m in a war movie and this is our last night before you ship out.’

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I leave for Iwo Jima tomorrow.’ And then Sam hummed a mournful disaster-is-coming song while he carried me further into the waves.

We had a stack of movie jokes.

But it was noir that we came back to again and again, noir that we loved – film noir, with its shadows and horizontal lines and slats of light seen through venetian blinds. Film noir, that American post-war phenomenon of doom and danger about how the war might be done and the boys might be home, but nothing would go back to normal. The French named the genre ‘black film’ for its darkness. Sam’s big project at school was a film that mimicked the soul of these stories but brought you a beat away from them, a knowing and updated version of noir.

Everyone’s corrupt. Danger and death wait in each vacant room. Lovers betray one another. The femme noir is alluring but chameleon-like; the protagonist can’t stay away from her, but will never actually know who she is either. And the story is told entirely in flashback. It starts with the end, the protagonist telling the police what happened, and you, who are watching, know, as the story unfolds, that there is no hope in this situation – everything has already happened and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it.

It was November 1, 1986 and 304 people had been murdered in Miami so far that year. Dominic, whose desk was next to mine and whose wisdom and resistance to flack I relied on, had the police beat. He had been told by his editor that he couldn’t cover every murder and shouldn’t even try, but he tried. He was never around anymore. Sometimes I saw him at night. He’d gotten into the habit of taking a two-hour break in the evening to drink as much as he could before going back to work. He’d been an overseas correspondent in Nicaragua and El Salvador before he’d come back home to have his marriage fall apart and his best friend turn up dead – the kind of suicide that came at the end of long, long lines of cocaine.

I knew the bar where Dominic spent time – it was a place that none of the other Record reporters went. He had no interest in discussing his day with anyone. Sam and I were invited with the unspoken provision that we not ask Dominic what he was writing unless he first raised the topic.

I worked for the ‘Neighborhoods’ section of the Record covering Miami Beach. My editor was sure the paper was going to fold and had begun investing in Beach real estate. He was somewhat preoccupied with his investments, and didn’t seem to notice that I steadily and grandly lied about how long it took me to cover a story. The assignments were supposed to play up the best parts of the gentrification that was beginning in South Beach. South Beach, back then, was retirees and Marielitos and cocaine kings; rundown buildings with wire mesh over the windows lined the streets and vacant storefronts pockmarked the paranoia-strewn pedestrian mall on Lincoln Road. My stories were crap, and it took me about a quarter of the time I said it did to produce them; the Record always got my first drafts. I was sick of interviewing optimistic community activists and promising high school students. I was waiting for something to happen.

And that was when he walked in.

He had owl eyes so deep and ringed with dark, he looked like bad memories and brutal worries were at the foot of his bed every night. His straight jet hair was just a little too long and slightly mussed, like some glitter era pop star, and his smooth olive skin had recently been under a lot of sun. His face was perfectly symmetrical and proportioned, which would have made him dauntingly handsome, if it weren’t for those painfully sad eyes. He had on a shortsleeved button-up shirt made of cotton so thin, I could see the outline of a silver religious medal he wore underneath. His trousers were brown and somewhat worn, but perfectly pressed. I guessed he was about my age – in his mid-twenties – and he walked right up to my desk, saying my name as if it was a question, and putting out his hand to shake mine with a strong, desperate grip.

I wondered how he had gotten past reception. That was the year bungling bank robbers had a shootout with the FBI in Unincorporated Miami-Dade. Cocaine kept the economy going when tourism dropped off. In the Everglades, Nicaraguan exiles had been training to join the Contras, squatting in the swamps with shiny mortar launchers. Dominic was always coming across something he wasn’t supposed to see and received death threats more regularly and convincingly than any of the other reporters. Security in the newsroom was particularly tight that year.

‘I’m Miguel Reyes,’ the sad-eyed stranger told me in slow Salvadoran Spanish. ‘Alida told me to come see you.’ His hands grappled for a moment, then settled on a small nylon duffel bag he’d slung over his shoulder, as if he was trying to find something to hang onto. ‘Alida Rivera. You grew up together in New York, yes? She told me to come find you in Miami, but when I tried the telephone number she gave me, it didn’t work.’

‘I moved a couple of months ago,’ I told him. Had moved in with Sam, and Alida didn’t even know that yet – she and I didn’t keep in touch regularly enough for that. ‘How do you know Alida?’ I asked Miguel.

‘I—’ he began. He paused and looked around nervously.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘How rude of me. Please, sit down.’

I have been told, by more than one person, that my personality changes when I am speaking Spanish – that I am more obsequious, more polite. As Miguel sat in the plastic chair beside my desk, I offered him some coffee. He said he couldn’t, that he didn’t have much time. There were friends of his he needed to find from El Salvador. It was urgent that he get a message to them, but they had become lost, here in the United States, after fleeing his country because of the war. Inez had given him my name, told him that if I wasn’t able to help, I would know someone who could. He had first looked for his friends in New York, and had met Inez through New York CISPES – the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.

Now he leaned over and unzipped the duffel bag he’d placed on the floor – it was the sort that middle-class men used to carry their gym clothes and less fortunate men used to carry their belongings when they weren’t sure where they were going to be staying that night. Quickly, Miguel pulled a battered manila envelope from the bag, but before he zipped it again I caught a glimpse of what was inside – a worn t-shirt, a tattered towel, a little black pouch that probably held his shaving things.

He caught me peeking, looked up, and smiled, then placed the photos on the desk – stilted portraits of a young woman with wavy brown hair, and a young man whose eyes burned with anger. The woman looked as if she had played a joke that the photographer would soon discover, the man as if he wanted the photo session to end quickly because it was a frivolous thing in a world where there was no room for frivolity: as soon as that photo session was over, he was going to go back to seeking justice. Both photos seemed strangely out of date. ‘My friend,’ Miguel explained, pointing to the man. ‘Back when we lived in La Libertad. Esteban Reyes, and his wife, Marisol Jovel.’

They had been gone several months now, he explained, had last phoned from New York to say they were leaving for Miami to start factory jobs, but had not been heard from since.

‘Alida thought I could help you?’ I asked.

‘She said you know people,’ he explained, fidgeting again, moving the photos back and forth. ‘No conozco Miami. No conozco a nadie por aqui.’

Alida was exactly the sort of person who would land me with a lost exile even though we hadn’t seen each other in over a year.

‘Esteban’s mother isn’t well,’ he explained. ‘She may not live much longer, and I have to find him.’

I watched him for a moment. Something about the situation wasn’t right, but I couldn’t have said what it was. Alida once said I’d make God show me the Ten Commandments carved in stone before I’d believe them, and I was jealous of the ease with which she welcomed people in trouble. She was always doing something good, meaningful. I was writing articles about art gallery openings and cafes that specialized in fresh fruit smoothies. Maybe I could redeem myself by helping this guy find a friend who needed finding.

‘What did they tell you before they left New York?’ I asked him.

I drove Miguel to some of the refugee agencies in Little Havana – it was good for him and good for my ego. Introducing myself as a Record reporter got us an attentive audience, especially among officials trying to curry favor after some scandal or other. But everyone who saw the photos shook their heads. They’d usher us out of their offices and back into waiting rooms filled with scared mothers and screaming kids, and Miguel and I would climb back into my beat-up Toyota to cruise down Calle Ocho, its low, drab cement buildings slapped with cast-iron burglar bars and brightly colored signs to evoke the world left behind: El Malecón, Yemaya’s, La Carreta. Miguel had arrived on the bus from New York the night before, and now he was sharing a room in a Little Havana boarding house with three others – one was a drunk, he told me, forcing good humor as he looked out the window. The man had come into their room roaring with anger at two o’clock in the morning. Another had eyed his duffel bag – he didn’t dare leave anything in the room. He took another sip of the café con leche I’d bought him. He told me he was sorry if he wasn’t acting like himself.

Miguel, in the passenger seat of my car, started to strike me as the kind of companion I’d been missing in this city of slick cars and fake tans. He put things in perspective by telling me of his trials. His problems were the kind of problems that people had back home; you had nothing and could do nothing, and therefore everything was out of control. Did I think of us going off on some kind of existential road trip? Maybe, a little. Did I think of him like a buddy in a buddy movie joining me to take on a mission that meant one thing to him and another to me? Yes, I did.

Then I came to my senses. He was a complete stranger. A bar-room pronouncement of Dominic’s came back to me, his explanation for why men like him became obsessed with the murders they wrote about: you look for what’s lost because you’re lost.

I pulled up in front of the Magic Blanket factory in Hialeah. ‘Hay algo que tengo que decirle,’ said Miguel, so softly I could barely make out his words. ‘Esteban and Marisol were receiving warnings.’

‘Warnings?’ I repeated.

Miguel’s eyes seemed to sink deeper. ‘Before they left El Salvador. From La Mano Blanca.’

‘The death squad?’

He nodded. ‘One morning they came home to find a white handprint on their door.’

La Mano Blanca’s warning.

‘And that was when they left Salvador,’ I concluded.

Miguel nodded. ‘They were union organizers,’ he explained further.

‘And they’re not here legally,’ I guessed.

There was a pause, as if he was waiting to see what I would do with this information.

I wasn’t sure how much Alida had told him about me. By the sounds of it, not much.

‘And I received the warning too,’ he said.

He had sunk back into the seat, and I was watching him to see if something would reveal that his story was manufactured. But I couldn’t find any seams on it, no trademarks, no twitches, no hollows in the center of his voice. He held the coffee cup like it was a talisman, hands trembling slightly, shoulders hunched, eyes directed right into mine – exactly like a man who had revealed a dangerous secret. I remembered the instructions Inez and I had been handed when, as children, we went out to play in the street: strangers should be left as you found them, sob stories promptly returned to their owners. Somewhere along the way, Inez had decided to dismiss this as cynicism rather than wisdom; no one we knew had ever stayed safe by avoiding risk.

‘We’ll find Esteban,’ I said.

By the time I dropped Miguel off at the boarding house, the sun was setting. The manila envelope with the photos inside was sitting on top of a stack of papers in front of the stick shift. The images were more rumpled and stained – I’d been taking them out and handing them to strangers all day long. ‘I’ll talk to my friend tonight,’ I assured Miguel. ‘But I need to meet with him alone first.’ Miguel nodded, but looked as if he didn’t want to leave the car. I was already late to meet Sam and Dominic at the bar, and not about to explain to Miguel that Dominic entertained neither friends nor strangers at the end of his eighteen-hour work days. The death threats meant he liked familiar places and familiar people. There was a limit to the familiar people he spent time with too. He could talk to cops and autopsy technicians, but not to anyone who raised things that were trivial – he couldn’t believe the things people complained about, how it was they worried about air conditioning, office politics, traffic.

‘Call me tomorrow at the paper,’ I told Miguel. ‘I’ll tell you what I find out.’ And then, I put my hand on top of his and squeezed it. He looked at me, eyes softening, and I took my hand away. My face heated.

He opened the car door and stepped out. ‘Que Dios la bendiga,’ he said, under his breath, before shutting the door.

As he walked toward the boarding house, with all the men outside drinking from bottles in paper bags, his head was bowed and he pulled the duffel to him as if it could offer comfort, almost cradled it in his arms.

The Bull’s Eye was the kind of bar that no self-respecting journalist would spend any time in, and was Dominic’s favorite place to go. White guys who’d fled to the suburbs parked behind the building surrounded by derelict houses as if it was still their neighborhood bar. They came to the Bull’s Eye after a day of delivering beverages, taking tourists out on boats, repairing cars. They picked up big cheap drinks at the bar and carried them over to where the other men chugged their big cheap drinks and played darts. There were dartboards everywhere, some covered with pictures of bad bosses and local politicians and every foot of the rough wood decor was cratered by the sharp points of darts. And among the men playing – they were all men – I found Sam and nearby Dominic, who was about to throw a dart at a dartboard covered with a map. Sam kissed me hello. It was a Bull’s Eye tradition to shout at your companions just as they were about to throw. ‘You’re gonna have to take Sam and me to wherever that lands,’ I informed Dominic, who turned around and grinned.

He faced the dartboard and hit dead center, which on the Bull’s Eye map was Miami.

Sam and I groaned with disappointment.

‘I’m getting more drinks,’ Sam announced, waving off Dominic’s insistence that he would.

Dominic and I went to a table in the corner and I pulled out my tobacco and started to roll a cigarette. ‘Tan pretencioso,’ Dominic teased. ‘Also, that stuff’s going to kill you.’

I licked the gummed end of the rolling paper and smiled. Dominic had the hunched-over stance of an adolescent boy embarrassed by his height. He wore his Levi’s big, trying to hide the beginnings of a paunch, and a few years of hard drinking after his wife left him made him look older than he was.

‘I’m pretentious?’ I asked. ‘What kind of guy can’t even get his dart to land somewhere outside his home town?’

He glanced at the tobacco packet and asked, ‘Qué clase de Boricua fuma Drum?’

‘I’m Nuyorican,’ I answered in English, lighting my cigarette. ‘We’ve already established I’m not authentic.’

I slipped the manila envelope from my bag and put it on the table.

‘Doesn’t Sam want you to stop smoking?.’

‘Sam really loves me,’ I informed him. ‘It’s okay with him if I get cancer.’

Then I took the photos from the envelope, and explained, in Spanish, ‘A friend of a friend came to the newsroom today. Anda buscando estos Salvadoreños.’’

Dominic looked at the photos and hooted, ‘Carajo! Who are they? Least popular in their high school class?’ He started to laugh.

‘Dominic, please. They’re union organizers. They left El Salvador because of death threats. Their friend came to the United States to find them, but they’ve disappeared.’

Dominic’s eyes watered then, just as if someone had punched him hard in the stomach. He drained the dregs from his glass.

Two bodies had been found the week before in a rooming house in Sweetwater – a man and a woman, young. They hadn’t been in the rooming house for long, only a few days.

The others knew them only by their first names, Reinaldo and Paula. They spoke Salvadoran Spanish. They said they worked in a factory. There was nothing left in the room to identify the couple past their first names. They’d paid the initial week’s rent in cash.

Dominic conveyed this after Sam returned to the table with our drinks. The photos lay on the table like accusations. Dominic slugged down some beer and stared at the images.

‘Dominic,’ I whispered. ‘Is it them?’

‘I don’t know,’ he told us.

Sam looked at me with lowered eyebrows, and I shrugged.

‘The bodies were pretty messed up,’ Dominic said, looking down.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘You mean the way they were killed?’

He shook his head. ‘They were killed by bullets,’ he told us. ‘It’s what happened afterwards.’

‘Hey, nothing’s too gruesome for us,’ Sam reassured him.

‘Someone cut off their faces,’ Dominic said.

Sam grabbed my shoulder.

‘Someone cut off their hands.’

I covered my eyes.

Dominic said, ‘They couldn’t get an ID.’

I uncovered my eyes.

The Bull’s Eye customers, in their baseball caps and t-shirts, were gesticulating with their beer bottles, laughing at the same jokes they’d heard over and over. They stood before the dartboards and let their artillery go, and the darts flew and their metal points tore into the cork. I imagined I could hear the thuds, though of course with the din and the music I could not. But it was as if I could hear the thud and then silence again. Mostly, in the noise, I kept hearing silence.

Miguel showed up at the paper the next day, brimming with expectation, a different man. He was waiting for me to give him good news, but I couldn’t give it to him. And I still couldn’t figure out how to break it. Dominic was right – we didn’t know who the corpses were.

‘Miguel,’ I said when he walked in. ‘I was waiting for your call. Sit down.’

He shifted in the chair next to my desk, tapping his foot impatiently, grinning.

‘I have some news for you,’ I began, ‘but—’

‘I have some news too,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s about Esteban and Marisol.’

I took a breath and pulled back.

‘I found someone who’s seen them.’

I swallowed.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘It’s good, no? One of the men in the boarding house took me to see his friend in Sweetwater. He said there was a Salvadoran couple there—’

‘Miguel,’ I said. My throat closed.

‘— and the man was named Esteban.’

‘When did he last see them?’ I asked. My voice came out lower than I meant it to. ‘A week ago,’ Miguel continued. ‘Esteban told him they’d been fired from the factory. They got some guy angry and they were afraid he was going to call immigration. Se treparon en una lancha en camino a Cuba.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘They got someone to take them to Cuba by boat. A compañero.’

There was no question that Miguel believed all this. And it was certainly plausible. Dominic hadn’t known much about the couple in Sweetwater. Even the names didn’t match up.

‘The boat captain is in Key Largo,’ Miguel continued. He showed me a crumpled piece of paper with the name of a captain, and a boat, and the marina where it was docked.

‘That’s over an hour from here,’ I told him. Without a car, it would take him far longer than that to get there. Once he was in Key Largo itself, he’d have to take a taxi out to the marina, and it would be expensive. His English was minimal.

He could go to Key Largo and disappear. This could be another one of those strange stories Dominic and I talked about in the bar. I could lose track of the ending.

‘I’ll take you there,’ I said, gathering a few things and putting them in my shoulder bag – a notepad, some pens, my tobacco.

When we were in the car, about to drive out, I saw that the tragedy had left his eyes, and without it he really was beautiful. There was a beat of silence. We smiled at one another before I started the engine. ‘What did you find out?’ he asked me suddenly.

I didn’t answer.

‘Last night,’ he reminded me, ‘from your friend.’

‘Nothing,’ I told him, and pulled out onto Biscayne.

Key Largo wanted all the connection it could get to the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film, but the last movie they made together was mostly shot on a studio lot in Hollywood, and until it was released, the land we stood on was still called Rock Harbor. Local business owners lobbied to name their town after a fictional hurricane-hit island. You drove through miles and miles of strip malls to get to the Keys, until you broke through the suburban squeeze and the highway skimmed the top of the water. And, if you continued down to the southern tip, you’d be on a ribbon of land no wider than two old Buicks. Then you’d reach a spread of land again, with clapboard houses and dirt roads trailing between the subtropical tangles of saw grass and sea grape.

We asked for directions at more than one gas station, then drove back and forth three times until we saw the turnoff – hidden by palmetto leaves and marked with a sign that read:

‘Private Property. Owners and Guests Only. Visitors and Workers Must Have Permission to Enter First.’

Miguel said he’d been told that the captain would arrive by late afternoon, certainly by sunset, and the sky was darkening, but the darkness owed just as much to an oncoming storm as it did to dusk. There were two yachts tied to the pier, three or four lost-looking fishing boats, and a few ratty rowboats flaking paint.

From the lonely wooden pier there was nothing visible but hungry turquoise sea, unsettled islands, mangrove trees, and hovering anhingas, their crooked necks and wings stubborn and solid, as if they had survived being broken and then put back together again.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Miguel, coming up from behind me. I could feel his breath near my ear, the heat charge of the coming storm. I turned to him, and then the first drops of rain began to fall.

Then we saw the boat – it was called The Wrong Impression. There was no one there, no one responded to our calls. But we climbed on, decided to stay there, and huddled on the deck to hide from the rain.

He was from La Libertad, a village by the sea. At first there had been farmland, but then his family lost it, and there was only work at the factory. When he spoke, it was as if he was telling my own grandparents’ story, of losing the place you come from, and I found myself telling him how they had lost their land and left Puerto Rico. And we told each other these things on the boat, under a blue canopy strung across the deck, while the waves slapped against the dock and the side of the boat, and the rain beat down. And by then we were sharing a small ledge, trying to keep from getting wet. Sometimes, we brushed one another’s hands when we held onto the ledge. And then our hands were next to one another’s, and then his fingers covered mine. And finally, he reached for me, and he kissed me, and I whispered, ‘I have a boyfriend.’ And I kissed him back.