“All in perfect shape.”
“I’ll bet,” Thomas Hudson said in English. Then to Mario, who came out of the house and down the steps to the car carrying the tall dark, rusty-colored drink, wrapped round with a sheet of moulded cork that came to within a half-inch of the rim of the glass, “Get a sweater for Pedro. One of those that buttons in front. From Mr. Tom’s clothes. See that the steps are cleaned of this trash.”
Thomas Hudson handed the drink to the chauffeur to hold and stooped to pet the dogs. Boise was sitting on the steps, watching them with contempt. There was Negrita, a small black bitch going gray with age, her tail curled over her back, her tiny feet and delicate legs almost sparkling as she played, her muzzle as sharp as a fox terrier and her eyes loving and intelligent.
He had seen her one night in a bar following some people out and asked what breed of dog she was.
“Cuban,” the waiter said. “She’s been here four days. She follows everyone out but they always shut the doors of their cars on her.”
They had taken her home to the Finca and for two years she had not been in heat and Thomas Hudson had thought she was too old to breed. Then, one day, he had to break her loose from a police dog and after that she had police dog pups, pups from a pit bull, pointer pups, and a wonderful unknown pup that was bright red and looked as though his father might have been an Irish setter except that he had the chest and shoulders of a pit bull and a tail that curled up over his back like Negrita’s.
Now her sons were all around her and she was pregnant again.
“Who did she breed with?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.
“I don’t know.”
Mario, who came out with the sweater and gave it to the chauffeur, who took off his frayed uniform coat to put it on, said, “The father is the fighting dog in the village.”
“Well, goodbye, dogs,” Thomas Hudson said. “So long, Boy,” he said to the cat who came bounding down through the dogs to the car. Thomas Hudson, sitting in the car now, holding the cork-wrapped drink, leaned out of the window and touched the cat who rose on his hind legs to push his head against his fingers. “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ll be back.”
“Poor Boise,” Mario said. He picked him up and held him in his arms and the cat looked after the car as it turned, circling the flower bed, and went down the uneven gully-washed driveway until it was hidden by the hill slope and the tall mango trees. Then Mario took the cat into the house and put him down and the cat jumped up onto the window sill and continued to look out at where the driveway disappeared under the hill.
Mario stroked him but the cat did not relax.
“Poor Boise,” the tall Negro boy said. “Poor, poor Boise.”
In the car Thomas Hudson and the chauffeur went down the driveway and the chauffeur jumped out and unchained the gate and then climbed back in and drove the car through. A Negro boy was coming up the street and he called to him to close the gate and the boy grinned and nodded his head.
“He is a younger brother of Mario.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said.
They rolled through the squalor of the village side street and turned onto the central highway. They passed the houses of the village, the two grocery stores open onto the street with their bars and rows of bottles flanked by shelves of canned goods, and then were past the last bar and the huge Spanish laurel tree whose branches spread all the way across the road and were rolling downhill on the old stone highway. The highway ran downhill for three miles with big old trees on either side. There were nurseries, small farms, large farms with their decrepit Spanish colonial houses that were being cut up into subdivisions, their old hilly pastures being cut by streets that ended at grassy hillsides, the grass brown from the drought. The only green now on the land, in this country of so many greens, was along the watercourses where the royal palms grew tall and gray, their green tops slanted by the wind. This was a dry norther, dry, hard, and cold. The Straits of Florida had been chilled by the other northers that had come before it and there was no fog and no rain with this wind.
Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodied than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon’s gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.
The cork glass-holder kept the ice from melting and weakening the drink and he held it fondly in his hand and looked at the country as they drove into town.
“Why don’t you coast down here and save gas?”
“I will if you say,” the chauffeur answered. “But this is government gas.”
“Coast for the practice,” Thomas Hudson said. “Then you will know how to do it when it is our gas and not the government’s.”
They were down on the flat now where flower-growers’ fields ran off the left and on the right were the houses of the basket-weavers.
“I must get a basket-weaver to come up and mend the big mat in the living room where it is worn.”
“Sí, señor.”
“Do you know one?”
“Sí, señor.”
The chauffeur, whom Thomas Hudson disliked very much for his general misinformation and stupidity, his conceit, his lack of understanding of motors, and his atrocious care of the cars and general laziness, was being very short and formal because of the reprimand about coasting. With all his faults he was a splendid driver, that is, he was an excellent car handler with beautiful reflexes in the illogical and neurotic Cuban traffic. Also he knew too much about their operations to be fired.
“Are you warm enough with the sweater?”
“Sí, señor.”
The hell with you, Thomas Hudson thought. You keep that up and I’ll ream you out good.
“Was it very cold in your house last night?”
“It was terrible. It was horroroso. You can’t imagine it, Mr. Hudson.”
Peace had been made and they were now crossing the bridge, where the trunk of the girl who had once been cut into six pieces by her policeman lover and the pieces wrapped in brown paper and scattered along the Central Highway, had been found. The river was dry now. But on that evening it had been running with water and cars had been lined up for half a mile in the rain while their drivers stared at the historic spot.
The next morning the papers published photographs of the torso on their front pages and one news story pointed out that the girl was undoubtedly a North American tourist since no one of that age living in the tropics could be so undeveloped physically. How they had already arrived at her exact age Thomas Hudson never knew since the head was not discovered until some time later in the fishing port of Batabano. But the torso, as shown in the front pages, did fall rather short of the best fragments of Greek sculpture. She was not an American tourist, though; and it turned out that she had developed whatever attractions she had in the tropics. But for a while Thomas Hudson had to give up doing any road work in the country outside the Finca because anybody seen running or even hurrying, was in danger of being pursued by the populace crying, “There he goes! That’s him! That’s the man who chopped her up!”
Now they were over the bridge and going up the hill into Luyano where there was a view, off to the left, of El Cerro that always reminded Thomas Hudson of Toledo. Not El Greco’s Toledo. But a part of Toledo itself seen from a side hill. They were coming up on it now as the car climbed the last of the hill and he saw it again clearly and it was Toledo all right, just for a moment, and then the hill dipped and Cuba was close on either side.