Curse the Names Read online

  Critical Praise for Edgar Award Finalist

  Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano

  “Dr. Mano Rodriguez is caught up in intrigue in this thoughtful, lushly detailed neo-noir … Much Spanish dialogue, with prompts in English on more difficult words, deepens the sense of locale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A sad, surreal, beautiful tour of the hell that was Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The writing is hypnotic, the storytelling superb. Havana Lunar is perfect.”

  —Tim McLoughlin, author of Heart of the Old Country, editor of Brooklyn Noir

  “Arellano engages the reader immediately by quickly developing his characters into unique individuals, both good and bad … Havana Lunar is not bashful in its presentation of Cuba and its seamy side: Arellano is savvy and able to show caring families while also introducing the reader to the grittier side … The detail is impressive … Arellano is masterful, weaving both the physical and emotional into a story everyone can relate to in some way …”

  —Multicultural Review

  “Written with passion and vision and with a clear, unflinching eye, Robert Arellano’s Havana Lunar breaks new ground. It is not a Cuban American novel but a Cuban novel written in English. In it the Cuban underworld of chulos and jineteras is revealed and the über-world of political bosses and apparatchiks unmasked. I am certain that Havana Lunar will find a wide and enthusiastic readership.”

  —Pablo Medina, author of The Cigar Roller

  “A noir novel short enough to read on a two-hour airplane ride and sufficiently satisfying to make you feel glad you read it.”

  —Albuquerque Journal

  “What a delight, after reading a string of uninvolving novels, to come across Robert Arellano’s engaging ‘Cuban noir novel,’ Havana Lunar. The Havana setting breathes life into this story of grisly murder and false accusation … Havana Lunar has lots to enjoy, everything a comic noir aficionado could hope for.”

  —Michael Sedano, La Bloga

  “Robert Arellano’s book is a hypnotic trip into another world, a place we are hardly ever allowed to go—Castro’s Cuba. Without polarizing political pontifications or moral insertions of right and wrong, Arellano takes us straight into a country where people survive, combining resilience with ingenuity to keep the best of what works while simply sneaking around the things that don’t. It’s the way of life for most people who live under dictatorships—and yet the joy and beauty of this novel is how effortlessly he weaves his characters into our lives … It’s as if Balzac meets Philip K. Dick, for Arellano’s Cuba is a whole other planet to us, one we definitely need to know more about …”

  —Abraham Rodriguez, author of South by South Bronx

  “In Havana, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, a continued United States embargo, shortages of just about everything except labor, and a zeal to make do with resources at hand, life is also lived with great passion. It is that passion which suffuses Arellano’s latest book, a ‘Cuban noir’ crime novel titled Havana Lunar.”

  —Taos News

  “The overarching rhythm of the chapters incorporates the underlying rhythm of the sentences … Alternating scenes, dialogue, and action create a cinematic experience … The intimate character of the tale has the quality of a memoir … a story as convincing as it is refreshing.”

  —Taos Horse Fly

  CURSE THE NAMES

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2012 Robert Arellano

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-109-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-030-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923107

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  info©akashicbooks.com

  www.akashicbooks.com

  For Donna and Dave Marston

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Monday, July 1

  Thursday, July 4

  Friday, July 5

  Saturday, July 6

  Sunday, July 7

  Monday, July 8

  Tuesday, July 9

  Wednesday, July 10

  Thursday, July 11

  Friday, July 12

  Saturday, July 13

  Sunday, July 14

  Monday, July 15

  Wednesday, July 17

  Sunday, July 21

  Thursday, August 1

  Tuesday, August 6

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Ibrahim Ahmad, Johanna Ingalls, K. Silem Mohammad, and Johnny Temple for their inspiration and advice.

  This was life.

  The luckiest hours

  Like scribbles in chalk

  On a slate in a classroom.

  We stare

  And try to understand them.

  Then luck turns its back—

  and everything’s wiped out.

  —Aeschylus, The Orestia

  The time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Monday, July 1

  She took my wrist in her hands and placed it on the padded, tissue-papered armrest. “Keep your elbow real straight for me now.” She was what you might call a goth: black scrubs, pierced tongue, and an extreme manicure, black-polished fingernails at least three inches long. How can someone who draws blood for a living have such long nails?

  There were tattoos up her inner arm: figures, faces, and names. I don’t know, guys she had been with? There were girls’ names too. I watched her preparations.

  She tied the latex strap around my bicep and gave me a rubber ball to squeeze. Somehow she pulled a pair of surgical gloves over those nails, and then she scrubbed the crook of my arm with an alcohol swab, finding a vein she liked. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. She jabbed the needle in and I groaned softly.

  “You’re lucky you have such low blood pressure,” she said, and we both waited for the vial to fill. “So, what are you doing for the Fourth?”

  Fourth of July: a special day for me—like the song says, “Born on.”

  “Staying home, probably. Fireworks make my dog skittish.”

  What made me say probably just then? And what made me refer to Oppie as just my dog? The same impulse that makes me take off my wedding band before entering the clinic: a just-in-case. Never mention the wife just in case you run into a woman who might want to make a pass at you.

  The blood tech was holding her breath, and for the first time in our short history of brief encounters I noticed that she looked into my eyes with a strange earnestness. Back in college, that expression would have made me put down my beer at a party and follow her up the stairs no matter how she looked. I said, “What about you?”

  She exhaled and flicked the strap away. A little grin stole over her usually dour pout. “Me and my girlfriends go to Morphy Lake. Have you ever been up there?”

  “Is that the one near Mora?”

  “Yeah. There’s an abandoned house above the lake. It’s the only place in that valley, right after the bend in the old road. Me and my girlfriends bring a bottle of Crown Royal and make up ghost stories.” And then she said, “You should come.”

  “What?”

  She backed out the needle and pressed a gauze pad against my skin. “You should come, we could hook up.”

  Hook up, that’s the phrase young people use for sex, right?


  For as long as things have been cooling with Kitty, I have been waiting for this to happen: a loose girl—a young woman, the likes of whose suppleness I haven’t experienced since grad school—makes the first move. I am a lecher, but I am also a coward, so I have always left it up to someone else to propose an extramarital affair.

  The nails got in the way and she fumbled with the Band-Aid. I had to help her put it on my arm, our fingers briefly touching. I let go of the rubber ball and she finished her job with a bit of surgical tape. I liked the way she held my wrist and gently bent my arm back at the elbow instead of saying okay, you don’t have to keep it straight anymore. I liked the homemade signs she taped to all the cabinets, little penciled messages that read: don’t 4get servecing code! and remenber: just a little pinch! I decided she might just be trying to pick me up. Hook up.

  I took a mental picture of her ass inside those scrubs. I wanted to know what it would feel like for those long fingernails to scratch my back, draw a line of blood. In my head, I was already winding across the mountains in the Spider, and Kitty was better than a thousand miles away—even though she would be right beside me—because my mind was on a sexy young blood tech I pictured disrobing inside an abandoned house at the end of the trail. I realized I had not felt this way in fifteen years, when driving three hours to get laid was almost as good as getting laid. It simultaneously inflamed my lust and awakened an affinity for deception.

  In the clinic parking lot, I climbed in the Spider, took the New Mexico map out of the glove compartment, and drew a line across the mountains.

  Thursday, July 4

  Dozens of families went camping at Morphy Lake for Independence Day weekend, and every one of them had to drive over that awful road. Even SUVs bottomed out on the ruts, but I’m the only one who tried it in an Alfa Romeo Spider, bashing the tailpipe all to hell. Kitty and I weren’t getting along, Oppie had indigestion, I stabbed myself in the hand with a tent stake, and the cap on the Dewar’s somehow got open and spilled whiskey all over the trunk of the Spider. Kitty caught me trying to suck whatever I could out of the floor mat. Not an auspicious start.

  Kitty said, “Are you going to give Oppie his suppository or not?”

  “I gave it to him last time.”

  “No. I gave him the last two times.”

  “I cut my hand. I don’t want to get it infected.”

  “Shit. How the fuck did you do that?”

  “Fucking tent stake.”

  “You clumsy fuck.”

  Kitty and I shared a carefree swearing habit, the mark of a childless couple. Sometime after the tenth wedding anniversary, living in close quarters without kids to keep us in line, we embraced expletives with gusto. It rattled anyone who hung around us. We never hit each other, but people picked up on the vibe of verbal abuse, and we had no real friends. There was Dr. and Mrs. Henry Farmer, but I can’t be sure they really count. It would be more accurate to call Hank Farmer a drinking buddy, while our wives relied on each other to bicker to about their husbands’ drinking.

  At sunset we were eaten by mosquitoes. I had forgotten to bring the repellent.

  Fire danger was just moderate, so the park rangers cleared the campground area for sparklers and small poppers only, but at dusk someone across the lake blasted “The Star-Spangled Banner” from an RV, and on cue a bunch of kids lit off some big ones on the beach: The bombs bursting in air …

  The pyrotechnicians scattered before the campground host could maneuver his Bronco II around the ring road at five miles per hour.

  Kitty and I watched it all from a rock while eating cold beans out of the can. The Coleman bottle I had brought didn’t have anything in it.

  “You stupid fuck. Couldn’t you feel it was empty?”

  “At least I remembered the fucking can opener.”

  Oppie started whimpering, so Kitty and I let up and laid our sleeping bags out in the tent. I popped the trunk of the Spider and soaked a tissue with whiskey from the floor mat as antiseptic, wrapping it around my injured hand and securing it with duct tape.

  When I got in the tent Kitty was deep in her sleeping bag with her shoulder to me. I climbed into my bag still wearing a shirt, pants, and socks. I waited fifteen minutes until Kitty’s breathing slowed and became shallow. I shook her shoulder to no effect. She hadn’t forgotten to pack her Ambien.

  I squirmed out of the sleeping bag and slipped into my windbreaker, patting the pockets to make sure the camera and the Altoids tin were there.

  Oppie, curled in a little ball at the foot of Kitty’s bag, looked up and wagged his tail. I made easy-boy gestures and clipped the leash to his travel collar. If I didn’t take Oppie he would whine and wake Kitty.

  I unzipped the tent flap and stepped outside into my shoes.

  The dark campground was quiet, the only sounds the crickets, my footfall through the brush, and the tinkling of Oppie’s tags. We followed an unmarked trail out the back of the overflow parking lot. I took Oppie’s leash off and we labored up the steep slope from the lake. The chirping of the crickets became louder.

  What starlight made it through the trees kept us on a footpath that ended at a wire fence about a quartermile into the woods. I spent a minute feeling my way around the edge of the forest. Behind the broken branch of a ponderosa pine I found the cattle gate. I went over and Oppie went under.

  I flicked the lighter beneath a sign nailed high to the side of a tall aspen: Aplanado. Sucking the makeshift bandage on my hand for a taste of the scotch, I dug in my pocket for the Altoids tin, took out a joint, and lit it.

  It was a narrow dirt road, packed earth winding potholed between ancient trees. It had been here before horses and wagons. It had been here before the original Indian trail, when barefoot traders and skin-shod scouts beat the prairie grass to dust. It had been here before deer and elk carved the contours of a trail for its proximity to water. It went from nowhere to nowhere.

  I smoked and walked between the ruts while Oppie sniffed around the overgrowth at the edges. The road humped at a spot where a culvert had been installed to allow an irrigation ditch to cross under. Water trickled through the metal ribs of the corrugated pipe.

  There was no moon. Only starlight reflected off the scarred faces of mountain peaks in the distance. I had a feeling that the road might dead-end any second, but then the tree cover broke open onto a dark valley.

  It’s the only place in that valley, right after the bend in the old road.

  I took one last hit of the joint, plucked the roach into the ditch, and kept going in the direction of the peaks, where eventually the road dwindled to scratches in the granite.

  I came upon the bend at the edge of a pasture and caught a glimpse of a rusted roof. At the bottom of an overgrown drive lay the house, its back turned to the world. No sign read No Trespassing, but everything about the place said Keep Out: cattle wire all around, ragweed higher than my head, no lights, not a sound.

  I climbed over the gate, walking through waist-high cheat grass along a mud drive cut into two deep furrows by centuries of truck and wagon wheels, and the shoulder of the house came into view with its hulking, twisted walls of crumbling adobe. I was high and I was horny, and the house was just as she had described it. I followed the drive around the side and Oppie sniffed away into a thick hedgerow.

  The front of the house was L-shaped, one long, straight section of sagging mud rooms with an addition of rough timber protruding from the end. The boardedup windows made me think of a face bandaged after a beating.

  An open portal on the inside of the L, with its bowed posts and peeled-back tin roofing, wasn’t doing much to hold up the rooms. The decking was riddled with splintered, rotting boards. A porch swing hung from rusty chains, hopelessly desolate on the threshold of this ruin.

  As a precaution I grunted, “Hello.” Silence. I stepped onto the portal and looked through the slats on the boarded windows.

  The heart of the house was dark. I hadn’t brought a flashlight, but I did h
ave the camera. I held it at arm’s length through the slats and fired the flash on the abandoned room, burning a brief image of squalor into my retina: floor covered with empty bottles and trash, planks full of jagged holes, and, in the corner, a discarded mattress blackened with filth, moldy stuffing erupting from a gash in its side.

  Nothing was happening. Nobody home.

  I am one hundred miles from Los Alamos—two hundred miles by road—and eight thousand feet lowdown in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Is it because I thought that a bunch of horny girls were going to be around here getting drunk without any guys their own age? Because I thought that I was going to bust out a joint and they were going to get uninhibited? Because I thought I was going to take pictures of it all? I did think that. Something about the way she said, We should hook up.

  On the other side of this barren peak, back up on the Hill, I would be watching Letterman about now, actually half-watching and half-wishing I had porn channels, while Kitty lies curled up with flatulent Oppie on the far side of the king-size, springless, formaldehyde-free mattress.

  A pudgy blood tech in black scrubs shakes her ass at me, and I drag wife and dog on a miserable camping trip without provisions on a slim-to-none hunch. I set up a tent beside a remote hellhole on Fourth of July so I can sneak out to a house, an abandoned house, on a thin whiff of the possibility of hooking up where I wouldn’t even have given a second look twenty years ago.

  I held the camera out to take a picture of myself. The flash hit me full in the face. This is to remind you what a loser looks like.

  I decided I might as well take a closer look.