Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“He was supposed to watch the curing fire. He fell asleep. Could have burned the whole crop.” He handed Tomas back to Joe. “Could have burned himself.”

Joe looked at the father and son now. Perez had his arm around the boy, the boy nodding, the father speaking in low tones and kissing the side of the boy’s head several times, the lesson delivered. The boy didn’t seem to soften under the kisses, though. So the father pushed his head away and they both went back to work.

The baseball field was completed the day the tobacco was moved from the barn to the pack house. Preparing the leaves for market was a job left mostly to the women, who walked up the hill to the plantation in the morning as hard-faced and hard-fisted as the men. While they sorted and graded the tobacco, Joe gathered the boys in the field and gave them the gloves and fresh balls and Louisville sluggers that had arrived two days before. He laid out three base pads and home plate.

It was as if he’d shown them how to fly.

In the early evenings, he’d take Tomas to watch the games. Sometimes Graciela would join them, but her presence often proved to be too distracting for a couple of the boys entering early adolescence.

Tomas, one of those kids who never sat still, was rapt in the presence of the game. He sat quietly, hands clasped between his knees, watching something he couldn’t possibly understand yet, but which worked on him the way music and warm water did.

Joe said to Graciela one night, “Outside of us, there’s no hope in that town but baseball. They love it.”

“That’s good then, yes?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Shit on America all you want, honey, but we export some good things.”

She gave him a flash of wry brown eyes. “But you charge for it.”

Who didn’t? What made the world run, if not free trade? We give to you, and you give something back in return.

Joe loved his wife, but she still seemed unable to accept that her own country, while undoubtedly beholden to his, was far better off for the transaction. Before the United States had pulled their asses out of the fire, Spain had left them languishing in a cesspool of malaria and bad roads and nonexistent medical care. Machado hadn’t improved on the model. But now, with General Batista, they had a surging infrastructure. They had indoor plumbing and electricity in a third of the country and half of Havana. They had good schools and a few decent hospitals. They had a longer life expectancy. They had dentists.

Yes, the United States exported some of its goodwill at the point of a gun. But all the great countries who’d advanced civilization throughout history had done the same.

And when you considered Ybor City, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she? They’d built hospitals with blood money. Pulled women and children off the streets with rum profits.

Good deeds, since the dawn of time, had often followed bad money.

And now, in baseball-crazy Cuba, in a region where they would have been playing it with sticks and bare hands, they had gloves so new the leather creaked and bats as blond as peeled apples. And every evening, when the work was done and the rest of the green stems had been removed from the leaves, and the crop had been sheeted and packed, and the air smelled of the remoistened tobacco and tar, he sat on a chair beside Ciggy and watched the shadows lengthen in the field, and they discussed where they’d buy the seed for the outfield grass so it would no longer be a scrabble of dirt and loose stone out there. Ciggy had heard rumors of a league near these parts, and Joe asked him to keep looking into it, particularly for the fall when the farm duties would be at their lightest.

On market day, their tobacco sold for the second-highest price at the warehouse, 400 sheets of tobacco, weighing an average of 275 pounds, went to a single buyer, the Robert Burns Tobacco Company, which manufactured the panatela, the new American sensation in cigars.

To celebrate, Joe gave bonuses to all the men and women. He gave two cases of Coughlin-Suarez rum to the village. Then on Ciggy’s suggestion, he rented a bus and he and Ciggy took the baseball team to their first movie at the Bijou in Viñales.

The newsreels were all about the Nuremberg Laws taking effect in Germany—footage of anxious Jews packing up belongings and leaving furnished apartments behind to head for the first train out. Joe had read accounts recently that claimed Chancellor Hitler represented an authentic threat to the fragile peace that had held in Europe since ’18, but he doubted the funny-looking little man would go much further with this lunacy, now that the world had sat up and taken notice; there just wasn’t any percentage in it.

The shorts that followed were forgettable, though the boys on the team all laughed a lot, their eyes as wide as the base pads he’d bought them, and it took Joe a moment to realize that they knew so little of the movies they’d thought the newsreels about Germany were the feature.

Then came the main event—an oater called Riders of the Eastern Ridge starring Tex Moran and Estelle Summers. The credits flashed quick across the black screen and Joe, who never went to movies in the first place, couldn’t have cared less who was responsible for making it. He was, in fact, starting to look down to make sure his right shoe was tied when the name that popped on the screen snapped his eyes back up:

Screenplay

Aiden Coughlin

Joe looked over at Ciggy and the boys, but they were oblivious.

My brother, he wanted to tell someone. My brother.

On the bus ride back to Arcenas, he couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. A Western, yes, with gunfights galore and a damsel in distress, and a stagecoach chase along a crumbling cliff road, but something else too, if you knew Danny. The character Tex Moran had played was an honest sheriff in what turned out to be a dirty town. A town where the most prominent citizens gathered one night to plot the death of a swarthy migrant farmer who, one claimed, had ogled his daughter. In the end, the movie retreated from its own radical premise—the good townspeople learned the error of their ways—but only after the swarthy migrant farmer had been killed by a group of outsiders in black hats. The message of the movie, then, as far as Joe could tell, was that the danger from without would wash clean the danger from within. Which, in Joe’s experience—and in Danny’s—was bullshit.

But, either way, it was a hell of a fun time at the theater. The boys had gone wild for it; the whole bus ride home they’d talked about buying six-guns and gun belts when they grew up.

Late that summer, his watch returned from Geneva by mail. It arrived in a lovely mahogany box with velvet inlay and gleamed from a polishing.