libertad part one

        The strand at Mirror Beach reflected the sunset's crimson glow. Kit and Kat strolled arm in arm barefoot through the sighing foam. Each receding wave laid bare fresh traces of burrowing sand fleas. Those minute creatures fed upon micro-organisms washed in from Mother Provider. This subtle repast, ongoing, everlasting. Kit sloshed ashore, thinking: we know nothing beyond what appears to be.
         Dressed like beachcombers they appeared ageless at any distance. Kat wore a floppy straw hat from Banana Republic and Kit wore a baseball cap from Sloppy Joe's. He confessed, "The day before you came home I was trudging here like an old tired man. Reciting T.S. Eliot to myself. 'I will wear my trousers rolled' and such. What a tonic you are!"
         "Lady Geritol, that's me."
         "Let's go get some mango ice cream."
         "You are spunky today!"
         Kit found himself trotting easily beside her, digging little heel-divots in the sand.
         Between breaths Kat said, "Maybe you can tell me about Cassandra. Something sexy."
         "That may be difficult."


                                                                                                    *


          It was an early Polaroid print, the kind you had to coat with a developer as soon as you pulled it from the camera. The once silver brilliance had aged to dull sepia. Kit handed it to Kat. "There she is before she bleached her hair."
          "Did she always wear her hair like a boy?"
          "Yes, but don't make too much of it."
          "That sculpture there, was she fondling its balls?"
          "The dude didn't have any."
          Cassandra was posing with a life-sized and very life-like stone Triton blowing a spiral mollusk shell. She could not resist caressing those slabs of muscle.
          Kit explained, "You can't see it, but below the waist he's all fish."
          "Men get that way after a fashion."


                                                                                             *


           After the ice cream they had cafe con leche. Kit smiled and said, "This little taste of Cuba reminds me of a friend from long ago. Went to college with him. Tomas Reyes, great guy. Later we hooked up in Canada. Part of the Venceramos Brigade. We went to Cuba to help bring in Fidel's ten million ton sugar harvest."
            "Oh, your first play in New York. 'The Zafra.'"
            "I wish you could have seen it. The man playing Tomas was incendiary!"


                                                                                               *


          Tomas wore pink guayabera shirts because Papi did. The pastel enhanced Papi's cafe con leche mulatto skin. At forty Senor Reyes was lean and packed solid. He wore his shirts loose so that he could feel a breeze through his armpits. He had no paunch to hide. The family lived in a green house surrounded by huge caladium elephant ears and a brace of banana trees. Tomas' clearest memory of those days: he was dressed in a toddler's sailor suit and playing with a balsa wood glider that soared aloft, stalled and fell. Sometimes it was snatched by the great banyan that shaded the driveway. A macaw resided there and spotted the red DeSoto that Papi religiously washed and waxed on the Lord's Day of Rest. Papi forbade Tomas to climb the tree for the glider. He was, however, allowed to swing like Tarzan on the roots that descended like vines from the massive limbs.
          "Wait until I come home," Papi warned. "I don't want you to crack your head open."
          As far back as he could remember, Papi was cautioning him about something.