libertad part seven

        Havana was finished. The Mob had relocated to more lucrative venues. At the hotel Lansky had left Lewis McWillie in charge of remaining operations. The CIA had spirited Batista from the country, leaving generals and lackey politicians in the lurch. The army fled en masse as Fidel Castro and his rag-tag horde descended upon the city. Not like a plague of locusts upon Egypt nor like Visigoths sacking Rome. But like liberators. The communists were the new Puritans and Castro was their Oliver Cromwell. These reformers had come to cleans Cuba of Yankee corruption. Meanwhile, there was McWillie, trying to make the best of a bad situation. In a moment of frustration he felt like kicking a dog, so he told his jack-of-all-trades, Uncle Zoot, to hit the road. Then he went back to repair the fallen lines of communication with Jack Ruby.
        Dislodged from his stooge's roost at the Tropicana, Uncle Zoot saw it all as a blessing, deciding to go into business for himself. No more the sad-sack flunky was he! Country girls would be easy to recruit and easy to herd, now that most of the thugs were out of the way, having disappeared or having joined the rebels. Uncle Zoot had his cousin Jorge to enforce the rules of commerce and crack the heads of deadbeats and penniless soldiers.


                                                                                          *


        So with the midmorning sun warming his back Uncle Zoot was thinking about the girl he had dismissed a week ago. Luz. A slim mulatto with frizzy dark hair with henna highlights. Luminous face, always smiling. Already her regulars were asking about her. He had noticed her coughing, then her fatigue. A few months went by with no change, except that her smile seemed forced and her business had fallen off. The doctor found she had tuberculosis.
        Uncle Zoot last saw her as she trudged away with a cardboard suitcase in hand and dry goods bundled in a bed sheet and balanced atop her head. They had parted without a word of farewell. The path snaked off into burnt cane fields and foggy bottomed forests and up jade green mountains toward her own private Cielo.
         As he sat there on his favorite bench he watched a man raking frangipani leafs. The man wore a white prisoner's uniform and a dirty straw cowboy hat. A black kinky beard grew so profuse that Uncle Zoot had thoughts of pubic hair. Disgusted, he trained his eyes upon a bounteous croton hedge.