The twin engine plane departed from Georgetown just as the fiery glow of the morning sun glinted off the crests of the ocean waves. I was on my way home after working a year long stint in Guyana for Uncle Sam. But first I found myself with an unusual assignment on the side—a stopover in Trinidad escorting my friend’s new wife to where he was stationed in Chaguaramas. Joe and I were ‘contractors.’ Our cover: construction; we were what was known as outriders in the cold war.
Joe’s girl, not yet nineteen, was a real beauty. Like a young Ava Gardner with the same zesty spirit. Kathleen leaned forward looking out the window commenting on the blue water. A child’s eyes in full wonderment. She talked a whirlwind of inconsequential things like movie stars and singers. My attention drifted in and out as she rambled on. Her chatter carried over to her family, in particular her father, who she hadn’t seen in awhile. She spoke of him fondly, as only a daughter could, her gleaming pride in him being a writer and import/export merchant. Then my wavering interest returned. Her father was Ed and I had done plenty of shipping with his company. He and I never talked about what we did and it didn’t really matter. I knew he was one. It takes one to know one, right? Apparently he fell out of favor with his handlers, turned to booze, and started a second family far away from the first. Devastating for Kathleen, I’m sure, but this girl loved her father. Period.
I delivered the bubbly package to Joe that evening and the three of us moved from club to club finally settling on a hole in the wall that offered American drinks and music. Joe and I discussed Montenegrin wine and our latest assignments as she danced near the table, swinging in time to the John Coltrane music that electrified the tinny speakers. At first, I wasn’t sure what Joe saw in her. I mean, she was beautiful but there were plenty of attractive girls on the island. Then watching her walk over, whisper in his ear, and the way they laughed, it gelled. He was only truly alive around her innocence. She brought balance into his jaded life and was able to make him forget what we had done in Guyana and continuing on in Trinidad.
“Hank, I need another favor.”
I moved the Don Diego cigar to the corner of my mouth. “What this time?”
“My baby wants to surprise her father with a visit tomorrow but I’m working. I know you have another day layover before you leave for New York. Would you mind? I don’t like her traveling around town alone.”
I eyed her swaying suggestively yet innocently to the beat. “Yeah, I can see where you would be worried. And no I don’t mind.”
“Great! Bartender, another round,” he shouted. He clapped the sides of my face. “What a friend!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I laughed. “Have you considered what comes next?”
“Whaddya mean?” He pretended to look puzzled.
"I mean you can’t do this sort of work forever if you intend to start a family." He had let it slip there was a little one on the way.
"We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” He looked at me with a devilish grin and Errol Flynn charm. I knew Joe never allowed reality to enter the calculation. He slipped from the table and swaggered drunkenly to the center of his universe and grabbed around her tiny waist as he spun her across the dance floor.
I laughed and turned away, catching the eye of a dark-haired Spanish beauty and finding my own dance partner for the evening.
*
I rendezvoused with Joe’s girl a little before noon the following day. We got some lunch and then wandered to the address she had for her father, walking to the center of town. There was a lightness in her step that gradually disappeared as we entered an area of rundown bungalows juxtaposed in a tidy row. We stopped in front of a turquoise blue house, paint cracking off the concrete walls, rust showing through the white metal bars covering the windows.
She knocked. A heavyset black woman answered, cautiously opening the door while Kathleen explained who she was. Pity softened the woman’s face as she took a shawl from behind the door and in a thick accent said, "I will take you to your father."
We walked for three city blocks. Straight to the cemetery. It was hard for me to imagine what Kathleen was feeling. Her face remained stoic, but when the woman stopped in front of a pauper’s grave, the color had drained from the girl's cheeks.
The woman hugged her by the shoulders and then departed. Kathleen dropped to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably, and clenched the raised mound with both hands. With trembling lips close to the earth she whispered words that disappeared with the circling wind. A storm was building in more ways than one and as dark rain clouds rolled in, I wondered if Ed had lost his life to the games I was playing.
It didn’t matter. A girl had lost her dad.
A light rain began tapping leaves. I looked around at the cramped, unkempt cemetery—the tall grass, the tipped over headstones. It struck me as appropriate. It was cluttered like the departed lives and the messes they left behind.
I bent down and gently pulled her up. She buried her face in my shoulder and cried. I thought about Joe and how he would have handled this reality when it occurred to me that he had by sending me. I began to lead Kathleen down the gravel path but she turned back, pulling out a picture from her purse. A picture of herself, probably meant for her new husband. She stooped in front of the grave once again and brushed away the hardening dirt. She tenderly kissed the photo and placed it in the shallow hole.
We walked out of the cemetery and I walked out of their lives for the better part of the next two decades. I would get the obligatory Christmas card usually in her handwriting, but like everything else, even that slowed down in time.
*
I met up with Kathleen at a farmhouse in Candor, New York. I brought my charmer, my new bride, and the two of them hit it off. We all sat around the dining table talking over coffee and cigarettes. Kathleen was into her second marriage at that time—she and Joe had long been over. She didn’t speak of him, but in the silences, volumes were filled.
I watched the lumbering shadow of a tree stretch across the floor and climb the table legs. My mind strayed back several years to Joe’s fight with cancer. His shallow bravado had remained intact to the end with his final words to me, "We had a helluva run, didn’t we, Hank?" I had stood next to his second wife and their children as we buried him in Arlington. Just like Kathleen’s father, another misguided and fallen Don Quixote.
"I’m happy to see you found that someone special,” she said bringing me back to the moment. “You deserve the best and I see you got it.”
“How sweet,” my charmer smiled. I nodded in agreement. A love like ours was a stark contrast to Kathleen’s tattered dreams.
My charmer took her melancholy away with soft exchange.
Kathleen leaned to the side with a hand nestled under her chin. The fine lines of age were just beginning to show but her beauty, her steadfast companion, held time at bay. Only the innocence was missing.
I stood finishing my smoke, walked to the country sink and looked through a smudged window. A cow was grazing near the fence as a group of children—step-kids plus a few of her own—played tag in the dusty driveway. Her much older husband was off in the distance plowing the field on a rust-bucket of a tractor.
“Where are you off to next Henry?” she asked as we were leaving.
“Germany.”
“Don’t stay away from home so long that you forget the way back.” There was emptiness in her voice. I knew it was doubtful she’d ever see Guyana again.
My charmer and I climbed into the backseat of the taxi that would take me to the airport and where I would catch a flight for Algeria.
Germany. In my dreams. The enemy was taking the Dark Continent by storm. I looked through the rear window as the taxi clamored down the driveway, Kathleen's little boy chasing after. She stood waving as the non-Rockwellian portrait faded.
We continued to periodically check on Kathleen. Maybe it was a feeling of obligation to Joe, or, maybe it was just a need to know the ending to her story. She married a third time—her life finally achieving some stability—then a stroke snatched away her final companion.
Through it all, she never complained. Her new born faith in God carried her through the fall years of life bowing to winter. This belief in the promise of a clean, well-lighted place in the hereafter strengthened, consoled, and defined her. The loneliness that had shadowed her voice long before had now become hope and peace.
*
I had learned much later, from another source, that while I had been escorting Kathleen to the cemetery, Joe was interrogating a captured mole delivered courtesy of the Brits. It took him only a few hours to acquire names of double agents as well as a confession of the spy's part in blackmailing Kathleen’s father and reducing him to a nub of a man. Joe returned the favor.
The irony, after all that payback, Joe wasn’t able to stand up against his mother who couldn’t stomach the shame of a possibly biracial grandchild after discovering Kathleen’s family lineage had indigenous blood. His mother’s constant badgering was all it took for Joe to walk away from his greatest worth.
My own hands me a glass of red wine, and sits down on the couch next to me as close as she can. We talk about the last time we spoke to Kathleen as
Giant Steps plays softly.
It’s a little after eleven, and, knowing she is a fellow nighthawk, we decide to give her a ring. My arthritic fingers painfully push the numbers on the phone.
She answers.
I take heart in knowing that Kathleen’s story continues.
-End-
More Henry:
Presence |
Renewed |
The Tree Stand
Beginning a Robert J. Randisi novel is like being shot out of a canon with rockets strapped to your ass for good measure.
