Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina Read Free Book Online Page A

beating fast and his throat wants to crumble, but if he has one advantage over the situation, it is that everything around him is his making—the house, the field, the sea, his posture, his lover walking toward him and walking away.
    He lets her go and lies back to look at the sky, which is soon covered by clouds. A strong wind blows off the ocean and the butterfly disappears. The wind pushes the grass stalks uphill and in a few minutes large drops start falling, a few at first, and then the sky breaks open and the rain comes down, heavy, persistent. He runs back to the house and finds that everything is as he left it, the whiskey bottle on the counter, the red roses he bought yesterday, still fresh and fragrant, the cantaloupe half on the kitchen table that he hoped they could have with lunch. Sitting on the reading chair he listens to the rain hit the cottage roof, beating him down until he is a small helpless creature in the universe of his making. He realizes his love, that he himself devised, is a dull sublunary lovers’ love.

KILLER OF CROCODILES
    A ngel’s grandfather, Pedro Romero, was the best policeman in Havana. They say he wasn’t afraid of anyone, un macho de verdad, they say, driven to ridding the city of the criminal elements who dominated the streets, even if he had to break the law to do so. Angel met Pedro in a nursing home in Miami, thirty years after Angel’s grandmother threw him out of the house for his philandering ways. Pedro took up with a woman with whom he had a daughter, and after she, too, broke with him, he fake-married a simple twenty-year-old girl from the country. They say his cousin, Gustavo, a lawyer and notary public, arranged the whole thing but never submitted the papers to the marriage bureau, so as far as the law was concerned, the marriage never took place. Pedro was merely interested in getting the guajira into bed. He wound up falling in love and stayed with her for fifteen years until he left for the United States. By then he had retired from the police force but his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. He was, after all, the man who had tracked, found, and killed Manolito Rivas, one of the most notorious murderers ever to roam the streets of the capital. Whenever Pedro entered a bar, people bought him drinks, and more than once he was seen walking down the Malecón with a tall, blonde Americana on his arm.
    By the time Angel met Pedro he’d been writing for ten years. He’d published two books that sold a total of a thousand copies, give or take a dozen, and after considering his meager success, he was almost ready to give up writing for good. His ambition, his last thread of hope, was to write a story about Pedro that would revive his sputtering writer’s soul.
    Pedro was a shriveled old man who could hardly speak due to the laryngeal cancer that was killing him but who still whistled at all the nurses who entered his room, even the ugly ones. As a result the nurses gave him special treatment, bringing him chocolate treats to suck on and cans of Orange Crush, the only liquid that slaked his ever-present thirst. When he saw Angel, he raised his hands in an inquiring gesture, and Angel answered that he was Zoila’s grandson and therefore his as well. Pedro started shaking so badly that he had to sit down. He waved Angel over to the chair and embraced him, planting a wet, unpleasant kiss on his cheek. Then he told that old joke about an inventor who had developed a fruit that tasted like a woman’s vagina. Angel forced out a laugh.
    You don’t like the joke? he asked. Angel could practically hear his vocal chords straining to vibrate.
    I’ve heard it before, Angel said.
    The truth was that laughing was difficult because Angel had inherited his family’s resentment over the way Pedro had treated them. What kind of man would abandon his wife and children just like that? His father was forced to leave school and work sweeping