Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia Read Free Book Online Page B

gods down from heaven. When their drums started talking, all available deities would stop their celestial bickering and drop in for dancing and good times.
    Domingo had no aptitude to play, but he was an ardent listener. In Guantánamo, the drums were everywhere: on street corners and in carnival bands, at parties and
fiestas de santos. Kimpá, kimpá, kimpá.
His mother said that drumming was for blacks who didn’t work and drank too much, meaning, of course, her brothers and uncles. But Domingo paid her no mind.
Tinkitín, tinkitín.
When he listened to the drums, he felt right in his own skin.
    Business picked up at dinnertime. A crowd of customers rushed in to the Havana Dragon after a movie let out down the block. It was raining and people shook themselves dry like dogs. The humidity steamed up the windows. Pinkish bolts of lightning lit up the sky. Domingo loved lightning, especially when he woke up to it in the middle of the night. It reassured him to know that nature soldiered on while he slept.
    After the storm subsided, a famous trumpeter dropped in for
cafesito
and a slice of pound cake à la mode. The man had fronted one of the best bands on the island until he’d defected in 1962. The trumpeter was wearing a shabby suit and a woolen cap pulled low on his forehead. His fingers were long and translucent. Ash from three cigarettes slowly collected on his plate.
    Que te importa que te amé
Si tú no me quieres ya?
El amor que ha pasado
No se debe recordar . . .
    At eight-thirty, two policemen walked into the Havana Dragon looking for Domingo. He watched them confer with Liu before they moved toward the kitchen. The shorter one took off his cap. His hair was flaming red and cut so short it stood on end. The sound of him cracking his knuckles gave him even more of an electrical air. The policeman said that Domingo’s father had jumped off a subway platform on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. A dozen people had seen him jump, including the conductor of the #4 train. There were two bruises on his head, not much left to the rest of him. Could Domingo accompany them to the morgue to identify his father’s remains?
    Domingo felt every nerve in his body converge in his throat. He wanted to say something, but all he could think of was the questions he used to ask Papi as a kid, the ones that had made his father laugh and shake his head.
What does distance look like? Who
discovered time? What is sound made of? Does everyonefeel pain the same?
    His father had been alive yesterday, Domingo thought. In the morning Papi had shuffled toward the subway station on Broadway, his lobster fists in children’s mittens, his thick-socked feet stuffed into cheap canvas shoes. He’d returned home that afternoon, his hands chapped scarlet, his body shrunken. He’d made stir-fried cabbage with dried shrimp for dinner. Before Domingo had left for the late shift, he’d undressed his father for bed like a baby.
    Outside, the street looked smoky and distorted after the rain. The diseased oak in front of the restaurant was gone. Last week, men in blue jumpsuits had come with their helmets and electric saws and methodically dismembered it. In New York, Domingo knew, it was always cheaper to kill something than to save it. He popped a menthol cough drop into his mouth and sucked it to nothing. It burned the small sore in his cheek that wouldn’t heal.

The Lucky Find
    HAVANA (1867–1868)
    A negress (with her first child) young and robust,
birthed six weeks ago, good and abundant milk, very
regular cook, basic principles of sewing, excellent
handservant, particular skills, healthy and without
vices: Calle San Juan de Dios n. 84.
    Shortly after reading the advertisement in El Diario de la Marina, Chen Pan closed up his secondhand shop and went to inspect the slave and her child at Calle San Juan de Dios. He’d seen notices for slaves before, next to rewards for runaway servants and ads for horses and plows, but never a mother for sale with her