HOUSE OF JAGUAR by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond [Bond, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CIA, Environment, Guatemala, Human Rights, Latin America, Revolution, War Crimes
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Published: 2014-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

35

154 ALABAMA was a tilting, unrenovated Romeo near the projects, Spanish names on the mailboxes. “Hey, niño,” he said to a boy playing marbles in the dank hall, “Donde vive la inglésa?”

“Four,” the boy said. “But she’s got someone.”

It was up one flight of sticky stairs with broken linoleum, a white door gouged by dog claws. The jamb had been split and repaired with tin. From other apartments came canned laughter and children’s screams. He knocked, then again.

A creak of floor, a woman’s sleepy voice, “Yeah?”

“Sherrie?”

“Who?”

“Sherrie Cunningham, I’m...”

“She’s gone. I don’t know where.”

“I’m a friend of her dad’s.”

“She don’t have no dad.”

“She did.”

The deadbolt opened, another lock shifted back. The door thunked against its chain. The girl had a long slender face with her father’s palomino hair, a little freckled nose and wide lips in a wide mouth. “She didn’t never have a dad.”

“I’ve got something for her. From him.”

Her face neared the door. “What was his name? Her dad?”

“Clint. Clint Cunningham.”

She undid the chain, tugged her faded brown kimono tighter. The kitchen smelled of leaking gas, ashtrays, crack, and heat. She shoved beer bottles and dirty plates to one side of the table, motioned at a chair and sat. “I can tell her for you.”

“Cut the shit, Sherrie. What the fuck you doing to yourself?”

Her hand searching for a cigarette among the dirty coffee cups was like a blind creature on the ocean floor. “Who’re you to tell me that! I don’t know you from nothing, asshole.”

“I’m Clint’s friend. He asked me to come back.”

“You’re just a little late.”

“It was in an old letter. I was supposed to read it if he died. But I got wounded and the letter disappeared and I just found it. I just talked with your grandmother in Portland, Mary Cunningham, and your Mom, Lucy Amato...”

“You some dick?”

“My name’s Joe Murphy and I live here in San Francisco. I was in the 101st Airborne with your Dad in South Vietnam and Cambodia.”

“How’s my grandma?”

“I think they all miss you. Want you to come back.”

The girl smiled and shook her head, hair rasping on the kimono. She tipped cigarette ashes into a cup. “You got anything on you? Coke, anything?”

He shrugged. “A little weed.”

“Give me a few hits?”

He gave her a joint and she lit it keeping her hair back from his Bic, sucking down and holding in the smoke. She held it out to him but he waved it away. “Your dad and me, we used to smoke that stuff all the time in Nam. They called our unit Celestial Airlines.”

“That’s where it got him.”

He sat back. “So it did.”

She waved the joint. “This is good stuff. I could sell some for you.”

“It’s my own. Not commercial.”

“Everybody... should have their own... victory garden...” Her pale lemon eyes canvassed the wall above the sink, yellow paint with big curling blisters showing a greasy brown beneath, the ventilator gummed black, a black cord hanging down, the single shelf with a rusty can of Raid and three empty Colt 45 malt liquor bottles.

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