Free Pressure Drop by Peter Abrahams Page A

mishandled during the day, of Dicky Dumaurier, Marilyn, Ravoukian—and Danny, most of all: Danny, swinging at a ball he couldn’t hit; Danny pounding his club on the rubber mat. Danny was to the ball as he was to Danny: he hadn’t connected. Perhaps Danny was already beyond his reach, driven away by the Big Bang of the divorce. Or was it just his own ignorance of what a father did and how he did it?
    Matthias had no memories of his own father. He had died young, leaving him a name he didn’t like, a blurred photograph and a medal. The name: Nathan Hale. Was it chosen because his father admired the patriot or had a premonition his son would come to a similar end? Matthias didn’t know. The photograph: a sailor in dress blues standing on a beach with a smile on his face. It had lain in the back of a drawer in a plywood chest that had been lost on one of the moves. The medal: the Medal of Honor in a velvet-lined box. Matthias could still recall the feel of its inanimate coolness in his hand: touching it was one of his earliest memories, reaching back to a time long before he had ever heard of Okinawa or World War II. The medal was sold by Stepdaddy Number Two to make a monthly payment on his Coupe de Ville.
    Matthias could no longer picture the face of Stepdaddy Number Two, but he retained a sparkling image of that two-tone Coupe de Ville, its red-and-white bodywork polished by Stepdaddy Number Two until it glowed. One Sunday morning an errant baseball went through its windshield while it was parked in the yard; the sound had gotten Stepdaddy Number Two out of bed and running outside in his undershorts, whirling his belt in the air. Matthias’s legs had frozen at the sight. He hadn’t been able to run a step. Number Two had given him the kind of beating that was known in their neighborhood as “a good whipping.” Matthias could picture the belt as vividly as the Coupe de Ville—snakeskin with a silver buckle. Once he’d woken in the night and seen his mother wearing it and nothing else.
    So What glided over the Tongue of the Ocean with Matthias barely touching the wheel, never checking the compass. The boat knew the way. On the northwest horizon, where the black of the sky met the lesser black of the sea, Matthias saw the rounded shadows of the Berry Islands, as clearly as he would have seen them by day. The full moon lit the world as finely as the sun, but worked only in black. It had been on a silent night much like this that they had drifted in to the beach at the foot of the Sierra Maestra. Cesarito. Rodriguez. Cruz-Romero. And the boy Tonio.
    Cesarito had sung nervously under his breath while they unloaded the crates on the beach and waited for Rodriguez’s brother’s men to come down out of the hills. Matthias had set the anchor and swum in to help them. He needn’t have done that: he was simply the boatman, in for the money. That little swim had led to his second whipping.
    Men had come out of the Sierra Maestra, but they were Fidel’s men, not Rodriguez’s brother’s. Guns went off. Rodriguez and the boy had fallen on the spot. Tonio. A skinny boy. A burst of automatic fire had cut through his neck; Tonio’s head had hit the sand with a thump Matthias heard clearly, distinct from all the noises of the fighting. Then he had turned toward the boat, seen the way blocked and run into the hills. Two days later, filthy, ragged, scratched by thorns, he had stepped out of the bush into the gunsights of a patrol. “ Yo soy turisto ,” he had said, raising his hands. They hadn’t even cracked a smile.
    Then came two years on the Isle of Pines: sleeping every night with a knife made from a fork in his hand. Isla de Piños, where he had done what he did for Cesarito and where they punished him for it; where Cesarito died anyway, but left him a gift: Zombie Bay, one of many things owned by the son of rich Habaneros. But no amount of money could ever