Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)”   

“Havana Hallelujah: Eulogy for a Dead Son pt 1.    

“I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again   

Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me   

Things I don’t understand.”   

  -Kendrick Lamar   

Naomi Galatea Cabbala and Isaiah Leonardo Jones met the two kids at the secluded cove on the north eastern shore of Cuba where they anchored the Exodus; he guessed they were ages 11 or 12 at most. They looked like they were related siblings or cousins, perhaps. The two Afro-Cuban adolescents swam out from the beach to the ship after receiving a call from Naomi. Lorenzo and Miranda Santos were here to watch the dog while they met with Naomi’s employer.    

Listen carefully you two, Naomi said sternly, squatting down to be eye level with the children as she instructed the grinning cornrow crowned duo. If we do not call you before dark, you call your uncle Julio and tell him where you are ok.     

Ok, Naomi. Miranda replied in an exasperated tone. We know whose boat this is. Lorenzo added, petting the dog with one hand while pointing to their newly cornrowed hair with the other.  Chill tia, We not going to mess it up. Miranda assured her. The two cargo shorts and white tee-shirt-wearing children waved at Isaiah as he waited in the stolen catamaran for Naomi to board. Izzy waved back and called out to the pair. There is food in the fridge. help yourselves; the code for the PC is MOTHER45. There are towels under the bench there and boogie boards Manta, I grew up on Morey, Mach VIIs on the other side. Starbucks is a great swimmer if you want to take her with you to the beach.   

Relax, we will take good care of her, Señor Jones. Lorenzo shouted back from the deck of the Exodus. Do not worry, Miranda added, and good luck with Señor Polly!    

Isaiah wondered how they knew, but then if they were close to this former Delta Force operative turned freelancer, they were probably in the same line of work as she. He wasn’t worried about the dog, Starbuck He liked the kids, and they liked him. Isaiah centered his mind by counting. As he began to work out equations in his head, he felt himself relax. There was something the way the two of them looked their arms around each other’s shoulders that reminded him of Miracle Max and his wife waving goodbye to the heroes “Bye bye, have fun storming the castle, try not to get murdered.” Did they even have a chance of getting out of this alive?  

As always, he ran the numbers in his head, calculating the odds as Naomi guided the ship towards the Havana. The city was still asleep on his left as they motored across the waves in the first light of morning. From here, it was less than 4 hours sail to the boathouse where they were to meet Señor Dead Eye Polly Ovejero. Whoever this gangster was, he was far more powerful and far more dangerous than Naomi comprehended. Third-world crime lords can’t make themselves invisible to investigative agencies’ files.  

And he was a ghost after he ran away from foster care in Louisiana at age 6; he never shows up on any official record again. The man simply disappeared 40 years ago, according to the public records. His name is not mentioned in any investigation conducted by the alphabet soup of government agencies with a history of poking its nose into the business of Caribbean nations especially Cuba.   

The man is at the least the head of the Cuban mob and possibly the head of the Caribbean mobsters, and not a word. Isaiah had hacked into every international government agency’s servers, Ameripol (Police Community of the Americans or Ameripol)  

ASEANAPOL, (Inter-Asean Police)[1]  

EUROGENDFOR (European Gendarmerie Force)  

European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina  

European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo  

Europol (European Police Office)  

Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization)  

Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit  

United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo  

GCCPOL, ( Gulf Cooperation Council Police)  

SELEC ( Southeast European Law enforcement Center), for the region of Balkan Countries, Police and customs regional international cooperation and joint activities.[2]  

Africa and found nothing? Impossible.  He had read enough FOIA reports to spot the work of the perhaps the church or the Freemasons. There was not a whisper of his name or anyone fitting his description in a single agency’s federal, state, or local officers’ reports. Think outside the box, deep pockets NSA? They have the resources, and this is their MO. But why? what are they up to and more importantly who is Senor Ovejero’s patron? Isaiahs’s parents had top secret clearance in the military, and their records disappeared once they enlisted in the same way.        

He needed to focus on getting his head in the game; this Dead Eye Polly fellow was the unknown factor in this equation. They had their weapons ready. Naomi had his modified potato gun, and he had the hybrid coil rail gun hidden in his guitar case. If things went tits up the mission was kill the Albino and take him to hell with us no matter what his guards did, they only had one objective to focus on and that was to kill Dead Eye Polly.    

 Ceaser  aka Milo  

Naomi had Dead Eye Polly on speaker when she phoned him after they arrived in Havana just before sunrise; now they were headed to the catamaran he stole for the gangster to make up for the boat he was expecting. As mad as he would be about his dead son, returning empty-handed would just compound your failure in the eyes of a man like the Dead Eye Polly. Naomi was healing well after being shot 4 days ago off the coast of the Bahamas when the boat heist with Polly’s son, Caesar, went sideways. He found her the next day adrift in the dinghy, unconscious and bleeding out from the gunshot wound.  

He brought the unconscious woman aboard, dressed her wounds, and put her in the guest berth directly below the cockpit. Once she came to, she explained her situation, thanked the young sailor, and asked to be dropped off near Havana. After hearing of her plight and her financial troubles with Polly, he volunteered to go with her and explain what happened to Ceaser and deliver the boat comparable to the one she was sent after that he stole alone while she rested.   

It had taken longer to sail here with the other vessel in tow, and now they were here in Havana. This was Isaiah’s first time here, even though he had sailed around the Caribbean with his parent every summer for the last ten years. They stayed away from Cuba, where they met when they were still in the military, and they stayed away from Haiti because of the chaos.     

Now the two walked towards the warehouse at the end of the pier, where they were to meet her employer, Dead Eye Polly and his guards, The Sons of Sparta. Naomi and Isaiah had their improvised weapons ready in case things went sideways, stored in canvas bags used for extra sails. Isaiah carried his guitar case in his left hand, which held the magnetic accelerator electric-powered cannon—a mass driver, or rail gun, often misidentified as a Gauss gun, though it was in fact a linear rifle hybrid the lab techs had dubbed War Pig.  

Both wore their hair in cornrows. Isaiah was dressed in a white Tang suit, the Chinese-style jacket with buttons down the front and a Mandarin collar with “frog” buttons. Beside him, the raven-haired ivory-skinned Cuban American Naomi, at 5’10”, was only an inch shorter than Penny.   

She dug through the clothes Aeon and Penny left behind when they headed to San Diego for Aeon to start school last fall, stopping the search after finding a red silk, black lace Dior Shanghai-style cheongsam dress that belonged to Penny.     

They slowly walked side by side down the docks towards the warehouse, with its corrugated steel walls and roof, into the lion’s den where Dead Eye Polly and his henchmen awaited them.    

As they got closer, something seemed off to Naomi. The former Delta forced operative had been here many times before on business and this was all wrong, the guards were not in their usual positions in the rafters, nor was anyone looking at them as they approached the group of several dozen people, all of whom had their backs to the warehouses giant sliding metal doorway.   

Inside the people were kneeling, and candles were lit, flanking a hastily framed portrait of Ceaser on the table, turned into an improvised altar between the glass tubes holding the holy mother votive candles. The large titanium white Armani suited albino kneeling at front was saying a blessing for his son Ceaser as they approached.    

“Holy Father, may this candle which I light in all humility in grief illuminate all my difficulties and decisions. May this candle be the flame that burns away all my pride, all my selfishness, and all my many other sins. May this candle be a fire that warms my grief-frozen heart and incites me to love.” Amen.    

The albino crossed himself, then rose to his feet. When Polly saw the two, his eye was red from weeping, but he was obviously overjoyed to see Naomi. The gargantuan 6’9″ tall, 413 lb, one-eyed negro albino embraced her as if she were a long-lost daughter. Polly stepped back and looked at the two sailors.    

“Naomi, I am happy to see you, my child. The gigantic cycloptic albino lisped.  I was certain you had met a similar fate as my Ceaser,” the albino said in his lisping, adenoidal voice. It was the voice of an educated man, if not formally, then in countless hours of autodidactic study. Dead Eye Polly’s vocabulary slid in and out of that of an early 20th-century Southern aristocrat, with the affectation of Truman Capote and a third-world gangster.   

“I assume you are the man to whom I owe a debt of more than gratitude for rescuing my little ninja Naomi here. Thank you. We are having a memorial for Ceaser. His brothers and sister are saying their goodbyes.” (By brothers and sisters, he meant his army of soldiers they called the Sons of Sparta that guarded the albino.)      

Naomi finally gathered her wits enough to ask.    

“So, you don’t blame me for his death and want revenge?”    

Polly looked at the woman incredulously. “Why would I do something so foolish? The police reports and the news all said the same thing as my own people on the island reported—Milo boarded the boat with a gun.” He looked at them both. “Naomi, he sighed, I sent him with you to learn how to do things using his head, not a gun. It was obvious he disobeyed your orders and got himself killed when the seasick passenger saw him board with a gun and grabbed his own gun.   

They hit the stoves fuel tank, which caused it to detonate, starting the fire that sank the ship. No one saw you or knew you were there other than my people. When you didn’t turn up dead or call, I assumed the worst, that you had been shot too, and your body drifted out to sea or washed up somewhere out of sight. I was simply overjoyed to learn that you were alive when you called this morning.”    

Naomi smiled. “I want you to meet the man who saved my life. This is—”    

Polly interrupted, “Please, child, I know exactly who he is. The youngest recipient of the Fields Medal, currently on track to win the Nobel for your work on Magnetoquasistatic fields and gravity wells. I knew who you were before this whole viral video of you partying with the local yachties in Key West thing started last weekend. Thank you, Señor Jones. Please, allow me to share my hospitality and show my gratitude for all you have done. I insist you let me feed you, and resupply your ship before you continue your journey.”    

Isaiah and the albino shook hands. They were both very large, odd-looking black men.    

“Purdón, Señor Ovejero, Naomi really needs to see an actual doctor,” Isaiah said as they headed into the building. I patched her up the best I could, and it seems to be healing well, but…    

I understand Capitán Jones. The albino, with the subtlest nod of his head, ordered two of his men to attend to her. The two guards put their arms around her and helped her into one of the waiting white cars.    

“I will see you as soon as I get new stitches,” Naomi said from the backseat of one of the zinc white Land Rover’s windows. “Thank you, Isaiah, for everything.”    

Polly and Isaiah headed to his vehicle as the two men continued to chat. “So, you were ready to shoot me, I see?”    

“Yes, but only if you refused to listen to reason.” Isaiah grinned like the goofy kid that he was. Polly looked into the 6′ 2″, green-eyed, black-skinned teen’s eyes and saw that he spoke truthfully.    

“Good. Naomi is not a bad girl; she just has a bit of a temper. The albino explained, surprisingly empathetic. Unfortunately, she also likes to gamble, so I picked up her debt before someone dangerous came after her. The word on the street is that if she owes you money, then I owe you money. That way, nobody tries to get cute or does anything stupid. They bring me the vid, and I handle the dept personally. You owe those guys and don’t pay on time, and they start breaking bones and chopping fingers.” The albino concluded.    

Isaiah looked at the lumbering albino as they walked, raising an eyebrow. He found it hard to believe that there was someone in the region more dangerous than Dead Eye Polly, but he clearly meant what he said.   

But that is exactly what you do. He grinned.    

Yes, but not to her. Polly confessed.    

“I thought you wanted her to work for you?” Isaiah said. “Isn’t that why you picked up her paper?”    

“Yes, but that’s only partially true. I want Naomi to work with me not for me, I don’t want her to soldier for me but to train my soldiers. but I took on her debt to protect her, as well as recruit her to teach my son Ceaser. The skills she acquired during her years as a Delta Force Operative are of immense value to a man in my peculiar profession.   

I have used her services in the past when I wanted a new boat to sail, and she has never failed me or harmed a hair on anyone’s head in the process. The sorrow settled with its full weight of the grief on his shoulders as they slumped. he sighed, sometimes we want the best for our children so badly, we can’t see the worst of them.”    

The albino looked into the boys’ eyes; his blind eye and his pale blue eye both rivers of tears. Isaiah saw his own father’s pain in his eyes.    

Isaiah wrapped his arms around the big man and let him cry loud. he wailed and howled, bellowing like a wild beast torn with grief, shredded with sorrow. He held onto him as he rested his head on his shoulder, the pain of loss moving through his body as a storm of tears fell.   

In this moment, Isaiah came to understand the big man, for all of his wealth and power, when he truly needed a friend, he had no one. Isaiah had felt like that for the last ten years since his sister Emily died; he understood this man’s pain. The guards kept their distance and watched as their boss, Dead Eye Polly, wept in the arms of a stranger.    

[Note] Lighting candles for the deceased    

[“This ancient custom of lighting candles for the deceased was already practiced by the Romans, even earlier by the Etruscans and, even further back, by the Egyptians and the Greeks, who used candles for the deceased in funeral rites, In the Christian religion, visiting the grave of a loved one, bringing flowers, lighting candles for the deceased and stopping to pray, is something comforting and consoling.    

Because candles for the deceased are pulsating sentinels, small fragments of light that draw the path to peace for our departed loved ones, it is, therefore, a good custom to light candles for the deceased and leave them on the tombstones to illuminate the night of the cemeteries. In the light of the candles for the deceased that is consumed, feeding on its own wax, we recognize the human life that is slowly extinguished.    

The offering we leave by lighting candles for the deceased is a sacrifice that accompanies our prayer with deeds and makes our intention of faith tangible. Protection, therefore, and guidance, these are the main functions of lighting candles for the deceased mourning. That every year it is customary to re-light, on November 1, All Saints Day, and on the 2nd, All Souls Day or Day of the Dead.”][International  

Ameripol, (Police Community of the Americans or Ameripol)  

ASEANAPOL, (Inter-Asean Police)[1]  

EUROGENDFOR (European Gendarmerie Force)  

European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina  

European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo  

Europol (European Police Office)  

Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization)  

Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit  

United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo  

GCCPOL, ( Gulf Cooperation Council Police)  

SELEC ( Southeast European Law enforcement Center), for the region of Balkan Countries, Police and customs regional international cooperation and joint activities.[2]  

Africa] 

-About the author 

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx