Joey Cloudy online

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

Havana: Eulogy for a Dead Son pt 2* 

Naomi Galatea Cabbala and Isaiah Leonardo Jones met the two kids at the cove where they anchored the Exodus; he guessed they were ages 11 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, Naomi squatted down to be eye level with the children as she instructed the duo. If we do not call you before dark, you call your uncle Julio and tell him where you are ok.  

Ok, Naomi. Miranda said, exasperated. We know whose boat this is. Lorenzo added, pointing to their newly cornrowed hair.  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 dingy for Naomi to board. Izzy waved back and called up to the pair. There is food in the fridge. Help yourself; the code for the PC is MOTHER45. There are towels under the bench there and bogie boards 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. Do not worry, 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 and calculated the odds as Naomi guided the skiff towards the eastern coast of Cuba 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 Dead Eye Polly Ovejero at his boathouse. Whoever this gangster was, he was more than Naomi comprehended. Third-world crime lords can’t make themselves invisible to investigative agencies’ files.

He was a ghost after he ran away from foster care in Louisiana at age 6; he never showed 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 enough government servers and read enough FOIA reports to spot the work of the Freemasons. The only jewelry the albino wore other than the crucifix was the Mason’s ring on his pinky, just like his own father.  

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 in his guitar case. If things went tits up the mission was kill the Albino take him to hell with us no matter what his guards did, they were to focus on Dead Eye Polly. 

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 Milo 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 ask 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 Milo 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 stay 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 Afro Cuban American Naomi, at 5’11”, 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, obviously in prayer, while the interior was alive with the flickering of votive candles were lit throughout the dank interior.

There were two tall candles flanking a hastily framed recent portrait of the deceased 16-year-old Caesar Milo Ovejero on the table, which had been turned into an improvised altar. The heavy gilded frame showed a young black boy in a white Armani suit, a younger dark-skinned clone of his albino father in the image smiling innocently in front of the family’s French Chateau that overlooked the entrance to Havana harbor. The moment enshrine rested upright 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 Milo as they approached. 

“Agya Kronkron, ma kyɛnere yi a mede ahobrɛaseɛ nyinaa sɔ wɔ awerɛhoɔ mu no nhyerɛn me nsɛnnennen ne me gyinaesie nyinaa. Ma kyɛnere yi nyɛ ogyaframa a ɛhyew m’ahantan nyinaa, me pɛsɛmenkominya nyinaa ne me bɔne afoforo pii nyinaa. Ɛmmra sɛ kyɛnere yi nyɛ ogya a ɛma m’awerɛhow a ayɛ nwini no yɛ hyew na ɛkanyan me ma ɔdɔ.”

“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″ 314 pounds one-eyed negro albino embraced her. 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 Milo.”

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, Captain Jones. We are having a memorial for Milo. 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 people on the island reported—he boarded the boat with a gun.” He looked at them both. “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 gas line, which caused the stove to detonate, setting fire to and sinking 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 you had been shot too, and your body drifted out to sea or washed up somewhere out of sight. I was just glad you were alive when you called to report in 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 know 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, let me feed you, thank 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. 

 “She really needs to see a doctor sir” Isaiah said as they headed into the building. 

  The albino with no more than a nod of his head. Two of his men put an arm around her and helped her into a car. 

 “I will see you as soon as I get new stitches,” Naomi said from the backseat through the car window. “Thank you, Isaiah, for everything.” 

  Polly and Isaiah headed to his vehicle as the two men continued to chat. “So, you came prepared to kill 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 does anything stupid or tries to get cute. They bring me the vig 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 the albino, but he clearly meant what he said. But that is exactly what you do. He grinned. 

“Yes, but never 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 do want Naomi, but not to work for me but work with me, I don’t want her to soldier for me but train my soldiers. but I took on her debt to protect her, as well as recruit her to teach Milo. 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 its weight on 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. he 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 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 like 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 their boss cry in the arms of a stranger. 

They made their way to Polly’s car and the zinc white armored Range Rover. The driver and guard sat in the front. Isaiah sat in the backseat with the grieving father as they traveled down the graveled path to the black tar road that led to Polly’s villa. The car turned right onto the main road and headed into the city that time forgot after the American embargo, Havana.

Isaiah ignored the passing tropical countryside. There were the usual old mid-20th-century cars in various states of repair; some were nothing more than the frame and rear axle cut down and reproposed as a burro-drawn cart. The occasional odd looking new tri-wheeled little yellow taxis that looked like a rickshaw fused with Mister Beans Mini Coupe.

He never gave the local architecture a second thought growing up in Texas and spending summers sailing around the Caribbean. Spanish architecture is nothing novel; you see it everywhere every day. Maybe that’s why he never met a black man that gave two shits about Hemingway at the end of the day the white heroes victory is about celebrating white supremacy.

Of course, they will say this is not true, that black people try to make everything about race, and by gosh, we good white folk are tired of hearing about it. Then immediately start a conversation about replacement theory, illegal immigrants, overpopulation, and the woke takeover of the media because they are now seeing POC in non-supporting cast roles in cinema.

A non-white token sidekick non-threatening friend is fine, but a darker-than-pink leading woman in a major film is just too woke. Ahh, those Hollywood liberals and their “Jewish space lasers”. These are the I’m not racist, I have a black friend at work or in class, so it’s not racist when I call black people nigg@ because I don’t use the hard R. I vote democratic, and I went out with a black guy once in college. Isaiah shook his head people were just plain awful. He would stay the night in Cuba, be sure Naomi was ok then set sail in the morning. 

  The albino lit a Cohiba, and Isaiah stared out the window at he aged stone and stucco 2oo and 3oo year old buildings of the tiny island nation, no different than any other Caribbean Island. The inhabitants of these insignificant clumps of dirt love to puff up their chests and claim that they are not the descendants of African slaves; they are Spanish.

I no Negre me Dominican, Costa Rican, or Trinidad sure there are decedents of Spaniards there and the indigenous Indians but when you standing next to me blacker than me, lip thick, wide nose nappy hair obviously from the same region of Africa as my ancestors were kidnapped from near the gold coast and claim everything that is only a small part of your genetic make-up but deny the majority of your DNA is African?!

Stupid nigg@rs annoy him; they didn’t even know that the only difference between them was when they got off the slave ship. Now, these pathetic self-hating nigg@s run entire nations in the Carribean. There is nothing more pathetic than talking to an obvious black man who hates his African ancestry so much that he pretends he is a European, a Spaniard.

They act as if each little island separated by a mere 20, 30, or 40 miles of water all colonized by the same nation with slaves from the same continent, but they magically are not the descendants of those Africans. They are going to be in for one hell of a surprise when they take a DNA test 23 and me is going have a lot of this old coons sucking on the barrel of a gun. The gangster’s villa a 3 story 2 2-century-old old stone building that was the governor’s mansion a century ago. The villa’s patio was on the beach, and his ship, a 40-foot catamaran, was anchored just offshore. 

The uniformed servants brought drinks out to the beachside patio where they sat and talked, waiting for Naomi to return from the hospital. Isaiah sipped his mojito and sat in the chair, Starbuck beside him, staring across the golden sands of the beach at the azure waters of the Caribbean Sea. 

Naomi arrived a few hours later as Isaiah and Polly were engaged in an excited discussion of sloops versus catamarans, the two black men both being sailors. They were happy to have this conversation with each other as they drank. Naomi watched the two men for a moment, mesmerized. She would have never thought the two of them would have a word to say to each other, and it was obvious from here that they had a real bromance going on.  

The albinos servants leapt into a frenzy of activity as Polly’s car entered the iron gates of the guard post and climbed the winding driveway that led up to the stone building. The albino climbed out of the backseat of the Range Rover and made his way up the stone path to the huge double doors of the 3-century-old fortified hilltop villa that had once been the governor’s mansion in colonial days.

The double doors opened as he approached, and several uniformed servants waited on either side of the entrance’s foyer. They took his jacket; another took his holstered weapons, the massive Holland and Holland elephant guns he had converted from riffles to pistols. He stepped out of his leather loafers as a woman placed a pair of white slippers on his massive feet. By the time he had walked through the foyer and entered the living room he was wearing a white silk smoking jacket and had a glass of bourbon in his hand.  

“Why do they let you do what you do?” Isaiah asked. 

Polly looked at the youngster and smiled.

“Supply and demand simple economics. Would you care for some ice cream?” 

Isaiah grinned, “Sure.” And followed the one-eyed mobster into the kitchen. He was surprised when he watched the big man grab two China bowls and silver table spoons and an ice cream scoop before fetching the Ben and Jerries Chunky Monkey from the freezer. He ran hot water over the scoop first then scooped up three big scoops into each bowl before he handed one to Isaiah with a spoon, then picked up his own after returning the rest to the freezer. The two men made their way outside to the patio next to the dining room. The view from here was spectacular, and it was easy to see why the Spaniards had built the fortress up here; it was easily defensible and only accessible by the one cliffside road.  

As they ate spoonful’s of ice cream, the albino asked the young engineer a question. I’m curious, Señor Jones. Why didn’t you turn my Naomi in to the authorities or take her to the hospital in the Bahamas when you found her? 

I did the math and odds where I was going to end up in jail for months or even get convicted or implicated in her death if she died, so I decided since the wound didn’t hit bone or organs, she had a good chance of making it.  

“You do not trust the police, I see.” the albino said, licking the spoon. 

“I trust the police as much as you do.” Senor Polly. Isaiah said. 

They both men through back their head as they roared with laughter. 

“You are wise not to trust them. even here, they are little more than a shakedown artist and not particularly bright. The albino laughed, Isaiah, you are too young to understand this, but I am in your debt. While you may or may not have been entrapped in one of their trumped up cases. The one thing that is certain is that if you had taken her in, she would certainly have been arrested and charged as an accessory to murder. A good thief is hard to find and my Naomi is one of the best. What ever you need, you just let me know, and it’s done.”  

“I have one thing I can use your help with.”

Isaiah gave the rest of the melted ice-cream in his bowl to Starbuck. 

“I need a package delivered to a cargo ship when you leave Barbados. I have people on board, but they will need to be supplied en route before they reach the Caribbean. Polly looked at Isaiah. So, can you meet them in the middle of the Atlantic and drop off the package? I hate to ask, but my own people would draw too much attention.” The albino said, finishing the ice cream. 

“I see no problem delivering your package, Senor Polly.”

Isaiah said as he petted the dog and picked up the empty bowl. 

“Your itinerary has you in Barbados in two months. My people will contact you when you arrive to load the package onboard just before you leave to cross the Atlantic. Now, the albino asks What can I do for you?” 

 [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.”] AK/wiki

-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