Joey Cloudy online

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

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

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 on the stolen catamaran for Naomi to board. Izzy waved back and called over to the pair.

“There is food and drink in the fridge. Help yourselves; the code for the PC is MOTHER45. There are towels under the bench there and bogie boards on the other side. Starbuck she’s a great swimmer if you want to take her with you to the beach.”

“Relax, we will take good care of Starbuck, Señor Jones, do not worry and good luck with senor 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 She liked the kids, and they liked her. Isaiah centered his mind by counting as he began to work out equations in his head he felt himself relax. 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 inside of 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 thier weapons 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 his boathouse to deliver 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 her 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 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 Caesar (Milo) Ovejero and deliver the boat comparable to the one she was sent after that he himself 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 French colonialist-induced 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 personal guard, The Sons of Sparta. Naomi and Isaiah had their improvised weapons ready in case things went sideways; hers was stored in the canvas bag 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. The guitar he left on his bunk aboard the Exodus, now miles away, was at this very moment being played by the child Miranda, Isaac Albéniz ‘Asturias’.

Both Naomi and Isaiah wore their hair in cornrows. Isaiah was dressed in an all 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 5’11”, 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. 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.

The people were all kneeling, and candles were lit, flanking a hastily framed portrait of Milo 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 negro kneeling at front was saying a blessing for his son Milo as they approached. 

“Santo Padre, que esta vela que enciendo con toda humildad en el dolor ilumine todas mis dificultades y decisiones. Que esta vela sea la llama que consuma todo mi orgullo, todo mi egoísmo y todos mis otros muchos pecados. Que esta vela sea un fuego que caliente mi corazón helado de dolor y me incite a amar”. Amén.”

“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″ 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 Ceasar. His brothers and sister are saying their goodbyes.” (By brothers and sisters, he meant his army of child 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 were dead too and that your body had drifted out to sea or washed up somewhere out of sight. I was simply relieved 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 this 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 long before this viral video of you partying with the local yachties in Key West thing started last weekend. Thank you, Señor Jones. Please, I must insist that you let me feed you, accept my offer of a night’s rest at my chateau while my men resupply your ship before you continue your journey.” 

 Isaiah thanked Dead Eye Polly for his hospitality as they shook hands. They were both very large, odd-looking black men. 

 “I stitched her up as best I could sir, but she needs to see a real doctor.”

 “I will have her driven to the clinic immediately.”

Polly said. With a nod, one of his men put an arm around her and helped her into one of the waiting cars. 

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

 Polly and Isaiah headed to the warehouse Polly eyed the guitar case Isaiah carried in his left hand and smiled.

“So, I see you came prepared to kill me?” 

 “Yes. Isaiah replied, grinning like the goofy kid that he was. But only if you could not be reasoned with.”

Polly looked into the 6′ 2″, green-eyed, black-skinned teen’s eyes and knew that he was not lying. 

 “Good.” the albino retorted with a knowing smile. “Naomi is not a bad girl; she just has a bit of a temper.” he explained, surprisingly empathetic. “Unfortunately, she likes to gamble, so I picked up her debt before someone dangerous came after her.” 

“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 her to work with me, but I took on her debt to protect her, as well as recruit her to teach Milo. The skills my Naomi 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 whenever 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 the full weight of the grief on his shoulders as they slumped. he sighed as he confessed.

“Sometimes we want the best for our children so badly, we can not see the worst of ourselves in them.” 

  The albino looked into the boys’ eyes with his blind eye and his pale blue eye, twin rivers of grief. In his eyes, Isaiah saw the sea of agony that haunted his own father’s eyes. 

Isaiah wrapped his arms around the big man and let him cry; loud as a storm, the great wall of grief thundered through him as he wailed and howled like a wild beast torn with agony, shredded with sorrow. He held onto him as he rested his head on his shoulder. he felt the pain of loss moving through his body, as a storm of tears fell from his eyes. And it was in this most intimate of moments that 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’s father had felt like this 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 wept in the arms of a stranger. 

They made their way to Polly’s car, a 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 cobblestoned road that led to Polly’s villa. The car turned right on the 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 nothing more than the frame and rear axle cut down and repurposed as a burro-drawn carts. The occasional odd-looking new tri-wheeled little yellow taxi that looked like a rickshaw fused with Mister Beans Mini Coupe.

He never gave the architecture a second thought. growing up in Texas and spending summers sailing around the Caribbean, Spanish architecture was nothing novel you saw 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 hero’s victory is about celebrating white supremacy.

Of course, the chalk faces 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 to be sure Naomi was ok then set sail in the morning. 

  The albino negro lit a cigar as Isaiah stared out the window at the 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 Negra me Dominican, mi Costa Rican, or Trinidad sure they’re decedents of Spaniards here and the indigenous but when you are standing next to me blacker than me, lip thick, wide nose, nappy hair obviously from the same region of Africa as my ancestor kidnapped 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?!

These stupid island nigg@’s self-hatred annoyed him; they didn’t even know that the only difference between them was when they got off the slave ship. Now, these pathetic Afro-hating nigg@s run entire nations in the Caribbean. 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.

They act as if each little island, often separated by as little as 30, or 40, miles of water, all colonized by the same European nations, with enslaved peoples kidnapped from the same regions of the African 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 to have a lot of these old coons sucking on the barrel of a gun once they see the results of their DNA test.

The gangster’s villa is a 5-story, 3-century-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, were happy to have this conversation with each other as they drank their conversation punctuated with laughter. Naomi watched the two men for a moment, mesmerized. She would never have thought that the two of them would have a word to say to each other, yet it was obvious from here that there was a real bromance going on between them.  

 [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