Mudsills & Mooncussers (#multimedia)

Chapter 6

ILLUSTRATION: The Arch House on Key West. (Today it is a part of the Island City House bed-and-breakfast complex. Sleeping in its tiny rooms is a blast from the past.)

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

A new day dawns as Aaron continues his search for the Boca Chica fire starter and the spy who is sending messenger pigeons to Rebels in Cuba.  

What surprises lie in store for him today?

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Tropical sun and blue sky hovered over mid-morning on Key West. The milkman's cow no longer added her bell's lazy clang to the cries of the peripatetic fishmonger going from house to house with his night's catch.

Aaron Matthews walked up to the gate of the Geiger house, but before he could enter, a movement caught his eye. Turning, he watched Joe Thibodeaux dash across a distant intersection, headed into the Cuban quarter of town. Curiosity wrinkled his brow. He followed her.

Joe stopped on the street outside the Arch House and looked quickly left and right. Aaron, a few yards behind her, ducked behind a banyan tree. From there he saw her dart through the latticed archway of the two-story white house and into the brick-pathed courtyard beyond.

Once in the courtyard, Joe traversed the brick walkway to the low wooden building shaded by Bahama-shuttered windows. Cats and chickens came to see if she had food for them, and she cooed to them in greeting but kept moving—to the door of the cigar factory.

Joe entered the small room where Arnau hunched over his desk fussing with incomprehensible paperwork. The rainbow-colored macaw perched behind him squawked, "Buenos Días! Buenos Días!"

Joe went immediately to the bird, scarcely seeing Arnau. "Buenos Días, Ulises!" said Joe.

Arnau said without looking up, "Y Buenos Días, Arnau?"

"Y Buenos Días, Arnau. Has he learned any new words this week?"

"A few, perhaps. But you have no time for foolish birds now. Carmen is very tired. You are late again."

Joe was already heading for the larger room that comprised most of the shady building. "I'm sorry," she said. "My mother ... sometimes it's hard to get away."

Outside, Aaron slipped into the courtyard and moved quietly down the brick walkway, stopping to pet a kitten and take a slow look around.

Inside, Joe entered a large room where sixteen Cuban men sat at long wooden tables stacked with tobacco leaves. Each man was an artist, rolling and stacking cigars with brown-stained fingers, constantly in motion, never looking up. Hour upon hour they rolled, clipped, stacked, rolled, clipped, stacked; and the piles of tobacco leaves on the left gradually became the countless cigars on the right.

At the far end of the room, near a window, a thirty-something Cuban woman sat on a high stool and read to the workers. She was in the middle of a thick book. Other books were stacked beside the stool, as was a guitar. Sometimes the workers were treated to music in lieu of a story.

Joe walked past the long tables toward the stool as Carmen read: "'I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to old Fagin's on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.'"

When Joe reached the stool, Carmen looked up gratefully, changed places with Joe, and handed Joe the book.

Joe looked at it. "Oliver Twist. New?"

"From the captain of the English schooner. He loves Arnau's cheroots."

Carmen left as Joe began to read: " ' "You!" said Rose Maylie. "I, lady!" replied the girl. "Thank Heaven upon your knees that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger..." '."

Outside the cigar factory, Aaron Mathews explored the distant corners of the courtyard, including a wire mesh enclosure where Arnau kept a dovecote. Aaron had just reached the pigeon coop when he heard a door close at the front of the building. He ducked behind a plant and watched as Carmen exited the building and proceeded through the archway toward the street.

When she was gone, he hurriedly selected a pigeon from the coop, affixed a band from his pocket to its leg, and tossed it skyward.

Assured that his message was on its way, Aaron prowled along the back wall of the long low building, crouching from window to window, listening to Joe's voice.

"'I have stolen away from those who would surely murder me if they knew I had been here, to tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named...'"

Aaron registered alarm. He tripped over a kitten that was winding between his feet seeking company. The kitten yowled and, in the attempt to regain his balance without giving himself away, Aaron missed part of Joe's narrative. What he heard when he recovered alarmed him more—at first:

"'...he goes by some other than his own name among us, which I more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put into your house on the night of the robbery...'."

Aaron's brow curled in confusion at this...

"'—I—suspecting this man—listened to a conversation between him and Fagin in the dark ...'."

Relief flooded Aaron's body, relaxing clenched muscles, as he recognized the story. The new Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, had been all the rage in England when Aaron was there. Joe was not preparing to announce the presence of a spy on the island, she was merely reading aloud to the cigar makers.

Joe continued to read Oliver Twist. Aaron settled into the plants beneath the window, listening to the story. The kitten came and cuddled in his lap, and he stroked it absently, absorbed in Joe's voice. He was unaccountably happy and refused to analyze his reasons.

...

The glare was bright and hot off the Florida Straits, and on the bluffs of the Cuban coast a young Rebel soldier hunkered on the ground outside the ramshackle hut of Javi, the pigeon man. The hut's crooked door creaked on its rusty hinges, and Javi emerged to squat beside the soldier. Javi carried a sloppy handful of roast fowl. He took a bite then offered some to the soldier, who declined.

"Wouldn't you think we'd have had some word by now?" asked the soldier.

"Why? You think big news? You think los inglés say to los yanquis to leave your country alone because you have amigos in London now? I don't think so, mi general."

The young soldier was far too earnest to appreciate Javi's teasing. "No, not yet at least," he said. "We've got to show ourselves strong. We've got to reclaim our ports—most of all New Orleans."

Javi stopped eating to take a swig from a raggedy wineskin and wipe his mouth on his hairy forearm. "Ay, Nueva Orleans! I went there once. A man can find anything he wants in Nueva Orleans. I hope to go back there someday."

"So do we," the soldier said. "Go back there with a fleet of our ships and blow the Yankee Navy to kingdom come. But we've got to get past Key West first. And that's the news I'm waitin' on. Where the Sam Hill is that bird from Key West?" The soldier stood and, shading his eyes with one hand, made an even more serious search of the horizon northward. Nothing but sun, sky, and blue-green water.

Javi gestured with the remains of the roasted bird in his hand. "Either your friend in Key West didn't have no news to send you, or he have news to send you, but the bird he send is ver', ver' slow. Me, I don't keep the slow ones." He bit again into his (presumably slow) avian lunch.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Coming on Tuesday in Chapter 7:   Aaron discovers (1) a possible fire starter, (2) a murder, and (3) Josephine Marie's secret terror of thunder and lightning.

Expect the action to begin moving faster and faster as the story progresses!

Thanks so much, dear Wattpad friends, for your reading, voting, and - most of all - sharing your comments.

Iris