January Justice by Athol Dickson Page A

name. I felt the strength go out of me. I sat down hard on the grass beside her marker.
    “Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, Jesus, God, help me.”
    The ground rose up. I felt it rolling like Pacific swells below the Panache’ s keel. It was as if the dead were pushing up against the turf around me. I was flotsam on a roiling sea of sorrow. I heard the cawing of a crow and looked straight up to see it circling. As it flew, it left ashes in its wake, ashes like a trail behind a jet spiraling above me, the blackened smudges spreading out to block the sun, swirling round and dropping down and meeting with the rolling turf, everything in motion, and me without my lover for a handhold. I closed my eyes and remembered my doctors, and I told myself to think of what is true. The ground was solid. The sky was clear. The only ashes were the ones inside my heart. I opened my eyes and looked again, and everything seemed normal, whatever that was.
    “Get up,” said Vega’s bodyguard.
    He was standing right behind me. I didn’t acknowledge him in any way.
    Castro kicked me in the small of my back. “Get up.”
    I winced and rose. I turned to face him.
    He said, “You think you know what it is to grieve?” He made a little gesture with the gun toward Haley, and then he aimed it back toward my stomach. “This here, this is just one woman in a grave. In my country, there are fields where five hundred people lie together. They have no name above them, like this one here. Who are they? Nobody will ever know. But I know who put them there. It was you did that. You, the USA, and your puppets in the junta.”
    It was the second time he had pulled a gun on me. Most men didn’t get to do that twice.
    I said, “Fidel, look at me,” and behind his sunglasses, he raised his yellowed eyes to meet mine, and I stared at his face while I slapped the gun aside with one hand and took it from him with the other, a move I learned from a marine in Somalia. And then his Glock was in my hand, pointing back at his belly, and he was looking down from his gun in my hand to his own now-empty hand, and his pockmarked cheeks began to flush.
    “How did you do that?”
    “Shut up and turn around,” I said, motioning with the Glock.
    He slowly turned his back toward me.
    I said, “Get on your knees.”
    Still standing there, he said, “You cannot do this here.”
    I tapped him hard on the back of his head with the Glock. It staggered him. I said, “Shut up and kneel.”
    He went down on his knees. I stepped close behind him, gripped the back of his collar in my left fist, laid the nozzle hard against the base of his skull. I said, “Apologize to her.”
    He spat on Haley’s grave.
    With a roar, I pistol whipped him. He rolled to the ground. I was astride him, the fabric of his shirt bunched in my left fist, the Glock in my right hand aimed at his face. In the fall his sunglasses had fallen off. As he lay there blinking up at me, my finger tightened on the trigger.
    He said, “It does not matter. I have done my duty.”
    It interested me a little. I said, “What duty?”
    “I saw you talking to those men. I told Comandante Valentín you would betray us to the junta, and you did. But it does not matter, understand? Because the Comandante knows. I told him what I saw you do, and now I am ready to die for my people.”
    He turned his yellowed eyes away from me and looked up toward the sky.
    “Hail Mary,” he said, “full of grace, blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Hail Mary, full of grace…”
    I breathed in deeply as he prayed. I let the breath out slowly. I thought of what I knew to be true. This man hadn’t actually hurt Haley. She was beyond that now. This man had his own burdens. He didn’t know that Haley had been my wife. And there were no crows above me. There were no ashes but the ones I carried in my head.
    I decided not to soil the rolling ground above Haley with the man’s blood. I did my best to