The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin

that was a great town. Rest in peace. Kennedy did that.”
    “You met Castro?”
    “When he was up in the hills, the Sierra Maestre it’s called, I went to see him.” He took in my skepticism. “At a certain point it looked good he was going to win it. Some people asked me to go talk to the man, before it was too late, help him out if he needed something—”
    “Something?”
    “Something, anything. Like a loan, or a pack of Luckies. Whatever. The idea being he would be nice to certain people, or at least not predisposed against, when and if he came to power. I went up there with a guy I knew writing for
Life Magazine
. Spent a week. Sweet guy, Fidel. Or at least he was. Throws a mean fastball.”
    “You’re telling me you’re friends with Fidel Castro?”
    “What’s the difference, kid?” Shushan said. “Nobody is going to care one way or another. That son-of-a-bitch Kennedy killed Havana. But he didn’t kill us. We’re still here.”
    “We?”
    “Me and you, and a few other people. You know what I think? Somebody is going to take the guy out.”
    “Castro?”
    “Castro? No, not Castro. He’s too fucking clever. Not Castro, kid. Kennedy.”

7.
    By the third day it was getting lonely at the Westbury. In the morning Esther/Terri came by, delivered by Ira-Myra’s, who brought Myra, who looked like a sack of melons topped by a pouty mouth, tiny nose and enough bouffant champagne-colored hair to qualify for a drag show—clearly a woman who slept in her make-up. After a series of ritualized condolences, both took up seats at the far end of the room by the door in a kind of alcove, like a pair of foo dogs planted at the entrance. Compared to Myra, Terri—I couldn’t call her Esther, not to her face; she so thoroughly disapproved of the name—looked like a separate species: a semitic version of Jean Seberg, whom I’d fallen in love with on screen in Jean-Luc Goddard’s
Breathless
(for months after seeing this at the Eighth Street Cinema I thought I was Jean-Paul Belmondo, who thought he was Humphrey Bogart—resilient, romantic, doomed). Despite her short hair—according to the style of the time, mine was longer—there was nothing boyish about her. Her look was confrontational: she was one of those women, rare for the sixties, who looked a man up and down. If this was the bright dawn of the feminist era, I needed sunglasses.
    “Not too much business yesterday,” Shushan told his sister. “You should’ve stayed over. We could’ve played Scrabble. We still could. The college kid here would probably beat us both.” He said it
bote
, though it was becoming clear Shushan was something of a verbal chameleon. When he talked to me it was almost standard English; with his business associates or someone with roots in the old neighborhood, like Terri, he seemed to descend, maybe consciously, into
deses
and
doses
. “You play Scrabble, Russy?”
    “I have.”
    “For money?”
    “For money?” I repeated. “I’m not much of a gambler, Shushan.”
    Terri glanced at me with interest. “Someone my brother knows who isn’t a gambler? This is rich.”
    “Everyone’s a gambler,” Shushan said. “Gambling is part of human nature. Terri’s clients, they’re gambling if they talk long enough at so much an hour then they’ll be cured. You’re probably gambling a college education is going to get you further in life. On which the odds are the same as Terri’s losers.”
    “Shut up,” she said.
    “Yeah, I tease her. That’s the old story of brothers and sisters, right? So tell me, doctor. When you look at young Russell here, what do you see? I mean from a few words, body language. First impressions. Would you trust him?”
    Terri examined me with her eyes, thankfully stopping at the neck. “With what?”
    “Money.”
    “Maybe,” she said. “Depends how much.”
    “Your life?”
    “I wouldn’t trust anyone with that,” she said. “You know that.”
    Shushan smiled. “I would.”
    From