DEATH TO DICTATORS

Rita finally pulled up to a house on a crumbling old road in Allapattah, completely ordinary. Vaguely Spanish-looking, stucco a nauseous shade of pinkish beige, a couple palms in the front yard. A hip-high wall around the property, with shoulder-height fencing topped in spikes—but nothing that would halt an intruder. Rita turned down the tunes and patted my hand.

“So I got the tat because—let’s say you’re a dictator,” she said, running her rough palm up my arm. The car still hot and getting hotter, sunlight through the windshield all prismatic, all colors.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m Dictator for Life Olive Greenberger and you must do my bidding.” I laughed, and she met my gaze, eyes burning.

“Let’s say you’re a dictator of a small Latin country or whatever,” she said, leaning closer, lips pink and soft, waving the cig, “and you been skimming that cash off the national budget for your personal bank account, mountains of pesos and dolares stacking up while you grind your people down.”

“I like this deal,” I said, leaning into her touch with a silly grin.

“No, Liv.” Her hand fell away as she blew a mouthful of smoke out the window, scowling like she’d tasted rot. “Bad dictator.”

I touched my hair, pulled it nervously—fucking fake, fake, faker. Her skin glowing kinda golden, lavender and sweat drifting off her, everything I wanted.

She tilted toward me, her voice low. “So like, where do you think you stash the cash so people can’t get at it, even if they overthrow you?”

I shrugged, released my hair, looked out at the palm trees bending in the breeze, at the collapsing pavement of the sidewalk, at my own stupid face in the side-view reflection. I didn’t know what she was talking about—I’d grown up with democracy and the Constitution and all that, and so had she—and this game was not fun and maybe I didn’t want the $10 tat and maybe I wanted to go home.

“Right there.” She gestured, end of her cig pointing at the Spanishy house decaying in the heat. “And once you’ve fled the revolution or whatever, where do you and your mistresses and children and armed bodyguards spend the rest of your days sipping piña coladas by the pool?” She pointed again, a slumping head of ash dangling dangerously.

She opened the car door with a long creak and hopped out, left it open—motor still groaning, vibrating through the seat. She squinted at the house, looking so self-possessed, so purposeful, so completely confident.

“Liv, you spent your whole short life in a retirement village for vacationing war criminals, fascist butchers, drug lords, torturers, exiled dictators—and you didn’t even know,” she called through the open door. “They’re crawling all over South Florida, the worst people on Earth, enjoying the sun and the sea, unkillable.”

She took a few steps toward the fence, half-turned to look back at me, a hand on her hip. “This house right here? Home of Gerardo Machado, the Cuban Mussolini they called him. My dad said he had secret police that slaughtered political enemies and tossed my abuelo in an underground prison—until Machado was overthrown by an even worse dictator.”

She stepped up to the short wall and I felt my stomach clench. I imagined Machado mowing his lawn or walking his dog on quiet evenings, sunsets blushing pink. I wanted to tell her to get back in the car, to get us far away from murderers. Instead I opened the door with a squeak that almost made me jump. I stood next to Rita and she smiled at me, all sweetness, which is how I knew she was about to get us into deep shit.

She reached down into the grass next to the road, rooted around til she found what she wanted. A nice-sized rock. She hefted it in her palm. The many gleaming windows of Machado’s house suddenly very fragile.

“Death to dictators,” she said firmly and put the rock in my hand. It was heavy, and I looked at it and looked at her and looked at the house. I’d never done anything bad in my life. But dictators were bad—so probably this was . . . good? I pictured him in there, in the kitchen, gripping a knife.

I took a deep breath, felt my stomach settle and my hands steady. This was good, I told myself, and I reared back and chucked the rock straight over the wall and across the lawn—right through a window. A huge crash and tinkle of shattered glass that sounded like freedom and I felt real for once. A rebel, a revolutionary. Like Rita, who looked at me, eyes huge like oh my god and we jumped up and down, both of us scream-laughing.

A big, hairy guy with a thick mustache in a tank top and shorts came running from the house, belly flubbering around, face all sweaty and bulging with blood and rage. This dictator took one look at us, not freedom fighters at all, squealing teenage girls, and he started pointing, shouting. “Motherfucker! Not again!”

Margarita cocked her head, gave him the finger, and flicked the stub of her cig onto his lawn and I wanted to grab her and kiss her right there in front of Machado—but he charged at us shouting and she grabbed my hand and pulled me to the car. We leapt inside, motored the hell out of there in a cloud of exhaust, wind in our hair while the dictator shouted about the cops and Rita turned up the music and my heart raced faster than the Mustang.

“Do you do that a lot?” I asked, leaning back into my seat.

She just laughed.

“I can’t believe we got Machado!” I said. I could feel my face flushed, hot with power or desire.

Rita looked over at me, eyebrows up, smile fighting at the corners of her mouth, growing into a full grin, all teeth, and then laughter again, like a chiming bell. “Machado died in the ’30s.”

I turned to her, face blank, blinking. “Then who—?”

She was howling, tears collecting in the corners of her eyes, pounding her hand on the steering wheel and rolling through stop signs without paying any attention. “The guy who owns the house now!” she said. She wiped her shining eyes, looked at me with my greenish hair, and broke out laughing all over again. I slunk down, feeling the engine rumbling in my stomach, a complete and total embarrassment.

Her laughter died, lips flattening into a tight line. “I could take you to a dozen of these, a freakin’ hundred,” she said, voice suddenly hard and quiet. “Prosper Avril, Juan Angel Hernández-Lara. They lived a few minutes from each other, a lot of them.” She leaned toward me, lowering her voice, dark gleam in her eye. “You think they ever got together to play bingo and compare murders?”

She nudged me and laughed but it wasn’t even funny.

“Tachito Somoza,” she continued, “he was this third-generation tyrant in Nicaragua. Firebombed whole towns, mowed down hundreds of protesters at once—when he wasn’t vacationing at a ritzy little place on Palm Island or whatever. That was before the Sandinistas killed him.”

She turned her head in a sudden jerk, sending a glob of spit flying out the window. The only Sandinista I knew was that Clash album she was always playing.

“Tachito’s dictator grandpa was killed by a poet, like my dad.” She wiped her chin with her sleeve.

“Why do they come here?” I said. “This is supposed to be a nice place.”

“Oh, is it?”

It was such a stupid thing to say, so obviously wrong: We’d had school days cut short by anonymous bomb threats. We knew kids who’d hurt themselves badly at those backyard wrestling matches, arms dangling uselessly from dislocated shoulders, legs twisted all wrong. Florida news was constantly full of weird violence, gruesome murders: that toddler eaten by an alligator; that kid who killed his mom and sat in the house with her for days; that dad who drove his whole family into a canal—brutality right on the surface, totally normal.

“How do you know all this?” I asked her.

She shrugged, her hands still on the wheel. “My dad, I guess. He always says his poetry was just preparation for the real thing: killing a dictator.” She pulled up to another house behind a rusty, cast-iron fence on a peaceful street. “The one who lived right here.”

It was a big property in Spring Garden—overgrown with shaggy bushes, big pines swaying—but a small house, the same shade of pink as her lips. Salmon-tiled eaves. Two stories but bunker-like with little windows, a place to hide. Swimming pool stretching past the house’s edge, reflecting light into the tree branches in great moving patterns. Miami River beyond, white fiberglass boats nodding slow and serious in the current.

“The walls are solid concrete,” she said softly. “Fulgencio Batista’s vacation home, during his reign. He helped get rid of Machado, then in the ’50s he became a dictator too. After Castro overthrew him, the US wouldn’t even take him back. The guy who bought the house found a safe stuffed with old photos. Pictures of the people he’d executed, each with a bullet to the head.” Her fists clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel, black polish shining against fingers gone white from the pressure. A drop of sweat trickling from her temple to her jaw. “Why did he keep those?” she said to herself. “Did it make his dick hard to see all the people he killed?”

I looked at her face, at the muscles tensed in her neck. I wanted to do for her what she did for me, to push back the grinding bullshit of the world. I cleared my throat. “I’ll get a rock,” I said.

But she grabbed my shoulder. “My dad wanted to kill him,” she said. She didn’t even look at me. “He joined the rebels in the mountains, swearing to get Batista, to make the world more like a poem. A true believer in the revolution. And once Batista fled, they thought they’d won, even though he was still alive. Then, Dad said, Castro started with the executions, rounding up gay people, throwing them in work camps. He saw his leader becoming another tyrant.”

I tried to take her hand but she shook me off.