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A Good Smoke S moothing down his pencil-thin moustache and wiping at his heavy stubble, Pablo Pastor hoisted up his duffel stuffed with tobacco leaves and started trudging up Government Street from the docks. His sojourn on the cargo boat—from Havana to New Orleans to Mobile—had set the Gulf of Mexico deep in his bones. He had thought to disembark for good at NewOrleans, but had heard the Spanish voices and seen the stalks of cut sugar cane bundled near the docks. La cana waswhat he had fled in Cuba—a life hacking endless fields of cane. There were other ways,surely, to earn one's keep in that grand Louisiana city, but he would take no chances. He had steamered on. The seaport that bustled around him now—longshoremen loading timber onto tall-masted ships, roughnecks lugging green stalks from battered banana boats, gentlemen in top hats boarding the riverboat Nettie Quill—gave wayto the commerce of the town. He passed vats of olives in front of the grocer Lignos Co., racks of coats before the general store I. Prince &Sons,a store with no name where a Chinese woman stood at a counter folding laundry. He glanced up to seethe soaring statue of a naval officer with sword at his side—"Admiral Raphael Semmes, Confederate States Navy"— and figured this warrior was a protector of the town. Following the flow of pedestrians, he turned from Government Street to Royal Street, then arrived at Dauphin, drawn toward the 16 A Good Smoke 17 leafiness of Bienville Square.Beneath the town clock at the Square, he gazed at the men in pearlypanamas ambling into the imposing stone building with its sign"First National Bank,"and tilted his battered straw hat against the three o'clock sun. Once he had a bath and wasshaved,had Americandollars in his pocket and afinesombrero like theirs and gentlemanly shoes, too—two-tones laced snugly against striped socks instead of sandals on barefeet—he'd become part of this town. The air was familiar with the damp drapery of Spanish moss and the pungence of the green bananas ripening to yellow, and—he sniffed the air and closed his eyes— ladies' sweet perfume. Where, though, wasthis seaport's tobacco?In the first sixblocks he walked,he counted fifty men, but only four lit cigars. He peered into the windows of drugstores with strange, Alabama names— Ortmann's, Megginson's, Molyneux &Demuoy—and sawbut afew cigar boxes with pictures of a noble gentleman on the lids. In Havana, cigarshadbeen everywhere. Hehad cometo the right land. Passing a drugstore called Ebbecke's,he looked in to seeboys in short pants at the counter, and young mothers with tresses so thick and fair it made him blush and dream about their naked, bright skin like he dreamed about the naked, dark skin of his beautiful Marta back home in Havanawho waswaiting, full with their child. "Dear Jesus Lord,"he said, "forgive my wicked thoughts." The hunger he felt was in his belly, too, but he'd spent his last nickel at the port of New Orleans for a bottle of cerveza and papas fritas that he'd nursed like sea rations on the easterly voyage to Mobile. He could make out a few English words on the menu printed abovethe counter in Ebbecke's:"Sausageand beans, 4

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