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The Hero’s Welcome


Todo el mundo had watched his heroics on television… “Todo el mundo!” Nestor told himself at the peak of his euphoria… But of his tens of thousands, if not millions, of admiradores there was one whose awe he most longed to have shining ’round about him. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what she, his Magdalena, his Manena, the nickname he loved, was thinking and feeling as she sat—or perhaps the intensity of it all brought her to her feet—riveted, awestruck, before a TV screen, rapt by the sight of her Nestor climbing up that seventy-foot rope hand over hand, without using his legs… then carrying the man on the mast, with his legs!… while going hand over hand down a 100-foot jib line… electrifying the city.

As a matter of fact, his Magdalena was utterly unaware of this high-wattage hero’s triumph. The entire time she had her hands full with… the mother of all mother-and-daughters. This one was a real catfight. Magdalena had just announced that she was leaving home.

Her father had a ringside seat, an easy chair beside the couch in the living room of their casita, their little house, in Hialeah, barely two miles from the Camachos’ casita. Magdalena was standing up belligerently—her fists on her hips and her elbows winged out—as Mother and Daughter traded hisses and growls and eyetooth glowers. Mother was sitting forward on the couch with her elbows winged out—this seemed to be an instinctive stance of both combatants in their mother-and-daughters—and the heels of her hands pressed down on the front edge of the frame, a veritable feline, ready to spring, claw, rip guts out, eat livers whole, and bite heads off by sinking both sets of incisors into the soft centers of the temples. Her father, if Magdalena knew anything about it, was possessed by a fervent desire to evaporate. Too bad he had sunk so far down into the easy chair. He’d have to be an acrobat to slip away unnoticed. Their fights mortified him. They were so vulgar and common. Not that he had any great delusions of gentility. He had been a threshing-machine mechanic in Camagüey when he and his wife met. Both had grown up there. He had been a truck mechanic in Havana for five years when they left Cuba in the Mariel boatlift… and he was a truck mechanic in Miami now. Nevertheless he had his standards. He hated these goddamned mother-and-daughters… but he had long since given up trying to control his two cats.

Mother was thrusting at Daughter. “Isn’t it bad enough I have to tell people you’ve gone to work for a pornographic doctor? For three years I tell them you work for real doctors at a real hospital. Now I tell them you work for a fake doctor, a pornographic doctor, in some dirty little office?… and you moving away from home to go live with God only knows who in South Beach? You say it’s a blan-ca. You sure it’s not a blan-co?”

Daughter made just a flick of a glance at the five-foot-high baked-clay statue of Saint Lazarus up by the front door before parrying: “He’s not a pornographic doctor. He’s a psychiatrist, a very well known psychiatrist, and it just so happens that he treats people who are addicted to pornography. Don’t keep calling him a pornographic doctor! Don’t you know anything?”

“I know one thing,” riposted Mother. “I know you don’t care if you ruin your family’s name. There is only one reason girls move away from home. Everybody knows that.”

Magdalena rolled her eyes up into her cranium, extended her neck, leaned her head back, stiffened both arms straight down past her hips, and made an unngghhhhummmmmmmm sound in her throat. “Listen, you’re not in Camagüey any longer, Estrellita! In this country you don’t have to wait until you can marry yourself out of the house.” Gotcha… Gotcha… twice in the space of eight words. Her mother always told people she was from Havana, because the first thing every Cuban in Miami wanted to know was your family history in Cuba—history, of course, meaning social status. Being from Camagüey was synonymous with being a guajira, a hick. So Daughter managed to work Camagüey—gotcha—into practically every mother-and-daughter. Likewise, every now and then she liked to call her mother by her first name, Estrellita, instead of Mami—gotcha—for the sheer impudence of it. She liked to dwell upon the y sound of the double l. Es-tray-yeeeee-ta. That made it sound old-fashioned, Camagüey and a half.

“I’m twenty-four years old now, Estrellita, and I have a nursing degree—you were there, as I recall, when I got it—and I have a job and a career and—”

“Since when is nurse work for a pornographic doctor a career?” Mother loved the way that one made Daughter wince. “Who are you with all day?—perverts! You told me that yourself… perverts, perverts, perverts.”

“They’re not perverts—”

“No? They watch pornographic movies all day. What do you call that?”

“They’re not perverts! They’re sick people, and that’s who nurses try to help, sick people. There are people with all sorts of unpleasant diseases, like… like… like H,I,V, and nurses have to take care of them.”

Uh-ohhh. As soon as “HIV” passed her lips, she wanted to snatch it back from out of the air. Any example was better than that one… pneumonia, tuberculosis, Tourette’s syndrome, hepatitis, diverticulitis… anything. Well, too late now. Brace yourself—

“Hahh!” Mother barked. “Everything is perverts with you! Now it’s maricones! La cólera de Dios! Is that why we paid all those tuitions? So you can chill up with dirty people?”

“Chill up?” said Daughter. “Chill up? You don’t say ‘chill up,’ it’s ‘chill out,’ or just chill.” Magdalena immediately realized that given the totality of her mother’s insult, “chill up” was the least of it. The only thing to do was to rub it in harder. So she resorted to the E-bomb: English. “Don’t try to speak English colloquially, Estrellita. You always get it wrong. You don’t get the hang of slang, do you. It always makes you sound clueless.”

Her mother went silent for a few beats, her mouth slightly agape. Gotcha! Magdalena knew that would get her. Answering her in English almost always did. Her mother had no idea what colloquially meant. Magdalena didn’t, either, until not all that many nights ago when Norman used it and explained it to her. Her mother might know hang and possibly even slang, but the hang of slang no doubt baffled her, and the expression clueless was guaranteed to make her look the way she did right now, which is to say, clueless. When Magdalena let her have it in English like this, it made her crazy.

Magdalena took advantage of the additional milliseconds the hiatus granted her and cast a real glance at Lazarus. The clay statue, almost life-size—not stone, not bronze, but ceramic—was the first thing you saw when you came into the casita. What a miserable saint to have to confront! He had caved-in cheeks, a scraggly beard, a pained expression, and a purply biblical robe—hanging open, to better exhibit the leprosy sores all over his upper torso—plus two clay dogs at his feet. In the Bible, Lazarus was about as low as they came, socially… a beggar with leprosy sores all over his body… begging for crumbs of bread at the gates of a swell place belonging to a rich man named Dives, who didn’t give him the time of day. The two of them, Lazarus and Dives, happened to die at about the same time. To make a point—namely, that in Heaven the last shall be first and the first shall be last—and that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God… Jesus sends this poor devil Lazarus to Heaven, where he dwells in “the bosom of Abraham.” He packs Dives off to Hell, where he burns alive eternally.

Magdalena was baptized as a Roman Catholic and had always gone to Mass with her mother, her father, and her two older brothers. But Mother was a real Camagüey country girl. Mother believed in Santería—an African religion that slaves had brought to Cuba… replete with spirits, magic, ecstatic dancing, trances, potions, ground roots, divination, curses, animal sacrifices, and God knows what other hoodoo voodoo. Santeríans began to match up their hoodoo gods with Catholic saints. The god of the sick, Babalú Ayé, became Saint Lazarus. Magdalena’s mother and father were light skinned, as were many believers by now. No way, however, could Santería ever shake loose of its social origins… slaves and simpleminded country guajiros. This had become a handy needle for Magdalena in the mother-and-daughters.

It hadn’t been like this when she was a little girl. She was a beautiful, irresistible creature, and her mother was very proud of that. Then, at age fourteen, she became a very beautiful, irresistible virgin. Grown men would sneak looks at her. Magdalena loved that… and how far were they going to get with her? Not one inch. Estrellita watched over her with the eyes of an owl. She would have loved to revive the role of the chaperone. It hadn’t been all that long since Cuban girls in Miami couldn’t go out on a date without Mother coming along as chaperone. It could become a bit… off. Sometimes the Mother-chaperone was pregnant with Daughter’s soon-to-be sibling. Bursting with child herself, she would be superintending Daughter’s first prim lesson in how to lead, in due course, with due propriety, young men down the path to the portals of the womb. The swollen belly made it obvious that Mother had been doing precisely what she was on duty to keep Daughter from doing with her young beau of the moment. Not even Estrellita could insist on prior approval of a boy Magdalena was going out with. But she could and did insist that he pick her up here at the casita, so that she could get a good look at him, and insist on asking him some questions if he seemed at all shady, and insist that he bring her home by eleven.

The only “older man” in Magdalena’s life was someone who was all of one year older than her and had a touch of glamour, since he was now a police officer with the Marine Patrol, namely, Nestor Camacho. Estrellita knew his mother, Lourdes. His father had his own business. Nestor was a good Hialeah boy.

Mother regained her wits and her voice. “Are you sure your little blanca roommate in South Beach isn’t called Nestor Camacho?”

Daughter went, “HahhhHHHH!”—so loudly and at such a coloratura soprano pitch, it startled Mother. “That’s a laugh! Nestor is such a good, obedient little Hialeah boy. Why don’t you call up his mother, and she can have a good laugh, too? Or why don’t you settle it right here? Why don’t you get your coconut beads and throw them in front of old Lazzy-boy there? He’ll tell you! He won’t steer you wrong!” She thrust her arm and forefinger at the statue of Lazarus like a spear.

Estrellita was speechless again. Something was happening to her face that went beyond the boundaries of a mother-and-daughter. It was black anger. Estrellita already got it when Magdalena made references to Santería. It was an indirect way of calling her an ignorant, socially backward guajira. She knew that. But now Magdalena was uttering outright blasphemy. “Lazzy-boy” she dared call Saint Lazarus. She was indulging in mockery of the faith’s powers of divination, such as throwing the coconut beads. She was ridiculing her faith and her very life.

With a cold fury that came from deep in her throat, she hissed out, “You want to leave home? Then do it. Do it now. I don’t care if you never set foot in this house again.”

“Good!” said Magdalena. “Finally we agree!”

But her voice had a tremor in it. The look on her mother’s face and the rattlesnake tone of her voice… Magdalena didn’t dare say another word. Now… she’d have to get out… and that set off a quake in the pit of her stomach. As of now, no longer would her new life among the americanos be the exotic, exciting, naughty adventure of a free spirit… As of now, she would be dependent upon an americano for a place to live, her paycheck, her social life, her love life. The only things she’d have going for her would be her good looks… and something that had never failed her… not yet… namely, her nerve.

Euphoria! was the name of the bubble that enclosed Nestor when the shift ended and he drove his aged Camaro north across the Miami line into Hialeah. Superman! was the name of the hero within. Superman lit up that bubble like a torch held aloft.

The Chief himself, Chief Booker, had driven all the way to the marina at midnight to give him an attaboy!

Hialeah… at the midnight hour… a silhouette in the dark of row after row after row after row after block after block after block of little one-story houses, the casitas, each nearly identical to the one next door, all of fifteen feet away, each on a 50-by-100-foot lot, each with a driveway going straight back… chain-link fencing fortifying every square inch of everybody’s property… front yards of rock-solid concrete adorned with little concrete Venetian fountains. But tonight the Camaro’s rolling flow made all of Hialeah luminous. This was not the same Nestor Camacho—you know, Camilo Camacho’s son—driving home anonymously from the same old night shift—

Not at all—for the Chief himself had driven all the way to the marina at midnight to give him an attaboy!

Nestor has arisen, radiant, from the ranks of Hialeah’s 220,000 souls. He is now known throughout Greater Miami, wherever the TV digit-rays have reached… the cop who risked his life to save a poor panicked refugee from the top of a towering schooner mast. Even now, at the midnight hour, the sun shone ’round about him. He entertained the idea of parking the Camaro two or three blocks from home and walking the rest of the way with a calm, measured pace, just to offer the citizens a glimpse of the radiant one… and to watch them nudge one another… “Look! Isn’t that him!” But the fact was, there were damned few pedestrians to be seen, and Hialeah didn’t have a nightlife worthy of the name. Besides, he was so damned tired…

His block was just as dim as the rest of them, but he could spot La Casita de Camacho immediately. A streetlight, weak as it was, was enough to create a reflection in the slick, glossy, almost glassy lettering emblazoned upon the side of his father’s big Ford E-150 van parked right out front: CAMACHO FUMIGADORES. His old man was proud of that lettering. He had paid real money to have a real commercial artist do it. The letters had black shading that made them seem to pop out of the side of the van in three dimensions. CAMACHO FUMIGADORES!… Camilo Camacho’s own bug-and-vermin-killer company… Strictly speaking, FUMIGADORES, plural, was not accurate. The firm had exactly one fumigator, and one employee, period, and his name was on the side of the van. For three years Camilo had “employed” an assistant, his son Nestor. Nestor couldn’t stand it… spraying Malathion into the dark, dank recesses of people’s houses… inevitably inhaling some of the shit… and listening to Camilo saying, “It won’t kill you!”… smelling Malathion every day in his clothes… smelling it on himself… getting so paranoid, he thought everybody he met could smell it on him… When people wanted to know what he did, he would say he had been working for a population adjustment firm but was looking for another job. Thank God he finally got accepted at the Police Academy! His father, on the other hand, was proud to have a firm that adjusted populations in people’s homes. He wanted todo el mundo to see HIMSELF parked in big letters in front of his house. Nestor had been a Miami cop for only four years but long enough to know there were plenty of neighborhoods… Kendall, Weston, Aventura, the Upper East Side, Brickell… where any man who parked such a vehicle in front of his house would be regarded as a cockroach himself. Likewise, his wife and the set of grandparents who lived with them, and the son who was a cop. The whole nest of them would constitute a regular infestation. There were parts of Coral Gables where it was against the law to park a commercial vehicle like that in front of your house. But in Hialeah it was a point of pride for a man. Hialeah was a city of 220,000 souls, and close to 200,000 must be Cubans, it seemed to Nestor. People were always talking about “Little Havana,” a section of Miami along Calle Ocho, where the tourists all stopped at Café Versailles and had a cup of terribly sweet Cuban coffee and then walked a couple of blocks to watch the old men, presumably Cubans, play dominoes in Domino Park, a tiny plot of parkland placed right there on Calle Ocho to lend a rather drab neighborhood a little… authentic, picturesque, folklórica atmósfera. That done, they could say they had seen Little Havana. But the real Little Havana was Hialeah, except that it was hard to call it little. The old “Little Havana” was dreary, worn out, full of Nicaraguans and God knew who else, and the next thing to being a slum, in Nestor’s opinion. Cubans would never sit still in a slum. Cubans were by nature ambitious. So every man who had a vehicle with commercial lettering on it, proving that he was an entrepreneur, no matter how small, parked it importantly in front of the house. CAMACHO FUMIGADORES! That plus the Grady-White cruiser in the driveway proved that Camilo Camacho was not a working-class Cuban. One out of maybe every five casita owners in Hialeah had some sort of cruiser—cruiser meaning it was too big to be denigrated as a “motorboat”—elevated up, way up, upon a towing trailer. The prow usually extended out beyond the facade of the casita. The towing rigs were so high, they were like pedestals… to the point where the cruisers dwarfed the casitas themselves. Here in the darkness, to Nestor their silhouettes made the boats seem like missiles about to take off above your head. Nestor’s old man had paid the same commercial artist to do the same sort of glossy, glassy lettering on the Grady-White cruiser’s hull. LAS SOMBRILLAS DE LIBERTAD, it said, “The Umbrellas of Liberty.” The name stood for the great life-or-death adventure of the old man’s youth. Like Magdalena’s family, Camilo and his father, Nestor’s grandfather, were country boys from Camagüey. Nestor’s grandfather had visions of getting away from a life of cutting cane and mucking out stables and humping plows. City Life he craved. He moved, with his wife and son, to Havana. No longer a guajiro! Now a full-fledged proletarian! Free at last, the new prole got a job as an inspector in the raw-sewage-filtration section of the Malecón waterworks. “Inspector” meant he had to put on rubber boots and carry a flashlight and hunch over like a gnome and walk through drainage pipes in the darkness while rivers of shit and other vile excrescences flowed and occasionally gushed over his boots. It was not perfumed, either. That wasn’t the City Life he had in mind. So he and Camilo stealthily built a crude dinghy in the cellar of their proletarian apartment block in Havana. They stole two big café umbrellas to use as sails… and shields against the sun. Camilo and his parents and Lourdes, Camilo’s girlfriend (in due course, his wife and Nestor’s mother), set out one night for Florida. They nearly died a hundred times, at least as the old man told the story (many more than a hundred times), from sunstroke, dehydration, starvation, storms, towering waves, currents gone amok, winds gone dead, and God knows what else, before reaching Key West twelve days later, all four at the point of death.

Well, now Nestor had a heroic saga of his own… to relate to them. He could hardly wait. He had called home three times from the marina. The phone was busy each time, but maybe it was better this way. They would hear it all from his own lips… with their young hero standing before them, watching their faces go from aglow to agog.

As usual, he parked the Camaro upon the little stretch of driveway between the sidewalk and the boat.

The moment he steps inside the house, his father is there waiting with his arms crossed over his chest and his I, Camilo Camacho, Lord of This Domain look on his face… his lordly demeanor somewhat compromised by the fact that he’s wearing a T-shirt that hangs outside his Relaxed-Fit blue jeans… The crossed arms bear down on his paunch from above, and the belt of his low-cut jeans hoists it up from below, causing it to swell out like a watermelon underneath the T-shirt. Nestor’s mother is one step behind I, Camilo. She looks at Nestor as if he, her third child, her last-born baby, were a little flame sizzling down a fuse to—

—Ka-boom!—I, Camilo Camacho, explodes:

“How could you do that to a man of your own blood? He’s eighteen meters from freedom, and you arrest him! You condemn him to torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons! How could you do that to the honor of your own family? People have been calling! I’ve been on the phone all night! Everyone knows! They turn on the radio, and all they hear is ‘Traidor! traidor! traidor! Camacho! Camacho! Camacho!’ You drag us through shit!” He cuts a glance back at his wife. “It has to be said, Lourdes”—turns back to Nestor—“Through shit you drag the House of Camacho!”

Nestor was stunned. It was as if the old man had smashed a baseball bat against the base of his skull. His mouth fell open, but no sounds came out. He turned his palms upward in the eternal gesture of baffled helplessness. He couldn’t speak.

“What’s the matter?” said his father. “The truth cut your tongue out?”

“What are you talking about, Dad?” It came out at least an octave too high.

“I’m talking about what you done! If some cop had done to me and your grandfather”—he nodded in the general direction of Nestor’s grandfather and grandmother’s, Yeyo and Yeya’s, room in the back—“what you just done to one of your own people, your own blood, you wouldn’t be here now! You wouldn’t be a big cop in Miami! You wouldn’t be nothing! You wouldn’t exist! Not even exist!”

“Dad—”

“You know what we had to do so you could even exist? Me and your grandfather had to build a boat by ourselves at night, down in a cellar so the block warden wouldn’t come nosing around. And we set out to sea at night, too, with Yeya and your mother—and all we had was food and water and a compass and two outdoor café umbrellas we had to steal at night and rig up as sails. Café umbrellas!”

“I know, Dad—”

“Twelve days it took us! Twelve days of burning up all day and freezing all night and getting thrown this way”—he pantomimes the boat pitching up and down—“and that way”—pantomimes the boat rolling—“and this way”—yawing—“and that way”—climbing waves—“day and night—and bailing out water day and night, too. We couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t hardly eat. It took all four of us bailing out water around the clock just to keep the boat afloat. We coulda died a hundred times”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that! For the last four days we had no more food and one bottle of water for the four of us—”

“Dad—”

“We were four skeletons when we finally reached land! We were half out of our minds! Your mother was having hallucinations, and—”

“Dad! I know all that!”

He, Camilo Camacho, went silent. He took in a breath so deep and twisted his face into such a grimace, complete with bared upper teeth and popped veins, he was either going to bite someone or have a stroke—until at the last moment he found his voice and rasped out:

“All that you call it? All that? All that was life or death! We almost died! Twelve days on the ocean in an open boat! There wouldn’t be no Officer Nestor Camacho without all that! He wouldn’t exist! If some big cop had arrested us eighteen meters from shore and sent us back, that woulda been the end of all of us! You woulda never been nothin’! And you call it all that! Jesus Christ, Nestor, what kind a person are you? Or maybe you not a person! Maybe you got claws and a tail like a mapache!”

::::::A raccoon he calls me!::::::

“Listen, Dad—”

“No, you listen! You don’t know what it is to suffer! You arrest a guy eighteen metros de libertad! To you it don’t matter that the Camachos came to America in a homemade—”

“Dad, listen to me!”

Nestor said it so sharply, his father didn’t try to finish his sentence.

Nestor said, “This guy didn’t have to do”—he started to say “all that” but caught himself just in time—“do anything like what you and Yeyo had to do. This guy paid some smugglers three or four thousand dollars to take him straight to Miami in a cigarette boat. Goes seventy miles an hour on the water, a cigarette boat. Took him what—maybe two hours to get here? Three at the most? In an open boat? No, in a cabin with a roof. Starving? Probably didn’t have time to digest the big lunch he had before he left!”

“Well—that don’t matter. The principle’s the same—”

“What principle, Dad? The Sergeant gave me a direct order! I was carrying out a direct order!”

A derisive snort. “Carrying out a direct order.” Another snort. “So do Fidel’s people! They carry out direct orders, too—to beat people and torture people and ‘disappear’ people and take everything they have. You never heard of honor before? You don’t care about your family’s honor? I don’t wanna hear that pathetic excuse again!… Carrying out a direct order…”

“Come on, Dad! The guy’s up there screaming to the crowd on the bridge and throwing his arms around like this”—he demonstrates—“Guy’s lost it! He’s gonna fall and kill himself, and all six lanes of traffic are backed up on the causeway, Friday rush hour, the worst—”

“Oh ho! A traffic jam. Why didn’t you say so?! Whoa, a traffic jam! That’s different… So you’re trying to tell me a traffic jam is worse than torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons?”

“Dad, I didn’t even know who the guy was! I still don’t know! I didn’t know what he was yelling about! He was seventy feet up above me!”

In fact, he had known, more or less, but this was not the time for fine distinctions. Anything to bring an end to this tirade, this terrible judgment—by his own father!

But nothing was going to stop I, Camilo Camacho, Lord of This Domain. “You said he was gonna fall and kill himself. You were the one who nearly made him fall and kill himself! You were the one crazy to arrest him, no matter what!”

“Jesus Christ, Dad! I didn’t arrest him! We don’t arrest immig—”

“Everybody saw you do it, Nestor! Everybody knew it was a Camacho who did this. We saw you do it with our own eyes!”

It turned out that his father and his mother and his grandparents had been watching the whole thing on American TV with the sound muted and listening to it on WDNR, a Spanish-language radio station that loved to get furious over sins of the americanos. Nothing Nestor could say would calm his father down in the slightest. I, Camilo Camacho, threw his hands up in the air as if to say, “No hope… no hope…” and turned and walked away.

His mother stayed put. Once she was sure that I, Camilo, had gone into another room, she threw her arms around Nestor and said, “I don’t care what you’ve done. You’re alive and home. That’s the main thing.”

Don’t care what you’ve done. The implied guilty verdict so depressed Nestor, he said nothing. He couldn’t even croak out an insincere Thanks, Mami.

He went to his little room exhausted. His whole body ached, his shoulders, his hip joints, the sartorius muscles on the inner sides of his thighs, and his hands, which were still raw. His hands! The joints, the knuckles—it was agony if he so much as tried to make a fist. Just taking off his shoes, pants, and shirt and getting up onto the bed—agony… ::::::Sleep, dear God. Knock me unconscious… that’s all I ask… sail me away from esta casita… into the arms of the Sandman… Take away my thoughts… be my morphine… ::::::

But Morpheus failed him. He’d doze off and then—jerk alert with his heart beating too fast… doze off—jerk alert… doze off—jerk alert!… all night, fits and starts… until he jerked alert at 6:00 a.m. He felt like a burnt-out husk. He was sore all over, sore as he had ever been in his life. Moving the joints of his hips and legs was so painful, he wondered if they would ever support his weight. But they had to. He had to get the hell out of here!… Go somewhere… and kill time until his Marine Patrol shift began at four o’clock. He edged his feet off the bed and slowly sat up… sat there groggily for a minute… ::::::I feel too awful… I can’t get up. So what are you going to do, hang around here waiting for more abuse?:::::: With straining willpower he made himself get sheer torture! up. Gingerly, warily, he tiptoed to the living room and stood at one of the two front windows of the little house, watching the women. They were already out hosing down their concrete front yards up and down the block, this being Saturday morning.

No man would be caught dead with one of those hoses in his hands. That was a woman’s job. That would be the first thing his mother did when she got up: power-spray their fifty-by-twenty-foot rock-hard sward. Too bad water didn’t make concrete grow. By now their front yard would be fifty stories high.

As far back as he could remember, Nestor’s picture of Hialeah was of thousands of blocks like this one, endless rows of casitas with little paved front yards… but no trees… studded here and there with vehicles that had writing all over them… but no trees… boats that said Conspicuous Leisure… but no trees. Nestor had heard of a time when all over the country the very name Hialeah summoned up a picture of Hialeah Park, the most glamorous and socially swell racetrack in America, set in a landscaper’s dream, a lush, green, wholly man-made 250-acre park with a resident flock of pinkest flamingos… now a shut-down, locked-up relic, a great moldering memento of the palmy days when the Anglos ran Miami. Today a bug-gassing van parked out front with your name on it was enough to make La Casita de Camacho socially swell in Hialeah. He had admired his father for it. Every night the old man came home with his clothes giving off whiffs of Malathion. But Nestor took that as a sign of his father’s success as a businessman. The same father now turns on him when he most needs his support!

Christ! It was getting on toward 6:30, and he was just standing here letting his thoughts run wild… The whole bunch of them would be up soon… Camilo the Caudillo, the Caudillo’s ever-worried, hand-flensing wife, Lourdes, and Yeya and Yeyo—

Yeya!

It had completely slipped his mind! Today was her birthday! There was no way he could finesse Yeya’s birthday. There was always a pig roast… a pig big enough for a hundred people or so… all the relatives… innumerable, here in Hialeah alone… plus all the neighbors from the wet concrete yards. His parents and Yeya and Yeyo and even he himself knew the neighbors so well, they had come to call them Tía and Tío, as if they were real aunts and uncles. If he went AWOL from this party, he would never be forgiven. Celebrating Grandmother’s birthday was a very big thing in the Camacho domain… it was practically a holiday… and the older she got, the more sacred it got.

There were grandparents living in the same house as their middle-aged children all over the place in Hialeah. Until his brother and his sister married their way out of the house, this casita was like the YMCA. There was one bathroom for seven people from three generations. Talk about people getting into each other’s hair…

Oh, Magdalena! If only she were beside him right now! He would have his arm around her… in front of everybody… right now… and she would be joking about all the concrete front yards and all the put-upon wives of Hialeah. Why didn’t everybody get together and water just one tree? That was what she’d be saying. She’d bet there weren’t a dozen trees in all of Hialeah. Hialeah started out as a dirt prairie, and now it was a concrete prairie. That was the kind of thing she would say, if only she were here… He could feel her body leaning against his. She was so beautiful—and so smart! She had this… way… of looking at the world. How lucky he was! He had a girl more gorgeous, quicker, brighter than—than—than a TV star. He could feel her body against his in bed. ::::::Oh, my Manena.:::::: His body hadn’t touched hers in that way for almost two weeks. If it wasn’t the hours he worked, it was the hours she worked. He never knew that nurses for psychiatrists had to work so long and so hard. This psychiatrist was a big deal, apparently. He had patients practically stacked up at the hospital, Jackson Memorial, plus the ones who came in to his office all day long, and Manena had to tend to patients at both places. Nestor never knew psychiatrists had so many hospital patients. Oh, but he’s very prominent, very much in demand, Manena explained. She was working day and night. Recently it had become so hard, there was no time to see her at all. When he finished his Marine Patrol shift at midnight, she would be in bed asleep, and he didn’t dare call her. She had to start work at 7:00 a.m., she had explained, because first she had to go by the hospital for a “pre-check” and then to the office for a full day of patients that ended at 5:00 p.m., but Nestor’s shift began at 4:00 p.m. Just to make things worse, they had different days off. The whole thing had become impossible. What was to be done?

He had called her cell phone not all that long after he got back to the marina. No answer. He texted her. She didn’t text back… and she must have known about it. If his father was right, everybody knew about it.

He had to see his Manena!… if only on Facebook. He rushed back to his room, got dressed as fast as he had ever gotten dressed in his life, and sat down at his laptop, which he kept on a table that only barely fit into the room, and went online… Manena! There she was… It was a picture he had taken of her… long luxurious dark hair streaming down to her shoulders… her dark eyes, her slightly parted, slightly smiling lips—that promised… ecstasy didn’t even begin to say it! ::::::But stop fantasizing, Nestor! Go to the kitchen and get some coffee… before you’re afflicted with company you don’t want to have.::::::

He sat in the kitchen in the dark, drinking a second cup of coffee, trying to wake up… and thinking… thinking… thinking… thinking… He couldn’t very well call her this early, 6:45 on a Saturday morning… shouldn’t text, either. Even the beep beep beep of a text message might wake her up.

A light came on, and he heard a familiar flush and glug-glug-glug of a toilet. Damn! His parents were getting up… Camilo the Caudillo would be heading right here… A wisp of hope!… His father had had a chance to sleep on it and wanted to make peace—

Click—the kitchen light comes on. His father is in the doorway… He has his eyebrows flexed downward, creating a ditch between them. He’s wearing his Relaxed-Fits, an XXL T-shirt whose short sleeves droop down below his elbows… yet it’s barely big enough to cover his watermelon belly. He hasn’t shaved. The undersides of his jowls are grizzly. He still has sleepers in his eyes. He’s a real mess.

“Buenos días…?” ventures Nestor. It starts out as a greeting but winds up more of a question than anything else.

His father says, “Whaddaya doing sitting here in the dark?” Don’t you even know how to sit in a kitchen?

“I… didn’t want to wake anybody up.”

“Who the hell’s this little light gonna wake up?” Don’t you know anything?

He brushed past Nestor without another word and fixed himself a cup of coffee… Nestor kept his eyes on Him, Camilo the Caudillo, Lord of This Domain. He feared another detonation. I, Camilo Camacho, downed his cup of coffee without lingering over a single sip. Then he marched out of the kitchen like a man with a job to do. He didn’t acknowledge Nestor’s presence in any way as he left… didn’t so much as glance at him out of the corner of his eye…

Nestor turned back to his coffee, but by now it was cool, too black, too bitter… and beside the point. He thought and thought and thought and thought… and still couldn’t figure out where he stood…

He asked himself, “Do I exist?”

The next moment… every manner of grunting, moaning, panting, and gasping for breath known to backbreaking labor commences just outside the kitchen.

It’s his father—but what the hell is he doing? His body is tilted to the right because he’s carrying an enormous thing on his right shoulder. It’s long, it’s bulky—it’s a coffin. His father is wrestling with it and staggering under the thing… It seesaws up and down on the old man’s shoulder… lurches sideways against his neck… It’s about to flip out of his grip… He wrestles it back on top of his shoulder… One arm battles the lurches… the other one tries to stop the seesawing… He’s red in the face… He’s gulping for breath… He’s making every inarticulate sound known to heavy labor…

“—messh… cinnghh… neetz… guhn arrrgh… muhfughh… nooonmp… shit… boggghh… frimp… ssslooosh… gessssuh hujuh… neench… arrrgh… eeeeeooomp.”

The old man’s legs are buckling. It’s not a coffin—it’s the caja china they always use to roast the pig—but when did anybody ever try to carry the damn thing by himself? There—the metal slots on the end where you insert handles for carrying it, one man on this end, one on the other… What fool ever tried to carry it over the shoulder? I, Camilo, built it himself years ago… an inch-thick plywood coffin-shaped box lined with roofing metal… must weigh seventy pounds… so long, so big, nobody could get an arm around it and hold it steady—

Nestor cries out, “DAD, LET ME HELP YOU!”

With that, the old man tries to move away from him… you mustn’t lay a finger on it, traitor… “Arggggh”… That one little move—that does it! Now the caja china calls the shots! The damned thing is a huge raging bull riding on top of a little rider… Nestor can see it happening… it’s like slow motion… but is in fact happening so fast, he’s rooted to the floor… inert… the caja china is going into a spin. His father goes into a spin to try to keep up with it… his legs get wound around each other… he’s keeling over… “Arrrggh”… the raging caja china is coming down on top of him… “Errrnafumph”… one end of it hits the wall—

C R A A A S H!

—sounds like a train wreck in a little casita like this—

“Dad!” Nestor is already crouched over the wreck, starting to lift the huge box off his father’s chest—

“No!” His father is looking straight up into Nestor’s face. “No! No!”… has the full grimace now… eyes aflame… upper teeth bared… “You—no!”

Nestor lifts the caja china off his father anyway and puts it down on the floor… To someone with lats, traps, biceps, bracs, and quads like his—pumped up to the max by adrenaline—it’s nothing… might as well be a cardboard box.

“Dad! Are you okay!?”

I, Camilo Camacho… lying on his back… glowering at his son, growling at his son, “Keep your hands off that caja china,” he says in a low but clear growl.

His dad isn’t injured… he’s perfectly lucid… the wall absorbed the momentum of the caja china… it just toppled over on I, Camilo Camacho… he’s not indicating any pain… Oh, no… he only wants to inflict it… Something close to despair sweeps through Nestor’s central nervous system… He has been helping his father carry the caja china out for the pig roasts ever since he was twelve… His father lifted it by the handles on one end, and Nestor lifted it by the handles on the other end… since he was twelve! It had become a little ritual of manhood! Now his father wants no part of him.

I, Camilo Camacho, doesn’t even want his son to lift a crash-stricken coffin off his prostrate form. You really know how to hurt a son, don’t you, Caudillo Camacho… But Nestor can’t find the words to say that or anything else.

“What happened!? What happened!?”

It’s his mother, running from the bedroom. “Oh, dear God—Cachi! What happened? Cachi!” That’s her loving nickname for the Master. “Are you all right? What was that terrible noise? What fell?”

She dropped to her knees beside him. He looked at her in an expressionless way, then put his tongue in his cheek and gave Nestor a baleful—and with his tongue in his cheek, accusing—stare. He held it like a laser beam… causing Nestor’s mother to turn to him… wide-eyed… baffled… frightened… fearing the worst… as much as asking, “Did you do this—to your father?”

“Dad, tell her! Tell Mami what happened!”

I, Camilo Camacho, said nothing. He just continued with his sinister beam fixed on Nestor.

Nestor turned to his mother. “Dad tried to carry the caja china all by himself, on his shoulder! He lost his balance—and it crashed into the wall!”

Nestor began hyperventilating… He couldn’t help himself, even though it cast a doubt upon what he was saying.

“Tell her why,” said the Lord of This Domain in his new soft, low, mysterious voice… implying that much remained unsaid.

Mami looked at Nestor. “What did happen?” Then at her husband. “Cachi, you must tell me! Are you injured?”

In a voice that rose an octave, a shaky octave, Nestor said, “I swear! Dad was trying to carry that thing by himself! Look how big it is! He lost control, and when I tried to help him, he jumped away, or sort of jumped—and he lost his balance, and the caja china crashed and ended up on top of him! Right, Dad? That’s exactly what happened—right?”

Down on her knees, Mami began crying. She pressed her hands against both sides of her face and kept saying, “Dear God… Dear God… Dear God… Dear God!…”

I, Camilo Camacho, maintained his stare at his son, pushing his tongue inside his cheek so forcefully, his lips parted on that side, showing teeth.

“Dad—you’ve got to tell her!” Nestor’s voice was becoming shrill. “Dad—I know what you’re doing! You’re playing Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”… Magdalena had introduced him to that expression. Somehow she picked up these things. “You’re playing Look What You Made Me Do!”

Same low soft voice: “You don’t talk to me that way. The Big Cop—but everybody knows what you really are.”

Mami broke into sobs, great blubbering sobs.

Nestor’s own eyes began to fill with tears. “This is not fair, Dad!” It was all he could do to keep his lips from trembling. “I’ll help you up, Dad! I’ll take the caja china out to the yard for you! But it’s not fair—you can’t treat me this way! It’s not right! You’re playing a game! Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”

He rose up from his crouch… He was getting out of here! Fighting back tears, he made his way into the little passageway that led from the extension to the rooms in the front of the house. A door opened behind him… a light… He knew immediately… Yeya and Yeyo—the last people on earth he needed at this moment, in the middle of all this.

Yeya, coming up behind him, said in Spanish, “What was that noise? Practically knocked us out of bed! What happened?”

Got to think fast… Nestor stopped, turned about, and gave Yeya the biggest, sweetest smile he could come up with. What a pair of guajiros stood before him. Keep them away from their son, I, Camilo Camacho, that was the main thing… Yeya was short and stout, with a sort of flowered muumuu covering her considerable bulk. But mainly there was her hair. It was the blue ball, the Blue Ball of Hialeah for ladies of a certain age. Old ladies didn’t dye their white hair in Hialeah, at least not in the usual way… Forty-eight hours ago, getting ready for her big birthday party, she went to the hairdresser. He cut it suitably short… for a woman of a certain age, added some—“blueing” in English—to give the gray a blue cast, and then blow-dried, back-combed, and teased it until it became a gossamer blue ball, a Hialeah crash helmet, as it was called. Hers was flattened a bit on one side from sleeping on it, but re-fluffing and reviving the helmet seemed to be no problem, as long as it hadn’t been pulled apart. Just above her brow her hair was wound about a pair of rollers. Yeyo, right behind her, was a tall man. He had once been big and meaty and strong. He still had a tall wide frame, albeit slightly stooped. By now he was more like a wide but bony rack for the old-fashioned pajamas and bathrobe he had on. At this moment he looked like someone who had just arisen unwillingly from a pleasant time with the Sandman. His gray hair was marvelously thick. God must have nailed down every hair upon his head for the duration. He had been a really handsome man, who fairly rippled with confidence and strength—not to mention an overbearing nature… But at this unwilling moment his hair was sticking out every which way, like a broken broom—

All of that Nestor took in instantly… that, and their expressions. This morning they were not his loving abuelo and abuela. Not at all. If he read those faces correctly, they resented his breathing the same air they were…

How to distract them. That was the idea.

“Hap—feliz cumpleaños, Yeya!”

Damn. Kind of blew it there. Almost said “Happy birthday.” Things like that truly rubbed Yeya and Yeyo the wrong way—the next generation using English instead of Spanish for something as traditional as Feliz cumpleaños. Yeya gave Nestor a look. Was he simple? A booby? Was he firing blanks? She glanced at his intentionally too-small shirt.

“Ahhh, the strongman,” she said. “Our TV star. We saw you, Nestorcito. We saw a lot of you.” She began nodding her head repeatedly with her lips drawn together and scrunched up beneath her nose like a little pouch with its string pulled tight… Oh, yes, Nestorcito, we saw all too much of you…

Before Nestor could say anything, Yeyo said (in Spanish), “Why did you tell them your name?”

“Tell who, Yeyo?”

“The TV.”

“I didn’t tell them.”

“Who did?” said Yeya. “A little bird?”

“I don’t know. They just got it.”

“Do you know it’s my name, too?” said Yeyo. “And your father’s? Do you know we care about our name? Do you know we Camachos go back many generations? Do you know we have a proud history?”

::::::Do I know you added to that proud history by defying the raging shit-flow in the Havana waterworks? Yes, I know that, you overbearing old crock.:::::: Real anger, not mixed with hurt, was now rising up Nestor’s brain stem. He had to get away from them before the words actually popped out.

His mouth was so dry, and his throat was constricted. “Yes, Yeyo,” he managed to say. “I know that. I have to go now.”

He had turned around to leave the house when… clop-groan-squeak thump… clop-groan-squeak thump… clop-groan-squeak thump… in the rear of the passageway… Oh, for God’s sake… his mother was trying to support his father… I, Camilo’s elbow rested on top of Mami’s forearm, which was trembling from the weight of the invalid. He was gimping along as if he had hurt his leg… clop—he took a step, putting all his weight on his “good” leg, causing the jerry-built wooden floor of the passageway to groan and squeak… then the lighter thump of the “bad” leg gingerly… “painfully”… trying to come along… What an outrageous faker Patience was!

Yeya screamed. “Camilito—oh, dear God—what’s happened to you?!”

In an instant she was at her Camilito’s side, trying to give him more support by jacking her forearms up under his other arm.

“It’s all right, Mami,” he said. “You don’t have to do that. I’m okay.” How courageous he sounded! How stoic! thought Nestor. In fact, it couldn’t have been very pleasant, having the heels of her hands jacked up into the soft spot of his armpit.

“But Camilito! My Camilito! There was such a crash! Oh, my God!”

“It’s nothing, Lourdes.” I, Camilo’s new soft, husky voice. “Just a little family… disagreement.” With that he pinned Nestor again with his ironic, tongue-in-cheek, teeth-baring stare, interrupting it only long enough to say again, “Just… a… little… family… disagreement…”

Now all four of them had their eyes pinned on Nestor. Yeya had become hysterical.

“What did you do to your father?! Your own father! It wasn’t enough, what you did to that poor boy yesterday? Now you have to turn on your own father?!”

Nestor was bewildered… couldn’t get a word out… just stood there with his mouth open. His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him in his whole life! Even Mami!

When he found his voice, he was almost as hysterical as Yeya. “Tell her the truth, Dad! Tell her what really happened! You’re—you’re—twisting it all around! In the name of God, tell the truth! Dad, you’re—you’re—”

He didn’t help his own cause by breaking it off right there, wheeling about, showing them his back, rushing to his room to pick up his car keys—bolting for the front door without so much as glancing at the rest of his family.

Bang—he slammed the front door of La Casita de Camacho behind him.