Back to Blood

4





Magdalena


Nestor took a deep breath… a free breath… in the open air of a nice clear Saturday morning. He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a big cop-sized watch packed with digital systems to burn. It was 7:00 a.m. exactly… unnaturally quiet out here on the street—good!… nobody stirring except for the women hosing down the concrete… a regular two-note concerto of spray hitting a hard surface. ¡SHEEEahHHHH ahHHHHSSHEEEE! He looks about… two doors away, Señora Díaz. He’s known her ever since the day he moved into this casita. Thank God, a sweet, kind friend from the free world! It makes him happy, just seeing her there with a garden hose in her hand, spraying concrete. Oh so very cheerfully he sings out, “Buenos días, Señora Díaz!”

She looked up and started to smile. But only one side of her mouth moved. The other side stayed put, as if it had gotten snagged by an eyetooth. Her gaze went blank. ¡SHEEEEahHHHH ahHHHHshHEEEE! as she mumbled the most mechanical Buenos días he had ever heard in his life… Mumbled it!… and turned her back, as if she had neglected to hose the concrete… over there.

That was all she was going to give him! A mumble and a retractable smile! And a stone-cold back… and he had known her forever! ::::::Got to get out of here, too! Off the street I’ve lived on practically all my life! Got to go—where, f’r chrissake?!::::::

He had no idea. Aside from the women hosing down concrete, such as Señora Díaz, Hialeah was in a Saturday-morning coma. ::::::Well… I’m hungry. ¿No es verdad? Dios mío, I’m hungry.::::::

He hadn’t had anything to eat for almost twenty-four hours, or practically nothing. He had his regular break at about eight o’clock last night, but so many of the guys were there asking him questions about the Man on the Mast thing, all he managed to eat was one hamburger and some french fries. He was counting on having something to eat when he got home. So his dad shoves a shitload of abuse down his throat instead.

He went straight to his aging muscle car, the Camaro… Muscle car?… with his big black Cuban cop shades on, jeans tailored until they fit like ballet tights in the seat… polo shirt size S, for small, because that made it “too” tight across the chest and shoulders. ::::::Oh, f*ck:::: what a stupid mistake! This morning he didn’t want to be seen showing off his muscles or in any other fashion calling attention to himself. Ricky’s Bakery would be open this early… in a shopping strip six blocks away. Six blocks—but he didn’t feel like showing his face in his own neighborhood and risking any more surprises like the one Señora Díaz hit him with.

In no time the mighty Camaro was cruising along the strip. The place was still asleep… He cruised past the botanica where Magdalena’s mother had bought the statue of Saint Lazarus.

Nestor climbed out of the Camaro in front of Ricky’s and got a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, “little pies” of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it—one whiff of pastelitos baking, and he relaxed… ambrosia… He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy. Ricky’s was a tiny bakery with a big glass counter in the rear running practically the width of the place. In the foreground, on each side, was a small, round, tinny metal café table, painted white—back when—and flanked by a pair of old-fashioned drugstore-style bentwood chairs. A lone customer sat there, his back to Nestor, reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee. He was middle-aged, judging by the way he had gone bald on the crown of his head without his hair turning gray. There were always three girls behind the counter, but the counter was so high, you had to come very close to see much more than the hair on the tops of their heads. ::::::Hey! Is that a blonde back there?:::::: Nestor had never seen a blond waitress at Ricky’s before. Maybe he hadn’t seen one now, either. His cop shades had engulfed the whole place in a half-dead dusk… at 7:00 a.m. So he pushed them up above his eyes.

Big mistake. That also made his own face plain as the moon. The big head at the little white tin-top table turned toward him ¡Dios mío! It was Mr. Ruiz, the father of Rafael Ruiz, one of Nestor’s classmates at Hialeah High School.

“Why, hello, Nestor,” said Mr. Ruiz. It wasn’t a cheery greeting. It was more like the cat toying with the mouse.

Nestor made a point of smiling at Mr. Ruiz and saying as cheerfully as he could, “Oh… Mr. Ruiz! ¡Buenos días!”

Mr. Ruiz turned away, then gave his head a quarter-turn toward Nestor, without looking at him, and said out the side of his mouth, “I see where you had quite a day for yourself yesterday.” No smile… none at all. Then he turned back to his newspaper.

“Well, I guess you could call it that, Mr. Ruiz.”

The head said, “Or else you could say te cagaste.” You blew it. Literally, you shit all over it. Mr. Ruiz turned away completely and showed Nestor his back.

Humiliated!—by this—this—this—Nestor wanted to twist that big head off its skinny neck and—and—and cagar down his windpipe—and then he’d—

“Nestor!”

Nestor looked toward the counter. It was the blonde. Somehow she had managed to tiptoe high enough to lift her face above the top surface. He knew her. Cristy La Gringa! he wanted to cry out, but Mr. Ruiz’s presence inhibited him.

He walked up to the counter. All that marvelous long wild blond hair! Cristy La Gringa! “Cristy La Gringa!” He realized that didn’t have the poetic wallop of “Inga La Gringa,” but it still made him feel like Nestor the Jester… a real wit, no es verdad? Cristy had been a year behind him at Hialeah High School, and she’d had a crush on him. Oh, she had made that obvious. He was tempted. She had made his loins stir… Pastelitos! Oh yes!

“Cristy!” said Nestor. “I didn’t know you were working here! La bella gringa!”

She laughed. That was what he used to call her at Hialeah High… when they were supposedly just kidding around.

“I just started here,” said Cristy. “Nicky got me the job. You remember Nicky? She was a year ahead of you?” She gestured toward the third girl. “And this is Vicky.”

Nestor ran his eyes over the three of them. Nicky’s and Vicky’s hair streamed down into turbulent waves at the shoulders, just like Cristy’s, but theirs was dark in the Cuban way. All three were shrink-wrapped in denim. Their jeans hugged their declivities fore and aft, entered every crevice, explored every hill and dale of their lower abdomens, climbed their montes veneris—

—but somehow he just couldn’t… He was too depressed. “Vicky and Cristy and Nicky and Ricky’s,” he said. They laughed… uncertainly… and that was that.

He went ahead and ordered some pastelitos and coffee… to go. He had come in with a vision of himself sitting at one of the little tables and making a long, leisurely breakfast of it, quietly, on neutral ground, just him and his pastelitos and coffee. Mr. Ruiz had put an end to that. Who knew how many more soreheads with smart mouths would show up here even now, this early on a Saturday morning?

By and by, Cristy brought out a white paper bag—somehow all the little bakeries and diners in Hialeah used only white bags—with the pastelitos and coffee. At the cash register, as she gave him change, he said, “Thanks for everything, Cristy.” He meant it in a loving way, but it came out sad and beaten more than anything else.

Cristy had already headed back behind the counter when he noticed a shelf beneath it with two stacks of newspapers.

Whuh! His heart tried to leap out of its thoracic cage. Himself!—a photograph of himself!—his official Police Department photograph—on the front page of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald! Next to his, a—a picture of a young man with a twisted face: Nestor knew that face, all right—the man on the mast… above those two head shots, a big photograph of the schooner near the causeway and a mob of people up on the bridge screaming until their teeth showed… and above that, the biggest, blackest print Nestor had ever seen on a newspaper: ¡DETENIDO! 18 METROS DE LIBERTAD—stretching across the entire front page… of El Nuevo Herald. Shock!—his heart began speeding. He didn’t want to read the story, sincerely didn’t want to—but his eyes seized upon the first sentence and wouldn’t let go.

In Spanish it said, “A Cuban refugee, reportedly a hero of the dissident underground, was arrested yesterday on Biscayne Bay just eighteen meters from the Rickenbacker Causeway—and asylum—by a cop whose own parents had fled Cuba and made it to Miami and freedom in a homemade dinghy.”

Nestor felt as if heat were surging up his cerebral cortex and scalding his brain. Now he was a villain, a vile ingrate who would deny his own people the freedom he enjoyed… in short, the worst sort of TRAIDOR!

He didn’t want to buy the newspaper… Its stain would spread indelibly upon his hands if he so much as picked it up… but something—his autonomous nervous system?—overrode his conscious will and ordered him to stoop down and grab one. Holy shit! When he stooped down, he got an eyeful of the newspaper atop the other stack. The entire top half of the newspaper’s front page was one huge color picture—the blue of the Bay, the enormous white sails of the schooner… above the picture—English language! The Miami Herald!—a headline as big and bold as El Nuevo Herald’s—ROPE-CLIMB COP IN “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE… He turned the newspaper over, to see the lower half of the front page—¡Santa Barranza!—a two-column-wide photograph, in color, of a young man with no shirt on… clad from the waist up in only his own muscles, an entire mountainscape of muscles, huge boulders, sharp cliffs, deep cuts, and iron gorges… an entire muscle terrain… ME! So in love fell he—with ME!—that he could barely remove his eyes from the image long enough to scan the story that filled the other four columns… “amazing feat of strength”… “risked his own life”—“Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!”… rope-climbing… “rescued a Cuban refugee by locking his legs about him.” See that?… he rescued the little bastard… Rope-Climb Cop hadn’t doomed him to torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons… Oh, no… He had saved his life… It said so, in so many words!… Nestor’s mood swung so high, so fast, he could feel it in his gizzard. The Miami Herald had granted him a reprieve… in English… but that counted, didn’t it?… The Herald-in-English—the oldest newspaper in Florida! But then his spirits sank… “Yo no creo el Miami Herald.” I don’t believe the Miami Herald. If Nestor had heard that once he had heard it a thousand times… The Herald had opposed Cuban immigration, once Cubans had begun fleeing Castro by the thousands… resented it when there were so many Cubans, they took over politically… “Yo no creo el Miami Herald!” Nestor had heard this from his father, his father’s brothers, his father’s sisters’ husbands, his cousins, the whole Hialeah lot of them… from everyone old enough to say the words “Yo no creo el Miami Herald…”

Still… this americano newspaper was all he had. Somebody in Hialeah must read the damned thing and even believe… some of it. It was just that he had never met that person. Plenty of the people coming to Yeya’s party could read English, though… Yes!… They could certainly read those huge letters calling what he had done a

“MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE, couldn’t they? He ducked out of Ricky’s and returned to the Camaro… Ineffable clouds of Ricky’s Bakery aroma from the bag next to him took over the entire car… The pastelitos and the Miami Herald, which lay next to the bag… two feasts… and “That’s him right there, the turncoat cop, stuffing his face with food and reading about his glorified self in the Yo-no-creo Herald…” Not cool, not cool… but I’m so tired… He took the plastic top off the cortadito, indulged himself with a sip and a sip and a sip of the utterly hedonistic sweetness of Cuban coffee… He picked up the Miami Herald and consumed some more lip-smacking syllables of the ROPE-CLIMB COP… He reached into the bag from Ricky’s—pastelitos!—and took out a moon of beef pastelito wrapped in wax paper… A little bit of Heaven!… tasted exactly the way he hoped it would… Pastelitos! A little flake of the baked filo dough fell… and then another… the very nature of baked filo dough… little flakes of it fell if you picked up a pastelito… little flakes fell on his clothes… upon the Camaro’s reupholstered seats… Far from annoying him, the gentle doughfall in the stillness of 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning was a little bit of Heaven, too… made Nestor think of home, childhood delights, sunny Hialeah, a cozy casita… soft, fluffy clouds of love and affection… and protection. Gently, gently, the flakes were wafted about by the white-noise zephyrs that blew out from the air conditioner vents… Nestor could feel the terrible tension draining out draining out draining out, and he drank some more coffee… ineffable sweetness—and how warm the cup and the plastic top had kept it!… and he ate some more moons of pastelito, and the flakes fell ever so gently and tumbled about in the zephyrs, and he found himself… lifting the little lever on the side of the seat and letting his own weight take it back to a twenty-degree incline… and the coffee, which was supposed to keep him alert after a sleepless night, sent a wave of perfect warmth up through his body… and his body surrendered itself utterly to the incline of the seat… and his mind surrendered itself utterly to a hypnagogic state, and presently…

He woke up with a start. He looked at the Camaro’s keys hanging from the ignition in the ON position and felt the cool breeze of the air conditioner. He had fallen asleep with the motor running… He lowered the windows, to let maximum fresh air in… Christ, that fresh air was hot! The sun was right overhead… it was killer bright… What time was it? He looked at his jumbo watch. It was 10:45! He had been asleep for three hours… stretched out in the Land of the Sandman with the engine running and the air conditioner chundering out electro-breeze.

He retrieved his cell phone from the bucket seat and sighed… Whatever messages its innards contained, they would be toxic. Yet once again he couldn’t resist. He punched up the new-messages display. There was one after another after another… until one made him do a double take. The number jumped up at him—a text from Manena!

“coming to yeya party c u later”

He stared at the thing. He tried to detect a sign of love in there… any at all… seven words. He couldn’t. Nevertheless, he texted back: “my manena dying to c u”

His spirits turned manic. It would be at least four hours before the party started, but he was going home… now. ::::::I’ll just ignore you Camagüey guajiros, Papa and Yeya and Yeyo. I’ll make damn sure I’m right there when Manena arrives.::::::

By now, 11:00 a.m., the streets of Hialeah were walls of parked cars. He had to park the Camaro more than a block away. Halfway down his own block, a couple of casitas ahead, Señor Ramos was walking out of his front door. From behind his big cop shades Nestor could see Señor Ramos staring at him. The next thing he knew, Señor Ramos was turning toward his front door and snapping his fingers in an exaggerated display of having forgotten something—shoooop—he’s back inside his casita. Señor Ramos is nothing but a baggage handler at Miami Airport. A baggage handler! A little speck of humanity! But this morning, on these streets, he doesn’t want to exchange so much as a buenos días with Officer Nestor Camacho. But so what? Magdalena is coming.

Wouldn’t you know it? From four or five casitas away he can hear his own casita… the power spray exacting friction from hot Hialeah concrete. Oh, yeah. There’s Mami, wearing a pair of long baggy shorts, a baggier too-big white T-shirt, and flip-flops… taming the concrete wilderness for the whateverteenth time this morning… and… Oh, yeah… he gets his first whiff of the pig, which has been roasting for a few hours probably… tended by those two macho masters of the big things in life, I, Camilo, and El Pepe Yeyo…

As soon as she sees her son coming, Mami turns off the hose and cries out, “Nestorcito! Where did you go? We were worried!”

Nestor wanted to say ::::::Worried? Why? I thought “we” would be happy for me to disappear.:::::: But he never spoke sarcastically to his parents and couldn’t make himself start now. After all, Magdalena was coming.

“I went out to get breakfast—”

“We had food here, Nestorcito!”

“—to get breakfast, and I ran into some friends from Hialeah High.”

“Who?”

“Cristy, Nicky, and Vicky.”

“I don’t remember them… Where?”

“At Ricky’s.”

Nestor could see the rhymes rickycheting, as it were, in his mother’s brain, but she either didn’t get it or didn’t care to be distracted by it.

“So early in the morning…” his mother said. Then she dropped that subject. “I have some good news for you, Nestor. Magdalena is coming.” She gave him the sort of look that gets down on its knees and begs for an animated reaction.

He tried, he tried… He arched his eyebrows and dropped his jaw for a couple of beats before saying, “How do you know?”

“I called her and invited her, and she’s coming!” said his mother. “I told her to be sure to come before you had to leave for your shift.” She hesitated. “I thought she might lift your spirits a little.”

“You think they need a lift?” said Nestor. “Well, you’re right. When I was out, I could tell… everybody in Hialeah thinks about me the same way as Dad and Yeya and Yeyo. What did I do, Mami? There was an emergency, and I was ordered to put an end to it without anybody getting hurt, and that’s what I did!” He realized his voice was rising, but he couldn’t stop himself. “At the Police Academy they kept talking about ‘the uncritical willingness to face danger.’ That means you’re willing to do dangerous things without stopping to analyze everything and decide whether you approve of the risk they want you to take. You can’t sit around having a debate. That’s what ‘uncritical’ means. You can’t sit around arguing about everything and… and, I mean, you know—”

He forced himself to slow down and lower his voice. Why lay all this stuff on his mother? All she wanted was peace and harmony. So he stopped talking altogether and gave her a sad smile.

She moved closer, and from her own sad smile he knew what was going to happen. She wanted to put her arms around him and assure him that Mother still loved him. He just couldn’t go through that.

He raised his hands up before his chest, palms outward ::::::Hold it:::::: at the same time he gave her a smile and said, “It’s okay, Mami. I can handle it. All it takes is a little ‘uncritical willingness to face danger.’ ”

“Your father and Yeya and Yeyo didn’t really mean… all those things they said, Nestorocito. They were just—”

“Oh, they meant it,” said Nestor. He made sure to keep his smile spread across his face.

With that, he went inside and left Mami outside to further chasten the concrete slab with the power spray.

Inside, the casita was overwhelmed by the odors, good and bad, of the pig roasting in the caja china. Good—bad—the neighbors wouldn’t care either way. They were all Cuban. They all knew what a big thing, what a family ritual, a pig roast was, and besides, most of them had been invited to the party. That was the Cuban way.

Nobody seemed to be in the house. Nestor headed toward the back. Yeya and Yeyo’s door was open, and so he went in there and looked out their back window. Sure enough, the whole macho crew was out in the yard. There was I, Camilo, directing Yeyo, who was bringing a bucket of coals for the caja china. There was Yeya, the muchacha vieja, pointing this way and that way, directing both of them… correcting both of them. Nestor could be sure of that.

So… he could either walk right up to the caja china clergy and force himself upon them in conversation ::::::Gosh, now that’s some pig! How much longer you think it’ll take? Dad, you remember the time the pig was so big—:::::: for the ten or twenty seconds it would take the three self-righteous pharisees to start spitting their vile bile all over him again… or he could turn his back on the whole scene… The birthday girl, Yeya, obviously didn’t care whether a non-person was there or not. It was not a difficult decision.

Back in his room, Nestor lay down to take a nap. The only half-decent sleep he had gotten in the last twenty-four hours were the three hours when the aroma and the flake-fall of pastelitos had put him under as he sat back at a twenty-degree angle in the driver’s seat of the Camaro outside of Ricky’s with the engine running and the air conditioner on. He couldn’t think of any prospect more inviting than going under again ::::::here in my own bed where I’m already horizontal:::::: but the phrase “here in my own bed” made him anxious. He didn’t know exactly why, but it did. What did “my own bed” mean in a house where three people considered you a traitor and the fourth, kindly enough, said she was willing to forgive you for having sinned against her and the three others and their heritage, and all of Mother Cuba’s offspring in Miami and, for that matter, everywhere in the world. So he lay there horizontally in a regular stew of rejection, stigma, and guilt, those three, and the worst of these, as always, was guilt… even though what was he supposed to have done, looked the mere americano Sergeant McCorkle in the eye and said, “No, I will not lay one hand on a Cuban patriot!—even though I haven’t the faintest idea who the f*ck he is,” and then just taken his dismissal from the force like a man? Bubble bubble bubble bubble went the stew, while the fouler odors of the pig roast wafted over him, the odors and the occasional rude cry, probably of excoriation, from the backyard, and the time passed as slowly as it had ever passed in his life.

After God-only-knows-how-long came the sound of the chosen pig roasters coming back into the casita, bringing their various recriminations with them, although mercifully he couldn’t really understand them. It was about 1:15, and Yeya’s party was to start at 2:00. They must have come in to get dressed. No one had said a word to him about that or anything else. Why was he even staying? He was nothing but an embarrassment to them all. One of our own, or formerly our own, has turned into a snake… but to bug out on Yeya’s party was the equivalent of leaving the family, cutting all ties, and that prospect he couldn’t imagine. Besides, in the short run it was another charge they could bring against him, evidence of just how vile he had become. He was right there in the house, and he couldn’t trouble himself enough to come to her party and pay his respects.

About half an hour later, Nestor heard a high-speed rat-tat-tat of Spanish coming up the hallway from the rear of the casita. All at once he was afraid they were starting the party without even telling him. Now it was obvious. He was invisible. He had disappeared so far as they were concerned. Well, there was one way to find out for sure. He got up off the bed. With an impulsive, heedless rush he opened his door. Barely ten feet away and coming toward him—here they were—what an eyeful!

They had changed into their party clothes. From Yeyo’s wide but bony shoulders hung, as if from a rack, a white guayabera that was now too big for him. It was so old, the trim that ran up and down both sides of his chest was beginning to yellow. The thing made it look like Yeyo was a sail waiting for wind. As for Yeya, she was a vision… of God knew what. She wore a big white shirt, too, a frilly one with voluminous sleeves that ended in narrow cuffs at the wrist. The shirt hung down to her hips, outside of a pair of white pants. The pants—Nestor couldn’t keep from staring. They were white jeans… tight white jeans that clung to her aged legs… but also to her bottom, which was big enough for three women her height… clung to her lower belly, which swelled out beneath the shirt—clung! But above all there was the perfect blue ball of hair, which enclosed her head, save for her face, in a single puff… With that and the jeans and a terribly red gash of lipstick across her mouth and a circle of rouge on each cheekbone… she was a real piece of work.

When they saw Nestor, they went silent. They stared at him in the wary way you might stare at a stray dog… and he stared at them… and his emotions suddenly spun 180 degrees. The sight of these two old people trying to look their very best for a party… the one looking like a sail that just blew into Hialeah from off the bay… the other one, in the low-slung white flesh-huggers, looking like a jean-ager time-shot fifty or sixty years older just like that… it was so sad, so pathetic, Nestor was touched by the sight of them. Here they were… two old people who didn’t want to be here in the first place… in this country… in this city… living at the sufferance of their son and his wife… walled off by a foreign language and maddening alien ways… Once they were young, too—although Nestor couldn’t actually picture it—and they must have grown up never having a dream dark enough to imagine their lives would end up like this… How could he have hated them the way he did this morning—or come to think of it, thirty seconds ago? Now he felt guilty… His heart was filled with pity… He was young, and he could take setbacks… even the pounding he had taken today… for his life was just beginning… and Magdalena was coming.

He smiled at them. “You know what, Yeya? You look great! I mean like really great!”

Yeya gave him an evil eye. “Where did you go this morning?”

She was starting in again, wasn’t she… By stressing the you rather than the go, she made it clear it was not really a question… merely another little black mark against his name.

Nestor said, “And I really like your guayabera, Yeyo. You must a had that made.”

“You must a not had yours—”

Nestor cut him off, although not intentionally. Guilt and pity made him babble on. “You know what? You and Yeya match!”

Yeyo cocked his head and gave Nestor an evil eye of his own. He was dying to start in again, too, but the kid was busy dousing him with flattery.

Nestor never even thought about it that way. His heart was filled with pity… and goodwill. Magdalena was coming.

The guests began arriving a little after two… No wonder Mami had ordered a hundred-pound pig… My God! They arrived in platoons… battalions… hordes… whole family trees full. Yeya was standing with Mami here in the little living room. The front door opened right into it. Nestor hung back in the rear of the room… all of twelve or fourteen feet from the front door. This wasn’t going to be fun… every single tribesman clucking and fuming and eating up all the delicious gossip… right in our own family!… I can’t believe it was Dad’s cousin Camilo’s son, Nestor, who did that!… and so forth and so on… and on and on…

The first to arrive was his uncle Pedrito, Mami’s oldest brother, and his family. Family? He arrived with a goddamned population!… There’s Uncle Pepe and his wife, Maria Luisa, and Mami’s mother and father, Carmita and Orlando Posada, who live with them, and Uncle Pepe’s and Maria’s three grown sons, Roberto, Eugenio, and Emilio, and their daughter Angelina, and her second husband, Paco Pimentel, and the five children they have between them, and Eugenio’s, Roberto’s, Emilio’s wives and children and… on and on…

The adults hugged and kissed Yeya and otherwise made a big fuss over her… The children mumbled through it and endured wet smacks from Yeya’s scarlet gash of a mouth… and said to themselves, “Urgggh! I’ll never be a slobbering old mess like her”… but mainly they could smell the pig roasting, and they knew what that was!… and the moment they were set free, they began racing through the casita toward the backyard, where, no doubt, I, Camilo, would say to them, “Little children, come unto me—and see how a real man… roasts a pig.”

One of the little boys, one of Aunt Maria Luisa’s grandsons or stepgrandsons, God knew which, seven or eight years old, was off like a rabbit with the rest of them when he came to a sudden stop in front of Nestor and looked up at him with his mouth open and just stared.

“Hi!” said Nestor, in the voice one uses for children. “You know what’s out back?” He smiled the smile one uses for children. “There’s a whole pig! It’s THIS big!” He held his arms out like wings to show just how colossal it was. “It’s bigger than you are, and you’re a big boy!”

The boy didn’t change his expression in any way. He just kept looking at him, gawking with his mouth open. Then he spoke: “Are you really the one who did it?”

That so unnerved Nestor, he found himself stammering out, “Did what?—who said—no, I’m not the one who did it.”

The boy digested this answer for a minute and then said, “You are too!”—and bolted toward the back of the casita.

In came more clans, tribes, hordes, the battalions. Half of them would come in the front door, seek him with their eyes, spot him, whisper to one another—and avert their eyes and never look at him again. But some of the older men, in typical Cuban fashion, deemed it incumbent upon themselves to stick their big noses in and call a spade a spade.

His uncle Andres’s cousin-in-law, Hernán Lugo, a real blowhard, came over with a very stern look on his face and said, “Nestor, you might think it’s none of my business, but it is my business, because I know people who are still trapped in Cuba—know them personally—and I know what they go through, and I’ve tried to help them, and I have helped them, in many different ways, so I’ve got to ask you something face-to-face: Okay, so technically they had the right to do what they did, but I don’t see how you ever—ever—let them use you as their tool. How could you?”

Nestor said, “Look, Señor Lugo, I was sent up that mast to talk the guy down. The guy was up on top—”

“Jesus Christ, Nestor, you don’t know enough Spanish to talk anybody down from anything.”

Nestor saw red, literally saw a film of red before his eyes. “Then I needed you, didn’t I, Señor Lugo. You would have been a big help! You coulda climbed eighty feet of rope, straight up, without using your legs, to get up there faster, and you coulda gotten as close to him as I did and you coulda seen the panic in his face and heard it in his voice and seen the way he was about to slide off a bosun’s chair about this big and fall eighty feet—and explode on that deck like a pumpkin! And you coulda told me that this guy has gone crazy from panic and he’s gonna die if he stays up here a minute longer! You could have seen that face close up—and heard the voice, with your own ears! You ever seen a man who’s lost control of himself, I mean really lost it? A poor sonofabitch who’s opening the lid of his own coffin? If you wanna help Cubans… don’t just sit on your big butt in an air-conditioned building! Try the… the… the real world for the first time in your life! Do something, goddamn it! Do something besides run your mouth!”

Señor Lugo looked at Nestor for a single moment more, then lowered his head and slunk away deeper into the casita.

::::::Shit. I’ve really done it now. I’m the one who lost control. That old bastard—he’s back there right now telling them all, “Be careful! Don’t get near him! He’s a mad dog!”… Still—seeing the fear on his face—it was almost worth it.::::::

He’d had it with all these people. ::::::Even if they want to talk, civilly or otherwise, I’m not saying anything and I’m not moving, either. I’m gonna be right here the moment Magdalena comes in.::::::

The platoons, the brigades, the battalions, the clans, the tribesmen, the termites in the family tree who were packed in around him here in the front room… drinking beer straight out of the bottles and talking at the top of their lungs. What an ungodly din. Nice atmosphere… none of them wanted to talk to him or set eyes on him or in any way be aware of his presence, much less acknowledge it.

::::::All right, if I’m such a non-person that you can’t even see me, why would you mind if I force my way straight through you to reach the front door?::::::

With that, he began shouldering through the crowd, cop shades over his face, looking at no one, giving this one a shoulder into his rib cage from behind and that one an elbow in the—“Oooof!”—stomach, muttering, “Coming through, coming through,” not pausing for an instant to look back at the tribesmen he had felled, taking delight in their startled objections, the Heys, the Ouches, the Hey, watch its. ::::::So what if they think I’m rude? They already think worse than that of me.::::::

Parading his muscles again gave him a grim pleasure, self-defeating but satisfying all the same. But the moment he went out the front door—no pleasure remained, grim or otherwise, and no fear. He was empty…

In the instant it took him, cop shades and all, to adjust to Hialeah’s eye-frying killer-concrete sun, he was aware of a figure walking across the street here in the middle of the block, but he could make out no details, just a silhouette.

In the next instant a vision—Magdalena.

She was walking straight toward him, looking into his face with a certain smile that he had always interpreted as a lure… toward unspeakable delights… the curve of her lips—pure mischief… the way her hair flowed in such thick silken waves down to her shoulders… her sleeveless white silk top scalloped so deep in front, he could see the inner curves of her breasts… and more… and his loins sent out a bulletin… her perfect lissome legs and thighs and hips, he loved it all, worshipped it, idolized it.

He blurted out, “Manena—I’d given up!”

Magdalena slipped between I, Camilo’s FUMIGADORES van and an ancient Taurus parked right in front of it and stepped up onto the sidewalk, and the sun exploded off the shimmers of the white silk barely upon her breasts and the waves of her hair, long enough, thick enough, soft enough to—to—to… She walked up to within three feet of Nestor, still smiling the smile that promised… all… and breathing rapidly.

“I’m so sorry, Nestor! I barely got here at all! I was at the hospital. I’ve never driven so fast—”

“Oh, Manena—” Nestor was shaking his head and fighting back tears.

“—fast in my life! And there was no place to park, and so I just left it over there.” With a little swing of her head she indicated somewhere behind her.

“Oh God, Manena, if you hadn’t come at all—” More head shaking, more tears pooling on the little edge where his lower eyelids touched the eyeballs—in lieu of the words he didn’t know how to say. “Manena, you have no idea what I’ve been going through—my own family, my own goddamned family!”

He glanced at his watch. “Shit! I can’t be late for the shift.”

He moved toward her. He must hold her in his arms. He puts his arms around her, and she put her arms around him ::::::but shit, she’s got her arms around my back. She always puts them around my neck.:::::: He tries to kiss her, but she averts her head and whispers, “Not out here, Nestor—some of them are outside—”

—presumably the crowd at the party. Yes, it’s true. Some of them have spilled out of the lawn in the back and onto the driveway. But what difference did it make?

He released his sweetheart and looked squarely at his watch.

“Shit, Manena! I’m gonna be late for my goddamned shift—and my car’s parked four blocks from here!”

“Oh—I’m sorry, Nestor,” said Magdalena. “I messed up—look, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I drive you over to where your car is? That’ll save you some time.”

As soon as he got in the passenger seat, he poured out his woes in a torrent. For no reason, no reason at all, his whole family—hell, all of Hialeah!—was trying to turn him into a traitor!—a pariah! He let it all out.

As she drove, Magdalena gestured toward the rows of casitas that rolled by on either side. “Oh, Nestor,” she sighed without looking at him. “I’ve told you this before. Hialeah is not America. It’s not even Miami. It’s a—well, the word isn’t ghetto, but Hialeah’s… Hialeah’s a little box, and we grow up here thinking it’s a normal part of the world. But it isn’t! You’re in a little box here! And everybody’s poking into your life and poking into everything you try to do and they can’t wait to gossip about it and spread stories, hoping you’ll fail. They love it when you fail. As long as you live in Hialeah and think in the Hialeah way… as long as you assume that the only way you can get out of some wretched casita is to marry your way out—what kind of life is that? You’re just letting them condition you so your eyes can’t even see any life outside of a Hialeah casita. I know who’s in your house right now. There’s so many people in there who are related to you, part of you, attached to you—they’re like one of those parasite plants that has all the tendrils that wrap around the trunk and then wrap around the branches, and when there’s no more room on the branches, they go after the buds and leaves and twigs, and now the tree lives on in a completely parasitical condition—”

::::::parasitical condition?::::::

“—or it dies. Listen to me, Nestor. I’m very, very fond of you—”

::::::“fond”?::::::

“—and you’ve got to get out of this trap now. I was talking to a doctor from Argentina yesterday, and he says—”

::::::This is the moment!:::::: They were within a block of his car. He glanced at his watch again. Time was growing short. :::::::Now!:::::::

Nestor leaned across the armrest and placed his hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes close up and in a way so wet, you’d have to be pretty dim not to see heavy weather coming.

“¡Dios mío, Manena!… oh, my God,” said Nestor, “we’re thinking the same thing at the same time. I shouldn’t be surprised—but it’s incredible!”

Magdalena suddenly pulled her head back.

“Sweetheart,” Nestor went on, “we’re two people with the same—I don’t mean just the same feelings but the same—well, we’re two people who understand things the same way. You know what I mean?”

Nothing in her expression indicated she did.

“I’ve been thinking all day about this. You know how we’re always saying, ‘It’s just not the right time’? You know how we say that? Well, I swear, Manena, I know this is! This is the right time! This moment!… Manena… let’s get married—now—right now! Let’s just say goodbye to all this!”—he twirled his forefinger in the air, as if to take in Hialeah, Miami, Miami-Dade County—“all of it. Why wait any longer for the right time? Let’s just do it—now! We’ll both be gone from… all this! Manena! I’m leaving with you—right now. How about it? I couldn’t love you any more than I do—right now. You and I both know what the right time is… right now!”

For a moment Magdalena just looked at him… blankly. Nestor could not read a thing in that expression of hers. Finally she said, “It’s not that simple, Nestor.”

“Not that simple?” He gave Magdalena the softest, most loving smile possible. “It couldn’t be any simpler, Manena. We love each other!”

Magdalena turned her head. She wasn’t looking at him when she said, “We can’t just think of ourselves.”

“You mean your folks? It’s not going to be any sudden shock to them. We’ve been with each other for three years, and I’m sure they know—well, they know we’re not just…, just going out on dates.”

Now Magdalena looked him squarely in the eye. “It’s not just them.”

“Whattaya mean?”

She hesitated, but she kept her eyes locked upon his. “I’m seeing someone else… also.”

Magdalena’s car turned into a sealed capsule. Nestor could no longer hear a thing except for a sound that began to fill his head… it sounded like the steam that comes out of those big irons at the cleaners.

His voice rose. “Did you just say also?”

“Yes.” She maintained her laser control.

“And what the f*ck is that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t use that kind of language.”

“Okay.” He gave her a sardonic smile that showed his upper teeth and turned his forehead into ribbons of wrinkles. “Then just answer the question.”

The smile cracked her composure. She began blinking to beat the band. “I mean, just like I see you, I see other people.”

Nestor managed to bark out a single rasp of laughter. The steely Magdalena suddenly came back into her eyes. “I don’t want to lie to you. I love you too much to do that. I do love you, you know. I finally decided I had to tell you about everything. I never wanted to keep anything from you. I was just waiting for the right time… Now you know everything.”

“I know… everything? I know… everything? I know you’re trying to double-talk me! I know you haven’t told me a f*cking thing—”

“I told you! Don’t use—”

“Why not? Because you’re such a f*cking lady who f*cking loves me? Have you ever heard any bigger bullshit?”

“Nestor!”

He could see the disgust, the anger in her eyes. But he could also see she was afraid to say another word.

“DON’T WORRY! I’M LEAVING!” So out of control, he couldn’t keep his voice down even when he tried. He opened the door and got out and walked in front of the car and stopped, looking straight through the windshield at her.

“THIS IS YOUR CHANCE! WHY DON’T YOU F*ckING RUN ME OVER AND BE DONE WITH IT!” Out of control and he knew it and was helpless. He walked around to the driver’s window, Magdalena’s window, and bent over and all but pressed his face against the glass. “YOU MISSED YOUR F*ckING CHANCE… CONCHA!” He was vaguely aware of people on the sidewalk across the street stopping to gawk, but he couldn’t keep his voice down. He withdrew his head and stood up and screamed at Magdalena from about a foot and a half away. “GO AHEAD! GET OUTTA HERE! GET OUTTA HIALEAH! GET OUTTA MY SIGHT!”

Magdalena didn’t have to be told twice. She gunned the engine, the tires squealed, and the car seemed to spring away, like an animal. Nestor followed the beast with his eyes every millimeter of the way, watched it screech around the corner on two wheels, for one horrible HORRIBLY GUILTY moment thought it was going to roll over ::::::OH, MY MANENA! MOST PRECIOUS CREATURE IN THE WORLD! MY ONLY LOVE! MY ONLY LIFE—WHAT HAVE I JUST DONE?! I CALLED YOU A CONCHA FOR ALL OF HIALEAH TO HEAR! And now I’ll never have the chance to tell you that I worship you… that you are my life!:::::: but, thankgod, it righted itself and disappeared.

More people had stopped to gawk. He’d better get outta here himself. He got in the Camaro, but instead of speeding off, he sat back in the seat. Only then did he realize he was breathing rapidly, all but gasping for breath, and his heart was racing within his rib cage, as if it had an urgent desire to be in a better place…

Out the windshield he could see what he had left… tiny huts all in rows, roasting on an endless arid prairie of concrete… the guilt, the thought of what he had thrown away, the hopelessness; these three, hopelessness, wanton waste, and guilt; but the worst of these was guilt.