There was also, that day, an e-mail sent on behalf of Professor Kaufmann to all the students participating in the internship, which started soon and which would run through most of August, ending right before classes began again. The e-mail detailed how to check in once we arrived at the facility, where to pick up our keys and meal cards, driving directions for those coming to Santa Barbara by car, important phone numbers to call if we had any difficulties or changes in our travel plans. I’d clearly been added to the recipient list by accident (there was a reference to separate, prior e-mails I hadn’t received), but it killed me to see it. I read it over and over again, inspected the list of names—only nine other people, from schools all over the country, some I’d never heard of: Reed, Pomona, Grinnell—and I opened another browser window and looked up all these places, these schools like Rawlings that didn’t exist before that moment. I sat there reading and rereading that e-mail and the Web pages about the colleges until my mom snuck up behind me with Dante on her hip. She dipped him over my head and put his hand in my hair, and he took the bait and pulled.
I’d promised my mom we’d leave the library in time to drive to what she assured me was a tame protest, a silent march Madres Para Justicia had organized in response to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court was, at that very moment, deciding whether to hear the case that argued Ariel himself had legal standing to file for asylum despite being a minor. Even though she guaranteed its subdued nature—We have a permit, there’ll be police escorting us and everything—I would not be marching with her. Dante and I would wait down the street at the Cuban restaurant that was sponsoring the march, meaning, I thought, that it would be empty and quiet once the protest got under way. I checked out a book about the world’s oceans for the pictures—something to keep Dante entertained—and we drove down there, me dropping off my mom a few blocks from where we would wait for her.
At the restaurant, we had to sit outside: the inside was home to a meeting run by another, separate group of organizers glued to a radio and also watching a live broadcast of the courthouse in Miami, despite the fact that the deliberations were happening in Washington (and isn’t that perfect, the way so much of Miami thought itself the center of everything, even that late in the fight?). I ordered a café con leche for myself and a plate of French fries for Dante, to function more as toys than food. He grabbed fries by the fistful and dropped them on the patio while saying bye-bye. I pushed the plate away when he wouldn’t stop doing this, then I busted out the ocean book and read to him about calcium carbonate shells and anemones and a whole host of organisms and structures. The pictures—glossy and full-color—promised us that places even farther away than California really existed, promised that the world was so much bigger than our block and the disappointment of that summer, that there was something much more vast than the despair sitting there with Dante brought me. The pictures did their job, occupying his attention for a few seconds at a time. I wiped off his hands with a paper napkin and let him flip through the pages himself, watching to make sure he didn’t rip any of them.
After about twenty minutes, something came toward us from down the street, louder than the traffic already passing, than the voices suddenly rising inside the restaurant, though this new sound was way too loud to be my mom and her group’s silent protest. It rang like a celebration, cars honking and people cheering, like the party in the streets after the Marlins had won their first-ever World Series. Within a few seconds I saw them coming: a brigade of pickup trucks and SUVs, some with oversized wheels, big banners flying behind them, American flags, Confederate flags. Car horns blaring, white men hanging out of the windows, banging hard on the roofs of their own trucks like they didn’t care about dents. As they approached, some people on the street just stopped and stared. Some dropped the grocery bags they held. But others waved back, pumped fists in the air. When the first of the trucks passed me, I read the banner twice before understanding everything it meant. The letters and numbers on it, spray-painted in wide, black script on what I now saw was a king-sized white sheet, read: 1 DOWN, 800,000 TO GO!!!
Something in me said to pull Dante out of his high chair and, though of course he couldn’t read, turn his face away and in to my chest. Within seconds that high chair was on the ground, knocked over by one of the screaming men who’d jostled to be the first out the door of the restaurant to throw whatever he could at the passing trucks. Other men followed, and the only thing that kept it from being a full-blown riot was the fact that the trucks sped up when they saw the rush of red-faced Cubans sprinting toward them. They kept going but turned off Calle Ocho a few blocks later, when it became clear that each man would chase them for as long as his body could handle.