The Veins of the Ocean Page 3
Five days later, I’m on the same journey, edging down the turnpike with the scrim of sunset lowering in the west, passing through Florida City, strip malls and car dealerships melting into swampland and fishing tackle shops, past Manatee Bay onto the Overseas Highway. It’s drifter territory, where people go to forget and to be forgotten. I’ve come to think of this land as a second home. The prison motel; familiar faces though few of us have exchanged names. Each of us serving our sentence, waiting, waiting, because prison has made us more patient than we ever knew we could be, until we get the call that it’s time; the end of the sentence, or just the end.
About a year ago, I saw Isabela at a wake for Miguel, one of Carlito’s old friends, a guy she eventually married. I waited until midnight thinking the mourner crowd would dissolve, then go to someone’s house for a meal or a drink, but there she was, sitting in a folding chair near the casket with her mother cradling her shoulders. I stood in the doorway, crossed myself, said a five-second prayer, and asked God to take Miguel straight up to heaven because he was pretty special to me when I was sixteen, and we did more talking than screwing, which back then was a rare thing. Miguel was a cop and he and Isabela fell in love during Carlito’s trial because Miguel was the type of guy to lend support. He was shot on the job by another cop during a robbery at the Dolphin Mall. Friendly fire.
I didn’t want Isabela to see me. Not that night. It’s bad enough that she has to run into me at the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the gas station. She’s never been cruel to me like other people in the neighborhood. She always smiles, tells me she prays for my family and for me. That she forgives Carlito and she doesn’t want him to die. I believe her, too, because on the day of the sentencing, Isabela cried through her victim-impact statement with a picture of her daughter clutched against her chest—one of those department store Christmas portraits—Shayna in a new red dress; a face just like her mother’s in miniature. Isabela faced the judge, then turned from him to Carlito, who was handcuffed to a table beside his lawyer, and through her tears asked the court to go easy on him because Isabela said no matter Carlito’s crime, and no matter how much she believed in justice, one death is no cure for another.
Isabela and I were close friends once. She was a few years older but we were in the church Youth Group together and she took me for my first abortion when I was fourteen because she said it wasn’t right to bring that kind of shame on my mother who’d already been through so much, and Isabela knew of a doctor who didn’t require parental consent.
A few years later, Carlito fell in love with her.
I was jealous. Isabela with her soft smile, a blanket all the boys wanted to be wrapped in. No boy ever looked at me that way.
My brother used to say he saw a family in her gray eyes and I’d grow furious, tug on his sleeve, and say, “You already have a family.”
Something I’ve never admitted: I was the one who told Carlito about Isabela’s cheating when he was beer-drunk in front of the TV one Saturday afternoon, wondering why she took so long to return his calls.
I pumped him full of rage, told him she was giving him horns, that he was letting her play him like some kind of cabrón.
I lied.
Said everybody in town knew about her easy ways but him.
Sometimes when we run into each other Isabela invites me to her house for dinner because she knows I spend most nights home alone watching the local news, just me and a tin of pollo asado from the cantina. I never go. I appreciate the charity, but despite their daughter’s graciousness Isabela’s parents probably wouldn’t let me through the door if I showed up.
She always hugs me when she sees me, hums into my hair that even though people say we’re on opposing sides, we’re in this mierda together and her baby is an angel now watching over us all.
There was a time when Mami called my brother and me her angels.
Carlito and I would cram into bed with her at night and she’d tell us stories about Cartagena before our papi dragged us away from our grandmother’s home, across the sea to Miami, before this house with the iron security bars on the windows.
“Mis angelitos,” she’d whisper, kissing our cheeks as we curled under her wings.
We’d pretend Mami’s bed was a raft and we were castaways adrift together, floating through the Caribbean, and Carlito would point out dolphins, sea turtles, manta rays, and sharks while Mami and I played along like we could see them too. Until Carlito declared that there was land on the horizon and, at last, we were saved.
We were saved.
Like everything down here, the park used to be Tequesta land. It sits on a crusty peninsula jutting into the bay like an accusatory finger, a tropical hammock overgrown with invasive Australian pines, foreign flora that killed off the indigenous trees, keeping in all the bugs and blocking out most of the sunlight. To Carlito and me, suburban kids normally confined to small yards and patchy lots, it was a jungle.
Our mother liked to take us there on weekdays, avoiding the weekend crowds, even if it meant calling in sick at work, declaring it un día de fiesta, pulling my brother and me out of school. Mami said we all deserved our little breaks once in a while. And we were just little kids, so it’s not like we were learning anything important.
I was seven and Carlito, nine. Best friends. Still innocents.
It was a weekday morning. The sun wasn’t yet at its highest, and the park was quiet except for a few tourist families and lonely fishermen along the seawall, standing between the pelicans lined like guards on the edge of the pier. We parked the car and walked past them to the other side of the narrow cape, to the beach beyond the forest. I wore a red bathing suit that was getting too small for me, elastic pinching my nalguitas. Carlito wore swim trunks handed down from a neighbor, too big and hanging low enough to show an inch of crack, and Mami complained he should have tied a rope around his waist to keep them up.
Our mother took to the beach like it was her temple, finding a piece of shore far from the lifeguard stands, boom boxes, and smoky portable grills, spreading a blanket, smoothing the sand lumps underneath before lying down and shutting her eyes to the sun. Sometimes she forced me, never Carlito, into the ocean with her and I felt guilty leaving him behind on land. Mami said the salty air purified the lungs and seawater nourished the skin. She’d pull me in by the hand, take my head into her palms, dunk me under the surf like a baptism, and let me float in her arms. I let her because these were some of the few times I had my mother’s full attention.
“Listen to the water, Reina,” she whispered as I let myself be cushioned by the soft rush of waves. “If you trust the tide, it will always return you to shore.”
We didn’t yet know about undertows and rip currents, the many ways the ocean can turn on you.
Carlito hated getting wet and stayed away from the beach, kicking a soccer ball around on the concrete walkway toward the seawall, down dusty trails through bendy pines, dodging the swarms of mosquitoes and spiderwebs that kept most people out of those paths. I was a faithful little sister, reluctant to go anywhere without him, so I’d always pull myself out of the water and away from Mami, towel off, and follow my brother.
Sometimes Carlito let me kick around with him, but most of the time he just wanted me to cheer him on while he battered the ball, shouting, “Go Carlito! Viva Carlito!” and after he’d kick an imaginary goal, he’d do a little dance and I’d scream so hard I’d almost make myself cry.
I was shouting and clapping so loud that morning that we didn’t notice the rattle of the planes right away. It was a slow burning buzz steadily rising over the shrill song of the cicadas. We felt the vibration over the roof of the forest and saw the bowing of the treetops before we knew what it was. Through an open patch of canopy we saw the belly of a chubby gray propeller plane, the quiet, old-fashioned kind. Behind it, another plane, and the two looped over us. Carlito grabbed the ball and I knew to follow him.
The lifeguards and park rangers made everyone get out of the water, then cleared the beach, and people gathered by the pier to gossip about the commotion. Someone said it was a drug bust; a cigarette boat registered in the Bahamas had unloaded a bundle of packages into the bay once the crew spotted the Coast Guard in their wake. Someone else heard there’d been a drowning, but if there had been, I guessed they would have pulled all the beachgoers into a human chain to comb the water like they did a few years earlier when Mami thought I’d gone under but really I just went to use the public bathroom.
Someone else said it was a suicide; one of those fishermen had gotten too drunk while minding his lines, staring out at the Stiltsville houses, and decided it was his time to end things. But the water along the seawall and beneath the pier was shallow, folding into barnacle-and-urchin-covered rocks that would needle you bad while breaking your fall. It was no place for a final jump.
Then we saw the vehicles arrive. Trailers unloaded ATVs. Another truck spit out a line of cops in special gear ready to mount them and take them into the woods. I didn’t realize I was scared until I noticed a stocky green-uniformed park ranger standing next to our mother, and that somehow made me feel safer even if strange men were always trying to stand next to her. She was still beautiful then, wearing no makeup, just the sheen of humidity, her hair in natural black curls, not the coppery straightened look she took on a few years later along with a smoking habit that hardened and sallowed her golden complexion.
“You know what they’re really looking for,” he muttered to Mami like he was an old friend.
She gave him a blank look. She could appear very naive when she wanted.
“Refugees.”
I remember his tone, as if the word itself were illicit.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“We got a call from someone who spotted a boat dropping them off.”
The search vessels arrived. Official-looking ones that weren’t Coast Guard but something else with a crested seal painted onto the sides. Jail boats, Carlito called them, plowing parallel to the seawall, though it seemed to me that between the rocks and the water, there was nowhere to hide. I knelt to get a better look, but the sun was high over the bay now, water reflecting like a mirror, yet I could still make out thousands of tiny fish gleaming like blades in the current below us.
Carlito complained that he wanted to go home but the ranger warned us that the Border Patrol had the park on a hold and nobody was allowed in or out. Not till they found who they were looking for.
“For all we know, somebody’s been waiting to pick them up and drive them out of here. They’ll be checking cars and trunks before they let anyone out.”
He put his hand on Mami’s shoulder and she let him, which I didn’t like.
“Best to wait till this whole thing clears and they got those folks all accounted for. This stuff happens at least once a month around here.”
Carlito and I sat on the wall watching the planes circle overhead, the cops rushing the vegetation like soldiers at war. Then came the dogs. A parade of angry-eyed canines, eager to enter the forest to find their prize.
I looked at Carlito and he looked to the ranger, who was standing even closer to our mother now, asking her where she was from, where she got that lovely accent.
“Colombia,” she said, and the guy let out a hoot.
“We got one right here!” he shouted, pointing to Mami, then to Carlito and me. “No, we got three! Quick, bring the dogs!”
Carlito and I didn’t get that he was joking till Mami let out a soft laugh, the kind everyone believed was authentic but us. We knew it was her decoy laugh. The one she used to get people off her back, and by people, I mean men.
We heard from another bystander who heard it from another ranger that four people had been caught already and were sitting offshore on a jail boat waiting for whatever came next. There were eight more out there, they said, but those who were already in custody wouldn’t say if the others had made it to land, were on another boat, or were just floating out on the water, clinging to a buoy or an inner tube or, worse, drowned. They probably weren’t Cubans, though, someone said, or the police wouldn’t be trying to smoke them out of the park like this.
An hour or so passed. The three of us sat in a patch of shade on the seawall. I laid my head on my mother’s lap while Carlito held the soccer ball in his. She told us the story about the náufrago who washed up on the beach in Cartagena when she was a little girl. That was in the time before jail boats and police planes, when the people in charge just let castaways land where they may and stay if they felt like it. The guy told everybody he was a Spanish prince and all the girls wanted to marry him, but it turned out he was just a gambler running from debts in Panama, and his enemies eventually caught up with him because, Mami said, nobody can run from anything forever.
Enough time passed that Carlito became bored with our mother’s stories. He took up his ball and started kicking it again.
“Come on, Reina,” he called for me, and we went back into the base of a trail already swept by the cops and rangers.
“Don’t go too far,” Mami said. “Stay where I can see you.”
Carlito zigged and zagged and I tried to steal the ball from him, but he was too quick, his legs were too long, and mine felt rubbery and knobby as I tried to keep up.
“I’m tired,” I moaned, squatting on the ground, my butt just shy of the dirt.
Carlito relented. “Just try to block my shots, okay?”
I stood up, ready to play goalie. I was small for my age, but my reflexes were quick. Carlito had trained me to read body language, to know which way a kick would come before the kicker even knew it. I watched and I waited and I blocked the first three kicks with a hand, with a foot, with my belly. But the fourth flew past me into the trees and because I was the loser, Carlito insisted I be the one to go into the bushes after it.
I should have been scared. But the need to please my brother overpowered all the terror stories we’d been raised on to keep us out of woods and jungles and swamps: legends of Madre Monte, who gets revenge on those who invade her territory by making them get lost; La Tunda, the shape-shifter, luring people into the woods in order to keep them there forever; or El Mohán, who simply loves to barbecue and eat children.
The twigs cut into my ankles and shins but I pressed through, negotiating rocks under my feet, pebbles wedging into my sandals, pushing branches from my face, slapping away bugs, slicing through spiderwebs until I was so deep into the woods that I came to the other side of a hidden inlet, a silent, still lagoon framed by mangrove trees with roots like ribs in the pooling green water.
I stood on the dusty embankment unsure of my discovery. A gray heron swooped over the water before me, and the only sound was of the planes, still rumbling over the far side of the park. A few turkey vultures and crows gathered by the edge of the brush and some instinct told me to run into them to scare them off, and search the shadowy wood behind them.
My brother called from the other side of the forest wall, “Reina, hurry up!”
I wanted to find the ball before he did, to avoid hearing him call me a useless slug, to prove I was a worthy teammate, that I was as good as any boy at keeping up a kick-around with him so he’d finally stop threatening to take me to the pulguero to trade me for a television.
And there it was: Carlito’s ball, its black-and-white mosaic waiting for me amon
g the knotty roots of a lonely banyan smothered by prickly pines. I pushed in closer, until the ball was just beyond my reach, but behind the plastic ball I noticed a meaty form that looked to be a shoeless human foot.
It’s no secret that dead bodies turn up all over South Florida, floating in canals, along the swampy arteries of the Everglades, or tossed to the side of a road. In this very park our mother had found, washed up on the beach, what she swore was a real human jawbone, and was so moved by its white smoothness that she took it home with her, bathed it in holy water, and buried it in our backyard until the raccoons dug it up, and then Mami just surrendered and put it in a drawer somewhere.
But this foot was dark and fleshy and my eyes followed it up to a bare leg in frayed denim shorts and a shirtless torso. It belonged to a boy—a teenager, I should say—thin, crouched like an animal. He turned to me. His eyes were wide and his young face was worn and burned from seawater and sun.
He watched me and I watched him as I heard my brother’s voice grow clearer, his feet crunching through the brush, “Reina, Reina! Where are you?” until he was finally beside me, his hand closing around my wrist.
My brother’s gaze moved from me to the boy, who stared back at us, trying to make himself even smaller.
I heard Mami calling for us, heard the worry in her voice, and the cops behind her shouting for us kids to come out of the woods and stop goofing around.
I heard the dogs barking, the weight of more footsteps walking over the dried leaves and broken branches carpeting the forest floor.
I knew he was one of the ones they were looking for. I knew he didn’t want to be found. I didn’t know which was the right side or the wrong side. I only knew that I never saw eyes like that before, so dark with fear, so aware that my brother and I could betray him.
“Get the ball,” Carlito whispered, releasing his grip on me.
I stepped closer to the boy, who watched me, pulling his hand from the curl of his chest to push the ball at his feet toward me.