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  “How’d you like that little creep going into the Ultimate Fighting mode soon’s he’s under water, Nestor?” said Officer Kite. “Didn’ I tell you those little fuckers turn into monsters as soon as they’re under water!”

  “I should a listened to you, Lonnie!” said Nestor. Thirty minutes ago he would not even have considered addressing Officer Kite by his first name. “That little prick—” he said, feeling very manly, “he’s a dead weight all the way down the fucking cable and soon’s we’re five inches under water, he decides to come to! Before I know what’s happening, he’s breaking my fucking nose with his bare hands!”

  And everybody laughed and laughed, but Nestor—had to read the two remaining text messages. Curiosity and anxiety and a last spurt of hope—maybe one is from Magdalena!—compelled him. He dared flick his eyes down to the cell phone once more. Dared to—had to. The first text was from J. Cortez. He didn’t know any J. Cortez. It read, “OK u r a big latingo celebrity. Now what?” What the hell did “latingo” mean? All too quickly he got it. A latingo had to be a Latino who had turned gringo. And what was that supposed to mean? Mirth reigned in the room, but Nestor couldn’t help himself… had to dive to the very bottom. The last text was from Inga La Gringa. It read, “You can hide under my bed anytime, Nestorcito.” Inga was the counter girl and waitress right around the corner from the marina. She was sexy, all right, a big Baltic blonde with amazing breasts that she managed to tilt upward like missiles and enjoyed showing. She had grown up in Estonia… sexy accent, too… a real number, Inga was, but she was forty or so, not much younger than his mother. It was almost as if she could tell exactly what he was thinking. Every time he walked into the place, Inga would come on to him in a flirtatious but comic way, making sure he got a good, long look down the crevasse between her breasts… or was she really merely fooling around? “Nestorcito” she called him, because she had once heard Umberto call him that. So he called her Inga La Gringa. He had given her his cell phone number when she said her brother could help him fix the overhead cam on his Camaro… which he did. Inga and Nestor teased each other… sure, “teased,” but Nestor never took the next step, although he was sorely tempted. But why had she said, “You can hide under my bed”? Hide from what? She was just kidding around in her Inga La Gringa lubricious come-nestle-in-my-loamy-crevice way, of course, but why “You can hide under my bed”?

  Somehow this hit him harder than a crack like “latingo.” “Hide,” says friendly, flirtatious Inga?… He felt his face fall… This time the rest of them were bound to notice—but the Sergeant stepped in and saved the day, saying, “But you know what gets me? Those kids on the boat were such pussies. They were scared shitless because some frightened-out-of-his-mind little guy looking like a drowned rat, maybe a hundred and ten pounds after a Big Mac, shows up on their fucking sailboat. Some a those pussies weighed fucking two hundred pounds, half of it fat, but they’re big kids. There’s no reason on earth why they had to let that poor little bastard climb their fucking mast and almost get himself killed… except they’re such fucking pussies! Do they have any clue they got no business taking a boat that big out on the fucking water… being such pussies? ‘Oh dear, we didn’t know if he had a gun or a knife or something’… Bull-shit! That little bastard barely had clothes on his back. And so we gotta send Nestor here up a fucking seventy-five-foot mast and play Superman and risk his ass hauling the little bastard down off a bosun’s chair about this big and down a goddamned hundred-foot jib cable.” The Sergeant shook his head. “You know what? We should a booked all those pussies and sent them to Cuba and kept the drowned rat here. We would a come out ahead on that one!”

  Hey! Who are those two, just joining the cluster of Marine Patrol cops? They sure as hell don’t look like cops. It turns out they are a reporter and a photographer from the Miami Herald. Nestor had never heard of a reporter coming all the way out here in the bay. The photographer was a swarthy little guy wearing some sort of safari jacket, pockets all over it, wide open. Nestor couldn’t tell what he was… but there was no doubt about the reporter. He was a classic americano, tall, thin, pale, wearing a navy blazer, a light-blue button-down shirt, khaki pants with freshly pressed creases down the front… very proper-looking. Over-the-top proper. Who ever heard of a newspaper reporter wearing a jacket in Miami? He was soft-spoken to the point of shy, this reporter. His name was John Smith, apparently. How much more americano could you get?!

  “I can’t believe what you just did,” said the classic americano. “I can’t believe anyone could swing hand over hand down that thing holding another person between his legs. Where’d you get the strength? Do you lift weights—or what?”

  Nestor had never spoken to a reporter before. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to. He looked at Sergeant McCorkle. The Sergeant just smiled and gave him a slight wink, as if to say, “It’s okay, go ahead and tell him.”

  That did it. Modestly enough, Nestor began, “I don’t think it takes strength exactly.” He tried to continue on the modest path—but he just couldn’t tell the americano enough. He didn’t believe in weight-lifting for the upper body. It’s much better to climb a, say, fifty-five-foot rope without using your legs. Takes care of everything, arms, back, chest—everything.

  “Where do you do that?” said this John Smith.

  “At Rodriguez’s ‘Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!’ they call it.”

  The americano laughed. “Como en ‘Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Que barata’?”

  ::::::This americano not only speaks Spanish—he must listen to Spanish radio! That’s the only time you can hear the “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Que barata!” commercial.::::::

  “Es verdad,” said Nestor. That was a linguistic handshake for John Smith’s speaking Spanish. “But you have to use weights and do squats and everything else for your legs. I don’t know what you do for carrying some little guy like that with ’em… except try to avoid the whole thing.” Light touch of modesty there… or self-mockery… or whatever. Nestor looked down, as if to check out his uniform. He tried to tell himself that what he was about to do was unconscious—which of course made it self-fraudulence per se.

  “Dios mío,” he said, “this shirt is soaking wet and fucking filthy! I can smell it.” He looked at Umberto, as if this had nothing to do with the two guys from the Herald, and said, “Where’s some dry shirts?”

  “Dry shirts?” said Umberto. “I don’t know, unless they keep them in…”

  But Nestor had already stopped listening. He was busy pulling his wet shirt up and off his torso and his arms and his head, which involved lifting his arms almost straight up. He winced as if in pain. “Awwwguh! Hurts like a sonofabitch! I must a pulled something in my shoulders.”

  “That figures,” said Umberto.

  Just like that John Smith’s swarthy little photographer had his camera up to his eyes and was pressing that button over and over.

  Sergeant McCorkle stepped in and took Nestor by the elbow and pulled him away. “We got shirts inside, not at the Miami Herald. You know what I mean?”

  He marched Nestor off at a good clip and pulled him close enough to say in a low voice, “You can talk to the press on the spot like this, as long as you don’t talk strategy or policy. But not so you can show off your fucking physique. You know what I mean?”

  But he was chuckling about it. This was not a day when he was going to get hard-ass toward Officer Nestor Camacho… who remained in Heaven.

  2

  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 a
ll 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.