The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “Holy shit.”

  “Parrots,” Mrs. Hartley tells me proudly. “We’ve got a few pairs. God only knows where they came from, but they’ve made themselves right at home. Like those huge iguanas you see around, the African rats, or even those pythons everyone’s hunting in the Everglades. It’s easy to forget what’s natural to the area anymore.”

  The cottage is one room with a small bathroom built into a corner and a kitchenette along one wall, definitely a step up from the places I’ve seen so far. It comes furnished too, with wicker furniture and a double bed pushed into a corner. I won’t have to take any of my own furniture out of storage. It’s a relief to start fresh.

  “Don’t mind the stink,” she says, opening up all the windows and doors, though I don’t notice the faint smell of sewage till she points it out. “That’s from outside. The tide’s low and sometimes seaweed accumulates under the dock. It’ll wash away soon. That’s island living for you.”

  She watches me as I poke around, open cabinets and closet doors, peek out the window, see the ocean spread beyond the thicket of trees.

  “The water pressure’s good and the kitchen is stocked with more pots and pans than you’ll probably ever need. You’ll have to get a PO box in town and garbage collection is every Thursday by the main driveway. There are flashlights, flares, and a blow horn in the broom closet. You know, for the storms. But for most hurricanes we have mandatory evacuations. I assume you’ve got somewhere on the peninsula where you can go in that case.”

  I nod, though I’m not sure I do.

  She works a little harder at the sell, but I know this is all I need.

  My first night in the cottage, I wait to see what sounds fill the evening as the sun slips behind the Hammerhead coco plum forest into the gulf. I step out onto the veranda to get a dose of sunlight before nightfall and make my way down the stone path toward the small cove of beach. Beyond it, on the other side of a coral wall and past a row of leggy mangroves, the Hartley house towers over the shoreline.

  A flock of pelicans glides over me, probably some of the dozens that gather to hunt for fish and rest their wings along the valley of wooden boat stumps by the bridge at Crescent Key Cut, landing on my dock as if it already belongs to them too.

  I sit on the beach and stare out at the water. Facing east, the sun disappearing behind me, I watch the sea darken with shadows, feel the sand cool under my feet.

  The ocean is different down here. On the mainland, the curling bay water is a deep blue and even on the shallow edges of shore it only clears to a pale green. The waves folding into the open ocean grow thicker and peak higher as you head farther north, a menacing rush in the current, the wind splitting waves that could push you under with the force of a hundred men.

  Down here the tide is calm, pulsing softly even under a heavier wind. The water bleeds turquoise and only darkens out past the reefs.

  I sleep with the window slats open, something I never would have done back home. I hear only the sounds of the night animals. Owls. The wrestling of branches by raccoons or possums. There are no police sirens. No car horns or screeching tires. No shouting neighbors. No arguments between the old couple living next door or screaming teens. No sounds of a creaking older house, leaking pipes, no rain beating on a roof in need of repairs. No television reporting the crimes of the city, no radio voices of late-night advice shows where people call in with their sad stories: the noise my mother relied on to fill our emptiness. No sounds of Mami in what used to be my brother’s bedroom, on her knees at her homemade altar, saying prayers, making promises, bargaining with her saints to set us all free.

  TWO

  When Carlito was sixteen and had saved enough money working at the car wash to buy his own ten-year-old cockroach of a thirdhand Honda, he and his friends would pack in and drive up to the MacArthur Causeway where the paroled sex offenders had set up their own tent village since the law didn’t let them live anywhere near parks or schools. If you drove past it, you’d never know there was a colony of ex-cons living there beneath the traffic, under tarps, cooking with mess kits over open flames. I saw the place myself once when Carlito dragged me there with him. He wanted to scare me because I was fourteen and the sort of girl who’d identify what others called danger and walk right into it just to see what would happen.

  Like the time I went hitchhiking, the one thing they always warn kids about in school since society is full of predators and pedos. I’d gone to the mall to meet a boy who ditched me within the hour for a girl he met at the doughnut stand. I remember I was feeling sick that day, but it was another month before I’d figure out the fool had already gotten me pregnant. I only wanted to get home, but Mami was at work and Carlito, off in his new ride. It was before the age of cell phones and there was no way to reach him. So I walked out to Kendall Drive and put out a thumb. A shiny black Audi pulled up a few seconds later. I’d never been in a car so nice so I got in.

  Sometimes you can tell a degenerate right away and other times they slip past even the most cynical folk. I didn’t smell this guy’s perviness until I popped into the seat next to him and the car was already rolling. Then it hit me heavy: the wetness of his grin, saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth, sweat forming on his lip and within the folds of his hands, which went right for my thighs, and it didn’t help that I was in a short-shorts phase that summer. He asked where I was headed and I told him home, and to turn onto the Palmetto. He didn’t, and next thing I knew we were flying down the Snapper Creek Expressway, his fingers inching into my crotch, and when I slapped them away, he took it as a tease and pushed farther.

  When we slowed into some traffic, I pushed the door open and jumped out. I tumbled, concrete ripping my skin like cloth, and huddled against the highway divider. It’s kind of a miracle I didn’t get killed, but the bigger mystery is why nobody stopped to ask if I was okay or why I’d jumped out of a moving car.

  I made the mistake of telling Carlito what had happened, and to scare me straight, like my torn-up elbows and legs weren’t enough of a reminder, he took me to the sex offender colony to show me some real depravados. I knew he and his friends liked to go there to throw rocks and yell at the guys that they should be castrated. I thought that was cruel even if they were society’s worst. I mean, you do the time, you should be able to get on with your life, but people are especially touchy when it comes to children.

  When I mentioned it to Dr. Joe, the prison shrink I used to hang around with, he said maybe Carlito was projecting his anger toward our father onto those men since most of the ex-cons were old and run-down-looking, the way I imagined Hector would look if he were still alive. I don’t think it goes that deep though. Those were years when Carlito and his posse of gangly bros would bench weights and beat speed bags in somebody’s garage, roaming around Tropical Park at night, jumping people for kicks, not even for their wallets. Theirs was a casual violence, yet they managed never to get caught.

  When we got to the sex offender camp that day, the boys started their usual taunts and I walked a few yards off while they went looking for targets because I didn’t want the pervs to think I’d just come to be mean. They weren’t so bad looking. Most of them appeared to be regular guys, like they could be somebody’s sick grandfather or borracho uncle. A few were dressed pretty normal, in pants and button-down shirts, looking like they could live in a real house or something, but others resembled rag-wearing swamp people, crusty-haired with dirt tattoos on their faces. Most actually looked sort of gentle and sad to be there and didn’t give me a second look as I toed the camp periphery. Only two or three did what you might expect and pulled out their penises when they saw me, but I was on their turf so you can’t really blame them.

  One of the guys walked over to me, asking me where I was from, and said he was originally from Mississippi and wanted to go back but he lost track of his family. I said that was unfortunate, but felt a yank on my arm and there was Carlit
o rudely pulling me away when the guy was just trying to tell me a piece of his story. Carlito called the guy a rapist, a pedophile, all kinds of things, and yelled at me the whole drive home for being such a tonta.

  Both of us were the type who cracked up at horror movies. Monsters, demons possessing houses, masked killers. We thought it hysterical that there is an industry of artificial horror when real life is so much more lethal. The secret is real murderers look like anybody else and you might even have one living in your own home. For all you know, the person you love most in this world might one day try to kill you. But that day Carlito’s goal was to teach me a lesson in practical fear and I had failed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he sounded desperate to understand. “I take you to a zoo of psychos and you’re trying to make friends like some kind of bobita? You’re going to get yourself killed one day, Reina.”

  I was quiet, but I knew he was wrong, and that it was just the opposite. Making friends with danger is the only way to survive.

  It’s a good thing I didn’t let myself become traumatized by the hitchhiking experience or Nesto and I never would have met. Though you can’t really call what I did to meet him hitching. And he wasn’t looking to pick anyone up.

  I was at the full-moon party at the Broken Coconut, a beach bar where all the Crescent Key area locals hang out. Since my arrival, I’ve found the island population strangely skewed—a lost generation of North American retirees, and most of the younger folks are their children or grandchildren, down for a visit, or service industry people in life-limbo. Like Ryan, the lanky Nebraskan pool boy at the Starfish Club Hotel I’d gone to the bar with that night, whom I met when I got a job doing nails at the hotel spa. He was part of a tribe of recovering cruise ship employees and seasonal nomads buying time working as charter boat jockeys or in hotels and restaurants till they figured out their next move.

  Maybe I misled Ryan, hanging out with him a few nights a week like we were on our way to becoming some kind of couple, even spending Thanksgiving together, along with the other holiday orphans right there at the Broken Coconut, eating conch fritters and blackened hogfish. But by then I’d been in the islands almost a month and with new winter darkness setting in early, I didn’t have much else to fill my evenings.

  All my years of solitude back home hadn’t prepared me for this type of loneliness. Even being ignored or avoided in an unfriendly community is its own sort of companionship.

  The night of the full-moon party, Ryan was especially grabby, pawing at my waist, my thigh, throwing his wormy lips close to my face. Until that night, he’d been careful with me, and I hadn’t made myself easier for him like I sometimes do when I can tell a guy is moving slow. We hadn’t even kissed, so the tension was high and maybe, if his approach had been different, though I’m not sure how, I would have been into it. Maybe I would have even let things get started there in the parking lot and gone home with him to the canal rental house he shared with four other guys, and slipped out in the morning in time for work. But something held me back.

  I’d been reflecting as of late that in this new life down here in the Keys, I wanted to try things differently. So I told Ryan as kindly as I could that we were not going to fuck that night. He looked both defeated and angry, tried arguing that there was no reason not to and we both wanted it, but I insisted I didn’t want it, trust me, I really don’t, which insulted him and he left me alone on the bar stool while the herd of drunks tried to push past me with their plastic cups waiting for refills of rum punch.

  I wove through the crowd to get out, but found my car was blocked into the parking lot by a dozen others, and there were no taxis on this end of the Overseas Highway. My cottage on Hammerhead was a few miles away, but it’s not the kind of walk you want to take alone at night—I’m not even that bold—so I hung around the parking lot entrance for a while waiting to see if I could catch someone on the way out to give me a lift home.

  That’s when I saw Nesto walking through the moonlight toward his blue pickup, conveniently parked beside the road. I approached him. He was wary of me. I mean, who wouldn’t be—a girl alone in the middle of the night asking for a ride—but he agreed with an accent my Miami education told me was distinctly Cuban, the freshly arrived kind, not yet watered down by years of exile, and in the sea of gringos that was the Broken Coconut that night, this somehow felt comforting.

  Plus, stuck to his dashboard there was a small faded stamp of a little pilgrim child saint holding a staff that I recognized right away from a similar depiction Mami kept on a table in Carlito’s old room.

  “El Santo Niño de Atocha,” I said when we got on our way, pointing to the mini Jesus. He was big in Colombia, especially for those who left the country, said to protect wanderers and travelers. He, San Antonio, and La Virgen del Carmen were the last santos Mami had petitioned for mercy and her son’s freedom. Even if she’d disowned Carlito by day, she still prayed for him every night. My mother was especially devoted to this little guy because he was also said to be the patron saint of the imprisoned.

  Nesto tipped his chin at me and shook his head. “No. That’s Elegguá.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

  I would have liked some conversation on that ride home, but he didn’t offer much. I tried questions on him. I noticed he’d been dragging a pulley with a toolbox behind him when I found him in the parking lot, so I asked him about it and he told me he’d been at the bar to fix a pipe leak, not for the party.

  “You’re a plumber?”

  “No. I just fix things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Anything.”

  He turned onto the road to the Hartley estate on Hammerhead slowly, dimming his beams as we approached the main house.

  I thanked him and hopped out of his truck onto the gravel path.

  “How are you going to get to your car in the morning?” He asked as I started to walk off.

  I shrugged. “The bus.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know. But I will.”

  Crescent Key is a small enough island that after a week or two, you’ll see the same faces, and default to hello smiles at the familiar ones at the Laundromat, post office, and mini-mart, even though you’ve never properly met. But it’s also the kind of place where you can go days without seeing a single nongringo, which doesn’t mean there aren’t any, it just means you can’t see them.

  I would have remembered Nesto Cadena’s face if I’d ever seen him before. I thought about it early the next morning when I stepped out onto the dock behind my cottage. Though I sleep badly, awakened in the night by my own thoughts, I was never a naturally early riser in my old life. I was never late to work, and often had to open the salon, but it cost me to wake up early for another day of the same tired life.

  Here, though, the sounds of the thicket around the cottage are gentle shoves and I wake up with the sun and birds, the morning dew slick on the planks of the veranda. The animals fall into a routine with me; the iguanas who live in the bushes discover the row of sliced grapes I leave for them along the path and I watch them peek out of the shrubbery and drag themselves over to their treat.

  That morning, I stood out on the dock behind the cottage, watching a couple of lionfish—another invasive species Mrs. Hartley warned me to watch out for, since they’re poisonous—whirl around its posts, and then two dolphins as they folded through the current in the distance.

  An old sport-fishing boat belonging to one of the neighbors down the canal came puttering out of the inlet toward the open water, a burly bearded guy behind the wheel.

  He waved as he passed me standing on my pier, and his beard parted with a grin.

  “Beautiful morning.”

  “You just missed the dolphins.” It seemed like the neighborly thing to say. They’d disappeared with the buzzing of his boat c
oming out of the waterway.

  “I know where to find them.” He tilted his head toward the sun. “There’s a whole nation just a few miles out.”

  A little while later, I headed down the path from the cottage to the driveway hoping Nesto would come through with the ride he’d offered me the night before. Where I usually parked my car, I spotted the blue truck, Nesto leaning on the edge of the hood.

  I paused on the path before he noticed me coming, enjoying the sight of him for the first time in daylight.

  I can tell you what he tells me now: his blood is wildly blended, the product of generations of clandestine encounters until it came down to his mother, the morena-mestiza from whom he inherited his wide smile and a bronzed complexion he likens to seven-year añejo rum, and his father, a guajiro from whom he got his sharp nose and slanted black Taíno eyes.

  My mother often said she was grateful that neither of her children carried any of their father’s features. In fact, we both looked so much like her, with her small eyes and small mouth, high forehead, and heavy brows, she joked it was as if we had no father and she’d had us alone.

  Nesto wears his hair in ropey locks tied together by a band, whipping across his shoulder blades, hair he says he started growing long the moment he began to plan his defection and will only cut the day ese, el barbudo Fidel, finally dies. He’s tall and muscular, with strong legs because he says milk was still plentiful when he was growing up, not like after the Soviets pulled out of the island and everything became scarce.

  We’re both of the invented Caribbean, Nesto says, a Nuevo Mundo alchemy of distilled African, Spaniard, Indian, Asian, and Arab blood, each of us in varying mixtures. He likes to compare our complexions, putting his arm next to mine, calls me “canelita, ni muy tostada ni muy blanquita,” showing off his darkness, proof, his mother told him, of his noble Yoruba parentage and brave cimarron ancestors, la raza prieta of which he should be proud no matter how much others have resisted mestizaje, hanging onto the milky whiteness of their lineage like it’s their most precious commodity.