Back to Blood

by Tom Wolfe

  A leaning pole! This boat, the Safe Boat, was the opposite of streamlined. It was uuuuuuug-lyyy… a twenty-five-foot-long rubbery foam-filled pancake for a deck with an old tugboat shack stuck on top of it as a cockpit. But its two engines had 1500 horsepower, and the thing went across the water like a shot. It was unsinkable unless you took a cannon and blew twelve-inch-diameter holes, a lot of them, through the foam filling. In tests, nobody had even been able to tip one over, no matter what insane maneuver he tried. It was built for rescues. And this shack of a cockpit he and the americanos were in? It was the Ugly Betty of boatbuilding—but soundproof. Outside, at forty-five miles an hour the Safe Boat was kicking up a regular hurricane of air, water, and internal combustion… while here inside the cockpit you didn’t even have to raise your voice… to wonder what sort of nutcase you were in for up on top of a mast near the Rickenbacker Causeway.

  A sergeant named McCorkle with sandy-colored hair and blue eyes was at the wheel, and his second-in-command, Officer Kite, with blondish-brown hair and blue eyes, was in the seat next to him. Both of them were real sides of beef with fat on them—and school-of-blond hair!—and blue eyes! The blond ones!—with blue eyes!—they made you think americanos in spite of yourself.

  Kite was SMACK on the police radio: “Q,S,M”—Miami Police code for “Repeat”—“Negative?” SMACK “Negative? You saying nobody knows what he’s doing up there? Guy’s up on top of a” SMACK “mast and he’s yelling, and nobody knows what” SMACK “he’s yelling? Q,K,T?”—for “Over.”

  Staticky crackle staticky crackle Radiocom: “Q,L,Y”—for “Roger”—“That’s all we got. Four-three’s dispatching a” SMACK “unit to the causeway. Q,K,T.”

  Long stupefied SMACK silence… “Q,L,Y… Q,R,U… Q,S,L”—for “Out.”

  Kite just SMACK sat there for a moment, holding the microphone in front of his face and squinting at it as if SMACK he never saw one before. “They don’t know shit, Sarge.”

  “Who’s on Radiocom?”

  “I don’t know. Some” SMACK “Canadian.” He paused—

  Canadian?

  —“I just hope it ain’t another” SMACK “illegal, Sarge. Those dumb fucks are so crazy they’ll” SMACK “kill you without even meaning to. Forget about negotiating, even if you got somebody who can” SMACK “speak the fucking language. Forget about saving their fucking lives, as far as” SMACK “that goes! Just get ready for some Ultimate Fighting under water with some” SMACK “mook who’s a mile high on adrenaline. If you wanna know what I think, that’s the nastiest” SMACK “high there is, Sarge, adrenaline. Some biker on crank—he’s nothing compared to one a these scrawny little” SMACK “mooks jacked up on adrenaline.”

  Mooks?

  The two americanos didn’t look at each other when they spoke. They looked straight ahead, eyes pinned on the prospect of some dumb fuck on top of a mast up by the Rickenbacker Causeway.

  Out the windshield—which slanted forward instead of back—the opposite of streamlined—you could see the wind was up and the bay was rough, but otherwise it was a typical Miami day in early September… still summer… not a cloud anywhere… and Jesus, it was hot. The sun turned the whole sky into a single gigantic high-blue-domed heat lamp, blindingly bright, exploding bursts of reflection off every shiny curved surface, even the crests of the swells. They had just sped past the marinas at Coconut Grove. The curiously pinkish skyline of Miami was slowly rising at the horizon, scorched in the sunbursts. In strict point of fact, Nestor couldn’t really see all that—the pinkish cast, the glare of the sun, the empty blue of the sky, the sunbursts—he just knew it was all there. He couldn’t really see it, because naturally he had on a pair of sunglasses, not dark but the darkest, magno darkest, supremo darkest, with an imitation gold bar across the top. That was what every cool Cuban cop in Miami wore… $29.95 at CVS… gold bar, baby! Equally cool was the way he kept his head shaved with just a little flat helicopter pad of hair upstairs. Even cooler was his big neck—cooler and not easy to come by. It was now wider than his head and seemed to merge with his trapezius… way out here. Wrestler’s bridges, baby, and pumping iron! A head harness with weights attached—that’ll do the trick! The big neck made a shaved head look like a Turkish wrestler’s. Otherwise a shaved head looked like a doorknob. He had been a skinny five-foot-seven kid when he first thought about the police force. Today he was still five-seven, but… in the mirror… five feet and seven inches’ worth of big smooth rock formations, real Gibraltars, traps, delts, lats, pecs, biceps, triceps, obliques, abs, glutes, quads—dense!—and you want to know what was even better for the upper body than weights? Climbing the fifty-five-foot-high rope at Rodriguez’s “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!,” as everybody called it, without using your legs. You want dense biceps and lats—and even pecs? Nothing like climbing that fifty-five-foot-high rope at Rodriguez’s—dense!—and defined by the deep dark crevasses each mass of muscle dropped off into at the edges… in the mirror. Around that big neck he had a fine gold chain with a medallion of the cool Santería saint, Barbara, patron saint of artillery and explosives, that rested on his chest below his shirt… Shirt… There you had the problem with the Marine Patrol. On street patrol a Cuban cop like him would make sure he got a short-sleeved uniform one size too small that brought out every bulge of every rock formation… especially, in his case, the triceps, the big muscle on the back of the upper arm. He regarded his as the ultimate geological triumph of the triceps… in the mirror. If you were truly cool and Cuban, you had the seat of the uniform trousers taken in—a lot—until from behind you looked like a man wearing a pair of Speedos with long pants legs. That way, you were suave in the eyes of every jebita on the street. That was exactly the way he had met Magdalena—Magdalena!

  Suave he must have looked when he had to prevent this jebita from passing the barricade across 16th Avenue at Calle Ocho and she put up this big argument and the anger in her eyes only made him crazier for her—¡ Dios mío!—and then he smiled at her in a certain way and said I’d love to let you by—but I’m not going to and kept on smiling in that certain way and she told him two nights later that when he started smiling she thought she had charmed him into letting her have her way but then he stood her up rigid with but I’m not going to—and it turned her on. But suppose he had been wearing this uniform that day! Christ, she wouldn’t have noticed anything other than he was in her way. This Marine Patrol uniform—all it was, was a baggy white polo shirt and a pair of baggy dark-blue shorts. If only he could shorten the sleeves—but they’d notice immediately. He would become the object of hideous ridicule… What would they start calling him… “Muscles”?… “Mister Universe”?… or just “Uni”?—pronounced “Yoony,” which would be even worse. So he was stuck with this… uniform that made you look like a grossly overgrown retarded toddler in the park. Well, at least it didn’t look as bad on him as it did on the two fat americanos right in front of him. From here, leaning back against the leaning pole, he got all too close a look at them from the rear… disgusting… the way their flab blubbered out into love handles where the polo shirts tucked into the shorts. It was pathetic—and they were supposed to be fit enough to rescue panicked people in the water. For an instant it occurred to him that maybe he had become a body snob, but it was only that, an instant. Man, it was weird enough just going out on a call with nothing but americanos around you. This hadn’t happened to him even once during his two years on street patrol. There were so few of them left on the police force. It was double weird being both outnumbered and outranked by a couple of minorities like this. He had nothing against minorities… the americanos… the blacks… the Haitians… the Nicas, as everybody called Nicaraguans. He felt very broad-minded, a nobly tolerant young man of the times. Americano was the name you used with other Cubans. For public consumption, you said Anglo. Curious word, Anglo. There was something… off… about it. It referred to white people of European ancestry. Was there something a little defensive about it, maybe
? It wasn’t all that long ago that the… Anglos… divided the world up into four colors, the white, the black, the yellow—and everyone left over was brown. They lumped all Latinos together as brown!—when here in Miami, in any case, most Latinos, or a huge percentage, a lot anyway, were as white as any Anglo, except for the blond hair… That was what Mexicans were thinking about when they used the word gringo: the people with the blond hair. Cubans used it for comic effect now and then. A car full of Cuban boys see a pretty blond girl on a sidewalk in Hialeah, and one of them sings out, “¡Ayyyyy, la gringa!”

  Latino—there was something off about that word, too. It existed only in the United States. Also Hispanic. Who the hell else called people Hispanics? Why? But the whole thing began to make his head hurt—

  McCorkle’s voice! jerked him back into the here and now. The sandy-haired sergeant, McCorkle, was saying something to his blondish second in command, Kite:

  “This don’t sound like an illegal” SMACK “to me. I never heard of an illegal coming in on a boat with a” SMACK “mast. You know? They’re too slow; they’re too obvious… Besides, you take Haiti… or” SMACK “Cuba. There ain’t no more boats with masts left in places like that.” He turned his head to the side and tilted it SMACK back to speak over his shoulder. “Right, Nestor?” Nes-ter. “They don’t even have” SMACK “masts in Cuba. Right? Say ‘Right,’ Nestor.” Nes-ter.

  This annoyed Nestor—no, infuriated him. His name was Nestor, not Nes-ter, the way americanos pronounced it. Nes-ter… made him sound like he was sitting in a nest with his neck stretched straight up in the air and his mouth wide open waiting for Mommy to fly home and drop a worm down his gullet. These morons obviously never heard of King Nestor, hero of the Trojan War. Yet this idiot sergeant thinks it’s funny to treat him like some helpless six-year-old with this Right? Say “Right,” Nestor crack. At the same time, the crack assumed a second-generation Cuban like him, born in the United States, would be so absorbed with Cuba that he might in some stupid way actually care about masts or no masts on Cuban boats. It showed what they actually thought about Cubans. ::::::They still think we’re aliens. After all this time they still don’t get it, do they. If there’s any aliens in Miami now, it’s them. You blond retards—with your “Nes-ter!”::::::

  “How would I know?” he hears himself saying. “I” SMACK “never set foot in Cuba. I never laid eyes on” SMACK “Cuba.”

  Wait a minute! Bango—right away he knows that came out wrong, knows it before he can sort it out rationally, knows that “How would I know?” is hanging in the air like some putrid gas. The way he hit the “I”… and the “foot” and the “eyes”! So dismissive! Such a rebuke! Impudent and a half! Might as well have called him a stupid blond retard straight out! Hadn’t even tried to hide the anger he felt! If only he had added a “Sarge”! “How would I know, Sarge” might have given him a fighting chance! McCorkle is a minority, but he’s still a sergeant! All he has to do is file one bad report—and Nestor Camacho flunks probation and gets blown out of the water! Quick! Throw in a Sarge right now! Make it two—Sarge and Sarge! But it’s hopeless—too late—three or four interminable seconds have gone by. All he can do is brace himself against the leaning pole and hold his breath—

  Not a sound from the two blond americanos. Nestor becomes terribly conscious of his heart SMACK hammering away beneath the polo shirt. Idly idly idly so what so what so what he is aware of the skyline of SMACK downtown Miami rising still higher as the Safe Boat speeds closer, coming upon more and more “lulus,” as the cops call pleasure boats owned and aimlessly navigated by clueless civilians sunbathing SMACK too fat too bare too slathered with thirty-level sunblock SMACK ointments, and passes them so fast, the lulus seem to whip by them SMACK backward—

  Jesus Christ! Nestor practically jumps. From here right SMACK behind the man’s chair he can see Sergeant McCorkle’s thumb rising above his shoulder. Now he’s SMACK motioning it back toward Nestor without moving his head—he keeps looking forward—and saying to Officer Kite, “He wouldn’t” SMACK “know, Lonnie. He never fucking set foot in Cuba. He never fucking laid eyes on it.” SMACK “He just… wouldn’t… fucking… know.”

  Lonnie Kite doesn’t respond. He’s probably like Nestor himself… waiting to see where this is all leading… while downtown Miami rises… rises. There’s the SMACK Rickenbacker Causeway itself, crossing the bay from the city over to Key Biscayne.

  “Okay, Nes-ter,” McCorkle says, still giving Nestor only the back of his head, “you wouldn’t know that. Then” SMACK “tell us what you would know, Nes-ter. How about that? Enlighten us. You would” SMACK “know what?”

  Get the Sarge in right away! “Come on, Sarge, I didn’t” SMACK “mean that the way—”

  “Would you know what day this is?” SMACK

  “Day?”

  “Yeah, Nes-ter, this is a particular day. Which particular day is this? Would you know that?” SMACK

  Nestor knew the big fat blond americano was fucking with him—and the big fat blond americano knew he knew—but he, Nestor, didn’t dare say anything indicating that he did SMACK know that, because he also knew the big fat sandy-haired americano was daring him to say something else smart so he could really hang him.

  Long pause—until Nestor says as SMACK simplemindedly as he can: “Friday?”

  “That’s all it is—Friday? Would you know if it was maybe more than just” SMACK “Friday?”

  “Sarge, I—”

  Sergeant McCorkle’s voice runs right over Nestor’s: “This is fucking José Martí’s fucking birthday,” SMACK “is what it is, Camacho! Why wouldn’t you know that?”

  Nestor feels his face scalding with anger and humiliation. ::::::“Fucking José Martí” he dares say! José Martí is the most revered figure in Cuban history! Our Liberator, our Savior! “Fucking birthday”—filth on top of filth!—and the Camacho to make sure Nes-ter gets the filth right in the face! And this is not Martí’s birthday! His birthday is in January—but I don’t dare fight back even with that!::::::

  Lonnie Kite says, “How did you know that, Sarge?”

  “Know what?”

  “Know this is” SMACK “José Martí’s birthday?”

  “I pay attention in class.”

  “Yeah? What class, Sarge?”

  “I been” SMACK “going to Miami Dade, nights and weekends. I completed both years. I got my certificate.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Sergeant McCorkle. “Now” SMACK “I’m applying to EGU. I wanna get a real degree. I ain’t planning on making this a career, you know, being a cop. If I was a Canadian, I’d consider it. But I ain’t” SMACK “a Canadian.”

  Canadian?

  “Look, I don’t wanna discourage you, Sarge,” said the blondish-brown-haired Officer Kite, “but what they tell me is” SMACK “EGU is more than half Canadian itself, the student body, anyway. I don’t know about the” SMACK “professors.”

  Canadian—Canadian!

  “Well, it can’t be as bad as the Department—” The Sergeant suddenly broke off that line of thought. He kept his hands on the controls, lowered his head, and thrust his chin forward. “Holy shit! Look” SMACK “up there! There’s the causeway, and you see up there up top a the bridge?”

  Nestor had no idea what he was talking about. Being this far back in the cockpit, he couldn’t begin to see the top of the bridge.

  At that instant the staticky voice of Radiocom: “Five, one, six, oh, nine—Five, one, six, oh, nine—what is your” SMACK “Q,T,H? Need you soonest. Four-three says they got a bunch a tontos, they’re out a their cars yelling” SMACK “at the man on the mast in a disorderly fashion. Traffic on the causeway’s” SMACK “stopped in both directions. Q,K,T.”

  Lonnie Kite Q,L,Y’d that for Five, one, six, oh, nine and said, “Q,T,H. Just” SMACK “passed Brickell heading straight to the causeway. See the sails, see something on top a the” SMACK “mast, see the commotion on the causeway. Be there in,
uhhh, sixty” SMACK “seconds. Q,K,T.”

  “Q,L,Y,” said Radiocom. “Four-three wants the man down and out a there A, S, A, P.”

  Canadians! There was no way Canadians made up more than half the student body at EGU—Everglades Global University—but Cubans did. So that was their not-very-clever little americano game! And they were so stupid, they thought it would take a genius to catch on! He ransacked his brain to try to remember how they had used Canadians just a few minutes before. And what about mooks? Were they supposed to be Cubans, too? Latinos? ::::::How much of an insult is it if an americano uses Canadian to mean Cuban… right in your face? Boiling, boiling, boiling—but get hold of yourself!:::::: Cuban? Canadian? Mook? What did all that matter? What mattered was that the Sergeant felt so insulted, he was now resorting to sarcasm, by the ton, even to vile stuff like “fucking José Martí.” And why? To goad him to the point of outright insubordination—and then have him thrown out of this elite unit, the Marine Patrol, and bucked back down to the bottom—or expelled from the force! Canned! Kicked out! All it would take would be for him to start an insubordinate confrontation with his commander at a crucial moment of a run—at the moment when the entire department was waiting for them to get some idiot down off the top of a mast in Biscayne Bay! He’d be finished! Finished—and with Magdalena, too! Magdalena!—already acting odd, distant, and now he’s a piece of garbage, expelled from the police force, terminally humiliated.

  The Sergeant was easing back on the throttle. The SMACKs became less violent and less frequent as they closed in on the huge white sailboat. They were approaching it from the rear.

  Officer Lonnie Kite leaned down over the instrument panel and began looking upward. “Jesus Christ, Sarge, those masts—I never saw masts that high in my life. They’re tall as the fucking bridge, and the fucking bridge has a mean water level clearance of eighty-fucking-two feet!”