Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  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!”

  Busy easing the Safe Boat in alongside the sailboat, the Sergeant didn’t so much as glance up. “That’s a schooner, Lonnie. You heard a the ‘tall ships’?”

  “Yeah… I think so, Sarge. I guess so.”

  “They built ’em for speed, back in the nineteenth century. That’s why they got masts that tall. That way you get more sail area. Back in the day they used to race out to shipwrecks or incoming cargo ships or whatever to get to the booty sooner. I bet those masts are tall as the boat’s long.”

  “How do you know about all that, about schooners, Sarge? I never seen one around here. Not one.”

  “I pay attention—”

  “—in class,” said Lonnie Kite. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Sarge.” He pointed upward. “I’ll be damned. There’s the guy! The man on the mast! Up on top of the forward mast! I thought it was a clump a dirty laundry or canvas or something. Look at ’im! He’s up as high as the tontos on the bridge! And, man, looks like they’re yelling back and forth…”

  Nestor couldn’t see any of it, and none of them could hear what was going on, since the Safe Boat cockpit was soundproof.

  The Sergeant had the boat throttled way down in order to sidle up against the schooner. They came to a stop just inches away. “Lonnie,” said the Sergeant, “you take the wheel.”

  When he rose from his seat, he looked at Nestor as if he had forgotten he existed. “Okay, Camacho, do something useful. Open the fucking hatch.”

  Nestor looked at the Sergeant with abject fear. Inside his skull he said a prayer. ::::::Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee. Don’t let me fuck up.::::::

  The “hatch” was a soundproof double-paned sliding door on the side of the shack that opened onto the deck. Nestor’s entire universe suddenly contracted into that door and the Olympics-level test of opening it with maximum strength, maximum speed—while maintaining maximum control… now! Immediately!… ::::::Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee—here goes—::::::

  He did it! He did it! With the fluid power of a tiger he did it!… Did what? Slid it! Slid a sliding door open! Without fucking up!

  Outside—all was uproar. The noise came crashing into the sacrosoundless cockpit, the noise and the heat. Christ, it was hot out here on the deck! Scorching! Enervating! It beat you down. It took the wind kicking up the bay to make it bearable. The wind was strong enough to create its own whistling sound and SLAP the hull of the schooner with swells and FLAP the huge sails, two masts’ full of them—FLAP them until they blew up into clouds of an unnatural white brilliance—Miami summer sun! Nestor glanced up toward that ball of fire—burning itself up—and even with his supreme darkest sunglasses he didn’t try that again—looking up into that hellish heat lamp, which was the entire sky. But that was nothing compared to the roiling SURF of human voices. Cries! Exhortations! Imprecations! Ululations! Supplications! Boos! A great bellowing and gnashing of teeth a mile from shore out in the middle of Biscayne Bay!

  The Sergeant emerged from the shack without the slightest flick of the eye toward Nestor. But as he disembarked, he made a jerking signal with his hand down by his hip indicating that Nestor should follow him. Follow him? Nestor followed him like a dog.

  Once the Sergeant and his dog boarded the schooner and were up on the deck—a regular rubber room, this deck was! Passengers, if that was what they were, were hanging over the railing and gesturing and jabbering at Nestor and the Sergeant… americanos, the whole bunch… light-brown and blondish hair… half of them, girls—all but stark naked! Wild blond hair! Wisps of thong bikini bottoms that didn’t even cover the mons pubis!… Tops consisting of two triangles of cloth that hid the nipples but left the rest of the breasts bulging on either side and beckoning, Want more? Nestor didn’t. At this moment nothing could have interested him less than making moves on lubricas americanas. They disintegrated in his prayers, which boiled down to Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee, don’t let me… fuck up!

  The Sergeant walked straight to the forward mast. Nestor walked straight to the forward mast. The Sergeant looked up. Nestor looked up. The Sergeant saw the roost of the mysterious man atop the mast. Nestor saw the roost of the mysterious man—a silhouette against a killer heat lamp dome, a black lump the equivalent of seven or eight stories above the deck. A regular storm of raw-throated voices was caterwauling down from above amid a cacophony of outraged vehicle horns. The Sergeant looked up again. Nestor looked up again. The two policemen had to cock their necks all the way back to see where the commotion was coming from. Sheer murder, looking up like this to the topmost arch of the bridge… An angry crowd was leaning over the railing, two deep, three deep, God knows how many deep. They were so far up, their heads looked the size of eggs. Even Nestor behind his darkest supremos couldn’t stare at them for more than a moment. It was like being in the street at the foot of an eight- or nine-story building with a mob unaccountably yelling at you from a roof set afire by the sun. And up there!—practically eye level with the mob, at practically the same height above the deck, was the man. The Sergeant was looking at him from directly below. Nestor was looking at him from directly below. By shielding their eyes with their hands they could see he did look like a clump of dirty laundry, just as Lonnie Kite had put it… no, he looked worse than that… he looked like a clump of filthy, sodden laundry. He was soaking wet. His clothes, his skin, even his black hair—what they could see of it—everything about him was now the same sopping slurry gray-brown color, as if he had just crawled out of an unpumped sump. It didn’t help that he jerked his head about spastically as he shouted to the crowd on the bridge and appealed to them by reaching out with his hands contorted, palms up, into the shape of a pair of cups. But how could he stay up there without holding on to the mast? Ahhhhh… he had found a little bucket seat—but how did he get up there in the first place?

  “Officer! Officer!”

  A great lubberly lulu, no more than thirty years old, had planted himself in front of Sergeant McCorkle. He kept jabbing his forefinger up at the man on the mast. There was fear on his face, and he was talking so fast, his words seemed to be leap-frogging one another, falling over one another, tumbling, stumbling, ricocheting, scattering hopelessly: “Gotta get no business here him like down from there, Officer, I never don’t know him like saw him before that you know mob up what do they he’s so angry there want who’ll him attack my boat like that mast alone destroy it cost a fortune you know that’s all I need—”

  The guy was soft—look at him!—but in such a luxurious way, was Nestor’s immediate verdict. He had full jowls but jowls so smooth and buttery they had reached the level of a perfect flan custard. He had a paunch but a paunch that created a perfect parabola from his sternum to his underbelly, the paunch nonpareil of Idle Youth, created, no doubt, by the dearest, tenderest, tastiest chefs in the world. Over the perfect parabolic arch of a gut was stretched an apple-green shirt, of cotton, yes, but a cotton so fine and so right-out-of-the-box, it had a perfect apple-green sheen—in short, a real pussy, this guy was, a pussy whose words kept coming out of his mouth in a tangle of pussy attitude shot through with fear.

  “—killer nutball I’m fucked sue me! The liable sucker who gets sued’s me! Raving maniac never saw before picks me!—”

  The Sergeant brought both hands up to his chest, palms up and out in the Whoa, back off mode. “Slow down! This is your boat?”

  “Yes! And I’m the one—”

  “Just hold it. What’s your name?”

  “Jonathan. The thing is, like, soon as I—”

  “You got a, like, last name?”

  The great lubberly pussy looked at the Sergeant as if he, the Sergeant, had lost his mind. Then he said, “Krin?” It sounded like half a questio
n. “K, R, I, N?” Being a member of the first generation that used no last names, he found the notion archaic.

  “Okay, Jonathan, whyn’t you”—the Sergeant gave his palms three little pumps down toward the deck, as if to say, Calmly, without getting all excited—“tell me how he got there.”

  It seemed that this portly, but perfectly portly, young man had invited his mates to come along for a cruise up Biscayne Bay to the house and marina of a friend on a celebrity-heavy waterfront enclave aptly known as Star Island. He saw no reason why he couldn’t ease the schooner’s seventy-five-foot mainmast underneath the eighty-two-feet-high bridge on the causeway… until they got close to it and it began to look maybe dangerous, what with the wind and the choppy water and swells that were causing the schooner to pitch a bit. So they dropped anchor sixty feet from the bridge, and all eight of them went to the bow to study the situation.

  One of them happened to turn around, and he said, “Hey, Jonathan, there’s some guy back there on the deck! He just came up the ladder!” Sure enough, there was this thin, stringy, soaking-wet, sodden mess of a little man, breathing heavily… homeless, everybody thought. He had somehow come up the ladder on the stern used for slipping into and out of the water. He now stood still, dripping, on the aft deck, staring at them. He started toward them slowly, warily, gulping for air, until Jonathan, in his capacity as owner and captain, yelled at him, “Hey, hold on, whattaya think you’re doing?” The guy stopped, began gesturing with both hands, palms up, and jabbering, between gulps of air, in what they took to be Spanish. Jonathan kept yelling, “Get offa here! Go! Fuck off!” and other unfriendly commands. With that, the bum, as they all took him to be, started running jacklegged, stumbling, careening, not away from them but straight at them. The girls began screaming. The bum looked like a wet rat. Half his hair seemed to be plastered across his face. His eyes were bugged wide open. His mouth was wide open, maybe just because he couldn’t get his breath, but you could see his teeth. He looked psychotic. The guys started yelling at him and waving their arms in the sort of crisscross pattern football referees use to indicate that a field goal kick is no good. The bum keeps coming and is only a few yards from them, and the girls are screaming, making a hell of a racket, and the guys are screaming—by now their yells have turned into half-a-screams—and flailing their arms over their heads, and the bum wheels about and dashes to the forward mast and goes up it, to the top.

  “Wait a minute,” says Sergeant McCorkle. “Back up a second. Okay, so he’s on the deck back there, and then he comes all the way from there to up here. Did you try to stop him? Did anybody try to stop him?”

  Jonathan averted his eyes and took a deep breath and said, “Well, the thing is… he looked like a psycho. You know? And maybe he had like a weapon—you know?—a revolver, a knife. You couldn’t tell.”

  “I see,” said the Sergeant. “He looked like a psycho, and maybe he had a weapon, you couldn’t tell, and you didn’t try to stop him; nobody tried to stop him.” He said it not as a question but as a recitation… in a form of deadpan mockery cops like.

  “Uhhh… that’s right,” said the great Idle Youth.

  “How did he climb the mast?” said the Sergeant. “You said he was out of breath.”

  “There’s a rope you can see right here coming down the mast. It’s got a pulley at the top, and there’s a bucket seat. You get in the seat down here, and you get somebody to hoist you to the top in the bucket seat.”

  Sergeant McCorkle pointed overhead. “Who hoisted him up?”

  “Well, he—you can use the rope and pull yourself up, if you have to.”

  “That must take a while,” said the Sergeant. “Did you try to stop him? Did anyone try to stop him?”

  “Well, as I said, he looked—”

  “—looked like a psycho,” said McCorkle, finishing the sentence for him. “And maybe he had a concealed weapon.” The Sergeant nodded his head up and down in cop mockery posing as understanding. Then he cut his eyes toward Nestor with a certain lift of the eyebrows that as much as said, “What a bunch a pussies, hnnnnh?”

  Ah, Bliss! To Nestor, at that point, that look was the equivalent of the Medal of Honor! The Sergeant had acknowledged him as a member of the courageous brotherhood of cops!—not just a probie in the Marine Patrol adept only at getting in his way.

  Radiocom transmission… “Guy claims to be an anti-Fidel dissenter… Bridge full of Cubans demanding that he be given asylum. Right now that don’t matter. Right now you gotta get him down from there. We got eight lanes a traffic on the causeway, and nothing’s moving. What’s your plan? Q,K,T.”

  That was all it took. For any Miami cop, especially one like Nestor or the Sergeant, that was enough to account for… the man on the mast. Undoubtedly Cuban smugglers had brought him this far, just inside Biscayne Bay, aboard some high-speed craft such as a cigarette boat, which went seventy miles an hour at sea, had dropped him off—or thrown him off—into the water near shore, made a U-turn, and sped back to Cuba. For this service he probably had to come up with something on the order of $5,000… in a country where the average pay for physicians was $300 a month. So now he finds himself floundering in the Bay. He sees the ladder on the rear of the schooner and climbs up, possibly believing it’s docked, since it isn’t moving, and he can just walk off onto the shore, or else that the boat will take him as far as the bridge. That’s all a Cuban has to do: set foot on American soil or any structure extending from American soil, such as the bridge, and he will be granted asylum… Any Cuban… No other refugees were granted such a privilege. America’s most favored migration status the Cubans enjoyed. If a Cuban refugee set foot on American soil (or structure), he was classified as a “dry foot,” and he was safe. But if he was apprehended on or in the water, he would be sent back to Cuba unless he could convince a Coast Guard investigator that he would face “a credible threat,” such as Communist persecution, if he had to go back. The man on the mast has made it out of the water—but onto a boat. So when Nestor and the Sergeant arrive he is technically still “in the water” and is classified as a “wet foot.” Wet foots are out of luck. The Coast Guard takes them to Guantánamo, where they are, in essence, released into the woods, like an unwanted pet.

  But at this moment the police high command isn’t thinking about any of that. They don’t care if he’s a wet foot, a dry foot, a Cuban alien, or a lost Mongolian. All they care about is getting him off the mast—right now—so normal traffic can resume on the causeway.

  The Sergeant looked off, and his eyes focused on… an imaginary point in the middle distance. He remained in that stance for what seemed like forever. “Okay,” he said finally, looking once more at Nestor. “You think you can climb that mast, Camacho? The guy don’t speak English. But you can talk to him. Tell him we have no interest in arresting him and sending him back to Cuba. We just wanna get him down from there so he don’t fall and break his neck… or stay up there and break my balls.” That much was true. The Department openly instructed cops not to get involved in the whole business of illegal aliens. That was the federal government’s problem, the ICE’s, the FBI’s, and the Coast Guard’s. But this was Nestor Camacho’s problem, or problems: climbing a seventy-foot foremast… and talking some poor scrawny panicked Cuban into descending the goddamned mast with him.

  “So can you do it, Camacho?”

  The truthful answers were “No” and “No.” But the only possible answers were “Yes” and “Yes.” How could he possibly stand there and say, “Well, to tell the truth, Sarge, I don’t actually speak Spanish—certainly not well enough to talk anybody out of anything.” He was like a lot of second-generation Cubans. He could understand Spanish, because his parents spoke only Spanish at home. But in school, despite all the talk about bilingualism, practically everybody spoke English. There were more Spanish-language television and radio stations than English, but the best shows were in English. The best movies, blogs (and online porn), and video games, the hottest music, t
he latest thing in iPhones, BlackBerries, Droids, keyboards—all created for use in English. Very soon you felt crippled… out there… if you didn’t know English and use English and think in English, which in turn demanded that you know colloquial American English as well as any Anglo. Before you knew it—and it always occurred to you suddenly one day—you could no longer function in Spanish much above a sixth-grade level. That bit of the honest truth shot through Nestor’s mind. But how could he explain all this to these two americanos? It would sound so lame—and maybe even craven! Maybe he just didn’t have the stomach for an assignment like this. And how could he say, “Gosh, I don’t know whether I can climb that mast or not”?

  Utterly impossible! The only alternatives he had were… to do it—and succeed… or to do it—and crash and burn. Making things still more muddled was the temper of the mob on the bridge. They were booing him! From the moment Nestor and the sergeant boarded the schooner, they had become steadily louder, uglier, more hostile, more raucous. Every now and then Nestor could make out a discrete cry.

  “¡Libertad!”

  “¡Traidor!”

  “¡Comemierda, hijo de puta!”

  As soon as he started up that mast, they would have it in for him—and he was Cuban himself! They’d find that out soon enough, too, wouldn’t they! He couldn’t win, could he! On the other hand… he went out to lunch for a moment… staring at the man on the mast without any longer seeing him. It came to him like a revelation, the question: “What is guilt?” Guilt is a gas, and gases disperse, but superior officers don’t. Once they sink their teeth in, they’re tenacious as a dog. Possible disapproval of a mob of his own people wasn’t remotely as threatening as the disapproval of this blue-eyed sandy-haired americano, Sergeant McCorkle, who was already just one button away from canning him—

  —and to whom he turned and said, “Sarge—I can do it.”

  Now he was in for it, whether he could pull off this stunt or not. He sized up the mast. He tilted his head back and looked straight up. Way… way… way up there—Jesus! The sun was burning up his eyeballs, darkest extremos or no darkest extremos! He had begun to sweat… wind or no wind! Christ, it was hot out here, grilling out on the deck of a schooner in the middle of Biscayne Bay. The man on top of the mast looked just about the size and color and shapelessness of one of those turd-brown vinyl garbage bags. He was still twisting and lurching about… way up there. Both his arms shot out again, in silhouette, no doubt with the fingers once more crimped up into the supplicant’s cup shapes. He must have been rocking pathetically in his bosun’s chair, because he kept protruding and then withdrawing, as if he were yelling to the mob. Christ, it was a long way up to the top! Nestor lowered his head to size up the mast itself. Down here where it joined with the deck, the damned thing was almost as big around as his waist. Wrapping his legs around it and shimmying up would take forever… inching up, inching up, pathetically hugging a seventy-foot boat mast… all too slow and humiliating to think about… But wait a minute! The rope, the lanyard the turd-brown boy had used to hoist himself to the top—here it was, rising up along the mast from out of a puddle of slack rope on the deck. On the other end was the illegal himself, smack up against the top of the mast in the bosun’s chair. ::::::I’ve climbed fifty-five feet up a rope without using my legs, :::::: it occurred to him, ::::::and I could have climbed higher, if Rodriguez had a higher ceiling in his “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!” But seventy feet… Christ!… No?—I got no choice.:::::: It was as if not he but his central nervous system took over. Before he could even create a memory of it he leapt and grabbed hold of the rope and started climbing up—without using his legs.