Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  A foul cascade of boos and slurs pounded down on him from above. Real slime! The cops were going to arrest a poor refugee on top of a mast and send him back to Castro and they were using a Cuban, a turncoat Cuban, to do the dirtiest work, but none of this quite reached the rational seat of justice in the left hemisphere of Nestor’s brain, which was fixated upon an audience of one—Sergeant McCorkle ::::::and please, O Lord, I beseech thee, just don’t let me fuck up!:::::: He is aware he has climbed practically halfway up hand over hand—still without using his legs. The very air is noise choked with madness… Jesus, his arms and back, his chest are reaching the edge of exhaustion. Has to pause, has to stop… but no time… He tries to look about. He’s engulfed in clouds of white canvas, the schooner’s sails… He glances down… he can’t believe it… The deck is so far below… he must have climbed more than halfway up the mast—forty, forty-five feet. The faces on the deck all tilted straight up, toward him… how very small they look. He tries to pick out the Sergeant—is that him?… can’t tell… their lips aren’t moving… might as well be in a trance… americano faces americano faces… fixed on him. He looks straight up… at the face of the man on the mast… his filthy clump of a body has shifted way over so he can look down… he knows what’s happening, all right—the mob on the bridge… their deluge of slime… directed at Nestor Camacho!… such filth!

  “¡Gusano!”

  “Dirty traidor peeg!”

  Oh, the filthy clump of laundry knows. Every time his hunter grabs the rope to pull himself up higher, the filthy clump can feel a little jolt in the bosun’s chair… The jib and spinnaker start FLAP FLAP FLAPPING in the wind… the clouds of canvas blow aside for a moment… there they are, the mob on the bridge… Christ! They’re not far above him anymore… their heads used to be the size of eggs… now more like cantaloupes… a great mangy gallery of contorted human faces… my own people… hating me!… I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t flashes through his central nervous system—but bucked back down to patrolman—or worse—if I don’t. Oh, shit! What’s that setting off sunbursts? A television camera lens—and shit! There’s another—and shit! One over there, too. Please, O Lord, I beseech thee… Fear hits him like a massive shot of adrenaline… Don’t let me… He’s still climbing up, hand over hand, without using his legs. He looks up. The man on the mast is no more than ten feet above him! He’s looking him right in the face!… What an expression… the cornered animal… the doomed rat… drenched, dirty, exhausted… panting… barely able to utter a cry for miraculous salvation.

  ::::::Ay, San Antonio, ayudame. San Lazaro, este conmigo.::::::

  Now Nestor—has to stop. He’s close enough to the top to hear the man’s entreaties above the noise from the bridge. He wraps his legs around the rope and stops still.

  “¡Te suplico! ¡ Te suplico!” “I’m begging you! Begging you! You can’t send me back! They’ll torture me until I reveal everybody! They’ll destroy my family. Have mercy! There are Cubans on that bridge! I’m begging you! Is one more such an intolerable burden? I’m begging you, begging you! You don’t know what it’s like! You won’t be destroying just me, you’ll be destroying a whole movement! I beg you! I beg you for asylum! I beg you for a chance!”

  Nestor knew enough Spanish to get the sense of what he was saying, but he couldn’t think of the words that might calm him and coax him down. “Credible threat”… That’s it! He’ll tell him about “credible threat”… A refugee like him gets a Coast Guard hearing, right there on the deck, and if they believe he was endangered by a credible threat, he would get asylum. The word for “credible”—what’s the damned word for credible? maybe the same as English?—cray dee blay? But “threat”… threat… What was the damned word for threat? He knew he once knew it… There it went!… Right through his brain, before he could catch it. It had a z in it a z in it a z in it… Almost had it again!… but once more it was gone. For that matter, what about an official hearing?… He had to say something—anything—and so he ransacked his brain and looked up at the man’s face and said, “La historia—” He caught himself just in time! What was happening to him? A famous quote from Fidel Castro was what his poor desperate brain had almost blurted out!

  Boos, taunts, every known loud expression of vilification rained down from the people packed against the railings of the bridge.

  The man looked down at him in an anxious way and said, “¿Como?” trying to sort out what Nestor has said.

  Maddening was what it was!… climbed sixty feet up a rope without using his legs—but he couldn’t make himself understood. He needed to get closer. He started climbing the rope again, hand over hand. He glances up at the poor drowned rat. His face is… aghast. How can he tell him he’s not coming up to arrest him? He can’t think of the words! So he stops climbing and wraps his legs around the rope to free his right hand to give a reassuring signal. But what signal? All he can think of is the peace sign… He spreads his index finger and his middle finger to form a V. The man’s face, now no more than four feet above Nestor, changes from aghast… to terrified. He starts to rise from the bosun’s chair. Jesus Christ, what does he think he’s doing? He’s up on top of a seventy-foot mast with nothing to support him but a tiny bosun’s chair—and he wants to stand. He tries to anchor his feet on the pulley housing. Now he’s out of his seat, teetering in a crouched position atop a mast that’s pitching on a choppy sea… Nestor can see the worst about to happen. He climbs seventy feet up a rope—hand over hand, without using his legs—only to cause a poor refugee to fall to his death—and whose fault is it? Nestor Camacho’s! Who has made the Miami Police Marine Patrol—hell, the entire force—look like the brutal, heedless persecutors and killers of a poor man whose only sin was trying to put one foot on American soil! Who has committed this heartless crime? Nestor Camacho, infamy incarnate!

  With two furious hand-over-hand hoists he reaches the bosun’s chair and tries to catch the man’s leg—or even his foot—too late! The man pitches forward—to his death! A ferocious fire erupts inside Nestor’s skull… No! The man has pitched forward onto the cable. He’s trying to slide down it backward… This poor skinny emaciated gray-brown slurry rat—he’ll kill himself! The cable runs at a steep angle from the mast to beyond the bow to the bowsprit… more than a hundred feet. Nestor crouches in the bosun’s seat… For an instant he can see the mob on the bridge. He’s level with them now… three, four, five deep… Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! They’re exploding off cameras! Heads are jumping up to get a better view of the show… a sign! One of them has a crude sign—from where?… written how?… COPS FIDELISTAS TRAIDORES… never been hated by so many people. He looks down… makes him dizzy… like standing on the edge of the roof of a ten-story building. The water’s a sheet of blue-grayish steel with sunbursts dancing all over it. Boats!… small boats around the schooner… from out of nowhere!… bloodsucking bugs… a boat—a sign. Can it really say what he thinks it says?… ¡ASYLUM AHORA!—

  —all of this in an instant… Guilt! Fear! Horror!… but the greatest of these is Guilt! Must not let their hero die before their eyes! He swings down onto the cable… no use trying to catch up with him by sliding… Instinctively, in the mode they used in training camp, he starts swinging from the cable by his hands, heading down swing by swing, keeping his eyes on his slurry gray-brown quarry… His arms, his shoulders, the palms of his hands—agony! He’s going to tear apart… only two swings away from the guy. The guy’s body is still on top of the cable, but it’s yawing this way and that… so scrawny… not strong enough for this… lifts his head, looks Nestor right in the face… worse than terror—utter hopelessness comes over the poor bastard… he’s had it!… the poor devil yaws so sharply he can’t stay on top of the cable… feebly hanging by his hands for one final moment. Now or oblivion! For the poor bastard! For Nestor Camacho! He reaches the poor bastard with two swings—to do what?… Only one thing possible. He wraps his legs around the scrawny rodent’s waist
and locks them at the ankles… the poor little bastard lets go of the cable and collapses. The dead jolt shocks Nestor… the dead weight! ::::::My arms torn off my body at the shoulder sockets!:::::: Can’t believe he’s still here—an organism composed of sheer pain from his burning hands to the sartorius muscles of his locked legs… sixty feet above the deck… to support this much weight by one hand while he swings the other to descend the cable… impossible… but if he doesn’t—¡Dios mío!—he’ll be fucking up! And not just fucking up… fucking up on television… Fucking up before thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions… might as well be billions… since one is all it would take, one officious mierda-mouth americano sergeant named—bango!

  ¡Caliente! Caliente baby

  Got plenty fuego in yo caja china,

  Means you needs a length a Hose put in it,

  Ain’ no maybe—

  It’s his iPhone ringing in his pocket! ::::::What a fool! I’m one slip from death, holding a man up with my legs and hauling him down a hundred-foot cable by hand—there’s nothing I can turn the goddamn thing off with! A goddamn song by Bulldog—not even the real thing, Pitbull!—and I still can’t keep the words from penetrating my head—::::::

  —’bout it.

  Hose knows you burnin’ up wit’out it.

  Don’tcha try deny it,

  ’Cause Hose knows you dyin’ a try it—

  —when he needs every neuron, every dendrite, every synapse, every gemmule in his mind to concentrate on the horrible fix he’s gotten himself into. If he falls seventy feet onto a boat deck because his iPhone is singing

  Hose knows all!

  Knows you out tryin’ a buy it,

  But Hose only gives it free

  —then he damn well better die!… He damn well better not wake up gorked out in an electric-motor-powered hospital bed in some morose intensive-care unit listed as “critical but stable”… the mortifying ignominy of it! But—no choice! He’s got to do it! Both hands still grip the cable, his legs grip what?—maybe 120 pounds?—of panicked-out little homunculus, and here goes! He releases one hand—and that’s it—no turning back! The downswing—the centrifugal force—::::::I’m done for!:::::: One hand! Unbearable, the centrifugal force ::::::pulling my rotator cuff apart, pulling my arm out of the socket!—my wrist away from the arm! my hand away from my wrist! nothing left but—

  To his fav’rite charity,

  Hose’ favorite cha-ree-tee, see?

  Hose’ fav’rite cha-ree-tee,

  An’ ’at’s me.

  —one hand clutching a cable! I’ll crash on the deck from seven stories up, me and the gnome:::::: but a miracle! He grabs the cable with his other hand on the upswing—yes, a miracle!—it redistributes the weight! Both shoulders, both wrists, both hands are whole again!—kept intact only by the slimmest steely cord of unbearable agony!—only that cord to save him and the slurry-brown elfin man from falling seven stories and winding up as two shapeless bags of ecchymotic-purple integument full of broken bones! Below, down in the Halusian Gulp, the deck is covered with turned-up faces the size of marbles. From above rain the insults, boos, and disgusting yaaaggggghs of the animals on the bridge—but now he knows! has the power to persevere in a state of morbidly horrifying pain!—already into another swing—and he makes it—fury from

  ’At’s me, see?

  An’ ’at’s me.

  above—gawking by the spectators below��but he thinks of only one soul, the minority Sergeant McCorkle, a mindless americano but a sergeant all the same—another swing—and he makes it—the damned phone is still ringing. ::::::Idiots! Don’t you know

  An’ ’at’s me, see?

  An’ ’at’s me.

  Yo yo!

  you are pumping toxins and messing up my mind? Oh, the hell with it!:::::: Another swing—he makes it. ::::::Dios mío querido, together we look into the web of blood in their eyes, and into the affectless red eyes of the television cameras!:::::: Another swing—he

  “—Yo yo!

  Mismo! Mismo!”

  makes it… another… another… another… ¡Dios mío!—no more than ten feet above the deck—that sea of eyeballs and open mouths—what the!!?? The slurry little ecchymotic sack of panic has come to life—he’s bucking like a fish in the vise grip of Nestor’s legs—a regular forest of hands

  “Yo yo yo yo yo.”

  reaching upward from the bow, but the cable extends beyond them to the bowsprit beep beep beep beep beep—a text message!—and the two of them, Nestor and the slurry—brown homunculus—he’s free of the leg lock!—not now you don’t!—too late! he does! In the next instant the two bodies, his and the gnome’s, hurtling off the end of the bowsprit and into the water. They’re under water—and it’s just as Lonnie Kite said! The little maniac has broken free of the leg lock and is… attacking him! kicking him! pulling his hair! craaaaacking his nose with his forearm… Kite had it right! Nestor wards off the little man’s increasingly feeble blows, moves in, clamps him in a police neck lock, and that does it! The little creature goes limp! Done for! Ultimate Fighting under water!

  When they reach the surface, Nestor has his slimy little quarry in a police lifesaver’s grip… gnome is coughing up water. Two feet away—the Safe Boat! Lonnie’s at the wheel. Nestor has reentered the world from a distant cosmos… Lonnie’s pulling the slurry-brown homunculus up onto the rubbery pancake deck… and then Nestor—who the hell are these people? Nestor finds himself right by the schooner. He twists toward the deck… the sun bursts off two big eyes of glass—TV cameras—and right there, leaning over the railing… the sandy-haired Sergeant McCorkle.

  Sarge doesn’t have to say a word—it’s all right there in his face. Nestor Camacho is now… a cop… a real cop… as real as they make ’em… Nestor Camacho enters Heaven.

  Sergeant McCorkle turned the drowned rat over to the Coast Guard right out there in the middle of the bay, and Nestor and the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite took the Safe Boat back to the Marine Patrol marina, which stuck out into the bay on the Miami side. All the way over, the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite lavished praise on Nestor in the accepted cop fashion, as if it weren’t praise at all. Lonnie Kite’s saying, “Jesus Christ, man”—he’s a comradely man now!—“the way that little fucker was jerking around at the end there, after you’ve saved his ass—what was that all about? You kick him in the balls to see if he was alive?”

  Nestor went coasting, coasting, coasting into euphoria.

  The other guys at the marina were excited for Nestor. In the eyes of cops, Cuban and non-Cuban alike, he had pulled off a super-manly feat of strength, above and beyond… way over the top.

  Sergeant McCorkle was now his pal—his pal! “Look, Nestor, all I told you was to bring the guy down from the fucking mast! I didn’t say put on a high-wire act for the whole fucking city of Miami!”

  Everybody laughed and laughed, and Nestor laughed with them. His cell phone went beep beep beep beep, signaling a text message. Magdalena! He averted his eyes ever so briefly—Magdalena!—but it wasn’t from Magdalena. It read, “Disobeying unjust commands is the test of character.” That was all; that was the whole message. It was signed, “Your teacher once, your friend no matter what, Jaime Bosch.” Mr. Bosch taught composition and reading comprehension at the Police Academy. He was everybody’s favorite teacher. He had tutored Nestor one-on-one outside school hours, purely as a favor and out of a love of teaching. “Disobeying unjust commands is the test of character”… Nestor couldn’t figure it out. It made his head hurt… a lot.

  He looked up at the rest of them, trying not to show his dismay. Thank God, they were all still in a merry mood, chuckling and laughing. Umberto Delgado, who had been in Nestor’s class at the Police Academy, said, in English: “What was all this scissor grip shit with the legs, Nestorcito? That grip’s for immobilizing the fuckers when you’re rolling in the dirt—not for hauling ’em down a fucking hundred feet of jib sail cable!”

  Everybody laughed and laughed and rollic
ked and rollicked, and Nestor loved it!… but the three text messages that remained… had to read them… came in while his life was literally on the line… while he held the man on the mast between his legs and was descending hand over hand down the jib line. He began burning with curiosity and an apprehension he avoided giving a name… and a hope—Magdalena! Once more he averted his eyes for an instant. The first one… “y u Nestor y u,” it read—and it wasn’t from Magdalena. It was from Cecilia Romero. Oddly, she was the girl he had been going out with when he met Magdalena. Wacky… what did she mean “y u Nestor y u”? Baffling… but he didn’t show it… he rejoined the exhilarating Marine Patrol tide of manly laughter… but a tiny doubt germinated.