by David Poyer
“Mr. Lenson.”
He turned, to see the captain leaning back in his chair. “Yes, sir?” “Weren’t the Immigration people supposed to be here when we pulled in?”
“That was my understanding, sir.”
“I don’t see anybody. Let’s see if port control’s heard anything.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He was picking up the handset when he saw the gate go up and the yellow school buses turn in past a huge transfer shed. “I think they’re here, sir.”
Leighty picked up the J-phone as Dan thanked the pilot and asked Morris to show him to the quarterdeck. He made sure Casey Kessler was finishing up the checkoff list, then called down to Main Control to secure the engines. By then, the captain was off the phone. Leighty glanced around the flat expanse of Biscayne Bay, dotted with sailboats and motor yachts headed out to sea, and swung down. “Go ahead and secure,” he said to Dan, and disappeared.
The 1MC said, “Now secure the special sea and anchor detail. Set the normal in-port watch. On deck, watch section one.”
Vysotsky was suddenly beside him. Dan started; he hadn’t seen the executive officer arrive. “Where’s the captain? Do you see his car yet?”
“He just went below, sir. A car?”
“The port people are supposed to have a sedan here for him and a pickup or a station wagon for a duty vehicle. There should also be some people from Tracor Marine to look at the evaps.”
“I’ll find out, sir.”
“Okay.” Vysotsky passed a hand over his cowlick, but it sprang right back up again. “Just so you don’t have to ask, we’ll pass liberty by divisions to expire on board at zero-six. Make sure everybody gets the word to exercise caution. There’s been some racial tension here lately. I’ll be in the captain’s cabin if you need me.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He revolved in his mind what had to be done but didn’t come up with much. The guys had worked hard for four weeks; they deserved a break. He decided to let them all go, except of course the duty section.
Vysotsky left the bridge. Dan called port services and found the woman responsible for the vehicles. She said they were at the agency; all Barrett had to do was send someone over to pick them up. She would call Tracor and find out what the story was on their team. Dan called to Kessler, “Casey, you CDO today?”
“Yeah, why?”
He told him about the cars, then called Vysotsky and told him it was being worked. After which, he went out on the wing, checked the lines and rat guards again, then looked aft.
The first Cubans were filing off, a slow-moving line that inched down the brow. Security types in brown uniforms watched in the heat. Men and women clutched their possessions. Children clung to hands and skirts. Not one looked back at the ship as they climbed slowly up into the buses.
Harper appeared, lean in rumpled khakis, fore-and-aft cap cocked jauntily. “So, what’s the plan? We gonna let the guys rampage?”
“Liberty by divisions, Jay. Start at eleven. Warn them to be careful; the exec said something about racial trouble.”
“Good enough.” The chief warrant started to turn away, then completed his rotation 360 degrees. “Say, some of the guys from the department are going to get dinner, then hit some reggae bars. Want to come? Get off the ship, rub bodies with some significant female companionship?”
“I have a place to go first, but maybe we can link up later. Where’s dinner?”
“Place called East Coast Fisheries. Sounds like a canning factory, but it’s supposed to be the best restaurant in town. Mitch Miller’s gonna rent a car, but I don’t think it’s more than a mile; you can walk it or take that bike of yours if you don’t want to wait for a taxi. After that, we’ll head out to Coconut Grove.”
“Well, don’t wait on me. But I’ll try to make it.” Dan remembered another loose end. “Hey, how about checking with Dr. Shrobo before you make libs, find out if he wants to go home or what? We may have to make some calls, get him a ride to the airport, whatever. I don’t want to overlook him like we did last time.”
“Roger, wilco,” said Harper.
THAT afternoon, he stopped on Biscayne Boulevard, just outside the gate, feeling conspicuous in his trop whites, and raised a hand for a cab. Taxi after taxi went by; the traffic was heavy, but none stopped. He wondered if it was the uniform. This was another decade, but no one who’d worn a uniform through the seventies would ever feel entirely comfortable in public in one again. But it might give him more clout where he was going. Finally, a Yellow pulled over. The driver looked Hispanic, and when Dan asked him, “Say, you know where they’re taking the refugees?” he flicked dark eyes at him in the rearview mirror.
“You mean Freedom City?”
“I don’t know. Where they’re taking the people who just came in from Cuba.”
“That’s it, but it’s way the hell west of town, Krome Avenue.”
“Can I get there on a twenty?”
The cabbie flipped the meter on and pulled out, and Dan settled back, looking out at a changed city.
He remembered the Gold Coast from years before, driving down with Susan during his summer leave: St. Augustine, Disney World, the Space Coast, Palm Beach, the Everglades, Key West. They’d taken A1A most of the way. How bitter recollected happiness became … . He looked out, trying to stop thinking about it. He didn’t remember all these new buildings. Miami was booming all right.
“So, what’s the Navy think about the trial?”
“I don’t know; we just pulled in. What trial?”
“Some nigger on a motorcycle, he resisted arrest, took two cops on a high-speed chase, then ran himself into an abutment. So what’s Dade County do? The cops are Cuban, right? So it puts them on trial. The verdict’s coming out today.”
“Is that so?” He stared out, only half-listening as the driver railed on. Looking down from the highway, he saw cafés, bodegas, outdoor markets. One sign read, ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE. Then gradually the city fell away, till they were in open country, scrub forest, fields of what looked like cane.
Then he saw new chain-link fence and buses and trucks idling on raw dirt. “Krome Avenue,” said the driver. “Where you want out, at the gate?”
Dan peered out, heart sinking as he saw what he’d feared: hordes of people, guard towers, barbed wire … . “Yeah.”
“Want me to wait?”
“No. Thanks.” He paid and got out and stood outside the gate, adjusting his ribbons. A convoy was coming in, charter buses flanked by Florida State Police with blue lights flashing. Scrub brush grew in a trash-littered ditch, then there was the fence, so new that straw was still stuck to its concrete footings.
When the convoy was through, he went up to the gate. A guard in a sweat-stained uniform faced him through a metal-bar turnstile he made no move to open. He wore a badge and a revolver. His name tag glittered in the sun. It said STANT. “Help you?” he grunted.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Detainee? Guard?”
“Uh, detainees. They’re Cuban. Might have just come in.” He cleared his throat at the hostile stare. “I’m on a Navy ship docked over at bayside. We were picking up refugees in the Straits. There were two, three people I wanted to check on, see if they made it.”
Already, Stant was shaking his head. “When they get in?”
“I’m not sure. But this is where they all come, right?”
“No. They’re routing them to Army camps now—Eglin, Fort Chaffee, Indian Town, all over the country.”
“But isn’t there a central registry—”
“What? No, no, no. This ain’t the Navy, Captain. What you’re looking for flat don’t exist. See those trucks? We’re taking in three hundred a day. They’ve got sixteen thousand in tents in Key West. We are totally overwhelmed.”
“How about your roster, then? I can check that and see if she’s here.”
“There ain’t no list, I told you. Shit, half these people change their names anyway once they hit the United States.”
“Well, some. But others, hell, we got no idea.” Stant seemed to overcome some internal bitterness. He unlocked the turnstile and waved Dan into a guard shack. “Sorry, I been on eighteen hours now. You want to come in, you can look at what we got. But it ain’t much. I mean, this caught everybody by surprise. It’s like there was a signal on the twenty-sixth of July and all of a sudden everybody hauled ass for the beaches. At first, they were sneaking out. Then they realized nobody was stopping them, so they all started coming, and now two days ago we find out fucking Castro’s opened all the jails. We’re getting nutcases, murderers, smugglers, homos, psychopaths, you name it.”
“What, he’s releasing criminals?”
“You don’t get news out there on your ship, huh? Pretty clever, he gets rid of his deadwood and sticks it to us at the same time. FBI’s got teams flying down. Now they got to decide who’s kosher and who they better hold on to. Give us two months and we’ll have it sorted out, but right now it’s a madhouse. You ask me if Juan McSanchez is here, all I can give you’s the old Customs and Immigration salute.” He shrugged and pulled a printout from under a counter. “This here’s all we got, and I’ll tell you now it’s a week out of date.”
“Well, can I go in and look?”
“No can do, sir. Orders are no visitors, not even family. We can’t guarantee safety. We got just enough personnel to man the gate. You got a name, I can put the word out, have them show up here. That might take all day, though.”
“But how do they contact their families?”
“Over there.” The guard pointed; Dan saw lines at a row of pay phones. “They get two free calls—anywhere in the country. They got relatives or friends, they come down and pick them up. After the paperwork and shots, and after they get their green cards.”
“Can I leave a message?”
Stant nodded. “Sure. No guarantee your friends will get it, but we’ll put it out down the grapevine, like I said.”
He wrote her a short note, telling her who he was, where Barrett was, asking her to call. He folded it, wrote “Graciela Gutiérrez” on the flap, and handed it over. After a second, he took out his wallet.
“Forget it; put that back.” Stant tucked the slip into his uniform pocket. “I’ll get it to her, if she’s here.”
Stant let him out and went back inside the shack. Dan stood irresolute, still not convinced there was no way to find her.
He drifted along the fence and came to a section that paralleled the road. The grass within was foot-worn to bare dirt, and men stood along it smoking. Most ignored him, but one wiry mustached man perked up and gestured him closer. He jittered from one foot to the other, rubbing his hands against his folded arms as if he was cold, though the heat was penetrating.
“Say friend, got a cigarette to spare?”
“No, sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Speak English good, don’t I? Used to live in San Antone. You looking for somebody?”
“Yeah.”
“Who? Maybe I can help.”
“Gutiérrez? Graciela Gutiérrez?”
“Oh sure, I know her. Want me to get her for you?”
Dan stared through the fence into the man’s eyes, then looked behind him at dozens, scores, hundreds of men dawdling aimlessly along the fence line, talking or just staring out at passing cars. A tattooed teenager urinated against the trunk of a burnt-looking palm tree.
“You know her?”
“Oh sure.” Tobacco-stained fingers probed the mesh. “Pretty girl, I know her, sure. Give me a dollar, I’ll get her for you. Or find you another girl—”
“Thanks anyway,” said Dan, and paced on, ignoring the shouting, the transition into no-doubt-obscene Spanish. Past the gate area he could look in to where row on row of tents stretched back across the sandy soil. They were going to have a hell of a mosquito problem this close to the Everglades. He saw smoke rising from cook fires, people standing in line holding paper bags, children running, men sitting on overturned cans playing cards. Gradually, he realized the camp was far larger than he’d thought. Only then did he accept, reluctantly, that there was no way to find out if she’d made it or not. It was chaos on the far side of the wire.
They’d fled Cuba looking for freedom. And here they were penned up again.
He only hoped Graciela and Miguelito were among them.
WHEN he got to the restaurant, he found everybody together at a table in the back: Harper and Horseheads; Cephas, the departmental yeoman; Chief Miller, Harper’s second in command on the security team. “Had a little errand,” he apologized as they moved their chairs to let him in. “Then I had to go back to the ship and change.”
“That’s okay, sir. Glad you could make it. Casey was gonna be here, too, but he’s got duty.”
“What’s good?”
“Steak, seafood. We already ordered. You’ll pay, but it’s good.” Dan thought unhappily that after the two taxi rides, he had only four dollars left. Harper looked different, and it wasn’t just the thick gold chain around his neck and the shirt unbuttoned to show his chest hair.
“My God. Is that a toupee?”
The chief warrant patted it fondly. “Ain’t you ever seen this? My liberty rug. Actual tests prove it doubles my batting average. So, what you ordering?”
“Maybe just a salad.”
“Oh, right, you’re the guy owes his fillings to the fucking lawyers. Why don’t I pick it up this time? Hey! Slick Hips! Martini’s your drink, right?”
“Well, okay. Thanks,” Dan said. “I’ll pay you back next week. Straight up, two olives. And a glass of water on the side.”
“Hey, we got mail, didn’t we? You hear from your fucking ex, your little girl?”
“No.” The question reminded him that he hadn’t heard from them since they got under way from Charleston. “I got to find a card, get her a toy or something. Her birthday’s next month.”
“Buy her something nice, something that’ll make her remember her daddy. How old’s she again?”
“Five.”
“That’s a nice age,” said Harper. “I remember when my girls was that age. Cute as shit. They’d run through the house after their bath, their little buns naked, laugh and shriek, Bonnie’d chase them … . But shit, I hardly ever saw them, I was out hustling bombs and beans and bullets. I counted it up once when I was in Westpac. Out of a year, I spent seventy-two days at home. The Navy’s not the sweet deal they make out in the recruiting posters.” Harper paused. “Although there are advantages. Japan, the Philippines.”
“I’ve heard about Olongopo—”
“Shit, not Olongopo. Watching those kids dive off that little bridge into Shit River for pennies. Forget it.” Harper shuddered.
“I liked the double-oh-seven,” said Cephas. “When I was a seaman deuce, we’d all go see Maria. She’d do that with the pickle—”
“Maria, yeah, she’d pick it up from a beer bottle, then lean over and fire it at the audience. Great show. But I hate Olongopo. Guys selling monkey meat on the street, the little kids saying, ‘I love you Joe, no shit. Oh, you cherry boy?’ We used to go to Subic City. We had a bowling team. We were always in and out trying to fix the fucking winches. We’d go up there and there was this little twolane alley and we’d just get fucking plastered on San Miguel and bowl. Sometimes when it rained, the fucking alley would flood, but we didn’t care; we’d bowl till the ball wouldn’t go through the water.” Harper shook his head dreamily, then recalled himself. “But that’s long ago and far away. Used to be you could have fun in port. Now it’s just grind, grind, grind. You’re lucky if you get a night ashore.”
“No shit,” said Horseheads. “It’s like being in prison.”
“Only prisoners get color TV and all the sleep they want.”
“You got that right, Ed. It’s tough on marriages, tough on families. Bonnie’s kind of a slob, but you got to hand it to her, she did all right keeping things going
when I was away. But now Emily’s starting to act up … .”
Dan sat half-listening, thinking how his own marriage had self-destructed; about Susan’s infidelity first, then remembering what the chaplain had said: that infidelity was a symptom, not a cause, that happy wives and happy husbands didn’t need to send signals like that. Could it have worked if he’d been around more, like Harper said? Had Susan been right after all—could they have made it if not for the Navy?
“They ought to pay us more, too,” said Cephas.
“Hey! Over here, Sweet Cheeks!” Harper rapped the table for another round. He stared after the waitress. “Shit, I’ve seen more meat than that on a butcher’s apron. Yeah, you can’t do it anymore on just your paycheck.”
“You’ve got a nice house,” said Dan. “A boat and everything.”
“Because I got the bars, a way to make a little extra on the side. Otherwise, I’d be living in some apartment complex, driving a fucking Honda, and Bonnie’d be shopping at K Mart. And I wouldn’t have Blow Job. Shit, that’s what you need,” he told Dan. “Remember at the beach, we were talking about how you wanted an apartment? If you had the dough? A place to take a girl? You don’t want an apartment. You want a boat. Get them a little drunk, get them seasick, and then take ’em down in that V-berth … . All right! Here comes the food.”
AFTER dinner, they went out, to find a parking ticket on Miller’s rented Dodge. Horseheads crumpled it up and stuffed it in the glove compartment as Harper started the car. “Where to?” said Dan, still not sure he was in the mood. The faces at Krome haunted him.
“Coconut Grove. Skids looked in the paper; there’s a hot group at The Yellow Man.”
“Skids” must be Cephas, though he’d never heard the yeoman’s nickname. “I didn’t know you liked Jamaican music, Jay.”