by Tom Cooper
From Yahchilane, vis-à-vis Nina, Crowe also learned after a few days that Marlon started as a cigar roller and had gotten into some trouble with contraband rum which led to other troubles with bad people in the city.
The young man couldn’t keep still. Kept getting up and parting the seashell print curtain and peering out the window as if expecting an ambush.
* * *
—
They filled the tiny room with Spanish language magazines and newspapers. A hot burner for café con leche. The transistor radio playing telenovellas and the Spanish broadcast of baseball games.
Those first few days Crowe was certain the old man would die. His eyes were glassy and ablaze with fever. His past was coming back to him. He spoke to people who weren’t in the room. People long dead. People in his memory.
Standing close Crowe could feel the sick animal heat wafting off him.
Crowe got Yahchilane to explain to them that they could have adjoining rooms, leave the connecting door open between, but even this they refused. They were overwhelmed and afraid. Sticking together had gotten them here.
A miracle they made it this far.
They wouldn’t chance a hair.
They played board games at the small Formica table. They watched television and listened to the radio. Still the young man kept restlessly pacing, peering out the peephole as if awaiting the authorities. Someone else.
Crowe tried to convince the mother, Nina, that the girl, Mariposa, should not be so close to all of this. And all this time in this small room, like a jail cell. But they would not separate.
Mariposa would sit on the edge of the bed watching PBS, one of the only channels the old wooden television sets got out this far into the Mangrove Coast. She watched Mr. Rogers. “Won’t you come to my neighborhood?” On one of the episodes, Mr. Rogers had a civilized disagreement with a neighbor. The neighbor, a mean-spirited old man with beetled brows and a rancid-looking mouth, would often bellow the refrain, “America, love it or leave it!”
This was the first American phrase Mariposa learned fully. “Love it or leave it!” she would say.
“More pizza, Mariposa?” Crowe would ask.
“Love it or leave it,” she’d say.
“How do you like the weather today, Mariposa?”
“Love it or leave it.”
“Have your orange juice,” Nina would tell her daughter. Their English getting exponentially better by the day.
“Love it or leave it,” Mariposa would say.
FORT LAUDERDALE
TWICE A WEEK YAHCHILANE WOULD DRIVE them in his root-beer-colored van to the radio station in Fort Lauderdale, WIOD, where every week they posted a list in the lobby of those Cuban refugees who’d safely reached American shores. Nina and Marlon would look at the list with wild hope, looking for their aunts and uncles and cousins. And when they didn’t first see a familiar name among them, they’d look over the list a second time, something deflating inside of them as if a nozzle was leaking air, as if somehow in their haste their eyes had failed them.
* * *
—
It was Nina who had saved them all. Piecemeal Reed Crowe gleaned this from the young woman, from Marlon, from Yahchilane.
Nina who read a page of the Bible, King James Version in English, every morning. Nina who woke before dawn so she would have the extra hour to herself. Days she had worked in a nail salon for rich Cuban women.
Nina’s hands were rougher than Crowe’s. Sometimes, while struggling to make a point, while trying to remember a word, she’d place her hand on his knee, tapping. Or flutter her hand on his forearm, fingers palpating.
Those first few days Crowe learned Nina worked in a nail salon so long that she would never forget the chemical stink. No, she vowed for the rest of her life to cut her fingernails and toenails the same way her mother and grandmother did, with old-fashioned clippers.
She scrimped four years of laundry money, sewing fishermen’s shirts, mending their filthy underwear, stitching their reeking socks, to buy the sardine boat. From Havana her family set sail, bound for Miami. But the trade winds and the El Niño knocked them off course.
They veered adrift.
And while at sea they saw a host of makeshift boats. All abandoned or capsized.
A few with dead people. Some with dead children.
Nina clamped her hand over her daughter Mariposa’s eyes.
And it was only later still that Crowe discovered their reason for leaving. Marlon, the brother, had gotten on the wrong side of the pro-Castro, anti-rebel forces. Drugs and guns and street crimes.
The news didn’t surprise Crowe. The brother’s young feral energy. The coiled anger inside him ready to spring.
Nina told him she never had an inkling she would end up here in America.
Some days being here still felt like a fantasy, she said, a dream. Here there was air-conditioning and hot water and most shocking of all a phone, right there, a phone in her own room. They could call anyone in the world they liked.
In Havana there was only one phone in the lobby of their apartment complex. A pay phone for hundreds of people. The line of people waiting to use it was often ten or more deep and it could cost a whole day’s pay just for a two-minute conversation. Most of the time you couldn’t hear, the noise, the yelling, the shoving, the street noise.
* * *
—
Another night Nina and Crowe were down by the water alone when he offered her a drag off the joint he lit. He did so with a lot of goofy semaphore, hand signals.
“No, never.”
It was the first time Crowe heard sternness in her voice. But it was not the first time he felt self-conscious in her presence.
He snubbed out the joint and put it in his pocket.
They sat quietly beyond water’s reach, on the edge of the high tide line. The sinking sun made a golden bridge on the ocean. A squadron of pelicans flew past, hovering low over the bronze water. Feeling suddenly awkward Crowe focused with unusual intensity on the bright cherry-red balloon of a spinnaker on the far ocean horizon.
Nina kept glancing behind her shoulder at the motel. Always worried about her child, her brother.
Crowe said, “Your brother keeps a tight eye on you.”
“More other way around.”
The woman seemed so much older than her years. Not in appearance, but in maturity. It was a quality that Crowe found himself immensely attracted to.
There was a southwest breeze keeping the insects at bay. A strand of her pure black hair whipped in the wind and stuck to her cheek, and her eyes caught the light and glowed a mossy green.
She glanced over her shoulder again. Now her brother was on the back porch, leaning with his arms draped and crossed over the railing. He was watching them. When he saw Crowe turning and watching too the brother shoved away and went back into the room.
Crowe, thinking, She is beautiful, said, “Does he dislike me?”
“Dislike?”
“Me, muy mal?”
“No, scared.”
“Scared, a new land. Yes.”
“Old land too. The people from. Our brother work with evil man.”
Nina looked around the beach, pointed at one of the cats, a marmalade-colored cat, that was slinking among the dunes after a green anole lizard. “Gato,” she said.
“Cat?”
“Catface they call the man.”
Crowe wasn’t sure he understood. “He looks like a cat?”
She gestured at her face. “Marks,” she said. “Hurt.”
“Scarred,” Crowe said.
“Yes, scarred. Mark. The scar, they look like? What you say?” She mimed with her fingers.
“Whiskers?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“Catface. He was born looking like a cat?”
“Scarred. Plane crash? In water? Trapped?”
Crowe’s mouth was suddenly dry. His heart cold as clay. He no longer cared, at least for the moment, so much what Nina thought of him. “A big plane?”
Little gesture with two of her fingers. “Piqueño.”
Crowe felt his blood pressure. “Where?”
“Somewhere in Everglades. Many years ago.”
SOMEWHERE IN THE EVERGLADES
SOMEWHERE IN THE EVERGLADES, NINA TOLD Crowe. A plane crash.
How long ago was that? Decades. Not hard to keep track, considering that was almost certainly the night his daughter was conceived. One might say the night the entire course of his life was conceived. The first seed of the mother of all plants sowed. One event unfurling after another. One tendril begetting the next.
And just when you thought you had the weed ripped out at the root, out sprang another shoot.
* * *
—
That night twenty years ago, after taking his soon-to-be-wife and later-to-be-ex-wife home, Reed Crowe motored his skiff back to the scene of the crash. Part of him knew it was a risk. Part of him knew it was dumb. Already he had more of the pot than he ever needed and then some.
But shitting away all that money?
Those men dead in the swamp, the weed belonged to no one now.
It would belong to the first man with the gumption to take it.
Bits of flaming wreckage still steamed and hissed in the black water. The crabs and the alligators and the frogs hemmed in on the floating bodies. But at the sound of his motor the creatures dispersed and retreated to their hiding places, watching him from a cautious distance.
Crowe cut off the motor and waited. He listened. Just the black terra incognita of the Florida swamp. The last diminishing gurglings of the bog as it sucked the plane down.
Crowe went from one bobbing plastic-wrapped parcel to the next, oaring his way around the brimstone, hoisting the packages over the gunwale. Every so often he had to draw close enough to one of the bodies that he could smell their brisket stink. The odor of singed hair and the chemical stink of burned clothing. And a few times he glimpsed the fire-ravaged faces.
Once, he could have sworn he saw the eye move. He thought he saw the eye roll in the moonlight and he called hello into the dark and then there was no answer. The eye went still and the body was still.
He went on into the night.
* * *
—
All that pot he sold over the years. All that pot he smoked within plain sight of the locals and the tourists here on Emerald Island. All those regulars who came back year after year.
Flagrant.
Taunting.
Unwittingly, but still.
No wonder, then, if someone could easily trace it all back to him. Even some thick-witted sonofabitch.
FISH HEADS
SOON AFTER THE CUBANS SHORED ON Emerald Island, the old man’s condition worsened, his coughs sounding like wet BBs shaking in a coffee can. Standing three feet away Crowe could feel the scorch of his fever. He could smell the grim gray sickness of him among the other smells of people living in too cloistered and hot a space.
If they didn’t get him to a hospital, Crowe knew, the old man would die.
The county hospital nearest Emerald Island was impossible, as they’d ask too many questions, ask for documentation and forms. He might as well rent a plane, advertise on a flying banner.
They would have to go down to Miami, where the doctors were less suspicious and asked fewer questions.
No matter how much the air-conditioning labored, the room stayed fuggy, warm enough that there was always sweat on your forehead.
Not good for the old man, nor for the kid.
The girl sitting there on the bed with her dolly, the old man dying on the other bed.
The dolly, a gift from Wayne. Wayne kept bringing the girl candy and coloring books. Kept making jokes with his face.
Maybe it was his imagination, but Crowe didn’t care for Wayne’s long glances, or where they settled. Mariposa’s chest in the VISIT FLORIDA T-shirt just beginning to bud.
“You want me to take the girl out for a walk?” Crowe would ask Nina.
“You ask that already,” she said, sterner every day. More herself. Her early temerity he’d mistaken as shyness. “And I say no.”
Now he understood she’d only been scared, overwhelmed.
Strangers in a strange land. Of course. And like any rational people they were doubtful of his intentions, this bearded man in the middle of nowhere Florida. No wife or child of his own. Associated with another man, rattailed, of dubious repute. And associate to another man, Native American, who was more inscrutable than the aforementioned combined.
Anyone in their position would be wary.
But after a week, as they convalesced, their personalities showed piecemeal. Crowe observed the change as they became less tentative.
The television and radio played constantly, often at the same time. Telenovellas, The Price Is Right, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers. The girl, Mariposa, was transfixed. She absorbed catchphrases. “Good morning, America,” she’d say. “Love it or leave it.” “Have it your way.” “Three, two, one, contact.” “Won’t you be my neighbor?”
The girl was an ace copycat.
Her favorite was something called “Fish Heads,” off the radio. “Fish heads, fish heads,” she’d sing in her accent, “roly poly fish heads.”
“My god, stop with the fish heads,” Nina would say. But with a little smile.
The girl would giggle and go on, “Eat them up yum, fish heads.”
* * *
—
In the mornings the girl would go down to the beach with the mother and in the shade of a beach umbrella Mariposa would write in her homework books with her crayons and pencils. She would feed Herman the heron grapes, cherries. Then the seagulls would come in wanting their share and before long a mob would dive-bomb after the girl and she’d go off squealing and running as the birds cawed and wheeled.
Marlon, chain-smoking, would pace and watch from the balcony. He smoked so much, you couldn’t help but notice his pinkie finger missing, the scarred nub that barely jutted out of the palm.
One time Crowe asked Nina what happened to Marlon’s finger. Trying to be casual, discreet, “Was it work?”
She scoffed. “Work? Marlon? If only. If only he’d just stayed at the cigar shop.”
Seeing Crowe’s questioning expression, she said, “The accident happened when he wasn’t working. When he was doing other kind of work. The wrong kind.” Nina left it at that, cursing under her breath, shooting her brother a private look of disdain. Even her moles, somehow, looked incensed.
So there you had it, Crowe thought. That would have explained Marlon’s temperament, his perpetual state of unease.
Most days you could find him playing a short, agitated game of solitaire at the Formica dinette table, the door kept ajar to air out the stifling room. So hot that summer that the wall unit air conditioners rattled as if suffering emphysema.
Portable fans rotated feebly in all the rooms. If the sea breeze was coming in cool off the ocean then people opened their windows and the conch-pattern curtains billowed.
After a game of solitaire, Marlon would smoke a quick cigarette. Then inside again for another quick game of solitaire. Marlon would spend whole afternoons in this fashion. A cuckoo bird executing ingress and egress in a deranged, off-kilter clock. Out the back door for a cigarette, inside for a game of solitaire, out the front door for a cigarette, inside for a game of solitaire, and then back to the ocean-facing side again.
After lunch and Mr. Rogers
it was naptime for the girl. Afternoons they spent in the room with the grandfather. The mother and brother and girl said prayers and Hail Mary’s. They tidied up the room, which was crowded but orderly, all the victuals and provisions, all the canned goods and pill bottles and lotions, neat and orderly on top of the vanity and television and bed stands and Formica table.
The only main alteration made to the room was the crucifix hanging above the old man’s makeshift convalescent bed, and this addition made only after Marlon asked permission and borrowed the hammer and nail.
SANTERIA
OFTEN DURING HIS ERRANDS CROWE WOULD catch Wayne Wade snooping and sneaking around their room. Crowe would tell him to mind his own business. Then Wayne Wade would scuttle off chastised and mopey for a while with his broom and dustpan. But after a spell he’d invariably return, the room the center of his daily orbit.
“You see all that voodoo shit?” Wayne said to him one day, leering at the Cubans’ motel door. “Candles and shit. Little dolls.”
Crowe knew of what Wayne spoke. On one of the nightstands Nina had erected a makeshift shrine. Ceremonial herbs and beads. Pictures of the saints. Scraps of yellow and red cloth.
Crowe said, “What’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me?” Wayne gave him a gummy grimace of incredulity. Yanked the bill of his soiled Miami Dolphins cap. “Voodoo, I’m talking.”
“They’re religious.”
“That ain’t religious. That’s batshit.”
“Saints. They’re called saints.”
They stood a few doors down on the mezzanine. They lowered their voices when Crowe pointed his chin at two fat kids standing at the vending machine.
Wayne asked in a harsh whisper, “And you don’t think it’s batshit crazy? At least admit it’s a fire hazard, all that crap burning near the wall.”