The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  Mariela and I decided to stay in the air-conditioned bus, snuggle, pretend we were teenagers, or tourists, or anyone we were not.

  When we arrived back at the Carmelita, there was a message on the phone from Juany. “He says he’ll talk to you, but no phones, no recorders, and no guns,” Juany explained when I returned his call. “OK?” OK.

  “I told him all about the specific dates and stuff your lady showed me. And the photos. He’s really keen to see the raft photo. Says it might help. So bring it, OK?”

  3

  Paco did not tell us his last name, if indeed the name Paco bore any relationship to an actual nickname, or first name. Everything about Paco oozed unreal-surreal. While he would never have made the Best of Miami Bus Tour’s list of the city’s “riches and most famous,” he already topped my own list of Miami’s weirdest.

  Paco lived in a rundown pastel pink bungalow on a large property on the fringes of the city, surrounded by a thick pink, taller-than-me concrete wall studded at the top with broken glass and razor wire. You had to buzz and identify yourself and your business to an unseen camera in order to get through the wrought-iron gate, and then do it all again in order to pass through the steel door that served as the entrance to Paco’s lair.

  Paco was in his eighties, short and frail with lank greasy grey hair. He was also skinny as the toothpick that dangled from his lips. Despite the heat, he wore a too-roomy flannel lumberjack shirt unfashionably tucked into a pair of better-days blue jeans, held up by a too-big belt that could have wrapped twice around his waist. A portable oxygen tank helped to keep him wheeze-breathing. Despite all that, Paco projected an intimidating, dangerous presence. Perhaps it was the fact the walls of his kitchen—the only room we were permitted to enter—seemed to double as a weapons depot, filled to bursting with an army-sized arsenal of rifles, guns and assorted weaponry, all intended for mass destruction and all organized by make and model.

  “In case,” he explained cryptically. And then he pulled up his shirt to show us the faded red-raw puckers where bullets had once entered his abdomen, his chest, and his shoulder. “Feel,” he invited Mariela, though not Juany or me. She gently ran her fingers over the ridges, pulled them back. “Castro,” he said simply. “Sixty-one.”

  Juany, appearing to realize we were heading for an extended history lesson, did his best to cut it short. “I think Fernando told you on the phone what these folks are looking for,” he said to Paco.

  “Pictures,” Paco answered enigmatically. “Show me.”

  Mariela took the photos from her purse, handed the pile off to Juany who passed them, in turn, to Paco, who dismissively riffled through her collection of pictures of Alex, Roberto, Delfín, and Tonito, one after another in quick succession, dropping each one on the kitchen table. Paco stopped, however, when he came to the snapshot Roberto’s mother had taken of the raft her son and his friends had been building to ferry them to America. He carefully studied it for what seemed like minutes, moved the image around in his hands, as if approaching it from a different angle might produce the information he was looking for. Finally, he looked up at Juany.

  “Bottom cupboard on your right,” he instructed. Juany opened a kitchen cupboard, which was bereft of pots or pans, but filled from top to bottom with piles of what looked like random file folders. They were not random. “Third pile on your right, fourth folder from the top,” he pointed.

  “The old guy’s a crackpot, but an organized, obsessive crackpot,” Juany had explained on the drive to Paco’s house. “My guy knows him from the brigades. They fought together at the Bay of Pigs, spent time in prison in Cuba. Apparently, Paco hasn’t been any good for regular work since then—war wounds, PTSD, I don’t know what…so he lives in his pink fortress—on a pension, maybe some help from the rich brigadistas, who knows—and he collects. And collects. Apparently, at some point, maybe after Elián, he began collecting information about every rafter, every raft, that came from Cuba. Somehow people in the exile community heard about what he was doing—who knows how—and began sending him news stories, photos, notes. My guy says if anyone knows anything about your rafters, it would be Paco.”

  Juany retrieved the folder, handed it to Paco. In the notch of the folder, I could see a meticulously handwritten subject line. “MAY 16, 2004—Stock Island, Key West.” Paco opened the folder, removed an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo, studied it, picked up Mariela’s photo, examined them side by side, handed them both to Juany, who considered them, and then passed them on to Mariela. I looked over her shoulder as her eyes darted from one image to the other, then back again.

  “One and the same,” Paco pronounced with satisfied finality. “Doesn’t look it from the second picture, course, but whoever built it musta done a good job…travel all that way and not a piece fall off. They done good work.”

  “Where did—”

  “Who found—”

  Juany and I stepped over one another, trying to get Paco to answer our standard-issue journalist’s questions. Mariela said nothing. She stared instead, agape, at something in Paco’s black-and-white photo that the rest of us had missed. I looked again, more carefully this time. And then I saw it. Sticking out from beneath the planking of the raft, there was an arm—not a human arm, but one belonging to a small doll.

  4

  Bob turned out to be a grandfatherly, salt-of-the-water fisherman from Stock Island, a spit of a place just past the Boca Chica Naval Air Station on the Florida’s Overseas Highway and just before end-of-the-keys, end-of-the-highway Key West.

  Juany had an interview scheduled for his next magazine piece in Miami that day, which he luckily couldn’t change, so Mariela and I had taken the endless three-and-a-half-hour Greyhound bus trek from Miami to Key West on our own. We didn’t talk. Mariela seemed lost inside her own thoughts, I lost myself thinking about what she must be thinking.

  Bob met us at the station in his pickup truck and drove us to his home, a hurricane-ready raised bungalow on concrete posts near a trailer park. He’d been apologetic when I called the day before. “I’m real sorry, but that raft, or whatever you call it, is long gone. I kept it for a month or so. Just in case somebody claimed it. Nobody did. My wife said it was an eyesore she didn’t want around. So I broke it up, saved a few boards and a couple of oil drums that didn’t leak, then dropped the rest off at the dump.” Bob told us he didn’t know anything more about the raft that was worth knowing, but he had eventually, reluctantly agreed to meet with us anyway.

  In person, he was far more personable. He led us up his home’s outside staircase and into a small, tidy kitchen where he introduced us to his wife, Maudie, a cheerful, squat woman in her sixties, who offered us tea and cookies. “Store-bought, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Not to worry,” I said. “Store-bought’s fine.” And they were. Better than fine. We hadn’t eaten since Miami.

  “And I hope you don’t mind kids,” Maudie said. “We got the grandkids for the weekend. Not sure where they are now, but I do know they’ll be back. And then we’ll all know it.”

  “I love children,” Mariela said, sharply enough that Bob and Maudie both turned to look at her. “I just mean,” she said, recovering quickly, “I don’t mind having children around.”

  “So,” Bob said, looking at me, friendly-wary. Who was I and what was this all about anyway? “You said on the telephone you were interested in that old raft I found. Not sure what I can tell you. I don’t remember so good these days. But why don’t you ask away.”

  Bob was looking at me. I looked at Mariela. She looked back. She wanted me to take the lead. After her off-kilter I-love-children outburst, she seemed fearful of the way words might come out of her mouth.

  “Oh, and before you ask your questions….” Bob stepped on the silence. “I guess I have a few of my own. First of all, what’s your interest in all this anyway? And why after all these years?”

  I loo
ked again at Mariela. She nodded. “My wife is from Cuba,” I began, “and she believes she might know”—not ‘have known.’ I’d become more adept at the delicate phrasing required to traverse these shoals—“the people on that raft.”

  “No people!” Bob’s response was swift, almost angry. “There were no people on board when I found her. No people at all.”

  “No, I understand,” I said. I did. Or thought I did. “We’re just trying to find out whatever we can. For their families back in Cuba,” I lied.

  “And how’d you know to find me?” Why did he sound so suspicious? And how could he not have known about Paco and the photo already?

  “Uh, it’s a long story,” I responded, off balance now, no longer sure what or how much I should say. “There’s a guy in Miami we met, a Cuban. His hobby is collecting information about all the rafts that came this way—”

  “Must have been Arturo,” Bob said to his wife, relaxing slightly. Then to us, “Cuban guy used to work for me on the boat sometimes. He was real interested when I brought the raft ashore. Wanted to know where I found it, and when. Took a bunch of pictures. He’s gone now. Couple years. Maybe to Miami. Maybe he’s the one you were talking to.”

  “Maybe,” I said. No need to tell him about Paco. “Anyway,” I continued, brushing past the truth nettles in my path, “if you could just tell us a little bit more about where and when you found it, the circumstances, that sort of thing.”

  Bob took a breath, calm now, began. “Sure. Well, it was a long time ago and, like I said, my memory…but I believe it happened sometime in the spring of zero-four—”

  “May 16?” I cut in, remembering the date on Paco’s file folder. “Could it have been then?”

  “Could have been. Makes sense. I know it was right after stone crab season. I was supposed to have a charter that day, some guy from up north wanted to go marlin fishing, but then he cancelled on me at the last minute.” Bob’s memory seemed to be better than he’d let on. “So I figured I’d just take the boat out for a little exercise, you know, get a little sun.” He looked shyly, slyly at his wife. “A little nap, maybe a little nip.”

  “I know what you do out there,” Maudie chided indulgently, then looked over at us. “No secrets after thirty years.” She smiled. “No secrets at all.” I wondered if that could ever be true.

  “So,” I said, trying to keep our conversation from veering too far off course, “what do you remember about the raft? Where were you when you found it? What time of day?” I wasn’t sure why I’d even asked that last question, except I remembered Mariela telling Juany she’d studied the tides and currents, knew the hour-by-hour weather in the Strait. Maybe—

  “Bob, honey, why don’t you just take them out there, show them?” Maudie again. “’Sides, it’d be a beautiful afternoon on the water.”

  “It would that,” Bob responded, relieved, it seemed, to escape the confines of the kitchen, perhaps the presence of Maudie.

  In short order, we drove to the marina where Bob kept the twenty-five-foot Parker Pilothouse Sport cabin cruiser he called Baudie (a clever play on Bob and Maudie, don’t you know), which boasted dependable, fully refurbished Yamaha F300 engines. I could not have told you any of that on my own, but Bob seemed eager to share in the sporty man-to-man kind of way some men have, even if the man he was talking to had no idea what he was talking about.

  “The real money’s in charters these days,” Bob explained to me as we motored into open ocean. “Fishing’s OK, but it mostly just fills in the gaps between the charters.”

  Mariela said nothing. She stood outside the Baudie’s cockpit near the stern, staring out into the vast nothingness of ocean. Staring. Imagining…imagining what?

  Finally, Bob checked his GPS coordinates, cut the engine. A sudden, deafening silence filled the spaces where the thrum of the engines had been.

  “It was right around here,” Bob said. “Two-and-a-half, three miles southwest of Taylor State Park. Late afternoon, the sun hanging on in the west over there. I was just tootling around, enjoying the breeze, like I said, enjoying a little nip…” He reached down, opened a small box at his feet, lifted out a bottle of Bacardi white, a rum I might have enjoyed before I knew its history. He took a long swig as if recreating the events of that day, passed the bottle to me. I took a swig—when in Rome—and turned toward the stern. Mariela must have slipped into the cabin after Bob turned off the engine. I extended the bottle. She shook her head. I passed it back to Bob.

  “Saw it off in the distance, that direction,” he said, pointing to the south, “maybe two hundred yards or so. I knew what it was right away. Not the first raft I’ve seen in these waters, that’s for sure. I couldn’t see any sign of life aboard, but it was hard to know at that distance, and my eyes aren’t that good with the distance anymore, so I decided to steer closer. Thought if there was anyone aboard I could maybe point them in the right direction toward Key West. Easy enough to get disoriented out here. Especially with no GPS. Most rafts don’t have GPS,” he said, chuckling at his own joke. “But there wasn’t anybody. So then I looked closer. The raft was in surprisingly good shape. I thought, well, why not, I could use it for a barge, maybe do a little towing, but—”

  “And you didn’t see anyone on board, in the water around—”

  “No!” he snapped. “I already told you…no people!”

  I backed off. “OK.” Changed course. “So what did you do then? Call the coast guard?”

  Bob seemed to eye me even more suspiciously now. What had I said? I could sense his mind working, but I had no clue what neural pathways he was navigating, or in what direction, or for what purpose.

  “There wasn’t any point,” he said softly after a minute. “What would they have done? I mean it was just one more empty raft. If the coast guard chased after every empty raft in the Straits of Florida, they’d never have any time to do anything else, now would they?”

  I looked over at Mariela who stood, listening. What was she thinking? That Bob hadn’t seen anyone, so they must have already died? Or that Bob hadn’t seen anyone, so they must have been picked up already by another vessel, or maybe they swam to shore, or?… I needed to push harder. “So, you’re absolutely sure. You didn’t see anyone, any sign of life, any—”

  Bob was angry now. “Why the fuck do you keep asking me that? I already told you. There was nobody. I didn’t see anybody, I—”

  “My son was on that raft.” We both turned to look at Mariela, Bob suddenly stunned silent, staring now, waiting, expectant. “His name is Tonito and he was three years old then.” She spoke in an even, unemotional voice, though I could see the wetness clouding her eyes. “I am trying to find my son.” Mariela reached into her purse then, removed the photo of Tonito, shoved it toward Bob, who grasped it, reluctantly, at its edge between his thumb and forefinger, as if the image itself could do him harm. He did hazard one fleeting glance at Tonito’s smiling face, saw more than he could cope with, pushed the photo back into Mariela’s hands, and then rushed out the cockpit door. Leaning as far as he could manage out over the side of the Baudie, Bob gagged, vomited, gagged, vomited until he had nothing left inside to throw up.

  I tried to make sense of what had just happened. The ocean was flat, wave-less. Bob had taken no more than a few swigs from the rum bottle, and none of us had eaten more than a few bites of Maudie’s store-bought cookies. While Mariela and I stood frozen in our odd tableau, staring, trying not to stare, Bob wiped his mouth with his forearm, then wiped his arm on his jeans, then used his balled-up fist to wipe the tears out of his eyes, and, finally, stood up.

  “I know,” he said after he stumbled back into the cockpit, looking directly into Mariela’s eyes. I had no idea what he meant. Then he turned to me. “I figured that’s why you called the other night. All this time, I been waiting for somebody to call. And then, you know, I almost told you not to come. Wasn’t sure I could tell
you what I had to tell you. Do you ever feel like that? You know you need to tell, but you’re so afraid of telling….”

  I had felt that. He turned back to Mariela, beseeching in his eyes now. “I saw your boy, ma’am. I saw them all. They was still on the raft, four of them, laying there on the decking, twisted together, the men almost in a circle around the boy. He was in the middle, all curled up. They were all dead. They’d been dead for a while, bloated, purple. The maggots had been at them.” He stopped, looked at Mariela. “Sorry. The birds were hovering too, waiting for me to leave so they could come back.”

  Mariela cried without sound, tears rolling down her cheeks. I wanted to go to her, wrap her in my arms, hold her. I couldn’t move.

  Bob let out a long, snuffly sigh that began deep in his gut. “I know I should have called the coast guard. I thought about it. I did. But then I thought, you know, god forgive me, all the waiting around for them to arrive, and all the questions, and all the paperwork….” He paused, waiting for his breathing to slow. “And I’d been drinking too. All afternoon. I didn’t need to get charged just for doing the right thing…so I never called.” Paused again. Looked at us, one to the other. Tried to read our reactions. We were unreadable. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, “so sorry.”

  I guessed I knew but knew I didn’t. Not for sure. “What did you do then?” I asked.