Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  Estrellita was speechless again. Something was happening to her face that went beyond the boundaries of a mother-and-daughter. It was black anger. Estrellita already got it when Magdalena made references to Santería. It was an indirect way of calling her an ignorant, socially backward guajira. She knew that. But now Magdalena was uttering outright blasphemy. “Lazzy-boy” she dared call Saint Lazarus. She was indulging in mockery of the faith’s powers of divination, such as throwing the coconut beads. She was ridiculing her faith and her very life.

  With a cold fury that came from deep in her throat, she hissed out, “You want to leave home? Then do it. Do it now. I don’t care if you never set foot in this house again.”

  “Good!” said Magdalena. “Finally we agree!”

  But her voice had a tremor in it. The look on her mother’s face and the rattlesnake tone of her voice… Magdalena didn’t dare say another word. Now… she’d have to get out… and that set off a quake in the pit of her stomach. As of now, no longer would her new life among the americanos be the exotic, exciting, naughty adventure of a free spirit… As of now, she would be dependent upon an americano for a place to live, her paycheck, her social life, her love life. The only things she’d have going for her would be her good looks… and something that had never failed her… not yet… namely, her nerve.

  Euphoria! was the name of the bubble that enclosed Nestor when the shift ended and he drove his aged Camaro north across the Miami line into Hialeah. Superman! was the name of the hero within. Superman lit up that bubble like a torch held aloft.

  The Chief himself, Chief Booker, had driven all the way to the marina at midnight to give him an attaboy!

  Hialeah… at the midnight hour… a silhouette in the dark of row after row after row after row after block after block after block of little one-story houses, the casitas, each nearly identical to the one next door, all of fifteen feet away, each on a 50-by-100-foot lot, each with a driveway going straight back… chain-link fencing fortifying every square inch of everybody’s property… front yards of rock-solid concrete adorned with little concrete Venetian fountains. But tonight the Camaro’s rolling flow made all of Hialeah luminous. This was not the same Nestor Camacho—you know, Camilo Camacho’s son—driving home anonymously from the same old night shift—

  Not at all—for the Chief himself had driven all the way to the marina at midnight to give him an attaboy!

  Nestor has arisen, radiant, from the ranks of Hialeah’s 220,000 souls. He is now known throughout Greater Miami, wherever the TV digit-rays have reached… the cop who risked his life to save a poor panicked refugee from the top of a towering schooner mast. Even now, at the midnight hour, the sun shone ’round about him. He entertained the idea of parking the Camaro two or three blocks from home and walking the rest of the way with a calm, measured pace, just to offer the citizens a glimpse of the radiant one… and to watch them nudge one another… “Look! Isn’t that him!” But the fact was, there were damned few pedestrians to be seen, and Hialeah didn’t have a nightlife worthy of the name. Besides, he was so damned tired…

  His block was just as dim as the rest of them, but he could spot La Casita de Camacho immediately. A streetlight, weak as it was, was enough to create a reflection in the slick, glossy, almost glassy lettering emblazoned upon the side of his father’s big Ford E-150 van parked right out front: CAMACHO FUMIGADORES. His old man was proud of that lettering. He had paid real money to have a real commercial artist do it. The letters had black shading that made them seem to pop out of the side of the van in three dimensions. CAMACHO FUMIGADORES!… Camilo Camacho’s own bug-and-vermin-killer company… Strictly speaking, FUMIGADORES, plural, was not accurate. The firm had exactly one fumigator, and one employee, period, and his name was on the side of the van. For three years Camilo had “employed” an assistant, his son Nestor. Nestor couldn’t stand it… spraying Malathion into the dark, dank recesses of people’s houses… inevitably inhaling some of the shit… and listening to Camilo saying, “It won’t kill you!”… smelling Malathion every day in his clothes… smelling it on himself… getting so paranoid, he thought everybody he met could smell it on him… When people wanted to know what he did, he would say he had been working for a population adjustment firm but was looking for another job. Thank God he finally got accepted at the Police Academy! His father, on the other hand, was proud to have a firm that adjusted populations in people’s homes. He wanted todo el mundo to see HIMSELF parked in big letters in front of his house. Nestor had been a Miami cop for only four years but long enough to know there were plenty of neighborhoods… Kendall, Weston, Aventura, the Upper East Side, Brickell… where any man who parked such a vehicle in front of his house would be regarded as a cockroach himself. Likewise, his wife and the set of grandparents who lived with them, and the son who was a cop. The whole nest of them would constitute a regular infestation. There were parts of Coral Gables where it was against the law to park a commercial vehicle like that in front of your house. But in Hialeah it was a point of pride for a man. Hialeah was a city of 220,000 souls, and close to 200,000 must be Cubans, it seemed to Nestor. People were always talking about “Little Havana,” a section of Miami along Calle Ocho, where the tourists all stopped at Café Versailles and had a cup of terribly sweet Cuban coffee and then walked a couple of blocks to watch the old men, presumably Cubans, play dominoes in Domino Park, a tiny plot of parkland placed right there on Calle Ocho to lend a rather drab neighborhood a little… authentic, picturesque, folklórica atmósfera. That done, they could say they had seen Little Havana. But the real Little Havana was Hialeah, except that it was hard to call it little. The old “Little Havana” was dreary, worn out, full of Nicaraguans and God knew who else, and the next thing to being a slum, in Nestor’s opinion. Cubans would never sit still in a slum. Cubans were by nature ambitious. So every man who had a vehicle with commercial lettering on it, proving that he was an entrepreneur, no matter how small, parked it importantly in front of the house. CAMACHO FUMIGADORES! That plus the Grady-White cruiser in the driveway proved that Camilo Camacho was not a working-class Cuban. One out of maybe every five casita owners in Hialeah had some sort of cruiser—cruiser meaning it was too big to be denigrated as a “motorboat”—elevated up, way up, upon a towing trailer. The prow usually extended out beyond the facade of the casita. The towing rigs were so high, they were like pedestals… to the point where the cruisers dwarfed the casitas themselves. Here in the darkness, to Nestor their silhouettes made the boats seem like missiles about to take off above your head. Nestor’s old man had paid the same commercial artist to do the same sort of glossy, glassy lettering on the Grady-White cruiser’s hull. LAS SOMBRILLAS DE LIBERTAD, it said, “The Umbrellas of Liberty.” The name stood for the great life-or-death adventure of the old man’s youth. Like Magdalena’s family, Camilo and his father, Nestor’s grandfather, were country boys from Camagüey. Nestor’s grandfather had visions of getting away from a life of cutting cane and mucking out stables and humping plows. City Life he craved. He moved, with his wife and son, to Havana. No longer a guajiro! Now a full-fledged proletarian! Free at last, the new prole got a job as an inspector in the raw-sewage-filtration section of the Malecón waterworks. “Inspector” meant he had to put on rubber boots and carry a flashlight and hunch over like a gnome and walk through drainage pipes in the darkness while rivers of shit and other vile excrescences flowed and occasionally gushed over his boots. It was not perfumed, either. That wasn’t the City Life he had in mind. So he and Camilo stealthily built a crude dinghy in the cellar of their proletarian apartment block in Havana. They stole two big café umbrellas to use as sails… and shields against the sun. Camilo and his parents and Lourdes, Camilo’s girlfriend (in due course, his wife and Nestor’s mother), set out one night for Florida. They nearly died a hundred times, at least as the old man told the story (many more than a hundred times), from sunstroke, dehydration, starvation, storms, towering waves, currents gone amok, winds gone dead, and God knows w
hat else, before reaching Key West twelve days later, all four at the point of death.

  Well, now Nestor had a heroic saga of his own… to relate to them. He could hardly wait. He had called home three times from the marina. The phone was busy each time, but maybe it was better this way. They would hear it all from his own lips… with their young hero standing before them, watching their faces go from aglow to agog.

  As usual, he parked the Camaro upon the little stretch of driveway between the sidewalk and the boat.

  The moment he steps inside the house, his father is there waiting with his arms crossed over his chest and his I, Camilo Camacho, Lord of This Domain look on his face… his lordly demeanor somewhat compromised by the fact that he’s wearing a T-shirt that hangs outside his Relaxed-Fit blue jeans… The crossed arms bear down on his paunch from above, and the belt of his low-cut jeans hoists it up from below, causing it to swell out like a watermelon underneath the T-shirt. Nestor’s mother is one step behind I, Camilo. She looks at Nestor as if he, her third child, her last-born baby, were a little flame sizzling down a fuse to—

  —Ka-boom!—I, Camilo Camacho, explodes:

  “How could you do that to a man of your own blood? He’s eighteen meters from freedom, and you arrest him! You condemn him to torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons! How could you do that to the honor of your own family? People have been calling! I’ve been on the phone all night! Everyone knows! They turn on the radio, and all they hear is ‘Traidor! traidor! traidor! Camacho! Camacho! Camacho!’ You drag us through shit!” He cuts a glance back at his wife. “It has to be said, Lourdes”—turns back to Nestor—“Through shit you drag the House of Camacho!”

  Nestor was stunned. It was as if the old man had smashed a baseball bat against the base of his skull. His mouth fell open, but no sounds came out. He turned his palms upward in the eternal gesture of baffled helplessness. He couldn’t speak.

  “What’s the matter?” said his father. “The truth cut your tongue out?”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?” It came out at least an octave too high.

  “I’m talking about what you done! If some cop had done to me and your grandfather”—he nodded in the general direction of Nestor’s grandfather and grandmother’s, Yeyo and Yeya’s, room in the back—“what you just done to one of your own people, your own blood, you wouldn’t be here now! You wouldn’t be a big cop in Miami! You wouldn’t be nothing! You wouldn’t exist! Not even exist!”

  “Dad—”

  “You know what we had to do so you could even exist? Me and your grandfather had to build a boat by ourselves at night, down in a cellar so the block warden wouldn’t come nosing around. And we set out to sea at night, too, with Yeya and your mother—and all we had was food and water and a compass and two outdoor café umbrellas we had to steal at night and rig up as sails. Café umbrellas!”

  “I know, Dad—”

  “Twelve days it took us! Twelve days of burning up all day and freezing all night and getting thrown this way”—he pantomimes the boat pitching up and down—“and that way”—pantomimes the boat rolling—“and this way”—yawing—“and that way”—climbing waves—“day and night—and bailing out water day and night, too. We couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t hardly eat. It took all four of us bailing out water around the clock just to keep the boat afloat. We coulda died a hundred times”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that! For the last four days we had no more food and one bottle of water for the four of us—”

  “Dad—”

  “We were four skeletons when we finally reached land! We were half out of our minds! Your mother was having hallucinations, and—”

  “Dad! I know all that!”

  He, Camilo Camacho, went silent. He took in a breath so deep and twisted his face into such a grimace, complete with bared upper teeth and popped veins, he was either going to bite someone or have a stroke—until at the last moment he found his voice and rasped out:

  “All that you call it? All that? All that was life or death! We almost died! Twelve days on the ocean in an open boat! There wouldn’t be no Officer Nestor Camacho without all that! He wouldn’t exist! If some big cop had arrested us eighteen meters from shore and sent us back, that woulda been the end of all of us! You woulda never been nothin’! And you call it all that! Jesus Christ, Nestor, what kind a person are you? Or maybe you not a person! Maybe you got claws and a tail like a mapache!”

  ::::::A raccoon he calls me!::::::

  “Listen, Dad—”

  “No, you listen! You don’t know what it is to suffer! You arrest a guy eighteen metros de libertad! To you it don’t matter that the Camachos came to America in a homemade—”

  “Dad, listen to me!”

  Nestor said it so sharply, his father didn’t try to finish his sentence.

  Nestor said, “This guy didn’t have to do”—he started to say “all that” but caught himself just in time—“do anything like what you and Yeyo had to do. This guy paid some smugglers three or four thousand dollars to take him straight to Miami in a cigarette boat. Goes seventy miles an hour on the water, a cigarette boat. Took him what—maybe two hours to get here? Three at the most? In an open boat? No, in a cabin with a roof. Starving? Probably didn’t have time to digest the big lunch he had before he left!”

  “Well—that don’t matter. The principle’s the same—”

  “What principle, Dad? The Sergeant gave me a direct order! I was carrying out a direct order!”

  A derisive snort. “Carrying out a direct order.” Another snort. “So do Fidel’s people! They carry out direct orders, too—to beat people and torture people and ‘disappear’ people and take everything they have. You never heard of honor before? You don’t care about your family’s honor? I don’t wanna hear that pathetic excuse again!… Carrying out a direct order…”

  “Come on, Dad! The guy’s up there screaming to the crowd on the bridge and throwing his arms around like this”—he demonstrates—“Guy’s lost it! He’s gonna fall and kill himself, and all six lanes of traffic are backed up on the causeway, Friday rush hour, the worst—”

  “Oh ho! A traffic jam. Why didn’t you say so?! Whoa, a traffic jam! That’s different… So you’re trying to tell me a traffic jam is worse than torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons?”

  “Dad, I didn’t even know who the guy was! I still don’t know! I didn’t know what he was yelling about! He was seventy feet up above me!”

  In fact, he had known, more or less, but this was not the time for fine distinctions. Anything to bring an end to this tirade, this terrible judgment—by his own father!

  But nothing was going to stop I, Camilo Camacho, Lord of This Domain. “You said he was gonna fall and kill himself. You were the one who nearly made him fall and kill himself! You were the one crazy to arrest him, no matter what!”

  “Jesus Christ, Dad! I didn’t arrest him! We don’t arrest immig—”

  “Everybody saw you do it, Nestor! Everybody knew it was a Camacho who did this. We saw you do it with our own eyes!”

  It turned out that his father and his mother and his grandparents had been watching the whole thing on American TV with the sound muted and listening to it on WDNR, a Spanish-language radio station that loved to get furious over sins of the americanos. Nothing Nestor could say would calm his father down in the slightest. I, Camilo Camacho, threw his hands up in the air as if to say, “No hope… no hope…” and turned and walked away.

  His mother stayed put. Once she was sure that I, Camilo, had gone into another room, she threw her arms around Nestor and said, “I don’t care what you’ve done. You’re alive and home. That’s the main thing.”

  Don’t care what you’ve done. The implied guilty verdict so depressed Nestor, he said nothing. He couldn’t even croak out an insincere Thanks, Mami.

  He went to his little room exhausted. His whole body ached, his shoulders, his hip joints, the sartorius muscles on the inner sides of his thighs, and his hands, which
were still raw. His hands! The joints, the knuckles—it was agony if he so much as tried to make a fist. Just taking off his shoes, pants, and shirt and getting up onto the bed—agony… ::::::Sleep, dear God. Knock me unconscious… that’s all I ask… sail me away from esta casita… into the arms of the Sandman… Take away my thoughts… be my morphine… ::::::

  But Morpheus failed him. He’d doze off and then—jerk alert with his heart beating too fast… doze off—jerk alert… doze off—jerk alert!… all night, fits and starts… until he jerked alert at 6:00 a.m. He felt like a burnt-out husk. He was sore all over, sore as he had ever been in his life. Moving the joints of his hips and legs was so painful, he wondered if they would ever support his weight. But they had to. He had to get the hell out of here!… Go somewhere… and kill time until his Marine Patrol shift began at four o’clock. He edged his feet off the bed and slowly sat up… sat there groggily for a minute… ::::::I feel too awful… I can’t get up. So what are you going to do, hang around here waiting for more abuse?:::::: With straining willpower he made himself get sheer torture! up. Gingerly, warily, he tiptoed to the living room and stood at one of the two front windows of the little house, watching the women. They were already out hosing down their concrete front yards up and down the block, this being Saturday morning.

  No man would be caught dead with one of those hoses in his hands. That was a woman’s job. That would be the first thing his mother did when she got up: power-spray their fifty-by-twenty-foot rock-hard sward. Too bad water didn’t make concrete grow. By now their front yard would be fifty stories high.

  As far back as he could remember, Nestor’s picture of Hialeah was of thousands of blocks like this one, endless rows of casitas with little paved front yards… but no trees… studded here and there with vehicles that had writing all over them… but no trees… boats that said Conspicuous Leisure… but no trees. Nestor had heard of a time when all over the country the very name Hialeah summoned up a picture of Hialeah Park, the most glamorous and socially swell racetrack in America, set in a landscaper’s dream, a lush, green, wholly man-made 250-acre park with a resident flock of pinkest flamingos… now a shut-down, locked-up relic, a great moldering memento of the palmy days when the Anglos ran Miami. Today a bug-gassing van parked out front with your name on it was enough to make La Casita de Camacho socially swell in Hialeah. He had admired his father for it. Every night the old man came home with his clothes giving off whiffs of Malathion. But Nestor took that as a sign of his father’s success as a businessman. The same father now turns on him when he most needs his support!