by Paul Monette
The mast came down with a shattering roar, crushing the wheelhouse, cutting a horrible swath along the port side of the prow. Several refugees were pinned. Others were knocked in the water. Now they could hear the tearing down below, as the bones of the ship broke up and the sea began to pour. Tony hauled Manolo into the lifeboat. He beckoned to several people at the rail, but they were in shock. Only the quick and the strong made their desperate way to the safety of the dory. Ten or twelve had clambered in when the last rope snapped, flinging the lifeboat over the side. It smashed into the water.
Tony grabbed the rudder. One of the sailors took the oars. The sea was so rough, they were pulling away from the trawler fast. The air was thick with the shriek of refugees, as those in the water struggled to stay afloat. Several of the men in the lifeboat reached out over the sides to the women and children, hauling aboard perhaps twenty in the first chaotic minutes. Tony tried to keep steering in a circle, but a wave would nearly swamp them and toss them aside. When he next caught sight of the trawler, it was a couple of hundred yards away. It still held together, but even in the gale-force wind Tony could hear the wail of surrender rising from its deck.
A strange and giddy laugh made Tony turn his head. The toothless retard had just been fished from the water. Practically naked, he stood in the lifeboat and clapped his hands, swaying to the beat of the storm as if it was music. Everyone else looked half-dead with grief and exhaustion. An angry sailor, outraged to hear such levity, grabbed the retard around the neck and made as if to toss him back in the water. Only a brutal cry from Tony managed to stop him. The retard subsided and sank to the floor of the boat.
There was nobody left in the water. Though they peeled their eyes and circled about, they saw nothing in the stormy waves. It was as if Yemaya had sucked them down to her dark cave at the bottom. Tony’s jaw was grim as he looked at the pitiful band of survivors—twenty-five, thirty at most, in a boat that would have held fifty. Manolo stirred below him and opened his eyes. He looked around gravely at the shivering refugees, then up at Tony. His eyes asked the question he couldn’t speak: We gonna make it? Tony nodded.
Suddenly one of the sailors let out a cry. He was pointing at something far out in the water. Tony squinted into the wind till he saw it: a boy, holding tight to a scrap of timber, bobbed up and down in the waves. In a flash Tony had shifted course, and the sailor at the oars poured on his strength. A shout of hope went up in the boat. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the figure of the boy. It was as if they could endure their losses if only they could be granted this one small reprieve.
The boy had seen them now. They shouted and waved encouragement as the lifeboat closed the distance. Manolo manned a second pair of oars. It seemed they would make it in time, in spite of the surging waves. They were only fifty feet away. Now Tony could see the look of shock and numbness in the boy’s white face. He had reached the end of his strength, and he didn’t seem able to focus on his rescuers. The refugees kept calling, as if they could will the life back into him. Thirty feet now. Twenty-five. The boy let go of the timber and slipped beneath the surface.
A wail of pain went up in the lifeboat, twin to the wail that rose from the deck of the trawler. The rowers’ faces were beet red as they strained against the sea. the boy’s face broke the surface; one hand clutched the air. Tony roared a curse of rage at the raw, indifferent sky. He suddenly felt he was going to explode. He tore off his shoes, jumped up on the gunwale, and dove into the whirling current.
He hadn’t swum in five years, since the languid days in the harbor at Marseilles. If he’d thought about it, he would have realized there was no way he could swim in such an angry sea. But he didn’t think; he just moved. He reached the spot where the boy went down. He was just visible beneath the surface, adrift and not even struggling now. Tony went under and dragged him up. He was deadweight as he choked to breathe. Tony crawled back toward the boat with his one free arm. All the refugees were shouting with joy. Manolo grinned at the rudder, shaking his head at his crazy friend.
Then the sea did a curious twist, like a woman turning restless in her sleep. Where Tony had been a bare ten feet from the boat, suddenly it was twenty feet. A whirlpool seemed to have caught at the boat, so Manolo couldn’t keep it steady for the rescue. A wave slapped Tony and left him gasping. He realized he hadn’t much strength at all. The boy was conscious, but he couldn’t help. Tony paddled frantically to stay afloat. Over the crest of the waves he could see the lifeboat drifting off. The refugees watched in stunned silence. The cheering had stopped.
The retard stood up in the stern and started to laugh again. They turned on him now as if they would kill him for sure. He thought it was all a game. He pulled from beneath the rear seat an inner tube, black rubber and spattered with patches. He whirled in a pirouette and flung it with all his might. It needed the strength of a madman. The inner tube dropped to the water a couple of yards from Tony. The cords were standing out in Tony’s neck as he groped toward it. In the end the sea took pity on him and waved him the last few feet. He grabbed it. The boy climbed onto it.
A wild hurrah went up in the lifeboat. Manolo had to shout them down, or they would have tipped it over. The retard kept on twirling, lost in a gleeful jig, but Manolo let him go on dancing. He knew good luck when he saw it. He sent up a silent prayer to Yemaya, as he watched Tony clamber up into the tube and settle the boy in his lap. They were drifting further and further off. Tony waved once, and Manolo waved back. They would not meet again till God knew where. But yes, they were going to make it. Nothing could stop them now.
The trawler did not break up. It shipped an enormous amount of water, but it was stubborn, having outlived twenty years of hurricanes in the Straits. Powerless, it drifted west till it ran aground in the Keys. Twenty-nine people were lost overboard, another thirty-two recovered from the lifeboat. It was hard to be sure about the numbers, since the captain’s list was lost when the wheelhouse was crushed. The U.S. agencies had lists of their own, but they’d proven to be notoriously inaccurate. Enormous changes had been made at the last minute, when the boats were being loaded in Havana. In the case of the trawler, they had to trust the refugees themselves for the information. This only made the bureaucratic tangle more of a nightmare than it usually was.
Fortuitously, the lifeboat came to rest at Miami Beach. The storm ended just before dawn, and they rolled in on a beautiful set of breakers, beaching right outside the Fontainebleau Hotel as the sun poured in from Africa. Manolo and thirty others stepped from the boat onto their new homeland. They walked up the powdered beach to the hotel’s outdoor terrace, where the early risers were just ordering breakfast under yellow and white umbrellas. The refugees stood in a line at the terrace wall, gaping at the splendor. The maitre d’ called the Miami police, the police called the INS office, and within two hours the Cubans were on their way in a bus to the Key West Naval Station. But not before they had ruined the breakfasts of a score of well-tanned lawyers and doctors.
Tony and the boy—his name was Paco—were blown like a leaf before the wind, but they never fetched up on land before the storm was done. They bore west for a while in the wake of the trawler, but every riptide sent them zigzag. Every capricious gust tossed them back a mile for every two they traveled. When the storm did a turnabout, shifting east and blowing the lifeboat towards Miami, the inner tube seemed to ride a hundred whirlpools. By midday the next day the sky was blue, and the swell of the ocean had dwindled to a whisper. The inner tube floated in the stark noon light, its two occupants fast asleep, the eight-year-old curled in the man’s arms like a kid brother.
A Coast Guard chopper spotted them as it swooped low over the emerald waters, looking for boats gone astray in the storm. Paco and Tony woke up to see the chopper descending like some vast prehistoric bird, whipping up the water as it drew close. Then it lowered its hooks, and a loudspeaker barked instructions, in English and then in Spanish, till Tony had secured them both in a sling. They were winched up in
to the belly of the craft, and it rose to a most majestic height and headed north-northwest.
It touched down on the wide lawn at Key West Naval, about two hundred yards from the mess, where the processing of the refugees was proceeding at an inchmeal pace. Four or five long lines trailed out into the yard. Though a squad of Coast Guard and INS officers worked to keep the lines orderly, several hundred refugees were clamoring to find their families and friends, many of whom had been separated when they were assigned to boats. But a certain hush came over the crowd when the chopper landed, as if they thought some bishop or politician had come to give a speech. Tony and the boy stepped down, flush with a sense of importance. They crossed the lawn, ignored the lines, and walked right into the building. Nobody stopped them.
Tony had already figured Paco to be his ace in the hole. If he said they were cousins, there would be a lot less likelihood of their finding out he was a convict. He sized up the row of tables along the wall as if it was a gauntlet he had to run: Immigration and Naturalization, Customs, Public Health, FBI, then a scatter of church and relief organizations. His arm around Paco’s shoulder, Tony cut into the Public Health line between two fretting families. They were all so scared, they looked like they thought they were going to be shot if they made the slightest wrong move. All over the room were TV crews, doing interviews with any refugees they found who could speak a little English.
“There is no vegetables, there is no meat,” cried a vehement woman, clutching a baby as her husband stood mute beside her. She spoke right into the camera, ignoring the blonde who held out the microphone, as if she thought this testimony would ensure her citizenship. “Two kilos of rice a month. No milk. The Russian shoes cost ninety dollars. My husband he drive a bus, a hundred dollars a month. How can we live?”
Arguments broke out everywhere. A young black refugee railed at the glazed official at the INS table. He shook his papers angrily in the official’s face. “Mira! Why you not listen? I am not prisoner, I am electrician. Look this,” he shouted, holding up a square of cardboard. “Union card. Emmanuel Rojas. No prisoner.”
“Yes, Mr. Rojas,” the official replied. “These documents are easily forged. Step this way, please.” And he prodded him into the FBI line. The rule was very simple: all young men were convicts until proven otherwise.
Someone had gotten hold of a portable radio. A salsa beat played loud and hot. In one corner of the mess, a church group had set up a food dispersal. Refugees clustered around, pushing and shoving. Each went away with his first American ration of Dr. Pepper and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Nearby, an obvious transvestite in a clinging gown and white-blonde wig, a sort of Cuban Dietrich, attempted to perform a song for the minicam unit from Channel 4. When the crew turned away to look for more political matters, Dietrich tore off his wig and began to shout in Spanish. “They ask for identification wherever you go. There is no freedom—there is nothing there. Everyone is the same, is boring. We have to steal to live,” he said with a passionate dignity. But the unit had already moved on, because it didn’t exist unless it was in English.
Tony had almost reached the Public Health table when he heard a cry of joy from the INS line beside him. Paco suddenly bolted. A man darted forward and grabbed the boy up in his arms. An uncle. The pair danced in a circle, laughing with relief, and then the boy pulled the man over to meet Tony, all the while pouring out the story of the rescue. The uncle shook Tony’s hand with both of his, thanking Tony effusively. “You are a saint,” the man said brokenly. “Anything you ever need. My name is Colon, Waldo Colon. Anything.”
A moment later they’d said goodbye, and Tony was all alone. A male nurse stepped up to examine him, shining a light in his eyes. Blood pressure. Pulse. The nurse peeled back Tony’s lip to check his teeth, as if he was a horse. Then Tony stepped up to the table for the first interrogation. The official jotted down a straightforward medical history, seeming to scarcely pay attention. Then at the end, kind of casually, he said: “What prison were you in?”
“No prison,” retorted Tony. “My wife and children are here in Miami. They’re waiting for me.”
“Mm,” the official murmured, checking out Tony’s short haircut, the drab of his clothes. He beckoned an FBI agent, who asked Tony to follow him. They went back of the tables to a makeshift office fashioned out of hospital screens. Two men sat at desks six inches deep in records. Cigarettes dangled from their mouths, and each sipped often from a coffee mug. They looked as if they were trying to mimic each other. The one on the left glanced through Tony’s medical file and then smiled at him, addressing him in Spanish.
“So what’d you do in Cuba, Tony?”
“Construction business,” said Tony Montana precisely—in English. Not even much of an accent.
“Where’d you learn English?”
“I go to the movies,” he said with a grin. He had studied two years with an old priest in the next cell. It was the first instance of self-improvement among the convicts that the priest had seen since the revolution.
“Got any family in the States, Tony?” asked the man on the right.
“No, nobody,” Tony said, abandoning the story of the wife and kids as being too complicated.
“Ever been in jail, Tony?”
“No, never.”
The man on the left slurped his coffee and checked a list in his hand. Dryly he asked: “You ever been in the crazy house?” Tony laughed contemptuously, not deigning to answer. And the man continued: “How about your sex life, Tony? You like guys? You ever dress up like a woman?”
“Fuck you,” said Tony Montana.
The two men laughed and lit cigarettes. They tilted back in their chairs, looking him up and down. Tony tried to think what power they had. They couldn’t send him back, could they? They couldn’t turn away refugees. That’s what America was for.
“So where’d you get the beauty mark, Montana?” asked the one on the left, trailing a finger down his own smooth cheek. “Eatin’ pussy?”
“Knife fight,” Tony said. “When I was a kid. You should see the other guy.”
The one on the right stood up, breaking the symmetry. He came around the desk and held out his hand, as if he meant to congratulate Tony. Tony made a move to shake, but the agent gripped his wrist and held it up. “And this?” he asked, pointing at a small tattoo between the thumb and forefinger. A heart with an arrow through it.
“That’s for my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend, my ass.” He dropped Tony’s hand and turned abruptly back to the table. His partner looked puzzled. The one who had noticed the tattoo puffed with pride as he straddled his chair. He savored the notion of being one up on his fellow agent. “Some kinda code they use in the can,” he said. “I seen it when I was stationed down there. Some of ’em got these pitchforks on their hand. They’re the hit men. You can’t believe how much they kill each other—like animals. I never seen a heart before.”
“You want to tell us what it means, Montana?” the other asked briskly, furious at himself for his ignorance. “Or you want to continue this up at Fort Chaffee?”
“Listen, you got it all wrong,” said Tony smoothly. “All I was in for, see—they gimme two years for possession of American dollars. See, I was planning to get a boat and come across to Florida. I hate Cuba. You understand? I’m a political prisoner.”
The two men laughed, and the one on the left said: “That’s funny, that’s good. Real original.”
“It’s true!” cried Tony threateningly, stepping forward and slamming his hand on the desk. The two men didn’t move a muscle. “You gotta have dollars, or you can’t get anywhere. I want to make somethin’ of myself here. I got about two thousand bucks off a Canadian tourist, but it turned out to be a trap, see—”
“What’d you do, mug him?”
Till now there had been a certain back-and-forth, as if the three of them were involved in a highly delicate negotiation. In the end they might have let him go. But now Tony lost all sense of the game. He
sneered at them, and he bit off his words like a snarling dog. “Hey, what’s it to you if I fuck Castro, huh? What would you do? They tell you all the time what to think, what to say. You wanna be a sheep, like everybody else? Puta! You gonna work your ass off fifty years and never own nothing? Whaddaya think I am? I’m no little puta of a thief. I’m Tony Montana, and I’m a freedom fighter got kicked out of Cuba. And I want my human rights just like President Jimmy Carter says. Okay?”
The two men turned to each other. They smiled sardonically. The one on the left offered the other a cigarette. They put their Winstons between their lips, then the one on the right flicked his Zippo and lit both. Each took a nice long drag. The one on the left nodded toward Tony. “Carter oughta see this human right,” he said.
“I’ll tell you somethin’, Tony,” drawled his partner. “We’ve heard all the crap before. We’re up to our knees in it. From what I can gather, Castro’s been cleanin’ out his sewers.”
“We’re gonna send you up to Fort Chaffee for a while,” said the first. “Let ’em do a little observation. See if they can figure out what rock you crawled out from under, before we let you loose with the other animals. Hey, Jack,” he called to the guard who was standing just outside the partition, “this one’s goin’ to summer camp.”
Tony stood tall and arrogant. “You send me where you like,” he declared. “Nothing you can do to me Castro has not done already.”
And he turned and joined the guard and strode out of the makeshift office like a king in exile. The two officials boiled inside as they watched him go, wishing they had the power to punish, like a proper inquisition. There was a ruckus as the next one was being brought in. He reached out and punched Tony’s arm. “Hey, cousin,” he said, as Tony spun around with both fists raised. It was Manolo. The two men laughed, though the guards restrained them from embracing. No words were necessary. Tony was led away, and Manolo stepped in to face the two men at the desks.
