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The Man on the Mast


SMACK the Safe Boat bounces airborne comes down again SMACK on another swell in the bay bounces up again comes down SMACK on another swell and SMACK bounces airborne with emergency horns police Crazy Lights exploding SMACK in a demented sequence on the roof SMACK but Officer Nestor Camacho’s fellow SMACK cops here in the cockpit the two fat SMACK americanos they love this stuff love it love driving the boat SMACK throttle wide open forty-five miles an hour against the wind SMACK bouncing bouncing its shallow aluminum hull SMACK from swell SMACK to swell SMACK to swell SMACK toward the mouth of Biscayne Bay to “see about the man on top of the mast” SMACK “up near the Rickenbacker Causeway”—

—SMACK the two americanos sat at the helm on seats with built-in shock absorbers so they could take all the SMACK bouncing while Nestor, who was twenty-five, with four years as a cop but SMACK newly promoted to Marine Patrol, an elite SMACK unit, and still on probation, was SMACK relegated to the space behind them where he SMACK had to steady himself against something called a leaning pole and SMACK use his own legs as the shock absorbers—

A leaning pole! This boat, the Safe Boat, was the opposite of streamlined. It was uuuuuuug-lyyy… a twenty-five-foot-long rubbery foam-filled pancake for a deck with an old tugboat shack stuck on top of it as a cockpit. But its two engines had 1500 horsepower, and the thing went across the water like a shot. It was unsinkable unless you took a cannon and blew twelve-inch-diameter holes, a lot of them, through the foam filling. In tests, nobody had even been able to tip one over, no matter what insane maneuver he tried. It was built for rescues. And this shack of a cockpit he and the americanos were in? It was the Ugly Betty of boatbuilding—but soundproof. Outside, at forty-five miles an hour the Safe Boat was kicking up a regular hurricane of air, water, and internal combustion… while here inside the cockpit you didn’t even have to raise your voice… to wonder what sort of nutcase you were in for up on top of a mast near the Rickenbacker Causeway.

A sergeant named McCorkle with sandy-colored hair and blue eyes was at the wheel, and his second-in-command, Officer Kite, with blondish-brown hair and blue eyes, was in the seat next to him. Both of them were real sides of beef with fat on them—and school-of-blond hair!—and blue eyes! The blond ones!—with blue eyes!—they made you think americanos in spite of yourself.

Kite was SMACK on the police radio: “Q,S,M”—Miami Police code for “Repeat”—“Negative?” SMACK “Negative? You saying nobody knows what he’s doing up there? Guy’s up on top of a” SMACK “mast and he’s yelling, and nobody knows what” SMACK “he’s yelling? Q,K,T?”—for “Over.”

Staticky crackle staticky crackle Radiocom: “Q,L,Y”—for “Roger”—“That’s all we got. Four-three’s dispatching a” SMACK “unit to the causeway. Q,K,T.”

Long stupefied SMACK silence… “Q,L,Y… Q,R,U… Q,S,L”—for “Out.”

Kite just SMACK sat there for a moment, holding the microphone in front of his face and squinting at it as if SMACK he never saw one before. “They don’t know shit, Sarge.”

“Who’s on Radiocom?”

“I don’t know. Some” SMACK “Canadian.” He paused—

Canadian?

—“I just hope it ain’t another” SMACK “illegal, Sarge. Those dumb f*cks are so crazy they’ll” SMACK “kill you without even meaning to. Forget about negotiating, even if you got somebody who can” SMACK “speak the f*cking language. Forget about saving their f*cking lives, as far as” SMACK “that goes! Just get ready for some Ultimate Fighting under water with some” SMACK “mook who’s a mile high on adrenaline. If you wanna know what I think, that’s the nastiest” SMACK “high there is, Sarge, adrenaline. Some biker on crank—he’s nothing compared to one a these scrawny little” SMACK “mooks jacked up on adrenaline.”

Mooks?

The two americanos didn’t look at each other when they spoke. They looked straight ahead, eyes pinned on the prospect of some dumb f*ck on top of a mast up by the Rickenbacker Causeway.

Out the windshield—which slanted forward instead of back—the opposite of streamlined—you could see the wind was up and the bay was rough, but otherwise it was a typical Miami day in early September… still summer… not a cloud anywhere… and Jesus, it was hot. The sun turned the whole sky into a single gigantic high-blue-domed heat lamp, blindingly bright, exploding bursts of reflection off every shiny curved surface, even the crests of the swells. They had just sped past the marinas at Coconut Grove. The curiously pinkish skyline of Miami was slowly rising at the horizon, scorched in the sunbursts. In strict point of fact, Nestor couldn’t really see all that—the pinkish cast, the glare of the sun, the empty blue of the sky, the sunbursts—he just knew it was all there. He couldn’t really see it, because naturally he had on a pair of sunglasses, not dark but the darkest, magno darkest, supremo darkest, with an imitation gold bar across the top. That was what every cool Cuban cop in Miami wore… $29.95 at CVS… gold bar, baby! Equally cool was the way he kept his head shaved with just a little flat helicopter pad of hair upstairs. Even cooler was his big neck—cooler and not easy to come by. It was now wider than his head and seemed to merge with his trapezius… way out here. Wrestler’s bridges, baby, and pumping iron! A head harness with weights attached—that’ll do the trick! The big neck made a shaved head look like a Turkish wrestler’s. Otherwise a shaved head looked like a doorknob. He had been a skinny five-foot-seven kid when he first thought about the police force. Today he was still five-seven, but… in the mirror… five feet and seven inches’ worth of big smooth rock formations, real Gibraltars, traps, delts, lats, pecs, biceps, triceps, obliques, abs, glutes, quads—dense!—and you want to know what was even better for the upper body than weights? Climbing the fifty-five-foot-high rope at Rodriguez’s “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!,” as everybody called it, without using your legs. You want dense biceps and lats—and even pecs? Nothing like climbing that fifty-five-foot-high rope at Rodriguez’s—dense!—and defined by the deep dark crevasses each mass of muscle dropped off into at the edges… in the mirror. Around that big neck he had a fine gold chain with a medallion of the cool Santería saint, Barbara, patron saint of artillery and explosives, that rested on his chest below his shirt… Shirt… There you had the problem with the Marine Patrol. On street patrol a Cuban cop like him would make sure he got a short-sleeved uniform one size too small that brought out every bulge of every rock formation… especially, in his case, the triceps, the big muscle on the back of the upper arm. He regarded his as the ultimate geological triumph of the triceps… in the mirror. If you were truly cool and Cuban, you had the seat of the uniform trousers taken in—a lot—until from behind you looked like a man wearing a pair of Speedos with long pants legs. That way, you were suave in the eyes of every jebita on the street. That was exactly the way he had met Magdalena—Magdalena!

Suave he must have looked when he had to prevent this jebita from passing the barricade across 16th Avenue at Calle Ocho and she put up this big argument and the anger in her eyes only made him crazier for her—¡ Dios mío!—and then he smiled at her in a certain way and said I’d love to let you by—but I’m not going to and kept on smiling in that certain way and she told him two nights later that when he started smiling she thought she had charmed him into letting her have her way but then he stood her up rigid with but I’m not going to—and it turned her on. But suppose he had been wearing this uniform that day! Christ, she wouldn’t have noticed anything other than he was in her way. This Marine Patrol uniform—all it was, was a baggy white polo shirt and a pair of baggy dark-blue shorts. If only he could shorten the sleeves—but they’d notice immediately. He would become the object of hideous ridicule… What would they start calling him… “Muscles”?… “Mister Universe”?… or just “Uni”?—pronounced “Yoony,” which would be even worse. So he was stuck with this… uniform that made you look like a grossly overgrown retarded toddler in the park. Well, at least it didn’t look as bad on him as it did on the two fat americanos right in front of him. From here, leaning back against the leaning pole, he got all too close a look at them from the rear… disgusting… the way their flab blubbered out into love handles where the polo shirts tucked into the shorts. It was pathetic—and they were supposed to be fit enough to rescue panicked people in the water. For an instant it occurred to him that maybe he had become a body snob, but it was only that, an instant. Man, it was weird enough just going out on a call with nothing but americanos around you. This hadn’t happened to him even once during his two years on street patrol. There were so few of them left on the police force. It was double weird being both outnumbered and outranked by a couple of minorities like this. He had nothing against minorities… the americanos… the blacks… the Haitians… the Nicas, as everybody called Nicaraguans. He felt very broad-minded, a nobly tolerant young man of the times. Americano was the name you used with other Cubans. For public consumption, you said Anglo. Curious word, Anglo. There was something… off… about it. It referred to white people of European ancestry. Was there something a little defensive about it, maybe? It wasn’t all that long ago that the… Anglos… divided the world up into four colors, the white, the black, the yellow—and everyone left over was brown. They lumped all Latinos together as brown!—when here in Miami, in any case, most Latinos, or a huge percentage, a lot anyway, were as white as any Anglo, except for the blond hair… That was what Mexicans were thinking about when they used the word gringo: the people with the blond hair. Cubans used it for comic effect now and then. A car full of Cuban boys see a pretty blond girl on a sidewalk in Hialeah, and one of them sings out, “¡Ayyyyy, la gringa!”

Latino—there was something off about that word, too. It existed only in the United States. Also Hispanic. Who the hell else called people Hispanics? Why? But the whole thing began to make his head hurt—

McCorkle’s voice! jerked him back into the here and now. The sandy-haired sergeant, McCorkle, was saying something to his blondish second in command, Kite:

“This don’t sound like an illegal” SMACK “to me. I never heard of an illegal coming in on a boat with a” SMACK “mast. You know? They’re too slow; they’re too obvious… Besides, you take Haiti… or” SMACK “Cuba. There ain’t no more boats with masts left in places like that.” He turned his head to the side and tilted it SMACK back to speak over his shoulder. “Right, Nestor?” Nes-ter. “They don’t even have” SMACK “masts in Cuba. Right? Say ‘Right,’ Nestor.” Nes-ter.

This annoyed Nestor—no, infuriated him. His name was Nestor, not Nes-ter, the way americanos pronounced it. Nes-ter… made him sound like he was sitting in a nest with his neck stretched straight up in the air and his mouth wide open waiting for Mommy to fly home and drop a worm down his gullet. These morons obviously never heard of King Nestor, hero of the Trojan War. Yet this idiot sergeant thinks it’s funny to treat him like some helpless six-year-old with this Right? Say “Right,” Nestor crack. At the same time, the crack assumed a second-generation Cuban like him, born in the United States, would be so absorbed with Cuba that he might in some stupid way actually care about masts or no masts on Cuban boats. It showed what they actually thought about Cubans. ::::::They still think we’re aliens. After all this time they still don’t get it, do they. If there’s any aliens in Miami now, it’s them. You blond retards—with your “Nes-ter!”::::::

“How would I know?” he hears himself saying. “I” SMACK “never set foot in Cuba. I never laid eyes on” SMACK “Cuba.”

Wait a minute! Bango—right away he knows that came out wrong, knows it before he can sort it out rationally, knows that “How would I know?” is hanging in the air like some putrid gas. The way he hit the “I”… and the “foot” and the “eyes”! So dismissive! Such a rebuke! Impudent and a half! Might as well have called him a stupid blond retard straight out! Hadn’t even tried to hide the anger he felt! If only he had added a “Sarge”! “How would I know, Sarge” might have given him a fighting chance! McCorkle is a minority, but he’s still a sergeant! All he has to do is file one bad report—and Nestor Camacho flunks probation and gets blown out of the water! Quick! Throw in a Sarge right now! Make it two—Sarge and Sarge! But it’s hopeless—too late—three or four interminable seconds have gone by. All he can do is brace himself against the leaning pole and hold his breath—

Not a sound from the two blond americanos. Nestor becomes terribly conscious of his heart SMACK hammering away beneath the polo shirt. Idly idly idly so what so what so what he is aware of the skyline of SMACK downtown Miami rising still higher as the Safe Boat speeds closer, coming upon more and more “lulus,” as the cops call pleasure boats owned and aimlessly navigated by clueless civilians sunbathing SMACK too fat too bare too slathered with thirty-level sunblock SMACK ointments, and passes them so fast, the lulus seem to whip by them SMACK backward—

Jesus Christ! Nestor practically jumps. From here right SMACK behind the man’s chair he can see Sergeant McCorkle’s thumb rising above his shoulder. Now he’s SMACK motioning it back toward Nestor without moving his head—he keeps looking forward—and saying to Officer Kite, “He wouldn’t” SMACK “know, Lonnie. He never f*cking set foot in Cuba. He never f*cking laid eyes on it.” SMACK “He just… wouldn’t… f*cking… know.”

Lonnie Kite doesn’t respond. He’s probably like Nestor himself… waiting to see where this is all leading… while downtown Miami rises… rises. There’s the SMACK Rickenbacker Causeway itself, crossing the bay from the city over to Key Biscayne.

“Okay, Nes-ter,” McCorkle says, still giving Nestor only the back of his head, “you wouldn’t know that. Then” SMACK “tell us what you would know, Nes-ter. How about that? Enlighten us. You would” SMACK “know what?”

Get the Sarge in right away! “Come on, Sarge, I didn’t” SMACK “mean that the way—”

“Would you know what day this is?” SMACK

“Day?”

“Yeah, Nes-ter, this is a particular day. Which particular day is this? Would you know that?” SMACK

Nestor knew the big fat blond americano was f*cking with him—and the big fat blond americano knew he knew—but he, Nestor, didn’t dare say anything indicating that he did SMACK know that, because he also knew the big fat sandy-haired americano was daring him to say something else smart so he could really hang him.

Long pause—until Nestor says as SMACK simplemindedly as he can: “Friday?”

“That’s all it is—Friday? Would you know if it was maybe more than just” SMACK “Friday?”

“Sarge, I—”

Sergeant McCorkle’s voice runs right over Nestor’s: “This is f*cking José Martí’s f*cking birthday,” SMACK “is what it is, Camacho! Why wouldn’t you know that?”

Nestor feels his face scalding with anger and humiliation. ::::::“F*cking José Martí” he dares say! José Martí is the most revered figure in Cuban history! Our Liberator, our Savior! “F*cking birthday”—filth on top of filth!—and the Camacho to make sure Nes-ter gets the filth right in the face! And this is not Martí’s birthday! His birthday is in January—but I don’t dare fight back even with that!::::::

Lonnie Kite says, “How did you know that, Sarge?”

“Know what?”

“Know this is” SMACK “José Martí’s birthday?”

“I pay attention in class.”

“Yeah? What class, Sarge?”

“I been” SMACK “going to Miami Dade, nights and weekends. I completed both years. I got my certificate.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Sergeant McCorkle. “Now” SMACK “I’m applying to EGU. I wanna get a real degree. I ain’t planning on making this a career, you know, being a cop. If I was a Canadian, I’d consider it. But I ain’t” SMACK “a Canadian.”

Canadian?

“Look, I don’t wanna discourage you, Sarge,” said the blondish-brown-haired Officer Kite, “but what they tell me is” SMACK “EGU is more than half Canadian itself, the student body, anyway. I don’t know about the” SMACK “professors.”

Canadian—Canadian!

“Well, it can’t be as bad as the Department—” The Sergeant suddenly broke off that line of thought. He kept his hands on the controls, lowered his head, and thrust his chin forward. “Holy shit! Look” SMACK “up there! There’s the causeway, and you see up there up top a the bridge?”

Nestor had no idea what he was talking about. Being this far back in the cockpit, he couldn’t begin to see the top of the bridge.

At that instant the staticky voice of Radiocom: “Five, one, six, oh, nine—Five, one, six, oh, nine—what is your” SMACK “Q,T,H? Need you soonest. Four-three says they got a bunch a tontos, they’re out a their cars yelling” SMACK “at the man on the mast in a disorderly fashion. Traffic on the causeway’s” SMACK “stopped in both directions. Q,K,T.”

Lonnie Kite Q,L,Y’d that for Five, one, six, oh, nine and said, “Q,T,H. Just” SMACK “passed Brickell heading straight to the causeway. See the sails, see something on top a the” SMACK “mast, see the commotion on the causeway. Be there in, uhhh, sixty” SMACK “seconds. Q,K,T.”

“Q,L,Y,” said Radiocom. “Four-three wants the man down and out a there A, S, A, P.”

Canadians! There was no way Canadians made up more than half the student body at EGU—Everglades Global University—but Cubans did. So that was their not-very-clever little americano game! And they were so stupid, they thought it would take a genius to catch on! He ransacked his brain to try to remember how they had used Canadians just a few minutes before. And what about mooks? Were they supposed to be Cubans, too? Latinos? ::::::How much of an insult is it if an americano uses Canadian to mean Cuban… right in your face? Boiling, boiling, boiling—but get hold of yourself!:::::: Cuban? Canadian? Mook? What did all that matter? What mattered was that the Sergeant felt so insulted, he was now resorting to sarcasm, by the ton, even to vile stuff like “f*cking José Martí.” And why? To goad him to the point of outright insubordination—and then have him thrown out of this elite unit, the Marine Patrol, and bucked back down to the bottom—or expelled from the force! Canned! Kicked out! All it would take would be for him to start an insubordinate confrontation with his commander at a crucial moment of a run—at the moment when the entire department was waiting for them to get some idiot down off the top of a mast in Biscayne Bay! He’d be finished! Finished—and with Magdalena, too! Magdalena!—already acting odd, distant, and now he’s a piece of garbage, expelled from the police force, terminally humiliated.

The Sergeant was easing back on the throttle. The SMACKs became less violent and less frequent as they closed in on the huge white sailboat. They were approaching it from the rear.

Officer Lonnie Kite leaned down over the instrument panel and began looking upward. “Jesus Christ, Sarge, those masts—I never saw masts that high in my life. They’re tall as the f*cking bridge, and the f*cking bridge has a mean water level clearance of eighty-f*cking-two feet!”

Busy easing the Safe Boat in alongside the sailboat, the Sergeant didn’t so much as glance up. “That’s a schooner, Lonnie. You heard a the ‘tall ships’?”

“Yeah… I think so, Sarge. I guess so.”

“They built ’em for speed, back in the nineteenth century. That’s why they got masts that tall. That way you get more sail area. Back in the day they used to race out to shipwrecks or incoming cargo ships or whatever to get to the booty sooner. I bet those masts are tall as the boat’s long.”

“How do you know about all that, about schooners, Sarge? I never seen one around here. Not one.”

“I pay attention—”

“—in class,” said Lonnie Kite. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Sarge.” He pointed upward. “I’ll be damned. There’s the guy! The man on the mast! Up on top of the forward mast! I thought it was a clump a dirty laundry or canvas or something. Look at ’im! He’s up as high as the tontos on the bridge! And, man, looks like they’re yelling back and forth…”

Nestor couldn’t see any of it, and none of them could hear what was going on, since the Safe Boat cockpit was soundproof.

The Sergeant had the boat throttled way down in order to sidle up against the schooner. They came to a stop just inches away. “Lonnie,” said the Sergeant, “you take the wheel.”

When he rose from his seat, he looked at Nestor as if he had forgotten he existed. “Okay, Camacho, do something useful. Open the f*cking hatch.”

Nestor looked at the Sergeant with abject fear. Inside his skull he said a prayer. ::::::Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee. Don’t let me f*ck up.::::::

The “hatch” was a soundproof double-paned sliding door on the side of the shack that opened onto the deck. Nestor’s entire universe suddenly contracted into that door and the Olympics-level test of opening it with maximum strength, maximum speed—while maintaining maximum control… now! Immediately!… ::::::Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee—here goes—::::::

He did it! He did it! With the fluid power of a tiger he did it!… Did what? Slid it! Slid a sliding door open! Without f*cking up!

Outside—all was uproar. The noise came crashing into the sacrosoundless cockpit, the noise and the heat. Christ, it was hot out here on the deck! Scorching! Enervating! It beat you down. It took the wind kicking up the bay to make it bearable. The wind was strong enough to create its own whistling sound and SLAP the hull of the schooner with swells and FLAP the huge sails, two masts’ full of them—FLAP them until they blew up into clouds of an unnatural white brilliance—Miami summer sun! Nestor glanced up toward that ball of fire—burning itself up—and even with his supreme darkest sunglasses he didn’t try that again—looking up into that hellish heat lamp, which was the entire sky. But that was nothing compared to the roiling SURF of human voices. Cries! Exhortations! Imprecations! Ululations! Supplications! Boos! A great bellowing and gnashing of teeth a mile from shore out in the middle of Biscayne Bay!

The Sergeant emerged from the shack without the slightest flick of the eye toward Nestor. But as he disembarked, he made a jerking signal with his hand down by his hip indicating that Nestor should follow him. Follow him? Nestor followed him like a dog.

Once the Sergeant and his dog boarded the schooner and were up on the deck—a regular rubber room, this deck was! Passengers, if that was what they were, were hanging over the railing and gesturing and jabbering at Nestor and the Sergeant… americanos, the whole bunch… light-brown and blondish hair… half of them, girls—all but stark naked! Wild blond hair! Wisps of thong bikini bottoms that didn’t even cover the mons pubis!… Tops consisting of two triangles of cloth that hid the nipples but left the rest of the breasts bulging on either side and beckoning, Want more? Nestor didn’t. At this moment nothing could have interested him less than making moves on lubricas americanas. They disintegrated in his prayers, which boiled down to Please, Almighty God, I beseech thee, don’t let me… f*ck up!

The Sergeant walked straight to the forward mast. Nestor walked straight to the forward mast. The Sergeant looked up. Nestor looked up. The Sergeant saw the roost of the mysterious man atop the mast. Nestor saw the roost of the mysterious man—a silhouette against a killer heat lamp dome, a black lump the equivalent of seven or eight stories above the deck. A regular storm of raw-throated voices was caterwauling down from above amid a cacophony of outraged vehicle horns. The Sergeant looked up again. Nestor looked up again. The two policemen had to cock their necks all the way back to see where the commotion was coming from. Sheer murder, looking up like this to the topmost arch of the bridge… An angry crowd was leaning over the railing, two deep, three deep, God knows how many deep. They were so far up, their heads looked the size of eggs. Even Nestor behind his darkest supremos couldn’t stare at them for more than a moment. It was like being in the street at the foot of an eight- or nine-story building with a mob unaccountably yelling at you from a roof set afire by the sun. And up there!—practically eye level with the mob, at practically the same height above the deck, was the man. The Sergeant was looking at him from directly below. Nestor was looking at him from directly below. By shielding their eyes with their hands they could see he did look like a clump of dirty laundry, just as Lonnie Kite had put it… no, he looked worse than that… he looked like a clump of filthy, sodden laundry. He was soaking wet. His clothes, his skin, even his black hair—what they could see of it—everything about him was now the same sopping slurry gray-brown color, as if he had just crawled out of an unpumped sump. It didn’t help that he jerked his head about spastically as he shouted to the crowd on the bridge and appealed to them by reaching out with his hands contorted, palms up, into the shape of a pair of cups. But how could he stay up there without holding on to the mast? Ahhhhh… he had found a little bucket seat—but how did he get up there in the first place?

“Officer! Officer!”

A great lubberly lulu, no more than thirty years old, had planted himself in front of Sergeant McCorkle. He kept jabbing his forefinger up at the man on the mast. There was fear on his face, and he was talking so fast, his words seemed to be leap-frogging one another, falling over one another, tumbling, stumbling, ricocheting, scattering hopelessly: “Gotta get no business here him like down from there, Officer, I never don’t know him like saw him before that you know mob up what do they he’s so angry there want who’ll him attack my boat like that mast alone destroy it cost a fortune you know that’s all I need—”

The guy was soft—look at him!—but in such a luxurious way, was Nestor’s immediate verdict. He had full jowls but jowls so smooth and buttery they had reached the level of a perfect flan custard. He had a paunch but a paunch that created a perfect parabola from his sternum to his underbelly, the paunch nonpareil of Idle Youth, created, no doubt, by the dearest, tenderest, tastiest chefs in the world. Over the perfect parabolic arch of a gut was stretched an apple-green shirt, of cotton, yes, but a cotton so fine and so right-out-of-the-box, it had a perfect apple-green sheen—in short, a real p-ssy, this guy was, a p-ssy whose words kept coming out of his mouth in a tangle of p-ssy attitude shot through with fear.

“—killer nutball I’m f*cked sue me! The liable sucker who gets sued’s me! Raving maniac never saw before picks me!—”

The Sergeant brought both hands up to his chest, palms up and out in the Whoa, back off mode. “Slow down! This is your boat?”

“Yes! And I’m the one—”

“Just hold it. What’s your name?”

“Jonathan. The thing is, like, soon as I—”

“You got a, like, last name?”

The great lubberly p-ssy looked at the Sergeant as if he, the Sergeant, had lost his mind. Then he said, “Krin?” It sounded like half a question. “K, R, I, N?” Being a member of the first generation that used no last names, he found the notion archaic.

“Okay, Jonathan, whyn’t you”—the Sergeant gave his palms three little pumps down toward the deck, as if to say, Calmly, without getting all excited—“tell me how he got there.”

It seemed that this portly, but perfectly portly, young man had invited his mates to come along for a cruise up Biscayne Bay to the house and marina of a friend on a celebrity-heavy waterfront enclave aptly known as Star Island. He saw no reason why he couldn’t ease the schooner’s seventy-five-foot mainmast underneath the eighty-two-feet-high bridge on the causeway… until they got close to it and it began to look maybe dangerous, what with the wind and the choppy water and swells that were causing the schooner to pitch a bit. So they dropped anchor sixty feet from the bridge, and all eight of them went to the bow to study the situation.

One of them happened to turn around, and he said, “Hey, Jonathan, there’s some guy back there on the deck! He just came up the ladder!” Sure enough, there was this thin, stringy, soaking-wet, sodden mess of a little man, breathing heavily… homeless, everybody thought. He had somehow come up the ladder on the stern used for slipping into and out of the water. He now stood still, dripping, on the aft deck, staring at them. He started toward them slowly, warily, gulping for air, until Jonathan, in his capacity as owner and captain, yelled at him, “Hey, hold on, whattaya think you’re doing?” The guy stopped, began gesturing with both hands, palms up, and jabbering, between gulps of air, in what they took to be Spanish. Jonathan kept yelling, “Get offa here! Go! F*ck off!” and other unfriendly commands. With that, the bum, as they all took him to be, started running jacklegged, stumbling, careening, not away from them but straight at them. The girls began screaming. The bum looked like a wet rat. Half his hair seemed to be plastered across his face. His eyes were bugged wide open. His mouth was wide open, maybe just because he couldn’t get his breath, but you could see his teeth. He looked psychotic. The guys started yelling at him and waving their arms in the sort of crisscross pattern football referees use to indicate that a field goal kick is no good. The bum keeps coming and is only a few yards from them, and the girls are screaming, making a hell of a racket, and the guys are screaming—by now their yells have turned into half-a-screams—and flailing their arms over their heads, and the bum wheels about and dashes to the forward mast and goes up it, to the top.

“Wait a minute,” says Sergeant McCorkle. “Back up a second. Okay, so he’s on the deck back there, and then he comes all the way from there to up here. Did you try to stop him? Did anybody try to stop him?”

Jonathan averted his eyes and took a deep breath and said, “Well, the thing is… he looked like a psycho. You know? And maybe he had like a weapon—you know?—a revolver, a knife. You couldn’t tell.”

“I see,” said the Sergeant. “He looked like a psycho, and maybe he had a weapon, you couldn’t tell, and you didn’t try to stop him; nobody tried to stop him.” He said it not as a question but as a recitation… in a form of deadpan mockery cops like.

“Uhhh… that’s right,” said the great Idle Youth.

“How did he climb the mast?” said the Sergeant. “You said he was out of breath.”

“There’s a rope you can see right here coming down the mast. It’s got a pulley at the top, and there’s a bucket seat. You get in the seat down here, and you get somebody to hoist you to the top in the bucket seat.”

Sergeant McCorkle pointed overhead. “Who hoisted him up?”

“Well, he—you can use the rope and pull yourself up, if you have to.”

“That must take a while,” said the Sergeant. “Did you try to stop him? Did anyone try to stop him?”

“Well, as I said, he looked—”

“—looked like a psycho,” said McCorkle, finishing the sentence for him. “And maybe he had a concealed weapon.” The Sergeant nodded his head up and down in cop mockery posing as understanding. Then he cut his eyes toward Nestor with a certain lift of the eyebrows that as much as said, “What a bunch a pussies, hnnnnh?”

Ah, Bliss! To Nestor, at that point, that look was the equivalent of the Medal of Honor! The Sergeant had acknowledged him as a member of the courageous brotherhood of cops!—not just a probie in the Marine Patrol adept only at getting in his way.

Radiocom transmission… “Guy claims to be an anti-Fidel dissenter… Bridge full of Cubans demanding that he be given asylum. Right now that don’t matter. Right now you gotta get him down from there. We got eight lanes a traffic on the causeway, and nothing’s moving. What’s your plan? Q,K,T.”

That was all it took. For any Miami cop, especially one like Nestor or the Sergeant, that was enough to account for… the man on the mast. Undoubtedly Cuban smugglers had brought him this far, just inside Biscayne Bay, aboard some high-speed craft such as a cigarette boat, which went seventy miles an hour at sea, had dropped him off—or thrown him off—into the water near shore, made a U-turn, and sped back to Cuba. For this service he probably had to come up with something on the order of $5,000… in a country where the average pay for physicians was $300 a month. So now he finds himself floundering in the Bay. He sees the ladder on the rear of the schooner and climbs up, possibly believing it’s docked, since it isn’t moving, and he can just walk off onto the shore, or else that the boat will take him as far as the bridge. That’s all a Cuban has to do: set foot on American soil or any structure extending from American soil, such as the bridge, and he will be granted asylum… Any Cuban… No other refugees were granted such a privilege. America’s most favored migration status the Cubans enjoyed. If a Cuban refugee set foot on American soil (or structure), he was classified as a “dry foot,” and he was safe. But if he was apprehended on or in the water, he would be sent back to Cuba unless he could convince a Coast Guard investigator that he would face “a credible threat,” such as Communist persecution, if he had to go back. The man on the mast has made it out of the water—but onto a boat. So when Nestor and the Sergeant arrive he is technically still “in the water” and is classified as a “wet foot.” Wet foots are out of luck. The Coast Guard takes them to Guantánamo, where they are, in essence, released into the woods, like an unwanted pet.

But at this moment the police high command isn’t thinking about any of that. They don’t care if he’s a wet foot, a dry foot, a Cuban alien, or a lost Mongolian. All they care about is getting him off the mast—right now—so normal traffic can resume on the causeway.

The Sergeant looked off, and his eyes focused on… an imaginary point in the middle distance. He remained in that stance for what seemed like forever. “Okay,” he said finally, looking once more at Nestor. “You think you can climb that mast, Camacho? The guy don’t speak English. But you can talk to him. Tell him we have no interest in arresting him and sending him back to Cuba. We just wanna get him down from there so he don’t fall and break his neck… or stay up there and break my balls.” That much was true. The Department openly instructed cops not to get involved in the whole business of illegal aliens. That was the federal government’s problem, the ICE’s, the FBI’s, and the Coast Guard’s. But this was Nestor Camacho’s problem, or problems: climbing a seventy-foot foremast… and talking some poor scrawny panicked Cuban into descending the goddamned mast with him.

“So can you do it, Camacho?”

The truthful answers were “No” and “No.” But the only possible answers were “Yes” and “Yes.” How could he possibly stand there and say, “Well, to tell the truth, Sarge, I don’t actually speak Spanish—certainly not well enough to talk anybody out of anything.” He was like a lot of second-generation Cubans. He could understand Spanish, because his parents spoke only Spanish at home. But in school, despite all the talk about bilingualism, practically everybody spoke English. There were more Spanish-language television and radio stations than English, but the best shows were in English. The best movies, blogs (and online porn), and video games, the hottest music, the latest thing in iPhones, BlackBerries, Droids, keyboards—all created for use in English. Very soon you felt crippled… out there… if you didn’t know English and use English and think in English, which in turn demanded that you know colloquial American English as well as any Anglo. Before you knew it—and it always occurred to you suddenly one day—you could no longer function in Spanish much above a sixth-grade level. That bit of the honest truth shot through Nestor’s mind. But how could he explain all this to these two americanos? It would sound so lame—and maybe even craven! Maybe he just didn’t have the stomach for an assignment like this. And how could he say, “Gosh, I don’t know whether I can climb that mast or not”?

Utterly impossible! The only alternatives he had were… to do it—and succeed… or to do it—and crash and burn. Making things still more muddled was the temper of the mob on the bridge. They were booing him! From the moment Nestor and the sergeant boarded the schooner, they had become steadily louder, uglier, more hostile, more raucous. Every now and then Nestor could make out a discrete cry.

“¡Libertad!”

“¡Traidor!”

“¡Comemierda, hijo de puta!”

As soon as he started up that mast, they would have it in for him—and he was Cuban himself! They’d find that out soon enough, too, wouldn’t they! He couldn’t win, could he! On the other hand… he went out to lunch for a moment… staring at the man on the mast without any longer seeing him. It came to him like a revelation, the question: “What is guilt?” Guilt is a gas, and gases disperse, but superior officers don’t. Once they sink their teeth in, they’re tenacious as a dog. Possible disapproval of a mob of his own people wasn’t remotely as threatening as the disapproval of this blue-eyed sandy-haired americano, Sergeant McCorkle, who was already just one button away from canning him—

—and to whom he turned and said, “Sarge—I can do it.”

Now he was in for it, whether he could pull off this stunt or not. He sized up the mast. He tilted his head back and looked straight up. Way… way… way up there—Jesus! The sun was burning up his eyeballs, darkest extremos or no darkest extremos! He had begun to sweat… wind or no wind! Christ, it was hot out here, grilling out on the deck of a schooner in the middle of Biscayne Bay. The man on top of the mast looked just about the size and color and shapelessness of one of those turd-brown vinyl garbage bags. He was still twisting and lurching about… way up there. Both his arms shot out again, in silhouette, no doubt with the fingers once more crimped up into the supplicant’s cup shapes. He must have been rocking pathetically in his bosun’s chair, because he kept protruding and then withdrawing, as if he were yelling to the mob. Christ, it was a long way up to the top! Nestor lowered his head to size up the mast itself. Down here where it joined with the deck, the damned thing was almost as big around as his waist. Wrapping his legs around it and shimmying up would take forever… inching up, inching up, pathetically hugging a seventy-foot boat mast… all too slow and humiliating to think about… But wait a minute! The rope, the lanyard the turd-brown boy had used to hoist himself to the top—here it was, rising up along the mast from out of a puddle of slack rope on the deck. On the other end was the illegal himself, smack up against the top of the mast in the bosun’s chair. ::::::I’ve climbed fifty-five feet up a rope without using my legs, :::::: it occurred to him, ::::::and I could have climbed higher, if Rodriguez had a higher ceiling in his “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!” But seventy feet… Christ!… No?—I got no choice.:::::: It was as if not he but his central nervous system took over. Before he could even create a memory of it he leapt and grabbed hold of the rope and started climbing up—without using his legs.

A foul cascade of boos and slurs pounded down on him from above. Real slime! The cops were going to arrest a poor refugee on top of a mast and send him back to Castro and they were using a Cuban, a turncoat Cuban, to do the dirtiest work, but none of this quite reached the rational seat of justice in the left hemisphere of Nestor’s brain, which was fixated upon an audience of one—Sergeant McCorkle ::::::and please, O Lord, I beseech thee, just don’t let me f*ck up!:::::: He is aware he has climbed practically halfway up hand over hand—still without using his legs. The very air is noise choked with madness… Jesus, his arms and back, his chest are reaching the edge of exhaustion. Has to pause, has to stop… but no time… He tries to look about. He’s engulfed in clouds of white canvas, the schooner’s sails… He glances down… he can’t believe it… The deck is so far below… he must have climbed more than halfway up the mast—forty, forty-five feet. The faces on the deck all tilted straight up, toward him… how very small they look. He tries to pick out the Sergeant—is that him?… can’t tell… their lips aren’t moving… might as well be in a trance… americano faces americano faces… fixed on him. He looks straight up… at the face of the man on the mast… his filthy clump of a body has shifted way over so he can look down… he knows what’s happening, all right—the mob on the bridge… their deluge of slime… directed at Nestor Camacho!… such filth!

“¡Gusano!”

“Dirty traidor peeg!”

Oh, the filthy clump of laundry knows. Every time his hunter grabs the rope to pull himself up higher, the filthy clump can feel a little jolt in the bosun’s chair… The jib and spinnaker start FLAP FLAP FLAPPING in the wind… the clouds of canvas blow aside for a moment… there they are, the mob on the bridge… Christ! They’re not far above him anymore… their heads used to be the size of eggs… now more like cantaloupes… a great mangy gallery of contorted human faces… my own people… hating me!… I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t flashes through his central nervous system—but bucked back down to patrolman—or worse—if I don’t. Oh, shit! What’s that setting off sunbursts? A television camera lens—and shit! There’s another—and shit! One over there, too. Please, O Lord, I beseech thee… Fear hits him like a massive shot of adrenaline… Don’t let me… He’s still climbing up, hand over hand, without using his legs. He looks up. The man on the mast is no more than ten feet above him! He’s looking him right in the face!… What an expression… the cornered animal… the doomed rat… drenched, dirty, exhausted… panting… barely able to utter a cry for miraculous salvation.

::::::Ay, San Antonio, ayudame. San Lazaro, este conmigo.::::::

Now Nestor—has to stop. He’s close enough to the top to hear the man’s entreaties above the noise from the bridge. He wraps his legs around the rope and stops still.

“¡Te suplico! ¡ Te suplico!” “I’m begging you! Begging you! You can’t send me back! They’ll torture me until I reveal everybody! They’ll destroy my family. Have mercy! There are Cubans on that bridge! I’m begging you! Is one more such an intolerable burden? I’m begging you, begging you! You don’t know what it’s like! You won’t be destroying just me, you’ll be destroying a whole movement! I beg you! I beg you for asylum! I beg you for a chance!”

Nestor knew enough Spanish to get the sense of what he was saying, but he couldn’t think of the words that might calm him and coax him down. “Credible threat”… That’s it! He’ll tell him about “credible threat”… A refugee like him gets a Coast Guard hearing, right there on the deck, and if they believe he was endangered by a credible threat, he would get asylum. The word for “credible”—what’s the damned word for credible? maybe the same as English?—cray dee blay? But “threat”… threat… What was the damned word for threat? He knew he once knew it… There it went!… Right through his brain, before he could catch it. It had a z in it a z in it a z in it… Almost had it again!… but once more it was gone. For that matter, what about an official hearing?… He had to say something—anything—and so he ransacked his brain and looked up at the man’s face and said, “La historia—” He caught himself just in time! What was happening to him? A famous quote from Fidel Castro was what his poor desperate brain had almost blurted out!

Boos, taunts, every known loud expression of vilification rained down from the people packed against the railings of the bridge.

The man looked down at him in an anxious way and said, “¿Como?” trying to sort out what Nestor has said.

Maddening was what it was!… climbed sixty feet up a rope without using his legs—but he couldn’t make himself understood. He needed to get closer. He started climbing the rope again, hand over hand. He glances up at the poor drowned rat. His face is… aghast. How can he tell him he’s not coming up to arrest him? He can’t think of the words! So he stops climbing and wraps his legs around the rope to free his right hand to give a reassuring signal. But what signal? All he can think of is the peace sign… He spreads his index finger and his middle finger to form a V. The man’s face, now no more than four feet above Nestor, changes from aghast… to terrified. He starts to rise from the bosun’s chair. Jesus Christ, what does he think he’s doing? He’s up on top of a seventy-foot mast with nothing to support him but a tiny bosun’s chair—and he wants to stand. He tries to anchor his feet on the pulley housing. Now he’s out of his seat, teetering in a crouched position atop a mast that’s pitching on a choppy sea… Nestor can see the worst about to happen. He climbs seventy feet up a rope—hand over hand, without using his legs—only to cause a poor refugee to fall to his death—and whose fault is it? Nestor Camacho’s! Who has made the Miami Police Marine Patrol—hell, the entire force—look like the brutal, heedless persecutors and killers of a poor man whose only sin was trying to put one foot on American soil! Who has committed this heartless crime? Nestor Camacho, infamy incarnate!

With two furious hand-over-hand hoists he reaches the bosun’s chair and tries to catch the man’s leg—or even his foot—too late! The man pitches forward—to his death! A ferocious fire erupts inside Nestor’s skull… No! The man has pitched forward onto the cable. He’s trying to slide down it backward… This poor skinny emaciated gray-brown slurry rat—he’ll kill himself! The cable runs at a steep angle from the mast to beyond the bow to the bowsprit… more than a hundred feet. Nestor crouches in the bosun’s seat… For an instant he can see the mob on the bridge. He’s level with them now… three, four, five deep… Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! They’re exploding off cameras! Heads are jumping up to get a better view of the show… a sign! One of them has a crude sign—from where?… written how?… COPS FIDELISTAS TRAIDORES… never been hated by so many people. He looks down… makes him dizzy… like standing on the edge of the roof of a ten-story building. The water’s a sheet of blue-grayish steel with sunbursts dancing all over it. Boats!… small boats around the schooner… from out of nowhere!… bloodsucking bugs… a boat—a sign. Can it really say what he thinks it says?… ¡ASYLUM AHORA!—

—all of this in an instant… Guilt! Fear! Horror!… but the greatest of these is Guilt! Must not let their hero die before their eyes! He swings down onto the cable… no use trying to catch up with him by sliding… Instinctively, in the mode they used in training camp, he starts swinging from the cable by his hands, heading down swing by swing, keeping his eyes on his slurry gray-brown quarry… His arms, his shoulders, the palms of his hands—agony! He’s going to tear apart… only two swings away from the guy. The guy’s body is still on top of the cable, but it’s yawing this way and that… so scrawny… not strong enough for this… lifts his head, looks Nestor right in the face… worse than terror—utter hopelessness comes over the poor bastard… he’s had it!… the poor devil yaws so sharply he can’t stay on top of the cable… feebly hanging by his hands for one final moment. Now or oblivion! For the poor bastard! For Nestor Camacho! He reaches the poor bastard with two swings—to do what?… Only one thing possible. He wraps his legs around the scrawny rodent’s waist and locks them at the ankles… the poor little bastard lets go of the cable and collapses. The dead jolt shocks Nestor… the dead weight! ::::::My arms torn off my body at the shoulder sockets!:::::: Can’t believe he’s still here—an organism composed of sheer pain from his burning hands to the sartorius muscles of his locked legs… sixty feet above the deck… to support this much weight by one hand while he swings the other to descend the cable… impossible… but if he doesn’t—¡Dios mío!—he’ll be f*cking up! And not just f*cking up… f*cking up on television… F*cking up before thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions… might as well be billions… since one is all it would take, one officious mierda-mouth americano sergeant named—bango!

¡Caliente! Caliente baby

Got plenty fuego in yo caja china,

Means you needs a length a Hose put in it,

Ain’ no maybe—



It’s his iPhone ringing in his pocket! ::::::What a fool! I’m one slip from death, holding a man up with my legs and hauling him down a hundred-foot cable by hand—there’s nothing I can turn the goddamn thing off with! A goddamn song by Bulldog—not even the real thing, Pitbull!—and I still can’t keep the words from penetrating my head—::::::

—’bout it.

Hose knows you burnin’ up wit’out it.

Don’tcha try deny it,

’Cause Hose knows you dyin’ a try it—



—when he needs every neuron, every dendrite, every synapse, every gemmule in his mind to concentrate on the horrible fix he’s gotten himself into. If he falls seventy feet onto a boat deck because his iPhone is singing

Hose knows all!

Knows you out tryin’ a buy it,

But Hose only gives it free



—then he damn well better die!… He damn well better not wake up gorked out in an electric-motor-powered hospital bed in some morose intensive-care unit listed as “critical but stable”… the mortifying ignominy of it! But—no choice! He’s got to do it! Both hands still grip the cable, his legs grip what?—maybe 120 pounds?—of panicked-out little homunculus, and here goes! He releases one hand—and that’s it—no turning back! The downswing—the centrifugal force—::::::I’m done for!:::::: One hand! Unbearable, the centrifugal force ::::::pulling my rotator cuff apart, pulling my arm out of the socket!—my wrist away from the arm! my hand away from my wrist! nothing left but—

To his fav’rite charity,

Hose’ favorite cha-ree-tee, see?

Hose’ fav’rite cha-ree-tee,

An’ ’at’s me.



—one hand clutching a cable! I’ll crash on the deck from seven stories up, me and the gnome:::::: but a miracle! He grabs the cable with his other hand on the upswing—yes, a miracle!—it redistributes the weight! Both shoulders, both wrists, both hands are whole again!—kept intact only by the slimmest steely cord of unbearable agony!—only that cord to save him and the slurry-brown elfin man from falling seven stories and winding up as two shapeless bags of ecchymotic-purple integument full of broken bones! Below, down in the Halusian Gulp, the deck is covered with turned-up faces the size of marbles. From above rain the insults, boos, and disgusting yaaaggggghs of the animals on the bridge—but now he knows! has the power to persevere in a state of morbidly horrifying pain!—already into another swing—and he makes it—fury from

’At’s me, see?

An’ ’at’s me.



above—gawking by the spectators below��but he thinks of only one soul, the minority Sergeant McCorkle, a mindless americano but a sergeant all the same—another swing—and he makes it—the damned phone is still ringing. ::::::Idiots! Don’t you know

An’ ’at’s me, see?

An’ ’at’s me.

Yo yo!



you are pumping toxins and messing up my mind? Oh, the hell with it!:::::: Another swing—he makes it. ::::::Dios mío querido, together we look into the web of blood in their eyes, and into the affectless red eyes of the television cameras!:::::: Another swing—he

“—Yo yo!

Mismo! Mismo!”

makes it… another… another… another… ¡Dios mío!—no more than ten feet above the deck—that sea of eyeballs and open mouths—what the!!?? The slurry little ecchymotic sack of panic has come to life—he’s bucking like a fish in the vise grip of Nestor’s legs—a regular forest of hands

“Yo yo yo yo yo.”

reaching upward from the bow, but the cable extends beyond them to the bowsprit beep beep beep beep beep—a text message!—and the two of them, Nestor and the slurry—brown homunculus—he’s free of the leg lock!—not now you don’t!—too late! he does! In the next instant the two bodies, his and the gnome’s, hurtling off the end of the bowsprit and into the water. They’re under water—and it’s just as Lonnie Kite said! The little maniac has broken free of the leg lock and is… attacking him! kicking him! pulling his hair! craaaaacking his nose with his forearm… Kite had it right! Nestor wards off the little man’s increasingly feeble blows, moves in, clamps him in a police neck lock, and that does it! The little creature goes limp! Done for! Ultimate Fighting under water!

When they reach the surface, Nestor has his slimy little quarry in a police lifesaver’s grip… gnome is coughing up water. Two feet away—the Safe Boat! Lonnie’s at the wheel. Nestor has reentered the world from a distant cosmos… Lonnie’s pulling the slurry-brown homunculus up onto the rubbery pancake deck… and then Nestor—who the hell are these people? Nestor finds himself right by the schooner. He twists toward the deck… the sun bursts off two big eyes of glass—TV cameras—and right there, leaning over the railing… the sandy-haired Sergeant McCorkle.

Sarge doesn’t have to say a word—it’s all right there in his face. Nestor Camacho is now… a cop… a real cop… as real as they make ’em… Nestor Camacho enters Heaven.

Sergeant McCorkle turned the drowned rat over to the Coast Guard right out there in the middle of the bay, and Nestor and the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite took the Safe Boat back to the Marine Patrol marina, which stuck out into the bay on the Miami side. All the way over, the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite lavished praise on Nestor in the accepted cop fashion, as if it weren’t praise at all. Lonnie Kite’s saying, “Jesus Christ, man”—he’s a comradely man now!—“the way that little f*cker was jerking around at the end there, after you’ve saved his ass—what was that all about? You kick him in the balls to see if he was alive?”

Nestor went coasting, coasting, coasting into euphoria.

The other guys at the marina were excited for Nestor. In the eyes of cops, Cuban and non-Cuban alike, he had pulled off a super-manly feat of strength, above and beyond… way over the top.

Sergeant McCorkle was now his pal—his pal! “Look, Nestor, all I told you was to bring the guy down from the f*cking mast! I didn’t say put on a high-wire act for the whole f*cking city of Miami!”

Everybody laughed and laughed, and Nestor laughed with them. His cell phone went beep beep beep beep, signaling a text message. Magdalena! He averted his eyes ever so briefly—Magdalena!—but it wasn’t from Magdalena. It read, “Disobeying unjust commands is the test of character.” That was all; that was the whole message. It was signed, “Your teacher once, your friend no matter what, Jaime Bosch.” Mr. Bosch taught composition and reading comprehension at the Police Academy. He was everybody’s favorite teacher. He had tutored Nestor one-on-one outside school hours, purely as a favor and out of a love of teaching. “Disobeying unjust commands is the test of character”… Nestor couldn’t figure it out. It made his head hurt… a lot.

He looked up at the rest of them, trying not to show his dismay. Thank God, they were all still in a merry mood, chuckling and laughing. Umberto Delgado, who had been in Nestor’s class at the Police Academy, said, in English: “What was all this scissor grip shit with the legs, Nestorcito? That grip’s for immobilizing the f*ckers when you’re rolling in the dirt—not for hauling ’em down a f*cking hundred feet of jib sail cable!”

Everybody laughed and laughed and rollicked and rollicked, and Nestor loved it!… but the three text messages that remained… had to read them… came in while his life was literally on the line… while he held the man on the mast between his legs and was descending hand over hand down the jib line. He began burning with curiosity and an apprehension he avoided giving a name… and a hope—Magdalena! Once more he averted his eyes for an instant. The first one… “y u Nestor y u,” it read—and it wasn’t from Magdalena. It was from Cecilia Romero. Oddly, she was the girl he had been going out with when he met Magdalena. Wacky… what did she mean “y u Nestor y u”? Baffling… but he didn’t show it… he rejoined the exhilarating Marine Patrol tide of manly laughter… but a tiny doubt germinated.

“How’d you like that little creep going into the Ultimate Fighting mode soon’s he’s under water, Nestor?” said Officer Kite. “Didn’ I tell you those little f*ckers turn into monsters as soon as they’re under water!”

“I should a listened to you, Lonnie!” said Nestor. Thirty minutes ago he would not even have considered addressing Officer Kite by his first name. “That little prick—” he said, feeling very manly, “he’s a dead weight all the way down the f*cking cable and soon’s we’re five inches under water, he decides to come to! Before I know what’s happening, he’s breaking my f*cking nose with his bare hands!”

And everybody laughed and laughed, but Nestor—had to read the two remaining text messages. Curiosity and anxiety and a last spurt of hope—maybe one is from Magdalena!—compelled him. He dared flick his eyes down to the cell phone once more. Dared to—had to. The first text was from J. Cortez. He didn’t know any J. Cortez. It read, “OK u r a big latingo celebrity. Now what?” What the hell did “latingo” mean? All too quickly he got it. A latingo had to be a Latino who had turned gringo. And what was that supposed to mean? Mirth reigned in the room, but Nestor couldn’t help himself… had to dive to the very bottom. The last text was from Inga La Gringa. It read, “You can hide under my bed anytime, Nestorcito.” Inga was the counter girl and waitress right around the corner from the marina. She was sexy, all right, a big Baltic blonde with amazing breasts that she managed to tilt upward like missiles and enjoyed showing. She had grown up in Estonia… sexy accent, too… a real number, Inga was, but she was forty or so, not much younger than his mother. It was almost as if she could tell exactly what he was thinking. Every time he walked into the place, Inga would come on to him in a flirtatious but comic way, making sure he got a good, long look down the crevasse between her breasts… or was she really merely fooling around? “Nestorcito” she called him, because she had once heard Umberto call him that. So he called her Inga La Gringa. He had given her his cell phone number when she said her brother could help him fix the overhead cam on his Camaro… which he did. Inga and Nestor teased each other… sure, “teased,” but Nestor never took the next step, although he was sorely tempted. But why had she said, “You can hide under my bed”? Hide from what? She was just kidding around in her Inga La Gringa lubricious come-nestle-in-my-loamy-crevice way, of course, but why “You can hide under my bed”?

Somehow this hit him harder than a crack like “latingo.” “Hide,” says friendly, flirtatious Inga?… He felt his face fall… This time the rest of them were bound to notice—but the Sergeant stepped in and saved the day, saying, “But you know what gets me? Those kids on the boat were such pussies. They were scared shitless because some frightened-out-of-his-mind little guy looking like a drowned rat, maybe a hundred and ten pounds after a Big Mac, shows up on their f*cking sailboat. Some a those pussies weighed f*cking two hundred pounds, half of it fat, but they’re big kids. There’s no reason on earth why they had to let that poor little bastard climb their f*cking mast and almost get himself killed… except they’re such f*cking pussies! Do they have any clue they got no business taking a boat that big out on the f*cking water… being such pussies? ‘Oh dear, we didn’t know if he had a gun or a knife or something’… Bull-shit! That little bastard barely had clothes on his back. And so we gotta send Nestor here up a f*cking seventy-five-foot mast and play Superman and risk his ass hauling the little bastard down off a bosun’s chair about this big and down a goddamned hundred-foot jib cable.” The Sergeant shook his head. “You know what? We should a booked all those pussies and sent them to Cuba and kept the drowned rat here. We would a come out ahead on that one!”

Hey! Who are those two, just joining the cluster of Marine Patrol cops? They sure as hell don’t look like cops. It turns out they are a reporter and a photographer from the Miami Herald. Nestor had never heard of a reporter coming all the way out here in the bay. The photographer was a swarthy little guy wearing some sort of safari jacket, pockets all over it, wide open. Nestor couldn’t tell what he was… but there was no doubt about the reporter. He was a classic americano, tall, thin, pale, wearing a navy blazer, a light-blue button-down shirt, khaki pants with freshly pressed creases down the front… very proper-looking. Over-the-top proper. Who ever heard of a newspaper reporter wearing a jacket in Miami? He was soft-spoken to the point of shy, this reporter. His name was John Smith, apparently. How much more americano could you get?!

“I can’t believe what you just did,” said the classic americano. “I can’t believe anyone could swing hand over hand down that thing holding another person between his legs. Where’d you get the strength? Do you lift weights—or what?”

Nestor had never spoken to a reporter before. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to. He looked at Sergeant McCorkle. The Sergeant just smiled and gave him a slight wink, as if to say, “It’s okay, go ahead and tell him.”

That did it. Modestly enough, Nestor began, “I don’t think it takes strength exactly.” He tried to continue on the modest path—but he just couldn’t tell the americano enough. He didn’t believe in weight-lifting for the upper body. It’s much better to climb a, say, fifty-five-foot rope without using your legs. Takes care of everything, arms, back, chest—everything.

“Where do you do that?” said this John Smith.

“At Rodriguez’s ‘Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!’ they call it.”

The americano laughed. “Como en ‘Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Que barata’?”

::::::This americano not only speaks Spanish—he must listen to Spanish radio! That’s the only time you can hear the “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Que barata!” commercial.::::::

“Es verdad,” said Nestor. That was a linguistic handshake for John Smith’s speaking Spanish. “But you have to use weights and do squats and everything else for your legs. I don’t know what you do for carrying some little guy like that with ’em… except try to avoid the whole thing.” Light touch of modesty there… or self-mockery… or whatever. Nestor looked down, as if to check out his uniform. He tried to tell himself that what he was about to do was unconscious—which of course made it self-fraudulence per se.

“Dios mío,” he said, “this shirt is soaking wet and f*cking filthy! I can smell it.” He looked at Umberto, as if this had nothing to do with the two guys from the Herald, and said, “Where’s some dry shirts?”

“Dry shirts?” said Umberto. “I don’t know, unless they keep them in…”

But Nestor had already stopped listening. He was busy pulling his wet shirt up and off his torso and his arms and his head, which involved lifting his arms almost straight up. He winced as if in pain. “Awwwguh! Hurts like a sonofabitch! I must a pulled something in my shoulders.”

“That figures,” said Umberto.

Just like that John Smith’s swarthy little photographer had his camera up to his eyes and was pressing that button over and over.

Sergeant McCorkle stepped in and took Nestor by the elbow and pulled him away. “We got shirts inside, not at the Miami Herald. You know what I mean?”

He marched Nestor off at a good clip and pulled him close enough to say in a low voice, “You can talk to the press on the spot like this, as long as you don’t talk strategy or policy. But not so you can show off your f*cking physique. You know what I mean?”

But he was chuckling about it. This was not a day when he was going to get hard-ass toward Officer Nestor Camacho… who remained in Heaven.