90 Miles to Havana (17 page)

“This must be the bus stop,” Angelita says, pointing to a bench. We sit down and she hands me her map.

“You aren't coming, are you?” I ask.

“I already told you, Julian, I can't. There is still a chance Pepe's foster family might take me.”

The sad feelings that I've been pushing down for so long are starting to bubble up again. They've been there for so long, but they're like splinters that are too deep to pull out; the only thing you can do is to ignore them. I grab my suitcase and start walking away.

“Julian!” Angelita yells. “Is that it? You just get up and leave like it doesn't matter to you?”

“Angelita, it does matter. What do you want me to do?” I mumble, feeling like my face is about to crack. “You know I can't go back there.” Angelita gets up and stands in front of me. I know she wants a better answer.

“When Alquilino and Gordo got sent away, I had to learn how not to think about them, just like I learned how not to think about my parents. I guess by now I'm getting better at it.” It's not really true, but I swallow hard and start walking away. The bus is rushing up the street toward us. When I hear the hiss of its doors opening I stop. “Good-bye, Angelita.”

“I'm sorry I can't go with you, Julian.”

Afraid that my legs are going to rebel and run back to the bus, I turn away as fast as I can.

“Remember, look for the path just past the bridge,” Angelita yells out the window. “Tomás said that you can't miss it. I'll try to come back next weekend, I promise.
¡Cuidate
, Julian!”

I start walking away, listening to the grind of the bus getting softer.

“Caballo will never let her out again.” The dark windows of an empty factory are looking down at me. They seem to be asking, “Why are you here; why all alone?”

I know if I don't keep walking fast, I'll change my mind and turn back. I try to remember how good I felt when I thought up this crazy plan. It might be a crazy plan, but it is
my
plan. Besides, it's too late to turn back. I already missed the last bus.

“I have to find Tomás.”

When I see the bridge up ahead. I start feeling a little better.

But then I spot five guys leaning on a parked car just to the right of the bridge. They look like the kind of guys that could put someone like me in a dryer.

As I walk by, one of them points his cigarette at me. “Hey, where you going?”

I make believe I didn't hear him and keep walking.

A short guy with slick dark hair points at my suitcase. “Running away from home?” he says, and the others laugh.

I pull my suitcase close to my chest and walk faster.

“Hey, amigo!” he calls out.

I hear the car engine roar, and I start running. The car glides up behind me and someone yells, “Hey, amigo, there's no need to be rude!”

The car stops in the middle of the bridge, and the guys get out. Surrounded, I lean back against the railing.

I'm trying to stay calm, think my way out, make the
right choice: a long drop into muddy water, or a trip to the Laundromat and a long ride inside a dryer. They're getting closer. I balance my suitcase on the railing. Then I climb up next to it but my knee knocks into the suitcase.

“No!” I scream as I watch it dropping, getting smaller and then splashing into the muddy water.

“What are you doing? Don't jump, we're not going to hurt you!” one of the guys yells.

I'm watching my suitcase with all my clothes, my notebook, all the addresses I'll need, spinning away in the brown water. Then I remember the gold bird. My mother is going to kill me if I loose it!

I balance on the thin rail. This is higher than the high board at the beach, and I was waiting until next year to try that.

“Don't jump!” the short guy says, as my suitcase spins downstream. I can't let it get away but my feet feel like they're glued to the railing—I can't make myself jump into the river or back on the sidewalk! I'm stuck and they're getting closer.

Then someone yanks on my belt, and I tumble back onto the sidewalk. They've got me; next stop, the Laundromat. I can't believe my eyes; Angelita is hovering over me like an angel.

“You're here?”

“Get up, stupid! Follow me!” She yanks on my collar,
then pulls me to the other side of the bridge, and disappears down the path. I trip and then slide down the steep muddy bank into the water. Angelita is already clinging to the floating suitcase when I swim up.

“I leave you for five minutes, and you get yourself into trouble,” Angelita says as she tries to catch her breath.

The guys up on the bridge are laughing and pointing at me. “Hey,
Cubanito
, you're crazy, man!”

“What was that all about?” Angelita asks.

“I thought they were going to take me to the Laundromat, put me in the dryer. The driver said gringos have a strange sense of humor!”

“We weren't going to hurt you!” one of the guys yells. “Crazy Cubans!”

Angelita is looking at me when I finally figure out that maybe they didn't mean any harm. “What am I going to do with you, Julian?” she says and pats my arm. “Don't worry about it. It could happen to anybody.”

“I always thought you'd be coming with me,” I say.

“Don't get your hopes up,” she says, as we twirl downstream in the warm tide.

“I'm glad you're here,” I say as the sounds of flowing water and birdcalls mix with the soft hum of the highway above us. The tall trees growing on the steep banks block out most of the sunny bustle of the city.

Wrecked cars and piles of old tires peek out from under the green blanket of vines and bushes creeping up the
banks. Sleepy turtles roll off their logs as we sweep around a bend. Then Angelita points at an old wooden boat ten feet up the bank.

“That must be Tomás's boat.”

The boat is perched on tree trunks and an old refrigerator. A rope as thick as my wrist is wrapped around the hull and then tied off to a lemon tree. We paddle to a rough dock made of telephone poles and crates tied together.

Angelita calls out, “Tomás!” There's no answer, so we climb up a rickety ladder to the deck.

The tipped wooden deck is crowded with rusting engine parts, bent nails, bolts, and tin cans; orphaned stuff that Tomás has adopted. I walk over to a pile of tin cans, with a stack of flattened tin sheets next to it.

“That Tomás doesn't waste a thing,” I say as I study the soup cans that have been cut and then hammered flat. Two buckets of rusty nails stand side by side; one is filled with crooked ones, in the other the straightened ones.

“I bet Tomás is a lot like Bebo,” I say to Angelita as she steps over a ball of used tinfoil the size of a basketball.

“You never told me Bebo was a pack rat,” Angelita says.

“Bebo doesn't have as much, but he uses whatever he's got lying around to make and fix things just like Tomás.”

As we're talking, a boat chugs around the bend. The outboard motor sounds like an angry mosquito as it strains against the current. Tomás is standing on a pile of wooden planks in the middle of the overloaded boat. There is a
man sitting in the back steering the boat across the current into the dock.

“I can't believe my eyes!” Tomás yells. “Angelita, Julian?” Tomás seems really happy to see us. “How are things at the camp?” he asks.

“Oh you know, the same I guess,” Angelita says.

“Well, you're here, and that tells me something.”

The guy in the back of the boat stands up and picks up a plank. “Hey, Tomás, the tide is changing,” he says in English, but with a different accent than Dolores. “If we don't get unloaded soon I'll never get out of here and then you'll be making me dinner.”

“
Jes, jes
,” Tomás says in his accented English, and waves at us. “Julian, Angelita, this is Dog. He's helping me with the boat.”

We wave hello, and Dog tips an imaginary cap at us. “That's short for Sea Dog,” he says and smiles at us.

“He's right about the tide,” Tomás says as he grabs a plank. “I hate to put you to work. We'll catch up over dinner.”

We help carry the heavy planks up the steep muddy bank as the Dog fiddles with the motor. It's not easy work, but we don't complain. As we take the last plank off the boat, Dog puts the engine in reverse and smiles. With his long sharp canines showing, Dog looks more like a wolf than a dog. He waves good-bye and speeds back toward the bend.

When we finish stacking the planks we wash up in the river.

“Tomás, how did you get the boat up there?” I ask.

“That's the way I found her, a hurricane tore her off her mooring and then carried her in here.”

“What about its owner?”

“Owner? I'm the owner now. Dog says if you find a boat adrift you can claim it. He called it Right of Salvage—finders keepers.”

Tomás leads the way up the ladder then opens a hatch at the back end of the boat and points at what looks like a pile of rusty metal. “Look at that engine, have you ever seen anything as beautiful?”

“That's incredible,” Angelita says sarcastically. “Did it come with the seaweed?”

“It looks kind of rusty,” I say.

“When I get through with that engine it will purr like a kitten,” he says. Then we follow him down into a surprisingly clean, uncluttered cabin. We sit at a table neatly stacked with navigational charts. There is a shiny brass compass above us on a shelf, and blue life preservers hanging from pegs. “This is where I come to think my way around things. I've got to have order”—Tomás points at his head and laughs—“or this thing won't work!”

Then he holds up a small knife and an onion. “It's dinnertime. Who wants to help?”

I volunteer, and Tomás smiles as I cut the top and the bottom of the onion, peel back the skin, slice it in half, and then into quarters.

“I'll bet you worked in the kitchen with Dolores,” he laughs.

“I watched Dolores peel hundreds of onions,” I answer.

“You paid attention. I like that.” Tomás scoops the onions into a dented frying pan and then lights a little brass stove. “So, what's your plan?”

“Plan?” I ask.

“I know you didn't come just to see the boat. You missed the last bus. What's going on at the camp?”

“Do you know Caballo?” I ask.

“Caballo? Sure. He's the reason I won't work at the camp. He's a crook. He wanted me to pay him for letting me work there. He said if I didn't, he'd find somebody else,” Tomás shook his head. “I told him the reason we had a revolution back home was because of people like him. I never went back to the camp after that.”

Now I like Tomás even better. I tell him about how Caballo sent my brothers away and how mean he's gotten. Tomás laughs when I tell him about all the tricks we played on him.

“It sounds like you got the revolution started! It's funny how these things follow us around.”

“If I go back he'll make my life miserable first, and then they'll send me away to an orphanage or worse,” I say.

“No, it would not be a good idea to go back,” he says. “I don't blame you for running away, but still, it takes a lot of nerve to do what you did.”

“I was more scared of what would happen if I stayed.”

“I can understand that, I guess that's why I left, too.”

He nods and looks around for an extra plate.

“Tomás, you never told me how you got out of Cuba,” Angelita says.

“It was my father who got me out. He was afraid of what would happen to me if I stayed.”

“Your father?”

“
Sí
, he was a mechanic in the navy. He hated it, but when I turned sixteen he insisted I join the navy and become a mechanic, too. I thought that was strange because he used to say that I could do much better than that.

“One day they sent us to Cárdenas Bay to fix a motor launch that belonged to his captain. We were on the dock when my father told me to row out and get started—he would join me later.

“When I got on board I saw that the gas tank was full, and that the waterproof compartment next to the wheel was crammed with charts for a trip—a trip to Florida.

“I started the engine and it was running like a top. I could tell right away that it had just been tuned—probably by him. Nobody can tune an engine like my father. He waved for me to run it, so I pulled up the anchor and flew across that bay. As I roared back past the dock I saw two naval officers standing with my father. The two navy guys were signaling for me to come in.” Tomás smiled. “But my father was standing behind them, pointing north.

“That's when I figured out why he had talked me into
joining the navy, why he sent me out to tune an engine that he probably had just tuned. Just that like that”—Tomás snaps his fingers—“I decided. I pulled back on the throttle, and headed straight for the dock. At the last second I turned and sent up a rooster tail of water that soaked all three of them. I made one more pass laughing and hollering like a madman so that they wouldn't think that my father put me up to it. The last time I saw him he and the navy guys were yelling and shaking their fists at me, but then he stepped behind them and flashed me the good luck sign.

“I motored north thinking about how he must have planned the whole escape and never said a word to me—just in case. He did his part and now I have to do mine.”

Angelita is standing next to the table clutching the plates to her chest, listening. “You left just like that? No clothes, no good-byes?”

“Not really. I found a change of clothes and some dollars in a locker below, but the thing that still really bothers me is that I didn't get to say good-bye to my mother.”

“How could you just leave like that? That's something I'd have to think about for a while,” she says as she lays out the three different-colored plates.