AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (12 page)

Silvana

Miami, Florida

Sunday, April 8, 2012

10:05 AM

T
HE HOT
SHOWER FELT GOOD
. Something about this particular shower, the one in
the gym, always invigorated Silvana, much more than her shower at home ever
could. The water shot out like harsh needles against her hard, stout body. She
always spent a few extra minutes luxuriating in its womblike comfort.

Sunday morning was gym day for her. She went other
days during the week, but it was always at odd hours, whenever she could cram
it in. Sundays, however, she didn't have to work, thank God, so she arrived at
8 AM and was able to devote a couple of hours to her exercise regimen.

Afterward, she dried off in front of a mirror, as
she often did. She checked out her muscle areas that she worked on that day,
trying to notice a difference, a new ripple here or there. Of course, such
results were never visible so soon after a workout, but she liked looking at
herself anyway. Her tattoos, especially. They showed the Cuban flag on one
bicep and a slithering pit viper on the other.

She was proud of her body, even though it was not
at all what society would label as "feminine", but then neither was
she. The feminine types were what she preferred as sex partners, but she never
had too many of those. Her sex drive was low to begin with, and men were
certainly way, way out of the picture.

Long-term relationships had eluded her somehow.
Women like herself were slowly coming out of the closet and often living openly
as committed lesbian couples. She thought about it. Every once in a while, a
woman would catch her eye, or rather, she would catch another woman's eye, and
they might spend the night together, or even two nights, but it seldom reached
beyond that. Sex was not high on her list of things to do. It was enjoyable,
but not a priority. She had her work. And love? That was something in the
movies.

But her body did impress her.
I've come a long way,
she thought as she looked at her reflection
in the full-length mirror.
A long fucking
way from my childhood, from Mariel, from my shithead father. A long way from la
bolsa, the makeshift raft we came across on.

And a very
long way from Eleventh Avenue.

Silvana

Hialeah, Florida

1991-1997

E
AST
ELEVENTH AVENUE IN HIALEAH
literally ran along the other side of the
tracks. The north-south rail line was the de facto dividing line between
extreme eastern Hialeah and the western rim of the city of Miami. Crossings from
one city to the other were limited to 17th Street to the south and Ninth Street
even further south. To the north were more tracks just beyond 21st Street,
these running east-west, further isolating the neighborhood from the rest of
the city, painting it into a literal corner. Eleventh Avenue ran between 17th
and 21st, a line of long, low industrial buildings where they made awnings and
doors, where they packaged tape and textiles, where you found body shops, tire
warehouses, and other such activities. These businesses were thoroughly mixed
in with rundown houses and one-story strips of apartments, all of whose better
days lay far back in the rear view mirror. There was a lot of dirt where grass
should have been, and well-tended yards were not to be found, having long ago
been surrendered to weeds and bits of trash.

It was to this neighborhood that Silvana arrived in
1991 at the age of eleven, when she washed ashore on a raft in front of
sunbathers at the ritzy Casa Marina Hotel in Key West following her harrowing
journey from Cuba. Mostly by herself. As soon as the local authorities got to
her, they fed her and gave her a change of clothing along with soothing words.

Then they shipped her off to Miami.

Her aunt, Teresa Del Valle, lived here in Hialeah,
having arrived herself several years earlier in a similar fashion. When young
Silvana turned up on her doorstep with nowhere else to go,
Tía Teresa
took her in. Teresa worked at the Hialeah Box Company, a
little place down the dirty street that made cardboard boxes of all varieties,
while Silvana stayed at home. She had told Silvana to watch a lot of television
and learn English.

"
Eso es
cómo se aprende
," she said. That's how it's learned. She told Silvana,
"Our people come here and watch American television to learn English. When
you learn enough of it, I'll send you to school."

Silvana took to the TV right away, and unlike many
who come to the American shores, she learned English fairly rapidly. The
commercials were her favorites, followed by cop shows, especially reruns of
Miami Vice
. There were no commercials on
Cuban TV, and she found them strange in the beginning, but when her aunt
explained their function to her, she got it and watched them eagerly.

The cop shows, of course, were somewhat similar to
the
telenovelas
of home, only in
English. She learned a great deal from these, particularly the
Miami Vice
reruns, where occasional
dialogue was delivered in Cuban Spanish, holding her interest. The actors were
trained to speak clearly and, even though all the dialogue was not necessarily
correct English, it was English that was commonly used. She heard many phrases
in the street and in stores that she heard on cop shows. This was of great help
to her in her attempt to master the language.

At first, she had a thick accent and misused verb
tenses, common with newly-arrived immigrants, but she soon overcame those
obstacles. By the time she was thirteen, she was fluent and her accent far less
noticeable than even that of her aunt, who had been here much longer.

Meanwhile, Teresa worked her job assembling
cardboard boxes and enduring the groping of her male supervisors. She was not
particularly pretty, but she had a body with big curves in all the right
places, and this was her draw. After Silvana had been living there a while,
maybe a year or two, Teresa told her the bosses would put their hands all over
her and inside her clothing — right while she was working! — and every
now and then, one or two of them would yank her off the job and bring her into
the storeroom where they would bend her over a big crate of cardboard sections
and pull her skirt up and her pants down. She often came home after work with a
pronounced limp.

Once in a while, Señor Lara, the
jefe
from the Miami office, was there,
and he liked to smack her around while fucking her, giving her the occasional
black eye. He was a fat man, she said, with meaty, powerful hands and always
smelling of sweat and drugstore cologne. She told of sweat dripping off his
thick mustache when he sucked hard on her nipples. When Silvana asked her why
she continued to put up with it, she would always shrug and say, "
No te preocupes, Silvanita.
" But
Silvana did worry about it.

A few months before her thirteenth birthday,
Silvana had enough of a grasp on English so that she was finally able to go to
school, where she found the work very easy, hardly challenging. The most
difficult part was certain teachers — Cubans themselves, who didn't speak
English very well, or spoke with a heavy accent — who were hard for her
to understand. Sooner or later, though, she caught on to all of them and
breezed through the curriculum each year.

The school, however, was not designed for students
like Silvana who were eager to learn. Rather, it catered to girls like Blanca
Nuñez, who lived in a six-unit apartment building around the corner, across
from a used tire shop on East Seventeenth Street, and whose mother worked there
and needed someone to watch her daughter during the day.

Silvana was with her aunt in a neighborhood food
market when she met Blanca, who went shopping with her mother. The girls found
out they were the same age and both hailed from the Cuban port city of Mariel,
so they quickly took a liking to each other.

They began spending time together after school,
this odd couple. They often spoke of home, familiar places in Mariel that were
bright spots of their Cuban childhood. Blanca tried numerous times to shift the
topic of conversation to boys, since her hormonal stirrings were now making
themselves known, but Silvana skillfully deflected that subject every time to
something a little more generic and less sexual. And whenever Blanca asked
Silvana to talk about her heart-pounding trip across the dangerous Florida
Straits, she was met with a dark glare and stony silence. Silvana was not about
to revisit the nightmarish ordeal of waking up one night on the raft after a
few hours' sleep to find her two companions gone.

Blanca was frisky, insolent, and somewhat pretty,
with nut-brown skin and flowing, deep brown hair, where Silvana was thoughtful,
respectful — to a point — and plain, and with flat hair of lifeless
brown. Her round face and squinty eyes never turned heads of the boys in
school, not that she ever wanted those heads turned, but Blanca, her complete
opposite, was the other side of the coin. Blanca would often tease Silvana into
coming out with her at night. They never went anywhere at first, just hung
around under streetlamps or down at Stephen's for a Coke, or sometimes they'd
make the trek to the Burger King down on Eighth Avenue.

Occasionally they'd meet up with Sofía Ramos at
Burger King. Sofía lived with her parents and her brother in another part of
Hialeah — in a nice house, Blanca had said — although she
originally lived in one of East Hialeah's shabbier sections. She was a year or
two older than Silvana and Blanca, but in the same class at school, having
flunked a grade or two along the way.

What she lacked in academic ambition, however, she
recouped in a bounty of looks. Slim body, smooth and tight with the springtime
of youth.
 
Skin as fresh and
flawless as the clear blue sky, only now being introduced to its first
applications of makeup. Flesh soft and rounded that glistened the way only
young flesh can. Dark, bewitching eyes that looked past a light touch of
eyeliner down into the souls of boys who dared approach her. At fourteen, she
was becoming dimly aware of the great power nature had given her, and it
thrilled her.

"Boys are just so stupid," she told
Silvana and Blanca one rainy evening at Burger King. "All you have to do
to is look at them the right way and they'll do whatever you want."

Silvana was not too interested in getting boys to
do whatever she wanted, but Blanca said, "How do you know they'll do
it?"

"You can see it on their faces," Sofía
replied. "Just yesterday, I looked at Tomás Leal and he asked if he could buy
me a Coke. I bet if I looked at him some more, I could get him to buy me a
pizza!"

"A pizza?" Blanca's eyes glazed over in
wonder. "He would buy you a pizza?"

"I bet he would!"

"I bet he wouldn't," Blanca said.

"I bet I could get him to take me right over
to Rey's and buy me a whole pizza."

Meanwhile, Silvana's insides were stirring with
desire, fearfully exciting desire that she dared not mention, at the sight of
this gorgeous Sofía and her … her witchcraft. Yes, that's what it was.
Witchcraft. Nothing less. Clearly, this girl could spin webs around helpless
boys who willingly fell into trances over her, just for the chance to speak to
her, to maybe …
maybe
even touch her.
Silvana desperately wanted to drag her aside and ask her if she ever had
feelings for girls the way she did for boys, but deep down, she already knew
the answer. She silently cursed the whole situation.

As the rain subsided, Sofía left and returned
home. Silvana and Blanca lingered at their table in Burger King a while longer.
Blanca talked on and on about Sofía and how there was no way any boy was going
to buy her a whole pizza just because she looked at him.

"But she
is
beautiful," Silvana said her heart fluttering. "You have to admit
that."

"Yes, she is. But we can be, too. Did you see
all that makeup she was wearing?"

"What about it?"

"We can wear makeup, too," Blanca said.
"We can be beautiful just like she is. Come on. Let's go get some and be
beautiful." She rose up from her chair and tugged on Silvana's arm.
"Come on."

"Come on where? What —"

She tugged again at Silvana's sleeve. "Just
be quiet and come with me. You'll see."

They crossed the street to the Rite-Aid, where
Blanca led Silvana directly to the makeup section. She pointed out all the
exotic paints and touchup items, oohing and aahing at each one.

"We can't buy any of this stuff,"
Silvana said. "Or I can't anyway. I don't have any money."

Blanca didn't respond. She was too wrapped up in a
package of mascara and its possibilities. Her attention then turned to a row of
lipsticks and she riffled through them until a particular deep shade of red
caught her eye.

"Look at this one! What a beautiful color!
Don't you think?"

It did complement Blanca's complexion, Silvana
thought. She pictured the shade on Blanca's full, moist lips, then imagined
those lips …

"Yes. Nice color," Silvana said, tamping
down the feeling swelling deep within her. "Very nice color."

"And this mascara, and this blush. I bet this
is the same stuff Gloria Estefan uses, don't you think?"

"I wouldn't know. I don't know what she uses.
I don't use makeup."

"Oh, Silvi, you just
have
to. Boys won't look at you if you don't. Look what Sofía can
do with a little bit of this stuff." She gathered up the mascara, the
blush, and the lipstick and the rest of it and, with a quick glance up and down
the aisle, dropped all of it into her purse.

Silvana gasped. Blanca led her out of the store
and the two of them hustled down Eighth Avenue as fast as they could, giggling
to each other, but without running or drawing any other attention to
themselves.

That was only the beginning. The two of them
developed a pretty effective shoplifting routine with Silvana acting as the
decoy and Blanca stuffing things into her purse. And not just at Rite-Aid. They
went to the food market, the record store, and wherever there was merchandise
waiting to be lifted.

≈ ≈ ≈

Over the next year, they
became inseparable. They hung out with a group of boys who stole license plates
and tires, then celebrated their scores with a couple of six-packs of beer
purchased with a fake ID one of the boys had. The boys were older, seventeen
and eighteen. One was even twenty! Blanca had sex with him a few times and
while she couldn't quite master the total domination Sofía had acquired, she
did have a good time, and he did buy her a few small trinkets with his share of
the money from their heists. One time, he stole a car and took her all the way
to Miami Beach in it one Sunday afternoon. All the way to the ocean! The next
day, Blanca repeated every detail of the trip over and over to Silvana and
anyone else nearby. Miami Beach! In a car!

There were other girls in this group also, and
gradually Silvana and Blanca became their natural leaders. As the next couple
of years passed, the girls became adept at pulling their own little jobs,
stealing purses in restaurants, even graduating to B&E, pulling off a few
well-selected break-ins and taking down some pretty decent scores. They became
known in that part of Hialeah, and one night while they were all together at
Rey's celebrating one of their successful heists, Blanca said, "People in
the neighborhood, you know, they know us now. I think we should have a name.
You know, like a label, a brand."

"A brand? You mean, like …"

"I mean a brand," Blanca said.
"Like a brand name. Like Maybelline is a brand."

Without thinking, Silvana said, "How about
Las Brujas
?"

The Witches. Sofía still owned a little corner of
her mind, even after all this time. That submissive connection quietly passed
through Silvana's consciousness.

"
Las
Brujas
," Blanca cried. "Ooh, that's perfect!" The other
girls squealed their approval and they each raised their soft drink cans to
consecrate their new name.