90 Miles to Havana (7 page)

“
¡Dolores! Muchos dolores.
”

Why is he is saying that?
Dolores
means
pains
in Spanish. But when I listen a little closer, I remember what my father said: “They are as good as dollars.” Gordo reaches past me and grabs the bill and hands it to me. “Give him the box, stupid. Take the money!”

“Welcome to America!” the man says as he collects the cigar box.

Alquilino grabs my arm; I follow him into the terminal and then stop at a row of green plastic chairs by a wall with framed travel posters hanging on it.

“Mami told me this is where a guy named Jorge is going to pick us up and take us to the camp. Look for a guy wearing a yellow hat,” Alquilino says at we sit down.

“Who is that man going to give the cigars to?” I ask Alquilino as I study the face on the ten-dollar bill.

“Papi told me they're for the president. I think his name is Kennedy. He's crazy about Cuban cigars,” he answers.

I'm looking around at all the happy reunions. Each traveler searches the crowd, finds their smiling face, then they hug and pull back to get a good look and hug again. I search the crowd, too, but I don't even know the guy who's supposed to pick us up. Then Gordo points at a tall man who's walking toward us. “Alquilino, is that the guy? He's got the hat.”

Alquilino stands up. “Jorge, Pedro Pan?” he asks, and then puts his hand out.

The tall man shakes his hand, then slaps him on the back. “Welcome to America!”

A strange city is glittering in the distance as we breeze along the empty highway. Then we zigzag through a maze of streets lined with seemingly identical little houses. I'm counting the lefts and the rights, looking for landmarks, but then we turn onto a dirt road surrounded by a field of swamp grass, scrub oak, and palmettos.

“We'll never be able to find our way out of here,” I mumble out the window.

At the end of the road there is a gate with a wooden sign swinging above it. Crudely carved letters spell “C-a-m-p K-e-n-d-a-l.”

When the camp station wagon squeals to a stop, Jorge points at the kids pouring out of four metal buildings that
look like huge pipes cut in half. “There's your welcoming committee.”

“Why are they all wearing bathing suits?” I ask, but before he can answer the car doors open, and hands reach in and pull us out into a cloud of red dust. We're surrounded by a mob, and I can't see daylight, just the pattern on my brothers' shirts right in front of me and an occasional wild face rushing by. The mob is chanting; “
¡Piscina, piscina, vamos a la piscina!
” The pool, the pool, let's go to the pool.

When the crowd begins to move, it feels as if we've been swallowed by a big animal. I hear the sound of splashing water—screams, and then the wall of bodies opens up and there's choppy water below and blue skies above. I take a deep breath, plant my feet, and dive for a small opening in the mass of splashing, screaming kids.

If I stay on the surface I know they'll try to dunk me; we played this game at the pool in Havana. I swim to the bottom, kick off my shoes, and hook my toes into the drain. Above me a tangle of kicking legs and waving arms block out the sky. They're waiting for us to come up but I can hold my breath for a long time. To my left Alquilino is frantically unbuttoning his shirt and Gordo is pulling at the knot in his tie. Brilliant, I think, they're taking off their clothes so that when we go back up we'll blend in!

I slip out of my clothes, and then ball them up. I swim for the ladder, climb out and then start running. Halfway across the dusty space the crowd catches up. We're surrounded again but now they're laughing and pointing at me.

Gordo and Alquilino are shirtless, but still wearing their dripping dress pants. I'm down to my underwear—this is like a bad dream.

An older boy swaggers into the circle.

“Gordo, isn't that Caballo?” I whisper.

Gordo is looking at Caballo—measuring him. “He's even bigger than he was before.”

Caballo was in Alquilino's class. He thought that just because he was one of the bigger kids he could push everybody around. That's why he and Gordo never got along. Caballo might have been one of the strongest guys in the schoolyard but the real boss was the kid who came to school with his bodyguard. When that kid was around, Caballo had to jump and dance to his tune. That was one of the reasons why nobody really respected him. The other reason was he was the only kid we knew that chose his own nickname; everybody else had a nickname given to him or her. It was something that followed you around like a stray dog. Caballo changed it and then threatened to beat up anyone that called him by his real name.

“Hey, Caballo. How you doing?” Alquilino says and then steps forward to shake his hand. A troublesome smirk is rising on Gordo's face and somehow I know exactly what he's going to say.

“Romeo, how have you been?” Gordo says.

Caballo pushes Gordo; he flies back into the crowd. When the crowd spits him out, Gordo rushes back at Caballo. Alquilino jumps in between them.

“Caballo, we're all friends!” he says as he tries to hold Gordo back.

The crowd is closing in. I'm hopping around on one leg, trying to pull up my wet pants, but I lose my balance and fall into a forest of dusty legs.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Caballo huffs. “You weren't my friends!”

Then I see Caballo's black leather shoe come down hard on Gordo's bare foot and now it's Caballo turn to fly into the crowd.

“Boys! Boys!” A booming voice parts the forest of legs. “Is this any way to welcome your fellow countrymen?”

Gordo is struggling against Alquilino's grip. I hop over and try to open the knot of Gordo's fist. “Gordo, Gordo, stop. He's not going to hurt us!”

Gordo's temper has a low tipping point; pass that point and he's capable of almost anything.

“Amigos . . . boys,” the tall young priest says as he inspects the new arrivals.

My brothers and I huddle together, barefoot and dirty. Alquilino's glasses have been knocked halfway up his forehead, red-faced Gordo looks like he's about to pop, and I discover that I put my pants on backward.

“I see you boys have been baptized,” the American priest says in perfect Spanish. Then he laughs. “We are a little overcrowded here and we do not have enough adults to supervise, so I rely on certain older boys to keep order.” The priest steps over to Caballo and puts his hand on his
shoulder. “I see you have met my friend Romeo.” Caballo struggles out a thin pleading smile at the priest. “Yes, of course. I mean Caballo, my trusted helper,” the priest corrects himself.

Then someone calls out in a singsong falsetto, “Oh Romeo, oh Romeo!” The buzzing hive of kids starts to giggle. Caballo nods at his helpers, two big kids dive into the crowd and the laughter stops.

The young priest continues, “This young man has been a great help. I don't know what I would do without him! He will find you a place to sleep and assign you a chore—everyone has one. If you behave, do your chores, and get along, you will get two dollars on Fridays and be allowed to go into Miami on Saturdays.” Then he looks at his watch. “I have to go speak to the director.” Then his face softens into a smile. “Welcome, and please try to get along.”

We're waiting outside a storeroom when three rolled up camp mattresses come flying out at us.

“Pick them up!” Caballo barks from inside the musty smelling room.

Then, as I'm trying to figure out how to carry the heavy mattress and my suitcase, Caballo tosses three pillows at us. Alquilino and Gordo tuck their mattresses under one arm, but my arm is too short to go around the mattress.

“Follow me,” Caballo orders, and they start walking away.

They're halfway down the hall when I finally figure it out. I balance the mattress on top of my head, wedge the pillow under the other arm, and pick up my suitcase with
my free hand just as my brothers did. The mattress tips and unrolls as I hurry down the hall, but I finally catch up at the entrance to a long green room. “This is the dormitory where most of us sleep,” Caballo says. The two older guys walking behind us laugh, but I don't get the joke.

This place is nothing like my mother said it would be. It looks and smells like the hospital where I had my tonsils taken out. I was scared when I walked into that hospital and I'm scared now. I want to drop everything and run away but I can't do that. So I start counting the metal bunk beds.

Bebo taught me this trick. He said that if you concentrate real hard on what's gong on outside of you—where you are—you won't think about the scared feelings inside.

Thirty bunks on the left side, thirty on the right, sixty times two—one hundred and twenty kids sleeping in the same room. There's a window and a tall green locker in between each set of bunks. All the beds are made up the same: green blankets, a white sheet neatly folded back.

When we get to the end of the room, Caballo kicks open a green door. “And this is where you'll sleep,” he says. “Your own private suite!”

I throw the heavy mattress down and look around. “This is a bathroom!” I say, and the older guys laugh even louder. I guess this is the punch line.

Caballo swings the door open and points at me. “I always knew you were the smart brother.”

I follow Gordo out of the bathroom. “Hey, Caballo,” he yells. “Why are you acting like such a big shot?”

Caballo whips around. “Because, Gordo, there's nobody here to stop me from being the big shot, and you better remember that.”

When we walk back into the bathroom Alquilino is busy looking around for a place to put our stuff. “We can put our bags and things in here in the morning,” he says, when he finds an empty broom closet. “I'll talk to the priest and see if we can get our own beds.”

Gordo is still fuming. “He thinks he's a big shot, we'll show him right, Alquilino?”

“Listen, Gordo, you better try to get along with him. I've got a feeling that Caballo could make our life miserable if you don't.”

In the morning, Alquilino stashes our suitcases in the closet, and Gordo stacks the mattresses on top while I flush the three toilets and try the water in the faucets just to keep busy. When our things are safely put away, we step out of the dormitory into a red-dust field with four gray metal buildings stacked around it. The only trees in the camp huddle in a clump around a shed, patches of prickly grass grow like green islands in a sea of red dust. I can't decide if the tall chain-link fence running around the whole camp is there to keep the kids in or the dangerous-looking swamp out. This place looks nothing like the log cabins in the color pictures of American camps that my mother showed me.

Outside the fence there is a wild jumble of vines and prickly bushes. I press my face into the fence and say, “I bet there's a million snakes out there!”

Next to the fence, to our right, I see a cloud of red dust rising out of a hole. “There is something digging under the fence,” I say. The shower of dirt stops, and a boy's head pops out. The red-smudged face looks at us and then pops back in.

The kid looks familiar, so I run to the hole and poke my head in. “Who's in there?”

I hear muffled voices coming from inside the hole, and then a little dirt man springs up smiling, hair, face, and hands—even his teeth—dusted red by the clay. I stumble back—it's Pepe. But this boy is the opposite of Pepe. Havana Pepe, the pampered baby of his family, was always dressed up in white.

“Pepe, what are you doing here?” I ask.

Pepe considers the question for a second. “Probably the same thing you are, waiting for my parents to come.” He rubs his forehead, and a red streak flashes just above his eyebrows.

Pepe watches Alquilino inspecting the opening of the hole. “I bet there's someone in there that would like to see you,” he says just as a red hand creeps out of the hole, and reaches for his calf. “Ow!” he yells.

“Angelita?” Alquilino asks.

Pepe winks at us and then sings into the dirt. “
Aaal-quiliii-no
is here.”

We're all bending over the hole as a red baseball cap rises slowly out of the little cave.

Alquilino stutters, “An-an-angelita!”

Angelita pulls the cap down over her eyes and glares at Pepe. “I'm going to kill you. I wanted to clean up first.” Then she turns to us and says, “And what are you three staring at?”

Gordo laughs. “What do you mean—what are we looking at? You're the one that's crawling out of a hole in the ground.”

I jump inside and peer into the dark hole. The tunnel runs under the fence, out into the swamp. “Are you going to escape?” I ask Pepe.

“No we're going to use it to go pick tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes? I don't see any tomatoes,” Alquilino says cautiously, studying the jumble of vines and bushes outside the camp.

“You can't see the fields from here; they're on the other side of the swamp,” Angelita says, then starts walking toward the shed surrounded by tall thin trees. “Let's get out of the sun.”

Gordo shakes his head. “You have to dig a tunnel first so you can go pick tomatoes?”

“Shut up, Gordo. I'll explain it all later,” she says and turns to Pepe. “Is it clear?”

Pepe scans the grounds. “Clear,” he says and then climbs the delicate branches to the flat roof of the shed.
It's our own leafy room with a sky blue ceiling, and trees growing all around it. Angelita removes her cap, then shakes her shoulder-length hair free. “Ahh! That's better.”

“Good to see you, Julian.” She gives me a hug and steps back to take a good look at me. “You've grown. Pretty soon you'll be telling your brothers what to do.”

Then she shakes Alquilino's hand and runs a finger over his chin. “Look at that! The last time I saw you I counted eight hairs, must be at least fifteen of them now.” Alquilino turns red, of course. Gordo squeezes in between them.