All about Skin (32 page)

Fell off a goddamn roof after spending the better part of my life roofing.

That's what he said to people who asked, more curious than concerned, at la bodeguita. Of course, it wasn't really a bodeguita at all, not like the little stores in West Tampa stocked with Cuban products, smelling of root vegetables, cumin, and dry-salted cod. This one, barely a mile from his house, was just a regular mini-mart: gas pumps, beer, bad coffee, prefab sandwiches, and lottery tickets. Still, it offered a break from the house and Eme's smoking.

Efraín had always disliked Emelina's cigarettes, but her smoke, blended with the smell from the air system, made the house even more unbearable that afternoon than it had been during the last three months. Emelina tended to him dutifully following the accident, just as he had cared for her years ago during her pérdidas. That's what they came to call her repeated miscarriages over the years. Her pérdidas. But while he had given his attention generously during her losses, he felt Emelina was miserly with hers. She was impatient as she helped him out of bed and to the bathroom. She was brusque in manner as she settled him on the couch in front of the television or helped him bathe, the ordinary necessities of the day. It humiliated him to need help.

“You can leave,” he said to her a week after the accident, more out of disappointment and weariness than anger. “Go back to work. I don't need you to stay.”

Emelina was visibly relieved to return to her job and the children, and he made do alone. Efraín had to admit he envied her the distraction of work. Without it he felt lost. Without it he felt the way he did as a boy standing on the tarmac of the Miami airport with nothing but a small suitcase and a name tag.

Outside, the chilly dampness of the afternoon startled his body as if he'd been dunked in icy water, and it wasn't even all that cold yet. Not really. Not Nebraska cold. It was the first day the Florida temperatures had significantly dropped for the season, and they'd continue to fall as day turned into night. Efraín hated winter. He hated the way the cold seemed to find him once it started, creeping up his sleeves and down his collar, pinching his ears and smarting his eyes no matter what he did to guard himself against it. And this winter brought with it a previously unknown discomfort, a constant ache from the pins that now held his ankle together.

Efraín started his truck and waited for the engine to heat up. He waited for warm air to blow from the vents, and when it did he rubbed his hands in front of them as if in front of a fire. He figured he'd go get his weekly Lotto, and get away from Emelina and her afternoon cigarettes as the house warmed up.

Emelina had been smoking the first time Efraín met her, back in 1966. It had been at a get-together at his friend Rafaelito's house, and he'd only been in Tampa a few weeks. He'd gone to the backyard, away from the noisy chatter of the house, to the end of the property where a stand of palmettos grew. He found Emelina behind them. She wore a short navy-blue dress with a white sailor collar, and stood there in white high-heeled sandals with perfectly polished coral toenails, holding a cigarette with the tips of her outstretched fingers.

“You caught me,” she said, adding quickly, “Papi doesn't approve.”

He mumbled something apologetic, and turned to leave, but she stopped him.

“When did you get here?”

He knew by the way she said “here” that she didn't mean here as in the backyard, or even here as in Tampa, but here as in the United States.

“Over three years ago,” he said. “Pedro Pan. You?”

“Just this past year. Camarioca Boat Lift. ¿Directo a Tampa?”

He shook his head. “Nebraska.”

“Nebraska? Where is that?” Emelina asked.

The truck warmed up during the brief drive to the mini-mart, but the steering wheel felt thick and cold in Efraín's hands, and the chill of the vinyl seats made its way through his clothes. As he pulled into the mini-mart, feeling his pockets for his cell phone, his attention was drawn to an ordinary woman by the notice of two unremarkable things. She'd gotten out of a taxi, an unusual sight in this suburban part of town where everyone drove themselves; and, even though he couldn't hear her, he knew by her body language that she was speaking Spanish. She touched her heart with one palm, and held up the other flat, patting the air before her, shaking her head and scrunching her shoulders all in one simultaneous motion.

Efraín parked, and rummaged in the glove compartment for his penciled Lotto play slip. He finally found it beneath some paper napkins he'd carelessly tossed in a few days before. The slip was worn and dogeared; he needed to fill out a new one.

“Why don't you buy Advance Play?” Emelina asked him once. “You play the same numbers every week; just buy the same ticket weeks ahead without the bother.”

“Because,” Efraín said, “it would be like spitting in the face of fate.”

“Do you believe in fate?” Eme asked.

Efraín wasn't sure. If he hadn't met Rafaelito he wouldn't have come to Tampa, and he wouldn't have met Eme. He wouldn't have started roofing, and broken his ankle. Was that fate?

In the parking lot of the mini-mart, Efraín kept the truck motor running, and enjoyed the blast of warm air. He used the center of the steering wheel as a table top, carefully penciling in his numbers on a crisp play slip. The knock on his door window startled him. It was the woman from the taxi.

He rolled down the glass, and cold air invaded his truck.

“¿Habla español?” the woman asked him.

Efraín nodded.

“Mire,” the woman started. She said el chofer, el taxista, had brought her here from the bus terminal, but she didn't think this was the address, and she didn't understand anything he'd said. He'd driven her back and forth, she said, pointing to the road that fronted the mini-mart, and then made her get out of the cab.

Efraín looked at the woman, trying hard to follow what she said. He had no trouble with Spanish, even though his conversations with Emelina usually fell into English, and he'd stopped thinking in his native language God knew how many years ago. He still spoke rapidly his Cuban Spanish with swallowed final syllables and nonexistent plural
s
's. He spoke effortlessly with Puerto Ricans who couldn't roll
r
's, and emphasized everything with bendito this, and bendito that. But this woman's Spanish was clipped, yet lilting, rising and falling in a cadence that left him wondering if she was asking a question or making a statement.

She stood there, pushing stray strands of hair away from her weathered face, clutching a piece of paper, telling him she was lost.

“Tell me what your paper says,” Efraín said.

“No puedo,” she responded.

“Why can't you?”

“Because I can't.”

Efraín looked at the woman, realizing she didn't know how to read, and said softly, “Por favor, Señora, let me see.”

He looked at the scribbled address on the wrinkled paper, a Fletcher Avenue address, the road behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, the east-west artery already filling with rush-hour traffic, and saw the taxi pull away. He looked down from the truck at the woman. She was squat and round, wearing gray sweatpants and an oversized men's jacket. Efraín sighed, half in pity, half in resignation, and asked her to get in the truck.

She climbed in with a knapsack and a small brown duffle. He began to say she could put them in the flatbed, but she put them on the floor in front of her and placed her feet carefully on top of them. Efraín noticed the side of her black sneaker was taped with a silver strip of frayed duct tape. A doughy smell of corn tamales emanated from her knapsack.

Efraín studied the address as she explained she was trying to find her brother.

“Where are you coming from?” Efraín asked.

“Carolina del Norte,” she said. “I came for the strawberries.” The strawberries were ripening and picking season would begin soon on the east side of the county. Harvesting work would be plentiful.

“It is very early for them,” she sang, “but, well, usted sabe, la Migra.”

Efraín stuck his play slip over the visor, and backed toward Fletcher Avenue. He believed from the numbers on the address that it shouldn't be far, just slightly west of the mini-mart. He waited for a break in traffic, as the afternoon crawl began.

“Gracias, Señor,” she said.

Efraín shrugged a de nada as they waited for a red light to change.

She rubbed her hands in front of the air vent as he had done earlier, and asked politely, “What is your country?”

“Cuba,” he said.

“How long have you been here?” she asked. “¿Hace mucho tiempo?”

“Sí,” Efraín said, “it has been a very long time.”

“¿Desde cuándo, Señor?”

“Since 1962.”

Efraín was fourteen. Fidel had closed private schools and formed youth patrols; young teenagers were being sent into the interior to work on agricultural farms and teach illiterate campesinos to read. They can't get their hands on him, he heard his mother tell his father one night.

Efraín inched his truck along with traffic, west toward the sinking sun. The woman rearranged her feet around her belongings. She lowered the top of her jacket zipper just slightly where it had been pressing against her chin. He realized it made it more comfortable for her to breathe and speak as she repeated his words back to him.

“It has been a very long time,” she said. “You came with your family, no?”

Efraín darted his eyes back and forth repeatedly from the wrinkled paper in his hand to the red brake lights of the car in front of him as if that would wipe away the images of the day he left Havana and his family.

“Señora, I believe the address is not far from here,” he said, his voice tight and strained, although there was no zipper pressing against his chin.

Pedro Pan. Efraín remembered standing on the tarmac of the Miami airport, wearing a name tag and feeling lost. Many children, some so young they clutched a stuffed animal or doll, were met by relatives. Others, like him, were placed on a bus and driven to Camp Matecumbe, a processing center.

That's where he first met Rafaelito; he too, was alone. Two weeks later, with no word from his parents, he boarded another bus, together with Rafaelito. This time they were escorted by a young nun from Catholic Family Services, who rode with them to a boys' home in Nebraska.

The longer Efraín rode on the bus, the colder the weather became. The monjita spoke to him cheerfully. He knew it was cheerfully because she smiled and patted his hand, but he couldn't understand a word she said. She even said his name wrong, Efren, as if it had no
a
or
i
.

Efraín felt a sudden chill as he drove cautiously in the stop-and-go traffic looking for the address on the worn sheet of paper. Suddenly the numbers were too low, and he cursed silently, assuming he'd missed it and doubling back. It happened again: a ten-number jump. There was an entrance to a condo complex where the number he searched for should be, and Efraín knew it wasn't the place, but he turned in anyway. It was a gated complex that didn't allow passage past the main driveway without an entry code. He turned the truck around, pulling along the length of a white-painted curb.

Did she have a phone number, he asked. Was she certain of the address; was her brother waiting? Bueno, she said and explained. Her brother expected her for the strawberries; he'd given the address over a pay phone to someone she knew. When word spread through North Carolina that la Migra was tightening down, she decided to leave early. She presented the address at the bus terminal and bought a ticket. She couldn't read, she said apologetically. But, she added proudly, she could count.

Efraín leaned toward the steering wheel and back again, shifting around in his seat; God, he hated buses.

At the boys' home in Nebraska he bunked with Rafaelito. They were the same age. After lights out they traded stories about their families and homes as they boasted of baseball feats, carefully avoiding with false bravado how scared and lonely they were. They started to crunch English words out of their mouths as they awaited letters from home.

They hoped to be reunited soon, the letters said, although the ones from Efraín's mother contained no specifics. Ten months later, as if a present for his fifteenth birthday, Rafaelito received a telegram saying his family was in Florida. Efraín began writing home every day. When are you coming? he asked in every letter.

Things were uncertain, his mother wrote back. His father wasn't sure when they could leave. The letters became repetitious as Efraín turned sixteen, seventeen, and then could see eighteen. The sprawling house of his boyhood, in the elegant Vedado neighborhood of Havana, had been in his father's family for three generations. His father was reluctant to leave; Castro would certainly fall. Efraín wrote one last letter before he turned eighteen.

Understand, niño, we cannot leave what is ours.

Now, decades later, he remembers the veranda that wrapped around his house in Havana. He has hazy memories of Soledad, the maid who prepared his noonday lunches while his mother played canasta with her manicured friends. And while he can no longer conjure his mother's face, he remembers her voice in that letter.

When he turned eighteen the orphanage provided a one-way bus ticket to any place he wanted to go. He'd received letters from Rafaelito, frequently at first when he left to join his family in Florida, more sporadically as the years went on. Rafaelito wrote that he and his family lived in Tampa, much farther north than Miami, but warm nevertheless. He told Efraín that Tampa had a boulevard called Bayshore, which hugged the bay the way the Malecón did in Havana, and although waves didn't come crashing over the seawall as they did on the Malecón, it was still quite a sight to see.

Efraín now wondered if the address was missing a number or had an extra one. It couldn't be any farther west. The avenue changed names shortly past the condo complex as it crossed a large intersection and became a curving tree-lined road leading into well-established neighborhoods.