90 Miles to Havana (19 page)

“The hats,” I say and point at the leaning tower of hats on her head.

“What about the hats?” she says and starts walking away.

I follow her to the shade of a palm where she sits down on a low wall and starts weaving four palm fronds together.

“At the camp, some of the kids made hats all day long,” I say as I pick out three of the long palm fronds from her pile. “I bet that's where you learned how to make them,” I say, as I weave the green spears together.

“So what?” I can tell she's not impressed. She's probably sixteen.

“We must have gone to the same camp!”

“You're nosy!” she answers as she weaves the hat into shape.

“Do you sell these? Is that how you make your living?” I ask.

“It's one of the ways.”

I stick my hand out. “My name is Julian.”

Her hands are surprisingly dirty. I'm not used to seeing girls with such dirty hands. Her chipped, peeling red fingernails have been chewed painfully short. “Lucia,” she says, without interrupting the rhythm of her busy fingers.

“Did your parents come and get you out of the camp?”

“No, they didn't. Are you always so nosy?”

“Where do you live?”

She sweeps her stringy hair back behind her ear. “I live at a foster home on Tenth Street. They take kids in from the camps.”

“I bet it's nice,” I say. “At the camp if you get sent to a foster home, it usually means living with a real family in a real house. It's a lot better than getting sent to an orphanage.”

She gives me a flat look. “It's not nice,” she says and then grabs the weaving out of my hands. “They do it for the money.” She unravels everything I did. “If you don't start it the right way, it won't end up right. Who's going to want a lopsided hat?” Her practiced fingers fold, tuck, and pull the hat into shape and then she hands it back to me.

“What do you mean they do it for the money?” I ask.

“It's like a business, they get money for every kid they take in.”

“What do you mean?” I ask again.

“What I mean is that the less they spend on each kid, the more they keep for themselves. All they feed us is this weird stuff called grits, and look at the clothes they give us.” She pulls at the frayed bottom of the man's plaid shirt hanging over cutoff shorts. “They buy these used at the Goodwill store, by the pound!”

“That's not fair,” I say, and she shakes her head at me.

“You're telling me. One of the girls I came with was taken in by a nice rich family. She's got her own room, nice clothes, they even send her to a private school. She invited me to swim in her pool but I don't have a bathing suit, and I can't show up dressed like this!”

“Can't you tell somebody about what they're doing?”

“Look, I'm not going to sell any hats with you sitting there asking me dumb questions.”

I'm trying to ignore her not-so-subtle hints. “What else do you do for money?”

“
Muy bien
, I see you are the persistent type.
Bueno
, I'll answer that question if you promise to leave me alone. Deal?”

“OK. I guess.”

“Later on in the afternoon I draw pictures on the sidewalk over there.” She tips her head past the big hotel behind us. “I put a cup out and the tourists throw their green dollars into it.”

“They give you money for drawing? That sounds easier than carrying heavy umbrellas around.”

“It's not as easy as you think. You've got to keep an eye out for Ramirez.”

“Who's Ramirez?”

“He's a cop. He and his partner ride around in their big black sedan looking for runaway kids. He knows I've got a place to live, but if he's bored he'll make me stop drawing, take me back to the house, and then I can't make any money!”

“What do you do with the money?”

“One question, remember?”

“This is the last question, please?” I know when I'm being a pest. I know I'm clinging on to her but she feels, and talks, like home. She's familiar and I have no one else to talk to!

“I send it to my mother in Cuba,” she says and then takes a short shallow breath like she's about to cry.

“I'm sorry,” I say and put my hand on the sleeve of her shirt.

“Sorry for what? I'm all right.” She moves her arm away. “My mother is buying an airplane ticket with the money to come here. Are you satisfied now?”

Now I feel ashamed of myself for bothering her.

“You have to go. Here come some customers.”

“Will I see you tomorrow maybe?” I say hopefully as a couple leans in to check out the hats.

“Not if I see you first,” she says.

The sun is just above the horizon by the time I finish dragging and then stacking the umbrellas next to Armando's
tent. He's inside repeating the word
Connect-y-cut
over and over. When he sees me come in, he stops. “What a strange language this English.” Then he pokes his head outside and checks on the umbrellas.

“Muy bien,”
he says as he takes a handful of bills out of his pocket and puts two tens into an envelope. “Here, give this to Tomás for me. Dollars for freedom,
para la Libertad
.”

“¿Para Libertad?”
I ask, as he hands me the envelope.

“And tell him that I talked to my brother. He and his
novia
will be ready on the twelfth.”

“What are they doing on the twelfth?”

Armando looks at me and then shakes his head. “He didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing, nothing, never mind,” he says and then digs deeper into his pocket.

“Here, put your hands out.” Armando pours the change into my hands, and then throws in three one-dollar bills. “There, not bad for a day at the beach. See you tomorrow afternoon. Just tell Tomás I'll have the rest of his money—the money I owe him—next week.”

I fold the envelope into my pocket and start walking to the bus stop. What's the money for? What are Armando's brother and his girlfriend ready for on the twelfth? I've got a funny feeling that the eleventh, circled in red on Tomás's calendar is part of the answer.

The coins in my pocket are jingling as I climb into the bus and then walk to an empty seat. We're driving down a
boulevard lined with palm trees and hotels when I spot a crowd of tourists standing in a circle looking down at someone drawing on the sidewalk. When we get closer I see that it's Lucia. Tourists are dropping money into her little cardboard box. I want to get off to see what she's drawing, but I know she wouldn't be happy to see me—she's got customers.

This morning the sound of an electric saw ripping into the hull wakes me up. I climb out of the cabin, look over the railing, and find Tomás fitting one of the salvaged planks into the hull of the boat. When he sees me, he waves for me to climb down and hands me one end of a plank. “Hold it in place there. Good, now push it in.” He picks some rusty nails out of the bucket and starts hammering away. “I'm glad you're here.” He smiles at me with four nails sticking out of his mouth.

We spend the morning replacing all of the split or rotten planks. Then while I sand the planks down to the bare wood, Tomás disappears under the tarp.

Working with Tomás is just like working with Bebo.
They never ask if I can do the job, they just show me what to do and then leave me alone. They don't doubt that I can do it and I don't, either. I like that.

Tomás comes back with three dented paint cans. “Here, I found these in the garbage.” He hands me a stiff paintbrush. “Maestro, it would be an honor,” he says and then points at the bare wood.

I paint the bare planks and then without asking I paint a big eye with black paint on the bow of the boat. When Tomás comes down to inspect my work, he laughs, “
El Ojo!
The Eye. It's perfect—how did you know?”

“I saw a picture of an Arawak canoe in a book once. It had an eye carved in front. The book said that the eye could see things that the people couldn't.”

“You see that brass compass up there by the wheel? That's
my
eye. I paid a lot of money for it. It's the most important thing on this boat. But I guess you can never have too many eyes when you're in the middle of the ocean!” Tomás says.

We finish working late in the afternoon, and I'm hot and hungry.

“Let's go get some shrimp for dinner!” Tomás says as he puts two nets into the back of a small skiff. “Climb in.” He pushes off with the oar and then starts rowing against the tide. “They're down by the last bridge,” he says as he pulls on the oars.

“The shrimp swim in with the tide.”

The traffic and the city are buzzing above us, but it's
peaceful down here in the green jungle water. We glide under an overhanging tree and Tomás nods at the lemons above us. “See those two babies right behind me?” he says without turning around. “Grab them. We'll make Tomás-ade tomorrow.”

By the time we get to the bridge the tide has turned and is now flowing into the river. Tomás ties the boat to a piling, its bow pointing into the stream, and hands me a net. “Here, you take that side.” He dips and gently swirls his net into the dark water. “The shrimp are just under the surface,” he says as he lifts his net and shakes a handful of shrimp into the bucket. I try the same motion, but my net comes up empty.

By the time I figure out how to spot the ghostly shrimp and then scoop them out Tomás has already filled the bucket three-quarters full. On my last try my net comes up full.

“Now you got the hang of it.” Tomás puts his net down and rows to the bank.

“We'll eat the ones you just caught,” he says and picks up the bucket. “These we'll sell to the guys up on the bridge.” Then he swats a mosquito off his neck. “We better hurry!”

I hold the boat as he talks to the fishermen on the bank. By the time he comes back a cloud of mosquitoes is gathering under the bridge.

“Let's get out of here!” Tomás yells as he climbs aboard.
“We've got the tide now; row us out to the middle of the channel. There's a breeze there that'll blow these little vampires away!”

Tomás taught me how to cook shrimp with rice. It tasted better than Bebo's, but I would never tell Bebo that.

Every night after dinner Tomás crosses out that day in the calendar, then he studies the tide charts and weather maps. The line of X's is getting closer to the red circle around the eleventh. Tonight he draws a blue circle that looks like the moon over the ninth of the month.

“What's that for?” I ask.

“The highest tide of the year, it's going to be a monster tide. Then the rain should start here.” He draws angled blue lines from the seventh to the twelfth. “Rain, heavy rain,” he says and points at a map of the tip of Florida. “This is our little river wiggling out of the Everglades. Between the rainwater draining out of the swamps and the high tide, this river is going to rise high enough to set the boat free! Just in time.”

Now the numbers and circles, Armando's money, and the calendar are all starting to make sense. I bet Tomás is going back to Cuba to pick up his parents. That's his part of the deal with his father. That's why he's in such a hurry to finish his boat.

“Would that be just in time for your trip to Cuba?” I ask.

Tomás whips around. “What did that windbag Armando tell you?”

“He didn't tell me anything. He just said something about dollars for freedom. I figured out the rest by myself,” I say, but he's not impressed.

Tomás paces around the cabin shaking his head. “I knew I couldn't trust him, if I didn't need his share to buy the gas, I wouldn't have let him in but I have fourteen people waiting for me.”

“Are they all your family?” I ask.

“No, it's just my mother and my father. The others are people that can't get out of the country any other way. Their families have given me money to help with the boat so that I can go get them.”

“How much do they have to give you?” I ask.

“They give me what they can. I would do it for nothing, but it would take much longer to make the money to fix the boat and then buy gas for the trip.”

I reach deep into my pocket and pull out the ten-dollar bill the man gave me for the box of cigars, the three singles, and a handful of change from the umbrellas. “This is all the money I have. Would you bring
my
parents, too?” I ask.

Tomás stops pacing and smiles at me. “Julian, it's not that simple.”

“I'll work really hard, save my money, and I can help
with the boat! You said yourself that I'm pretty good with engines!”

“Julian, this is not like going fishing. It's very dangerous. If any one of those fourteen people tells the wrong person, or if we get caught, we could all end up in jail.”

“Please, Tomás, I miss my parents and they're not going to let them out—I know it.”