90 Miles to Havana (4 page)

“I think she saw us,” I say.

“We're not afraid of her, right, Alquilino?” Gordo says.

The woman is now holding her hand out, waiting for Angelita to give her the necklace, but Angelita turns away. José gently places his hands on her shoulders and whispers something. Suddenly Angelita turns around, rips the thin gold chain from her neck, then flings the necklace against the wall. The woman in the white dress clenches her
fists, but then she laughs and says something to the soldiers. She takes out a notebook, writes something down, and then waves them away. She's done with them.

As they walk to the car Angelita looks up, shading her eyes against the morning sun. I can see her mouth moving, but I can't hear what she's saying.

Gordo and I wave as they get into their car. Alquilino is just standing there, his arms hanging limp at his sides. “I'm going to miss Angelita.”

Gordo corrects him, “We're all going to miss her.”

As they drive away the little woman picks up the necklace, and then shouts loud enough for us to hear,
“¡Guzanos!”

“Why
guzanos
?” I ask.

“Anyone who leaves is a
guzano
, a worm,” Gordo answers.

The soldiers closed the green shutters, and then sealed them with a red paper stamp.

“The stamp,” I said. “Bebo told me that they put those on so they'll know if anyone goes in after they close it up.”

We were watching the soldiers paste a big sign right on the front door, when my mother yelled from the bedroom, “The gold swallow! Alida wore it New Year's Eve. She forgot to return it!”

“Don't worry; I'll go talk to the woman,” I hear my father say, and then he rushes down the stairs.

By the time we get out to the sidewalk my father is pleading his case. “Señora, please,” he says politely, “it means a great deal to her.” It's scary to hear my father pleading,
almost begging. I've never heard him speak to anyone that way. “It was a gift from her grandmother and with so much going on Mrs. Garcia forgot to return it!”

The woman raises her hand to silence him. “That would be against the regulations. I told you already, once the house is sealed no one is allowed inside.” Then she points at the sign on the door, “Read the sign carefully. If you're caught, you can be shot or thrown in jail.”

“Señora, please try to understand. If you could make an exception this time.”

“Señor, it is you who has to understand. There will be no more exceptions. Things are different now,” she says and then walks away.

She is right about things being different. In the last few days, the streets have filled with soldiers, most of them no older than Alquilino. They strut around, carrying their rifles on their shoulders like baseball bats. I think they're trying to impress the girls.

Yesterday I went with Bebo to fill the gas tank in my father's car. We had to wait for almost an hour to cross Quinta Avenida because there was a huge line of tanks and army trucks going by. On the way to the gas station we saw lines of people waiting for the bus, lines for bread, milk, and meat. When I asked Bebo why the people in the food lines looked so grumpy he said it was because they know that the shelves are probably going to be empty by the time they finally get inside.

Of course there was a long line at the gas station, but the
biggest line of all was at the U.S. Embassy. Bebo said that the people in that line were waiting to get their passport so they can leave. The saddest line was the one that snaked around the back of the embassy. That line was for the parents who could not get passports but were trying to send their children out alone. Maybe that explained the steely expressions they all wore like masks. They looked sad and determined, as if they had made up their minds to take the medicine, no matter how bad it tasted.

“How could parents send their children to a strange country all alone?” I asked, and Bebo shrugged. He didn't even try to answer.

On the way back home we had to wait to cross Quinta Avenida again. The same trucks, tanks, and soldiers we saw in the morning were now driving in the opposite direction.

Our new leader has just launched into his third talk of the week on the T.V. My mother is angry because she can't watch her favorite show.

“No wonder everybody's leaving. Who wants to listen to that man for four hours every night, lecturing, dictating, wagging his finger at everybody.” She wags her finger at me. “Julian, make him disappear.”

With every click of the knob the screen blinks, the dictator disappears, but then he appears again.

“It's like a bad dream,” my mother groans. “Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look. That face—the beard—pasted on every telephone pole and wall. We have the wagging finger, but no soap, no soap operas, and no Armando!”

She used to listen to her favorite radio announcer, Armando, read the novellas every night in his deep, dramatic voice. It was her favorite show.

“
Querida
, you should keep your voice down. Our nosy neighbor across the street can hear everything you are saying, and you don't want to get on her bad side,” my father says almost whispering.

“Did you try to talk to her again about getting my pin back?” my mother asks.

My father shakes his head. “It's like talking to a robot. No exceptions.”

“My grandmother gave me that pin!” my mother cries, and then storms out of the room.

Alquilino has been staring into space, fiddling with his glasses; he's thinking, trying to figure something out.

He and Gordo are so close but they're so different. Gordo acts and then sometimes thinks about the consequences. Alquilino thinks forever about the consequences and then sometimes acts. He turns things around and around so much that sometimes he can't make up his mind.

But I can tell by the way Alquilino pushes his glasses up on his nose that today he's going to act.

“Come on, Gordo. I have a plan,” he says, and then he and Gordo walk into my mother's bedroom. I follow a few steps behind, stopping at the door as they climb out the window to the flat roof.

Our neighborhood is turning into a ghost town; almost every day the soldiers come with their guns and another family leaves. The soldiers seal the windows with their red tape, trapping the spirit of the families inside with their laughter, dishes, and photographs. Those empty houses, like the tombs of the Egyptian kings we read about in school, are dark and mysterious and begging to be explored.

Alquilino and Gordo have been sneaking out late at night to explore, but they never let me go with them.

“We should do it tonight before the new people move in,” I hear Gordo say as they look down onto Angelita's patio. “We can go in through that pantry window, it
doesn't have a latch. That's the way Angelita gets in when she gets locked out.”

“But the shutters are locked up tight,” Alquilino answers.

“We'll just have to pry them open with a screwdriver,” Gordo answers.

I stick my head out the window. “You don't need a screwdriver,” I whisper, and then climb out to the roof. “Pepe showed me where the extra key is.”

“Where is it?” Gordo demands.

“I'll tell you, if you let me go with you.”

Gordo reaches for me. “Where is it, Julian?” he says menacingly, as I slip behind Alquilino.

“Julian, this could be dangerous.”

“I know, Alquilino, but this is for Mami, and I can help.”

Gordo shakes his head. “I don't think he should go. What if he does something stupid?”

“What if
you
do something stupid, Gordo? You're not perfect, and besides I know all their hiding places. Pepe showed them to me,” I say, and then duck, just in case.

Alquilino is scratching his chin again. “If she didn't leave it in her jewelry box, then we'll have to search the whole house.”

“That's a big house,” I add. “The more of us searching the better. Right, Alquilino?”

Alquilino nods at Gordo. “That makes sense to me. I say he can go.”

“Fine, but if he messes it up it'll be your fault.”

That night I'm waiting under the covers, fully dressed, my flashlight checked and ready. When Alquilino gives the signal, we sneak out of the house, and then climb the tall fence into Angelita's patio.

Alquilino and Gordo link their hands. I step up and shimmy up the column to the balcony, then crawl across the narrow ledge to Pepe's window. Standing on my tiptoes, I feel along the top of the sill and find the key.

The key slips into the lock, the door creaks open and Gordo breezes by me. Pepe's wind chime clinks and clangs.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Gordo says.

“You didn't give me a chance,” I answer.

“Shh, Julian close that door,” Alquilino whispers as he walks into Pepe's bedroom.

We step gingerly around the plastic horses, dump trucks, and army men scattered on the floor. The sad abandoned toys look like they're waiting for Pepe to come home. The crumpled sheets on the unmade bed still hold Pepe's sleeping outline. It feels like he's about to walk into the room.

We look in Mrs. Garcia's jewelry box, the dressers, and then in between the mattresses. As we rifle through Mrs. Garcia's pocketbooks in the closet the wind chime in Pepe's room clangs again.

“You closed the door, right?” Alquilino asks me.

“Yes,” I answer.

“Someone's in Pepe's bedroom. Let's get out of here,” Gordo says.

Keeping our eyes on the landing above us, we fly down
the stairs to the dark foyer, then creep along the wall to the door. Suddenly a stooped-shouldered silhouette floats behind the railing in front of Pepe's doorway.

“The son,” Gordo hisses.

“Never mind who it is,” Alquilino says and pulls him back against the wall.
“Vamos.”

As we dash across the foyer I remember the little hiding place in the pantry behind the tile. Pepe told me that his mother had it made to hide important things.

As Alquilino slowly works the knob, I'm thinking that I could just run back in, get it and run out. My mother would be so happy to see it; I would be the hero. But then I remember the nibble, the tug on the line, the lost fish, and I hesitate. What if I mess it up? We could all go to jail or get shot!

“Wait, there's one more place we didn't look,” I whisper to Alquilino.

“Where?” Alquilino asks.

“There's a hiding place in the corner of the pantry. It's behind a loose tile. I'll show you.” I grab his arm to pull him back in but Gordo steps in between us.

“He's in Alida's bedroom,” he says. We can hear him upstairs opening and closing drawers, jangling the metal hangers in the closet. “He'll come down here next. You guys meet me at home.” Before we can say anything, Gordo grabs my flashlight and then disappears into the shadows.

“Let's go!” Alquilino says as he pulls me out of the house.

I notice that the front of our house is all lit up.

“Something's wrong,” I say.

“No kidding! Let's go see.” I follow Alquilino to the bushes in front of the house.

“Trouble.”

The little woman and her son are at our front door. She's waving her arms, pointing at her son, and then upstairs. Then she tries to wedge past my mother and father.

“She's saying something about us,” I whisper to Alquilino.

“You have no right to come into my house in the middle of the night!” I have no trouble hearing my mother when she's mad.

“Let's go, she wants to check our room,” Alquilino whispers.

We climb the thin trunk of the papaya tree that grows by our window, jump into the room, and as I'm about to pull the covers over my head I see Gordo's empty bed. “What if they come up?” Alquilino is already under the covers, so I grab my pillow, jump out of bed and then pull Gordo's covers back. “Throw me your pillow. Quick!” I line up all three pillows, throw the covers over them. “It doesn't look like him,” I say but no matter how I arrange them it still looks like three pillows under a blanket.

My mother is at the bottom of the stairs. “I don't know what your son is talking about. I watched my boys go to bed!”

I grab Gordo's baseball glove from the night table, then lay it right next to where his hand would be—as if he just put it down.

As I get into bed, I hear the little woman at the top of the stairs. “If they're in bed, then you have nothing to worry about, but if you don't let me in I'll just have to assume that my son was right.”

“It's all right,
querida
,” I hear my father say. “She'll look and then she'll go. Isn't that right, Señora?”

“It's not all right,” my mother warns. “If you let her in once . . .”

Our door opens and a yellow shaft of light slices over Gordo's bed, then Alquilino's, stoping on top of me.

“You see?” my father says. “They're all asleep. Please, I don't want to wake them up.”

“Are you satisfied?” My mother taunts the woman. “My sons are sleeping and the real crooks are running away. I can almost hear them laughing.”

“We'll see who gets the last laugh,” the woman threatens as the slice of light rakes back over us, and then it's dark again.

Gordo grunts as he pulls himself in through the window. He tumbles into the room, waving the little bird in the air as if it were flying.

“Look what I found behind a bag of rice.” Then he digs into his pocket and pulls out Angelita's necklace.

“You got both?” I whisper.

“The necklace was on the kitchen table and the bird was right where you said it would be. That flashlight saved the day, too. I was coming out of the pantry, and the kid was standing in the middle of the kitchen. I flashed
the beam right into his eyes and then bolted out the door. I don't think he saw me.” Gordo looks at his bed. “Is that supposed to be me?”