90 Miles to Havana (8 page)

“Hey there, Gordo,” Angelita says and steps back.

“You've grown, too, Angelita.” Gordo smiles.

Angelita ignores Gordo's attempt at flattery. She walks to the shade and then lies down on her back. She spreads her hair like a black silk fan on the tar roof.

“Right before we left, my mother wanted to chop it all off. She said it would be easier.”

“You have beautiful hair,” Gordo croons. He pokes her forearm with the toe of his new sneaker. “So, what are you doing here? We saw you leave with your parents.”

“Ay, what a nightmare. When we got to the airport they had given my mother and father's seats to someone else. I'm sure the little woman that took my necklace had something to do with it. My mother said that after I threw it down, she wrote our names down in her little book.

“My father almost had a heart attack,” Angelita
continued. “Then my mother called this guy, who helps kids get out of the country.”

“Pedro Pan?” I ask.

“Yeah. They had a group of kids on that airplane and they let us go with them because we already had our papers and tickets.”

Alquilino is poking at the dried tar with a little stick; he breaks through it and black oil oozes out. “I can't picture your mother letting Pepe out of her sight.”

“It wasn't easy for her, but she had no other choice. She made me swear that I would protect Pepe with my life.”

Pepe looks up defiantly. “That's funny, she asked
me
to take care of
you
, too.”

“You're right, Pepe. We've got to take care of each other. For once in her life my mother was right to worry, because here, the big eat the small.”

Alquilino pushes his glasses back up on his nose. “God, Angelita, you're so dramatic!”

“Alquilino, you just got here, and I bet your mother didn't tell you what this place is really like. First of all look out there, tell me what do you see?”

“A lot of kids playing,” Alquilino answers.

“Look closer—listen,” she says.

On the makeshift baseball field, boys are arguing over a foul ball. In the middle of center field six younger boys are busily digging in the sand. Next to the field, a small pool
overflows with splashing, screaming kids. A group of girls is sitting in the shade of a small building, weaving hats out of palm fronds. At the highest point in the camp there is a picnic table with a little roof on top. Caballo is sitting at the head of the table dealing cards out to his friends, occasionally looking out over the fields.

Alquilino shrugs. “Kids playing, that's all.”

“I know, there are no grown-ups,” Gordo says. “That's it right?”

Angelita crosses her wrists over her eyes. “You don't get it! They're not just playing.”

There is something funny about the way they're playing. I look a little closer, trying to compare this to all the other playgrounds and baseball fields that I remember. The first thing I notice is that I can't hear anybody laughing and the argument on the baseball diamond is still going on. We used to have huge arguments but only for a minute or two, then someone would yell, “Let's play ball!” and we'd start up again. Soon we would be laughing and joking around. Here everybody seems to be concentrating and playing so hard that they're not having fun.

“It's like they're playing too hard,” I say.

“Bingo!” Angelita shouts and throws her arm around me. “That's one of the first things I noticed when I got here. It took me a little while to figure out why everybody plays so hard.”

“So what. We played just as hard at home,” Gordo says.

“This is different, you'll see. When they concentrate
real hard on baseball or weaving their hats they can't think about how much they miss their parents, where they are, or where they might end up.”

“End up?” I ask.

“No one stays here for long.”

“That's not what our mother said. She said we would wait here until they can get out, too,” I say and stick my finger in the black tar. I knew there was something they weren't telling me!

Angelita leans in close to Gordo and Alquilino. “Didn't you tell him?”

They're all looking at me, shaking their heads.

“Tell me what?” I ask, feeling like I've been left out of the joke again. It's embarrassing, even Pepe seems to know the punch line.

“Where are they going to send us?” I ask as I draw a shape like a raindrop with the tar.

Angelita looks at Alquilino then at me. “This is just where you wait until they find a place for you. If you're lucky, you go live with a foster family. If not, they send you to an orphanage. Sometimes they can send two together but three . . .” She shakes her head.

Gordo looks at me with his I-told-you-so eyebrow rising.

“You were the only one that told me the truth,” I say.

Gordo just shrugs and then says to Angelita, “They're going to send us to live in an orphanage?”

Angelita stands up. “I don't want to scare you, but you should know how things work here.”

“That doesn't scare us, right Alquilino?” Gordo says.

Alquilino doesn't answer. He's watching the older kids who had been playing cards stroll out to the baseball field. They grab the ball and bat, and then force the younger kids off. When one of the younger boys complains, an older kid pushes him down and then stands over him. Not one of the boy's friends dares push back. They help the boy up and then skulk off to a pocket of open space by the fence.

“I guess you're right, Angelita. The big fish do eat the small here,” Alquilino says.

“Caballo and the older boys are going to eat us up like minnows if we don't stick together.”

Gordo sticks his chin out. “No one is going to boss us around, right Alquilino?”

Again Alquilino doesn't answer Gordo. “What else don't we know about this place?” he asks Angelita.

Angelita tucks her hair back into her cap and pulls Pepe up by the collar of his shirt. “We have lunch at twelve and dinner at six.” Then she looks at Gordo like she's annoyed at him. “By the way, everybody is talking about how you pushed Caballo,” she says, and Gordo smiles.

“That's not good, Gordo. The most important thing you should know is that nobody pushes El Caballo. He's the boss. He'll get you back, he has to.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because, if he doesn't, some other kid might try the same thing.”

Gordo puffs out his chest. “I'm not scared of him.”

We're trying to decide how and where we're going to sleep in the green-tiled bathroom, when the lights flicker on and off.

“That's the signal, ten minutes before lights out,” Alquilino says.

“I'm going to sleep right here by this closet,” Gordo calls out as he unrolls his mattress. Alquilino sets his bed down next to Gordo, but if I set mine down next to his I'll be sleeping with my head up against the toilet.

“Why don't we sleep outside?” I ask. “At least it doesn't smell like a bathroom out there.”

Alquilino shakes his head. “They have rattlesnakes
here. I read that they like to crawl into your blankets to get warm.”

I settle on a spot on the other side of the room where I can lay my head under the sink instead of the toilet.

The too-thin mattress and the bathroom smell kept me up all night. Every time I dozed off, the green of the tiles seeped into my dreams, and I would wake up with the taste of bathroom in my mouth. I was finally feeling my way into a black-and-white dream, when someone came in and turned on the lights.

I open my eyes to the sound of an airplane taking off. Someone is flushing the toilet and there is a hairy leg right in front of my face. The legs belong to Caballo. He's standing over me, briskly brushing his teeth.

“
Molores mis maiting mor mou
.” He rinses and then spits. “Report to the kitchen, Dolores doesn't like to wait.”

Gordo gets up on one elbow, yawns, and stares at Caballo as if he has no idea where he is.

“I hope you enjoyed your tile beds.” Caballo laughs as he wipes the white line of toothpaste dripping down his chin.

“We never slept better,” Gordo says and smiles. “Thanks for asking,
Romeo
.”

Caballo takes a step toward Gordo but he reconsiders, “Keep it up, Gordo. This is nothing like it was at school. Here, I always win.”

Before Gordo can answer Alquilino gets up. “Gordo, Julian, get dressed. Let's go meet Dolores.” Then he steps right in front of Caballo. Alquilino, as tall as Caballo, leans
in real close and looks right into his eyes. Suddenly Caballo doesn't look as big or scary to me. “Lay off him, Caballo,” Alquilino says, really low, and then leisurely starts rolling up his bed.

When Caballo storms out, Gordo slaps Alquilino on the back and laughs. “That was pretty good, Alquilino. You scared him. I saw his face.”

Alquilino just nodded. He's diplomatic like my father, but also crazy proud and protective like my mother.

We follow the sound of clanging pots and a high warbling voice singing in English as we walk through a big room crowded with long tables. “She'll be coming around the hmm-hmm when she comes, she'll be hmm-hmm around the mountain when she comes.”

“This must be the kitchen,” Alquilino says as he carefully pushes the door open. Inside a big woman dressed in a faded green uniform is bending over a metal table. When she sees us, she wipes her big beefy hands on her dirty apron and stares at us. We stare back from the doorway, keeping a safe distance between us.

“Well, are you comin' or you goin'?” she says slowly in English, I guess so we can understand. “I'm Dolores, and it's about time you alls got here.” She throws three aprons across a metal table at us.

“Them's for you,” she growls. “I ain't got time for formal introductions, we got people to feed.” We had English lessons in Cuba, but our teacher must have taught us a different kind of English.

When she comes closer, we back out of the doorway.

“Git back in here!” Dolores growls and sticks her belly out.
“Mira, mira,”
she says as she swings her refrigerator-sized hips around in a circle.

I get it: she's showing us how to put on the apron. Then she dances past the table, grabs me by the arm, and ties the apron around me. She pulls me behind a tin bucket brimming with potatoes, hands me a knife, then leans across the table. “I'll bet you boys never washed a dish, or made a bed in your whole blessed life,” she says as her pink face floats over a bowl of green peppers. “Raised like little lords, you were. Like most of the kids here you had someone to do all those things for you. Then that mean old revolution came, and now you got to wash dishes, sweep floors like us regular people!” She shakes her head. “Don't that beat all?” Then she smiles at my brothers. “Now for a little history lesson! A long time ago we had our own little revolution here. That's when we sent the king and them other highborns back to where they came from. That's when we became the United States of Ameriky.” She speaks each word slowly and clearly. “Here, ain't nobody born better 'n nobody else.
Comprendy?
” she says as she picks up her roller. “Here in Ameriky, you gets back as good as you give.” Then without warning she slams the roller down on the metal table, and green peppers bounce out of the bowl and potatoes roll under the table.

“Enough talk!” she yells. “Now, pick up them potatoes and start to peelin'!”

A mountain of potatoes, onions, and peppers have been
chopped and cooked and one hundred plops of “otsmeel” on little, yellow plastic dishes have gone out the serving window but we haven't had breakfast yet.

“!Dolores, tengo que comer!”
Gordo calls out.

“We eat now?” Alquilino asks.

Before Dolores can answer, a river of dirty dishes starts flowing back into the kitchen. As she pulls on yellow rubber gloves she says, “You can eat later,” then she laughs. “
Mucho
later,
muchachos
!”

By the time we finish washing the breakfast dishes and finally hang up our aprons, Dolores is starting on lunch.

“Room for improvement, but not bad for your first day!” she says, as she deals out slices of bologna onto stacks of white bread. She hands each one of us a sandwich. “See you tomorrow, bright and early and
muchachos
”—she smiles and rubs the top of my head—“welcome to Ameriky!”

One hour before they turn off the lights, we're all supposed to be writing letters home or reading.

Tonight I start on my first letter: “Dear Mami and Papi, I miss you very much. . . .” I don't know what to say next so I stop and draw one of the weird metal buildings on the left corner.

Alquilino sees me doodling. “Julian, quit messing around and write something,” he says.

“I don't know what to write. You said I couldn't tell them about how mean Caballo is or how bad the food
tastes, or that we're sleeping on the floor in the bathroom. What else am I going to say?”