The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (8 page)

Just as Abuelo had said, in a few weeks the little worms grew into bunnies with eyes and fur, and Bernie and Bonny were reunited. To Abuelo’s amazement, Bonny didn’t try to bite me when I reached into her nest to pet and hold the bunnies. They were so tiny they looked almost fake—like chocolate Easter bunnies. So small and perfect they didn’t seem real and yet there they were—breathing and warm, twitching their ears and blinking—pure life in the palms of my hands. I’m sure Mamá must’ve noticed the crowded rabbit cage while watering her potted plants or taking out the garbage, but she must’ve looked the other way. After all, they were no trouble for her, as long as they stayed outside the house and in the cage. And besides, she was busy contending with Caco. For years he had been pleading with her for a dog, ever since she’d let me keep Misu. But now that I also had chickens and rabbits, he became even more jealous of me—and utterly relentless.

Of course, Abuelo and I wanted a dog too, but we had already pushed our luck with Mamá. We let Caco do all the begging and bargaining, knowing he’d have a better chance than we did. It took him weeks of whining and making promises around the dinner table:
I swear I’ll walk him every day . . . I promise to feed him . . . Please, you won’t have to do anything . . . Riqui has chickens. Riqui has rabbits . . . It’s not fair!
He persisted until Mamá finally gave in: “Okay,
está bien,
now stop
jodiéndome
. But the dog goes outside. I don’t want to see any dog hair or dog poop
en mi casa
.” Abuelo caught my eyes across the table. I guessed from the look in his eyes that he already had a dog in mind: a German shepherd like Papo, the dog he’d left behind with a neighbor when he fled Cuba. Even so many years later, Abuelo still liked to show off a cracked black-and-white photo of himself and Papo on the porch of his house in Cuba: Abuelo with a full head of hair and wearing a crisp linen shirt, Papo at his side, his chin resting on Abuelo’s shoe, both looking straight into the camera.

As I suspected, the very next Sunday Abuelo asked Caco and me if we wanted to go pick out a puppy at Ignacio’s farm in Homestead, as if we would say no. We jammed our sneakers on in two seconds and jumped into Abuelo’s baby-blue Comet, all three of us riding in the front seat. Looking out the car window, it was hard to believe that only forty minutes away from our suburban backyard there was a place like Homestead, with no sidewalks; no utility poles; hardly any houses, driveways, or hedges. Only the bumpy, lonely road we were on, trespassing through open land covered in untamed grass that met the horizon in every direction. “Was Cuba like this?” I asked Abuelo. “
Más o menos,
” he said, “
pero
with sugarcane fields everywhere, and mountains, and lots and lots more palm trees.” I imagined Cuba rushing past the car windows. For a few seconds I was there with him, driving through his homeland as if there had never been a revolution, as if he had never left his
patria
.

As with Cuba, I had never been to Ignacio’s farm but felt as if I had from all the stories Abuelo told me. It was just as I had imagined: a small house that looked even smaller in contrast to the expanse of land surrounding it; its wood siding weathered, its paint chipping, its windows slightly askew, as if the house were grimacing. We pulled into the gravel driveway to the sight of Ignacio waving at us from the front porch.
“¡Blanco! ¡Qué pasa!”
he shouted to Abuelo. “
Aquí,
Navarro,” Abuelo responded. Ignacio and Abuelo called each other by their last names—it was a macho thing between them I noticed, like the hard pats they gave each other on their backs to offset the warm hugs they gave each other in greeting. We stood in the driveway as Abuelo introduced us:
“These are my
nietos,
Caco and Riqui.” I was quietly stunned by the house, the land, and the three-foot-long machete hanging from Ignacio’s belt. He wore the same type of straw hat that Abuelo and Pedrito often did, and was about the same age, but Ignacio didn’t have a gut like Abuelo; I could still make out the sinews of his biceps underneath the flaccid veneer of his old skin.

“You
muchachos
never been to a real
finca, ¿verdad?
Come,” Ignacio said, winking at us. We followed him through a makeshift gate made of splintered wood and wire mesh into the acres of land beyond the house. It was the land he was proud of, not his house. On the other side of the gate, we stood in a large, dusty clearing with a few tufts of grassy weeds sprouting from the bare ground and several roosters roaming freely. The clearing was surrounded by chicken coops, each one ten times the size of ours, holding hundreds of hens like a single mass of white feathers clucking and scratching the ground. We trailed behind Ignacio as he led us through his rows of
plátano
trees fanning themselves with their leaves as big as windmill blades. He picked a couple tiny bananas from a tree and offered them to Caco and me; we both looked strangely at the fruit. “Taste these. They’re
plátanos burros,
like bananas,
pero
more smaller and more sweet,” he reassured us. Following Caco’s lead, I peeled mine and took a cautious bite.
“Qué rico, delicioso,”
I said to be polite, trying not to make a face over the strange Play-Doh–like taste.

We reached a field that seemed to consist of nothing more than rows of neatly planted weeds. But then Ignacio stopped, pulled back one of the plants, and said proudly,
“Mira qué lindas,”
revealing a bunch of strawberries dangling like heart-shaped charms at the ends of the stems. I didn’t wait for Ignacio to offer me any; I plucked one right away and ate the whole thing in one bite. Falling a few steps behind on purpose, I secretly filled my pockets with a dozen more strawberries for Bonny and Bernie. In my excitement, I forgot why we were there, until Caco whispered to me anxiously, “Hey, where the hell are the puppies?” I shrugged.

After the strawberry patch, we entered a field of sugarcane. I could hear wind like something alive was pushing through the stalks, setting them aflutter before moving over my face. Suddenly, in a single move, Ignacio slid his machete from its sheath, slashed a stalk of cane clean, and then began slicing off the bark as easily as if he were peeling an orange. “Taste this,” he said, handing us each a piece. “It is as good as the
caña
from Cuba.” Whether or not that was true I had no way of knowing. But it did feel like Cuba, at least the way I had imagined it, walking through the maze of stalks mysteriously converting the sun into sugar. Gnawing on the cane as hard, sweet, and sticky as rock candy, I lost all sense of direction, trusting that Ignacio knew the way, until we emerged back at the clearing. But still no puppies in sight.

“
Bueno,
Navarro, what about
los perritos
?” Abuelo finally asked Ignacio.
“Oh, sí-sí-sí,”
he said, breaking out of the sugarcane field and walking toward the house, “
Vengan
—come.” He opened the back door, then clapped and whistled, summoning four puppies that romped unsteadily down the steps into the clearing. They must’ve been a few months old, no taller than my knee and still not in full command of their bodies. They wobbled around, pawing at our legs and biting our shoelaces, chasing each other and anything that moved. Just as I had guessed, they were German shepherds like Papo. “I have to keep these little
cabrones
inside still, they get into trouble out here,” Ignacio explained just as one of the puppies started after a rooster, then pounced on a leaf, then waddled back to us with a stray feather in his mouth. “Which one you want?” he asked us.

We probably should have let Caco decide; after all, it was going to be
his
dog. But apparently Abuelo had already given it some thought. He pulled a tennis ball out of his pocket and tossed it
into the clearing. The puppies pawed after the ball, rolling over it and each other in a darling match of puppy rugby. The winner emerged with the ball barely in his mouth, and much to everyone’s surprise, even Ignacio’s, he started making his way back to Abuelo, dropping and picking up the ball again and again. “This one,” Abuelo said without reservation, then picked up the puppy and inspected it as he had done with Bonny, announcing its health and sex. “Okay, he’s cute,” Caco agreed, taking the puppy from Abuelo and holding it up in the air above his head. “This one!”

On the way back home, Caco and I sat in the backseat, as jumpy with excitement as the puppy that Caco couldn’t hold still on his lap. “Don’t touch him,” Caco whined, “he’s my dog. You can’t touch him unless I say so.” He was even more jealous than I had imagined. “Please,” I begged, and he let me pet the puppy a few strokes before demanding, “Stop! That’s it!” With a name already in mind, I asked him, “What are you going to call him? How ’bout Chester?” “Chester? What kind of a sissy name is that?” Caco said, not surprisingly. “Okay. How about Scooby?” I proposed. “Don’t be so stupid,” he retorted. I sensed it was personal; any name I suggested would be met with the same derision, so I shut up. After a little silence, Caco asked, “How about Bubba?” as if he really wanted my opinion and wasn’t simply looking for me to agree with him. I thought it was a silly name, but I had to be nice if I wanted petting rights. “That’s nice. But I don’t think he really looks like a Bubba. Do you?” I said cautiously and politely. “No, I guess not. How about Tiger?” he asked again. “Yeah, he looks like a Tiger, with all that orange and black,” I agreed.

Tiger proved to be the perfect name because he turned out to be as wild as one. In less than a month, he had crisscrossed the backyard with so many ruts it looked as if it had been plowed like Ignacio’s farm. He chased everything—nothing was safe, not even his own tail or shadow. Abuelo and I had to constantly fill the holes he’d burrow trying to get into the chicken coop. He’d harass Bonny, Bernie, and the bunnies, pawing at their cage and barking in their faces; they would huddle together in a corner of the cage, terrified, until I’d come and shoo Tiger away. He met his match the day Mamá came home to find he had yanked the laundry off the clothesline. Horrified by the massacre of her home-sewn dresses and the panty hose shredded to rags over the lawn, Mamá pronounced Tiger insane and ordered him tied up, “
Si no,
I’ll get rid of that
perro loco
myself,” she threatened. And so it was. Caco, practically in tears, tied Tiger to a five-foot chain that Abuelo staked in a corner of the yard from where the dog could do no damage.

Even though Tiger was a nuisance, I couldn’t stand the sight of him chained up, whimpering and yo-yoing around the stake. I decided to try training him using a twig, leftovers I saved every night after dinner, and a free booklet I picked up at Tropical Pets,
How to Train Your Puppy
. I even watched reruns of
Lassie
to pick up pointers on how a good dog should behave. But since I wasn’t allowed to pet Tiger—much less play with him—I had to train him in secret. During the afternoons, when Caco was away at baseball or soccer practice, I’d go through the exercises in the booklet with Tiger as quickly and patiently as I could. It wasn’t easy. Tiger was just as kooky as Alberto Delgado, who would get up in the middle of class and run around the room sputtering out raspberries. Mrs. McShane called him “hyperactive,” but we called him Alberto
Del-spazo
. Tiger was a
spazo
too: he’d become distracted by the faintest sound or slightest breeze through a tree or fixated on a leaf or a fallen
aguacate
and ignore me completely.

It seemed hopeless, and I was about to give up, until the afternoon I discovered the one thing Tiger loved as much as I did—Easy Cheese. I was squirting some right into my mouth while teaching him to sit, encouraging him with a morsel of leftover fried pork. Instead of the pork, he stole a lick from the tip of the Easy Cheese can and then sat, salivating and waiting for more like a good little doggie. I could only conclude that Tiger didn’t like either Cuban food or Abuela’s
cooking, or both. He was German, after all, not Cuban. I broke through to him after a few weeks. He was no Lassie, but at least he learned to sit and fetch, and he stopped tearing up the yard as much. I showed Mamá, and she agreed to take him off his chain for a week to see how well he’d do. He passed her test and after a while she even looked the other way sometimes when Caco or I took him inside the house.

It seemed like me, Abuelo, Misu, the chickens, the rabbits, Tiger, Mamá, and Caco would live happily ever after. And we did for a few months—some of the best months of my life that I can remember. Every afternoon filled with a sense of purpose, taking care of
my
animals as if I were a veterinarian: tossing feed to the chickens, weighing them on our bathroom scale to make sure they were getting enough to eat, collecting and counting their eggs; hand-feeding strawberries to Bonny and Bernie, cleaning their paws with soap and water, and checking the bunnies for ear mites; teaching Tiger a new command over a shared can of Easy Cheese, then taking his pulse and listening to his heartbeat with my ear against his chest. For those few months, even Abuela commended me for the
manly
duties I had taken on instead of rebuking me for the usual pastimes I favored, like coloring and finger painting. Life was good.

Then Abuelo brought a rooster home from Ignacio’s farm. He was bigger than Misu or the rabbits, with talons almost as long as my own fingers. His scarlet wattle quivered under his beak like the wrinkly flesh under Abuela’s chin. I followed him around the yard at a safe distance, catching his steely, sideways glances at me with his glassy eye as if he knew what I was thinking. I was scared of him, yet fascinated by the architecture of his muted gold plumage; his waxy tail feathers like a poof of exclamation points, as bold as any peacock’s. Commanding even Tiger’s respect, he roamed the backyard freely, pecking and scratching and crowing every morning at dawn. He was majestic, stately, and royal, his comb like a big red crown. I decided to name him Rey, Spanish for “king.” Abuelo agreed. But Abuelo didn’t bring Rey home just for decoration; he had plans for him, which became obvious as soon as I saw Rey in the chicken coop perched on top of a hen, pecking at her head. Just as had happened with Bonny and Bernie, within a few weeks there were close to a dozen baby chicks darting around the coop like tiny yellow pinballs. What was Abuelo thinking? Surely Mamá would notice and become infuriated.