you do it, Nestor! Everybody knew it was a Camacho who did this. We saw you do it with our own eyes!”
It turned out that his father and his mother and his grandparents had been watching the whole thing on American TV with the sound muted and listening to it on WDNR, a Spanish-language radio station that loved to get furious over sins of the americanos. Nothing Nestor could say would calm his father down in the slightest. I, Camilo Camacho, threw his hands up in the air as if to say, “No hope… no hope…” and turned and walked away.
His mother stayed put. Once she was sure that I, Camilo, had gone into another room, she threw her arms around Nestor and said, “I don’t care what you’ve done. You’re alive and home. That’s the main thing.”
Don’t care what you’ve done. The implied guilty verdict so depressed Nestor, he said nothing. He couldn’t even croak out an insincere Thanks, Mami.
He went to his little room exhausted. His whole body ached, his shoulders, his hip joints, the sartorius muscles on the inner sides of his thighs, and his hands, which were still raw. His hands! The joints, the knuckles—it was agony if he so much as tried to make a fist. Just taking off his shoes, pants, and shirt and getting up onto the bed—agony… ::::::Sleep, dear God. Knock me unconscious… that’s all I ask… sail me away from esta casita… into the arms of the Sandman… Take away my thoughts… be my morphine… ::::::
But Morpheus failed him. He’d doze off and then—jerk alert with his heart beating too fast… doze off—jerk alert… doze off—jerk alert!… all night, fits and starts… until he jerked alert at 6:00 a.m. He felt like a burnt-out husk. He was sore all over, sore as he had ever been in his life. Moving the joints of his hips and legs was so painful, he wondered if they would ever support his weight. But they had to. He had to get the hell out of here!… Go somewhere… and kill time until his Marine Patrol shift began at four o’clock. He edged his feet off the bed and slowly sat up… sat there groggily for a minute… ::::::I feel too awful… I can’t get up. So what are you going to do, hang around here waiting for more abuse?:::::: With straining willpower he made himself get sheer torture! up. Gingerly, warily, he tiptoed to the living room and stood at one of the two front windows of the little house, watching the women. They were already out hosing down their concrete front yards up and down the block, this being Saturday morning.
No man would be caught dead with one of those hoses in his hands. That was a woman’s job. That would be the first thing his mother did when she got up: power-spray their fifty-by-twenty-foot rock-hard sward. Too bad water didn’t make concrete grow. By now their front yard would be fifty stories high.
As far back as he could remember, Nestor’s picture of Hialeah was of thousands of blocks like this one, endless rows of casitas with little paved front yards… but no trees… studded here and there with vehicles that had writing all over them… but no trees… boats that said Conspicuous Leisure… but no trees. Nestor had heard of a time when all over the country the very name Hialeah summoned up a picture of Hialeah Park, the most glamorous and socially swell racetrack in America, set in a landscaper’s dream, a lush, green, wholly man-made 250-acre park with a resident flock of pinkest flamingos… now a shut-down, locked-up relic, a great moldering memento of the palmy days when the Anglos ran Miami. Today a bug-gassing van parked out front with your name on it was enough to make La Casita de Camacho socially swell in Hialeah. He had admired his father for it. Every night the old man came home with his clothes giving off whiffs of Malathion. But Nestor took that as a sign of his father’s success as a businessman. The same father now turns on him when he most needs his support!
Christ! It was getting on toward 6:30, and he was just standing here letting his thoughts run wild… The whole bunch of them would be up soon… Camilo the Caudillo, the Caudillo’s ever-worried, hand-flensing wife, Lourdes, and Yeya and Yeyo—
Yeya!
It had completely slipped his mind! Today was her birthday! There was no way he could finesse Yeya’s