blonde. Somehow she had managed to tiptoe high enough to lift her face above the top surface. He knew her. Cristy La Gringa! he wanted to cry out, but Mr. Ruiz’s presence inhibited him.
He walked up to the counter. All that marvelous long wild blond hair! Cristy La Gringa! “Cristy La Gringa!” He realized that didn’t have the poetic wallop of “Inga La Gringa,” but it still made him feel like Nestor the Jester… a real wit, no es verdad? Cristy had been a year behind him at Hialeah High School, and she’d had a crush on him. Oh, she had made that obvious. He was tempted. She had made his loins stir… Pastelitos! Oh yes!
“Cristy!” said Nestor. “I didn’t know you were working here! La bella gringa!”
She laughed. That was what he used to call her at Hialeah High… when they were supposedly just kidding around.
“I just started here,” said Cristy. “Nicky got me the job. You remember Nicky? She was a year ahead of you?” She gestured toward the third girl. “And this is Vicky.”
Nestor ran his eyes over the three of them. Nicky’s and Vicky’s hair streamed down into turbulent waves at the shoulders, just like Cristy’s, but theirs was dark in the Cuban way. All three were shrink-wrapped in denim. Their jeans hugged their declivities fore and aft, entered every crevice, explored every hill and dale of their lower abdomens, climbed their montes veneris—
—but somehow he just couldn’t… He was too depressed. “Vicky and Cristy and Nicky and Ricky’s,” he said. They laughed… uncertainly… and that was that.
He went ahead and ordered some pastelitos and coffee… to go. He had come in with a vision of himself sitting at one of the little tables and making a long, leisurely breakfast of it, quietly, on neutral ground, just him and his pastelitos and coffee. Mr. Ruiz had put an end to that. Who knew how many more soreheads with smart mouths would show up here even now, this early on a Saturday morning?
By and by, Cristy brought out a white paper bag—somehow all the little bakeries and diners in Hialeah used only white bags—with the pastelitos and coffee. At the cash register, as she gave him change, he said, “Thanks for everything, Cristy.” He meant it in a loving way, but it came out sad and beaten more than anything else.
Cristy had already headed back behind the counter when he noticed a shelf beneath it with two stacks of newspapers.
Whuh! His heart tried to leap out of its thoracic cage. Himself!—a photograph of himself!—his official Police Department photograph—on the front page of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald! Next to his, a—a picture of a young man with a twisted face: Nestor knew that face, all right—the man on the mast… above those two head shots, a big photograph of the schooner near the causeway and a mob of people up on the bridge screaming until their teeth showed… and above that, the biggest, blackest print Nestor had ever seen on a newspaper: ¡DETENIDO! 18 METROS DE LIBERTAD—stretching across the entire front page… of El Nuevo Herald. Shock!—his heart began speeding. He didn’t want to read the story, sincerely didn’t want to—but his eyes seized upon the first sentence and wouldn’t let go.
In Spanish it said, “A Cuban refugee, reportedly a hero of the dissident underground, was arrested yesterday on Biscayne Bay just eighteen meters from the Rickenbacker Causeway—and asylum—by a cop whose own parents had fled Cuba and made it to Miami and freedom in a homemade dinghy.”
Nestor felt as if heat were surging up his cerebral cortex and scalding his brain. Now he was a villain, a vile ingrate who would deny his own people the freedom he enjoyed… in short, the worst sort of TRAIDOR!
He didn’t want to buy the newspaper… Its stain would spread indelibly upon his hands if he so much as picked it up… but something—his autonomous nervous system?—overrode his conscious will and ordered him to stoop down and grab one. Holy shit! When he stooped down, he got an eyeful of the newspaper atop the other stack. The entire top half of the newspaper’s front page was one huge color picture—the blue of the Bay, the enormous white sails of the schooner… above the picture—English language! The Miami Herald!—a headline as big and bold as El Nuevo Herald’s—ROPE-CLIMB COP IN “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE… He turned the newspaper over, to see the lower half of the front page—¡Santa Barranza!—a two-column-wide photograph, in color,