a pumpkin! And you coulda told me that this guy has gone crazy from panic and he’s gonna die if he stays up here a minute longer! You could have seen that face close up—and heard the voice, with your own ears! You ever seen a man who’s lost control of himself, I mean really lost it? A poor sonofabitch who’s opening the lid of his own coffin? If you wanna help Cubans… don’t just sit on your big butt in an air-conditioned building! Try the… the… the real world for the first time in your life! Do something, goddamn it! Do something besides run your mouth!”
Señor Lugo looked at Nestor for a single moment more, then lowered his head and slunk away deeper into the casita.
::::::Shit. I’ve really done it now. I’m the one who lost control. That old bastard—he’s back there right now telling them all, “Be careful! Don’t get near him! He’s a mad dog!”… Still—seeing the fear on his face—it was almost worth it.::::::
He’d had it with all these people. ::::::Even if they want to talk, civilly or otherwise, I’m not saying anything and I’m not moving, either. I’m gonna be right here the moment Magdalena comes in.::::::
The platoons, the brigades, the battalions, the clans, the tribesmen, the termites in the family tree who were packed in around him here in the front room… drinking beer straight out of the bottles and talking at the top of their lungs. What an ungodly din. Nice atmosphere… none of them wanted to talk to him or set eyes on him or in any way be aware of his presence, much less acknowledge it.
::::::All right, if I’m such a non-person that you can’t even see me, why would you mind if I force my way straight through you to reach the front door?::::::
With that, he began shouldering through the crowd, cop shades over his face, looking at no one, giving this one a shoulder into his rib cage from behind and that one an elbow in the—“Oooof!”—stomach, muttering, “Coming through, coming through,” not pausing for an instant to look back at the tribesmen he had felled, taking delight in their startled objections, the Heys, the Ouches, the Hey, watch its. ::::::So what if they think I’m rude? They already think worse than that of me.::::::
Parading his muscles again gave him a grim pleasure, self-defeating but satisfying all the same. But the moment he went out the front door—no pleasure remained, grim or otherwise, and no fear. He was empty…
In the instant it took him, cop shades and all, to adjust to Hialeah’s eye-frying killer-concrete sun, he was aware of a figure walking across the street here in the middle of the block, but he could make out no details, just a silhouette.
In the next instant a vision—Magdalena.
She was walking straight toward him, looking into his face with a certain smile that he had always interpreted as a lure… toward unspeakable delights… the curve of her lips—pure mischief… the way her hair flowed in such thick silken waves down to her shoulders… her sleeveless white silk top scalloped so deep in front, he could see the inner curves of her breasts… and more… and his loins sent out a bulletin… her perfect lissome legs and thighs and hips, he loved it all, worshipped it, idolized it.
He blurted out, “Manena—I’d given up!”
Magdalena slipped between I, Camilo’s FUMIGADORES van and an ancient Taurus parked right in front of it and stepped up onto the sidewalk, and the sun exploded off the shimmers of the white silk barely upon her breasts and the waves of her hair, long enough, thick enough, soft enough to—to—to… She walked up to within three feet of Nestor, still smiling the smile that promised… all… and breathing rapidly.
“I’m so sorry, Nestor! I barely got here at all! I was at the hospital. I’ve never driven so fast—”
“Oh, Manena—” Nestor was shaking his head and fighting back tears.
“—fast in my life! And there was no place to park, and so I just left it over there.” With a little swing of her head she indicated somewhere behind her.
“Oh God, Manena, if you hadn’t come at all—” More head shaking, more tears pooling on the little edge where his lower eyelids touched the eyeballs—in lieu of the words he didn’t know how to say. “Manena, you have no idea what I’ve been going through—my own family, my own goddamned family!”
He glanced at his watch. “Shit! I can’t be late for