notion of what desolation was? He hadn’t tried to kid himself about what was happening to him over the past twenty-four hours.
Exactly twenty-four hours ago he had left this place, the marina, soaring on the applause of his fellow cops, astounded by the realization that the entire city—the entire city!—had been watching him—him! Nestor Camacho!—on TV as he saved a poor panicked wretch on top of a seventy-foot mast teetering over the edge of the Halusian Gulp. Barely fifteen minutes later he walks into his own house—and finds his father standing right at the door, anger up, paunch out, to dismiss him from the family… and from the Cuban people, while he’s at it. Nestor is so upset, he barely sleeps at all and gets up in the morning and learns that the Spanish-language media—which essentially means the Cuban media—has been saying the same thing for the past twelve hours: Nestor Camacho has betrayed his own family and the Cuban people. His father not only considers him a non-person, he acts as if he no longer has a corporeal presence. He acts like he literally can’t see him. Who? Him? Nestor? He’s not here anymore. His neighbors, people he has known practically all his life, turn their backs on him, actually turn around 180 degrees and show him their backsides. His one last hope, his salvation, his one remaining attachment to the life he has lived for the past twenty-five years, namely, all his life, is his girlfriend. He has been seeing her, dating her, which is to say, these days, going to bed with her, and loving her with all his heart. So she shows up just a little over eight hours ago, just before he has to leave for the shift… to inform him that she is seeing, dating, and no doubt sharing the sheets with somebody else now, and hasta la vista, my dear Damaged Goods.
To top it all off, the shift starts, and his fellow cops, who were flocking about him like a bunch of cheerleaders twenty-four hours ago, have turned—well, not cold, but distant. None badmouths him. None acts like or insinuates that he has betrayed anybody. None acts as if he wants to take it back, the praise they gave him last night. They’re embarrassed, that’s all. After twenty-four hours they have this piece of meat beaten black-and-blue by Spanish-language radio, Spanish TV, the Spanish newspaper—El Nuevo Herald—and even kindly souls discreetly avert their eyes.
The only one who showed the faintest desire to talk to him about the whole mess was Lonnie Kite, his americano Safe Boat mate. He took him aside just before they boarded the Safe Boat to begin the shift and said, “You have to look at it this way, Nestor”—Nest-ter. “If that little fucker had been up on top of a mast almost anywhere else, all anybody would be saying is ‘This kid Camacho is Tarzan with a pair of stones you could take down a building with.’ Your bad luck is that it had to happen in front of a bunch a gawkers on the Rickenbacker Causeway on a Friday afternoon at rush hour. They all get out of their cars and line the bridge, and they got the best seats in the house for a game a Cuban Refugee—he the brave little guy—fighting Dumb Cop. They don’t know shit. Without all these clueless assholes, there wouldn’ a been nobody with their undies in an uproar.”
The americano meant to be bucking up his spirits, but he depressed Nestor even more. Even the americanos knew! Even the americanos knew that Nestor Camacho just got whipped.
He was hoping something would happen on this shift, something so big, like a big boat collision—collisions, mostly involving small boats, happened all the time—that it would absorb his attention entirely. But no, it was the usual… boats adrift and they can’t get the engine to turn over… somebody thought they saw swimmers out in a boat lane… some idiot in a cigarette boat is barreling across the water, making extreme turns to rock other boats with his wake… a bunch a drunks are out on the bay, throwing bottles and unidentified trash into the water… that was the night’s catch, and none of it was serious enough to distract Nestor from his deep worries… and by the time they returned to the marina, he had begun totaling up totaling up totaling up his miseries…
… and the scene before him captured his tally—desolation—perfectly. He was approaching