terrain I rule. I have ultimate power, and I’m quite ready to blow you away if I have to. Oh, so you want to know what it would take to make me “have to”? Well, let’s start with breach of verbal contract.
The pale americano blanched dead white—or so it looked to Officer Camacho. Journalist John Smith’s lips parted slightly… but he said nothing. He just nodded yes, dipping his forehead forward ever so diffidently.
The next thing Nestor knew… he was sitting there in the glamorous glow of the Isle of Capri bar’s lucent liquor bottles, spilling, as they say, his guts. It all came out. He couldn’t tell this americano—he had seen exactly twice in his life—enough. He had an overwhelming urge… not to confess, for he hadn’t sinned… just one more beer but to tell somebody, some at least halfway neutral party, of his anguish and humiliation, his rejection by all those closest to him—at once!—in less than twenty-four hours!—and by untold thousands of his own people, just one more beer his fellow cubanos, who were only too happy to believe what they heard on that most powerful of organs, Spanish-language radio, and even by that old-fashioned medium no one under forty ever looked at anymore, namely, the newspapers… his father standing there in his doorway, which was Nestor’s, too, with his wide-legged stance, like a wrestler’s, and his arms folded across his chest—like an infuriated wrestler’s… just one more beer and neighbors he had known all his life who turned their backs the moment they saw him coming… and, to top it off, his fellow cops, who had hailed him as a hero twenty-four hours ago just one more beer… and had now turned chilly with embarrassment over this tainted man in their midst… just one more beer—in cervisia veritas… all of it, all of it, right down to his cell phone ringing in his pocket while he’s this close to falling to his death from seventy feet above a boat deck, trying to go hand over hand down a hundred-foot cable carrying a man with his legs… and then the goddamned phone starts beep-beep-beeping with text messages, and people—his own people—cubanos—are screaming bloody murder at him from the Rickenbacker Causeway bridge… all of it, even the cold expression on Magdalena’s face when he began shouting ¡CONCHA! at her—
For three and a half hours Nestor poured out every last drop of his sorrows and his soul… and would have never stopped, had not the Isle of Capri closed up at 4:00 a.m. The two young men were now out in the street. Nestor felt unsteady. His balance was… off. His gait lacked fluidity. Well, no wonder… the stress of the last two days… the lack of sleep… lack of food, too, come to think of it. He never did come to think he might just be close to wasted after downing nine beers in a row, plus a tequila shot, more alcohol than he had ever had in one evening in his life.
But the americano periodista must have come to think of it, because he looked at Nestor and said, “You’re planning to drive home now?”
Nestor barked a bitter little laugh. “Home? I don’t have one a those anymore, home.”
“Then where are you planning to spend the night?”
“I don’t know,” said Nestor, except that it came out I’ownoh. “I’ll sleep inna car if I’ve to… No! I know… I’ll drive overt Rodriguez’s and sleep on a mat inna gym.”
“What if it’s locked?”
Another bitter little laugh. “Locked? Nothing’s locked if you know what a cop knows.” Even Nestor picked up a whiff of his own cop braggadocio.
“Nestor”—that impudent first-name business again—“I think you’re too exhausted to drive anywhere. I’ve got a pullout in my apartment, and I’m only five minutes away at this hour. How about it?”
Is he kidding? Sleep at some americano periodista’s place? But that word the periodista used… exhausted. Just hearing it out loud made him feel even more exhausted… exhausted, not wasted… not wasted, worn out… never felt this worn out. Aloud he said, “Maybe you’re right.”
Afterward he could barely even remember John Smith’s driving him over to his apartment… or passing out on the pullout couch in a cramped little living room… or all the vomiting…
When Nestor woke up, returned to the land of the conscious, it wasn’t really as late as he had hoped it would be. Only the dimmest daylight showed through the weave of a length of hopsacking that served as