Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Down here the tide is calm, pulsing softly even under a heavier wind. The water bleeds turquoise and only darkens out past the reefs.

I sleep with the window slats open, something I never would have done back home. I hear only the sounds of the night animals. Owls. The wrestling of branches by raccoons or possums. There are no police sirens. No car horns or screeching tires. No shouting neighbors. No arguments between the old couple living next door or screaming teens. No sounds of a creaking older house, leaking pipes, no rain beating on a roof in need of repairs. No television reporting the crimes of the city, no radio voices of late-night advice shows where people call in with their sad stories: the noise my mother relied on to fill our emptiness. No sounds of Mami in what used to be my brother’s bedroom, on her knees at her homemade altar, saying prayers, making promises, bargaining with her saints to set us all free.

When Carlito was sixteen and had saved enough money working at the car wash to buy his own ten-year-old cockroach of a thirdhand Honda, he and his friends would pack in and drive up to the MacArthur Causeway where the paroled sex offenders had set up their own tent village since the law didn’t let them live anywhere near parks or schools. If you drove past it, you’d never know there was a colony of ex-cons living there beneath the traffic, under tarps, cooking with mess kits over open flames. I saw the place myself once when Carlito dragged me there with him. He wanted to scare me because I was fourteen and the sort of girl who’d identify what others called danger and walk right into it just to see what would happen.

Like the time I went hitchhiking, the one thing they always warn kids about in school since society is full of predators and pedos. I’d gone to the mall to meet a boy who ditched me within the hour for a girl he met at the doughnut stand. I remember I was feeling sick that day, but it was another month before I’d figure out the fool had already gotten me pregnant. I only wanted to get home, but Mami was at work and Carlito, off in his new ride. It was before the age of cell phones and there was no way to reach him. So I walked out to Kendall Drive and put out a thumb. A shiny black Audi pulled up a few seconds later. I’d never been in a car so nice so I got in.

Sometimes you can tell a degenerate right away and other times they slip past even the most cynical folk. I didn’t smell this guy’s perviness until I popped into the seat next to him and the car was already rolling. Then it hit me heavy: the wetness of his grin, saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth, sweat forming on his lip and within the folds of his hands, which went right for my thighs, and it didn’t help that I was in a short-shorts phase that summer. He asked where I was headed and I told him home, and to turn onto the Palmetto. He didn’t, and next thing I knew we were flying down the Snapper Creek Expressway, his fingers inching into my crotch, and when I slapped them away, he took it as a tease and pushed farther.

When we slowed into some traffic, I pushed the door open and jumped out. I tumbled, concrete ripping my skin like cloth, and huddled against the highway divider. It’s kind of a miracle I didn’t get killed, but the bigger mystery is why nobody stopped to ask if I was okay or why I’d jumped out of a moving car.

I made the mistake of telling Carlito what had happened, and to scare me straight, like my torn-up elbows and legs weren’t enough of a reminder, he took me to the sex offender colony to show me some real depravados. I knew he and his friends liked to go there to throw rocks and yell at the guys that they should be castrated. I thought that was cruel even if they were society’s worst. I mean, you do the time, you should be able to get on with your life, but people are especially touchy when it comes to children.

When I mentioned it to Dr. Joe, the prison shrink I used to hang around with, he said maybe Carlito was projecting his anger toward our father onto those men since most of the ex-cons were old and run-down-looking, the way I imagined Hector would look if he were still alive. I don’t think it goes that deep though. Those were years when Carlito and his posse of gangly bros would bench weights and beat speed bags in somebody’s garage, roaming around Tropical Park at night, jumping people for kicks, not even for their wallets. Theirs was a casual violence, yet they managed never to get caught.

When we got to the sex offender camp that day, the boys started their usual taunts and I walked a few yards off while they went looking for targets because I didn’t want the pervs to think I’d just come to be mean. They weren’t so bad looking. Most of them appeared to be regular guys, like they could be somebody’s sick grandfather or borracho uncle. A few were dressed pretty normal, in pants and button-down shirts, looking like they could live in a real house or something, but others resembled rag-wearing swamp people, crusty-haired with dirt tattoos on their faces. Most actually looked sort of gentle and sad to be there and didn’t give me a second look as I toed the camp periphery. Only two or three did what you might expect and pulled out their penises when they saw me, but I was on their turf so you can’t really blame them.

One of the guys walked over to me, asking me where I was from, and said he was originally from Mississippi and wanted to go back but he lost track of his family. I said that was unfortunate, but felt a yank on my arm and there was Carlito rudely pulling me away when the guy was just trying to tell me a piece of his story. Carlito called the guy a rapist, a pedophile, all kinds of things, and yelled at me the whole drive home for being such a tonta.

Both of us were the type who cracked up at horror movies. Monsters, demons possessing houses, masked killers. We thought it hysterical that there is an industry of artificial horror when real life is so much more lethal. The secret is real murderers look like anybody else and you might even have one living in your own home. For all you know, the person you love most in this world might one day try to kill you. But that day Carlito’s goal was to teach me a lesson in practical fear and I had failed.

“What’s wrong with you?” he sounded desperate to understand. “I take you to a zoo of psychos and you’re trying to make friends like some kind of bobita? You’re going to get yourself killed one day, Reina.”

I was quiet, but I knew he was wrong, and that it was just the opposite. Making friends with danger is the only way to survive.

It’s a good thing I didn’t let myself become traumatized by the hitchhiking experience or Nesto and I never would have met. Though you can’t really call what I did to meet him hitching. And he wasn’t looking to pick anyone up.

I was at the full-moon party at the Broken Coconut, a beach bar where all the Crescent Key area locals hang out. Since my arrival, I’ve found the island population strangely skewed — a lost generation of North American retirees, and most of the younger folks are their children or grandchildren, down for a visit, or service industry people in life-limbo. Like Ryan, the lanky Nebraskan pool boy at the Starfish Club Hotel I’d gone to the bar with that night, whom I met when I got a job doing nails at the hotel spa. He was part of a tribe of recovering cruise ship employees and seasonal nomads buying time working as charter boat jockeys or in hotels and restaurants till they figured out their next move.

Maybe I misled Ryan, hanging out with him a few nights a week like we were on our way to becoming some kind of couple, even spending Thanksgiving together, along with the other holiday orphans right there at the Broken Coconut, eating conch fritters and blackened hogfish. But by then I’d been in the islands almost a month and with new winter darkness setting in early, I didn’t have much else to fill my evenings.