Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

All my years of solitude back home hadn’t prepared me for this type of loneliness. Even being ignored or avoided in an unfriendly community is its own sort of companionship.

The night of the full-moon party, Ryan was especially grabby, pawing at my waist, my thigh, throwing his wormy lips close to my face. Until that night, he’d been careful with me, and I hadn’t made myself easier for him like I sometimes do when I can tell a guy is moving slow. We hadn’t even kissed, so the tension was high and maybe, if his approach had been different, though I’m not sure how, I would have been into it. Maybe I would have even let things get started there in the parking lot and gone home with him to the canal rental house he shared with four other guys, and slipped out in the morning in time for work. But something held me back.

I’d been reflecting as of late that in this new life down here in the Keys, I wanted to try things differently. So I told Ryan as kindly as I could that we were not going to fuck that night. He looked both defeated and angry, tried arguing that there was no reason not to and we both wanted it, but I insisted I didn’t want it, trust me, I really don’t , which insulted him and he left me alone on the bar stool while the herd of drunks tried to push past me with their plastic cups waiting for refills of rum punch.

I wove through the crowd to get out, but found my car was blocked into the parking lot by a dozen others, and there were no taxis on this end of the Overseas Highway. My cottage on Hammerhead was a few miles away, but it’s not the kind of walk you want to take alone at night— I’m not even that bold — so I hung around the parking lot entrance for a while waiting to see if I could catch someone on the way out to give me a lift home.

That’s when I saw Nesto walking through the moonlight toward his blue pickup, conveniently parked beside the road. I approached him. He was wary of me. I mean, who wouldn’t be — a girl alone in the middle of the night asking for a ride — but he agreed with an accent my Miami education told me was distinctly Cuban, the freshly arrived kind, not yet watered down by years of exile, and in the sea of gringos that was the Broken Coconut that night, this somehow felt comforting.

Plus, stuck to his dashboard there was a small faded stamp of a little pilgrim child saint holding a staff that I recognized right away from a similar depiction Mami kept on a table in Carlito’s old room.

“El Santo Niño de Atocha,” I said when we got on our way, pointing to the mini Jesus. He was big in Colombia, especially for those who left the country, said to protect wanderers and travelers. He, San Antonio, and La Virgen del Carmen were the last santos Mami had petitioned for mercy and her son’s freedom. Even if she’d disowned Carlito by day, she still prayed for him every night. My mother was especially devoted to this little guy because he was also said to be the patron saint of the imprisoned.

Nesto tipped his chin at me and shook his head. “No. That’s Elegguá.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

I would have liked some conversation on that ride home, but he didn’t offer much. I tried questions on him. I noticed he’d been dragging a pulley with a toolbox behind him when I found him in the parking lot, so I asked him about it and he told me he’d been at the bar to fix a pipe leak, not for the party.

“You’re a plumber?”

“No. I just fix things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Anything.”

He turned onto the road to the Hartley estate on Hammerhead slowly, dimming his beams as we approached the main house.

I thanked him and hopped out of his truck onto the gravel path.

“How are you going to get to your car in the morning?” He asked as I started to walk off.

I shrugged. “The bus.”

“I’ll take you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know. But I will.”

Crescent Key is a small enough island that after a week or two, you’ll see the same faces, and default to hello smiles at the familiar ones at the Laundromat, post office, and mini-mart, even though you’ve never properly met. But it’s also the kind of place where you can go days without seeing a single nongringo, which doesn’t mean there aren’t any, it just means you can’t see them.

I would have remembered Nesto Cadena’s face if I’d ever seen him before. I thought about it early the next morning when I stepped out onto the dock behind my cottage. Though I sleep badly, awakened in the night by my own thoughts, I was never a naturally early riser in my old life. I was never late to work, and often had to open the salon, but it cost me to wake up early for another day of the same tired life.

Here, though, the sounds of the thicket around the cottage are gentle shoves and I wake up with the sun and birds, the morning dew slick on the planks of the veranda. The animals fall into a routine with me; the iguanas who live in the bushes discover the row of sliced grapes I leave for them along the path and I watch them peek out of the shrubbery and drag themselves over to their treat.

That morning, I stood out on the dock behind the cottage, watching a couple of lionfish — another invasive species Mrs. Hartley warned me to watch out for, since they’re poisonous — whirl around its posts, and then two dolphins as they folded through the current in the distance.

An old sport-fishing boat belonging to one of the neighbors down the canal came puttering out of the inlet toward the open water, a burly bearded guy behind the wheel.

He waved as he passed me standing on my pier, and his beard parted with a grin.

“Beautiful morning.”

“You just missed the dolphins.” It seemed like the neighborly thing to say. They’d disappeared with the buzzing of his boat coming out of the waterway.

“I know where to find them.” He tilted his head toward the sun. “There’s a whole nation just a few miles out.”

A little while later, I headed down the path from the cottage to the driveway hoping Nesto would come through with the ride he’d offered me the night before. Where I usually parked my car, I spotted the blue truck, Nesto leaning on the edge of the hood.

I paused on the path before he noticed me coming, enjoying the sight of him for the first time in daylight.

I can tell you what he tells me now: his blood is wildly blended, the product of generations of clandestine encounters until it came down to his mother, the morena-mestiza from whom he inherited his wide smile and a bronzed complexion he likens to seven-year añejo rum, and his father, a guajiro from whom he got his sharp nose and slanted black Taíno eyes.

My mother often said she was grateful that neither of her children carried any of their father’s features. In fact, we both looked so much like her, with her small eyes and small mouth, high forehead, and heavy brows, she joked it was as if we had no father and she’d had us alone.

Nesto wears his hair in ropey locks tied together by a band, whipping across his shoulder blades, hair he says he started growing long the moment he began to plan his defection and will only cut the day ese, el barbudo Fidel, finally dies. He’s tall and muscular, with strong legs because he says milk was still plentiful when he was growing up, not like after the Soviets pulled out of the island and everything became scarce.

We’re both of the invented Caribbean, Nesto says, a Nuevo Mundo alchemy of distilled African, Spaniard, Indian, Asian, and Arab blood, each of us in varying mixtures. He likes to compare our complexions, putting his arm next to mine, calls me “canelita, ni muy tostada ni muy blanquita,” showing off his darkness, proof, his mother told him, of his noble Yoruba parentage and brave cimarron ancestors, la raza prieta of which he should be proud no matter how much others have resisted mestizaje, hanging onto the milky whiteness of their lineage like it’s their most precious commodity.