Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

An hour or so passed. The three of us sat in a patch of shade on the seawall. I laid my head on my mother’s lap while Carlito held the soccer ball in his. She told us the story about the náufrago who washed up on the beach in Cartagena when she was a little girl. That was in the time before jail boats and police planes, when the people in charge just let castaways land where they may and stay if they felt like it. The guy told everybody he was a Spanish prince and all the girls wanted to marry him, but it turned out he was just a gambler running from debts in Panama, and his enemies eventually caught up with him because, Mami said, nobody can run from anything forever.

Enough time passed that Carlito became bored with our mother’s stories. He took up his ball and started kicking it again.

“Come on, Reina,” he called for me, and we went back into the base of a trail already swept by the cops and rangers.

“Don’t go too far,” Mami said. “Stay where I can see you.”

Carlito zigged and zagged and I tried to steal the ball from him, but he was too quick, his legs were too long, and mine felt rubbery and knobby as I tried to keep up.

“I’m tired,” I moaned, squatting on the ground, my butt just shy of the dirt.

Carlito relented. “Just try to block my shots, okay?”

I stood up, ready to play goalie. I was small for my age, but my reflexes were quick. Carlito had trained me to read body language, to know which way a kick would come before the kicker even knew it. I watched and I waited and I blocked the first three kicks with a hand, with a foot, with my belly. But the fourth flew past me into the trees and because I was the loser, Carlito insisted I be the one to go into the bushes after it.

I should have been scared. But the need to please my brother overpowered all the terror stories we’d been raised on to keep us out of woods and jungles and swamps: legends of Madre Monte, who gets revenge on those who invade her territory by making them get lost; La Tunda, the shape-shifter, luring people into the woods in order to keep them there forever; or El Mohán, who simply loves to barbecue and eat children.

The twigs cut into my ankles and shins but I pressed through, negotiating rocks under my feet, pebbles wedging into my sandals, pushing branches from my face, slapping away bugs, slicing through spiderwebs until I was so deep into the woods that I came to the other side of a hidden inlet, a silent, still lagoon framed by mangrove trees with roots like ribs in the pooling green water.

I stood on the dusty embankment unsure of my discovery. A gray heron swooped over the water before me, and the only sound was of the planes, still rumbling over the far side of the park. A few turkey vultures and crows gathered by the edge of the brush and some instinct told me to run into them to scare them off, and search the shadowy wood behind them.

My brother called from the other side of the forest wall, “Reina, hurry up!”

I wanted to find the ball before he did, to avoid hearing him call me a useless slug, to prove I was a worthy teammate, that I was as good as any boy at keeping up a kick-around with him so he’d finally stop threatening to take me to the pulguero to trade me for a television.

And there it was: Carlito’s ball, its black-and-white mosaic waiting for me among the knotty roots of a lonely banyan smothered by prickly pines. I pushed in closer, until the ball was just beyond my reach, but behind the plastic ball I noticed a meaty form that looked to be a shoeless human foot.

It’s no secret that dead bodies turn up all over South Florida, floating in canals, along the swampy arteries of the Everglades, or tossed to the side of a road. In this very park our mother had found, washed up on the beach, what she swore was a real human jawbone, and was so moved by its white smoothness that she took it home with her, bathed it in holy water, and buried it in our backyard until the raccoons dug it up, and then Mami just surrendered and put it in a drawer somewhere.

But this foot was dark and fleshy and my eyes followed it up to a bare leg in frayed denim shorts and a shirtless torso. It belonged to a boy — a teenager, I should say — thin, crouched like an animal. He turned to me. His eyes were wide and his young face was worn and burned from seawater and sun.

He watched me and I watched him as I heard my brother’s voice grow clearer, his feet crunching through the brush, “Reina, Reina! Where are you?” until he was finally beside me, his hand closing around my wrist.

My brother’s gaze moved from me to the boy, who stared back at us, trying to make himself even smaller.

I heard Mami calling for us, heard the worry in her voice, and the cops behind her shouting for us kids to come out of the woods and stop goofing around.

I heard the dogs barking, the weight of more footsteps walking over the dried leaves and broken branches carpeting the forest floor.

I knew he was one of the ones they were looking for. I knew he didn’t want to be found. I didn’t know which was the right side or the wrong side. I only knew that I never saw eyes like that before, so dark with fear, so aware that my brother and I could betray him.

“Get the ball,” Carlito whispered, releasing his grip on me.

I stepped closer to the boy, who watched me, pulling his hand from the curl of his chest to push the ball at his feet toward me.

I picked up the ball and looked back at my brother. He turned toward the woods and called out to whoever could hear us not to worry, that we were coming, and rushed ahead while I stayed behind.

I stared back at the boy until he hid his face from me again. I wanted to help him and felt confused because in school I’d learned that police were people you went to for help, but something told me the best thing I could do for him was to leave and pretend I’d never seen him.

“No le voy a contar a nadie,” I said, assuming he understood, and ran out of the forest toward my brother and mother, but was intercepted by a dog, barking frenetically, its sight set on the ball in my hands like it was a piece of raw meat.

The cop took the ball from me and held it close to the dog that snapped and howled at it, but the cop just looked frustrated and stared at Mami, who’d come to my side with Carlito behind her.

“This is your ball?” he asked me.

“It’s my ball,” Carlito said defiantly. “She’s my sister.”

“You brought it with you to the park today? You didn’t find it here?”

“I bought it for my son myself,” our mother said, slipping a hand onto each of our backs. That wasn’t really true. Tío Jaime had been the one to give Carlito the ball, but it gave us a kind of thrill to see her lie to a man of the law.

The officer yanked the dog by the leash away from the trail and started back toward the seawall. I looked at Carlito but he looked away from me, away from the woods, and sighed to our mother, “Can we go home now?”

We never found out what happened to the rest of those migrants or even where they came from. When I was old enough to fool around with cops and academy cadets, they told me loads of people washed up on South Florida shores in crafty sailing vessels from all over the Caribbean, even after the laws changed and it became much trickier to be let in: Cuban balsas with Soviet car engines, Haitian and Dominican rafts held together with tarps and tires. Some people were just dropped off by speedboats or yachts that shuttled across the Florida Straits in the night. Some slipped right in before dawn, forever undiscovered. If they were among the lucky ones, a dry foot on land would get them amnesty or asylum. But some had the misfortune of arriving in daylight and being spotted on the water, ratted out by citizens, booked into Krome within hours, and set for deportation. But I guess that’s not as bad as drowning along the way.