The other bag contained bottles of water. He had searched the trash for bottles, had washed them carefully, filled them with water, and corked them. Diego hadn’t mentioned water or food, but Ocho remembered his conversation with his brother, Hector, and thought bringing water would be a wise precaution.
He also had two baked potatoes in the bag.
Diego would laugh at him — they were not going to be at sea long enough to get really hungry, or so he said.
Please, God, let Diego be right. Let us be in America when the sun rises tomorrow.
There would be a man waiting in the Keys, waiting on a certain beach. Diego showed Ocho a map with the beach clearly marked in ink. “He was a close friend of my wife’s brother,” Diego said. “A man who can be trusted.”
The boat was fast enough, Diego said, to be in American waters at dawn. They would make their approach to the beach as the sun rose, when obstructions to navigation were. visible, when they could check landmarks and buoys.
Diego was confident. Dora believed her father, looked at him with shining eyes when he talked of America, of how it would be to live in an American house, go to the huge stadiums and watch Ocho play baseball while everyone cheered … to have a television, plenty to eat, nice clothes, a car!
Dios mio, America did sound like a paradise! To hear Diego tell it America was heaven, lacking only the angel choir … and it was just a boat ride away across the Florida Straits.
Of course, Diego said they would probably get seasick, would probably vomit. That was inevitable, to be expected, a price to be paid.
And they could get caught by the Cubans or Americans, get sent back here. “We’ll be no worse off than we are now if that happens,” Diego argued. “We can always try again to get to America. God knows, we can’t get any poorer.”
Dora with the shining eyes … she looked so expectant.
She was the first, the very first woman he had ever made love to. And she got pregnant after that one time!
When she first told him, he had doubted her. Didn’t want to believe. She became angry, threw a tantrum. Then he had believed.
He thought about her now as he walked the dark streets, past people sitting in doorways, couples holding hands, past bars with music coming through the doorways. He had spent his whole life here and now he was leaving, an event of the first order of magnitude. Surely they could see the transformation in his face, in the way he walked.
Several people called to him, “El Ocho!” Several fans wanted to shake his hand, but no more than usual. This was the way they always acted as he walked by — this was the way people had treated him since he was fifteen.
He left the people behind and walked past the closed fish markets and warehouses. His footsteps echoed off the buildings.
The boat was in a slip, Diego said, behind a certain boatyard.
He rounded the corner, saw people. Men, women, and children standing in little knots. Hmm, they were right near the slip.
They were standing around the slip.
He saw Diego standing on the dock, and Dora.
People stepped out of the way to let him by.
“All these people,” he said to Diego, “Did you announce our departure at the ballpark? I thought we were going to sneak out of here.”
Diego had a sick look on his face. “They’re going with us,” he said.
“What?”
“The captain brought his relatives, my brother heard we were leaving, talked to some of his friends ….”
Ocho stared at the boat. The boat’s name on the stern was written in black paint, which was chipping and peeling off. Angel del Mar, Angel of the Sea. The boat was maybe forty feet long, with a little pilothouse. Fishing nets still hung from the aft mast. The crowd — he estimated there were close to fifty people standing here.
“How many people, Diego? How many?”
“Over eighty.”
“On that boat? In the Gulf Stream? Está loco?”
Diego was beside himself. “This is our chance, Ocho. We can make it. God is with us.”
“God? If the boat swamps, will He keep us from drowning?”
“Ocho, listen to me. My friends are waiting in Florida. This is our chance to make it to America, to be something, to live decent …. This is our chance.”
People were staring at him, listening to Diego.
Ocho looked into the faces looking at him. He tore his eyes away, finally, looked back at Diego, who had his hand on Ocho’s arm.
“No. I am not going,” He pulled his arm from Diego’s grasp. “Go with one less, you will all have a little better chance.”
“You have to go,” Diego pleaded, and grabbed his arm.
“Ocho,” Dora wailed.
“You have to go,” Diego snarled. “You got her pregnant! Be a man!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Eighty-four people were packed aboard Angel del Mar as she headed for the mouth of the small bay under a velvet black sky strewn with stars. A sliver of moon cast just enough light to see the sand on the bars at the entrance of the bay.
The boat rode low in the water and seemed to react sluggishly to the small swells that swept down the channel.
“This is insane,” Ocho said to Diego Coca, who was leaning against the wall of the small wheelhouse.
“We’ll make it. We’ll reach the rendezvous in the Florida Keys an hour or two before dawn. Vamos con Dios.”
“God had better be with us,” Ocho muttered, and reached for Dora. The baby didn’t show yet. She was of medium height, with a trim, athletic frame. How well he knew her body.
As far as he knew, he was the only one on the boat who had brought water or food. Oh, the other passengers had things, all right, sacks and boxes of things too precious to leave behind: clothes, pictures, silver, Bibles, rosaries, crucifixes that had decorated the walls of their homes and their parents’ and grandparents’ homes.
Boxes and sacks were stacked around each person, who sat on the deck or on his pile. Men, women, children, some merely babies in arms … It appeared to Ocho as if the Saturday night crowd from an entire section of ballpark bleachers had been miraculously transported to the deck of this small boat.
The breeze smelled of the sea, clean, tangy, crisp. He took a deep breath, wondered if this were his last night of life.
He pulled Dora closer to him, felt the warmth and promise of her body.
Well, this boatload of people would make it to Florida or they wouldn’t, as God willed it. He had never thought much about religion, merely accepted it as part of life, but through the years he had learned about God’s will. He was not one of those athletes who crossed himself every time he went to the plate or prepared to make a crucial pitch, vainly asking God for assistance in trivial matters, but he knew to a certainty that most of the major events of life — be you ballplayer, manager, father, husband, cane worker, whatever — are beyond your control. Events take their own course and humans are swept along with them. Call it God’s will or chance or fate or what have you, all a man could do was throw the ball as well as he could, with all the guile and skill he could muster. What happened after the ball left your fingers was beyond your control. In God’s hands, or so they said. If God cared.