We laugh, a lot. And we drink more rum.
Then Yovanoti says, “Let us drink to the solidarity between the German and Cuban peoples!” And we drink some more.
Alexis doesn’t drink this time. He says, “So you gonna get me your father’s piece?”
“You’re still tripping on that?”
“Are you gonna get it for me or not?”
“Fuck, Alexis, you know he doesn’t let it out of his sight, not even when he’s taking a crap.”
“He sleeps with it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then...”
Alexis laughs when he sees the gun. It’s a Makarov and it’s so clean, it looks new. I hand it to him and he just stares at it. He really does like pieces like that. Not me.
El Cao and Yovanoti also look it over. “That’s a nice one,” they say.
Alexis takes out the clip and empties it. He puts in his own bullets, one by one.
“Tomorrow, the whole world should pay me tribute,” he says. “There are gonna be two fewer black guys. Let’s go,” he says, and we leave.
But first we take a couple swallows of rum. Or three.
“I’m sure they’re there,” Alexis says, and he shows us the house. “That’s where they go to drink beer.”
And so we wait at the corner. No one speaks. While we wait, I look at the moon. Tonight, it’s round and very bright. This corner’s shitty, I like mine better. It smells of piss here. Yovanoti is smoking cigarette after cigarette. Richard El Cao is sitting on the ground; he’s singing, softly. Alexis just stares at the house.
“That’s where those mothafuckas are,” he finally says.
The two black guys come out and head for the other corner. We go after them, unhurried. We turn the corner and see them make like they’re looking into this one house. They’re probably gonna pull something there. All black guys are the same. Well, almost all. My father says not all black guys are thieves but that all thieves are black. And he says black people have five senses, just like whites. Except that they have two for music and three for stealing. He should know, since he’s a cop. That’s why he laughs so hard when he tells these jokes and when he talks about the black guys they’ve arrested. When they’re in jail, he says, those black guys aren’t so tough.
We continue along the sidewalk and when we get near the black guys, they feign indifference and light cigarettes. Even though there’s so much moonlight, they don’t seem to recognize us. As soon as we’re in front of them, we jump them and Alexis shows the piece. The black guy who held the knife sees it first. What a black rat he is. He takes off and that costs him his life: Alexis lets fly some lead and the guy falls to the ground. He starts thrashing, like a rabid dog, and Yovanoti and I kick him and yell at him, Black faggot, you got scared, huh, you black faggot. We do that until he shivers really weird and gets stiff, with his tongue hanging out. The other black guy’s just standing there, frozen, seeing how his buddy’s dead as a doornail. Alexis stands in front of him.
“Now you’re gonna pay me my hundred pesos, aren’t you?” he says, and hits him on the nose with the piece.
“Fuck, white boy, no need to be this way,” the guy says, and shoves his hand in his pocket.
“Careful!” screams El Cao, and Alexis doesn’t think: He shoots him right in the head. The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots. Then the black guy falls and Alexis leans down to talk to him, though I don’t think the guy can hear him anymore.
“See what happens to tough little black guys like you and your buddy?” He takes the guy’s hand out of his pocket. The black guy doesn’t have a gun today, just a roll of bills: more than five hundred.
Since everybody on the block’s already looking and screaming, we start running. That’s when everything gets fucked up: Two cops appear on the corner and Alexis doesn’t even give it a thought. He never gives anything a thought. And with the aim he’s got. He shoots and downs one, and the other one flees. We run off and no one else comes after us.
If you kill two black delinquents, you get in trouble. But if you kill a cop, then things go from bad to the very worst. We know this, which is why we all agree when El Cao speaks up.
“Let’s steal a boat from the river and head for La Yuma, cuz this is really bad now; this is what happens when you hang out with punks like this,” he says, taking the gun from Alexis. When Alexis starts to say something, El Cao interrupts him: “Shut up or I’ll shut you up.”
It’s been two hours now I’ve been staring at the sun. I like looking at the sun. I can look at the sun without dropping my lids, with my pupils intact, and without tears. It’s been two hours since the boat ran out of fuel and more than four that we’ve been without water. It’s been at least an hour since Alexis slipped off the side, when he went to drink some sea water and never came back. Yovanoti says a shark probably got him. Then he starts to cry and babble, “I’m glad, I’m glad,” and to spit in the water. I don’t like that. I think Alexis was my best friend.
I’ve never worried so much about time passing. Richard El Cao says it’ll be dark in two hours, and that this is good. I don’t know if it’s so good. The best thing would be to be on the corner, listening to the bitching of the old women, singing a little, and staring at the sun. Without water, without food, without rum in the middle of the ocean, yeah, there’s nothing better... It stinks of vomit and shit. If an American coast guard doesn’t show up, we’re fucked. And if one does show up, we’re even more fucked. I ask myself, What the fuck am I doing on this boat? I wanna throw myself in the water like Alexis, but I control myself.
It’s nighttime and I fall asleep.
The sun’s fucked up, intense. My head hurts a little. I’m really sleepy. It’s been awhile since Yovanoti has said anything about what he’s gonna do when he gets to La Yuma. He’s thrown up so much he doesn’t have anything left to throw up. He’s just oozing green spit. El Cao says we should think about good things, we shouldn’t think about how thirsty we are. That’s hard to do. I think about sucking Vanessa the blonde’s tits and then I think about being in church and then about the corner. Later, still, I think about the mulatta’s pussy, the one from the movie. And, to be honest, I do feel better, I even get a hard-on.
When El Cao speaks up again, he says, “Now it’s nighttime again.”
Yovanoti starts to cry and El Cao slaps him twice. So that he’ll calm down. Then Yovanoti throws up a little more. There’s not much moon tonight and I can’t see anything; I don’t stare at anything either.
When I wake up, I see the sun and I see the helicopter. It doesn’t look like the Cuban police. From way up there, with a bullhorn, they shout down something in English. When I look around the boat, I see only El Cao, just lying there, fainted, I think. Yovanoti is nowhere to be seen. To think he was the one who most wanted to go live in Miami. Tough luck. I really need a chug of rum right about now. I splash some water in El Cao’s face and he wakes up, but he stays down.