Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [48]
Two men, whom I assumed to be Chinese, sat with themselves. They sat so close together I thought they would merge. I could not imagine the length of their journey, and the dejection concentrated in their faces matched the storms over the swamps in the west. It is a long way back to Haiti when you’ve nearly died trying to escape from it, but it was not so far that you couldn’t try again. The Cubans were, for the most part, home free. But China was another planet. It may have taken them months to get here, and now they were going back. They had the tired faces of men without hope and whose only luck is to endure, yet despite all this, when I smiled at them, they smiled back. Their eyes were unexpectedly kind. I gave them the thumbs-up and went past them into the shade.
There didn’t seem to be an American section, so I sat with my back against the corrugated wall of a Quonset hut. A man with muscles like wrought iron dipped in black enamel walked over and asked me for a cigarette by forming a peace sign with his index and middle fingers and moving it back and forth in front of his lips. I patted my empty pockets, and he left me, looking only mildly disappointed. After all, he was in a place where disappointment was as chronic as the sunlight. I sat there and watched as six of the men marched out from under the canopy and began playing soccer with the defeated husk of a basketball.
I have to get the hell out of here, I thought. I’ll go nuts if I have to sit here much longer. I glanced around, but all I saw was razor wire, low clouds, and unhappy people. Then, quite suddenly, the fatigue I had been holding at bay with fear and adrenaline swept over me, and I decided not to fight it any longer, so I tilted my head back, closed my eyes, and tried not to think.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, a guard was shaking my shoulder and telling me that my lawyer was there to see me. There was a crack of thunder in the west, and the wind picked up speed. I got quickly to my feet and followed the guard as he walked toward the main building. We had all but made it to the gate when the first heavy drops of rain began to hit the ground.
I was led into a large, rectangular room with rows of benches and tables and bars on the windows as a reminder of how things were. The guard at the door patted me down before I went in and told me I would be patted down again on my way out. His voice was devoid of inflection; it was the voice of an automaton who had repeated the same words so many times that he was no longer capable of hearing his own boredom. I would not have traded his life for my own despite the alternative. Even the prisoners were better off. They could at least go home, and home, regardless of how much a hell it may turn out to be, still possesses certain latent possibilities. The guard was just waiting for a pension to set him free; his was a life sentence, and time was a conveyor belt heading a day at a time toward the pit.
The room, which smelled of cigarettes and sweat, was nearly empty, and I saw Susan Andrews almost as soon as I walked in. She was seated at a table, her head down, reading what looked to be a brief. There was a bulging leather valise sitting on the table beside her like a mascot, and a can of soda was cupped absentmindedly in her hand. I walked over and sat on the bench across from her.
She didn’t look up immediately the way most people would have in a place like Krome, and I was reminded of how fierce her concentration could be. She made one violent slash with her pen, then lifted her head and smiled at me. She had a beautiful face, but the smile ruined it, at least temporarily. The smile she flashed was thoroughly impersonal, a practiced gesture, a concession to civility, a bright coin tossed without consequence to the beggars of the world. There was nothing for Jack Vaughn in that