The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [77]
The policeman stopped in confusion and the driver, a large, powerfully built man with a deep, soft voice, said, “I’m José Canó.”
The policemen were still confused, and so the passenger helped them: “The father of Robinson Canó.”
“Robinson Canó!” The two policemen nearly saluted and the conversation quickly turned, as it often did here, to baseball.
To be someone in the Dominican Republic, you didn’t really have to be someone, you just have to have somebody in your family who is someone. One of the important advantages of being someone was that the police would leave you alone.
José Canó, with considerable talent and even more determination, had struggled mightily, and he had traveled a very long distance. But really it was his son, Robinson, who made him a someone. But that was something he had earned too.
Canó was from Boca del Soco, the mouth of the Soco River. Of the numerous rivers in San Pedro, the Soco is one of the few that are not tributaries of the Higuamo. Its mouth is on the other side of San Pedro. The river is a beautiful, wide, curving tropical river with blackish-brown water and banks overgrown with thick greenery. Unlike the Higuamo, there is little built on those jungle-thick banks: looking around the bend from the mouth suggests a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. In reality, though, the Soco wanders down from the heart of sugar, the cane fields, and the cattle farms in the center of the island.
To cross the Soco and get to the little fishing village on the other side, Macorisanos had to cross a narrow two-lane metal bridge of the kind of minimal construction that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tossed off overnight.
Vendors lined up by the side of the road selling the small, black, whitefleshed fish caught in the brackish waters of the channels. What had become the big item along this roadside was crabs—very ugly land crabs with boxy black and gray bodies and protruding eyes. They sold them in strings of twelve.
Across the river was a series of sheds and ramshackle houses around a large square field, a cricket field. It was a cocolo neighborhood with a good number of Haitians as well. It had been a neighborhood of fishing and crabbing even before the cocolos and the Haitians arrived.
Andre Paredes, twenty-six years old, had been doing this since the year 2000, although he was at least the third generation in his family to catch crabs in Boca del Soco. Every year more people wanted crabs, which at first he thought would be good for business. But the result was that more and more hungry people came to Soco to dig crabs and sell them by the side of the road. Now there was more demand but fewer crabs. This was true of the fish in Soco also: more people wanted to buy them, so the prices went up, so more people fished until there were fewer fish to catch.
The crabs burrowed straight into the ground for about a foot and then turned at a sharp right angle. A crabber looked for a crab hole and then dug a second hole with a machete. If this was done right, the crab would now find itself in a tunnel with two exits. Sometimes the crabber could just reach down the hole and grab the animal. Or he could stick a hook down to grab it. If the crab ran, it would come out the other hole and the crabber could still get it. In the dry season there was one crab to a hole, but in the wet season three or four would be found in the same hole. There were several theories on why. One popular and implausible theory—Dominicans usually prefer the implausible—was that they huddled together in the rainy season because they were afraid of thunderstorms.
A good crabber used to catch five or six dozen in a day around the village