Cayos in the Stream Read Free

the crowd Swift’s next two barbed lines:
    Thus every poet, in his kind
    Is bit by him that comes behind.
    More whoops. More hollers. They like it that you can use somebody else’s words to poke fun at yourself. Some of them turn what you say into Spanish for those who do not follow English well.
    You do not talk about the islands off the Cuban coast by accident. You do it smoothly, but on purpose. There are dozens or hundreds of those little islands—thousands, for all you know. Just how many at any one time depends on tides and storms.
    Some of the islands have villages. Some have goatherds. Some have fishermen who visit now and then. Some just have palms and ferns and geckos and hummingbirds. If you plant a supply dump on one of those, who will be the wiser? Only the sailors who row in from a U-boat to pick up what you have left behind.
    All those Spaniards here in Cuba, organized into the Falange. Franco’s toadies. And Franco is Hitler’s toady. Without Hitler, what would Franco be? One more tinpot general who tried for a putsch but did not make it.
    And a good many Cubans will line up with those Spanish fifth columnists. Yes, President Batista declared war on Germany and Italy and Japan after Pearl Harbor. But he was General Batista before he was President Batista. He finagled the impeachment of the guy who ran the country before him. He is smoother than Franco—he did not have to fight a war to take charge of things—but he is stamped from the same cheap metal. No wonder plenty of his countrymen line up with the Fascists.
    You have got some hope of learning if they try to give the U-boats a helping hand. Spaniards are Spaniards. Cubans are Cubans—Spaniards mixed in this island bowl with Negroes and Indians. They all love to hear themselves talk. What one man knows today, four will know tomorrow morning, sixteen tomorrow afternoon, and the whole country in three days’ time.
    You talk in bars yourself. You have never been shy about tooting your own trumpet. You have not been shy about anything for a long time. Making a big noise is what gets a man notice. But you know what seeds you are planting. And, no matter how much you talk, you also know how to listen. You thank God you do not have to be a reporter any more. Still, the little tricks you picked up in that trade come in handy even now. Listening while you seem to be running your mouth is not the least of them.
    Something is funny on Cayo Bernardo. You hear it. Then you hear it again a few days later. You are pretty sure the fellow you hear it from the second time does not know the first man who told you. You are also pretty sure you never heard of Cayo Bernardo until that first man mentioned it.
    Aboard the Pilar , you haul out your charts. Cayo Bernardo turns out to be a flyspeck on the map. It is not far from Cayo Santa Maria, a bigger flyspeck. Cayo Santa Maria, in turn, lies not far west of Cayo Cocos. Cayo Cocos gets close to being a real island.
    Cayo means island in Spanish. On the far side of the Florida Strait, it has turned into key . You lived on Key West for a while. You first met Martha there, before Spain. Key West used to be Cayo Hueso—Bone Island. Language takes crazy hops sometimes.
    “Heading off to chase wild geese again?” Martha asks you when you go from the boat to the house.
    “It could be.” You try not to get angry. When you do in spite of trying, you try not to show it. She is after your goat. You do not want to let her know she has got it. You go on, “Men in boats and men in ships are chasing wild geese across all the oceans of the world. It’s part of the war. Wild geese by the hundreds, men chasing them by the tens of thousands. Sometimes they catch them. Sometimes, by Christ, they do.”
    “Yes? How often?” she jeers.
    “Often enough to make the chasing worthwhile,” you say.
    “Ha!” A single syllable of scorn.
    “Often enough to make the chase needful, then. There. Are you happier?” You know she is not