When Roy’s mother swam into a bevy of jellyfish and got stung by them he was walking along the beach smashing men-of-war with a board. He liked hearing them pop and seeing their blue ink spurt onto the white sand. Roy took care to stand a couple of feet away from the cephalopods, not wanting to step on their invisible poisonous tentacles. He heard his mother’s screams and saw her walking unsteadily out of the ocean. She was crying and two teen-age girls who were sunbathing on the beach got up and ran over to her. Roy dropped the board and ran over, too.
“It was terrible,” his mother said, sobbing between words. “I was swimming close to shore and all of a sudden I was surrounded by jellyfish. They stuck to my back and I couldn’t get away from them. They kept stinging me.”
“Jesus, lady, your back is full of wounds, your shoulders, too,” said one of the girls. “You should see a doctor right away.”
“They’re hairs,” said the other girl. “The stingers are actually hairs that grow out of their tentacles. I learned it in biology.”
Roy and his mother were in Miami Beach, staying at the Delmonico Hotel, waiting for his father to come over on the ferry from Havana. Roy knew that his parents were getting a divorce but he didn’t know exactly what it meant. He understood that his father would not be living with him and his mother any more, but his dad had seldom been with them in the past few months anyway, so Roy didn’t think that would make much of a difference.
At the doctor’s office, Roy was made to sit in the waiting room while his mother was being attended to. A receptionist asked him how old he was and when he told her five but almost six she gave him six Tootsie Rolls. Roy didn’t like Tootsie Rolls but he took them from her anyway, said thank you, and stuffed them in the right hand pocket of his silver-blue Havana Kings jacket.
Later, Roy decided, he would distribute them to the bus boys at the Delmonico. Roy had gotten to know them well during the five weeks he and his mother had been there. They had all been nice to him—especially Leo, Chi Chi, Chico and Alberto—giving him dishes of ice cream and Coca-Colas while he hung out in the hotel kitchen and talked to them about baseball. They were all Cubans and Roy often went to the Sugar Kings games with his father when he was in Havana. In December, Roy’s father had introduced him to El Vaquero, “The Cowboy,” the Cuban League home run champion who had for many years played third base for the Cienfuegos team. El Vaquero, whose real name was Raimundo Pardo, had recently had “una taza de café” with the Washington Senators, but he’d struck out much more often than he’d hit home runs for them so the Senators had cut him loose. El Vaquero was going to play now for the Sugar Kings. Roy was looking forward to seeing him hit home runs out of Gran Stadium, but when he told this to Chico and Leo they laughed and said El Vaquero was too old, that his nickname should be changed to El Viejo, “The Old Guy.”
“What did the doctor do, Mom?” Roy asked when they were in a taxi going back to the hotel.
“He washed and disinfected the places where I was stung and then applied ointment to them. He said they’ll take a few days to heal. You’ll rub the ointment on my back for me at night, won’t you, Roy?”
“Sure, if you want me to. But I go to sleep before you do. When Dad gets here, he can do it if I’m already in bed.”
Roy’s mother looked out the cab’s window on her side. The sidewalks were very crowded and the taxi couldn’t go fast because a wagon filled with plantains being pulled by a horse was in front of it.
“Don’t talk about your dad,” she said. “Not right now.”
“Why, Mom? He’s coming to Miami, isn’t he?”
“It hurts, Roy. I didn’t think it would, but it does.”
“Don’t worry, Mom, they’re just jellyfish stings. You’ll be okay in a few days.”