‘A Handbook to Luck’

After a year and a half in Los Angeles, Enrique spoke English perfectly. His mother, who'd grown up in Panama and was the daughter of the country's water commissioner, had taught Enrique the little English she knew. This gave him an advantage over his father but it didn't account for Papi's terrible trouble with the language. His father tortured each sentence, forcing English into the rapid staccato of Cuban Spanish. He called things he and she, instead of it, and pronounced his j's like y's. His vocabulary was good but his speed and pronunciation made it impossible for anyone to understand him.

Papi blamed his accent for stalling his career. A magician's sleight of hand, he told Enrique, was entirely dependent on his ability to focus an audience's attention. If people couldn't understand what he was saying--"Speak English!" some drunk invariably shouted during his performances--how could they be manipulated? Papi said that magic was largely a matter of making ordinary things appear extraordinary with a touch of smoke and illusion.

Enrique wished they had stayed in Miami with the other Cubans. At least his father could have performed for them in Spanish, not that the exiles were in any mood for magic these days. Their idea of entertainment would be seeing El Comandante hanging from a Havana lamppost. But everybody had told them that California was the place to go for a career in show business. Papi had begged him to join his magic act again but Enrique had refused. He comforted himself by imagining Mamá watching over his life from the sidelines, urging him to say no.

Lately, his father talked about moving to Las Vegas. He knew Cubans from the casinos back home who were working on the Strip as pit bosses, blackjack dealers, nightclub managers. Papi was also acquainted with a few mobsters who'd moved their gambling operations there after the Cubans kicked them out of Havana. Las Vegas was growing fast, he said, and soon would become the world capital of magic. Where else could a man start the day with fifty dollars in his pocket and end up a millionaire by nightfall?

Enrique turned on the television, forcing the thick knob from one station to the next. There were Abbott and Costello reruns on Channel 9, but he wasn't interested. They only made him laugh when he was sick. He had a slight cough and his neck ached. If he was lucky, he might catch the flu and get to stay home from school for a week. His ribs hurt after a scuffle in the playground. No big deal, just the usual uneven swap of punches with the bully from Ocean Park. It wasn't easy being the new kid (almost everybody else had known each other since kindergarten), and dark-skinned, and the second-shortest boy in the class.

The six o'clock news didn't change much. Whenever Enrique saw President Johnson on television, he remembered the American tourists who used to go to Varadero Beach before the revolution and rudely called everyone "boy." Every day more U.S. soldiers were being killed in Vietnam, fighting the Communists. Enrique lost track of how many thousands so far. Why weren't the Americans fighting the Communists in Cuba? What was the difference? And whatever had happened to the men who'd fought in the Bay of Pigs? Why didn't he hear about them? Enrique was suspicious of facts. As far as he could tell, nobody could be sure of anything except numbers, or something you could hold in your own two hands.