Kilometer 99 (32 page)

In some ways, for me, this is more difficult than finding the dead body. I wonder if all of us, walking around La Lib now, are truly survivors. Or are we trapped in a kind of limbo state somewhere between life and death? A state that might even be worse than death. Nobody else shares my reaction.

His eyes still closed, the undead man mutters “Claudia” between shallow breaths. Ben helps him out of his hole. When the reunited pair finally embrace, it's more a matter of her holding him up. His long-numb limbs struggle to move, and soon enough she sets him down onto the ground. The children return with a shallow bucket of water, and the man takes several trembling sips. “Papá!” the boys shout. Too weak to embrace them, the father reaches out to brush his fingers against their cheeks and shoulders.

Ben and I sit down. I worry about the crackhead situation. We helped for only ten minutes or so, and now there are several of us. This family doesn't look like they have any spare cash to contribute to our cause. While nobody forces the issue, the crackheads stand around awkwardly; one of the new guys—the smallest among them—looks particularly restless.

The woman wipes dirt and debris from the man's face and hair while he continues to force down water and blink furiously. She shouts an order to the kids and they disappear into a hut of plastic and cardboard on the far side of their fallen home.

The children return with a cold pot of boiled potatoes. “
Toma,
” the older one says, and sets them down in front of us. Ben and I aren't bashful. The smaller boy runs back inside and produces a dish of salt. The crackheads are slightly more hesitant, but they tuck in soon enough. I am hungry, and with all the awful smells around, this meal has the right degree of blandness for me to stomach. A new guy, the small one who's been looking restless, takes a couple of bites, then chucks his potato to the ground. He grumbles something I can't understand. Flaco shushes him.

After two or three of the cold potatoes, Ben brushes his hands together and stands. “
Vamos,
” he instructs the rest of us.

The family thanks us all and asks for God to bless us. They are still in a state of overwhelmed shock. I get the feeling they don't quite understand who we are or what exactly we're doing.

“
¡Qué mierda!
” shouts the smallest crackhead once we're out of earshot. The others reprimand him in a Spanish so hushed and slang-ridden that I can't follow, though I assume he expected cash for helping the man. To me, it's fairly obvious that the family would've dug the body out within the hour, whether or not we'd shown up.

At first, Ben doesn't appear to pay attention, but then suddenly he stops walking and turns to the complainer. “Weefer, why don't you fuck off, then? Nobody promised you anything. There's no minimum wage here. That family didn't have shit to give you. Walk away,
pues.
” Standing there with the headband on, bare-chested, lean from skipped meals, glaring down at a rival, Ben looks exactly like the real Chuck Norris in his prime.

Weefer—I gather that's his name—spits on the ground, then walks off muttering curses.

Ben walks onward. We follow.

There are no more dramatic screams or critical rescues. Everyone around us resigns themselves to the slow grind of excavating bodies. I feel self-conscious about the silly RESCATE bandanna upon my head.

Soon enough, we fall in, helping unearth a house that is badly buried. An old woman and a small boy dig through the rubble with sticks. Few words are exchanged; we take our shovels and move earth. The boy communicates by pointing and making a sort of bleating noise through his sinuses. As the minutes and shovelfuls go by, and I watch the old woman gesture and signal to him, I understand he is deaf as well as mute. We carry the dirt away in buckets and grain sacks. This family also looks too poor to pay us anything. It's a good thing that Weefer left.

The minutes spent digging turn into hours, and I wonder if there truly is a house underneath all this dirt and dust. The moment that thought enters my head, my shovel hits a piece of corrugated metal. We hoist out the heavy chunks of old junk—tire rims and broken cinder blocks—used to weigh the sheets of roof down. All of us put aside our shovels and pick through the pieces with caution. Now that the sounds of digging diminish, I can hear the perfect waves breaking in the distance.

This time, we find a hand first. I'm the one to spot it. We make short work of clearing away the rest of the dirt. It's an old man's body. Like Pelochucho, he was caught sleeping in. Large adobe bricks fell all around, though his body isn't crushed like others we've excavated. Nobody speaks, but it's obvious that his cause of death was not falling debris, but live burial. The old woman and the little boy cross themselves and cry. The boy makes honking sounds in between his sobs. We back away. Ben passes out menthol cigarettes.

The woman and the boy wrap the body with sheets and blankets, just as Ben did with Pelochucho. She takes pieces of twine that were strung along the bottom of the bed frame and uses them to tie up the bundle.

Once we've finished our smokes, the old woman approaches Ben and me. She shakes Ben's hand, then hands him a folded stack of American dollars.

Ben is incredulous. “Where did she get this?” he asks me as the woman walks back to the body. “Look at this place.”

I stare into the hole that was their home. The boy honks away over the bundled-up man—his grandfather, most likely.

“They must be getting
remesas
from the States.” I think of Niña Tere and her husband, Guillermo. “The boy's parents, or one of them at least, probably send back cash. Maybe she doesn't realize what it's worth. He”—I point to the twine-tied blankets—“probably took care of the finances.”

The crackheads approach and steal glances over Ben's shoulder. I hear one whisper, “Dollars.”

Ben wraps his fist tighter around the money, then shoves it into the Velcro side pocket of his board shorts. He is flustered—feeling guilty about taking this woman's money, but knowing that the crackheads will never abide his giving it back.

“Wait,” he shouts down to the woman and the boy. I didn't notice, but they are making fruitless attempts to lift the body.

“We'll help you,” Ben says. He turns to the crackheads and gestures with his arm. Two of our helpers hoist either end of the body to their shoulder level; once they have it up, the third one supports the sagging middle.

Ben assures the woman that it's better this way. She asks God to bless us all—making our team of three possibly the most blessed crackheads in the world. The boy bleats a few more times.

Our crew doesn't look happy about the extra work, but they are placated by the possibility of serious payment.

“Wait a second,” Ben instructs once we're out of sight of the dead man's house. He goes around behind me, and counts the money against the small of my back. The three pallbearers turn and try to look.

“Keep going,” Ben calls out. The edges of the bills tickle the bare skin below my shirt.

“How much?” I ask.

“Almost three hundred,” he says. “It's mostly twenties. I'll give them three each and keep the more mismatched bills for us.” He stuffs the wad of money into the back pocket of my jeans. Ben smacks my ass lightly, as if sealing the bills there.

Immediately, I wish she'd never given us that cash. It feels heavy as an adobe block in my pants, as bad an omen as the wads that Pelochucho flashed around a few short days ago, the big ones I had to hand over to the drug boss. Worthless to us under the circumstances, it's nothing more than a burden, a source of trouble. Once Ben pays these guys their cut, there is no chance they'll be back to help for days.

I don't mean to be judgmental. They are good men, in their hearts. Their left hands don't know what their rights are doing. In many ways, their acts of altruism are no more selfish than my reasons for joining the Peace Corps—or Alex's reasons for working with the Red Cross. But their addiction is too strong. The source of their short-term pleasure is too easy, too close, too available.

Soon enough, we arrive at the makeshift mass grave, and it's easy to see why Ben dislikes it. Mounds of dirt are piled up at one end, all sprinkled with a layer of lime, like confectioner's sugar over pound cake. Closer to the entrance, on the town side, bodies are covered in thin layers of earth. A couple of burning tires dribble out columns of black smoke around the perimeter. Above, buzzards fly in patient circles, kept at bay, it seems, by the toxic smoke. The flies are not so easily dissuaded. Most of the corpses are wrapped in blankets and twine like the one that we brought, but some are just bodies, dead in their clothes.

It's obvious that the architects of this place never expected it to grow so large, even in the first two days of its existence. They've already begun moving the dirt around near the entrance, expanding it in the direction of town. I wonder how long it will take before this mass grave swallows up the whole port, until it connects with the graveyard on the point, and La Libertad is nothing but dead bodies and killer waves.

The most unsettling part of the mass grave is the men working there. They all have on long-sleeve shirts with collars pulled up against the flies and sun. Handkerchiefs or pieces of cloth cover their faces from the stink—not unlike the Colombians who gave us those accursed cocaine bales. They work—digging and dragging corpses, sprinkling lime, and fanning the fires—with a slow, persistent cadence, like real-life grim reapers.

“Who are these guys?” I ask Ben. “The … attendants?”

“Who knows?” he says. “The rumor is that they're guys who lost everybody. Guys who have no idea what happened to their families or loved ones—where they were at the time of the quake. They're
esperando
to come across the bodies.” To describe what these men are doing, Ben chooses the Spanish verb, which means both to hope and to wait—another word that cannot be satisfied. “But my theory,” he goes on, “is that they're guys who somehow did wrong by the ones they lost. The way they seem obliged to do this shit … it's like they believe they can make up for something by serving the dead.”

Our three crackhead helpers hand off their burden to one such man. He doesn't speak to them, just drags the body off to a pile, where a cloud of flies scatter. It's like watching the dead bury the dead.

*   *   *

We walk away from the grave and back toward town. The crackheads ask Ben about the money. He takes the bills from my pocket and hands them each three twenties.

“There it is,” he says. “
Gracias.
” But we're invisible by then. They are off toward the crack house, not like men celebrating, but like men on a most urgent errand. I think of myself this morning, standing at the water's edge with my surfboard. These men are not free to indulge; they are forced.

“We can forget about seeing them for a while,” Ben says.

The crack house—or its temporary shelter—will probably be the last place in La Lib to take currency. Everywhere else will soon accept only barter: food, water, fuel. I wonder, in the event that we're stuck here much longer, if the dealers won't find a way to get more raw cocaine into the port before the rescuers arrive.

The sun is low along the horizon. We walk back to La Posada with shovels over our arms. I keep thinking of the self-appointed undertakers at the mass grave, for whom even hope is death. Isn't that the logical end of our efforts? Isn't that what we will be reduced to tomorrow, once that many more hours have passed? Won't all relief work become, at some point, merely a process of burying the dead?

*   *   *

We find the gate locked back at La Posada. One of the columns holding it up has been bent by the earthquake; it closes cockeyed, but keeps us out regardless. Still wobbling a bit on her bad leg, Kristy comes over with a key ring and lets us in. She's cleaned the place since we've been gone—cleared the rubble and broken glass around the kitchen, made little caches of food and supplies.

“At last,” she says. “You're back. I've been worried; I had no idea where you'd gone. The people here, they're getting desperate.”

I'm not sure if she's afraid for us or for herself. For the first time, I understand how lucky we are: caught in an empty hotel, with plenty of food, and only the three of us. But if things go on like this much longer, our luck could be our undoing. La Posada will be a prime target for looters and thieves, once it comes to that.

Niña Tere once told me a story about how, when the farmers burn the sugarcane fields, a mass of snakes comes writhing out in a tangled, swirling mess—a rolling wave of refugee serpents—a few feet in front of the fire. Is this what has become of us here in this city? A homeless bunch of earthbound creatures, slithering our way toward the next temporary hole, choking and strangling one another as we go?

I wonder briefly why my grandfather never told similar stories about the cane plantations in Hawai‘i, then remember that we have no snakes on the islands.

Kristy takes a key from off her big ring and extends it toward the two of us. “Here,” she says.

I reach out and take it.

“We've got to keep this place locked up at all times. I see how the people are looking at it.”

I put the key in my pocket. Ben walks over to the side of the Jeep. He opens the rear hatch, sits on the bumper, and unlaces his boots. I take off the RESCATE bandanna.

“We won't be gone so long tomorrow,” I tell Kristy.

“
Ojalá,
” she says.

I walk over to our corner of the courtyard, sit in Ben's hammock, and unlace my own boots. One then the other, they fall to the ground with dull thuds.

Ben rummages through the back of our car, taking a rough inventory of its contents. Finally, he appears from the side with a half-f bottle of Nicaraguan rum.