Kilometer 99 (8 page)

She grimaces for a half second, then nods. “I understand. With the earthquake, it must be very difficult.”

“There's no time or money to finish the aqueduct. It simply doesn't make sense.”

“Indeed.” Her voice chokes up a tiny bit. “
Pues,
we were lucky to have you. I'll get the soup.” Niña Tere disappears into the small and smoky outbuilding that serves as the kitchen. Nora and I sit alone at the table.

“Is that your car outside?” Nora asks.

“More or less,” I say. “You remember Don Benjamín? It belongs to the two of us.” Ben and I never spent much time here, but I made sure to introduce him. “We're going to South America, in that car.”

“That's a long way,” she says.

“It's a very long way,” I agree.

Niña Tere returns and places steaming bowls of soup before us: rice, potato, squash, the small dark leaves of
chipilín
—a wild herb said to be healthy. The stringy lace of egg white promises a hard yolk somewhere at the bottom. On her second trip, she brings a dish of salt, a stack of fresh tortillas, and a couple of quartered limes.

When I first arrived, I found the Salvadoran custom of hot soup in the sweltering midday hours ridiculous. Now it feels nice, familiar. How many days have I eaten this same meal here at this table, on this same red-and-white oilcloth? Surely, this time will be the last.

“How are things?” I ask. “With the village council?”

Niña Tere shrugs. “Not much interest in the water project. All you hear about is the earthquake now.”

I tear a tortilla in half and touch one of the corners to the coarse salt in the dish. “What do you mean?”

“The council solicits help from different agencies: clothing, plastic, food, things like that.” She speaks without enthusiasm. “That's taken up most of their time.”

I'm confused: Cara Sucia's homes fared relatively well during the quake. The village is in much better shape than its surrounding communities. More homes are standing than not. Certainly, there's no lack of housing or food.

“It's foolishness,” Tere admits. “Somebody brought out a load of blankets and mattresses last week, and people went crazy. They didn't have enough for everyone, so they cut them in half. Can you imagine? What do you do with half a mattress?”

“But most people here have bedding, right? They should've taken those things down to El Terrero,” I say.

Niña Tere shakes her head, as if this episode exhausted her reason long before I learned of it. “People like free things,” she explains.

Nora commits to her soup, a few grains of soft rice stuck to her chin. I try to remind myself that this isn't my problem anymore.

Once my soup is finished, I lean back in the chair. Niña Tere brings a soccer ball–shaped watermelon from the kitchen and sets it in the center of the oilcloth. It's so ripe that when she touches the blade to one side, the entire shell splits all the way around.

We suck down the fruit until I think I'll burst, gossiping and reminiscing. Niña Tere laughs out loud, recalling the sight of me in muddy work clothes, heading off to supervise all the village men.

“We'll never see something like that again, not in this village,” Niña Tere says, nodding her head.

“Something like what?”

“You.” She points at me with her lips. “A North American, from Hawai‘i no less, coming down to work for this community.” She laughs aloud and claps her hands together. “While the rest of us are trying to sneak into your country to find work.”

We share an awkward second of silence.

“I should go,” I tell her.

“So soon?”

We say our final good-byes. Each gives me a hug.

I climb in the car but drive only a few doors down the road and stop again.

My old house already looks abandoned; vines climb the walls and front fence. I find my key and walk through the yard. A half dozen bats fly out as the door swings open. The inside looks much as I left it. The same shattered coffee mug lies across the floor. The same long crack reaches up between the cinder blocks. The only difference is the fresh bat guano, spread about the walls like hasty brushstrokes.

I've been living out of the backpack I grabbed on my way out of here last time; luckily, it was still half-packed from an earlier weekend trip. Now I gather up some spare clothes and other valuables and stuff them into a larger bag. I make sure to take a sweater and raincoat for the cold legs of our South American journey. At the doorway, I pause for one last look around my old home. Then I pull the door shut and leave the place to the bats.

There are other friends in this town to whom I owe good-byes. But I'm simply not up to it. I drive back to La Lib with the windows all the way down. The air feels nice against the soup-caused sweat that covers my skin.

 

10

The most unexpected thing about meeting Ben and rediscovering surfing was that it corresponded with a breakthrough in my Peace Corps work. The water project—which had spun its wheels through months of bureaucratic limbo—finally took off. Materials arrived by the truckload. Cara Sucia's men gathered each morning with picks and shovels.

My first six months in that village had been spent ticking away the hot hours reading books, painting my little house, and asking questions for a useless health census. Almost overnight, I switched to twelve- or fourteen-hour days, walking through the jungles and coffee fields in jeans and boots, checking elevations, making work schedules, measuring the depth of ditches, and asking landowners for permission to lay pipe.

I became a hero in Cara Sucia. The villagers had all been suspicious of me at first. With the start of the project, I won them over. Even the old boys of the council took my opinions seriously. They called me
ingeniera
—“engineer.” I was offered food and invited into homes. If I complained of any problems with my house or my cistern, a man would arrive to fix them. I had to invent excuses for not being godmother to several local children.

All the while, my surfing life was in full swing. Though I never lied about where I went on the weekends, rumors spread that I was off advising on other aqueduct projects. It didn't matter much; there was no need for me to supervise every second of the construction. What counted most were the results, and I was producing those in spades. Nobody questioned what I did with my own time.

And it wasn't only the villagers who were enthusiastic. The Peace Corps office heard great things about me. I was asked to speak to incoming trainees. Suddenly, all of those bizarre courses I'd taken in college—building concrete cubes in the lab, or tiny models of suspension bridges—finally made sense. I
was
an engineer after all.

I called home frequently and spoke of my work with pride. My father had been against my Peace Corps service in the first place. He'd seen it as an indulgence, a waste of time. But with the news of the project, everything changed. He was rapt, asking detailed questions, always wanting to know how I learned to do this or that.

My father loved to work with his hands—to build things—but he never had a chance to attend college. The landscaping business was something he inherited—and grew—but his heart wasn't fully in it. His favorite part, I believe, was tinkering with the broken lawn mowers. He's the one who pushed me to study engineering.

To my surprise, he decided to fly to El Salvador early in the second year of my service. I was shocked when I heard. In fact, I had to call off a weekend in La Lib with Ben.

The three of us had an awkward dinner in San Salvador the night my father arrived. I don't think he understood who Ben was, or why they should meet. There was no room for socializing or boyfriends in my father's vision of my life here. Ben rolled with it well enough.

The next morning, my father and I rode a rattling chicken bus out to Cara Sucia. It was a Sunday; nobody was working. I took him to see the spring boxes—the most complete part of the project. Soon into our walk, he slipped on the trail and muddied his pants and golf shirt.

At the river's edge, I showed him the two concrete boxes we'd built, and lifted the cover so he could watch the water gushing inside. He asked how we worked in the river and I explained that we made a wall out of red clay—the kind used to make cookware and roofing tiles—to divert the water's flow while we poured the first layers of concrete.

“Amazing,” my father said over and over, as if I'd invented these techniques, not learned them from the locals.

It was a beautiful day along the riverbed. Butterflies clung to wet rocks. We followed the four-inch galvanized pipes downward on their way. I showed him the suspension bridge we'd constructed to span a wide and rocky ravine, told him about the Salvadoran teenagers who'd worked up there, while the pipe was supported by only a series of machete-hewn tree limbs. I pointed out the forked mango tree where we bent the galvanized pipes, with eight guys pushing on either end, whenever the aqueduct needed to turn corners.

My father listened with a brand of awe that I'd never before seen in him. On that day, I realized that raising me alone had been his life's work. This project must've meant a certain measure of secondhand achievement for him.

We had a look at the beginnings of the tanks, where the work was currently going on. Along the road, I pointed out where the distribution lines would run to the houses. A couple of families had already planted taps beside their cisterns, in anticipation of the water.

My father was less interested in getting to know the community. He didn't enjoy being studied by the Salvadoran villagers, dragged around and introduced in a language he couldn't understand. Little kids pulled at the sides of their eyes and demonstrated kung fu moves they'd seen on television. I'd ceased to notice such things long ago. But my father looked bothered by it all. Even at Niña Tere's house, he remained quiet and withdrawn. He passed a silent judgment on the village, as though it wasn't deserving of the water project that had so pleased him.

By the time we went to the airport for his departing flight, I was exhausted. Playing the tour guide had worn me out. He bought us a dinner of fried chicken at the terminal's Pollo Campero. For the last five minutes or so of his trip, with fast food and soda spread across the table, I felt like a child once again. In fact, once the boarding calls began, I had to remind myself that I was staying here. Having won my dad's approval for this project, it felt like a finish line of sorts.

Once back in Hawai‘i, he continued to follow the progress of the aqueduct. He bought the first computer he'd ever owned. Through frequent e-mails, he continued to offer me his pride, an emotion I'd not quite figured out what to do with.

We spoke on the day of the earthquake, of course, but not since. I haven't managed to tell him about quitting the Peace Corps, or about the Jeep and South America. I suppose I thought it better to wait until we're actually on the road—until there's no chance he might talk me out of it.

 

11

“Okay, that was not cool, but whatever. I can look the other way.” Pelochucho stands beside Ben. Both wear button-down shirts with short sleeves and collars. They seem to be waiting on me.

“Come again?” I climb out of the driver's seat.

“You guys are on my clock here. You can't go disappearing.” He glares down at an expensive-looking wristwatch—all shining metal and dark leather. “We need to be at Kilometer Ninety-nine like now.”

“K Ninety-nine? There's no surf. And you weren't even awake.” I look toward Ben, hoping for some support. “Are we supposed to wait outside your door all day?”

“No worries.” Pelochucho smiles and holds up his hands. “Miscommunication. But seriously, we've got to go.”

A ping sounds from the Jeep's engine. The three of us stand on the driver's side. My mouth hangs open, still eager to defend my right to take my own damn car when and where I please.

“Chuck, you drive,” Pelochucho says. “I'm riding shotgun.” He walks around the car and opens the passenger-side door.

That means, of course, that I'll be left lying across the plywood shelf in the back. Pelochucho's door swings shut.

“Do you want to drive?” Ben asks me halfheartedly.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Pelochucho calls from inside the car. “Your money.”

A Velcro pocket rips open. Pelochucho's hand, clutching two hundred-dollar bills, is thrust in Ben's direction through the open driver's door.

Ben takes them both and is about to hand one to me.

“Chinita, here's yours.” Another two bills come through the car door.

I look inside the Jeep and see a thick wad of hundreds in Pelochucho's other hand.

“I figure you guys were technically on the clock yesterday, you know.” He passes Ben one more hundred. “And this is like a signing bonus or something. Let's go.”

I'm about to ask why I need to go along in the first place, but at the sight of the cash, I think better of it.

“Hold on to this for me?” I pass my two hundreds back toward Ben.

He nods and puts all five bills in his pocket. He was right: That money might represent weeks, perhaps another full month, of traveling for us.

I climb onto the wooden platform in the rear and ask Ben to close me in.

*   *   *

The road to K 99 undulates along the rugged coastline. In the back, tossing about with every curve, I have vertigo and mild nausea. I can't decide if the pot smoke, wafting over from another of Pelochucho's pungent joints, makes things better or worse.

“You'll turn right just before the surf spot,” Pelochucho says in a hoarse voice. “There, that's the one.”

Ben shifts into four-wheel drive. We head uphill on a steep dirt road. My body slips backward along the shelf. After a minute or two of climbing, Pelochucho says, “Stop.”