Panama (14 page)

He gives me the atta-girl wink.

But nature does not give in.

A week later there are Commission men examining the deep cracks in the ground along the rim of the Cut near the houses, some cracks a few feet from the edge, others as much as a hundred yards back. Our house seems fairly stable, but a crack runs beside a neighbor's house and they're told to leave.

"Not gonna do it." This is the man of the family speaking, a thick, tough crane man. "No crack gonna scare me off my property." "His" property belongs to the Commission, but the defiance is entirely his own. He won't leave.

Father knows geology and engineering and takes the warning seriously. Lives are threatened here, so he tries to explain using logic based on solid geology, thinking a sturdy fellow won't deny sturdy thinking.

"You've got sedimentary and igneous intrusions there," he says to him as a friend and good neighbor. "And it's mixed with the lava flows, and once you disturb that, adhesion's lost." He points at what he's talking about as they stand on our back porch after work.

"See that blue-green volcanic sediment?" The crane man nods. "That'll slip on those red and black clays, lateral support'll be gone, and the slide will start. No stopping it. The house and everybody in it will go down."

The crane man gives Father a blank look and shakes his head. "I'm not leaving."

I see Father's wheels turning. He understands this brute of a fellow and he respects him, but the fellow is allowing his family to be in danger and that's hard for Father to take. He tries again—something simpler, more graphic.

"See the big block of earth where your house is—see how it's splitting away?" A nod. "It'll go any day now, the house with it."

A thoughtful hesitation from the crane man. Then a shake of the head. It's a matter of stern manly stuff now. He won't leave.

Father respectfully goes quiet. The two of them stand staring at the house perched at a tilt. Silent observation—very Midwestern.

A week later, early morning, before it's light, there's commotion outside my window. I get up, look out.

Father's down there, about to leave for work, talking to the crane man, whose back steps have separated from the house and are now well on their way to the bottom of the Cut. As they speak, a rocking chair on his porch tips and tumbles, the earth giving way a bit more.

"Your family's in danger," Father calls to him across our properties in a firm voice of warning.

"You have to leave," Mother says. She sounds scared for them. "Come here—we have room."

A memorable time, that hour. We all sit around the kitchen table with coffee and hot biscuits, talking about the situation, slathering on butter and raspberry preserves. I love it. New voices and laughter in our house at such an early hour, a whiff of danger hovering over the warm smell of coffee, the earth moving outside the door.

"The Commission will take care of everything," Father says. The crane man knows this but he still doesn't like it. Father reassures him: "New house, better than that one. They'll move you and you won't miss a day's work."

Father passes him the basket of warm biscuits, making this comfortable for him—he'd be doing the right thing to move, not the cowardly thing. The crane man eats, deep in slow consideration. His timid wife and their little girl no more than ten with long, dark pigtails sit beside his massive frame and wait for a decision. The crane man's hand is so beefy, it's difficult for him to hold the dainty handle of Mother's china cup. The sound of splitting wood halts our talk and we peer out. One of the braces under their porch has started to go, the dirt crumbling under it and moving in narrow flows down the slope. Watching this, the crane man relents.

"Well ... I s'pose..."

"Good," says Father and gets on the phone.

He's relieved. This was a tragedy waiting to happen and it's been averted. Father wants nothing like this on his watch, not when there's safety monitoring by the Commission and preven-tative measures. It's not necessary. I realize how well taken care of Mother and I are. We're safe, thanks to Father's care. He's good at it.
Don't let me ever shame or disappoint him.

In a few hours West Indians swarm in, packing, lifting, carrying. By noon furniture is removed, plants taken out, a bicycle and two pet cats placed on a wagon. In less than twenty-four hours the crane man and his family are our neighbors no more—they're in a new house farther back from the edge of the Cut. Their old house moves down the hill in stately disobedience the following night.

As we discuss the matter at supper the next evening, two engineers come to the door.

"Would you step outside," one says to Father.

They've taken core samples, done testing. "You'll need to move right away."

It shouldn't be a shock—we're on the same unstable ground as the neighbor—but Mother stiffens and goes speechless for a moment, looking as though the earth has already dropped out from under her. Father is pragmatic, of course. It's our turn and he says the same things to her that he said to the crane man: "They'll take care of everything. We'll get a better house..."

"Yes, I know," she says, but she's angry.

She finishes her meal frowning. They'll enter her home, her private world, and touch her things, handle her possessions—a personal offense to Mother. For her the move will be a challenge.

Two days later we're in another almost identical two-story home—standard Commission architecture, upper and lower screened porches with rockers, a larger living room, a better kitchen, and located farther back from the Cut. It's an airier, more pleasant home, and Mother is relieved. She's happy. She sets to work arranging it exactly to her liking, and I know she'll spend weeks, months at it, organizing each corner, each shelf, the placement of each plant exactly as she thinks best.

None of it matters to me. The move was a pleasant distraction is all. And my new room is bare like the old one, not a trace of childhood. Good.

Federico is still tattooed inside my brain.

He's never left.

Our first evening in the new house is two weeks after last seeing Federico. He works until four and I'm either at school or home. Art class is over. He's not avoiding me—it's that we've made no new meeting arrangements and I'm not at all sure how things will go.

At the new house on that first evening Mother unwraps cups and saucers in her larger kitchen. Harry, Father, and I sit in rockers on the porch looking out over the Cut. It's farther away now, at a safe distance but still in plain sight.

Harry is still a regular visitor. Father likes his Midwestern ways, and Mother appreciates that he's polite without fail and never uses harsh language or raises his voice. And he's sharp; she has great respect for his intelligence.

I love being around him, but in my mind he's pretty much eclipsed by Federico and everything that's gone on between us. I still manage to do good schoolwork, but more than ever Federico is in my head. I see our bodies together, hear the jungle sounds, replay our urgency and release to the scholarly backdrop of recitations on the Holy Roman Empire or the first winter in Jamestown—Captain Smith, his mates, their problems. It's all made more vivid by the grip of Federico on my thoughts. I'm not slowed. I make no effort to get him out of my head.

"The Commission took care of everything, didn't it?" Harry says that first evening in the new house. He's propped his feet on our new porch railing.

"We hardly lifted a finger," says Father and looks across the canal, pleased.

I tip back my rocker a little, one leg on the railing. Of course I'm thinking of Federico—the constant visual replay.

"Perfect Socialist model," says Harry. "Largest enterprise going on in the world—taking care of everybody, and not one man at any level working for profit. That's socialism."

I rock and consider his idea. I see it through Federico's eyes; he's already on fire with that idea or something like it for Spain. Interesting.

"Take the Panama Railroad—government run, efficient, never late, always in perfect repair ... No U.S. railroad's that good or equipped with better safety devices. And the workers, the ones in the Cut—no private contractor in the world is feeding workers any better."

Father interrupts him. "Well now, wait. That's not true. They gave those Spanish fellas bad meat. They had to come to me for help."

"But it was corrected, wasn't it? It hasn't happened again." Father nods. "No problem admitting mistakes and making corrections."

"May be," says Father, and rocks.

"Government runs the Tivoli, the ships between New York and Colon, the commissaries, health care, transportation—everything government run and efficient."

He's right, of course, but I'm watching the magenta sky turn purple, then deep blue, heading toward soft black, Federico hovering in those hues.

"Know what will happen when the canal's built and you go back?" he says.

"What's that?"

"The Socialist party is going to pursue you."

That makes Father chuckle. "What do they want with me?"

"They want you to join up." Father laughs again but Harry is serious. "They think they can get you to vote for the government to take over and run things the way they've run them here. It's true."

"Well, they won't get my vote," Father says. "Things are fine the way they are."

Now Harry laughs. "I thought so. You're from Missouri, right?"

"Saint Joe."

"I told them—I told them about you. You're well read, you know what's going on, you're an informed voter, but you're not from the old country, so you don't have nightmares of wars and marauders ... They'll never get you or anybody like you on board. You're American, happy enough the way you are."

Harry has a big smile and Father is nodding, and I can just see Federico in this conversation—the energy, the enthusiasm, the contained rage about injustice, leaning against the porch railing, bent toward Father to make a point.

Harry says, "You know who the Socialists found on the payroll last week?"

"Who?"

"A mechanic. Been on the dig from the start, member of the Socialist party. He straightened them around, all right. He told them government ownership doesn't mean a damn thing unless the workers run the government, and in the Zone they sure don't. He ruined their whole theory. Just blew it away!"

Harry chuckles—he loves all this—and rocks. If only Federico were here, he'd get a new idea about Americans. He'd like Harry, already does. And Father—everybody likes Father.

I have to wonder if Ruby McManus is in Harry's mind the way Federico is in mine—her physical presence, skin and soft hair and desire crowding out everything else. I don't think so.

Harry is consumed with socialism and he's making his point, while across from us I see Federico in the last fading streaks of light. Stars are coming out over the hills.

Harry is on a roll. He doesn't stop.

"...the Zone's the furthest thing from socialism," he says. "We're divided into castes, very Hindu. Every workman's on a different salary. We're housed and furnished and treated right down to the last item according to our caste..." A nod toward Mother's chinking sounds inside. "Size of kitchen, number of electric lights, candlepower, style of bed, size of bookcase ... you know how it works." A nod from Father. Harry isn't seeing Ruby in his mind; he's absorbed in what he's saying.

My foot drops off the railing. I prop it up again.

"...Goethals, he's in a palace compared to this. That's not pure socialism. Heads of departments have palatial homes, bosses like you live in furnished homes like this one, and on down..."

I make no further effort to clear away the images of Federico and me together on the cot, in the dribbling shower, across his table, against the wall and the hammock, in the afternoon heat for two weeks, and I hear Harry's voice faintly in the background talking to Father. The silhouette of the jungle across the canal is the muscular shape of Federico's shoulders over me and I can't take my eyes away; cries of monkeys and parrots stab the dark.

"...your quartermaster at two hundred twenty-five dollars is friendly with a station agent making one seventy-five, but their wives would never think of calling on each other socially—that's caste. Engineers and crane men earn different salaries and they don't mix. And the wife of a foreman making one sixty-five has a dining table that's six inches longer than the others and her icebox holds one more cold storage chicken, so she wouldn't think of sitting down to bridge with a woman whose husband makes one fifty." Harry's really enjoying this. "And I'll tell you something else: none of these women giving their five o'clock teas with two servants is going to like going back to the States and doing her own laundry again with no one to help."

My head tilts back against the rocker. The dark male shoulders of the jungle fade for a moment. Could Harry be right? Mother doesn't indulge in these petty social competitions—they're beneath her. I realize I'm thinking more freely, more openly. It's Federico's embrace that's done it to me, his sexual fit in my body and the heat of him. Opened me right up. I'll never be the same. Thank goodness. I'm more tolerant and forgiving and less critical—I can feel it in these few minutes. I want to defend Mother against what Harry says, stand up for her—this is totally new. How small her annoying peculiarities and how admirable her larger moral code seem to me suddenly. Mother's fine, perfectly all right the way she is.

"I don't think Mother will mind," I say to Harry.

"Maybe," he says.

I know I can't tell Mother about Federico and me, ever, but I have a new respect for her integrity and the rules she holds herself to as firmly as she does me and Father. I like them. She tolerates no petty social competition, no lying that she knows of, no sloth, no silliness, and certainly nothing to indicate a lack of character, and all those are reasonable rules of conduct—they're wonderful ones. All right, they lack the warmth that a love of life could give them, but that's beyond her and no business of mine. They're the family code and a good one, and sitting there on the porch with Father and Harry, I like our code very much. I like us. What's drained out of me is the tormented, twisting, angry, frustrated, unknowing need to escape, and it's left me with plenty of open space to become ... something else.