Panama (3 page)

I lower the train window and hang out. Hot wind whips my hair. Those women with children and baskets on their heads and the workers in the Cut aren't really so distant, but I might as well be watching from the moon. I can't reach them. I'm sequestered in the American Zone.

Twice a day on the train I go through this mental anguish, looking at the exotic world I want to know, and I wind tighter with resentment each trip. It's not good.

Provincial weeks turn into provincial months. I go from sulky to resentful. I'm morose. On a good day I brood, but Mother's narrow-eyed look keeps me in line so I don't act on my feelings or talk about them, which makes them worse.

I start a diary where I spill my discontent.

I begin to go whole days without speaking.

I overhear Mother say to Father: "She's growing up."

Yeah.

At last.

Harry's not the love of my life. He's more the brother I never had, better than the boys, more suitable to my near-adult self, and he'll get me to whatever it is I want—I know it the moment I meet him. He's the connection.

It happens like this.

I'm staring at our living-room rug one evening. It's a dark green leaf design. I'm thinking it's as close as I'll ever get to the rainforest, which at that point was probably true. That makes me crazy. Everything does. The hellish humidity, my boring life, everything. I'm groggy and sticky. I'm sixteen. I'm pondering two more years of this deathtrap. I feel so bad, I can't read the book beside me. Thank God I've perfected not showing my crankiness.

"How's everything?" Father says. (He noticed?) He lets the top half of his paper droop. He peers at me. "Are you doing okay, sport?"

(Sport is my kid moniker. What's going on?)

"I'm okay," I say.

"Just okay?"

"Well ... I'm kind of unhappy. I don't know."

This is his time to read the paper, wait for supper, like in Dayton. But he seems to want to know what's going on with me and I'm baffled. It's new.

"I guess I miss the boys," I say.

"Why, sure you do. I do too. New place like this, you're going to miss your friends." (We've been here a year.) "Nobody you like at school?"

The first query about my life and adjusting. What a corseted family we are.

"No, not really," I say. "Not interesting ones that I like. But that's probably just me being picky." There's a smoky smell—some clearing is going on down the hill, the usual brush burning.

"Well, I wouldn't say that. You're not picky." He puts down the paper, gives me his full attention. All the way to Panama to break the Victorian ice in our family.

I don't really think I'm picky either, but we both know I can't voice a complaint because Mother won't allow it. He knows how difficult that is and he knows how it feels living in such a strained atmosphere.

"Well now, we can't have that. Everybody needs friends."

I smile and move over to the ottoman in front of his chair.

"I complain to my diary."

"You do?"

"Write in it every day. How the men are in the Cut working all day and the women just gossip and the girls at school are too old to play dolls so they talk about romance. That's all they do. They've never heard of the Wrights' machine and they wouldn't care about it if they did..."

"Oh, for heaven's sake."

"It's true. The girls whisper about the boys and who they like or don't like and it's stupid. I miss Orville and Wil."

"Well, it's not easy to find people like them, but there are interesting people here."

"I haven't met one."

"Then we'd better take care of that. Come with me to the Canal Club on Saturday for lunch. I'll introduce you to an interesting fella."

This is so out of character, I don't know what to say. I grin. "Thanks, Pop. Who's the interesting person?"

"Harry."

"American?"

He nods. "You'll like him. Works for the Zone police. Closest thing you'll find to the boys. Smart, too. A high-quality fella, has horse sense." This is the single-most prized quality in our family.

I'm smiling, loving this. He's smiling, too. He raises his paper and I go back to my spot on the couch.

Did that really happen?

I speculate about this fellow—who he is, what he's all about. I know nothing, of course, except that he's passed Father's muster, which is considerable. In all of this there is a glimmer of hope.

"What's his name again?"

"Harry."

I sit back and grin.

The smoky smell reminds me of fall in Dayton when people burn their leaves.

WHO ARE YOU, HARRY?

The Canal Club, Saturday, layers of white tablecloths, gauzy white curtains in the breeze, American faces except for servers.

This better be good. My nerves have been clutched for three days in anticipation—my imagination running riot, a measure of how desperate I am.

Father nods to several Commission bigwigs when we enter and we're led to a prominent table in the front of the room near a window. I realize for the first time how respected Father is, how well positioned in the Commission hierarchy. I like it. And I'm nervous.

A waiter approaches—very tall, very black, with a mellow Caribbean accent. "Good afternoon."

He places menus in our hands and leaves us to study them.

"The fish comes from the bay outside the window," Father says. "It's fresh."

Nice to know. There are chicken plates and salads and cold cuts, a nice selection. We sit silently going over the various dishes, me nervous, and then a voice says, "Hello."

I look up.

Harry. It has to be. A big, wide smile—nothing inscrutable there.

"I'm sorry I'm late. Police nonsense ... paperwork..." He shakes Father's hand and nods to me.

"You're not late," says Father and introduces us.

Harry shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, whole sectors of me coming to attention that have been asleep for years, some for a lifetime.

Chairs scrape the floor and we settle in.

I can't take my eyes off him. He's of medium height, with clear blue eyes and perfect white teeth. He wears khaki police shorts and shirt, high boots, and the standard-issue wide-brimmed police hat, which he sticks under his chair. He's younger than the Wrights. Midtwenties, I estimate.

"Sure be glad when the rain starts," he says.

Father agrees and they make canal small talk. I want badly to join in but can't think of a thing to say, so I listen like a good girl.

Harry mentions he came down from Costa Rica, not from the States, and was "somewhere else in Central America before that."

He's an adventurer. This is getting better and better.

We order: fruit and some kind of chicken for all of us.

I ask him how he got his job. "Was it difficult?"

"Not really. I speak Spanish and a couple of other languages. That helped."

"They just signed you up?"

"Not exactly. I thought they'd want diggers—didn't know they don't use whites for that. But I filled out forms anyway and said a few words in Spanish and they hired me on the spot. It's the languages they wanted."

"Amazing."

"They made me census taker."

"First census taker I ever met," I say. I get a laugh with that. It feels good and I push the hair off my neck.

"Enumerator is what they call me."

"What do you do?"

"I go through the entire population of workers one by one. I'm doing a human accounting of this great dirt-shoveling congress," he says and laughs.

It makes me smile. This is a turn of words no common Midwesterner would use. I'm struck. It's not love—I don't have a crush on Harry. I'm knocked out by what he is because it's what I want to be and it's sitting beside me in the flesh, talking and laughing. It's unassuming and leading the footloose life I want so badly.

"So you meet all the workers?" I say.

He nods. "Much more interesting than digging," and he goes on, seeing our interest. He talks about the people, the work they do, what their world is like, and about himself.

"Found out I could go almost anywhere steerage and it's cheap—free if I do a little work on board. I can go where I want if I'm willing to work, and I am." That big grin. He's a vagabond.

We eat, talk, get into a short conversation about our families back in the States, and Father makes the offhand remark that Mother's people are from Kentucky.

Harry grins. "My grandfather was a telegrapher for the L.H. & St.L. Railroad in Irvington."

Father's surprised. "Well, for heaven's sake," he says. "That little town's just down the road from my wife's folks."

With that Harry becomes the rare man Father can trust with his firstborn or his life savings. It's not wandering freedom that gets Father—that's what gets me. It's Harry's roots—where a man comes from—that Father puts his stock in.

"Irvington man, eh?"

"Grandfather was."

A lull. Our plates are cleared by the quiet black man. I seize the moment.

"I'd sure like to come along when you enumerate."

Harry doesn't hesitate. "That's no problem, but it's almost always at night—only time the workers can talk."

"Can I go, Father?"

Harry: "There's a lot of climbing through brush to get to the labor camps..."

Me: "Great, great." Father doesn't know what to do. "I'll write about it for school. Please, Daddy, can I go?" I haven't called him Daddy in a decade.

Hesitation. Small dishes of pineapple sherbet are placed before us.

"I'll have to speak to your mother."

Mother could stop all of this if she decides to. Harry's my ticket to freedom, but Mother's not keen on adventure, not in a jungle, not at night with someone she doesn't know.

A Harry/Mother meeting is arranged. It goes well, of course. What's not to like about Harry? His clean-cut looks, his manner, his background? He's from Kentucky and a sometime teacher—Mother taught until she married. He scores big with her on every point and yet, when he's gone...

"It's just not proper for a man in his midtwenties to be out with a girl of sixteen in the middle of the night." Does she think all men are predatory animals except for Father? "It's a temptation and it doesn't look right."

"He wouldn't lay a hand on her."

"It's not right."

Father hangs in, defends Harry, and because Mother trusts Father's judgment and really does like Harry, she doesn't say no, just that she wants to think more about it.

I go up to my room, jittery. I can't sit still. I need an answer. I need it to be yes. I need to throw something, hit something, make noise, break things, do something wild and out of control, but I don't. I'm trained not to. I look in the mirror. My face is breaking out.

Downstairs an hour later, when she gives permission for me to go, I literally jump for joy, give her a hug, and bound back up the steps two at a time.

In my room I dance a jig, quietly. Soundlessly leap on my bed and pump my legs in place, my arms in the air, eyes squinting. I throw back my head in a silent howl of joy. This is how victory sounds in our house. My diary gets the noisy announcement:
Guess what I'm going to do?!!! Harry's going to save me! He's going to make things all right!

It's eight o'clock in the evening on the appointed Thursday. I'm in fevered anticipation, wearing jodhpurs and high-top shoes, ready to go out with Harry, feeling great. This is what I want, what I thought I'd get all those years of waiting and thinking about Panama. A great adventure in the dead of night. After supper, anyway.

The jodhpurs are what I wore when I went to Huffman's pasture with the boys—practical but hot. Loose pants or khaki shorts like Harry's would be cooler but Mother won't hear of it. "Scratches and insects and snakes," she says. I have to cover my legs, wear lace-up leather footgear. I'm too happy to complain.

Harry has told me that in the field he carries a white canvas bag with his field notebook, red cards to tag the canvassed buildings, and a certificate to show he's the official census taker. Not many workers can read, but the sight of him in police uniform with the certificates makes him look official. That's what matters. All this is more than I could have hoped for and better than helping Wil and Orville. Harry is my new Wright brother, a more worldly one.

Mother and Father see us off, standing at the top of the stairs. "Be careful."

From down on the track we give them a wave and start walking fast along the rails in the moonlight. This is the road to everywhere, used by everyone, on foot or by train.

"Stay close," Harry says.

He walks in front. We hardly exchange a word, only stride along in the sultry night. We pass a few individuals who nod or greet us in Spanish. "...
buena
..."

Looming ahead, the abandoned French locomotives appear ghostlike, rusted, the remains of their fiasco a decade earlier. Beautiful old machines, vines growing into them. They look like sunken vessels. I slow briefly to sketch and Harry calls back: "Come on, stay close."

We hustle along for nearly half an hour. It's pitch-black. The heat is oppressive but for the first time I don't care.

Finally we come to Cunette, the laborers' camp. Barracks and dim lights.

"Stay behind me," Harry says. We approach the first barrack. He moves the canvas flap aside and steps in.

Quarters for the common laborers, all of them black. It's little more than a tent with a wooden floor. I can't see anything for a few minutes—Harry's figure in the door blocks my view but I hear his voice.

"Buenas noches..."

In fluent Spanish he tells them who he is, what he's doing. I've had lots of Spanish and know it well, but I can't speak like Harry. No American accent at all. It rolls out of him fast and easy like a mother tongue. I see why he was hired on the spot.

There isn't a sound from the men inside—their animated talk has stopped. Harry holds his questionnaire clipped to a board and starts with the closest worker.