Panama (7 page)

I've never heard of it, but Dr. Freud sounds scholarly enough. And German. I riffle through the pages. Nonfiction—perfect.

I take it to the checkout desk. The librarian looks shocked, then disapproving. I look her straight in the face and don't falter, not for a second. I have no time for this nonsense.

"Due in two weeks," she says. Stamp!

I'm out of there.

Down the track I go toward Federico's cabin, the Freud book in hand. (I have every right to take a walk after school.)

I'm heated but more with excitement this time, not the temperature, which is at its dry-season, midafternoon peak. The sun is merciless and when I get to Federico's cabin my dress is streaked with perspiration. Still, it doesn't bother me.

From the tracks I can see the flaps are rolled up to let in fresh air while he and his roommate are working. It's a Wednesday. Because I remember Harry saying something about a day off in the middle of the week, I'm hopeful. ("It's for workers who plant dynamite after regular hours." "What's the requirement to plant dynamite?" "Good sense, I suppose. They put it in the tree trunks, then run like hell.")

I wait for Federico on the cabin steps, hoping he'll show up.

Trains clatter by. I try to read but the heat is blistering.

I'm ready with my story. I'll tell him I found a book I thought might interest him—I saw his books when I was there with the census taker, does he remember? I'll sound businesslike, friendly but not silly. The key is to act casual, as though the whole thing is an afterthought.

Sweat drips on the book.

More trains pass.

The sun is relentless.

I'm that sizzling ant under the magnifying glass. It bakes me, and finally I realize he'll be coming back as usual on the 5:30 labor train with all the other workers and I have to be home by then. Another stupid mistake I've made. I give up.

I take a last look at the cabin and start home. The heat is scorching, and this time with the excitement drained out of me, I'm bothered.

When I walk into the kitchen Mother pours me a lemonade and gives me a strange look.

"You're soaked," she says. "What happened?"

"Um ... y'know..." I shrug.

She drops it.

That night I try to think clearly, to come up with a foolproof way to meet Federico, but I can't. I'm failing for lack of imagination. Maybe it's over and all I'll ever have is that glimpse of him in the shower at night, which is a lot, but in the long run it's only a jungle adventure and it will fade. I'll eventually forget it. With that dark thought very clearly in mind, I go to sleep.

I go unconscious, actually, because I've given up. I've surrendered. Sleep is escape again and I don't care if I ever wake up.

The old Dayton ways are rooted deep.

I do wake up, of course, but I'm depressed and realize immediately I have to snap out of it, regroup, not give up. Nothing is accomplished by giving up. The Wrights had tons of failure and they didn't give up. That's how they learned what didn't work—failure is the path to success. I get a grip and realize I've been doing it right all along. I've been eliminating what doesn't work and I have to keep going—stay with it and use what I've learned from past mistakes.

Deep breath—I feel better. But there's nobody to talk to about this and thrash it out. Can't talk to the girls at school and not my parents. I'm on my own. Only my diary hears about this, and that's not a conversation. Trying to come up with a way to encounter Federico sounds simple, but it isn't. He works twelve grueling hours a day, six days a week, and I'm at school and expected home by four. Still, I'm convinced it can be done, and by midmorning in English class, I'm optimistic. I hear Mrs. Ewing's voice:

"...and include as much geology as possible."

What did she say just before that? Something about a new essay assignment: what your father does on the canal. She's written it on the board.

This is pure annoyance. I have no time for this kind of thing, going for half a day with Father into the Cut to watch what he does, think about it, write about it, which is what she wants. I know it's important and he does it well, but I don't want to give it any time or thought. Time and thought are the things I use for solving my Federico problem. I'm angry. At school, at Mrs. Ewing, at her assignment.

I resolve to make it into something useful. I will be in the Cut and there are workers down there, tens of thousands of them, actually, and among them somewhere Federico. Could he really take a few moments, lean on his shovel, and chat with me about Freud between ton-loosening blasts? Of course, I'd have to find him first.

The day arrives and I join Father, all this an annoying distraction. I'm sullen. He doesn't notice my mood. He loves having me come along, but I've been in the Cut before and I'm not interested—I just want to get it over with.

Mother and I have gone with him on a Sunday down the long stairs with other families and stood gawking at the immensity. But today, for my assignment, Father will tell me about it again. He'll include more detail and he'll love every minute.

One excellent thing: I get to wear my out-with-Harry clothes—no skirts allowed in the Cut during working hours. Maybe because of that and Father's enthusiasm I actually do forget about Federico ... for a short time.

So I stand with Father early in the morning and he plunges in, gestures toward the various machines and work sectors: "...midnight supply trains bring in coal for the shovels..." I take notes. "...they're kept running twenty-four hours, eighty-five of them running at any given time." Impressive. "Blasters send down rocks and the diggers go to work breaking them up. The shovelers move in and put eight tons of boulders and dirt onto a car in a single bite. My job is to keep those cars running and carry the spoil away..."

How could I take this lightly? I'm impressed all over again. I like the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of how things work. Got that, no doubt, from working with the boys and from Father—genes don't discriminate much by gender.

And something else. Down inside the canal with the workers, it's different from a Sunday stroll there with Zoner families. That's a sightseeing tour, benign and touristy. In the sweat and noise of a workday there's a frightening aspect, a looming threat, as if the whole thing might decide to swallow us, then spit us out, like a gargantuan serpent fed up with the relentless grinding on its gut. It makes me uneasy.

Not Father, though. He's in his element. He's calm and happy, hard at work. He keeps talking and I write as fast as I can.

He points to the trackshifter. (Yet again.) The giant mantis is parked as usual by the wall, waiting.

"Every night it repositions the rails—picks them up and lays them down in a new spot. Have to move the whole operation along, tracks and all..."

I think it's the humanness of the machine that gets him, the way it behaves like a child with a train set, rearranging the track at will, easily. It's a giant human. But aren't all machines? I'll make that part of the essay, what giant machines do. How like us they are, the trackshifter with its giant arms and giant prehensile claw. It's all we know, our puny human bodies, so we copy them and make machines. This is the kind of thing that gets me top marks and I know it.

I glance around at the workers, pick-and-shovel fellows, glistening in the heat. I want to have a word with them. But Father goes on talking and I write and boulders crash onto flatcars, steam shovels grind, and warning whistles scream before every blast. I think I can't take much more, then Father finishes speaking and stands thoughtful in the deafening inferno. I have to ask him:

"Doesn't the bedlam wear you out?"

"Noise means it's progressing the way it's supposed to. Doesn't bother me a bit."

That's why he's boss, I think, and make note of that, too. "I need a break," I tell him.

"Sure."

I make my way across dirt clods and gullies to a group of workers, scores of them that line the canal wall breaking up the larger boulders. There's just a chance...

"Hay Castellanos aquí?"
I say.

"No.
Antillano solo."
No Spanish, only West Indians.

I look on down the length of the canal. As far as I can see there are workers, forty thousand of them at any given time. I've just queried a dozen and Federico is not among them. This is folly.

I take a good look at the canal, a rare view from the floor, andfinish off my notes: shovels are stacked one above the other; seven different levels; seven parallel tracks, moved to new positions every day; dirt trains moving back and forth with no snarls. This is my father's job, overseeing all this.

I'm done, or think I am. But then something remarkable happens.

From the corner of my eye I see the impossible. I take a good look. A steam shovel is sinking.

There's no doubt about it—the shovel is sinking. A barely perceptible movement.

I nudge Father. "Look."

He's busy, doesn't respond.

I poke him again. "Look!"

He turns his head. Shovel number forty-nine is sinking.

Father's jaw drops. Seconds pass. The shovel lowers and we watch. Blasting noise continues around us.

Father calls over to another engineer and he, too, watches, all of us in disbelief. The shovel descends, still swinging eight-ton buckets of dirt to a waiting railcar, both engineers on board totally unaware.

Several pick-and-shovel workers now see the phenomenon and call out to fellow workers,
"Mira! Mira este..."
and there's minor panic.

Workers drop their tools. They back off, spooked. We all are. It couldn't be happening. The steam shovelers notice, too, and suddenly stop, which signals all the other workers and everything comes to a halt.

Now, behind us, a railcar pulls up and Colonel Gaillard hops off and comes striding forward with great authority—he's our lead construction engineer. "Ah, you've seen it."

"What's going on?" says Father.

"It's happening all along the Cut, about a foot a minute, all morning."

"What is it?"

"We're rising." He waves toward the canal center. "We're on soft strata here in the middle so the slides along the walls are pushing us up. The shovels aren't sinking—they're near the wall. We're rising."

Father looks over the situation and sees that what Gaillard says is true. "How far will it go?" he asks him.

"We don't know. But it's nothing to worry about."

He's never seen such a thing. Nobody has. Nobody's ever done anything like this before, so everything is new. How does he know it's nothing to worry about?

Gaillard goes back to his transport car. He sits observing the phenomenon until it stops. Then he gives Father a little salute and he's on his way.

Can-do Americans—there's no stopping them.

Father calls out to the workers that everything is okay, to go back to work. They trust him. Pick-and-shovel men begin swinging their tools. Steam shovelers give their idling engines a throaty roar and everything resumes. Tons of lava rock blast to the canal floor and shovels deposit the tons into a waiting railcar. My father is boss of that. That's what he does in the canal.

At supper Father knifes the air with his hand.

"Like pressing down on the side of a pan of dough—the dough will push up in the middle. The slides on the sides of the canal are making the soft floor in the middle rise. It has nowhere else to go."

"Terrible," Mother says.

"No, only the slides are terrible. We may never stop them."

"What then?"

"We keep digging."

Father keeps saying these words and it disturbs me. I don't want to think of everything moving forward while my dilemma remains—his success to my failure. The work goes on in spite of slides and yet I can't reach Federico. I might never see him again.

"We'll dredge when it's full of water if we have to," Father says. "That's what matters—keep going, keep working. Gaillard and Goethals, you never see them shaken. Canal center rising—they're calm, tell us to wait till it stops and then go on. Nobody's ever seen anything like it, but we do as we're told and we're fine. Most important thing—attitude and endurance."

It's important, all right, and it's admirable, but to me it's disturbing.

Father takes a bite of beefsteak. All's well in his world.

I include Father's remarks in the essay and my own remarks about machines made in our likeness. A few days later I get the highest grade in class and an extra nod from Mrs. Ewing. I stare out the window and don't hear anything more she says. A student starts reading: "My father's work in the Cut..."

I can't bear to listen. I have bigger problems—I may never see Federico again (that dark feeling is back). I know where he lives and I have no excuse to go there. It's simple. It's not a question of attitude or endurance or even of learning from failure. I'm failing again for lack of imagination and my positive attitude is gone. I've lost hope, this time for good. Horse sense is telling me I won't see Federico again and it's a fact I'd better accept.

I sit in class hot, bored, and numb.

We meet in front of the Tivoli!
Luck. Pure luck.

It's early one evening, Mother's inside the hotel, and I'm sitting on a bench reading
The Interpretation of Dreams.
It's tough going and I'm concentrating, probably frowning. I turn back a page to reread something and realize there are rope-soled shoes in front of me. They're at a respectful distance but definitely pointed toward me—the shoes of a Spanish worker. A voice says, "Pardon," and I look up.

It's Federico.

He's dressed in clean clothes, politely holding his beret in front of him. I'm completely calm (and aware that I'm calm), and I can see he doesn't remember me. He's thinking—probably about approaching me, and the book, and what to say. Then his expression changes and he does remember. He smiles and looks relieved.

"Ah. You were with the enumerator."