Apologize, Apologize! (22 page)

I wondered what the temperature was like in El Salvador.

“Excuse me, sir.” The stewardess touched me on the shoulder. “Sorry to wake you.”

“That’s all right,” I said, straightening up in my seat, glancing out the window to the gathering lights below.

“Please fasten your seat belt. We’ll be landing soon.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I smiled and watched her walk down the aisle toward the cockpit, her perfume a thin trail of scent wavering in the air like the surrounding white cirrus clouds.

I turned my attention to the glimmering ground below, my first luminous sight of El Salvador. It was 1983—the year of my so-called revolution.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A
YOUNG GUY, BETO CRUZ, OLDER THAN ME—IN HIS THIRTIES,
I guessed—met me at the airport in San Salvador. He had dark hair and eyes and was emanating intensity from across the scuffed miles of linoleum that separated us, holding up a makeshift sign with CALY FLANAGUN written in black Magic Marker.

His English was fluid, and he spoke with almost no accent—turned out he had lived most of his life in Canada with his mother.  He’d been home for only a few years.

“You’ll be staying in a hotel tonight here in San Salvador, and then tomorrow we’ll drive to the Pacific coast. I’ve got something I want to show you,” he said as we drove, me riding shotgun in an old VW van, his arm stretched across the top of the seat, fingers almost touching my shoulders.

“Oh, I thought we were going to . . . Where’s the convent? In the north?” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s on the way. I’m taking the scenic route,” he said, smiling, lighting up a cigarette, the tips of his fingers stained with nicotine, looking away from the road and over at me. “Well . . .” He laughed nervously. “We’re going to go north, but first we’re going south—just a few hours out of the way. I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I figured you might be interested in my work concerning child labor. The nuns are into it big-time, and Sister Mary Ellen thought it would be good for you to see what’s going on here. And who knows? Maybe you get a little interested yourself. Maybe you want to help. We could use all the help we can get.”

“Sure,” I said, chewing my bottom lip, trying to be upbeat, though I was feeling less certain than I sounded.

The car pulled up in front of the hotel, and even though it was nighttime there were hundreds of people on the street, crisscrossing our path. I was looking for a gap in the steady flow and stepping away from the curb, luggage in my hand, when I was stopped in my tracks. 

A stranger approached me, came out of nowhere, walked right into me, bumped my chest with his chest, then took two quick steps back so we were facing each other. He raised his hand to my forehead, his hand took the shape of a gun, his forefinger touched the spot directly between my eyes, and he made a muffled sound, a popping noise, what kids do when they pretend to shoot someone. Lowering his arm to his side, he disappeared into the steamy surge of human traffic.

“What was that all about?” Beto said, catching up to me. “Hey, let’s go. You can make friends later.”

“Yeah, okay, that guy surprised me, that’s all.” My heart was pounding, gut churning—I felt all these miniexplosions going off inside me.

“Good thing it wasn’t real,” Beto said as we stood inside the elevator on the way to the top floor.

I nodded, marveling that in a country where guns were as common as fingers, I had encountered the only pretend pistol. The adrenaline rush finally subsided, but for the first time in my life, I was conscious that a silent bang and an imaginary gun, made of human thumb and forefinger, can be almost as terrifying as the real thing.

Trundling along in our beat-up van early the next morning, I was looking around, trying to acclimatize myself to all the brilliant colors—the trees, the houses, the sky overhead. We’d traveled about thirty miles when Beto pointed to a rocky field, a body dump where the government routinely abandoned the corpses of murdered citizens. By midmorning, deeper into the mountainous countryside, I was shocked to see dead bodies along the side of the road, rotting under the sun, hands tied behind their backs, the stench filling the car. There was a young man wearing blue jeans. He was bare-chested, and his arms were extended out from his sides. His head was missing. I wasn’t able to figure out whether he was lying on his back or his stomach. I couldn’t help but look and look and look. I was repulsed, but at the same time I wanted to see as much of death as I could. The only other bodies I had ever seen were Ma and Bingo, and their deaths hadn’t looked like these.

Pulling my shirt collar over my nose, I signaled Beto to pull over. He stopped the car, and I leaned out the open door and retched onto the side of the road.

Beto waited patiently and then restarted the engine. “Anyone caught burying the dead risks getting killed himself.”

“Is this a good idea?” I asked, sitting on my hands to conceal their shaking. “Should we be traveling around like this?”

“Sure. Why not?” he answered me, his eyes on the road ahead as an oncoming car, swerving dangerously, deliberately veered to hit a duck in the middle of the road. It was chaos on the roads, and every once in a while we’d encounter a group of people walking and Beto would dutifully roll to a stop and offer them a ride, all of them piling into the back of the van, some reaching over into the front seat, offering their firm handshakes in greeting.

Wet and hot, it was early afternoon, I was sweating, hair pasted to my forehead, the fabric of my shirt catching on the car’s torn vinyl upholstery as we bumped along rugged dirt roads, passing coffee farms and sugarcane fields, stopping occasionally to let the overheated van cool, a Baltimore oriole, reassuringly familiar, singing in the trees overhead, a nice change from the clucking of chickens. I was hearing roosters crow in my sleep.

“Where are we going?” I finally summoned the nerve to ask.

“Don’t worry. Everything’s okay.” He sipped water from a thermos as I eyed him with suspicion. He grinned back at me and slapped me on the upper back. “Hey, man, where’s your sense of adventure?”

We both looked in the direction of the mountains, distracted by the muffled exchange of  automatic gunfire not so far away.

“I don’t have a sense of adventure,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, I hope you can swim! Hold on.”

I was sitting alongside Beto, both of us soaking, huddled together on a wooden bench in an aging fiberglass outboard. I nodded and wrapped my arms around my chest, my knees jumping as I tried to stop my teeth from chattering.

“Yeah, I can swim,” I said, taking a look around—surrounded on all sides by the Pacific Ocean.

It was a little past dawn. After spending three sleepless nights in the van in a tiny fishing village, the locals scrupulously avoiding eye contact, we were heading out to a fishing platform where kids from the area villages were forced to net fish eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Starved, bullied, threatened, and even sexually abused, they were at the mercy of thieves, storms, and natural predators. For respite, there was the war.

By using my money to bribe foremen over the last few days we were able to do some limited filming aboard the leaky platforms, as they wavered back and forth on shaky stilts battered by the wind and the waves.

But now we were on a different mission. Beto and I and a handful of foreign Catholic aid workers were making the journey by boat to film the rescue of some of these underage child workers.

“Don’t worry, Collie,” Beto said in a reassuring manner I’d come to distrust. “It’s all arranged. It will be smooth as silk.”

The shore birds circled noisily overhead, blurry and overexposed, banking in the strong west wind. Waves were washing over the boat, and I was on my knees, clinging to the sides. I leaned over the side of the rickety boat and threw up into the water.

“Are you sure you’re not pregnant? Pull yourself together, Collie, or what the hell good are you?” Beto said as another ten-foot wave washed over us. He looked like a pillar of salt, his hair white and stiff and standing on end.

I was in over my head, the executive part of my brain relinquishing power to a terrified intern. The water smelled briny, the boat reeked of fish and gasoline, my clothes stank—I was experiencing El Salvador as if it were an olfactory hallucination, minus the hallucination. The aid workers’ boats had already pulled up alongside the platform, and they were shouting out their intention to come aboard. Beto was filming, and I was handing him equipment as the fishermen waved their arms and screamed threats and swore.

Some of the younger kids were crying. One of the platform workers grabbed a small boy by the hair and dragged him to the edge of the wooden deck; the boy was maybe eleven or twelve years old, skinny, his arms and legs covered in bruises and sores.

The man picked up the boy, arm around his waist, bent him almost in half, and lifted him two or three feet off the ground. The boy was crying loudly, and the man was threatening to throw him overboard if we didn’t leave.

We moved our boat closer—I maneuvered until we were positioned right next to the man and the boy, just beneath the corner of the platform. All around was shouting, screaming, crying, when the platform worker made a sudden violent move and threw the boy in the water, and two of the aid workers jumped in after him, all three of them disappearing below the water’s surface.

I heard a low laugh, almost a growl, and looking up caught sight of a platform worker appearing like a toothless grin just above me. He made a wind-up motion with his right arm, hurtled something my way, and I felt a heavy wet thud in my lap.

“Holy shit!” I leapt to my feet, jumping backward, colliding with Beto, who kept right on filming. A sea snake slid from my lap onto the floor of the boat, recoiled, and struck out at the air, curled back in on himself, and shot forward, biting the camera’s strobe arm. I was so scared that I couldn’t even close my eyes.

“For chrissakes, Collie, dump that thing overboard!” Beto yelled as the adult workers on the platform pointed and laughed.

I intuitively reached for one of the oars and used it to poke and prod the snake until he wrapped himself around the end of the paddle. He kept biting into the wood, his mouth open wide enough to swallow a soup bowl, and I tossed the snake and the oar over the side and into the water. A warm, thin trickle of piss ran down my inner leg.

“Let’s get out of here!” the cry went up among the aid workers in the other boats, the little boy safely aboard.

A mournful wail ensued as a handful of older boys—sixteen, maybe seventeen years old—clapped and waved over at me, calling for help. It was clear they wanted to come away with us. I sank to my knees in the bottom of the boat.

Shaking so much I felt as if I were coming apart, I forced myself to take one last look behind as our boat churned away.

“Well, we got one of them out of there, anyway. Too bad about the others,” Beto was saying as he fiddled around with different camera lenses. “The sea snake was a nice touch, don’t you think? . . . Hey, are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. You’ve got to toughen up, Collie, or you’ll be no use to anyone.”

I shook my head and pawed at my ears. His words were muffled—it was as if I were listening to him from beneath a waterfall.

“When are we going to the convent?” I asked.

He appraised me for a moment and sighed. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll leave in the morning.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was nodding gratefully, thinking that if I could only get to the convent, everything would be okay.

“Quit apologizing,” Beto said, registering a mix of contempt and pity. “Where the hell do you think you are, anyway, at a fucking dance recital?”

Ma once accused me of treating life as if it were a dance recital.

Six nuns, four of them Americans including Sister Mary Ellen and two Canadians, came out to greet us when we arrived in the tiny village of Adora a couple of days later.

“Hello, hello!” They were very happy and hugged and kissed us—I remembered something that Pop once said: “Nothing like squalor and suffering to cheer up a nun.”

The sisters, along with a couple of secular aid workers, lived in a pink-and-tan house made of adobe and mud. Tin sheets and cardboard covered the roof. Everything was makeshift. Most of the people in Adora lived in shacks constructed of wood and plastic.

“So has Beto been a good travel guide? Showing you all the sights?” Sister Mary Ellen asked me, as if we’d arrived for a long weekend in Palm Beach, linking her arm in mine as she led us inside the house. There were three rooms, including a bedroom and a rudimentary kitchen, along with one big living area that had a worn sofa with springs poking through polyester fabric and a couple of metal chairs. Dishes and books were stacked on a long table with a bright green shiny top.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.

“Outside,” Sister Mary Ellen said. “I’m sorry it’s not what you’re used to, Collie.”

“It’s what I’m getting used to,” I said, not meaning a word of it.

“If you want to get cleaned up, then you should head down the road to the spring where there’s a plunge pool. But be careful not to swallow any of the water. You might want to plug your nose, too, as an added precaution. Lots of little thingies that could cause you problems,” she said, laughing.

“Here’s where you’ll sleep—” A young nun pointed to a hammock in the main living area.

“Thanks,” I said as Beto put his stuff in the corner and caught my backpack as I tossed it to him. I could hear tropical birds calling to one another outside the open windows.

“It seems pretty quiet around here,” I said.

“What did I tell you?” Sister Mary Ellen said, offering me a glass of lemonade.

“Where are the other students?” I asked her. “You said there was going to be a group of volunteers.”

“Oh, they’re in different places. Most of them are with the priests in the south and a couple of them are with us, but they’re a couple of miles out, living with a farmer and his family, helping to dig a new well.”

The next morning, Beto and I met some of the villagers— everyone was friendly, and all the little kids followed us as we walked among their homes, tiny one- or two-room shacks without plumbing or electricity or appliances. Whole families slept on plastic sheets laid out on the floor.

One girl, maybe nine or ten years old, with black hair and black eyes, followed me around most of the morning. I gave her a twenty-dollar bill. Her eyes widened, and tears ran down her cheeks. She hugged me and ran, crying out for her parents. I made up an excuse and went back to the little house where the nuns lived, knowing it was empty. It took me a while to pull myself together. I never want anyone to look at me that way again.