Apologize, Apologize! (23 page)

After lunch, Beto and I drove Sister Mary Ellen and one of the aid workers, a girl named Sandy from Philadelphia, out to the farmer’s house. We joined the other volunteers, two engineering students from Northwestern who were helping dig the well. They handed us a hammer and nails along with some flimsy wood and a roll of chicken wire. I caught them exchanging a look—their skepticism about my abilities was obvious.

“Nice manicure,” one of them said as Beto laughed.

I spent the next few days helping to design and build a chicken coop and did such a good job that I won them over. I got lucky those first few days getting the chicken coop assignment. When I was a kid, I helped Uncle Tom build an elaborate loft for the pigeons—this was a snap by comparison.

When it was finished, the farmer and his wife and kids gave me an egg laid by one of the hens. I held the brown egg in the palm of my hand, and its warmth spread throughout my entire body. So this was what it was like to be good, to feel goodness in every part of you—for those few days, I thought I had found what I was looking for in the rough shape of an El Salvadorean egg.

Five days later, the village and the mission were attacked by government militia wanting to teach the nuns a lesson. Sister Mary Ellen and the two Canadians had flown to Bolivia for a conference. They were due back the day of the attack. I was getting ready to go to the airport to pick them up when we got hit with the shrapnel from a mortar shell that exploded near the car.

Beto jumped into the jeep alongside me, and we sped away, abandoning the car when it ran out of gas.

We walked for two days, when I again heard the sounds of helicopters overhead strafing the fields and villages, and we were back up and running. Some guy I didn’t know had a hold of one of my arms. Beto grasped my shirtsleeve. Sandwiched between them and along with hundreds of villagers, I fell to the ground and started to climb the steep mountainside on my hands and knees.

Volcanic rock crumbled and gave way; my fingers were stained the same caramel color of the rock, blood beneath my nails. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue and cloudless. There was a warm breeze, lime and orange trees waving on the surrounding green hills, bodies like tumulus beneath them.

“Keep moving. Keep moving. Don’t stop,” Beto said as guns from the helicopter raked the ground in front of us, behind us, to either side of us. A chicken appeared from nowhere and landed on the stranger’s shoulder, pecked the top of his head. He was trying to swat it away, but he couldn’t budge it; the two of us and Beto were laughing like crazy, tears streaming down our cheeks.

Seems like all I did was laugh, I was aching from laughter, couldn’t breathe, it hurt to laugh.

“Stop, you’re killing me,” I said.

The chicken abruptly lifted off, clucking, wings flapping, and the stranger was on his stomach, not moving, he was perfectly still. He looked like laundry, like clothes left out in the sun to dry.

“Don’t stop, Collie,” Beto said.

“Laughing?” I said as I kept moving up the mountain.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, we were able to connect with another group of Catholic aid workers, when five government militia types wearing identical mirrored sunglasses stopped us at a checkpoint outside of a small village in Chalatenango, which was mostly under guerrilla control.

They pulled me off the back of the open truck, wanting to do a visa check. The others were ordered on their way—Beto put up polite but vigorous argument, but nobody wanted to listen. I was struggling to understand what was being said. After some discussion, they emptied my pockets, took the money from my wallet, and when I objected they shoved me, pushed me around a bit, and tossed me in the backseat of an old Chevy, locked the doors, and sped off. I looked behind me and saw Beto standing in the middle of the road, watching. I never saw him again.

“What are you doing with me?” I tried to speak with more confidence than I felt.

“We’re taking you to the airport. You’re going home today,” the guy who appeared to be in charge answered me in heavily accented English.

“Why?”

“Visa’s expired.”

“No, it hasn’t—” I stopped myself. I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t sure they were telling me the truth about going to the airport.

“Expired visa or you expired. Makes no difference to me. You choose.”

Pleased with his wit, he turned and translated for the others, who laughed. I laughed, too—inappropriate laughter had become my stock-in-trade, though I wasn’t feeling very funny. It wasn’t good to disappear in El Salvador.

Twenty minutes later, we spotted a burning bus on its side stretched across the narrow dirt road. Our driver scratched his head and asked what he should do.

“Well, what else can you do? Stop,” said the wit. He ordered me to stay put as the car came to a slow halt and he and the others, weapons drawn, got out to assess the situation. 

I heard a series of loud bangs, and the militia guys went down like bowling pins, some wounded and the others dead. I felt a fiery pain in my left thigh—glass from the window of the car. Guerrillas, too many to count, emerged in waves from the surrounding jungle and converged on the car. Shooting the sky, they jumped on the hood, kicked the doors, and some enormous guy picked up a huge rock and tossed it into the center of the windshield. Glass shattered as the rock landed next to me in the backseat.

I was dragged from the car, knocked to the ground, and struck in the head with the butt of a semiautomatic weapon. For a minute I saw stars, then my vision gradually cleared. A young guy about my age stood on top of me, grinning.

He nudged me in the hip with the muddied tip of his boot. “So what are you doing here? Saving the world?”

“You’re an American,” I said.

“No, but I grew up in Los Angeles, lived there with my grandparents. I got sent home when they died. What are you doing with these guys?”

“I got picked up at the last checkpoint. They were taking me to the airport, sending me back home. . . .”

“Why?”

“They said my visa had expired.”

“Sounds like a bullshit story to me.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“You an American?”

I nodded, squeezed shut my eyes, and held my breath.

“What are you doing in El Salvador? You with the CIA?’

“No. I’m a volunteer at the Catholic mission. I’m supposed to go home in a few days.”

“The mission that got attacked?”

There was a crowd of angry faces staring down at me. It was quiet but for the moaning of the wounded and a long, low hiss, the sound of steam escaping the bus’s ruptured radiator. One of the insurgents put his rifle against my heart, cocked the trigger, and, shrugging, looked at the young guy who was asking me all the questions. My interrogator—his name was Aura—chewed on his thumb for a moment and then, seeming indifferent, gestured to the others to bring me along.

“
Merci
,” I said, whispering, recruiting the power of the French language.

“Don’t you mean
gracias
?” Aura asked in a civil fashion, as if we were in some bizarro-world language lab.

Force-marched along with two wounded policemen through miles of swamp and dense jungle for the next three days—right away I lost my hiking boots in the deep, sticky mud—and continuing on barefoot, I developed these god-awful oozing sores from dozens of burrowing foot worms.

My leg, already in rough shape, caused me a lot of grief and stopped working altogether on the second day. I sank to my knees. I think I may have passed out. One of the guerrillas dragged me up onto my feet, handed me a big stick, and gave me a push just to get me started. Enormous leafy canopies of twelve-foot-high prayer plants and knifelike thorny vegetation blocked every step as a haze of encircling sweat bugs and mosquitoes covered me like a second skin.

We finally got to an area of some relief where the rain forest was intersected by a wide, flattened swath, a rudimentary road made by local wildlife. We came to a semiabandoned village, where we were greeted by a handful of hooting and jeering men and a few villagers who had set up camp among the burned-out huts.

After a brief conference, one of the men ran to get shovels. When he returned he handed them out among a small group, who took us to a remote end of the village, where they began digging in the ground. Somebody pushed a handmade shovel into my chest and ordered me to start digging. Shovels were in short supply, so the two wounded soldiers were pushed down onto all fours and made to scoop out the dirt with their hands.

Standing barefoot in the moist, loose dirt and hacking away at the buried roots of resistant palms, I dug until the edge of the hole was so high that it touched my waist. Behind me, without warning, I heard loud voices, a sudden great commotion, and truncated shrill pleas for mercy. 

Two gunshots were fired one right after the other. Gripping the shovel’s handle, my arms trembling from the effort, I shut my eyes tightly, anticipating a third.

Instead, coarse hands reached down and yanked me up by the shirt collar, lifting me from where I stood inside the hole. My legs buckled, and I fell on my knees and watched as the lifeless bodies of the executed policemen were tossed into the freshly dug grave, one on top of the other. Aura looked over and laughed at me, the sharp edges of his pleasure slicing through me like a knife.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You might come in handy.”

Some guy came up from behind me, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me on my stomach for several yards, paused, and threw me into a deep trench dug into the earth sometime earlier. A thick cover of branches and palm leaves concealed it.

I fell asleep. I was afraid to wake up.

It was raining, the pit filling several inches with water along the bottom where I was lying on the ground, soaked to the skin. I was pulling glass and maggots from the random pattern of holes in my thigh. I heard a rustling overhead; the air was filled with the feral odor of wet pelt and, looking up, my head spinning, vision blurred, I was amazed to see several monkeys peering down at me through the twigs and the leaves.

Curious and unafraid, they watched me for a long while, chattering to one another, and then one of the monkeys picked up a loose rock and lobbed it at me, hitting me in the leg. It stung. A few of the others picked up scattered sticks and threw them at me, striking me to no great effect, but I stayed still, and soon they got bored and left. For some reason, the monkeys’ attack had the strange effect of cheering me up.

The sticky musk of flowers clung to the air like night sweat. Staring up into the black sky, sedated by the meditative drone of insects, I saw the ghostly shapes of blackbirds circling overhead. Their wings softly fluttering, they called out to one another.

“Ma says she’s proud of you, Coll.” It was Bingo, even if it was only in my head.

“Now I know you’re not real,” I said to him. “Even if she were proud of me, she’d never admit it. She’d die first.”

“She did, don’t you remember?”

The next day, the village was attacked by militia, who were going systematically from village to village in the area. Some local guy, after nearly falling into the hole with me, took strange pity and pulled me from the pit as he ran for his life. We were hiding in the forest, in flight from men who were thrashing through the deep tropical undergrowth, hunting for human prey, slashing away at stubborn, spiny plant fronds.

I was shaking uncontrollably, my teeth chattering violently, and my noisy terror threatened to give us away. My savior pushed me down and clamped his hand around my mouth, nearly suffocating me, pinning my face in the mud until I passed out.

“You speak English?” I asked him finally when I came to.

He looked at me and shrugged.

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked him, thinking it was a safe question even if he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. “I’m a Catholic, too,” I said. I was having trouble standing.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” I said, feeling practically delirious as we walked along together, his arm around my waist, my arm thrown over his shoulder, my left foot dragging along the ground, him not saying a word. And then I told him the whole story, about lying to Pop and Uncle Tom about the holidays, about how the Falcon had tried to keep me from making the trip, about how I’d built the chicken coop for the farmer and his family.

“I’m here helping,” I said as he looked at me as if I were out of my mind. My knees buckled—there was a lot of that going around.

My leg was chewed up and pulsing. It was infected, and I kept passing in and out of consciousness. The man from the village talked someone into driving us to a makeshift clinic—a converted chicken coop—full of young kids being treated for injuries they’d suffered as soldiers after being kidnapped and conscripted by rebel forces. The man who dragged me out of the hole was scanning the beds, obviously looking for someone. He left disappointed without saying good-bye. I never knew his name. 

There was only one doctor, assisted by a handful of nurses. He was French. The nurses were Belgian. One of them, named Madeleine, seemed to be in charge. She had a nice way of being bossy as hell. They were going crazy trying to treat all the kids, and they just kept pouring in—it was like using your thumb to try to stem the flow from a breached levee—and it was the middle of the night and there was nowhere to put them, no one to take care of them.

They treated me and my leg, and after a few days I started to come around. Madeleine offered me the use of a primitive cane and asked me to help her take care of the kids. I had my shirt collar pulled up over my face—the smell—I was slipping and sliding among the dross of a charnel-house floor. One little boy, he seemed dead to me, needed a transfusion—there were no blood supplies, no electricity. The French doctor pointed at me and called me over and told me he was going to take 500 cc of blood from me for this boy.

“But what if I’m not a match?” I asked, thinking it was a reasonable question.

He wound up and hit me in the face, knocking me into the wall. And then again, he hit me again when I straightened up. I put up my hands, the cane went clattering to the floor, and I was saying, “It’s okay, just do it, take my blood if it will help.”