Hurricane (7 page)

Suddenly Mr. Ramírez mumbles, “I pulled my Vera out, and now she is wrapped in plastic, under stones in the yard.” He pauses, staring off into space. Dirt still covers his body. His fingers are cut and torn from using his bare hands to dig. He seems so different now, not like the same man who only a week ago gave our soccer ball back to us with a two-handed, over-the-head toss like a sideline throw, or who, a few months ago, teased Víctor about tearing down our barbecue jailhouse.

Mr. Cortez looks at Mr. Ramírez sadly, and then he looks around the room at all of us. “Perhaps later we will be able to bring everyone up from the mud—maybe when we get help. But right now we have no coffins, we have no place to put the bodies—and we can't help those who are already gone.”

There's silence in the room, but we all nod. It's not just Mr. Ramírez who has changed. I barely recognize these people, my neighbors whom I've seen every day for my whole life. How long will it be until help arrives? If all of Honduras is as bad as La Rupa, what if no help ever comes?

Even though the hurricane is over, a steady rain falls all afternoon. But the worst of the storm has passed. What more can happen to us now anyway? How could things be worse? As I think this, I remember Dad, and Víctor and Ruby. Things could be
much
worse. My stomach aches and churns.

Mom brings in two large pots, one of beans and one of rice, cooked in boiled rain water, and sets them on the table in the kitchen. There's no tap water to wash the dishes, but nobody complains about having to use a slightly greasy plate or fork or spoon. Everyone comes to the table to dish up. The kids go first, and even the younger ones know not to take too much food. Nobody pushes or shoves. Nobody asks for more than their share or argues or complains about the portions they're served. Everyone just says, “Thanks.”

Looking at my neighbors and friends, I feel proud of us all.

As I'm finishing my meal, Mom says, “José,” and signals with a tilt of her head for me to follow her.

I set my plate down and go. As we walk out the back door, I look at the huge boulder, thinking again how lucky we were that it stopped rolling when it did. I've set up Mom's small barbecue near the big boulder. Our stack of firewood is wet, but with enough newspaper we easily got a fire going.

Mom shuts the door behind us. I see the worry in her eyes. I'm surprised to see Mom like this. She's been so strong. I think about the way she's held Juan, the way she spoke to Alfredo, and how she has made all our neighbors feel so comforted and welcome. To see her scared now makes me afraid too.

“Look,” Mom says, opening the black plastic garbage bags that hold our supplies of beans and rice.

I'm shocked by how little is left. I ask, “How can there be so little food?”

Mom answers, “There are just so many of us.”

She's right. She's cooked servings for ten people for two days now.

Mom's next words jar me. “We
have
to find more food,
fast
!”

I say, “But all the houses are buried.”

Mom nods and stares at the ground for a moment.

I say, “Maybe I could walk to San Pedro Sula and bring back what we need.”

Even as I say this, I know it's a stupid plan. San Pedro Sula might as well be a million miles away with all this mud and the flooding we've heard about on María's radio.

Mom says, “San Pedro is too far.”

“I know. Maybe help will come. Maybe …” I feel so stupid. If Dad and Víctor were here, what would they do? I can't think of any good ideas at all!

Trying to keep the worry out of my voice, I ask, “Where will we find food?”

“Maybe the Arroyos'?” Mom says gently and a little bit guiltily.

Of course! The Arroyos' little grocery! Their trucha had lots of canned goods—milk, beans, baby food, fruit, vegetables, meat, tuna—lots of stuff.

I ask, “How can we get it?”

Mom says, “You'll have to dig. The Arroyos would have been the first to help us if …” She hesitates.

I know that she is right, and I agree with her. “I'll dig.”

The first thing this morning, the third day after the mudslide, Mr. Larios, Mr. Barabon, and Jorge Álvarez come with me to dig in the mud where the Arroyos' place used to be. Because it stopped raining an hour or so ago, the mud has begun to dry. By taking soft steps, we can actually walk without sinking down very far. It doesn't take us long to reach the Arroyos'.

For a long time we just stand there, staring at the dark muck. Finally I say to the others, “I think I know about where the store was.” I hesitate for a second and point to the ground. “The store was here, but the mud has moved everything back. Look at their roof.” The broken, splintered lumber and metal roofing is scattered on the ground, twenty-five to thirty feet back from the street, as if the storm simply grabbed it and flicked it away. I feel a small rush in my stomach and throat, like I might throw up, but I try to sound calm and sensible. “Maybe the mud pushed everything back. Maybe we should start digging about there,” I say, pointing to a spot ten feet or so from where we're standing; this is where I guess the little trucha part of the house might be now. My workmates nod, and we begin digging.

It's hard work. The mud is sloppy and smells bad. Each shovelful seems heavier than the last. The blisters on my hands from digging before, when we were looking for survivors, tear open and start to bleed, but we all keep digging because the last thing we need is to run out of food.

What if we're not even close to where the trucha is?

What if we can't find it?

What if no help comes from the outside, no water, no food, nothing?

What if …

I pull up a shovelful of wet mud, and suddenly I see a human hand, its fingers outstretched as though it is reaching toward me.

It looks like a lady's hand.

Mrs. Arroyo.

It takes a while to get all the mud moved away from Mrs. Arroyo. Not wanting to let the blades of our shovels hit her dead body, each of us is very careful.

When the bodies of little Edgar Barabon and Mrs. Handel were found yesterday, I was with another group at a different spot, so Mrs. Arroyo is the first dead person I have seen other than Mrs. Ramírez, whom I couldn't look at.

Just as we're almost done digging out Mrs. Arroyo's body, Mr. Larios says, “Hold on. Stop.”

I ask, “What's wrong?”

He doesn't look at me but keeps staring at the spot where he's been digging. He sets aside his shovel and kneels down. He carefully moves away some mud with his bare hands. There is another body right next to Mrs. Arroyo's. Now we are digging out Mr. Arroyo too.

The closer we come to getting them out, the worse it smells. None of us says anything, but I fight back gagging. My eyes water and my throat stings. Mr. Barabon and Mr. Larios look sad and sick too. Jorge steps away and retches.

As we get closer and closer to finishing, we see that when the mudslide covered them, the Arroyos were in their bed. They never knew what hit them, except maybe in the final seconds when Mrs. Arroyo reached out. They lie curled up, in sleeping positions, facing away from each other. It looks almost as though they are still just asleep, resting peacefully.

Finally we lift their muddy bodies out and lay them down carefully. I don't want to look at them too closely, but I can't stop myself. You can tell it's them, but they look like wax statues.

So many times I bought treats from Mrs. Arroyo, taking peppermint sticks and strawberry candy from her hand. I remember Mr. Arroyo sweeping in front of their little store and lifting the screen over the open window first thing every morning. Now they are dead!

We lay a black plastic tarp over the Arroyos' bodies and stand over them silently for a few moments, none of us saying anything. As terrible as it is, we must get back to digging for food. I try hard not to look over at the black plastic that covers them. We placed them under the tarp still facing away from each other in death like they were in bed the last night of their lives. I think about my dad and about when he'll come home and cuddle close with my mom in their bed again. What if the Arroyos' bodies were
my
parents? The thought makes me sick.

Finally we start to find some food—two cans of corn and another of green beans. We keep digging. Now it's like finding buried treasure. The Arroyos' little store is full of soggy cardboard box after soggy cardboard box of canned food: hams, Jolly Green Giant vegetables, creamed corn, soups of every type, chili, meat, and canned peaches, pears, and fruit cocktail. But our luckiest finds are the big containers in which the Arroyos stored rice, beans, and flour. Even though these are simple wooden barrels with loose-fitting lids, they were all against a wall that collapsed right over the top of them.

“This is amazing,” Mr. Larios says. “All these are still good.”

I smile. “Now we have plenty for everyone.” As I say this, I make the mistake of looking again at the black tarp. I immediately feel my face turn red and think, Shut up, stupid!

Mr. Barabon, who has not spoken a single word all morning, notices my embarrassment and says, “It is right to be glad about finding this, José. There is no disrespect. It is good that we found this food, and it is all right to be happy about it. The Arroyos would be the first to say so.”

“Thanks,” I say.

We are all quiet again.

After more digging, I'm pretty sure that we've found nearly all the food at the Arroyos' trucha. Of course, with all the muck, we can't be sure. But we've found enough to feed La Rupa for many weeks. This is the good news.

The bad news is that even with all this food, in our wet, rainy, muddy world of water, water, and more water, we still don't have much water that we can drink.

There's no safe water in La Rupa because the sewer pipes burst and contaminated it all. None of our faucets have worked since the night of the storm, and the creek, which runs on the south side of town, was never clean anyway but is now more mud than water. The only flush toilet left in La Rupa is in our house, but since there's no running water and the sewer line's broken, it doesn't flush anymore anyway.

The Rodríguez family has no plumbing, of course. Part of the reason they put their house on the far edge of town was so that their little outhouse would be out of sight in the nearby trees. But that outhouse has filled up now. Everybody has been walking back into the trees for privacy, but raw sewage, from the broken sewer pipes, oozes up out of the mud in the streets. The stench is horrible.