Kilometer 99 (2 page)

The sound of wails and cries gives way to shouted prayers—desperate pleas to the Virgin and the Señor. The fruit vendor demands divine explanation: “Why, Lord? Why us? What have we done to deserve this?” Her face points upward, her mouth tweaked in a scowl, fists tightened together against her chin. The kids abandon me and gather around her—stroking her hair, hugging her waist—as she asks, “Haven't we suffered enough?” I cough out loud and cover my mouth. The remains of this family's home are stuck in my throat.

On the main street, every second or third house has turned to dust. They float in place like wispy architectural ghosts. Buildings I presumed to be brick or poured concrete turn out to be made of bamboo and earth—covered over with a thin cement finish.

I stand upon the rutted asphalt of the main road. My house is in a smaller village outside of town, a twenty-minute walk south. The aqueduct I've been working on for the past year is an hour-long hike to the north. My lover lives a hundred miles to the west, without a telephone, inside a tiny adobe hut. My father is five thousand miles away.

The Peace Corps issued me a mostly worthless pager, which now buzzes and vibrates in the pocket of my jeans skirt. I take it out and see the word
STANDFAST
spelled out in pixels—whatever that means.

People scream out names. Some of the calls are answered. Others grow more distressed. I stand in the center of the road, wondering which way to go—wondering, even now, if this is a beginning or an end.

Rubber flip-flops on my feet, I start south, downhill, toward Cara Sucia.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, I'm in front of Niña Tere's still-erect home. The house beside hers has partly collapsed and leans over, cockeyed, like a kneeling giant. Everyone stands outside. Shirtless men hold babies and inspect walls. A group of evangelicals gather by Don Israel's to sing hymns. In a courtyard across the street, a grandmother uses a blanket to cover the body of a teenage boy, his chest and neck discolored by blood and dust. I knew him; he was called Felix, and his grandmother used to scream at him for being lazy and watching too much television. The whole village could hear them argue.

“I'm all right!” Niña Tere emerges from the entrance to her house, her dog oddly silent at her side. “They say El Terrero suffered the worst. Every house down.”

El Terrero is a smaller village farther south, tucked into the valley alongside of us.

“The pueblo is bad, too,” I say.

“That slab of bedrock,”—she stomps her foot on the ground—“the one that prevents us from finding any groundwater, it did us some good this time.”

“And Nora?” My voice quivers as I ask after her daughter.

“In bed.” She points back to the house with her thumb. “She stayed home sick today, thank God.”

I nod. Outside, the evangelicals beg forgiveness in song.

“And the aqueduct?” Niña Tere asks, as if it's my own child.

“I'm heading there now.”

“Be careful.”

*   *   *

In my own little house, a favorite coffee mug has fallen off my desk and shattered upon the floor. A crack creeps its way between the seams of cinder blocks on the inside wall.

I put on long pants and hiking boots, throw a water bottle and a sweater into a backpack that's still half-full, and set out on foot to check the damages. I have to turn my head as I pass Felix and his grandmother's house, but I can hear her crying and saying what a good boy he was, how much she loved him.

*   *   *

Back in town, people begin to grind away against the tragedy. Cars are commandeered to take the injured to the capital. Bodies are placed under bedsheets. The literal dust had settled, but that now seems a cruel insult to the metaphor.

I walk toward the ANTEL public telephone office and see a crowd spill out its doors. Hysterical parents shout numbers for their sons and daughters in the States. Phones ring and ring. The clerk tries his best to calm everybody down. There's little chance of getting a line to the Peace Corps office, to my father's house, or to whatever phone is closest to Ben; it will be a long while.

I walk uphill and to the north, up the network of tiny roads and trails that I've come to know well over the past year. Fields of corn and corn stubble give way to coffee forests. The landscape turns from brown to green and grows more vertical. Here the homes—modest one-story affairs made from wood and corrugated metal—have survived intact.

In an hour, I reach the house that served as our bodega. We paid the owners to look after our pipes and cement back when we worked in this area. One of their outbuildings—a kitchen, perhaps—has collapsed. No bodies lie in their courtyard. Nobody cries or prays. I don't stop to say hello.

I start down the trail toward the river. The rush of water and the calls of birds fill my ears. Soon, a silver line of galvanized pipe shines from afar. Another, similar line appears from out of the dark foliage. Its angle is, as I'd feared, off-kilter from the first.

At the trail's next switchback, I see the brown scars on the hillsides where earth and rocks have rolled free. To descend farther is clearly dangerous. But I don't feel scared. In a way that soon after will strike me as silly, disrespectful, and self-absorbed, I feel I have nothing more to lose.

The pipeline is totaled. Boulders—a big round variety familiar to me only from Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons—have knocked the galvanized stretch all over the valley and into the river. The mouths of disconnected pipes gape at me as if begging for mercy.

I walk upstream. The spring box has come undone at the seams. I think back to my college courses on concrete. It makes sense: The weakest bond would be to the surrounding rock. Water rushes out from the cracks at the sides. I open the top hatch. It's nearly empty.

I close that worthless spring box, like it's a chapter of my life, and walk back toward town, now very worried about Ben.

*   *   *

In the ANTEL office, all lines are still tied up as far-flung families try to reach one another. Salvadorans in the States call for news of their loved ones. Local families send word of their suffering and survival to relatives.

After several tries, I get through to the Peace Corps office and tell Astrid I'm okay. I ask about Ben; he's not yet checked in. I give Astrid my ANTEL number and beg her to relay it to Ben if he calls.

In the meantime, I ask the clerk to place a collect call to my father's house in Honolulu. It takes a while to get a line out, but once we do, my father manages to accept the charges despite the language barrier.

Straight away, he asks if I'm okay, where I am, how the quake felt. I didn't expect him even to know about it. Apparently, El Salvador has become international news. This makes me even more fearful for Ben, but my father has other concerns.

“Is the aqueduct okay?” he asks. “Have you heard anything?”

“It's ruined.” I exhale so hard that my breath sounds through the earpiece. “Crushed by landslides and boulders.”

“Oh my,” he says. “At least it happened while nobody was working up there, right?”

“True.” That was a stroke of luck. Had the quake hit a few short weeks ago, workers would've died. I might've been among them.

“I'm so glad you're all right, Malia. That's all that matters. The aqueduct is
manini.
You'll fix it, by and by.”

“Honestly, Dad, what worries me now is Ben. I haven't heard if he's okay or not.”

“Ben?”

“You remember. You met him. My boyfriend.” An adolescent note rings in the final word. My father and I have never really figured out how to talk about my love life.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “The redhead.”

“Right. He lives in a little mud hut.” As I describe it, my mind's eye pictures those blurry house-size clouds from a few hours earlier.

My father goes silent.

“It's good to hear your voice, Dad. I should free up this line.”

“Okay, Malia. Thanks for calling. And don't worry about the aqueduct. Take care of yourself.”

I spend the next few minutes on the steps of the telephone office, waiting to hear from Ben, fearing the worst, all our good times replaying through my mind like a highlight reel. In those hours, it becomes clear that I'm witnessing the end of what might be the best year of my life: working on this aqueduct, surfing with Ben in La Libertad. It's been a golden age of sorts. I wait to hear just how over it is.

A sheet of corrugated-metal roofing rings out against the street. I turn to see the house it came from, a few doors down the hill. Next comes a shriek so high-pitched that I wonder if it's human, not the cry of some giant bird or jungle cat. More shrieks. Two men pry a crying woman up off the ground, but she slips their grip. Standing on my toes, I watch her throw herself atop somebody else, a body. The two men get a better grip and finally force her out to the curb.

As I watch that woman sit there sobbing, her face buried in her hands, one thing becomes abundantly clear: I can't just sit here by the phone and wait for news.

Back inside the ANTEL office, I ask the clerk to dial the pager service. He passes me to the operator; I give her the message I need sent to Ben: “Don't move. I'm coming to find you.”

 

4

Outside, I stand on the street and stick out my thumb. A pickup stops within seconds. In the back, a man with a bandaged face lies upon an old mattress.

Another man shouts, “Niña Malia! Going to El Centro?
¡Vamos!
”

It's Don Antonio, the khaki-clad municipal health promoter whom I once worked with to gather data on water usage. He kneels inside the pickup bed, tending to the injured man.

I nod and climb in the back with both of them. The driver guns it toward the city.

The patient is wrapped up like a Halloween mummy; blood and facial hair poke out between the bandages. He's conscious, breathing hard, and steeling himself against pain. After several minutes, Don Antonio leans away from him and whispers into my ear, “And the aqueduct?”

I shake my head.

He seems to understand.

At the turnoff for Panchimalco, more injured gather, hoping for rides. Our truck doesn't stop. I wonder about the old cathedral in their town, the one that's weathered so many tremors and other disasters. Has it survived this quake as well?

Once we approach Los Planes, Don Antonio points toward the Puerto del Diablo, as if spotting some damage to the iconic rock face. It looks the same to me. We zoom past Nora's school. Beyond the gate, its roof has sunken inward; it sags below the walls like a saddle. The wealthy houses in Los Planes proper appear intact, but armed guards stand in all the entrances, shotguns and tin badges at the ready.

Nothing prepares me for the situation in El Centro, San Salvador's downtown. The street signs and traffic signals are ignored. Pedestrians, buses, taxis, and private cars all crowd against one another helter-skelter. The traffic spills out of the roads and onto the sidewalks. In the market district, a gigantic lot—normally filled by a labyrinth of vendor stalls—has been taken over by slow-moving vehicles. Right-of-way seems determined only by the size of the car and the recklessness of the driver.

We inch our way through the automotive mosh pit, driving up curbs and over poles and tarps that have been abandoned by the vendors. Mangoes and bananas squash beneath our wheels.

Along the hillsides above the city, the ravines run brown with mud and the detritus of humble squats. I strain my eyes to make out a few antlike figures clinging to shrubs and rock.

We start toward a faster-moving avenue in the distance, then the truck brakes hard. Two men jog past the front: tattooed Salvatrucha gangsters, arms full of electronics and fake designer clothes. One wags an index finger at us and offers a sinister grin. They keep running and then disappear between the cars.

The bandaged man groans at each start and stop. Don Antonio takes a syringe from his bag but can't seem to fill it, what with all the bumping and braking. We make progress toward our avenue but are bottlenecked by a bus heading in the same direction. Inside it, the passengers all point and stare at something on the other side. Don Antonio and I turn to look.

A knobby-kneed elephant and two underfed giraffes—ribs and pelvic bones poking out of their hides—come around the bus and gallop past the back of our truck. They continue on through the traffic, the giraffes' long necks still visible above the smoggy din. I slap myself on the face, sure I'm dreaming or hallucinating. Don Antonio puts a hand on my shoulder.

“The zoo.” He points back to a damaged wall in the direction from which we've come.

I nod, hoping that the lions and tigers went a different way.

*   *   *

We follow in the bus's wake and finally make it to the
avenida.
The driver gets the truck up to a dangerous speed, and that somehow seems to soothe the bandaged man.

In another few miles, we obey our first stoplight and pull up next to an empty flatbed truck, wooden slats along its sides. It's covered in black soot, as are the two workers standing in the back. The whole rig still reeks from the syrupy char of sugarcane.

I whistle at them and ask, “Santa Ana?” It's a good guess. Most of the cane comes from the west, near Ben.

“
Sí.
” One worker nods. “
Vamos.
”

I hop from the pickup bed onto the wooden side of the cane truck. “Good-bye,” I shout to Don Antonio.

“May you go with God,” he says. Most likely, he thinks that I'm heading off to some sort of water-related emergency, and not just hoping to find out if my lover is alive or dead.

The light changes and we speed off, with me still clinging to the outside of the cane truck. I manage to scale the wooden slats and drop onto the bouncing floor of the flatbed. The two workers and I all spread our stances and try to maintain balance—one hand on the side—surfing our way over the bumps and turns.