Kilometer 99 (35 page)

I make my way to La Libertad's one ATM, double-checking for my newly returned bank card through the fabric of my jeans. For the first time in several days, I'll need money, and I'm curious to check the balance. I have the card, all right, but when I come to the cash machine, it's in pieces. The screen is charred and black, as if somebody tried to burn it or blow it up. It lets off a piercing beep. There's no way I'm putting my card inside.

As I walk away, a young man squats down on the step in front of the unopened bank. I do a double take. He puts his face in his hands, then turns it up again, his eyelids half-open.

“Weefer?” I'm staring at Ben's killer.

He looks over. He doesn't recognize me, but he seems to understand that I'm not from here. “Hello, my friend!” he mutters in broken English. “Give me a small gift, won't you, please?” He holds up his empty palm, expecting a coin.

It would be so easy for me to kill him. Even without the knife that my fingers now squeeze, I could choke him to death with a strap from my backpack, crush his head with a rock. I could do it in front of a crowd of people and nobody would look twice or cause me any consequences at all. The strange thing is, I don't feel anger toward him. I still want Ben back, but I can't be bothered with any sort of revenge. I feel a little sorry for Weefer, but mostly, I feel like I understand him, understand what it means to need your fix—a fix that makes no sense to most of the world. In the end, I leave him there with his glassy eyes and his open hand.

A little farther down the road, workers at another relief station give out blankets and mattresses, with as much disorder. I wonder how soon they'll start cutting the mattresses in half, how many blankets will simply be used to wrap up the dead.

Near the end of town, I spot a Salvadoran man in uniform starting an empty pickup truck with a Red Cross insignia, preparing to leave. I whistle and beg a ride. Thanks to my stolen cap, the driver allows me to hop in the back.

“Chinita!” I hear the shout as I turn for my final look at Puerto La Libertad. I turn to see who called to me. The sight of him almost makes me fall down there in the pickup; it's Peseta. His T-shirt is held out in front of him, its little cloth hammock filled with jars of free medication. Somehow, he's managed to stay one step ahead of the gangsters, the drug dealers, the falling walls. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise. I hold up a hand—finger and pinkie extended—and give Peseta a
shaka.
Of all the labels that have been slapped on him over the years—surfer, addict, runner, hustler, urchin—none of them quite does him justice. What Peseta is most thoroughly is a survivor. He smiles and holds up two fingers on his free hand, making a peace sign with supreme confidence, as if he is mayor of this chaos, the president of this small apocalypse.

The pickup clears the excavated landslides. I ask to be let out before it turns inland toward San Salvador to resupply. From there, I cross the
desvío
and flag down one of the big sugarcane trucks. The cab is full, but they let me ride atop the rolling two-story pile of charred stalks with the rest of the laborers. I feel a kinship with them. If not for all the noise, I'd explain that I, too, am descended from sugar-plantation workers, a part of their clan. We gnaw the syrupy juice from out of the blackened lengths of cane as the driver passes carelessly on the Litoral's blind curves. Trees, fields, and the textile sweatshops whiz by at ninety miles an hour, until all of El Salvador is nothing more than a sweet and blinding blur of nature and injustice.

At the turnoff for the airport, I tap on the cab and the truck stops. I give the Red Cross baseball cap to one of the workers. After thanking the driver, I cross the parking lot to the terminal. My clothes and backpack are now black from the soot of the cane stalks, but at least that covers up the stubborn bloodstains on my jeans.

The smell of fried chicken inside the airport is overwhelming; everyone carries on boxes of Pollo Campero for their relatives in the States. I find an ATM and a TACA counter, and within minutes I have a one-way ticket for Los Angeles.

On the other side of the security barrier, I buy some chicken and a Coke and sit watching the planes take off. I think briefly of the families in that hamlet on the hill above Kilometer 99. I hope they get to keep both their land and the money Pelo paid them for it. Perhaps that can be one small crumb of justice to fall from this tragedy. Maybe they understood the deal better than I did, knew something about the nature of fortune that I never quite grasped.

The boarding call begins for my flight, and I can almost feel Honolulu's trade winds, smell the old wood of my father's house. Suddenly, I wonder: What will El Salvador look like from the air? Will it be a mess of collapsed buildings and muddy landslides? Will I see Cara Sucia from up there? Could my mark on this country—a few lines of useless silver among the endless greens and browns—be seen from such heights?

The other L.A.-bound passengers stand and line up at the gate, chicken boxes in their hands. The voice crackling across the loudspeaker is incomprehensible, but I know that it's my section being called. Something comes over me. I rise up and turn away from the Jetway. Before I know it, I'm running out of the terminal, past security and the baggage claim and out to the street. I have to hold up a hand to shield my eyes from the afternoon sun as it beats down so hard upon this, a world that never asked me to save it.

 

34

It's hard to say what went through my mind. For a moment, the time line of my life unraveled before me like a vast stretch of ocean seen from a high ridge. I could tell which regrets would stick, and which mistakes I could still fix.

I found a taxi right outside the terminal. Once again, the road to Cara Sucia seemed so much shorter when not traveling by bus, as if the whole nation were shrinking beneath my feet. In less than one hour, I stood in the doorway to Niña Tere's house.

“Malia?” she said, a bit shocked.

“Can I stay with you for a while?”

“You can stay here as long as you like. It's our pleasure.”

The second quake hadn't been nearly as strong in Cara Sucia or its environs. The people there were less traumatized than anybody I'd seen for days.

By the next morning, I'd met with the village council and convinced them to repair the aqueduct. It was less regimented than the previous phase of construction. Everyone—even women and children—formed a disorganized mob and dug ditches for the distribution lines, the pipes that would run from the tanks into their homes. Every pick and shovel in Cara Sucia swung for weeks on end. It became a sort of social event, like an Amish barn raising. The work was slowed by constant mischief and coffee breaks, but it got done.

For my part, I took a handful of the best workers—the ones who had real construction experience, or at least a good work ethic—and led them up to the spring. Like before, we used red clay to move the river and dry out the area around the spring box. With an unsightly mess of stone and concrete, we sealed up the sides, where our box had come apart during the first quake.

From there, we worked our way down. I spent all of the money in my recovered bank account on cement and pipes. In some cases, we were able to replace the galvanized sections. In others, we laid PVC and covered it over with a stone and concrete sleeve. All the while, I told the workers—and myself—that our goal shouldn't be to build an indestructible water system, but to make one that could be repaired in the event of floods or earthquakes or other acts of God. Flexibility, I reminded them, is more important than strength.

I spoke to my father about what was happening. He was confused but patient, glad that I sounded so safe and stable over the phone. I never told the Peace Corps or anybody else what I was up to. It took weeks to summon the strength, but I managed to write a letter to Ben's family. I didn't say much about who I was, but instead emphasized Ben's last days in La Lib, the hero that he had become late in his final act. Hopefully, his father and brothers would find something to admire in that.

At night, in my little bed inside Niña Tere's house, I often kept myself awake wondering where Ben and I might be if things had turned out differently, if we hadn't met Pelo, if we'd never quit in the first place. I guessed which country we'd be in by now, my mind making the southbound journey that my body never could.

Might we be surfing that long Peruvian left, riding backside for the first time in years? Might we be in Patagonia, staying in one of those cabins in Torres del Paine that Ben sometimes talked about, standing on the banks of a blue-green glacial lake, staring up at snowcapped peaks reflecting the pink light of dusk, alpacas grazing at their base? How long would it have taken us to reach the Tierra del Fuego—that place that even my imagination lacks the vocabulary to describe? Ben might've tossed that southbound stone he so often spoke of into the sea.

That seemed the cruelest part to me: that he couldn't have lived at least one more year. Had he gotten to the bottom of that continent, spent twelve months doing exactly what he wanted, his life would've felt a hundred times more complete.

*   *   *

Without any sort of institutional bureaucracy, with only a personal bank account for a budget, with no lip service about sustainability or empowerment or whatever, the job went incredibly fast. I worked from dawn till dusk every day, and got home in time for a giant dinner and a bucket bath at Niña Tere's.

Was I happy during this time? I was unconflicted, which seemed like enough. Had my
kuleana
been in Cara Sucia all along? Even that seems like an oversimplification. I'm still as cynical as ever about development and relief. This was more about finishing what I'd started, getting a baby-faced monkey off my back.

On the big day, my work crew finished up at the tank and walked back to the village. I went to Niña Tere's house and told her to open the valve on the faucet, the one that had stood there useless above her cistern for so many months. A series of oddly human sounds came from the tap—gurgles, coughs, throaty breaths. She grimaced at me and started to close it again, but I told her to wait. After a minute or two, a slow dribble finally came from the pipes. Soon, the gravity-fed pressure built up, forcing the water out in a straight, strong arc. Nora clapped her hands and ran in circles. Rambo barked. Whoops and hollers erupted from the surrounding houses. Old ladies thanked the same saints they'd blamed for the earthquake. A couple of guns were shot in the air.

Niña Tere wiped away the beginnings of tears in her eyes, and we went out to the street. People splashed their dry courtyards. Spouses dumped bucketfuls of water atop one another. Somehow, a pair of mischievous teenagers made water balloons—as if that was some instinctual adolescent skill, born into even those children who'd never had running water in their homes. I wondered if I should warn everyone not to be wasteful, but I decided it was a good idea to bleed the air and pressurize the lines.

All the people from the village came up to offer congratulations, even some timid hugs. “
Ingeniera,
” they said, “the water has finally fallen.”

Niña Tere held on to my hand as we watched the celebration. “What will you do now?” she asked me.

“Now,” I said, “I have to go home.”

I left there the day after the water arrived. I didn't mean to be cold about it, but it wasn't fair to my father to stay even one minute longer than necessary. The members of the village council wanted to throw a party for me, but I assured them that it was better this way, that the Cara Sucians congratulate themselves for the project, rather than some short-term visitor.

I found myself at the airport again, not even four full months later. This time, I boarded my flight.

*   *   *

Back here in Honolulu, it didn't take long to find the job that I've had for years now. It's an engineering and architectural firm that specializes in green homes for rich people—mostly on Maui and the Big Island. The ironic part is that much of my work these days involves designing exactly the sorts of features that Pelochucho wanted for his ill-advised resort: retaining walls, erosion-proof drainage, seismic foundations.

It's a good living. After a year or so in my father's house, I moved into my own apartment in one of the tall glass towers near Ala Moana. It's on a high floor, far above the street noise, and has an ocean view.

But at the hotel restaurant where I agreed to meet Alex, I find it hard to summarize my life these days.

“Do you keep in touch with anybody from El Salvador?” Alex asks me as the food arrives.

“Not much.” I shrug. “It isn't something I'm proud of; I thought I'd always write, to Niña Tere at least. But nobody has Internet access in Cara Sucia, so … it just tapered off eventually.”

“I know what you mean.” He finds the steak knife and cuts into his meat. “And who has the time?”

In the booth beside him, Alex's elder son quietly accepts the small morsels of food that his mother makes for him. As Courtney predicted, Alex has been touring the world with the Red Cross for years now. He went straight to New York City after El Salvador, from there to sites around the Indian Ocean, then to New Orleans, Haiti, Central Asia, and so on. He married a beautiful Indonesian girl he met doing tsunami relief. They have two young boys. The four of them stopped to spend some vacation days in Waikiki on their way back from visiting her parents in Jakarta.

I was shocked when he called my office and asked if I'd join them for dinner. Apart from a few odd e-mails, it was the first time we'd spoken since that day by the beach in La Lib. He looks happy—quite bald now, and softer around the middle. The scars along his forearms have almost completely faded away. I enjoyed chatting with him about his life but find that I do not envy it. The very idea of all that destruction all the time, it unsettles me. Important or not, it seems an unbalanced way to live, always focused on the globe's most desperate scenes. Even the constant plane travel sounds unbearable.