Kilometer 99 (33 page)

“What do you think?” he asks me. “Cocktail hour?'

*   *   *

Barefoot, we walk up the stairs to the roof over the undamaged part of La Posada. My heart flutters at the top of the stairs, but I figure that this building has weathered two bad quakes already. It can hold us for another hour. Our patio chairs still stand undisturbed from a couple of nights ago. The sun is now in its final stages of setting. Down the coast, fires in the cane fields burn away, past the landslides, where the road is impassable.

“Swell's dropping,” Ben says.

I look out at the point. If this is a set wave that we're seeing, then he's right.

“What's the tide doing?” I ask.

“Filling back in. I think high tide was around ten today. And it's real high, with the full moon and all.” Resting on a cinder block by our chairs is an empty jelly jar that we used as a beer glass days ago. Ben blows the dust out of it and pours in a couple fingers of rum.

“Do you think it's a good idea to leave Kristy here by herself? She seems to think things are going to get ugly—looting and whatnot.”

“The boats should get here soon, now that the surf's coming down.” He slurps the big shot of rum.

“And if they don't?”

Ben grimaces. “If people come in here to steal from us—food and gas and stuff—then maybe they need it more than we do.”

“From now on,” I say, “we won't find anything but bodies under the dirt, will we?”

Ben shrugs and shakes the jelly jar upside down. “You know, if we dawn patrol”—he pours more rum into the glass—“we might get a nice tidal push, maybe some punchy waves.”

“That's true.” For a second, I wonder if this isn't a joke, the old bait and switch.

Ben passes the glass of rum to me. “Maybe the looting won't start until after breakfast.”

I roll the rum around in my mouth for a second before swallowing. “Maybe we should go surfing tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Ben says the word in that occasional Southern drawl of his. “Tomorrow we can do whatever we want.” He doesn't mean this as permission, but as a basic—and in some ways, a difficult—fact of life.

We trade shots of rum for a while longer but don't speak. Surfing, I realize, is so much simpler than living. If you're too far inside, don't go. If you're too far down the shoulder, you can't make it. And if you're right in the pocket, then any semblance of a decision fades away. All mistakes or misjudgments—you pay for them within a half second. I thought there should be some similarity in this earthquake thing—both are a matter of responding to nature. But it isn't the same at all. Each new happening holds no clear response, and every misstep inspires days of second-guessing.

When the bottle is empty, Ben hands me the last glassful and says, “We'll get on it first thing.” He squeezes my shoulder and makes his way down the stairs. I finish the last shot in two sips, then head down myself. He is already asleep in his hammock. I crawl inside the tent. This time, I need no Valium to get me through the night. And I wonder if that—the ability to fall asleep without trouble and without pills—is reason enough to go on with the exhaustive work of burying the dead.

 

31

I think I'm dreaming. Short, soft breaths puff along my face. A child with small lungs moves over me. Something shuffles beside my head. The breath smells bad, like rotten fruit but also chemicals. This is not a dream. Somebody is in my tent with me, and it's not Ben. He goes for my Che wallet.

Without thinking, I push him hard with both hands and curse in English. “Fucking sneak thief motherfucker!”

The tent cloth whooshes with motion. He tries to scurry his way outside the door on knees and elbows, but I grab him by his wrists. The two of us wrestle our way through the still-open flap.

Out in the courtyard, I scream, “Ben! He was in the tent!”

Ben snaps upright in his hammock. He sees the two of us struggling in the dark. I hold tight to each wrist. The thief thrashes and convulses like a snake in my hands, tries to kick me in the knees. To Ben, it must look like some bizarre dance of violence.

“Weefer!” Ben screams. It's the guy who briefly helped us. “
¡Mañoso culero!
” Unlike me, Ben remembers how to speak Spanish. He runs over and puts Weefer into the same kind of headlock he used on my first night here. Also like that night, I notice how comically small the crackhead in Ben's arms actually is. I wonder if it could be the same person.

“Let me go!” Weefer screams.

From her own room near the kitchen, Kristy emerges, shouting. She screams for the police, which is almost laughable, under the circumstances.

While Weefer thrashes around in Ben's arms, I go for one of his pockets—dodging his flying knees and elbows, airborne spittle everywhere. I manage to pull out my Che wallet. In the process, a small pink piece of glass falls to the dry earth of the courtyard. I pick it up. One end is charred and black. The other end is broken off.

“Fucking crackheads.”

To help me access the other pocket, Ben switches his grip, pulling upward. Somehow, Weefer gets one of his arms free. It swings toward me in a windmill motion. I take a step back.

In a blur of spinning limbs, Weefer reaches up and then appears to pat Ben on the back. The two of them freeze, their arms around each other: Weefer on his tiptoes and extending his head up at Ben's, Ben leaning forward, toward the smaller man. It's like Weefer wants to whisper something into Ben's ear, or kiss him on the cheek.

Then Weefer is gone. The speed with which he climbs up the stairs to the roof and then scurries down the tree is almost comical—like the old sped-up footage from silent movies. Ben goes to his hands and knees, wheezing as though he's just surfaced from a two-wave hold-down. Blood pours from his back. I look. A little metal stalk blossoms to one side of his spine.

“Take it out!” He coughs the words.

I'm frozen: waiting for the punch line, not getting the joke.

“Take it out,” Ben pleads this time.

I nod, then wrap my fingers around the silver stick and pull straight up. It's that butter knife sharpened on both edges—the same one Peseta used to save me, or one that's identical. Ben turns over on his back, arms out at his sides. This isn't right, I want to say. Ben told me himself that they never carry weapons when they come in to steal. No, I shake my head, incredulous. Go back! It's an illegal move. Over the line! From underneath Ben's back, puffs of dust blow out with each of his belabored breaths.

“Kristy!” I shout. “
¡Llame a un médico!
” I finally remember how to speak Spanish.

“You'll be okay,” I say to Ben. At that point, I still believe it.

“I can't breathe.”

“Kristy's calling a doctor.”

He smiles at this, as if trying to laugh, seeing the absurdity that I've missed in the very notion of calling anyone, let alone a doctor.

“We should've left here,” he says with great difficulty. “We should have left here a while ago, sweetheart.”

“No!” I say it out loud now. “No. We survived!” The equation simply doesn't add up: Ben's will to live was greater than two major earthquakes, but less than a fucking butter knife? It can't be so. I put my hand on each of Ben's round shoulders. “Listen to me: We're the survivors!” I shake him as I shout, but he doesn't stir. “We're the survivors!” I say it again and again.

Sweetheart
is the last word Ben says. I turn him onto his front, thinking I can plug the hole in his back somehow, with my fingers or with the same towels we used to hold together Pelochucho's face. But by the time I have my hand over the wound, it is too late. That manta ray of muscle across his back now feels as limp and lifeless as a supermarket steak. No air comes in or out, only blood. Ben has drowned to death on dry land.

Beside him, on the dirt of the courtyard, I curl myself into a fetal position, spooning his body one final time, blood soaking into my shirt. I cry until my face hurts, muttering words like
fuck
,
goddamn
, and
love
every so often.

An hour passes before Kristy finally comes and pulls me off the ground. She helps me over to the hammock where Ben had slept before I woke him. She covers me up with a sheet, then covers Ben's corpse with a thick wool blanket. I can smell him still in the thin nylon strings of the hammock. Drained of tears, I tremble and hyperventilate away the rest of the night.

A random bit of wind blows in with an odd, metallic smell to it. A few drops of rain fall—raising small puffs of dust about the courtyard—and then grow into a heavy downpour. I wonder, if this rain had started an hour earlier, would it have kept Weefer at home?

For the first and perhaps the only time, I feel a suicidal urge. The unknown suddenly looks more appealing than this world. I think of what Alex had told me about pretending and not pretending. For me to go on living, another year or another seventy years, I'll have to pretend every second not to be haunted by this night.

 

32

In the morning, buzzards circle overhead. Kristy asks for my help. We take the already-flat spare tire from the Jeep and carry it over by Ben's body. I watch as she empties some kind of fuel from a glass bottle, then strikes a match and sets the tire on fire. From the kitchen, she brings a small bag of white powder—lime for making corn tortillas. She lifts the blanket and dumps the powder over Ben. We both know it isn't enough, and that there's no way to get more.

“We can't leave him here,” she says. “The buzzards.”

I look up at the black birds rotating above. Impossibly, the worst is not over yet.

I know a little about death in this climate from the people in Cara Sucia. If somebody had a bad fall or accident in the countryside, and died out of earshot, buzzards were the most reliable way to find the corpse. There's a method of measuring how long the person has been dead by what's been eaten away. They call it the “law of the vultures.” The eyes are the first to go, then everything around the mouth and nose. Only once the dead flesh is tender enough do the buzzards begin to pick the body apart.

I can't handle this. I walk out of La Posada. Thin ribbons of smoke spiral upward from elsewhere—cook fires, perhaps, or other burning tires. Every car parked along the street has been broken into. Auto glass litters the ground. Many of the still-standing walls have crude signs written in charcoal or whitewash across their sides:
HELP! SMALL CHILDREN, ONE BURIED ALIVE!
But it's obvious that all these words are days old by now; their messages no longer carry much weight.

At the remains of one such house, the word
HELP
is written, with an arrow pointing at a doorway. A small dark-haired girl pokes a soot-streaked face out the door. The arrow on the wall points straight to her head. She chews one of her fingers and stares at me with big eyes. We lock gazes momentarily. I keep on walking.

Along the road that leads to the Pan-American Highway, I take long strides, my hands on my head. I pull out fistfuls of hair, looking around for someone who might help me now, in the absence of Ben.

In post-earthquake La Libertad, there are neither embalmers nor refrigeration of any kind. I have no way of communicating with anybody from Ben's family, short of swimming twenty miles down the coast, or hiking over dirt loosened by landslides. And what could the family members do if I did get word to them? There'll be nothing but picked-over bones and buzzard shit left to repatriate. I have to handle this on my own, and handle it here. And this, the greatest tragedy I can imagine, means nothing to anybody else around. My problem is the dead body of someone I love—a problem more common than a headache in this place.

I turn and walk back toward La Posada. What are my options? I can't stand the thought of burying Ben in that mass grave. He hated it there. In some ways, that was the one aspect of this earthquake that he couldn't handle. It would be impossible to bury him anywhere else. All the ground left in La Lib has been claimed by the newly homeless.

Kristy still tends the tire fire when I return, studying the buzzards overhead.

“Kristy,” I say, “do you have any tools?”

She produces a drawer from her own room, a hammer and some screws inside. Last night's rain caused the cement bags that fell on the Jeep to break and then harden. Now the whole thing is a big sculpture of steel and masonry that will have to be jackhammered away. I manage to free Ben's collapsible multitool from the glove compartment, along with the roll of tie wire he used to fix my flip-flop. I go to work setting a series of screws into the decks of our two surfboards. With one broomstick and a set of notched two-by-fours, I make crosspieces so that the boards will float side by side, like a raft.

I think of my education then, as I sort through pieces of old crates and broken furniture, scraps of wood that will soon be precious for burning. Years ago, I must've learned calculations and equations for testing the strength of such things. Now, I bounce them in my hands or push against the grain with my thumbs. If I judge a board sturdy enough, I attach it lengthwise over the crosspieces with a mess of nails and wire. Eventually, I have a raft that won't come apart when I shake it.

Ben's sleeping bag is in the Jeep. It's a technical model from an American gear store, with a hood for the head. I unroll the bag and undo the zipper all the way. With a deep breath, I get his feet in. Kristy helps me turn his body over. I zip him all the way up, facedown, wrap the insulated hood over his head, and cinch up the string. Kristy brings out the same ball of twine that we used with Pelochucho. We tie off the bundle at the neck, waist, and feet.

Now I need a way to move him. The only thing with wheels inside La Posada is the Jeep, and that's not going anywhere. I sit on the packed dirt of the courtyard for several minutes, my head resting upon my kneecaps. This is ridiculous: my pride in making a stupid raft, without any way even to get it to the waterline.