Water from My Heart (15 page)

Isabella answered me. “Parrots.”

Farther off to my right, maybe several hundred yards, I heard a strange sound that was loud and can only be described as a howl. “What was that?”

Paulina spoke as she walked. “Howler monkeys. There's one directly above you.” I stopped and stared upward, where I was met by two eyes staring back at me. Paulina snapped her fingers and made some whistling, clicking noise with her mouth that I'd never heard. The monkey jumped as if shot out of a cannon. It danced from tree limb to tree limb until it landed on the ground, where it ran across and, to Paulina's great delight, climbed her like a tree and perched on her shoulder.

I adjusted the pack on my shoulders and shook my head. “This place should sell tours.”

Behind me, the little boy who'd had the thorn in his foot appeared from around a tree. He was dragging his mother—a skinny young woman carrying an infant. He pointed at me and proclaimed loudly,
“El doctor!”
He tugged on his mother's shirt.
“El doctor!”

I waved and she eyed me from a distance.

Paulina nuzzled and spoke quietly to the animated monkey, who drifted from shoulder to shoulder to arm and then to the top of her head. He was constant motion.

With another click of her lips, she set him down and he disappeared into the trees, swinging from limb to limb as we walked.

“I guess you and he have done that before?”

“No.” A knowing smile with a single shake of her head. “Just met.”

We walked into what looked like a garage where they repaired the tractors and heavy equipment. A man working on a large tire, with an enormous wrench in his hand, smiled widely when he saw Leena. He limped around the tire, and she extended her hands in the same way Isabella had with me. He bowed slightly and then she hugged him. His eyes lit.

She spoke, he nodded, and after a second, he sat in a chair while she knelt and began rolling up his pant leg, exposing a nasty wound. She rinsed it with bottled water, then cleaned the wound. Finally, she gave him an injection above the wound, covered it in a greasy antibiotic ointment, and wrapped it in gauze. She finished by giving instructions, which included politely, and with a smile, pointing at him to do exactly what she said. He nodded and pulled a small bag from next to the chair and gave it to her. She rolled it up and stuffed it into my pack, then kissed his hand and walked me through the back of the warehouse.

Beyond us, a large concrete world—half the size of a football field—opened up to us. Huge sheets of black plastic had been spread across the concrete, and men with brooms and rakes were spreading coffee beans in single rows across the sheeting. Leena spoke. “The first harvest of beans is coming in. They'll spread and sort across these sheets, where they will dry. Then”—she led me by the hand—“they are bought in here.” We walked into a separate building where a huge belt-fed machine shook large sifters filled with beans. The noise was deafening, and the air was filled with dust and pieces of hull. The earth vibrated with the movement of the machines. “Where the husk is broken, leaving only the bean.” She continued walking, leading me by the hand out the back where a row of a dozen or so people sat sorting beans into bags between their legs. “They are then sorted into grades of bean. The best are sorted and sold as single source, organic, and fair trade, although I find little that is fair about the trade that occurs here.” When she said this, her tone turned acerbic. She continued. “The lesser or imperfect beans are sold to larger companies for ground coffees throughout the Americas.”

Leena spoke to several of the workers sorting beans, who waved or smiled at her. We exited out the side and down a hill that took us through a chicken coop holding several thousand chickens.

The sun was falling as Leena led me to a pot of water sitting off to the side of a fire where the embers glowed red and white. She touched the water with her finger, then pulled a bar of soap from her pack, and we washed at the water. She made me scrub my arms nearly to the pits, my face and neck. Isabella, too. When finished, we shook dry, shouldered our packs, and began descending the hill through the coffee plants. With the smell of the plantation still wafting around us, Paulina stopped and listened. The sound of an engine. A diesel. Grew closer. Paulina pulled us behind a large tree, and we squatted as a newer white Toyota 4-wheel drive HiLux with roof racks and aggressive tread mud tires climbed up the mountain. Leena leaned around the tree to get a good look at the driver. She whispered, “That's the foreman.” Her face grew tight, and she spat, “Can't afford clean water for his workers, but he can drive a new $20,000 truck.” She paused, shaking her head. “He doesn't allow us here. Says we're bad for business. For morale.”

“You're doing all this, and they don't want you here?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” She listened again. “He fancies himself a cardplayer, so he plays a game every Tuesday night in León. Sleeps off his hangover until Wednesday about noon. Pays his whores. Returns here about dinnertime.” She weighed her head back and forth. “He's early today. That means he won, and he's back in time to show off.”

I spoke while watching the truck ramble over the rocks. “Did you say he likes to play cards?”

She looked irritated, and the veins in her arms had popped out like rose vines. “Yeah.”

“And you say that truck is new?”

She watched with disapproval as it rolled and bumped over the rocks and roots. “He wasn't driving it last week. Why?”

“Just curious.”

I'd only seen pictures of Colin's truck, but I doubted there were two just like that. And if the foreman was driving it, that meant Zaul had lost it in a card game, which made me wonder what else he'd lost. León was not a big town, and I'd be surprised if there was more than one high-stakes poker game on Tuesday night.

She stared up through the trees at the plantation, which was now out of sight. She spoke quietly. “The two young nursing mothers are his—” She spat in anger and shook her head. “And he makes no provision for them. He feeds them scraps from the table when they do what he wants, but they just gave birth two and three weeks ago so they can't”—she held up her fingers like quotation marks—“do what he wants.”

Isabella tugged on my shirtsleeve and waved her index finger. Wiper again. “That means they don't do any kissing. 'Cause kissing makes babies. Then when the babies are big enough, they pop out the zipper.” She poked me in the side. “I have a zipper 'cause I'm a girl. And momma has a zipper 'cause she's a girl, but you don't have a zipper 'cause you're a boy.”

I nodded and looked at Leena. “Zipper?”

Leena shrugged. “You have a better explanation?”

“No. No, I do not.”

We continued walking. My pack was empty, for which I was grateful. As we walked, I heard a thud, followed by a second and a third. Finally, I saw the cause of the noise—something orange and yellow falling from the tree above us.

Leena picked one up. Cutting a slice, she handed it to Isabella, who shoved it in its entirety into her mouth. She smiled widely, pushing the juice out the sides of her mouth, which did not go unnoticed. Leena smiled, and the look spoke of healing of a deep wound. She offered one to me and I accepted. “I've never eaten a mango that I can recall.”

“Never?”

“Certainly not like this.”

She shoved a section in her mouth and spoke around it. “It's the taste of Nicaragua.”

My teeth sank deeply and the juice exploded. I'd never tasted anything like it. Leena enjoyed my reaction. “Good, huh?”

I nodded but didn't speak, trying to keep the juice in my mouth. Isabella retrieved four more, and while Leena peeled another, I asked her, “Tell me about the man in the hammock.”

She paused. “Roberto. He used to feed me mango when I was Isabella's age.” She looked up. Eyes red. “He's dying.”

“Can anything be done for him?”

She shook her head. “He has a disease in his kidneys. It is caused from pesticides, which are sprayed on the sugarcane. They aren't legal in any civilized country, but here in Nicaragua they are used in plenty. Before they cut the cane, they burn it. Making it easier to harvest. Burning it does something to the pesticide, turning it into some other chemical or something that is even more harmful. The men working the cane breathe it, and it is filtered by their kidneys. There are scientists here from America studying it, but even they have no idea what's going on. All they know is that what is sprayed on the cane is killing the men that work it. Roberto started working in the cane when he was five.”

“How long have you known him?”

“My whole life.”

“Does he have family?”

She shook her head. “They were either killed by Carlos or left for Honduras.”

Either the heat or the insanity of this place was starting to get to me. “So, he's going to die alone in that dark, hot room, soaked in his own urine, and all he has to show for his life is half a bottle of water and one piece of candy?”

She stared at me. A long pause. Her head tilted as she considered me. A tear accompanied her whisper. “Yes.”

We walked down the mountain in the dark. Isabella got tired halfway down and reached for my hand. We walked a few hundred yards like that, and when she stumbled, I picked her up and set her on my shoulders, which seemed to wake her momentarily. When we reached the road beneath, Isabella raised her hands high in the air and stared up at the stars. “Look, Mom, I can touch them.”

I'd never seen so many stars.

We got to their home sometime after nine. Isabella ran inside, where I heard a man talking. Leena walked to the hand pump attached to the well and began filling a bucket. When full, she dropped a smaller bucket into it and slid the whole thing next to a black plastic curtain. “I'm going to heat up some dinner. You shower first.” She pointed to the building where I'd spent my recovery. “Should be some more clothes in there. Wear whatever fits.”

Leena broke some sticks in half and shoved them into the embers of the fire in the corner where she intended to heat dinner. The she disappeared into the kitchen, where again I heard a man's voice. I stepped behind the curtain, stripped, found the soap, and took a bucket shower. Cold at first, it felt divine. Dumping water over my head, I took a look at myself. My arms and legs were filthy to where the line of my clothing had been. My ankles and feet were white. Relatively clean. Then the tips of my toes were dark and caked in mud and dust.

Outside, Leena poured water over a naked and sudsy Isabella who was squatting on the concrete sink.

In my room, I found a pair of cutoff jeans and gray T-shirt that fit. When I returned to the kitchen, Leena stuck her soapy head out of the plastic sheeting. “Dinner's on the table.”

“Thank you.”

I walked into the kitchen and found Isabella laughing at the table with an older man, maybe sixtyish. He stood, shook my hand, and tapped his chest. “Pow-low.” He had, quite possibly, the strongest hands of any human being I'd ever met. Not to mention his forearms. He was a walking, talking Popeye.

Paulina shouted over the edge of the curtain. “Charlie, meet Pow-low. It's spelled like Paulo but”—she laughed easily—“we say it a bit different around here.” She said matter-of-factly, “He helped me lift you into the back of the truck.”

I tapped myself. “Charlie.”

He smiled, exposing gums missing more teeth than he owned. He pointed at his truck, sitting in the backyard. “You vomit and manure my truck.”

“I'm sorry?” He pointed matter-of-factly to the bed of his truck, then to his mouth. “Vomit. You.” He shook his head and held his nose. More hand motions. “Truck.” He pointed to my shorts. “You…dirty…smell very much bad.”

I heard Paulina laughing from behind the curtain.

Paulo evidently didn't speak very much English, but I understood what he was saying. I shrugged. “Yeah, about that. I'm sorry.”

He smiled kindly, as if it happened every day.

“No problema.”
He acted as if he were emptying a bucket. “I water.”

Dinner consisted of rice, beans, a fried plantain, and some water. I was hungry enough to eat the table, the neighbor's dog, and the chair I sat in, but when offered seconds, I declined. Leena watched me with quiet amusement. Paulo hovered, elbows on the table, and spoke quietly with Leena and Isabella. Leena translated his Spanish to my English as he spoke, not wanting me to feel excluded. He told her about his day working in the sugarcane fields, and she scolded him and told him he shouldn't have worked there today. He waved a finger and said something that she didn't translate.

Finally, she turned to me. “Thanks to you, we were able to see about four times as many folks. Thank you.” A genuine smile. “You make a good mule. The truck leaves tomorrow a little after noon. Paulo is going to work in the morning, and when he returns on the noon work bus, he'll take you to León.”

Her tone of voice told me that something occurred before noon, which prohibited him from driving me. “Anything I could do to be useful?”

She spoke to Paulo, who weighed the question and then nodded. Leena returned to me. “You could work with Paulo. It would double his daily rate.” A shrug. “It'd help pay for gas.”

“Seems the least I can do.”

Paulo seemed to appreciate the gesture and poked me in the arm. “I wake. We work with me. It's good. Very good. Work not hard.”

The night was quiet, and people had returned to their homes around us. The smell of smoke was constant. Somewhere a pig grunted and two dogs fought. In the distance, I could hear singing.

Paulina cleared the plates. “He'll wake you in time to leave.” Isabella stood from the table, sleep heavy in her eyes, and hugged Paulo and then her mother. Finally, without giving it a second's thought, she hugged me and then climbed into the bed. It was the only bed in the small space, so she must share it with her mother. She was asleep by the time Leena pulled the covers up over her shoulders. Leena returned and began washing the plates in the concrete sink when I stood next to her. “I'll wash.”