“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.
&n
bsp; 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.”
She shook her head. “Nicaraguan men don’t do dishes.”
She was tired and hadn’t stopped moving since before I’d awakened. She had to be dead on her feet. I offered a second time. “I am not Nicaraguan.”
She nodded, dried her hands. Retrieving the bag from my pack that had been given to her by the man at the coffee-sorting house, she poured its contents onto a large cloth napkin and sorted through them.
She picked through the beans as one who’d done it before.
“Will you roast them?”
“If there’s time…this weekend.”
Paulo had gone to bed in the room next to theirs. I could hear him snoring quietly. When I finished the dishes, Leena chuckled. “I don’t know what you do for a living, but if it doesn’t work out, you make a pretty good el doctor in the volcanic mountains of Nicaragua.” More laughter. “You got skill.”
I looked at my hands in the growing moonlight. She followed with, “I set a jug of water next to your bed. You need to make yourself drink it. You’ll need it tomorrow morning.”
“Okay.”
“And fill it again before you leave.”
She was walking away when I asked her the question that had been on the tip of my tongue since I saw her kneel next to that man’s hammock. “Can I ask you something?”
She turned. Waited.
I glanced up at the coffee plantation atop the mountain. “How do you do this? Day in and day out.”
She paused, stared up at the mountain, and then answered the heart of my question. “I love them without trying to change them. I look at their suffering, their hopelessness, and while I’d like to wave a wand and fix it, I can’t, so I do what I can.”
“Which is?”
“Climb down in their misery and love them where they are.” She waved her hand across the landscape. “People would much rather die holding someone’s hand than live alone.”
“How do you not let it taint you?”
A shrug. “Never said it didn’t.”
She disappeared inside as I whispered, “Sure fooled me.”
I walked to my little plastic-wrapped shed and lay on my bed in the dark. The mosquitoes were buzzing my ears, so I turned on the fan, opting for the lion breathing in my face instead of the buzzing horde.
As the fan oscillated, I kept asking myself how I got there. The world had turned upside down and yet something about it felt completely right. The problem of Zaul seemed a long way away. Colin. Maria. The Bertram. My shack in Bimini. Shelly. Drugs.
As sleep pulled heavy on my lids, one image would not retreat. The sign that read, CINCO PADRES CAFÉ COMPAÑÍA. As I tossed and turned, an image returned. When I worked for Marshall and he’d dismantled Cinco Padres, I had returned to my office in León to close up. My last afternoon, when I’d taken a motorbike up into the hills, I remembered stopping and watching families walk down—carrying their lives on their backs. That road was the same we’d walked up and back today.
I whispered to myself, “Those people were these people.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the time I turned thirty-nine, Hack and I had finished two more skiffs and I noticed him slowing down. Hack’s cough grew worse and began producing more. Often at night, when we were working in his shop, he’d get to coughing and have to step outside to bring that stuff up out of his lungs and spit out whatever came up. One night, after a rather violent coughing fit, I noticed his handkerchief was tinted red. I told him, “You better let me take you to a doctor.”
He nodded, holding his rib cage. “Maybe it’s about time.” Given that he hated doctors, I knew it was serious.
The next morning, I borrowed a neighbor’s golf cart and carried him to the Bimini Clinic toward the northern end of the island. If Bimini has anything resembling a hospital, it’s this. For reasons unexplained, a CLOSED sign hung on the door. I muttered to myself, “How do you close a hospital?”
Hack laughed. “Easy. It’s Bimini.”
He was right. This was typical Bahamian lifestyle. If something better presented itself, work could wait. The island had a limited drugstore, but only one doctor, who was more often than not drunk, so the idea of “emergency medical care” didn’t really exist. That made it tough to get a prescription for anything while he was passed out. We stepped back into the cart where Hack started one of his coughing fits. Minutes passed while he coughed up a lung and spat the remainder out on the ground around us. This was not a pretty sight and, sitting there with my hands in my lap, it made me feel rather helpless.
While Hack retched, an attractive lady walked by. Bathing suit, hat, flip-flops, designer shades. Bag over her shoulder. Big wide hat. In truth, her legs caught my attention. While her face was beautiful, the look blanketing it was one of resignation and depression. Her shoulders looked like they were carrying a thousand pounds. But despite the small planet that was weighing her down, when she passed Hack, she stopped and listened to his cough. Then she turned to me. A switch flipped and professionalism replaced the heaviness. “Does he belong to you?”
“I’m not sure he belongs to anyone, but yes, I’m his friend.”
“Sounds like he has walking pneumonia. And currently, it’s winning. You’d do well to get him to a doctor.”
I pointed at the CLOSED sign on the clinic door.
Her eyes narrowed, and she then rested a hand on her hip. After a minute, she pointed to her hotel a few blocks up the street. “Follow me, I’ll give him a look.”
“You a doctor?”
One ear still trained on Hack, she nodded and held out a hand. “Shelly Highsmith.” Hack bent over double, clutching his ribs. “You better follow me.”
We followed her to her hotel, where I sat Hack on a bench and we waited. She returned from her room with a stethoscope draped around her neck and a cold bottle of water in her hand. She sat next to him, gently put her hand on his back, and began listening to him breathe. He winked at me. The resulting look on her face did not encourage me.
After a minute, she turned to me. “You live nearby?”
I nodded. Hack was in the process of rolling a cigarette. She touched his hand. “If you want to see tomorrow, you better hold off on that.”
Hack slipped the rolling papers back in his pocket and leaned his head back.
Shelly turned to me. “He’s carrying around a rather nasty infection that’s probably been in there a while. He’s pretty weak and extremely dehydrated—which isn’t helping matters. He needs intravenous antibiotics and fluids. Like right now.”
&n
bsp; I glanced down the road. “I imagine they have that at the clinic, but we’d have to break the door down to get it.”
Hack spoke up. “Doc leaves his back door unlocked. He’s got some medicines in there. If you let yourself in, get what you need. I can pay him when he wakes up.”
We couldn’t leave him in the hotel lobby, so we took Hack to my place and set him on the lounger on my back porch with Shelly’s water bottle. He promised to stare at the waves and not smoke while we drove the golf cart to the doctor’s office.
Shelly Highsmith was a plastic surgeon. And evidently a good one. She was the chief of cleft and craniofacial surgery at the research hospital in Miami where she specialized on children. “Every kid should have a beautiful smile.” Four years younger than me, she was in her midthirties, and yet unlike me, she was visiting the island for her first vacation in eight years, prompted by an ugly and unexpected divorce. Said she was sitting in her office, staring out across the bay, when the papers came to finalize it. She signed and realized she’d never made the crossing. Lived in Miami a decade and never ventured across the water to the island.
The doc was in fact passed out on his couch next to an empty bottle of our rum. I didn’t bother Shelly with that detail. We raided his medical cabinet and fridge, getting what we needed. Shelly said she’d like a drug more specific to his condition but broad-spectrum would work.