23

In the morning, I wake feeling paralyzed, tethered to the bed. I summon the force to feel the spot beside me but can’t find Ben. I close my eyes again for a long string of minutes.

The ceiling fan spins and oscillates from above. The sound of Kristy’s broom scraping the tiles carries in. I rise, get dressed, and open the door. With one hand, I shade my face from the sun. Across the courtyard, Ben and Pelochucho sit in the dining room. Ben waves me over.

Still foggy and confused, I walk toward them. Has Pelo forgiven me as well? Did I only dream the events of the previous day?

“Morning, Chinita,” Pelo says.

“Sit down, Malia,” Ben says.

I do as I’m told. “I’m sorry,” I say to both of them, “about yesterday.”

“It’s okay,” Pelo says. “Water under the bridge. Anyway, Chuck Norris and I have come up with a way to solve all our problems.”

Kristy drops a mug of hot milk and the jar of instant coffee in front of me. Ben must’ve ordered it on my behalf.

“Come again?”

“A midnight run,” Ben says. “Out to the cove at K Ninety-nine.”

“I’ve been talking to the guys here in town,” Pelo says. “There’s a shipment coming in tonight. They need a middleman.”

“What?” I ask, still confused.

“Or middlewoman, as the case may be.”

“The bales,” Ben explains. “The cocaine.”

I look each of them in the eye and wait for a punch line. They’re serious. I nod, then scoop a spoonful of instant coffee into the mug of warm milk.

“We all need the dough,” Pelo says. “Buying the rest of those houses out there cost me everything I had stashed. If this hadn’t come through, then I’d be sitting on a bunch of land and cement, and no cash to build with. It’s perfect timing.”

“We’ll make all our money back,” Ben says. “Pay off our tab here. As soon as your passport comes, we can get on the road.”

I take a sip of coffee but don’t say a word.

“And I’ll tear up your contract with SalvaCorp,” Pelo says. “Water under the bridge, like I said.”

“It’s a one-time thing.” Ben isn’t asking for my permission on this. “The crack trade here is the reason our money got stolen. It’s only fair we get it back through the crack trade.”

That’s an interesting bit of logic.

“I’ll give those guys the green light, then.” Pelo stands up. “Glad we had this talk. No worries about yesterday, Chinita.” He heads off to the shared toilets.

I sip desperately at my coffee.

“You okay?” Ben asks.

“Okay? Yeah. It’s just … happening fast.” I’m not sure what to say. This sounds like a terrible idea. But Ben is no longer angry. After what happened with Alex, the robbery, and the way I blew the hotel job, I hardly have the right to put my foot down.

Across the courtyard, a flush sounds from the shared toilets. Pelo opens the sheet-metal door with a clang. He studies the too-high stack of cement, as if surprised to find it there.

“Do you want to get out of here for a minute?” I ask Ben. “Take a walk or something?”

*   *   *

It’s obvious that there is no surf; we don’t even bother with watching from the steps. Instead, we walk into town, heading toward the pier. La Libertad wakes up and comes to attention before our eyes, at an hour we usually spend sleeping in or surfing. Fishermen have breakfast in the alley eateries and food carts along the streets. Hotel employees mop seawater across the concrete floors of their establishments. Toothless old men—with faces so exposed to sun and wind, they look as though they’ve been carved from wood—repair holes in fishing nets for the millionth time.

After a couple of blocks, we come to the pier. I follow Ben out onto the raised concrete platform, several meters above the ocean. Small wooden boats line either side, from which fishermen and their families sell their wares. Women with thick forearms and bloody aprons await customers. For a few cents extra, they’ll scale, fillet, and eviscerate the catch of the day—working fast with a razor-sharp knife and a grooved plank for a cutting board. The most coveted of the local catch are corvina and red snapper. Rumors abound of fishermen coloring lesser fish with red chalk to pass them off as snapper. Live crabs shift and wriggle inside five-gallon buckets. Fresh scallops lay on the half shell, carrot-colored egg sacks resting beside their flat columns of white flesh. Tiny dried fish, like grains of rice with eyes, are sold by the plastic bagful, mainly as a condiment for pupusas or fried yucca. Vendors explicate the virtues of shark fin oil—a sludgy, viscous yellow packed in mismatched glass bottles—as a cure for pneumonia, headaches, and general malaise.

During our honeymoon phase, Ben and I used to come here and buy a whole fish. He had a method of checking freshness based on the clarity of the eyes. We’d take it back to Kristy to cook. Today, we figure she has her hands full.

“Check it out.” Ben points to the far end of the pier. There, one archaic chain winch lifts a small boat up from out of the water. A lone fisherman—aboard a blue-and-white vessel packed full of nets and silvery piscine flesh—hangs in midair, suspended by a thick rusty chain at the bow and stern.

“I’ve never seen them do this before,” Ben says.

“Me, neither.”

The boat reaches the top, and a few other fishermen help unload.

Ben and I walk to the rail of the pier and look down at the calm sea below.

“Some swell, huh?” I say.

Ben shrugs. “Surfing’s a way of life, you know.”

The tide is out. The ocean looks at least two stories below our feet. Behind the bar at La Punta, there’s an old black-and-white photo of a giant set hitting La Lib; in it, monster waves break over this end of the pier. Today, such a thing is impossible to imagine.

“Are we really going to do this?” I ask Ben, staring out at the horizon.

“You want out?” he asks gently.

“I want to go to South America with you. I want to rewind our lives to a few days ago, before we met Pelo and lost our money and everything else.”

Ben nods. “Me, too. The trip—it’s our dream, right? It’s worth fighting for. This little errand is just a way to make it happen.”

“So the ends justify the means,” I say.

He nods again. We stare over at the hapless point.

“You know what’s weird about all this?” I ask. “If I’d helped Pelo out with that hotel, helped him displace all those poor Salvadoran farmers, then it would’ve been fully legal, just as lucrative, and probably good experience on my damn résumé.” I look down at the ocean. “This other plan, it’s like a major sin in the eyes of the world, and the truth is, I don’t feel that bad about it. Scared, sure, but not guilty.”

Ben nods. “It’ll happen, with or without us. Somebody will get that money. Why shouldn’t it be you and me?”

“You don’t think we could get into trouble? I don’t like the idea of a Salvadoran jail too much.”

“Malia, have you ever heard of any gringo having any problem with the police here that couldn’t be solved with a twenty-dollar bill? Hell, we’ll be working for the guys who give orders to all the local cops.”

I nod. “It’s a one-time thing, right? We get paid. We get my new passport, and then we get on our way.”

“Absolutely.” Ben puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not greedy; I just want my trip. We earned it. This town owes it to us.”

Out toward the point, a lone pelican dive-bombs into the calm water with a splash, surfaces a second later, and then rises up again.

“Fuck it.” I reach down and take the rubber flip-flops off my feet, tuck them between the middle and index fingers on each hand. “Let’s do it.” I turn around, take two steps, and dive off the pier.

The drop is greater than I anticipated, but it feels safe compared to other dives I’ve made back home. This is open ocean, after all—no boulders or rock shelves to negotiate.

My sandals split the water first. My body slips deep down, into a colder layer of sea, before I finally turn and paddle upward. Despite all the boat fuel and fish guts in the vicinity, the water feels amazing against my skin, like an embrace from an old friend.

I surface, sandals still on my hands. The fishermen make all sorts of chatter—some cheering, others ranting about the dangers of such a stunt. Somebody claims that a jump like that could “explode the lungs.”

A grin grows across my face, bigger and giddier than any I’ve felt in days. Ben looks down at me and laughs. Shaking his head, he removes each of his own flip-flops.

I shout, “Do it!” from below.

Feetfirst, hands and sandals cupped around his balls, Ben jumps. To the delight and horror of the audience along the pier, he makes a giant splash just inches from me. I scream.

He surfaces with a whoop and a holler. His eyes turn big and round. With the sole of his sandal, he pushes water at me.

I squeal and splash back. Both of us laugh. Ben wraps one arm around my shoulders—dog-paddling with the other—and kisses me on the lips. Groans and giggles come from the fishmongers above.

*   *   *

It takes a while to reach dry land, even with the tide coming in. The flip-flops on our hands slow down the swimming. By the time we come ashore, I’m starving, and still not eager to return to La Posada. Soaking wet, we find seats at one of the food stalls near the pier, a place that sells breakfast to fishermen. I dig a few wet bills from the pocket of my cutoffs. We order beans, eggs, and fresh cream. The woman behind the counter fixes our plates and serves us tortillas but provides no utensils.

“Oh my God,” Ben says.

I look up.

Walking down the street is Crackito. His feet are bare and he is wearing his too-big rags of a shirt and shorts. His entire head—hair, eyes, mouth, everything—is covered in spray paint, mostly blues and reds, a bit of glittery gold in the mix as well.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the spray-painted face gag. Local kids sometimes do that to drunks who pass out in the street. But this seems far crueler—to paint someone so young and helpless.

“Poor bastard.” Ben sighs. “Niño!” he calls to the boy, motions for him to join us.

Crackito shuffles over. Ben pulls out a stool for him to sit on, then asks the woman behind the counter for another plate. She frowns at us, not pleased to have Crackito in her establishment.

“Hungry?” Ben asks.

Crackito nods, staring down at the hands lying empty upon his lap.

“Who did this to you?” I ask.

“Nobody.” Crackito shakes his head.

Once the food comes, he eats the whole plateful in seconds.

I pay the tab and give the cook a large tip. Crackito takes off his shirt and goes into the ocean to wash the paint off, scrubbing at his face and torso with handfuls of black sand. It seems to work.

“If you want to stay behind tonight, Malia, that’s fine. Pelo and I can handle it.”

“I said I’m in.” The truth is, I can’t cope with the thought of leaving Ben to do this alone.

“We’d better get back,” he says.

During Peace Corps training, we had a terrifying session on security, meant to scare us into caution and prudence. The only rule I remember is this: If somebody threatens you, don’t ever let yourself be moved to another location. Once the bad guys move you, things always get worse. If somebody in a ski mask puts a gun to your head and tells you to get into a car—which did happen to a volunteer in San Salvador not so long ago—scream, run, but don’t get in the car. I recall that lesson now, in light of Pelo’s new plan. I’m convinced our situation will keep getting worse if we take steps forward in league with him.

Though Crackito has now run along, an image from a few minutes earlier, of him in the surf, still lingers in my mind’s eye—the way he scoured himself with sand and salt water, while that thick and ugly layer worked its way off. I wish I knew a similar way to scrub off some of my recent missteps.

“I’ll meet you at the hotel,” I say to Ben. “I want to make a phone call.”

*   *   *

At the ANTEL office, I tell the clerk the only phone number that I still have committed to memory. In my head, I count back the time zones and figure out the hour in Honolulu.

“Hello?”

“Dad,” I say. “It’s me, Malia.”

“Malia.” He’s excited. “How are you? I’ve been waiting to hear from you. How’s the aqueduct?”

I pause so long that it becomes awkward. Then: “I don’t know, Dad. I’m not working on it anymore.”

“Oh,” he says. “Is that right?”

“With the earthquake and all … it’s not really a priority. I left the village.”

“I see.” He sounds utterly confused. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m staying at the beach, with Ben. You remember Ben? I—well, we, we’re thinking about doing some traveling.” I cringe as I say it, but at least the words get out of my mouth.

“Traveling?” my father says.

“Yeah, Dad. We may go to South America for a while.”

“South America.” He says it just above a whisper. “Do you … do you have the money for that?”

Another awkward pause from me. “Of course.”

I’d been dreading this conversation for so long. It was meant to be a confession of a truth that my father didn’t want to hear. Somehow, it’s become more a mix of falsehood and omission.

My father’s breath sounds like static through the phone. “It all sounds very interesting, Malia.”

I feel the beginning of tears, and clench my teeth together. “It’s what I want. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance like this again.” That much is true.

“When do you think you might come back here, to Hawai‘i?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It could be a while.”

“Well, well,” he says. “I guess you know what you’re doing.” He doesn’t sound confident in his own words. Perhaps he fears that I’m turning into my mother—prone to run off with strange haole men, no thoughts for family or future.

“I’m very proud of you, Malia.”

That’s when the tears finally get the best of me.

“All the things that you’ve done in that country—it’s incredible.”

I want to tell him about the night with Alex, about the robbery, about the fact that I walked away from that aqueduct when it might have needed me most, and about the plan for tonight—to make the money that I claimed to already have. I want some way to tell him about everything, a way that might actually make sense to him. Most of all, I wish I still had the kind of problems that my father could fix with a few words.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too, Dad. I need to go now, but we’ll talk soon, okay?”

“Okay, Malia.”

I wipe at my eyes with the hem of my T-shirt, then pay the ANTEL clerk for the call.

On the street, I take some deep breaths and try to compose myself. It’s time to go back to the hotel—to find Ben and Pelo—and to go get this over with already.