30

The next morning, I step out of the tent, still groggy. Ben sits in a hammock strung between two of the remaining columns. He rubs his eyes with his fists. Hiking boots are on his feet—still, or already. Tied around his forehead is a white cloth that reads RESCATE, the Spanish word for “rescue,” in Magic Marker. I nod in his direction, but don’t say anything.

“Morning,” Ben says.

“What did you do with Pelochucho?”

“I found some guys. They buried his body with others. It wasn’t pretty, but he’s underground.”

“That took all day?”

“No. Afterward, I helped more people out. There’s lots to be done around here.”

I find my surfboard under the wrecked Jeep, run my hand over the wax on the deck. It still has plenty of traction. I roll my neck a few times, then gather up the leash.

“What are you doing?” Ben asks.

“There’re still waves.” I hear them crashing against shore even now. “Sure as hell won’t be any crowd. I’m going surfing.”

“You can’t do that, Malia. We’ve got to help.” He is matter-of-fact.

“Fuck that. I quit being a hero. Remember? It was all your idea.”

“This is different. People are alive under there. We quit the Peace Corps, but we’re still human beings.”

“What’s the point?” I ask him. “I spent two years trying to help that one little village. And then”—I snap my fingers—“boom. Like that. A waste of time.”

“You’ll regret this,” Ben says. “Trust me.”

“Do you know what happened to me the other night, Ben?”

“What, while I was in jail?” His head cocks to one side.

“This close.” I hold up my thumb and forefinger and pinch a centimeter of air. “I came this close to being raped by some fucking Salvatrucha drug dealer. Trying to get you back.” I feel the tears along my cheekbones. The burning in my gums doubles.

“I didn’t know.” Ben shakes his head hard. “You didn’t want to tell me. Who was it? Tell me who it was. I’ll go find Peseta and—”

“Peseta’s the one who saved me. He’s probably dead now because of me. Because of that ridiculous plan that you and Pelo came up with.” There’s still more anger in me than I realized. “And don’t you dare think up some kind of half-baked revenge scheme. This isn’t the high school parking lot; these guys are real.”

Ben looks down, ashamed.

I lower my voice. “All I wanted was to leave, to get out of here.”

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry.” He reaches out a hand and tries to touch me.

I move my shoulder away from his fingers. “You want me to help this town? Forget it. I’m going surfing.” I walk away, my board under my arm.

*   *   *

Outside of La Posada, things grow worse. People carry machetes and clubs. Abandoned stores and businesses are rummaged through for anything of value. Teenage boys fight over firewood and ripe coconuts. The final semblances of civility threaten to erode fast.

The point is firing. Sets of four and five waves, double-overhead, barreling, dead wind. It’s one flawless thing, an oasis of perfection, within a vast desert of both natural and man-made disaster.

I realize then, or remember perhaps, that a surfer’s idea of perfection is different from everyone else’s. It isn’t abstract or inscrutable, some shadow on the wall of a cave. We know what it feels like—perfection—how it looks and the sound it makes.

And here it is right before my eyes: world-class waves all to myself. But somehow, the point suddenly has strings attached. It tempts me like one of those fast-talking salesmen in the Faustian stories, asking only for my soul in return. Were the surf mediocre, I’d put in without a second thought. But right now, the heaven that’s in the water shows the hell that’s on land in greater relief. I still think most of these development and relief efforts are pointless, on a long-enough time line. But in this place and at this moment, it suddenly isn’t about the results anymore. It’s simply what I ought to do, an end in itself.

Weeks ago, I came across a rare kernel of wisdom in an article from that same faded surf magazine; it feels appropriate now: “Surfers are not free to live in the moment; surfers are forced to live in the moment.”

I turn around and walk back to La Posada.

*   *   *

Ben is still there. Water boils on his camp stove. He squats beside it, brushing glass and ants from a piece of salvaged sweet bread.

“You’re back,” he says.

“I want to help you.”

He smiles. “Get your boots on, and find something you can drink coffee out of.”

I put on my boots and baggy jeans, along with the tank top I’d borrowed and then stolen from some new volunteer in San Salvador last week. Ben pours my coffee into a tin cup from the cab of our ruined car.

“I’m sorry, Malia.” He puts his hand around mine. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, for getting us into that mess in the first place.” His eyes are moist and twitchy. “It was my fault.”

I nod and look away from him, not wanting to talk about it anymore.

After breakfast, Ben pulls two shovels and a pick out from under the Jeep. With a marker and the remains of a torn T-shirt, he makes me my own RESCATE bandanna. We leave La Posada. We walk within sight of the crack house, but it’s a pile of rubble. By one of its fallen corners, a crude tent has been built from a black tarp. I make out the bearded doorman from the other night, but don’t see Pardon Me Mother or the boss man.

Soon enough, I understand that Ben didn’t work alone yesterday. We’re joined by two older crack addicts—men I can remember seeing around town. They are keen to help out, and introduce themselves as Flaco and Alacrán.

As the four of us walk together, I suddenly think of Crackito—the young human punching bag with whom we ate breakfast a few mornings before.

“¿Y Crackito?” I ask Flaco.

“No” is all he says. “No, Chinita.” Flaco shakes his head and looks at the ground.

My next inexplicable thought: I hope that boy was high as Mount Everest when the earthquake happened. I hope he still had a little of my money, or that he’d stolen something in the night that was worth a big hit from a borrowed stem, when whatever doorway or makeshift shelter he’d found to sleep under had come crashing down upon his head. This is the best fate I’m capable of imagining for little Crackito.

First thing, we find an old man and a young woman trying to lift chunks of concrete where a two-story house has fallen. The four of us put down our tools and help with the heavy columns. The work is difficult. It takes everybody at once to hoist the bigger debris. Soon we see a blackish foot from which dangles a rubber flip-flop.

“Look,” Ben says.

The old man and the woman come over. They call out a name a couple of times: Jacinto. The woman cries. The old man has already resigned himself to the worst. The two of them clear the rest of the rubble from the body. We all turn away, as if it’s a sort of rite that we owe to them.

Through tears, the woman uncovers the dead man’s face. Her husband? Brother? The old man shakes Ben’s hand and thanks him. They speak softly. Ben motions toward our two Salvadoran comrades. The crackheads stand there leaning on their tools, with gaunt frames and vapid expressions, like a postapocalyptic rock band posing for a photo. The old man walks over to them, reaches into his pocket, and gives them each a bill and a few coins. He says, “God bless you.”

They nod and mutter, “Gracias,” then drop Ben’s tools and wander off.

“Where are they going?” I say to Ben.

“To buy crack.”

Ask a stupid question, I think to myself.

“Once they get back, we need to move inland. Here it’s just fallen houses. There it’s worse. Landslides and homes tumbling down the bluffs.”

The corpse is nearly clear now. I try not to look, but I can tell that he’s wearing blue jeans cut off below the knees. Whoever it is, he must’ve been somewhat successful; it’s a nice home.

The old man approaches us with a nearly full pack of menthol cigarettes. “Would you like?” he says. “I don’t smoke.”

Acting on a mix of politeness and indifference, we take them. It isn’t until after Ben has lit us both up and I’ve taken a couple of drags that I realize the cigarettes must’ve come from the dead man’s pocket.

While we smoke, the woman wraps a blanket around the corpse.

“Can you two handle things from here?” Ben asks the old man.

He nods.

“Where will they take the body?” I ask Ben in between drags.

“To that mass grave those guys started.” He points with his hand. “Where I took Pelochucho. I don’t like going there too much.” Ben blows minty smoke. The crackheads reappear around the corner. Their eyes now cloudy like unfresh fish, they are no less somber. Two more walk with them. Now six, we start up the hill to Las Lomas, Ben in the lead.

“We saved three people who were pinned down yesterday,” Ben says as we walk. “But it was easier. They were screaming and stuff.”

As if on cue, a woman’s cry is followed by a clatter of metal. We turn in the sound’s direction. The frenzied shouts finally take the form of words.

“¡Auxilio!” It’s a fat woman with wavy hair and pale skin. She stands over two young boys, both of them digging furiously with bare hands at a pile of dirt littered with scraps of corrugated metal.

“He’s alive!” she shouts.

We run over. Sure enough, somebody is beating from below on a piece of the metal roofing, one corner of which has been unearthed. Muffled shouts come through the dirt. It looks as though this was an adobe house, which has fallen down and also been partly covered by the collapsing bluffs.

“Careful, careful,” Ben shouts as our crackheads dig through the earth with their hands and hoist the heavy chunks of adobe.

“¡Niños!” Ben shouts at the two boys. “Go and find some water. Fast!”

They run off. The fat woman stands behind us, muttering “Help” and “He’s alive” alternately. She dances from one thick leg to another. Finally, Ben and I are able to lift the corrugated-metal square.

I expect something beautiful, the happy ending of a sappy movie where the buried man hugs his wife as the score reaches its crescendo. Instead, I am terrified.

The first thing that hits me is the smell of shit and piss that rises out of that hole. The trapped man sits up from the waist and gasps for air. The space that the section of metal made for him resembles a coffin. Now upright, he looks like a shabby vampire. In the more than twenty-four hours that he’s been under there, his body has evolved into something meant to live that way—his skin pale and moist, his legs crammed together and looking as boneless as two earthworms. He throws a hand up to cover his eyes against the sun.

In some ways, for me, this is more difficult than finding the dead body. I wonder if all of us, walking around La Lib now, are truly survivors. Or are we trapped in a kind of limbo state somewhere between life and death? A state that might even be worse than death. Nobody else shares my reaction.

His eyes still closed, the undead man mutters “Claudia” between shallow breaths. Ben helps him out of his hole. When the reunited pair finally embrace, it’s more a matter of her holding him up. His long-numb limbs struggle to move, and soon enough she sets him down onto the ground. The children return with a shallow bucket of water, and the man takes several trembling sips. “Papá!” the boys shout. Too weak to embrace them, the father reaches out to brush his fingers against their cheeks and shoulders.

Ben and I sit down. I worry about the crackhead situation. We helped for only ten minutes or so, and now there are several of us. This family doesn’t look like they have any spare cash to contribute to our cause. While nobody forces the issue, the crackheads stand around awkwardly; one of the new guys—the smallest among them—looks particularly restless.

The woman wipes dirt and debris from the man’s face and hair while he continues to force down water and blink furiously. She shouts an order to the kids and they disappear into a hut of plastic and cardboard on the far side of their fallen home.

The children return with a cold pot of boiled potatoes. “Toma,” the older one says, and sets them down in front of us. Ben and I aren’t bashful. The smaller boy runs back inside and produces a dish of salt. The crackheads are slightly more hesitant, but they tuck in soon enough. I am hungry, and with all the awful smells around, this meal has the right degree of blandness for me to stomach. A new guy, the small one who’s been looking restless, takes a couple of bites, then chucks his potato to the ground. He grumbles something I can’t understand. Flaco shushes him.

After two or three of the cold potatoes, Ben brushes his hands together and stands. “Vamos,” he instructs the rest of us.

The family thanks us all and asks for God to bless us. They are still in a state of overwhelmed shock. I get the feeling they don’t quite understand who we are or what exactly we’re doing.

“¡Qué mierda!” shouts the smallest crackhead once we’re out of earshot. The others reprimand him in a Spanish so hushed and slang-ridden that I can’t follow, though I assume he expected cash for helping the man. To me, it’s fairly obvious that the family would’ve dug the body out within the hour, whether or not we’d shown up.

At first, Ben doesn’t appear to pay attention, but then suddenly he stops walking and turns to the complainer. “Weefer, why don’t you fuck off, then? Nobody promised you anything. There’s no minimum wage here. That family didn’t have shit to give you. Walk away, pues.” Standing there with the headband on, bare-chested, lean from skipped meals, glaring down at a rival, Ben looks exactly like the real Chuck Norris in his prime.

Weefer—I gather that’s his name—spits on the ground, then walks off muttering curses.

Ben walks onward. We follow.

There are no more dramatic screams or critical rescues. Everyone around us resigns themselves to the slow grind of excavating bodies. I feel self-conscious about the silly RESCATE bandanna upon my head.

Soon enough, we fall in, helping unearth a house that is badly buried. An old woman and a small boy dig through the rubble with sticks. Few words are exchanged; we take our shovels and move earth. The boy communicates by pointing and making a sort of bleating noise through his sinuses. As the minutes and shovelfuls go by, and I watch the old woman gesture and signal to him, I understand he is deaf as well as mute. We carry the dirt away in buckets and grain sacks. This family also looks too poor to pay us anything. It’s a good thing that Weefer left.

The minutes spent digging turn into hours, and I wonder if there truly is a house underneath all this dirt and dust. The moment that thought enters my head, my shovel hits a piece of corrugated metal. We hoist out the heavy chunks of old junk—tire rims and broken cinder blocks—used to weigh the sheets of roof down. All of us put aside our shovels and pick through the pieces with caution. Now that the sounds of digging diminish, I can hear the perfect waves breaking in the distance.

This time, we find a hand first. I’m the one to spot it. We make short work of clearing away the rest of the dirt. It’s an old man’s body. Like Pelochucho, he was caught sleeping in. Large adobe bricks fell all around, though his body isn’t crushed like others we’ve excavated. Nobody speaks, but it’s obvious that his cause of death was not falling debris, but live burial. The old woman and the little boy cross themselves and cry. The boy makes honking sounds in between his sobs. We back away. Ben passes out menthol cigarettes.

The woman and the boy wrap the body with sheets and blankets, just as Ben did with Pelochucho. She takes pieces of twine that were strung along the bottom of the bed frame and uses them to tie up the bundle.

Once we’ve finished our smokes, the old woman approaches Ben and me. She shakes Ben’s hand, then hands him a folded stack of American dollars.

Ben is incredulous. “Where did she get this?” he asks me as the woman walks back to the body. “Look at this place.”

I stare into the hole that was their home. The boy honks away over the bundled-up man—his grandfather, most likely.

“They must be getting remesas from the States.” I think of Niña Tere and her husband, Guillermo. “The boy’s parents, or one of them at least, probably send back cash. Maybe she doesn’t realize what it’s worth. He”—I point to the twine-tied blankets—“probably took care of the finances.”

The crackheads approach and steal glances over Ben’s shoulder. I hear one whisper, “Dollars.”

Ben wraps his fist tighter around the money, then shoves it into the Velcro side pocket of his board shorts. He is flustered—feeling guilty about taking this woman’s money, but knowing that the crackheads will never abide his giving it back.

“Wait,” he shouts down to the woman and the boy. I didn’t notice, but they are making fruitless attempts to lift the body.

“We’ll help you,” Ben says. He turns to the crackheads and gestures with his arm. Two of our helpers hoist either end of the body to their shoulder level; once they have it up, the third one supports the sagging middle.

Ben assures the woman that it’s better this way. She asks God to bless us all—making our team of three possibly the most blessed crackheads in the world. The boy bleats a few more times.

Our crew doesn’t look happy about the extra work, but they are placated by the possibility of serious payment.

“Wait a second,” Ben instructs once we’re out of sight of the dead man’s house. He goes around behind me, and counts the money against the small of my back. The three pallbearers turn and try to look.

“Keep going,” Ben calls out. The edges of the bills tickle the bare skin below my shirt.

“How much?” I ask.

“Almost three hundred,” he says. “It’s mostly twenties. I’ll give them three each and keep the more mismatched bills for us.” He stuffs the wad of money into the back pocket of my jeans. Ben smacks my ass lightly, as if sealing the bills there.

Immediately, I wish she’d never given us that cash. It feels heavy as an adobe block in my pants, as bad an omen as the wads that Pelochucho flashed around a few short days ago, the big ones I had to hand over to the drug boss. Worthless to us under the circumstances, it’s nothing more than a burden, a source of trouble. Once Ben pays these guys their cut, there is no chance they’ll be back to help for days.

I don’t mean to be judgmental. They are good men, in their hearts. Their left hands don’t know what their rights are doing. In many ways, their acts of altruism are no more selfish than my reasons for joining the Peace Corps—or Alex’s reasons for working with the Red Cross. But their addiction is too strong. The source of their short-term pleasure is too easy, too close, too available.

Soon enough, we arrive at the makeshift mass grave, and it’s easy to see why Ben dislikes it. Mounds of dirt are piled up at one end, all sprinkled with a layer of lime, like confectioner’s sugar over pound cake. Closer to the entrance, on the town side, bodies are covered in thin layers of earth. A couple of burning tires dribble out columns of black smoke around the perimeter. Above, buzzards fly in patient circles, kept at bay, it seems, by the toxic smoke. The flies are not so easily dissuaded. Most of the corpses are wrapped in blankets and twine like the one that we brought, but some are just bodies, dead in their clothes.

It’s obvious that the architects of this place never expected it to grow so large, even in the first two days of its existence. They’ve already begun moving the dirt around near the entrance, expanding it in the direction of town. I wonder how long it will take before this mass grave swallows up the whole port, until it connects with the graveyard on the point, and La Libertad is nothing but dead bodies and killer waves.

The most unsettling part of the mass grave is the men working there. They all have on long-sleeve shirts with collars pulled up against the flies and sun. Handkerchiefs or pieces of cloth cover their faces from the stink—not unlike the Colombians who gave us those accursed cocaine bales. They work—digging and dragging corpses, sprinkling lime, and fanning the fires—with a slow, persistent cadence, like real-life grim reapers.

“Who are these guys?” I ask Ben. “The … attendants?”

“Who knows?” he says. “The rumor is that they’re guys who lost everybody. Guys who have no idea what happened to their families or loved ones—where they were at the time of the quake. They’re esperando to come across the bodies.” To describe what these men are doing, Ben chooses the Spanish verb, which means both to hope and to wait—another word that cannot be satisfied. “But my theory,” he goes on, “is that they’re guys who somehow did wrong by the ones they lost. The way they seem obliged to do this shit … it’s like they believe they can make up for something by serving the dead.”

Our three crackhead helpers hand off their burden to one such man. He doesn’t speak to them, just drags the body off to a pile, where a cloud of flies scatter. It’s like watching the dead bury the dead.

*   *   *

We walk away from the grave and back toward town. The crackheads ask Ben about the money. He takes the bills from my pocket and hands them each three twenties.

“There it is,” he says. “Gracias.” But we’re invisible by then. They are off toward the crack house, not like men celebrating, but like men on a most urgent errand. I think of myself this morning, standing at the water’s edge with my surfboard. These men are not free to indulge; they are forced.

“We can forget about seeing them for a while,” Ben says.

The crack house—or its temporary shelter—will probably be the last place in La Lib to take currency. Everywhere else will soon accept only barter: food, water, fuel. I wonder, in the event that we’re stuck here much longer, if the dealers won’t find a way to get more raw cocaine into the port before the rescuers arrive.

The sun is low along the horizon. We walk back to La Posada with shovels over our arms. I keep thinking of the self-appointed undertakers at the mass grave, for whom even hope is death. Isn’t that the logical end of our efforts? Isn’t that what we will be reduced to tomorrow, once that many more hours have passed? Won’t all relief work become, at some point, merely a process of burying the dead?

*   *   *

We find the gate locked back at La Posada. One of the columns holding it up has been bent by the earthquake; it closes cockeyed, but keeps us out regardless. Still wobbling a bit on her bad leg, Kristy comes over with a key ring and lets us in. She’s cleaned the place since we’ve been gone—cleared the rubble and broken glass around the kitchen, made little caches of food and supplies.

“At last,” she says. “You’re back. I’ve been worried; I had no idea where you’d gone. The people here, they’re getting desperate.”

I’m not sure if she’s afraid for us or for herself. For the first time, I understand how lucky we are: caught in an empty hotel, with plenty of food, and only the three of us. But if things go on like this much longer, our luck could be our undoing. La Posada will be a prime target for looters and thieves, once it comes to that.

Niña Tere once told me a story about how, when the farmers burn the sugarcane fields, a mass of snakes comes writhing out in a tangled, swirling mess—a rolling wave of refugee serpents—a few feet in front of the fire. Is this what has become of us here in this city? A homeless bunch of earthbound creatures, slithering our way toward the next temporary hole, choking and strangling one another as we go?

I wonder briefly why my grandfather never told similar stories about the cane plantations in Hawai‘i, then remember that we have no snakes on the islands.

Kristy takes a key from off her big ring and extends it toward the two of us. “Here,” she says.

I reach out and take it.

“We’ve got to keep this place locked up at all times. I see how the people are looking at it.”

I put the key in my pocket. Ben walks over to the side of the Jeep. He opens the rear hatch, sits on the bumper, and unlaces his boots. I take off the RESCATE bandanna.

“We won’t be gone so long tomorrow,” I tell Kristy.

“Ojalá,” she says.

I walk over to our corner of the courtyard, sit in Ben’s hammock, and unlace my own boots. One then the other, they fall to the ground with dull thuds.

Ben rummages through the back of our car, taking a rough inventory of its contents. Finally, he appears from the side with a half-full bottle of Nicaraguan rum.

“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.