“I understand you love these people, but with so many hard memories, how can you stay here?”
“I, like Paulo, like Isabella, am a child of this land. My soul breathes here. It doesn’t breathe in town. I’ve tried it.”
“You could make more money in town.”
“Money doesn’t buy the air I need.” I had no response to that. She eyed the valley, the mountainside, the homes dotting the landscape, and continued, “We, all of us, have been affected by war, hurricanes, drought, economic hardship. The result is a disease—an epidemic—called ‘hopelessness.’ It’s carried on the air around here, and I am fighting it.”
My voice dropped to a whisper. The enormity and impossibility of her task weighing on me. “How do you plan to do that?”
She didn’t look at me. “With the antidote.”
I’d never felt this passionate about anything in my entire life and I knew it. I spoke slowly. “Which is?”
Her eyes found mine and in them I saw no pretension. No quarter. “With my life.” She straddled the bike and waited for me. “It’s the antidote. And it’s all I have to give.”
* * *
I swung my leg over, careful not to kick her in the chin, and cranked the bike. We sat idling, staring up at the mountains. She spoke over me. The tectonic plates of my life were shifting with every word she spoke. Nothing felt certain. She continued. “Every now and then, somebody will be working a garden or digging a well, and we find another body or a bone or something that someone can identify as having belonged to someone they love. When they do, we erect another cross. Hold another funeral. We pause. Dead a decade, the pain is very much alive. Sometimes I remind myself when I’m walking up the mountain that my father bought with his blood and sweat that my dad’s looking down, watching my sweat mix with his. I hope he’s pleased with what I’ve poured out.” A smile and a single shake. “But I will admit, I sure do miss his coffee.”
We drove north out of Valle Cruces onto the main highway, and then I followed Paulina’s finger down dirt roads toward the coast. We stopped at every surfing destination, dive, and hangout we could find—and there were many. Nicaragua is a surfer’s Central American paradise. We talked to a dozen tanned and bleached surfers carrying boards of different lengths and sizes. None had seen or heard of Zaul. Evidently, he’d not made it this far north.
We returned after lunch and met Paulo at the house. I was anxious to get back out on the road, but Paulina reminded me of my deal with Paulo. Paulina picked up on my anxiety. “Nothing happens in Nicaragua between lunch and dinner other than a bunch of naps. Besides—” She motioned to Paulo, who was holding three new coils of rope and a rather stout-looking harness. “Jefe, will you dig?”
I turned to Paulina. “Jefe?”
“Boss.”
I pointed at the ropes. “He wants to drop me down in that hole, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. “He thinks if he can show the people that you’re not afraid to go down there—”
“Seeing as how I’m an ignorant gringo.”
“Pretty much. They’ll have no reason to be afraid.”
“You mean, my corpse hanging on that rope will shame them into digging it out themselves.”
The purity in her laughter was unlike any I’d ever heard. “Yep. Something like that.” She shrugged. “You can say no.” A pause. “But…you can also say yes.”
“What happened to ‘nothing happens in this country after lunch’? I was thinking about a nap.”
“It’s ninety-six degrees in that chicken coop. You think you can sleep in that?”
I fingered the ropes, as if I knew some way to test the strength. As if holding them would convince me that they were strong enough to hold me. Paulo stretched a length between two arms. “Strong. Very strong. No concern.” He grabbed my forearm with his hand, squeezing it. The effect was that my hand latched onto his forearm where the muscles rippled. He held it there. Popeye with skin. “I hold the rope.” He smacked his forearm with his other hand in order to bring attention to his strength.
I didn’t take my eyes from his. “You hold the rope?”
“Sí.”
“Okay.”
He smiled, exposing his few white teeth. “Vámonos.” He shouted loudly and with growing excitement toward the house, “Vámonos.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The truck wouldn’t make it up the mountain, but the bike would. Paulo hopped on back and we climbed our way up. Paulina and Isabella took the truck until the tires began slipping and then followed on foot. I told Paulina that I was okay and that there was no need, but she just shook her head. “Are you kidding? I’m not missing this.”
We stood next to the wellhead. Below me, the words were worn but I could still read them. “Agua de mi corazón.”
The mudslide had removed the concrete cap and cracked the top of the well. Through the years, someone had bordered it or attempted to keep people from falling in by placing trees next to or over it. We cleared those. I stood over the dark hole and dropped a small rock. I did not hear it land below me. Next to me sat the dormant pump. It was a seesaw-looking apparatus about five feet long, a handle on either side, connected to a PVC pipe with a four-inch diameter. Paulo pointed. “This well one time flow over. Up. Out. Rise from ground. Then one day, mountain move—” His hand gestures suggested an earthquake. “Not so much water. Then more people live on mountain. More coffee plant in ground. More cows. Everyone use more water. Need more water. Put in pipe.” He imitated the motion of pushing down and pulling up on the arm of the pump. “We bring water up. Very good water.”
Around us, kids came out of the trees. First two, then three more. Pretty soon, a crowd had gathered, and they were whispering among themselves.
Maybe the most striking feature was not what lay below, but what grew above. The largest mango tree in Nicaragua had grown up around the well. Literally. It was ginormous. Paulo pointed to the treetops and then to the roots below our feet, leading my eye to how the roots had encircled the concrete cap of the well and grown over. He pointed to the corner of his eye, to his tear ducts. His English was broken, long vowels were short and short long. He sounded more American Indian than Spanish. “Long ago, tree cry in the water. Roots make many tears. Water taste like mango. Very very good. Very very sweet.” He made an aggressive blender motion with his hands. “Mango clean water. Good medicine. People walk long way drink here.”
At the moment, I didn’t care too much about the water or how it tasted; I cared about the harness, so I pulled on the webbing and buckled myself in. Paulo tied the rope to the tether behind my shoulder blades and I pulled on his headlamp. Paulo held the rope and demonstrated, pulling on the rope twice: “I come up.” He pulled a single time: “Give loose.” Then he pulled for a prolonged time: “I come up right now fast.”
“Got it.”
Paulo threw the rope over the rusty wheel above me and fed the rope through the grooves. Then he wrapped the rope once around a nearby tree to cause friction in my descent. He then handed me a five-gallon bucket and tethered it to my harness. He placed a notepad and pen in my hand and said, “For talking.” Last, he handed me a small trowel, or shovel, and a hammer and patted me on the back, followed by a not-so-gentle shove. “You go.”
I stood over the opening as he tightened the rope, pulling his end up close against his hip; the four hundred feet of rope was neatly coiled at his feet. As Paulina and Isabella cleared the crest of the hill, I spoke to Paulo. “You’ll hold the rope. Right?”
He nodded. And eyed the hole. “You go.”
I sat in the harness, testing its ability to hold me, squatting over the hole. Then very gingerly, I pulled up one foot and then the other until I was suspended over the hole, sitting in my harness like a hammock. Holding my bucket, I nodded at Paulo and he slowly began lowering me into that hole. My last image of daylight was Paulina staring down on me. She spoke over me as the well covered me up. “I might have not been entirely truthful about peop
le’s reasons for not going down there.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yeah, we have these snakes up here that—”
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
“They like the cold.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t see her nodding, but her tone of voice told me that she was. “But don’t worry. They’re not poisonous.”
The hair rose on my neck and arms. “Now you tell me.”
I was thankful for the headlamp. As I descended, it showed the painstaking work that Paulina’s father had done and what he’d had to cut through to put in this well—much of which was rock. Every foot or two, I found an indentation in the wall. Large enough for a man’s hand or foot.
It took several minutes for Paulo to lower me to the ground floor—or what had become the ground floor after the mudslide and what had been thrown on top since. I had a feeling that the actual floor of the well was still another hundred or so feet. And to my great delight, before I set my feet down on the dried and hardened mud, I searched and found no snakes. Which was good because I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do had I found one.
I worked through the afternoon, sending up a bucket—on a second smaller line—every few minutes. Through the afternoon, we passed the bucket back and forth thirty or forty times. The mud was dense, full of rocks, and in many places, hard as rock. The moisture added with the pressure had turned volcanic mud into nearly impenetrable rock. I sent up a note, asking for something that I could work like a pick in such a small space. They sent down a dull hammer.
Breaking through that rock took a long time.
After about six hours, I was exhausted and the harness was cutting into my hips and armpits. I’d also lost count of the number of buckets I’d sent up. Toward what felt like dinnertime, I tugged on the rope twice and Paulo began the long pull upward. I did what I could to help by climbing up the small “steps” Paulina’s father had chipped into the wall decades ago. When I reached the surface, a crowd of fifty or so people had gathered. Paulina covered her mouth and laughed at my appearance. I was covered in dirt from head to foot. Many of the kids laughed. A few ran away, afraid. One of them walked up to me and touched me—poking me as if to determine if I was truly a man or if the devil had stolen my soul.
Paulo asked, “Good?”
I nodded.
He patted my biceps. “You strong dig. Bueno. Much distance.”
Paulina appeared. “How you feeling?”
“Like a shower never sounded so good.”
She laughed at my appearance. “There are a lot of women who pay a lot of money for that kind of mud bath.”
I pointed at the rope. “How far down did I go?”
Paulo waved his hand side to side. “Two hundred.”
“How far did I dig?”
“Six. Maybe eight feet.”
That was discouraging. “Felt like fifty.”
Paulina rode Paulo and Isabella down the mountain on the bike to the truck. Then Paulo drove Isabella home and Paulina returned for me.
Back at the house, Paulo had filled two buckets of water for me behind the plastic curtain. Most “showers” require about half a bucket. I guess he was trying to tell me something. It took me twenty minutes to get clean. Staring down at the muddy water swirling the crude concrete drain, it struck me that more than volcanic mud was coming off.
I devoured my rice and beans and must have eaten a dozen tortillas followed by two plantains. I heard some rustling out back, and then Leena poked her head in the door and beckoned with a curled finger. When I walked outside, she was resting one hand on a hammock stretched between the mango tree and some other large hardwood. “You need to learn how to swing in a hammock.”
“Seriously?”
She smiled. “Park it, Charlie.”
All I wanted to do was climb in my bed, but I straddled the hammock, sat, and then lay back. She was right. Everything about it was divine. She sat next to me in a plastic chair, gently rocking me back and forth, and as she did, every pain and weight lifted off me with the gentle sway of the canvas hammock.
I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, but I had a feeling there were dishes to do or clothes to wash or some responsibility I was shirking. I offered, “Aren’t we supposed to be doing something?”
She propped her feet up on the end of the hammock and chuckled. “We’re doing it.”
I doubt I’d ever been that tired. And it’d been a long time since I’d felt that good.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Paulina woke me with a steaming mug beneath my nose, then set it on the table next to me. She said, “Paulo’s already gone and Isabella’s at school. We should get moving.” I glanced at my watch. It was already eight o’clock. I’d slept ten hours.
We piled onto the bike and resumed our search, starting where we’d left off yesterday. My hands and forearms were sore from digging, as was most everything else in my body. Our path paralleled the coast, and much of the time was spent rolling down dirt roads just inside the dunes with the sound of the waves on the other side. We stopped in several gas stations, places to eat, bars, anyplace where someone might have reason to stop. No one recognized his picture. At noon, Paulo called. He said he’d talked to a manager at a seaside hotel who had kicked out five guys who trashed two of his rooms and broke a bunch of bottles on his pool deck. He said they were traveling in an old Chevrolet convertible. He also said one of them had been pretty busted up, one eye was swollen shut. When asked what he looked like, the man described Zaul.
Paulina and I shared lunch on the dunes beneath a mango tree that had been picked clean except for the shade. The breeze felt good and I actually dozed. When I woke, I found Paulina walking in the waves, a faraway look in her eyes. She said nothing to me upon her return. I got the feeling it’d been a long time since she’d done anything like that. That in itself got me thinking. As did the fact that Isabella couldn’t swim.
Other than a single necklace, Paulina didn’t wear jewelry. Few women around here did. Granted, it cost money, which was in short supply, but I got the feeling it was more cultural. The necklace she wore was a long chain, which seldom showed unless you were looking. And I admit, when it came to Leena, I found myself looking more often than not. She also let her hair grow—as did every other woman. While they wore their hair all rolled up in a bun, none cut it. Most hung at waist length when they let it down, which was usually after a shower or when they brushed it just before going to bed.
She sat down next to me beneath the mango tree, and I asked about it. “Why do you keep your hair so long?”
“It is believed here that a woman’s hair is her crown. Where God bestows his glory.”
“Then why do all of you pull it up in tight buns that pin your ears back?”
She laughed. “’Cause it’s hot and all that hair on your neck only makes it worse.”
“All function. No form.”
More laughter. “Something like that.”
“What about jewelry? No one here wears any.”
“We are taught not to bring unnatural attention to ourselves. To let our natural beauty do that. To not attempt to improve on what God made perfect.”
I pointed at her necklace. “And that?”
She smiled. “That is the exception.”
“I noticed.”
She placed the polished and worn stone that hung on the chain in her palm. “One evening, when my father was at the bottom of his well and had been digging for months, thinking he’d never strike water, he found two polished stones. When he picked them up, water began seeping in from the edges. To anyone but us, the stones are worthless, but he had them made like this; the chains are made of Nicaraguan gold. He gave one to my mother, one to me. In over thirty years, I’ve never taken it off. My mother did the same. Worth nothing, yet to me, it’s priceless.” She crossed her legs and her face turned curious. “Tell me more about you. How you got here. Your work. What you do when you’re
not here.”
“In college, I spent some time playing poker for a living, but I realized there were people better than me so I cashed in my chips.”
“Smart.”
“Doing so caught the attention of a man who ran a venture capital firm. So I spent some time in the financial world but was fired when I didn’t want to play ball with my boss.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say he wanted to own more than just my time.”
“What’d you do for him?”
“Traveled a lot. I evaluated companies. Tried to figure out which were worth keeping and which were worth breaking up into small pieces. Depended on which made him more money.”
“Did it pay well?”
“Could have, but he kept it all when I left.”
“Sounds like a story there.”
“Just a bit.”
“You ever work outside the States?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Europe. The islands. Asia. Some in Central America.”