Jesus Land (36 page)

None of this moves me.

The only thing that makes the event notable is the fact that David and I are now both on a “trust level” and therefore qualify to volunteer at the orphanage together. Which doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll let us. They could say no just to mess with our heads. It happens.

We take precautions to make our case stronger. When we meet, as usual, for a few minutes at the end of lunch, we sit in the center of the courtyard and read our Bibles. If someone asks us what we’re doing, we tell them we’re reading the Scriptures from start to finish to better understand the Holy Word. That we’ve always wanted to read the Bible straight through, and this
is an excellent opportunity to do it, together. Our classmates eye us with suspicion, but the staff nod their approval.

After a week of this display, we work up the courage to knock on Ted’s office door and ask permission to volunteer together. I’ve donned my “I
Jesus” T-shirt for the occasion and David wears “God Rules!” My heart drums at my ribcage when Ted tells us to come in and take a seat.

To our surprise, he says yes right away.

“We’re putting a lot of faith in you kids, and we hope you won’t disappoint us,” he says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. He peers first at David, then at me. “Remember, we can’t always watch you, but Jesus can.”

He points a finger Heavenward.

“Jesus is always watching and listening and knowing. You can fool us, but you can’t fool Jesus.”

“Yes, sir,” we respond, holding his gaze. “We’ll be good.”

The next afternoon, when the guard clanks shut the metal gate behind us and we’re suddenly alone on the Dominican side of the barbed wire, excitement flares between us. As we walk down the paved drive toward the main road into the village, we don’t say a word or even look at one another until The Property slips behind a wall of trees.

And then we start to run. We run leaning away from The Property, leaning so far forward that we’re half falling, half flying down the hill, our sneakers catching abruptly on the pavement, the rubber soles slapping in our ears. Once again we are kids, racing each other down the path in the woods behind our old house, giddy with speed.

We continue to race after we turn onto the dirt road into Jarabacoa. We run until our legs are wobbly, and our breath
comes out in chunks, and we are beyond everything. David sprints past me and I catch up to him and grab his arm, and we stumble and fall onto the road. We lie on our backs laughing as the jungle whirls around us in a giant green kaleidoscope.

After a while, David staggers to his feet and pulls me up.

“Hot damn,” I gasp, my head still spinning. “Holy crap.”

“Just remember,” David pants, jabbing a finger at the sky and imitating Ted’s low voice. “Jesus is always watching and listening and knowing!”

“No sirree,” I say. “You can’t fool Jesus!”

“And you can’t jack off with Him either!”

We fall back into the dirt, howling, and when David pulls me up again, I punch him in the biceps and he clamps his hand over his arm as if it hurt. Just like old times. Just like our old selves.

Two Dominican women appear on the road wearing bright dresses and balancing bundles of twigs on their heads. They give us a sidelong glance, then cross to the far side of the road and hurry past us.

“Come on, I’ll take you to this place I know,” David says.

We brush the dust from our clothes and continue down the road. The air is dense with the sweet smoke of burning sugarcane, and the gray clouds that blanketed the valley in the morning have evaporated, leaving a brilliant sapphire sky.

As we walk in the shade of the mango and mamey apple trees arching over the road, emerald green parakeets dart through the branches, live ornaments that twitter and flash. We walk in silence, marveling at this strange land and the fact that we are in it together.

We pass a row of jeweled shanties propped on stilts over a ravine. They are pieced together from plywood and sheet metal and have roofs made of palm fronds. As we walk by, the trapdoor on the bottom of a purple one bangs open and water slops into
the ravine. The stench of human waste rolls over us and we squeal and pinch our noses shut and jog up the road.

An ancient VW bus rattles toward us, bouncing hard over potholes.
Gua-guas,
the Dominicans call them. The driver will charge you five centavos to ride anywhere in the village. Dominicans jam the interior and hang off the sides, gripping handles that have been welded onto the exterior. The women gawk at us and the men wolf whistle, turning to stare even after the exhaust fumes envelop us. We shift our eyes to our feet. It’s the same as in Indiana—everybody wondering what business a black boy and a white girl have together.

Up the road, merengue music bounces from a yellow shack with a Coca-Cola sign hanging over its doorway. The primitive two-beat rhythm is everywhere here—blaring from car radios, from shanties, from the jam boxes perched on teenage boys’ shoulders like parrots. On weekends, a three-piece band plays live merengue in Jarabacoa’s central square as couples sashay over the dirt, their hips pressed together. When we walk by, boys—egged on by their friends and green cans of Presidente beer—ask us to dance, pointing to the gyrating couples before extending a hand.

“Dejame en paz,”
we tell them. “Leave me alone.” It’s what Bruce makes us say, and they oblige, shrugging and moving on to someone else. I often wish they’d grab my hand and pull me into the music before Bruce could stop them.

“There,” David says, pointing at the yellow shack with his chin, Dominican style. “Let’s get something to drink.”

I glance at my watch; we have to be back at The Property in an hour and fifteen minutes.

“Come on, we’ve got time,” he says, stepping toward the shack. “The missionaries don’t keep track of our comings and goings—they’re too busy saving souls to notice.”

There’s no one inside. The only furnishings are two plastic card tables and plastic chairs. A ghetto blaster playing the merengue music rests on one of them, and we sit at the other, next to an open window. The music is too loud to talk. A girl in a New York Yankees T-shirt walks through a screen door at the back of the shack and lowers the volume before turning to us. David says something to her in slow, struggling Spanish and she nods and walks back through the screen door.

“Did you get me a Coke?” I ask him.

“I ordered coconut juice,” he says with a sly smile. “I think.”

“But I wanted Coke. I already used all my house pop privileges this week.”

He smirks and brushes a fly from his face. “Trust me, you’ll like this. If you don’t, I’ll buy you a Coke. I got enough pesos.”

An overloaded
gua-gua
clatters past the window, playing the same merengue song that’s on the ghetto blaster. I look at David and smile and then look back out the window as the dust stirred up by the
gua-gua
settles back onto the road. It’s weird to suddenly be alone with him like this, to be sitting across a table from each other in a private place. There’s too much to talk about, and nowhere good to start.

The waitress returns with two glasses of chalky white liquid, and David hands her some coins.

“To getting out of here as soon as possible,” I say, raising my drink.

“To going home,” he says, clinking his glass against mine.

I look into my glass when he says this to avoid his eyes, then chug half my drink. I notice the metallic taste only after I set my glass down on the table.

“Hey, there’s booze in this!” I shout, lifting the glass.

David frowns and sniffs his drink.

“Hey, I think you’re right,” he says. “Must be my bad Spanish. I’ll send them back.” He starts to raise his hand to signal the waitress, who’s sitting on a stool by the entrance.

“Are you nuts?” I cry.

“But it’s against Program policy,” he says.

I press my glass against my “I
Jesus” T-shirt protectively, and he cracks up.

“I guess it’s not our fault the waitress brought the wrong drinks,” he says, grinning. “Although she tends to do it every time I come here: I ask for coconut juice, and she brings a piña colada.”

“You are so bad,” I say, clinking my glass against his.

He’s changed since Indiana, when he’d call me a lush for siphoning Comfort from the pantry. I guess he now understands why people drink. To feel something. To feel nothing. To feel better.

A disc jockey babbles Spanish on the ghetto blaster before the first unmistakable guitar chords of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” waft from the speakers. I jerk around and stare at the radio; it’s my favorite Police song, and the first pop song I’ve heard in three months.

“Oh my God!” I squeal, turning to look at David. “Can you believe it?”

He nods and smiles slyly again.

“I knew you’d like this place.”

We order two more drinks and tap our sneakers against the cement floor and drum our fingers on the table. The waitress sees us grooving and cranks up the volume, smiling. Which is fine by me, because I don’t want to discuss The Program, or home, or what will become of us, or anything else. I want to drink, and listen to secular music, and pretend to be normal.

The Police song turns into Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” and David taps his watch.

When we walk back into the sunshine, the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” is playing and we’re dancing down the dirt road chanting
“We got the beat, we got the beat, we got the beat, yea-ah-ah! We got the beat!”
over and over like an incantation. A
gua-gua
rolls by and when the passengers gawk and whistle, David waves at them and I flip them off.

We stop at a roadside
colmado
stand to buy peppermint chicles from a wrinkled man and stuff our mouths full of them and arrive at the orphanage light-headed yet minty-fresh.

A little boy, naked but for a pair of torn shorts, opens the gate. He smiles shyly up at David before sprinting back to a small bent slide crowded with children. An old Dominican woman sits on a tree stump behind them, jiggling a baby on her lap.

David turns to me.

“Basically, our job is to keep the little kids busy while the missionaries convert the older ones,” he says, pointing at a building beyond the slide; a chorus of high voices sing “The Bible Tells Me So” in the interior. “It’s not that hard.”

“Beats hauling rocks,” I say.

As we walk toward the slide, a throng of kids swarms around David, tugging his arms and shrieking
Daveed! Daveed!
He beams down at them and slings a tiny potbellied boy into his arms. I watch this spectacle of my brother circled by adoring children like some modern-day black Jesus and my heart is warmed by more than rum.

“Aren’t you popular!” I say.

He shrugs away my comment, smiling. We spend the next hour playing Duck, Duck Goose and Ring Around the Rosie, and David and I holler as loudly as the other kids. Every once in a while we stop to grin at each other, tipsy and smug with our exploit.

On the way back to The Property, we consider running away. We could catch a bus to La Vega and from there, another to Santo Domingo. But we have only $6 in pesos between us, not enough to cover the fare. We could hitchhike. But even if we reached the capital, we’d have no money for a plane, and they’d find us and haul us back.

“My hair can’t get much shorter, but I don’t think you’d look so hot with a shaved head,” David says.