Kilometer 99 (9 page)

Ben kills the engine and comes around to let me out. Pelochucho calls to someone in his awkward Spanish. Once out of the car, I look around.

We're in the campo. The ruins of several small adobe houses are flanked by temporary structures. For me, it's like instant déjà vu from the scene at El Terrero hours ago: makeshift walls of corrugated metal and black plastic, smaller yellow tarps bearing the USAID logo. Women tend fires built safe distances from the remaining walls. Children and dogs poke their faces out from behind the shored-up fragments and stare at the car. One young mother carries a baby suckling at her breast. In all, there must be five or six families holding on to this hilltop community.

“Don Miguel!” Pelochucho shouts. He greets a light-skinned Salvadoran man who's stepped out from one of the shelters.

Miguel is short but long-limbed and lean, built like an Olympic wrestler. The index and middle fingers are missing from his right hand.

“
Mis amigos.
” Pelochucho points at Ben and me.

“Pleased to meet you.” Ben shakes Don Miguel's three-fingered hand.

“A pleasure.” I do the same.

“The papers?” Pelochucho almost manages to pronounce the word correctly in Spanish.

Don Miguel seems to understand what he wants and goes to fetch it from his house.

Pelochucho then speaks to us in English: “Who's got the better Spanish, between the two of you?”

“Ben,” I say.

Don Miguel returns with a small stack of typed documents.

“Him.” Pelochucho points at Ben. “Read.”

Ben smiles at Don Miguel. “He's asked me to look over your documents.”

“Of course.” Miguel seems to like Ben.

“
La vista,
” Pelochucho says, pointing seaward. Then, in English, to Ben and me: “Check this out!”

The three of us walk away from the houses and shelters toward a shoulder of land on the ocean side. We step over dry corn stubble in an out-of-season field. Ben stares up and down from the documents, all of which bear the bluish seal of a Salvadoran notary.

“Pelo,” I ask, “what's going on here?”

“Me and Don Miguel are doing a little business. He wants out of the corn and beans racket. I'm looking to invest in this country, and this break.”

We climb up the small ridge and catch a view of the ocean. A blast of offshore breeze lifts my hair. Straight below are the cove and the point of Kilometer 99. We watch miniature swells struggle to break.

“There it is.” Pelochucho flashes his overpopulated grin. “Put this view on a magazine ad or a Web site. Tell me it won't have the gringos flocking.”

It is quite beautiful. I have to turn my head from side to side to take it all in. In the afternoon wind, whitecaps on the rough ocean shine like diamonds. Not far from the point, a lone pelican dives deep for a fish.

“This looks legit to me.” Ben stares down at the paperwork. “But I'm no lawyer.”

“Are you buying this cornfield?” I ask.

Pelochucho turns to me. “This field has grown its last corn. It's about to become the K Ninety-nine Surf Hotel.”

That gets Ben to put down the papers.

“The outside wall will go here.” Pelochucho takes a couple steps down the steep hillside and tries to walk a straight line. “I want every bedroom to get a view of the surf. The suites will have their own— What's that Hawaiian word for porch?”

“Lanai,” I say.

“Exactly. We'll put the pool over there.” He points back toward the farming hamlet. “But what will make it great is the service. I'm talking shuttles to the airport, all English-speaking staff, drinking water in your room, safe food, rides to the other breaks.…”

“You'll take the adventure out of it,” Ben says.

“I'm after the surfers with money,” Pelochucho says, “not the ones with guts.”

“Pelo, you cannot build here.” Since he said the word
hotel,
I've been studying the angle of the hill, the consistency of the soil.

“Now don't get all high-and-mighty. This will be huge for the local economy.”

“It's not that; it's the land. Look at this hillside. You see those ruts over there?” I point to a deep ditch running down the far side of the field. “This place has probably been eroding a few inches a year. Corn is terrible for soil conservation. I doubt you could even pour a foundation without a massive landslide. And what if there was another quake? Every one of those adobe homes came down in this one.” I point back toward the hamlet. “Imagine what would happen to a two-story hotel, built here!” I kick the ground.

“What are you?” Pelochucho asks. “Some kind of—”

“Engineer,” I say. “I'm an engineer. And I'm telling you: Do not build on this spot.”

“I was actually thinking more like three stories.”

Ben speaks up. “She knows what she's talking about, Pelo. The thing about corn is that it doesn't like the shade, or other root systems. These double black-diamond cornfields tend to get steeper and steeper, with nothing underneath to hold them together.”

Pelochucho stares down at the dirt about to be his, lets out a long sigh. “You guys make some good points. I'll have to take this into consideration.”

“Are you buying the land all the way up to his house?”

“That's the deal. I want to put the pool over there.”

“Move your hotel back to the far side of the ridge.” I take a couple steps inland, point toward the abandoned set of walls from which Don Miguel retrieved his documents. “You'll lose the view, but it'll be worth it.”

Pelo turns to see the panorama of the point one more time.

“You could make an observation deck here.” Ben does his best to sound optimistic. “Get some telephoto lenses; have a guy filming the sessions. Weekend warriors love that kind of shit.”

Pelochucho sighs again. “Let's go buy some land.”

He walks back toward the hamlet, several strides ahead of us. Ben and I trade glances and shrugs.

Don Miguel sets up a table with plastic chairs and a pen.

Before sitting down, Pelochucho pulls that thick roll of hundreds from his board shorts and hands the whole thing over to Don Miguel. “For you,” he says in Spanish. He uses the second-person familiar, which is technically an insult. Miguel doesn't seem to mind.

I can't decide whether or not to protest. I have no faith that Pelo will build responsibly. But I don't want to step on Don Miguel's plans, whatever they might be.

Don Miguel counts the money once, then twice. I try to follow with my eyes. My best guess is two or three thousand. Not a lot, but probably more than he'd get from a local buyer, especially since the quake, with so many people trying to liquidate their land. I wonder what the other families think of this. Do they know about the hotel plans?

Pelo sits down and asks Ben for the paperwork. He turns straight to the signature page and signs his name. Don Miguel does the same, a broad smile across his face. Pelo stands up again. There follows a flurry of handshakes and thanks, a few pats on the back. Pelochucho looks impatient with the whole process.

Don Miguel follows us to the car. He tells Ben and me that he's glad to have met us.

“Where will you go now?” I ask him. “What will you do?”

“The rest of my family is in Chalate,” he says, suddenly somber. “We'll go there for a while, stay at my mother's house. With this money, I can afford a good coyote. I hope to find my way north, maybe in time for a harvest. My brother-in-law has agreed to receive me.”

“You're going north?” I ask. “To the States?”

“That's right.” He shrugs. “It's what one must do to make a living in times like these.”

“Good luck to you,” I say. It hardly seems a worthwhile deal for him: giving up his home, which is practically beachfront property, for a chance to pick citrus or wash dishes in Texas or California. Does he have any idea what kind of rare resource this view is? I wonder how he thinks of the ocean. A source of fish? A cause of rust? The reason his cornfield catches too much wind? Certainly, he doesn't see it as added value to this land. Do these other families have any idea about the quality of waves in their backyard?

Pelochucho is already in the passenger seat as we say our final good-byes. I climb into the back and Ben shuts the hatch.

*   *   *

Pelo stays silent on the return trip, then goes straight to his room once we reach La Posada. His A/C unit hums hard the second his door shuts.

We go up to the roof. Ben makes a spliff from the local brown weed and his moist Dutch tobacco. I roll myself a cigarette.

A dog-eared surf magazine—abandoned weeks ago by some other traveler—lies on the concrete at our feet. Ben picks it up and wades through the pages for anything of interest.

“Look at this.” He points at one of the ads toward the back. It reads
WAVE ESCAPES! EL SALVADOR ADVENTURE.

Rumors recently circulated about a company running tours to isolated surf spots in the east, several hours from here. Apparently, they drop their clients off by boat and then take them back to a nice hotel where everybody eats pasta and drinks imported beer.

“Rich fuckers won't stop until they ruin all the good spots.” Ben's camped and surfed in that part of the country several times—once with me. It has a special hold on his heart.

“That was published before the earthquake,” I say. “It's probably not so popular anymore.”

“‘The Wild East'—that's what they're calling the point breaks out by El Cuco. Ridiculous.” Ben throws the magazine to the floor.

We go silent for a moment and focus on the smoking. Both of us stare out at the ocean as though hypnotized. The midday winds have ceased; the surface is flat and still.

“You ever have flat spells like this in Hawai‘i?” Ben sounds stoned already.

“Sure we do.”

“Where do you surf mostly?”

I let out a lungful of smoke. “Waikiki when I first started. It's consistent, but full of tourists. Once I got more into it, I'd go to Diamond Head or Ala Moana. Some other places you probably haven't heard of.”

“North Shore?” he asks, as all mainland surfers tend to.

“If I could get a ride,” I say. “When they hold the contests in the winter, it's a zoo up there. Hard to find an empty parking spot, let alone an empty wave.”

When I say the word
wave,
the roof trembles under our feet. Both Ben and I hop up from our chairs. Some gasps and whimpers sound from the street below. Aftershock.

“Jesus.” Ben sits back down. “You have a lot of this in Hawai‘i?”

I shake my head. “Where I'm from, not too much. It's more of a problem on the Big Island, with the volcano and all. You probably never felt one before last month, huh?”

“No,” he says. “In North Carolina, we only worry about hurricanes. But you get a bit more warning with those.” He readjusts his fingers around the spliff. “And the surf picks up at least.”

“I don't think I could ever get used to them,” I say. “Even if I lived my entire life on a fault line.”

“Fuck it.” Ben seems suspicious of sitting on the roof all of a sudden. “How about a beer at La Punta?”

*   *   *

We return to the place where we first met: La Punta, best of the local seaside restaurants. The owner is a salty Florida expat who came here during the seventies and pioneered the waves at the point. He weathered the entire civil war in this same location. Now he has a Salvadoran family; his son has been the national surfing champion several years running.

It's a beautiful evening. The wind is dead, the sea glassy. Still a little shaken by the aftershock, we ask to sit downstairs, at a table not underneath the second floor's concrete deck. A waiter in a white shirt takes our order. He brings back two amber beer bottles, along with two dishes of mealy ceviche, a toothpick sprouting from the center of each.

“So tell me,” Ben says, “how was Cara Sucia?”

“Good.” I had almost forgotten about the first trip of the day. “I'm glad I went. It was nice to say some good-byes.” I swallow a mouthful of beer so big that it burns the back of my throat. “It made me feel a little better about the situation.”

“Better?” Ben brings his beer bottle up to his lips but pauses before drinking. “What situation?”

“It freaks me out … abandoning things.” I push ceviche around the dish. “Makes me scared that I might turn into my mother.”

Ben laughs out loud. “An earthquake leveled your aqueduct, Malia. That doesn't make you your mother.”

A part of me wants to argue with him, to suggest that parenting might also be fraught with setbacks and obstacles, which wouldn't justify giving up. Instead, I nod.

I'm not sure how well Ben understands my issues with quitting and leaving. As an Agro-Forestry volunteer, his projects—diversifying crops and fighting erosion—were largely unpopular in his community. It's important work, but he wasn't raising anyone's expectations. Could he appreciate how many hopes and dreams—let alone thousands of hours of labor—were hung on my water system?

A part of me envies Ben's work. Every expensive piece of infrastructure here, no matter how noble its purpose, is in part a monument to the egos of its architects. In that respect, today's aqueducts and clinics aren't so different from the Mayan temples or Catholic cathedrals once erected in this country.

“Look, Malia.” Ben puts his hand atop mine. “I feel weird about quitting, too. I love this place.” He turns toward the point. “I never thought I'd leave early. But things happen. That two-year target is just an arbitrary number.”

“I know,” I admit. “Still, it's hard to swallow—leaving now, with the country in ruins. I mean, we came here to help, didn't we?”

Ben sighs. “No matter what, we'd have to have left our sites in worse shape than we found them. What were we supposed to do with four or five months? Other than miss each other and be miserable?”