The World in Half (6 page)

“Okay.”

His skin is honey-brown, and he has wide-set, light brown eyes traced with a hint of green. One of his front teeth is chipped at the inside corner, giving his grin an air of mischief and boyishness, and his hair is cut short. He’s wearing baggy cargo pants and a red T-shirt with a faded checkered-flag decal on the front.

I finger the handle of my fork and move it from one position to another on the thick, rounded edge of my plate.

“I’m bothering you?” he asks. “I just wanted to welcome you to the hotel. Make sure you have everything you need.” He smiles as though that wasn’t his intention at all. Not in a malicious way. More as though it was simply something to say, a token bit of exchange.

When I tell him that everything has been fine so far, I expect him to leave, but he stays put. “Just in case I see you again before your stay is over, what’s your name?”

“Miraflores.” I don’t know why I say the full thing, since at home everyone calls me Mira.

He squints at me. “Like the canal?”

“I was named after the locks at the canal. Yes.”

“But you’re not Panamanian, are you? Are you a Zonian?”

“A what?”

“I guess not, then. They know who they are. They’re really fucking proud of it.”

“I’m half Panamanian,” I say, even though I’m nervous to let the words out of my mouth. Because is he going to want me to prove it? Can I prove it? Is he going to ask me questions I don’t know the answers to?

“Really? So you’re half from here.” He turns the toothpick around in his mouth. “And where is the other half of you from?”

“Chicago.”

“In the United States?”

“Right in the middle of it.”

“That’s where you live?”

“Yes.”

“So you live in the middle of the United States, but you speak Spanish?”

“I’ve been speaking Spanish to you this whole time, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, but usually the Americans come here and expect us to speak English, not the other way around.”

I don’t say anything.

“Now I’m really bothering you, huh? You want to finish your breakfast?”

He’s been propping up the toothpick with his fingers while he talks, but now he draws it out of his mouth and scoots away from the table as though he’s going to leave.

“You’re not bothering me,” I say.

“No?” He relaxes in his chair and chews on the soggy end of the toothpick again. “So how long are you staying here in Panamá?”

I don’t feel like answering his questions all of a sudden. He’s kind of nosy, isn’t he? And why is he asking, anyway? I don’t want to give away something that would let him take advantage of me if that’s his intent. Although maybe I already have.

“Hey, what was all that I heard earlier?” I ask instead. “With your flowers?”

“Ah, fucking lady didn’t pay for the flower I gave her. Sorry. My language. Hernán’s always reminding me there’s a proper way to speak to the tourists.” He looks at me searchingly. “How did you know about the flowers?”

“I could hear you from in here.”

He snorts. “No shit? Sorry about that, too, I guess.”

“It’s okay.”

“Hey, you want one?”

“What?”

“A flower. I have orchids today. Every other dude on the street is dealing in roses, but roses are so fucking ordinary. I guarantee I’m the only guy out there with a bucket of orchids. The tourists love them.”

“Aren’t orchids rare, though?”

“I don’t sell the endangered ones, if that’s what you mean. I already got in trouble for that shit once. The fucking, like, flower police or something came up and told me I was breaking all these laws. Whatever. I stick to the legal ones now. So do you want one?”

“I’m okay.”

He twists the toothpick between his fingers.

“How do you know Hernán?” I ask.

“Who said I know Hernán?”

“You mentioned him a minute ago.”

“You know him?”

I’m about to say that he’s the doorman when I realize I don’t know the word for “doorman” in Spanish. “He’s the man who stands outside the door.”

“It’s nice that you paid attention, you know. People usually don’t notice. I’ll have to tell him you noticed.”

“So you
do
know him.”

“Hernán’s my uncle. My father’s brother. I’ve been living with him since I was about five.”

“So you
really
know him.”

He shrugs.

I don’t know whether to press him. Maybe it’s my own frame of mind and reason for being there, but I ask, “And your father?”

“My parents took off for Brazil and left me with him. They got transferred there for work, but then they never came back. Hernán’s okay, though.”

“Your parents left you?”

“Not at first. They sent money back, called me on the phone. But somewhere along the way they decided they liked their new life in Brazil. They wanted to stay. They didn’t see a reason for me to come join them. So I don’t know if they left me. They just never came back for me.” Nothing in his face shows that he feels anything about the fact that his parents abandoned him, but his voice betrays a forced nonchalance.

On the floor, a parade of ants navigates the crevice between two tiles.

“I’m in Panamá because I’m trying to find my father,” I say.

He takes the toothpick out again, discarding it on the floor. The ants march over it. “What do you mean?”

“My father lives here. He’s Panamanian.”

“Ah, the half of you from here.”

“Right.”

“What do you mean you’re trying to find him? He’s lost?”

“I’ve never met him. He doesn’t know I’m here looking for him.”

“Serious? He doesn’t know you’re here?” He looks at me for several seconds while he curls his lips around his teeth. “Do you want help?” he asks finally.

“That’s okay.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“So I could help you. Fuck,” he says, throwing his hand in the air. “You’ve never even talked to him or anything?”

I shake my head.

“I mean, my parents are all the way in Brazil but I could call them if I wanted. I just never want to. But Christ. You have a little bit of information on him at least?”

“I have his name.”

“Anything else?”

“I have an address. He might still live there but he might not. I don’t know. And I know he used to work at the canal. Maybe he still does.” I turn down one corner of my mouth. I know it’s not a lot to go on.

“You don’t know much, huh? I guess we have somewhere to start, though. I mean, if you want my help. I know the city pretty well.”

This isn’t the sort of offer I normally would accept. When I was growing up, my mother taught me to be wary of strangers, especially those who seemed willing in any way to be helpful, to be nice, to be of use. But then again, coming here in the first place wasn’t the sort of thing I normally would do. And what if he really can help me? I don’t have that much else to go on at this point.

“Okay,” I say.

He smiles wide, evidently pleased. His chipped tooth is uneven against the others. “We should know each other’s names,” he says. “I know yours.”

I nod.

“Mine is Danilo.”

 

 

 

Every inch
of the bus is elaborately spray-painted and air-brushed. The driver’s name is scripted in blue near the grill and there’s an image of Fidel Castro in fatigues on the side. Before I even get on, I can hear music with a backbone of thumping bongo drums coming from the radio inside.

Danilo and I share a double-wide seat, and he taps his knees to the beat of the music while we ride. He brought his flower bucket with him because, as he explained to me as we walked through the hotel lobby, he never knew when he might make a sale. He keeps it in the aisle beside his feet.

The bus is crowded and hot and, between the voices and the music, loud. The driver keeps shouting for everyone to move back, move back. He hollers over and over,
“Péguense que tienen ropa.”
A young boy crouched on the floor beside the driver stands periodically and echoes the same remarks. Danilo shouts back once,
“¡Gracias, pavo!”
and then turns to me and says, “Those guys are the worst.”

“Who is he?” I ask.

“Probably the driver’s nephew or something. They’re on all the buses now. Like helpers.”

Danilo acts aggravated, but for me it’s invigorating to be on the bus and to feel like I’m really, truly, in Panama at last. Not just in the hotel or in a taxi or in a restaurant, but here among the people who call it home. I clutch my bag on my lap and look at everyone while a sort of giddiness fizzes inside me like a firecracker, a series of warm pricks bursting against my chest. Outside, palm trees hover overhead as we, along with hundreds of other vehicles, lurch and crawl and bump over the city streets. The driver doesn’t stop at intersections. Instead, he honks twice—two little bleats to announce that we are coming through—then barrels ahead. Traffic lights are rare. On side streets, there are stop signs, and elsewhere traffic is regulated naturally by the halting ebb and flow of vehicles pressing slowly ahead, edging around each other, making their own lanes, turning where they want, stopping in the gravel along the side of the street.

“I’m glad I don’t have to drive here,” I whisper to Danilo.

“Eh. It looks like a fucking mess, but it’s so slow that people never get in accidents,” he says.

We pass stout white buildings with wavy red-clay roofs, restaurants with their names painted in block letters onto the façade, strip centers, uniformed guards with machine guns slung over their shoulders pacing the street corners, a man selling Coca-Cola and Orange Crush in bottles from a cart, apartment buildings with laundry hanging over the balconies, huge cathedrals, people holding umbrellas on street corners, kids selling fruit stuffed into long plastic sleeves, covered bus stops, wild tangles of plants in every open space. This is it. I’ve been staring at the photographs in my guidebook for weeks. But now, this is it.

Danilo asked me the address before we got on. I told him: Ave A. Casa 822. He clucked his tongue and grimaced.

“What?” I asked. “Do you know it?”

“I don’t know the house, but that address is in a bad area.”

“How bad?”

“It’s just . . . Look, it’s not terrible. But it’s a good thing you’re going there with me. Let’s just say that.”

I didn’t press him about what that meant exactly. I don’t know, maybe I should have. But what would have been the point? The address was the address, after all, and no matter where it was, it was where I needed to go.

Another fifteen minutes into our ride, the bus stops. I don’t think anything of it at first. Outside, a dog sniffs at a styrofoam container of food open on the sidewalk. But by the time the dog wanders away, we’re still stopped. Two cars in the intersection in front of us start honking at each other. I glance at Danilo. He’s gazing out the window across the aisle, totally unconcerned. Behind us, two men start talking about how a month earlier one of the city buses caught fire and how the passengers rushed to the back exit to get out but the door was sealed shut, so they changed course and surged toward the front of the bus instead, but with everyone scrambling and pushing and screaming and climbing over one another, most of them got trapped inside the bus and died when it went up in flames. The woman across the aisle from us is holding an ivory-colored rosary in her lap, working her fingers from one smooth bead to the next.

“Danilo,” I say. “Are we close?” If we are, maybe we can just get out and walk.

“Not really.”

“How long have we been sitting here?”

He surveys the deadlock in front of us. “Who knows?”

A bubble of panic rises inside me. What am I doing here, on this bus, with someone I hardly know? He could be taking me anywhere. He could be anyone. I’ve heard the stories about tourists who are kidnapped or murdered when visiting a foreign country, and yet here I am, trusting him. Why did I talk to him in the first place?

I look at Danilo again, at his soft earlobe and the fine hairs that gather in a little curl just below it, the buttons of his spine peeking out over the stretched, droopy neck of his T-shirt. He grips the back of the seat in front of him with one hand outstretched and, as I’m staring at him, drops his head to wipe his forehead against his arm. Then he turns to me again.

“You okay?” he asks. “You look, I don’t know, strange.”

I laugh in spite of myself. “What a compliment.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” I say.

“What wasn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean going to find your father?”

I think I mean all of it: taking a leave of absence from school, lying to my mother, coming to Panama, talking to Danilo, getting on the bus, and yes, going to find my father. But what I say again is, “I don’t know.”

Danilo straightens and focuses his brown eyes on mine. “Miraflores,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Well, I keep meaning it. I just don’t think I’m ready yet.”

Danilo doesn’t say anything at first. “Where do you want to go?” he finally asks.

I brush my knuckles over my lips. “Back to the hotel?”

He shakes his head. “You can’t spend your whole time in Panamá in the hotel.”

“I’m not. I’m on the bus right now.”

“But we haven’t
gotten
anywhere yet. No. We have to go somewhere.”

 

 

 

I know where we are
before he tells me. Panamá La Vieja. Old Panama. The vestiges of what the city used to be. Danilo acts surprised when I say it. I tell him I read about it in my guidebook.