If We Survive Read online

  Listen, I don’t want to be all critical and pick on Nicki, because as I said, she was a sweet girl really, with a true depth of kindness in her . . . but I do have to tell this one story on her just because it makes me laugh.

  One day, toward the end of our visit, when the wall was just about finished, the natives invited us to a ceremony. This was a big compliment—an honor really. The people of Costa Verdes are Christians—Catholics—but the country’s original religion is some kind of ancient Mayan thing, and it still survives under the surface of the culture. That is, the people go to the church in the plaza every Sunday and all, but they still have a couple of festivals and ceremonies from the old days—part of that religion they surrendered when the Spanish explorers came and converted them.

  Most of the time, they didn’t let strangers come to these ceremonies. But I guess they were grateful to us for fixing their school and all, so they invited us along. And let me tell you, it was cool. I mean, hypercool, cool to the magnitude of awesome. We all gathered very solemnly in this cave—really, a cave hidden under vegetation in a side of one of the mountains. We sat against the cave wall and the only light was the flickering flame from a torch this old priest was carrying. The priest looked like he was about two hundred years old, he was so stooped and brown and wrinkled. He moved around the cave in front of us, lighting a bunch of candles with his torch so that the whole place glowed with this sort of wavering yellow light.

  Then this big wooden statue was carried in by two of the men from the village. A carved, painted statue of some sort of grinning skeleton man. Very cool. Like some kind of Batman villain. I guess he was the god they were worshipping.

  The men set the statue in the center of the cave. Then the priest—and I swear I’m not making this up—gave the god a cigar to smoke. No, really. He stuck the cigar in the god’s grinning mouth and lit it for him with one of the candles! Then, when the god was comfortably enjoying a smoke, the priest moved around among the candles, swinging this balled cloth that spread a sweet smell everywhere like incense. And all the people clapped and sang and chanted, with their eyes shining and their faces looking kind of rapt and devout and happy. Very, very, very cool. Made me wish we did stuff like that in our church sometimes! Well, not really. But you know what I mean.

  So anyway, this whole ancient, sacred ceremony went on, with all of us Americans being honored by being allowed to watch. And there we were, in this mystical cave full of candles and incense and chanting people. And finally, when it was over, the priest blew out the candles one by one, and the cave sank into a blackness that you could never describe, never even imagine, just a complete, lightless nothingness full of the fading echoes of the people’s prayers.

  Then silence. Total darkness. Total silence.

  And out of that silent darkness came Nicki’s voice—a sort of lazy, complaining whine.

  “I am in such a shopping mood today!” she said.

  I nearly pitched forward onto my face laughing. That was Nicki all over, it really was. The natives honored us by sharing their most ancient secrets, and all she could think about was scoring a new pink T at A&F!

  Sweet girl, just . . . shallow.

  And then there was Jim Nolan. And you know the old expression, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all”?

  Well, I haven’t got much to say about Jim Nolan.

  Jim was the smartest person in the universe—if, that is, the universe were his own imagination—which I think he believed it was. Jim was sixteen. Tall, very skinny, stoopshouldered. Had kind of bugged-out eyes and very thin lips that he always seemed to be pressing together in disapproval of something. He really did know a lot—or he thought he did, anyway—about history and books and so forth. And whenever anyone said anything about practically anything, he was only too willing to correct them about it and give them a lecture on what he thought was the truth of the matter.

  “We—we Americans, I mean—we destroyed this country, that’s the fact of it,” I heard him say once.

  I was coming down the hill after helping Pastor Ron and the others drag tarps over our building materials in preparation for the afternoon storms. I heard Jim talking before I saw him.

  “General Benitez was a great reformer,” Jim went on. “There’s just no question he would have redistributed the land more fairly. It’s only because our CIA took it upon themselves to come in here and help the reactionaries overthrow him that you continue to have the poverty and unfairness you have today!”

  Typical Jim. All the poverty and misery in the world was America’s fault. Just as it never occurred to Nicki that poverty and misery were the default mode of the planet and we should be grateful for what we had, it never occurred to Jim that we didn’t cause that poverty and misery; it was there long before we got here.

  Anyway . . . I heard him talking like that and I came around a stand of thick-trunked evergreen trees and then I saw him. He was standing in a little clearing with a group of men. The men were sitting on the ground and Jim was standing over them as if he were a professor giving them an open-air lecture. He was pointing a finger at them as he spoke, driving his ideas home as the words tumbled out of him.

  The men? They just sat there, gazing up at him with dull eyes. One of them I noticed looked particularly mean. A lean, broad-shouldered guy in his thirties. He had a craggy face, weatherworn and somber. A thin mustache, a cigarette dangling from the full red lips underneath. His eyes looked to me to be almost black. And the way he was looking up at Jim—with a sort of droll, distant, disdainful humor—well, it was the way someone might look at a spider who was just disgusting enough to hold his attention for a few seconds before he stepped on it.

  That guy—that guy with the mean eyes? That was Mendoza, it turned out. I would see him again. Hanging out around the edges of the village. Talking to some of the men there. Talking to Pastor Ron once, as if they were having a philosophical debate of some kind.

  And of course later, in the cantina, with his gun.

  But that time—that time Jim talked to him—that was the first time I ever noticed him.

  Enough about Jim. Let’s move on to Meredith Ward. What can I tell you about Meredith? Not much really. She was a hard person to get to know—though she was not hard to admire at all. I sure admired her, at least. I admired her and I liked her—a lot.

  Meredith was the oldest of us—except for Pastor Ron, of course. She was twenty or so—maybe twenty-one, I’m not exactly sure. She was not from my hometown, not from Spencer’s Grove, like the rest of us. She went to Westfield College nearby and, like a lot of the kids from Westfield, came into town to attend our church on Sundays. I guess that’s how she became part of this wall-building expedition.

  Meredith wasn’t pretty like Nicki. She wasn’t pretty at all, really, not in what you’d consider a glamorous way. But to tell you the truth, after getting to know her for a day or two, I found her looks sort of grew on you. In fact, I started to think she was sort of beautiful. She reminded me of a painting or a statue or something: very tall, taller than I am, almost six feet, her back always straight and her chin always up, her face kind but serious, her pale brown eyes clear and direct. She had a very pale complexion—white with maybe a little rose just beneath the surface. And she stayed that way, even after the rest of us had turned brown from working in the sun. She had short curly hair, a sort of high forehead, a strong, straight nose—like I said, not pretty in any movie star way but really . . . noble-looking—I guess that’s what you’d call her.

  She didn’t talk very much. I noticed that about her right away. Not that she was standoffish or anything. She’d sit with us and listen and laugh at all of our stupid jokes like everyone else. But everyone else always seemed to be talking about something or other: what they liked to do for fun or what music they liked or what video on YouTube cracked them up, their school plans, career plans, philosophy of life, and so on and so forth. Not Meredith. She listened. She asked a qu
estion sometimes, made a comment sometimes. But she almost never said anything about herself—what she liked, what she did, who she thought she was. Even when you asked her a direct question, she’d answer in a few words, very simply, and that was the end of it. After a couple of days around our campfire, I knew she came from Colorado originally. And I knew she wanted to be a grade-school teacher after graduation. That was it.

  I’ve told a story about everyone else, and I’ve got a story about Meredith too. It’s a sad story, but it does tell you a lot about her.

  While we were in the village—just the second day we were there—a baby died. I don’t know what caused it, a fever or something. There wasn’t any doctor in the village, and I guess the sickness just carried the kid off.

  Anyway, the first thing I knew about it was just after I woke up. I was coming out of the Guy Tent when I heard the terrible sound of the baby’s mother screaming and crying. She was out in the street, the dead baby in her arms. She was calling out desperately to the other villagers, to us, to God, to anyone who would listen. Like I said, I don’t speak much Spanish, but I understood she was begging us—begging all of us—to make the baby come back to life, to make her nightmare end.

  What happened next: the poor woman went sort of crazy with grief. She carried the infant’s body back into her cottage and refused to come out. I caught a couple of glimpses of her in there through the open door. She was cradling the dead child in her arms as if she could somehow comfort it. She refused to let anyone come near it, refused to let anyone take the baby away for burial. Her husband went in and tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. Some of the other women from the village tried as well—same result. The local priest—the Catholic priest—Father Juan, his name was—he went in and reasoned with her for half an hour. Then the old priest too, the guy from the cave ceremony—he tried. But the mother simply would not let the baby go, would not admit that the child’s soul was gone now, that she was cradling nothing but the body that remained.

  We—the other Americans and I—went to work on the wall, digging the pit, clearing the debris. It got to be almost noon. The woman was still in her house just down the road. Sometimes, when I would take a wheelbarrow of trash down to the dumping spot, I would see her in there, still clutching the corpse of her child and wailing—crying out in a way I could hardly stand to hear, a pure, steady, unending keen of grief. It just broke my heart.

  At last, just as I was returning to the worksite after one trip, I saw Meredith. She was on her knees, using a small spade to work over the place where we were going to lay our new footer. Without saying a word to anyone—without even looking at anyone—she laid the spade aside and stood, brushing a strand of hair back off her forehead. She left the site. Walked down the dirt road to the grieving mother’s house. Wove silently through the clutch of women who had gathered worriedly outside the door and went inside.

  Ten minutes passed—and then, all at once, the mother’s terrible wailing stopped.

  Just like that—and for the first time that day—there was quiet in the village.

  All of us building the wall stopped what we were doing. I don’t think we really realized how awful that noise had been until it ended. We looked toward the mother’s house. Another fifteen minutes went by. Then Meredith came out.

  It’ll be a long time, if ever, before I forget the sight of her. Walking straight and tall as she always did, her chin lifted, her expression set, her eyes clear—and carrying the little bundle of the dead child gently, tenderly in her arms. The mother followed just behind her, her head hung, as she went on crying quietly. The crowd of women outside parted as Meredith passed through them, silent and stately. She walked down the road to the church with the mother right behind her and handed the child over to Father Juan for burial.

  “What in the world did you say to her?” I asked Meredith that night as we finished our dinner around the fire.

  But Meredith only shook her head—and there was something about her that made you stop asking questions when you knew she didn’t want to say more.

  So I guess that’s everyone—everyone except for me, that is. And there’s not much I can tell you about myself because, frankly, I’m just not all that interesting. My name is Will— Will Peterson. I just graduated tenth grade this past spring. I just turned sixteen. I’ve lived in Spencer’s Grove, California, my whole life and I am pretty much your standard-issue run-of-the-mill male-version kid. I don’t love school but I like my friends. I like football but I’m too small to play, except an occasional game of touch in the park. I like video games—duh!—especially the first-person shooters—and especially the survival horror ones where you get to blow zombies away—and maybe most especially the ones that make my mom cringe because of all the blood. Bwa ha ha! I don’t really know what I want to do with my life. Something about computers probably. Maybe have my own business of some kind. Anyway, I still have a lot of time before I have to figure all that out.

  The only thing I should add, I guess, is that I had my own special reasons for coming to Costa Verdes, for joining this little expedition to Santiago to build the school wall. I mean, sure, I wanted to come for the church and to do good in the world and all that Bible stuff. And yeah, I also needed the Public Service credits to graduate like everyone else.

  But there was also this: my mom and dad had been fighting a lot recently. As in: a lot of a lot. They were fighting about everything, it seemed like. Work, the house, money. Me. And I have to tell you: I hated it. Hated, hated, hated—you can add as many “hateds” to that as you want and still be in the ballpark. And even more than I hated to hear them fighting—or to not hear them when they lowered their voices and went right on fighting in a low mutter and hiss—I hated what I just knew was going to happen next. The we-need-to-have-a-little-talk-Will. The Dad-is-moving-away-just-for-a-little-while.

  The it’s-not-your-fault-Will. It’ll all be just the same as always except now you’ll have two houses to go to, won’t that be nice? Nice. Right. I mean, I would’ve rather they just shot me. All right, maybe that’s a small exaggeration. I’m just saying: I hated listening to them squabble and I hated waiting for the Big Day and the Little Talk to arrive. The way I figured it: if I could get a week away in Central America and do my little bit to save the world and not have to listen to my parents fight all at the same time—well, good deal, right?

  Absolutely.

  So that was my story. That was me.

  And that was all of us—five of us. Pastor Ron, Nicki, Jim, Meredith, and the illustrious Will Peterson, aka myself.

  We came to Costa Verdes to build a wall.

  I just wish I could tell you that all of us made it home alive.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We finished our work on a Friday. There it was, the little cinder-block box, the school, fully rebuilt. Benches all back in place. Debris all cleared away. It was a good feeling to know the kids here would be able to learn stuff again and that I’d had a little bit to do with it.

  The villagers were grateful. That night, in fact, they held a celebration for us in the plaza in front of the church. They hung strings of colored Christmas lights like they did on market days and they lit sparklers. The children gathered in a chorus, wearing their best white shirts, and sang a song for us. Then a band played music and the women danced, waving colored handkerchiefs around. Father Juan held a special service on the church steps. He said a blessing on the school and included us in his prayers.

  Like I said, it was a good feeling. I was glad I’d come.

  In the morning, we rolled up our sleeping bags, folded our tents, packed our backpacks, and hoisted them onto our backs. We tromped down from our campground on the side of the hill to the cantina-slash-hotel in the plaza. That’s where we had to wait for the van that would take us to the plane that would take us to the airport in the capital city of Santa Maria. From there, we would fly back to California.

  We were all excited, all eager to get home. Even me. I gues
s I harbored some small hope that my folks would have worked things out while I was away. I know: fat chance. But I couldn’t help hoping. And, anyway, I missed them.

  It was just after noon when we entered the cantina. The place was almost never crowded—only sometimes when buses brought tourists through town to see the church. But there were some people there today, families seated at some of the tables eating lunch, men standing at the bar drinking beer. The cantina not only had the only Internet access, but it also had the only television in the village—a really old one—I think it was powered by coal or steam or something! Anyway, it was up on the wall over the bar with a blurry, fuzzy soccer game playing on it, and the men were all watching that.

  Our group sat at a large round table in the corner up front. Pastor Ron bought us all some Coke and chips.

  “Well, here’s to the children of Santiago,” said Pastor Ron in his mild, quiet voice.

  He lifted his glass of Coke and we all clinked our own glasses against it.

  “I want to drink to going home!” Nicki said loudly. “And to taking a bath and going on Facebook and having a phone that works! And sheets. Clean sheets! I cannot wait!”

  “Well, I guess you’ve really learned something about the way other people live, Nicki,” Pastor Ron said to her—so mildly I couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not.

  “Which I bet she’ll forget the minute she gets to CPK,” Jim Nolan muttered into his Coke.

  “CPK!” said Nicki, sighing deeply. That’s California Pizza Kitchen to you—the central place to hang in Spencer’s Grove. “Don’t even mention CPK until I’m actually holding a roasted artichoke and spinach slice in my perfectly manicured fingers!”

  “I rest my case,” Jim said, rolling his eyes.