Bad Faith

by Theodore Wheeler

  Worthy shouted Ahoy! to the girl and the backpackers. How is it in there?

  One of the backpackers told Worthy the water was fine.

  Going to join us? the girl in the blue bikini asked.

  Still thinking, Worthy told her.

  Worthy stood at the edge of a narrow crevasse. The crevasse was a few feet across but a long way down. A wooden stepladder lay over the gap. Worthy walked across the stepladder to tell the girl in the blue bikini about being a doctor on a humanitarian mission. Worthy explained how a consortium of Evangelical churches in Allen, Texas, paid physicians to move here, to work here, to live in an apartment complex in San Salvador, an apartment complex with armed guards, balconies off the bedrooms, a swimming pool and BBQ pit, yes, communal amenities of the apartment complex the Evangelicals paid for. She should see it sometime, Worthy said. It’s nice.

  Steve crawled over the horizontal ladder to the basin pool, next to Worthy. Steve didn’t stand after he crossed. He sat with his legs splayed, not too close to the edge. When he looked down there was nothing until the bottom. The bottom stubbled with trees, hundreds of feet down, thousands. Steve didn’t know much about distances. What sounded accurate to people who knew such things, what didn’t. The measurement of distances didn’t really matter to him. You wouldn’t want to fall, he told himself. That’s what mattered.

  Steve thought about what people told him back home. The doctor, in particular, his wife’s doctor, he should say, the ob-gyn, had told him not to worry. He and the Mrs. went through a lot the last time they’d had a baby, not even a year ago, and now they were going to have a third, an Irish twin. People had told him the Mrs. couldn’t get pregnant while she was nursing. What people had told him was wrong. It will all work out in the end, the ob-gyn had told him, like the last time. Steve and the Mrs. were lucky, they already had two healthy girls. But what they’d gone through when daughter two was born, that’s what he worried about. The blue spells in the delivery room. The specially made neonatal oxygen mask. The NICU. That other doctor, daughter two’s doctor, he should say, with a mustache and coffee mug and blue pinstriped dress shirt, the crisp, starched, pressed white coat. That other doctor told them the baby needed a spinal tap, when they were in the NICU. Is that okay, that other doctor told them. They didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question. That other doctor asked the Mrs. if she smoked cigarettes during the pregnancy. If the Mrs. drank alcohol, took pills, smoked marijuana—that could be the problem, and why the baby couldn’t breathe right. That other doctor asked the Mrs. if she snorted cocaine while the baby was inside her. The Mrs. cried. The Mrs. hadn’t cried yet that morning, not during the baby’s blue spell, not when the nurse slapped a button on the wall to call a code, not when all staff on the floor rushed in to shout out what was wrong, the baby not breathing, suddenly, when they took the baby away, the baby blue. Steve had cried. He couldn’t stop crying. But the Mrs. didn’t cry then because the Mrs. was on drugs, drugs her ob gave her: muscle relaxers, stool softeners, Zofran, Demoral, Pitocin, ibuprofen, the epidural cocktail, which was why the Mrs. was in a wheelchair when that other doctor asked her rude things, when that other doctor told how it would probably be okay, once they got the results from the spinal tap back.

  That other doctor was right. It was okay. Daughter two didn’t die. Daughter two learned how to breathe in a few days, and they took her home to begin the business of forgetting about blue spells.

  The girl in the blue bikini told Steve how she wasn’t German like he thought she was. I am Finnish, the girl in the blue bikini said. My name is Anja.

  The backpackers told Anja they were leaving. They were backpacking down to the village to get there before sunset. They wanted hand-patted pupusa. They wanted cerveza.

  Anja told the backpackers to go on without her. Anja told them she was staying with Worthy.

  I just met them guys two days ago, Anja told Worthy and Steve, sweeping her long, Finnish-blond hair around her neck. Her dripping-wet hair.

  After they puzzled arms and legs in the tuk tuk—the boy on Steve’s lap because Anja was on Worthy’s lap—the driver told them the tuk tuk wouldn’t start. The driver turned the key but the tuk tuk motor didn’t catch.

  Worthy didn’t know a thing about tuk tuk motors but was willing to take a look.

  Worthy couldn’t fix the tuk tuk motor.

  It was getting close to sunset, Steve thought, or maybe not. How the sunset worked here was a mystery. If it would go dark slowly or all at once. It felt much later than it did before, before the tuk tuk motor didn’t catch.

  The driver told them there was family nearby. A cousin.

  They’re all cousins, Worthy told Anja. Worthy circulated these mountains frequently for work. Worthy knew. Worthy tended to locals for osteoporosis, typhoid, juvenile anemia, maladies of the teeth, broken bones, infections of the feet and gums, suicide, rickets, toxic exposure, diarrhea, battery associative of sexual violence, battery associative of alcoholism, juvenile malnutrition, late-onset obesity, rabies, dengue. Worthy was comfortable in the mountain jungle, with the people who lived here and their complaints. Worthy wasn’t worried.

  They pushed the tuk tuk down the mountain a ways. There were shack houses along the path, sided by two-by-six boards with cracks between each edge so Steve could see in a little. The driver told them they could stay the night. Or they could walk down the path. It was about an hour’s walk, the driver told Worthy and Anja, who both spoke Spanish.

  We’re going to stay here, Worthy said.

  It’s still light out, Steve told Worthy. We should walk.

  Anja took Worthy’s hand. Anja leaned into Worthy. Let’s wait till morning, Anja said.

  Anja told the woman who ran things inside the shack house that she and Worthy would be happy to help with dinner. Anja and Worthy grabbed Tupperware containers and went off for water.

  Steve was left behind. He knew Worthy and Anja didn’t want him along. He sat in a corner to wait, with some coconut shells, with a stack of VCRs that apparently didn’t work and one that did, which was connected to a television. The woman who ran things told Steve something he couldn’t understand. An old-timer was there, the woman’s husband or father, he guessed. The driver and the boy were there too. The driver told Steve something and pointed to the tuk tuk. The tuk tuk waited outside for the guy who knew how to fix things to come.

  Steve wanted to call the Mrs. but couldn’t while he was in the mountains. There wasn’t cell reception. There wasn’t Wi-Fi. He couldn’t Skype with the Mrs. That’s why he wanted to walk back to Juayúa and get in Worthy’s Subaru Outback and go back to Worthy’s apartment in San Salvador. Worthy’s apartment had Wi-Fi. The Mrs. wouldn’t be pleased if they didn’t Skype. Steve’s two daughters wouldn’t be pleased—they’d get no phone-daddy that day, which is what daughter one called him when he was away on business, when she only saw him on Skype, maybe once a day, when there was time to step away from steak and/or sushi business dinners, or slip out of a meeting to video chat with the Mrs. and his daughters back in Milwaukee, which is where they lived. He felt bad he couldn’t Skype. He wasn’t too pleased with himself, sitting in the shack house with the woman who ran things and the old-timer and the driver and the boy.

  The woman who ran things went outside and shouted down the path. Steve didn’t know who was coming up the road, who the woman was yelling to. Ya viene, the woman told him, on her way back to the other room. A neighbor came inside the shack house after the woman.

  She said to come talk to you, the neighbor said.

  Why? Steve asked the neighbor.

  I speak English, the neighbor told him, which he’d noticed already. I used to live in the U.S., in L.A.

  The neighbor had a chance to speak English with tourists who came through, but the neighbor didn’t do this very often. This was embarrassing for the neighbor. The neighbor had been deported from the U.S.

  Usually tourists don’t stop by for dinner, the neighbor said. Why do you stop for
dinner?

  There’s a girl, Steve told the neighbor.

  The neighbor nodded. I saw her. Blue bikini. Tall blonde.

  The neighbor’s neck and arms were covered with tattoos. MS, the neck tattoos showed in Old English script. Mara Salvatrucha. 13. The neighbor wasn’t wearing a shirt. The neighbor had chest tattoos of two women. The women were topless, and each topless woman shared one of the neighbor’s nipples. One real nipple for each woman. One nipple for each woman in ink.

  The neighbor was short but well-muscled, thirty-five or so, maybe younger. The neighbor looked around the shack house. The neighbor’s eyes were dark; there was a softness in them. The neighbor explained the woman who ran things in the shack house was his aunt.

  Nobody knows what to do with me, the nephew said, since I came from L.A.

  Were you in San Sal before? Steve asked the nephew. Or are you from here?

  I was born here, the nephew told him. I went to San Salvador after L.A.

  Steve was afraid of the nephew and the nephew’s tattoos. Maybe the nephew would kill him. Maybe this was his time. On the United flight from Houston Steve had prepared himself to get mugged while in El Salvador, for his digital camera or his Droid with the Skype app to be stolen. If he went into the mountains, like he was now, he’d get blown away, execution style, and dumped in the trees. Maybe the nephew was too nice a guy for that, Steve hoped. Maybe the nephew was no longer a gang member, no longer a deportee.

  Could a person stop being these things? he wondered. Could the nephew just be a nephew? The nephew had tattoos. The nephew had been deported.

  There was trouble in the city, the nephew told him. A misunderstanding. In Santa Tecla. Do you know where that is?

  Steve told the nephew that he didn’t know where Santa Tecla was, or what that meant. It wasn’t in L.A., like he thought they were talking about. Santa Tecla was on the outskirts of San Salvador. The nephew returned to the mountains after the misunderstanding. The nephew’s aunt took care of things after that. She got her nephew a job in Juayúa sweeping out the cathedral where the shrine to the Black Jesus was. She got her nephew a job spraying off the sticky floors of nightclubs with a hose. She got her nephew a job bagging groceries at a supermarket. She got her nephew a job frying chicken at Pollo Campero. She got her nephew a job repairing the highway. Hooligans put big rocks in the mountain highways, on the bends, so cars would hit the big rocks before they could slow down, which the hooligans found funny. The aunt got the nephew a job removing rocks from the highway.

  The aunt brought coffee and stayed close to watch until Steve and the nephew drank from the glasses of coffee.

  Steve wondered what the aunt’s story was. The old-timer was her father-in-law, the nephew explained. The driver, her brother-in-law. Her husband had been killed in the war, slain by a Salvadoran battalion trained at the School of the Americas, in an ambush, they think, in the slaughter at Tenango y Guadalupe. The aunt and the nephew went to the capital a few years later to look for her husband’s portrait in a book of the missing. Human rights groups put together binders filled with portraits of the dead. Guerillas, combatants, the disappeared. The dead from torture, dumped outside the capital for human rights groups to photograph or sketch in graphite.

  The nephew was arrested in the capital when the aunt went to look through a book of the missing. The nephew was from a place rebels were from. The nephew was deported from El Salvador, went to L.A., joined a Salvadoran gang in L.A., was deported from L.A., went to El Salvador.

  The old-timer was at Tenango y Guadalupe too, the nephew told him, but the old-timer escaped the slaughter.

  The old-timer sat in a corner. The old-timer’s beard was cut through by a white scar where a bullet crossed his skin at Tenango y Guadalupe.

  The aunt banged dishes in the other room, where the sink was. The nephew told him how these things weren’t talked about in the shack house. It was true, Steve could see this. The old-timer shifted with displeasure each time the nephew said the words Tenango y Guadalupe.

  My name is Ernesto, the nephew said. My name is Steve, he told the nephew.

  Ernesto asked where Steve came from.

  I live in Wisconsin.

  He told Ernesto about his job, about communications management, about how he’d grown up the son of a lumberyard manager in Geneva, Nebraska, where there was a municipal swimming pool filled with blue water in the summertime and cornfields where he caught toads and other toad-like amphibians when he was a boy, and how he went to L.A. a lot for his job now.

  Probably a different L.A., Steve said. He stopped midsentence because both knew it was a different L.A. than the one Ernesto had lived in after being deported from El Salvador as a boy.

  He told Ernesto about his daughters because that’s what he talked about when he thought people were judging him harshly. He talked about his daughters, the first and the second, and how there was going to be a third soon, if everything went okay.

  You have a family in Milwaukee, Ernesto said. What are you doing here?

  I don’t know, he told Ernesto. This is a strange place to end up.

  They laughed about that. The old-timer, the driver, the boy. They laughed too.

  You know, Steve said. My wife made me promise I wouldn’t get myself killed, or else she wouldn’t let me come to El Salvador in the first place. Now I’m stuck here on a mountain and can’t call her. There’s no signal. What do you think she’s thinking?

  She thinks you’re dead, Ernesto told him.

  Worthy and Anja glowed red-faced and sweaty when they emerged from the trees. Worthy and Anja held hands. Worthy and Anja smiled dumbly to each other.

  Worthy told the aunt that there wasn’t much water. The water Worthy and Anja brought back from the trees had mostly spilled from the Tupperware they were given.

  At dinner Worthy told stories about college. How they met at Marquette. Steve didn’t understand a word of the stories until Worthy said Marquette and pointed at him and the room laughed. Worthy had been pre-med, a walk-on guard for the Golden Eagles squad that made the Final Four. Worthy liked talking about being Dwyane Wade’s backup, which was true enough for Worthy’s purposes. That was over a decade ago. Worthy had curly blond hair and a dark complexion. Worthy’s hair had mushroomed into a Jewfro when Worthy backed up Dwyane Wade.

  Worthy explained how, these days, the missionaries from Allen, Texas, sent doctors into the mountains to inoculate and educate and leave behind booklets about Protestant heaven. Was it all that great of a gig? Sure it was. There was travel. Worthy helped folks who probably needed help. Maybe Worthy had never dreamed of living in Central America. Worthy sure hadn’t during med school, or during the residency in Portland. Worthy wanted to be a surgeon. That didn’t work out. But Worthy didn’t like to talk about anything that might emit a tangent of failure. The job brought Worthy to El Salvador. Worthy was happy here. Worthy belonged here, pushing through the jungle, parking a Subaru Outback on the cobblestone streets of Juayúa.

  The Worthy from college was easy to remember. The Worthy from med school. Worthy belonged to nobody in particular. Worthy belonged everywhere.

  Worthy charmed the room. Worthy still wore the same hairstyle he had in college, the blond Jewfro. Worthy passed out dollars to the boy and other kids who snuck in to see what was going on. Worthy fed dollars through the cracks in the shack house’s siding to kids outside who were too shy to barge in. Anja said Worthy was like an ATM.

  Worthy and Ernesto talked about fútbol they’d seen in Estadio Cuscatlán and Los Dodgers they’d seen in Chavez Ravine. Worthy checked over the teeth and aches and pains of the old-timer. More old-timers came to have their teeth and aches and pains checked over since Worthy had bragged loud enough about being a doctor.

  In the morning the guy who knew how to fix things came to fix the tuk tuk. The guy who knew how to fix things found it easy to fix the tuk tuk. The carburetor was dry, the line from the gas tank pinched from being parked too long on an uneven surf
ace.

  Worthy told Anja she should come to San Sal. They’d go to Costa del Sol. I belong to the beach club there, Worthy told them. Anja agreed that the beach sounded like fun so they left Juayúa together.

  On the ride back from the mountains Steve remembered something else about Worthy. Worthy had called when daughter two was in the NICU, to make it understood that friends were pulling for the Mrs. and Steve and their little angels. It was late at night, Worthy’s voice patched in over some satellite linkup that was only for emergencies. Steve was such a mess when Worthy called. The Mrs. was still at the hospital because she wouldn’t leave daughter two’s side, not while daughter two was in the NICU; daughter two with the special neonatal breathing mask, the blipping monitors that freaked out in the middle of the night when daughter two’s oxygen levels inexplicably, persistently, fell. Steve couldn’t take being at the hospital. He went back to the house in the afternoon, picked up daughter one from Montessori, made her buttered noodles for dinner, made her cookies and milk, put daughter one in the bathtub, tucked her in with her Clarabelle doll, read Madeline and the Bad Hat kneeling at the side of her bed. They prayed together to a cloudy sky; a cloudy sky being how daughter one conceived of God. He answered work e-mails from the couch after daughter one fell asleep, until late. E-mails from HR, his replies explaining that no, he wouldn’t miss more work than he had sick time for; that yes, he would cover his responsibilities. Steve had wanted to quit over HR asking that. He’d wanted to smoke cigarettes on the back deck, from a three-year-old pack he kept in a ziplock bag at the bottom of the deep freeze in the basement.

  Before Steve went to dig up the emergency cigarettes, Worthy called to check on him.

  Steve didn’t know what to say to Worthy over the phone. He was brain-dead. Exhausted. He didn’t have enough love to give. This he knew. He wasn’t smart enough. He wasn’t capable when it came to meaningful things. His baby was in the NICU. His baby was breathing, or she was not.