by Roger Bruner
Worst of all, though, I wasn’t always conscious of cursing. Sometimes I didn’t remember doing it. At least I never took God’s name in vain. I was sure of that. But I was scared I might do it yet and have lightning strike me some sunny day—like an unseen hand zapping an annoying, unsuspecting mosquito.
Figuratively, if not literally.
I needed to kick this swearing habit, and I needed to do it yesterday. I’d made a fresh start at orientation. I was proud of holding my tongue when I didn’t feel like it. But … I’d just blown it again.
Only thirteen precious days remained for giving up cursing. Could I do better tomorrow? I’d have to. After all, tomorrow would be another day. For both me and Scarlett O’Hara.
I reached under the blanket to examine the rock I’d hit my head on and snickered without amusement at finding myself between a rock and a hard place in more ways than one. My confidence about how much I’d accomplish on this trip had evaporated with the change of projects. Why didn’t I feel more enthusiastic about Santa María when I felt so sure God wanted me here?
Why had He brought me this far and let roadblocks and detours keep popping up? The worst one was my own self-doubt. If I couldn’t live up to my own expectations, how could I ever hope to live up to God’s?
If God had wanted to close the door on this trip, why didn’t He do it before I left home? At least I’d be lying comfortably in my own bed without a budding headache rather than tossing and turning on a stinky old blanket in a dirt field in the wilds of Mexico among a bunch of snobby Christian girls.
Not that the boys were much better. But at least they were out of sight in their own field.
Touching the back of my head as delicately as if it were made of butterfly wings, I winced in pain. But at least I couldn’t find any traces of blood—wet or dried—on my scalp or in my hair.
I’d inherited some outstanding physical traits from my Vietnamese mother. Not just the glossiest head of black hair a girl could hope for, but also dark brown eyes and slightly darker-than-normal Caucasian skin that resembled a permanent low-grade tan. Each summer, I worked hard at improving on it. Since my face didn’t have any Asian features, nobody knew about my mixed background unless I told them.
Because I had so much of my dad in me, I looked like an all-American hybrid. At least I didn’t get his boring, pale blue eyes. How often I wished I’d inherited a few inches of his height, though.
An all-American hybrid?
Yes, but I also looked vaguely like the natives of Santa María, who weren’t nearly as dark as some of the Latinos I’d seen. The exterior similarities didn’t do much to make my interior feel the least at home in my new surroundings, though.
After pushing some trash out of the way and running my hands over the adjacent ground to find a spot free from rocks, I realigned my blanket and knelt again. After a slower, more careful descent, I made a pillow-soft landing any airline pilot would have been proud of and stretched out full-length.
I nestled my head in the crook of my left arm and closed my eyes. Unused to going to bed early, I was more exhausted than sleepy. Experience had taught me that sleep was the best way to drive away negative feelings; but the harder I tried to relax, the more I woke up.
What I wouldn’t have given to hear a sweet, soothing lullaby, but I was too many years and too many miles from anyone who might sing one to me. I wouldn’t dare call Betsy Jo on my cell phone at this time of night and wake her for something like that.
Aleesha could have done it, but I didn’t want to wake her up, either. We’d gotten off to too good a start.
I scratched my nose with fingernails that would be the uttermost of ugly nubs by this time tomorrow and sighed.
Thy will be done.
As I prepared for the sleep that had to come eventually, I rolled up in my borrowed blanket. Aware that I resembled a size-two caterpillar in a size-twelve cocoon, I imagined God and His night-duty angels chuckling at me, and I managed a slight smile. But restoring my normal sense of humor—not to mention my feeling of purpose and well-being—would take more than that.
chapter fourteen
Day 2
Kim?” The female voice spoke in a mechanical tone. “Miss Kim Hartlinger? It’s dawn, and this is your wake-up call.”
The female voice sounded vaguely familiar; but since I was still 99 percent asleep, I ignored it and hoped it would quit bothering me.
“Wake up, Kim.” The voice changed to such an overly sweet tone that I thought I was lying in my bed at home.
But my bed wasn’t hard and lumpy.
“Time to rise and shine, Kim.”
“Mom, I’m up.” My grumble was barely audible. I thumped a multi-legged critter off my nose where he was having way too much fun bodysurfing on the residue of last night’s insect repellent.
After turning onto my stomach, I buried my face in my arms to keep out the light. I wasn’t alert enough to wonder where the bug had come from or why I was lying in a field of light.
“This isn’t your mother, little one.”
No, the voice definitely wasn’t Mom’s.
I looked into Aleesha’s alert, wide-awake eyes. Her face–mostly her smile—glowed in the early morning light.
“Do all black people wake up so alert?” I said with a whiny moan.
“You told me you weren’t prejudiced, Kim. Was that a little white lie?”
I yawned, but not in response to the question. “No, not even a little Caucasian or half-Asian half-truth.”
We laughed together then. I’d already concluded that Aleesha was loving, lovable, and slow to take offense at anything people didn’t mean offensively. She never stopped demonstrating what an original she was. Some people might have called her a show-off, as if all of us aren’t original and don’t show off sometimes, but Mom would have described her as a “character.”
Aleesha was her own person for sure.
She attributed my occasional racial misconceptions to ignorance. The ignorance of living a segregated life in an integrated world—that’s how she described it—and she was right.
I couldn’t help the fact I didn’t know more than a handful of African Americans by name. As the kids of university professors, they probably never drove through ghettos or modeled any of the popular racial stereotypes.
Aleesha hadn’t answered my original question, though, so I tried again. “So, are you saying every African American in the world jumps out of bed fresh-eyed at dawn? Aren’t any of them sleepyheads like me?”
Lord, didn’t You make some of them need caffeine to wake up, too?
“I hear you thinking, girl ….”
“You can’t do that,” I said as if she’d caught me making an innocent slur. “Nobody can. Nobody but God, anyhow.”
“Well, if not, how come I know what silliness you’re thinking?”
“Silliness, Aleesha?” I said, trying to channel my thoughts to something so innocent my mind wouldn’t be worth reading.
“What you were just thinking about …” she said, ending with a dramatic pause. “What you were thinking about was both silly and irrelevant, and I’d be embarrassed to say it aloud if I were you.”
“Oh.” What else could I say?
And what else should I have expected from a personable, extroverted theater and drama major? If Aleesha had lived in Elizabethan England, she would’ve managed to become the first woman to play a female role at the Globe Theatre. Now she’d undoubtedly insist on playing the Bard of Avon himself if Shakespeare in Love was ever remade.
I remembered that she hadn’t answered my question, but she’d dodged it so long I forgot what it was. So I tried something else. “So what’s this business about getting up now?” I glanced at my wristwatch. I’d carefully reset it to San Diego time before landing, unaware that I’d end up in a village time had apparently ignored and forgotten about.
“Come on, girl,” she said. “Daylight has been on its way for half an hour now. We’ll see the sun soon.” S
he started humming, whistling, and thumping a rap version of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” She was good, but why did that surprise me?
“My watch says 5:45 a.m.,” I protested. “I have plenty of time left to sleep. The sun may be on its way, but I’ll wait for a formal appearance before making my own, thank you very much.”
“Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim,” Aleesha said, as she wagged her head from side to side in mock disapproval.
“Aleesha, Aleesha, Alees-” Although my disfluency often involved repeating words unnecessarily, I got so tongue-tied trying to say Aleesha’s name four times in a row that I gave up rather than start stuttering.
Several years earlier, a casual acquaintance with a speech impediment asked if I had one, too. I’d never thought about it before, although I knew Mom and Dad would have done something about it if they thought so.
Nonetheless, a question like that coming from someone a horrible speech impediment had turned into an expert—someone I didn’t even like that much—made me so self-conscious I had worse problems from that day forward. Especially addressing groups of one or more whenever I thought somebody was actually listening. Although I seldom had problems in relaxed conversations among good friends, I could stumble over or start repeating words anytime I started thinking too hard about what I was saying.
The power of suggestion had proven more dangerous than the actual disfluency.
Maybe that’s why my oral French skills were inferior to my written ones. And why I was only class salutatorian instead of valedictorian. My teacher had to give me a B once for the way I messed up oral French.
I knew and comprehended the rules perfectly. The French in my head was flawless, and my teacher seemed to understand that; but she had to grade me on how it came out.
Some people thought I’d begun speaking disfluently just to get attention, especially since I’d never had the problem to such a, uh, pronounced degree before. Most of my friends thought it was cute, although some of my teachers thought I was showing off. The boys loved it, although they quickly learned I never had a problem saying no and proving I meant it.
I hated having a problem like that inside my head. One way or the other, that is. But the harder I tried to speak fluently, the worse things got. Stressing out over the inability to relax is tough ….
“I guess you didn’t hear that part of orientation yesterday, huh, Kim?”
I’d wondered if I was missing anything important when my mind started wandering during orientation, but I was too exhausted to care.
“After the shock about the project changes, I’m not sure I listened to that much of orientation.” At least I could be honest with Aleesha about it.
“Kim, Kim, Kim,” Aleesha said gently and sympathetically.
I didn’t try saying “Aleesha, Aleesha, Aleesha” back. Aleesha was a nice enough name, but I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t roll off my tongue easily even once.
“So, what did I miss hearing?” I yawned involuntarily and lay back to unroll from my blanket. The mothball smell hadn’t weakened since last night.
While waiting for Aleesha’s response, I instinctively grabbed my cell phone from my purse and powered it on to check for voice mail and text messages. Surely I’d have something from Betsy Jo by now.
But Santa María was even further in the boonies than they’d told us. My phone couldn’t find a signal. We weren’t even in a roaming area.
I tossed it offhandedly on my blanket. It bounced off and hit a nearby rock. The battery cover popped off, and the battery flew out. I enjoyed a good belly laugh about that, and Aleesha looked at me like I was crazy to think breaking my cell phone was funny.
Actually, I was laughing with relief that my head hadn’t popped open the same way when it hit that same rock last night. It had to be the same one. It was the only one in sight.
Aleesha smiled at me as if pretending I was normal, and her acceptance made me feel like I was watching the sunrise ….
I couldn’t say whether guys considered Aleesha pretty, but I wouldn’t have wanted to compete with her. Although she was a few sizes larger than me, she was also taller by inches. A number of them. Better proportioned than me, she even had a definable waist. I was too old to keep beating up everyone who called me “snake hips.”
Although her workwear wasn’t Gucci, American Eagle, Aéropostale, or Hollister (“At least I had enough sense to leave all my fancy clothes at home,” she’d ragged me unmercifully), she wore her clothes well.
If Millie Q.’s teeth had looked more like Aleesha’s—she’d never worn braces—I wouldn’t have noticed them. Aleesha had a radiant, unblemished complexion my friends would have killed for and wore modest, understated makeup. And I would have killed for her tan ….
“You missed the part of orientation about aligning our work hours with local daylight hours. We’ll get up at dawn and prepare for the day ahead. Although we’ll dress, eat breakfast, and get organized, we won’t start work until there’s enough daylight to prevent accidents. Without power for lights, we won’t be able to work or play after sunset.
“Even with flashlights and those cactus-fueled bonfires, walking around in the dark would be dangerous. The litter the storm brought is mostly single layered in our fields—”
“Except between the sleeping bags,” I pointed out.
Aleesha nodded. “But even a single layer can hide dangers we’d easily see in daylight. So we’ll go to bed with the chickens. You know what Ben Franklin said; Rob and Charlie insisted on quoting him ….”
“Oh, yes!” I said, hissing my s with sibilant disgust. “I hear that every morning at home. But at least I haven’t heard it since yesterday.” I laughed at myself, and Aleesha had the good taste not to.
Together we quoted Rob, Charlie, and my parents in a silly, singsong voice that reminded me of the mice in Babe: “ ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’”
Aleesha repeated those words but put them to a hip-hop rhythm. I enjoyed her twist on something so boringly familiar, and we did it as a duet several times. Aleesha was one clever gal. For me to appreciate hip-hop—especially this early in the morning—she had to be good.
And she obviously had good sense. She’d picked me as a friend.
“So I really need to get up, huh, Aleesha?”
“Yes, ma’am, that you do, Miss Kim.”
“Well, Miss Aleesha, at least I seem to be dressed already. Yesterday’s travelwear is the closest I’ve got to construction clothes. Refreshing my deodorant might help, though.”
I hadn’t expected to laugh at myself so easily today, especially since I’d never slept in dirty clothes before, much less worn them a second day ….
I changed clothes three or four times a day at home. That’s one reason I had so many of them.
That’s also why Mom made me do my own laundry. See, Mom, I’m learning responsibility! I threw some of her laundry in with mine from time to time, too, and the only things I ruined were her favorite white skirt and top. How was I supposed to remember not to wash whites with new, never-before-washed vividly colored brights that might run?
As daylight brightened, I noticed a hole in the pants leg where my knee had lost the battle with the rocky ground last night. If I had to ruin my favorite clothes, I’d do it one outfit at a time. Leaving any apparel here might not be a sacrifice. I probably wouldn’t want to put such filthy clothing back in my suitcase. They’d leave it smelling worse than mothballs.
How much less important that seemed now than last night, though. Yesterday’s stress and fatigue hadn’t helped my clarity of vision.
Neither had the shock.
“I’m starving,” Aleesha said. “I wonder what’s for breakfast.”
“I can smell the coffee from here ….” I licked my lips. I hoped they’d brought the kind of sugar substitute I liked; I detested the other popular kind.
“It’s a mirage, Kim. There’s no electricity here. No running water. Remember? Ergo a
nd therefore, no coffee. Not hot coffee, anyhow.”
“Oh.”
I felt dumb for forgetting about our uncivilized circumstances. But how would we have a nice hot breakfast without electricity? After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Maybe Rob and Charlie had brought gas grills. Yes, that must be it. I sniffed the air for the scent of food cooking, but the breeze must have carried the aroma in a different direction.
“You’re not imagining things, Kim. You’re smelling some super-strong, coffee-flavored candy I brought to make up for not having the real thing. It contains mega-amounts of caffeine. You want a piece? Under these circumstances, you must pretend to enjoy the amenities you’re pretending to have.”
“Sounds great, although I’m not sure I’d consider coffee just an amenity. I’m glad to know I’m not going crazy, though.”
“Girl, that doesn’t mean you’re not going crazy. It just means you’re not going crazy about smelling coffee.”
I started laughing so hard I couldn’t respond at first.
“Can you drop a piece of that candy in my cup, please, and do you have a spoon I can stir it with? It’ll help me pretend better. Then let’s see what they’re going to feed us.”
chapter fifteen
Some of the most gorgeous yellow flowers adorned the cacti in the area. I couldn’t imagine ever losing my fascination with them.
While strolling over to the mess tent, Aleesha explained that it wasn’t a tent at all, nor was it any more covered than the field we slept in. It was the site—the rough equivalent of a dirt foundation—where the largest of Santa María’s buildings had stood before the storm. I never found out what the lost building had been, although I wondered about it enough.
My experience on local, church mission trips had taught me that teens and young adults can be quite imaginative—even sarcastic—in perceiving and labeling their surroundings. “Mess tent” in this setting was just one example. Another was referring to the well-worn dirt path that separated the mess tent from the rubbish-covered, so-called Passover Church yard as “Broad Street.”