Crunch

by Rick Bundschuh

  Standing off to the side, they giggled to each other as Holly went through the motions of walking away from a price she thought was too high, only to have the shop vendor plead her back with another offer.

  Soon their arms were loaded down. Monica, the whirlwind shopper of the bunch, held stacks of brightly patterned blankets, peasant tops, and skirts. Jenna had a tooled leather purse, and Malia bought a stuffed aardvark for her seventh-grade brother. Holly, true to her calling, had scored some lipstick and perfume—cheaper than Wal-Mart.

  Bethany normally would’ve been right in the thick of it all, but instead she played the role of lookout for new bargains as she clutched the soccer ball tightly and merely looked. She didn’t have the stomach for spending money on things she didn’t truly need after today’s brush with poverty.

  The group walked farther and farther into the arcade of shops, chuckling as they were dragged into one after another by eager vendors.

  “Uh, Holly, I hope you’ve been keeping track of the time,” Bethany said as they stepped out of yet another shop.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Holly exclaimed, glancing at her watch. “We’ve got to head back…now!”

  The girls burst into action, quickly weaving in and out of concession stands, crowded passageways, and kiosks.

  “Are we lost?” Monica asked, sounding near hysteria. “Don’t tell me we’re lost! Oh, I DO NOT want to be lost in downtown Tijuana! Do any of you know where we are?”

  “Relax,” Bethany grinned. “I’ve been keeping an eye out. We should pop out on the main drag right past this next shop.”

  Sure enough, the girls turned the corner and found themselves once again on the noisy, touristpacked Revolution Boulevard.

  “See? Plenty of time to spare!” Bethany said as the girls made their way past photo-op carts with their donkeys painted to look like zebras toward the crowd that had begun to gather around the vans.

  Kai and Dano looked like they were going to pass out from excitement.

  “Look what I got!” Kai whispered urgently as he walked up to Bethany.

  “What?”

  Kai glanced over his shoulder. Dano did the same, and Bethany rolled her eyes.

  “It’s a Rolex—fully waterproof!” Kai said pulling back the sleeve of his sweatshirt to display a shiny gold watch. “Do you have any idea how much these cost in the States? And I got it for thirty bucks!”

  “A real Rolex?” Bethany asked, suddenly smelling a rat.

  “It says Rolex, doesn’t it?” Kai glanced at Dano with a “girls—what do they know?” look.

  Then Jeff, one of the North Shore body board crew, strolled up and crowed about the great deal he got on a new watch.

  Jeff held out his arm and showed off the identical watch that Kai had just purchased. “Ten bucks! Can you believe it? Ten bucks for a Rolex!”

  Bethany bit her lip to keep from laughing. The look on Kai’s face was payment enough—or so she thought—until Eddie arrived.

  “Oh, I see you bought yourself a Rolex,” he said with a grin as he spotted the watches on the boys’ wrists. “I hear they’re guaranteed to run at least up to the border,” he said, suppressing a laugh.

  “Whatd’ya mean?” Kai asked, looking between Eddie, Sarah, and Maggie. “Aren’t they real?”

  “Real fakes,” Eddie laughed again.

  “But they say Rolex,” Kai argued.

  “Made by Rip-Off,” Eddie quipped.

  Kai groaned, and everyone laughed.

  “Don’t worry, Toto, we’ll be back in Kansas before you know it,” Bethany grinned as she climbed into the van.

  “Gee thanks, Dorothy,” Kai muttered somewhere behind her.

  Bethany laughed as she sank into her seat and gazed down at the soccer ball she had bought. She felt as if she were the happiest shopper in the whole van.

  six

  Eduardo crawled out of bed and blinked a couple of times as he looked around the room. He could have sworn that he heard someone calling his name, but his mother and older brothers and baby sister were already gone. Shivering, he padded across the room to see if there was any food left over from the night before. He found a tablespoon of refried beans left in the pan. Eduardo grabbed up a tortilla from the shelf below and hurriedly scooped the beans into his mouth.

  His family would already be on their way to work through the huge pile of trash that was forming from the morning’s first delivery. His brothers had told him that his friend Bethany must have worked very hard to surf again after the tiburon had taken her arm. His mother agreed. God liked to see people work hard at their jobs, she’d told him, so that was just what he was going to do.

  Maybe if he worked hard enough, God would let him see his face.

  Eduardo slipped on his dirty shoes and went to join them.

  Bethany picked at her breakfast as Sarah finished telling them all about the change of plans for the day.

  She felt a little guilty about her lack of enthusiasm—especially since the change had been brought about because of her—but she was worried.

  “This is very unusual for the orphanage to make such a request on behalf of the children,” Eddie said with a pleased smile. “They tend to be very, very protective of their children—especially with none of them being able to swim. The only reason they are letting the kids visit the ocean today is because your group made such a good impression on them.”

  “Your presentation really inspired those boys,” Maggie added with a wink at Bethany.

  Bethany nodded and managed to smile but continued to worry on the inside. She had felt so strongly about giving little Eduardo that soccer ball. What if things kept cropping up and she never made it back to him before she had to go home?

  “Bethany?” Eddie said, suddenly startling her from her thoughts. “You might want to bring the soccer ball with you.”

  “Really?” she said, trying not to sound too desperately hopeful. Kai heard it in her voice, though. He shot her a supportive grin from across the table.

  “I gave you my word that I would take you. What kind of Christians would we be if we didn’t keep our word?”

  Bethany nodded again—this time happily. Then she caught Monica staring at her thoughtfully, like she was trying to figure something out.

  Bethany didn’t mind. She was too busy thinking about the little boy with the dream of becoming a soccer player…and a smile that could melt an iceberg.

  Eduardo wandered over the crushed wasteland toward the rubbish pile where his family was working. Trash trucks rolled by, their hydraulic lifts hissing as raw refuse and bags of trash hit the ground.

  Eduardo watched a small group rush forward to rip into the rotting and stinking trash bags to search for bottles, cans, or bits of metal.

  Most people carried a gunnysack type bag into which they threw any recyclable materials they found. When a bag became too heavy to drag along, the worker would take the full bag back to the family’s home. There the bag was emptied into a pile to be separated later.

  The job of sorting out the various materials was done by the youngest children in each family. The child sorted the materials into large piles of glass bottles, tin cans, and other bits of aluminum. These materials accumulated until they could be sold by weight. This summer, at the age of five, Eduardo had graduated from sorting to searching for materials.

  “Eduardo, trabajo! (work!),” his older brother shouted over the noise. Eduardo quickly picked up a greasy blackened bag.

  Using a stick, he poked a hole into the bag of trash. Then he rifled through the contents with his hands, holding his breath for as long as he could against the horrid odor.

  He was rewarded with four or five beer bottles, several soda cans, and half a dozen tin cans. He dropped them into his sack and poked his stick into another bag.

  This time it was a jackpot! The bag was literally full of cans and bottles. Maybe this is leftover from a party or something, he thought excitedly as bag after bag yielded similar results. He filled his
sack until it was difficult for him to drag it along, let alone lift. But all Eduardo could think of was how proud his mother would be with his discovery—how proud God would be!

  Huge garbage trucks continued to sweep into the area. They backed up quickly to deposit their loads and then drove off again.

  Eduardo struggled with his overstuffed sack as it became snagged repeatedly on broken pieces of refuse or bits of rubble.

  The crashing and grinding sound of the garbage trucks was all around Eduardo as he gritted his teeth and pulled for all he was worth.

  Suddenly he saw the giant shadow of a truck loom over him. Its massive double wheels backed up over his precious sack of treasure.

  Eduardo yelled as he struggled to free his gunny sack. The roar of rolling trash filled his ears as the contents of the truck crashed around him.

  The truck’s airbrakes sounded, and the wheels turned and released the sack Eduardo was tugging on. As the bag broke free, Eduardo tumbled on his back into a tangled mass of rubbish…and before he could react, the black double wheel of the garbage truck came rolling down on him.

  When the Hawaiian youth group got to the orphanage, the children were almost beyond themselves with excitement. They chatted nonstop and bounced up and down with energy that Holly noted would put Bethany to shame.

  “I say we join them,” Bethany said, feeling better about the day knowing that she would be able to see Eduardo as well. Holly looked at her like she had lost her mind but followed her into the raggedy old van that belonged to the orphanage. The kids squealed in delight.

  “When am I ever going to learn to just say no?” Holly said as she smiled at Bethany and let herself get pulled into a seat with an excited group of boys.

  “Sorry to have to break it to you, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Bethany said as one of the little boys wrapped his arms around her neck. “So, you might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride!”

  Soon the ocean’s blue horizon came into view, and the vans parked on a small dirt cliff just above the beach. The van doors opened, and a wave of children quickly scrambled down a tiny trail to the white sand below. The teens and adults had to work hard to keep up with them and prevent them from running straight into the ocean.

  As Bethany ran with the children to the beach, her eyes quickly went to the surf crashing on the shore. Looks like this place has some surfing potential after all, she thought just as she spotted a perfectly shaped “left” racing in.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Bethany exclaimed, nudging Holly, “Did you see that wave?”

  “Yeah, too bad you don’t have a surfboard or bathing suit,” Holly sympathized.

  “I do have a bathing suit. I am wearing it under my clothes,” Bethany grinned. “When I heard we were coming to the beach, I ran upstairs and put it on.”

  “I wish I would’ve thought of that,” said Holly.

  “Okay, we gotta quit eyeballing the surf and go play with the kids,” Bethany said. She shook herself from the wave-induced trance long enough to remember what they were there for.

  Holly grinned. “Thanks for bringing me back to earth.”

  “Yeah, well, I needed to hear it too,” said Bethany.

  “What you need,” Kai said, startling them as he ran by with a giggling little boy in his arms, “is to show these kids how we have fun at home, Dorothy!”

  “Wait up, Toto!” Dano called as he ran by, his little passenger riding on his shoulders.

  “Hey, that’s my line,” Bethany yelled as she and Holly raced after them.

  For the next hour, Bethany and her friends chased the small fries around the sand, splashed in the shoreline, and made sand castles.

  Lunch was brought down, and Bethany washed the sand off her hands in the tiny incoming waves. She shivered in the icy water as she waded in up to her calves.

  As the group sat on the sand eating their lunch, a car pulled up on the bluff. Out poured three blond-headed surfers. Bethany noticed one pointing excitedly to the “left” she had seen earlier in the day. Before long, the young men clad in wet suits were trudging down the cliff with surfboards under their arms.

  “Look, surfers,” Bethany said to the little boy sitting next to her. She pointed to the young men paddling out through the white water.

  The little boys leaned forward in rapt attention. Every eye was fixed on the surfers’ performance, and each time one of them took a wipeout, the children laughed delightedly.

  Bethany smiled, thinking the guys surfing that afternoon might never again have such an appreciative audience as they had that day.

  “Tu surf?” one of the children asked, suddenly turning back to Bethany.

  “He is asking if you are going surfing,” Eddie supplied with a smile.

  “I figured,” Bethany said, chewing on her lip thoughtfully. “No, no tabla.” Bethany shrugged her shoulders. “Eddie, is that the right word for surfboard?”

  “Yeah, you’ve got it.”

  “Ah!” the boy nodded, but she didn’t miss the disappointment on his face.

  Soon the young surfers began to drift in and walk up the cliff to their car. Bethany saw that they noticed with curiosity the mix of dark-skinned little boys and American teens. When she turned back around, she also noticed that Holly was gone.

  The next thing Bethany knew, Holly was standing in front of her with a surfboard in her arms.

  “The guys said you could borrow this. They know who you are and would be pretty excited to see you surf,” Holly said with her trademark Cheshire-cat grin. Then she added, “Sarah and Eddie already said it was okay.”

  Bethany shook her head at Holly and then took the board from her hands. “I am going to freeze my butt off without a wet suit,” she whispered.

  “Good thing,” Holly replied breezily. “That way you won’t stay out too long.”

  Eddie announced to the children that Bethany would be showing them how she surfed. Moments later, Bethany was slowly plowing her way into the surf.

  Bethany was shivering in the icy water and wondering if she could handle the cold. But then she remembered stories of how her mom “trunked” it through winters in San Diego and how her dad, wearing an antique, stiff wet suit had plodded through the snows of New Jersey to surf in the winter.

  Don’t be a baby; this is in your blood, she reminded herself. But she was still so cold her teeth chattered.

  Okay then, think about the kids.

  It didn’t take Bethany long in the lineup to pick off her first wave. She paddled the unfamiliar surfboard as if she had ridden it her whole life and dropped into the medium-sized wave with grace and ease, stalling at just the right spot to get a short cover-up before rocketing to the end of the section.

  The guys on the cliff stared in astonishment.

  Bethany surfed on five or six waves before coasting to the beach. All of the children ran to meet her as she lifted herself out of the surf. Even the American guys on the cliff came down to talk to her.

  “I have no idea how you did that!” one of them said.

  “Can you believe that!” they said to each other, “I dare you to try to surf with one arm!”

  Bethany smiled shyly and handed back the surfboard. “Thanks a lot you guys—you made their day,” she said as the orphans jumped up and down around her like tiny pogo sticks.

  “You made our day too,” Kai said with a grin as he handed her a towel to wrap around her shoulders.

  “I am soooo cold that if I had a stick in my mouth, you could sell me as a Popsicle,” Bethany said in a shivery voice, and they all laughed.

  With the show over and with pockets full of seashells, the orphans were herded back to the waiting vans.

  As soon as she started to thaw, Bethany’s thoughts immediately returned to Eduardo.

  “Eddie, are we anywhere near the dump?”

  “Did you bring the soccer ball?”

  “Yeah,” Bethany smiled. “In fact I hid it in the van so these kids wouldn’t get it dirty. I wan
t it to be nice, clean, and unused when I give it to Eduardo.”

  “You know, that may be the first new gift he has ever been given,” said Eddie.

  “Wow!” said Bethany.

  “I think we can make a detour after we drop off these kids. Just one van though—we will send the rest back to the dorm to clean up for dinner.”

  “Thanks, Eddie, I appreciate it.”

  “Payment for freezing on our behalf today.”

  “Sounds like a fair trade,” Bethany grinned.

  As soon as they dropped the exhausted but grateful little group off at the orphanage, the group split up. The rest of the team headed for the dorm, while Eddie and Bethany made their way back to the dump.

  Bethany looked for familiar markers as Eddie guided Mike, the driver, through the dusty and dirty roads. Soon enough, she was hit with the familiar smell of rotting garbage. And then the seagulls circling in the sky gave away the dump’s location.

  The single van bouncing down the rough road did not attract nearly as much attention as the caravan had on the previous day. Eddie directed the driver past the concrete slab that had been the home of the portable bathhouse and straight toward the squat collection of shacks.

  Bethany reached behind the backseat of the van and grabbed the soccer ball. When the van came to a stop, she and Eddie hopped out.

  “Thanks again for doing this, Eddie.”

  “I’m happy to do it. Do you remember where he lives?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Bethany as they picked their way past the homes made of pallets and tar paper.

  “Here,” she said, pointing excitedly to the low tarp-covered home.

  Eddie knocked on the door but there was no response.

  He tried again, calling out something in Spanish.

  Again, no response.

  Then a neighbor came outside and began to speak to Eddie in a quiet tone. Eddie suddenly became very animated…and grim. While she wasn’t sure what was being said, Bethany felt like something cold had dropped into the pit of her stomach.