Theodore Wheeler: Bad Faith

After lunch Worthy scouted for a room that would be needed for the following weekend, to return to with a Peace Corps girl who would put out if meals and a hot shower were involved.

Worthy drove them to Juayúa. They paid respects to the Black Jesus shrine in the white stone cathedral in Juayúa. Worthy told Steve they should get a tuk tuk to take up the side of the mountain to see the falls.

Los Chorros de la Calera, Worthy told him. That’s what it’s called.

The boy next to the tuk tuk didn’t say anything. The boy didn’t know English. The boy didn’t appear to know Spanish. Worthy talked to the boy’s father. The boy’s father was the driver. The driver said he’d take them to the waterfalls. Upside the mountain. The driver set a low price and Worthy told the driver that would be fine. This was November and not much was going on. Worthy paid half up front, then they all squeezed into the rusty three-wheeled taxi — two big Americans in the back with the boy between them on the metal bench seat. Both Steve and Worthy craned their heads toward the middle, over the boy’s head, so they’d all fit.

The driver scooted them around the square in Juayúa. Women set up card tables to sell pirated DVDs and CDs and salted fruit and packaged marzipan. The tuk tuk rattled and shook. The mountain path was washed out, rutted through. The driver, one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle to rev and unrev, kept the motor going through its pops and sputters. The boy laughed between Worthy and Steve in the back.

The driver stopped halfway up the mountain, where the path ended at a chain-link fence. They got out. Worthy told the driver to wait.

Waterfalls rumbled somewhere beyond the gate, beyond the wall of leaves and spindly tropical trees that quivered up to sunlight. Steve followed Worthy to the noise, along a footpath that went into the jungle.

Steve thought they’d be alone at the falls for some reason, but there were people, backpackers, a girl in a blue bikini swimming in the basin pool where the smaller of the falls stopped, before a bigger one cascaded to the bottom of the valley.

Worthy told him to not swim in the water.

It’s freezing. That water comes from the top. Jump into icy water like that and your heart might stop. An old guy like you, Worthy joked.

Backpackers swam and splashed and yelled about how cold the water was. One of the backpackers hauled up onto a stone ledge with a hanging vine then leapt back, hollering, into the water. Aside from the girl in the blue bikini, only young men swam in the basin pool. Their packs leaned together, away from the cliff. Their clothes trailed to the water. The girl in the blue bikini was very blond. Maybe she’s German, Steve thought. He saw the girl’s body under the icy-clear mountain water. The girl’s long arms and legs shivered like a mirage under the waves she made with her kicking and paddling and laughter.

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.