Theodore Wheeler: Bad Faith

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.