Theodore Wheeler: Bad Faith

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 surface.

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.

Worthy told him everything would work out. Worthy told him sometimes an infant takes fluid into the lungs while in the womb and has trouble breathing and the infant must clear the fluid by herself.

Mortality is a strange thing, Worthy told Steve. You can put your wife in the best hospital in the world and the same thing would happen. The NICU doc will say the same stuff that yours told you, and then they’ll wait to see if the fluid clears. The same as if she was born in a war zone. Or a coffee plantation nowhere close to a clinic.

I don’t know if that makes you feel better, Worthy told him, but it’s the truth.

They got stuck in traffic in San Sal, on the way to Costa del Sol. Anja with her legs crossed in the front seat next to Worthy. Worthy said there was an FMLN rally at Estadio Cuscatlán. They’d seen the leftists, the farmers and machete men from plantations, coming in from the countryside, from the mountains. The back of every oil-burning pickup filled with young men. Which was normal anyway.

Anja told them what she knew about the war in El Salvador. Part of a poem from memory, something an American wrote. The colonel pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.

They ate ceviche at Costa del Sol. They drank coco loco. They stayed at Costa del Sol until sunset and Steve drank cervezas in the Subaru on the way back to San Salvador. In the morning Worthy would drive him to the airport and he’d go home.

I have to piss, Steve told Worthy. Worthy stopped the Subaru at a gas station outside the city. The gas station didn’t have a restroom.

Steve went to piss behind the gas station, into the weeds and tall yellowing grass by the edge of a ravine. From the edge of the ravine he could see the orange twinkling lights of San Salvador and the valley.

The young man with a shotgun snuck up behind him. The young man with a shotgun told Steve something in a quiet voice that made Steve jump at how quiet it was, that it came from nowhere at first, then the young man with a shotgun was saying it again.

Short with shaggy hair, the young man, shotgun shells snug in the cartridge loops of his khaki shirt.

Steve didn’t know what the young man with a shotgun told him. He stood there and said nothing back, his belt undone, his dick out. The young man pointed to his dick with the shotgun and then to the ravine edge.