Here’s how it ends. I’m on a bus in Guatemala, daydreaming about a woman I’ve never met and feeling slightly guilty that I’m not going to die today.
It’s about 100 degrees, I haven’t showered in at least a week, and everyone else smells as bad as I do. People standing in the aisles have been rubbing up against my shoulder, and the slightly overweight woman next to me has had her leg leaning against mine for the past half an hour.
And then the bus pulls to a stop.
We’re on the highway, for God’s sake. Why the bus is stopping is beyond me.
But five minutes pass, maybe ten, and people start getting off the bus. I figure it can’t be any hotter outside, so I grab my bag and go out.
The pavement is shimmering with heat, and there’s a traffic jam that extends up the road as far as I can see to a bend that sweeps behind a mountain. Somehow, though we’re miles from the nearest village, there’s a guy walking toward us on the road’s shoulder, carrying a cooler full of flavored ice. I flag him down and buy two tubes of the stuff, though by the time I get them open, they’re more like flavored cold water.
Still, they hit the spot. And I’m happy enough that I’m out of El Salvador to care too much about our current predicament. So I tilt my head back to finish off the last of my purple “ice” and relish the short inner chill as the liquid shoots down my esophagus. I’m imagining that it’s a margarita when an explosion reverberates through the mountains.
It’s close. It must be. Because I can feel my chest rattle and I can hear glass breaking. I squint to see beyond the bright reflections emanating from the cars stopped in front of us. In the distance, a cloud of black smoke plumes skyward.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I’m not. But knowing it would happen doesn’t make it less tragic. In fact, I’m suddenly feeling so sad that my knees buckle a little, like some involuntary part of me knows it’s not worth taking one more step forward. Might as well just fall down right now and die.
I’m not dead, though. And since nobody around me speaks English anyhow, I say it out loud. “I’m not dead.”
I think about how David patted me on the back in Jutiapa just before getting on his bus. “Doubt is a wonderful thing,” he said.
Now, David Schumaker is no more. The plume of smoke rising over the mountain is coming from his bus. I’m sure of it. David’s dead, and there’s nothing he or I could have done about it.
Still, I feel partially responsible.
I met David when I was in prison in El Salvador. What was I doing in prison in El Salvador? Drugs. Not my fault. Some asshat on a bus just outside of Sonsonate stashed an ounce of cocaine in my backpack. I think it was an ounce. Might have been a gram. I don’t know shit about coke.
In fact, I didn’t know shit about why I was in prison until David explained it to me. He said it was a scheme for taking advantage of tourists, especially solo ones — some guy stashes the drugs on you, the police look through your luggage, maybe taking a few choice items, and then they get you to bribe them to let you out of jail.
I asked him how he knew all this.
“By pretending I’m not fluent in Spanish,” he said.
Same thing had happened to him. He kept quiet through the whole ordeal until they finally came to him with the offer. “You give money, you can to leave prison,” they said. He told them to go to hell.
Why? Good question. That’s what I asked David. Here’s where it gets weird.
His answer: “If someone had told you when you were a kid that you’d break out of a Salvadorian prison when you were 50, would you believe them?”
There was a mouse moving across the floor of our prison cell when he asked me this. It came within a few inches of my feet. I remember thinking he had a lot of nerve, that mouse.
Then I noticed David looking at me with his eyebrows raised, like he wanted me to actually answer the question.
“No. I would not believe anyone who told me I’d break out of a Salvadorian prison,” I said. “Are you telling me that I’m going to break out of a Salvodorian prison?”
“Yes. I’m not entirely sure how it happens, but it will.”
I asked him if he knew when it would happen ‘cause Salvadorian prisons aren’t that comfortable. When he said no, I just chuckled and tried to get some sleep.
I think I dreamt of mice running through mazes. It wasn’t a very reassuring dream, but it was better than being in prison with a nutcase. So when David woke me up in the middle of the night, I wasn’t too happy about it.
“I was just getting comfortable,” I told him.
“Now’s our chance.”
The guard that night was a little green. He may have been in on the scheme — I’m sure they all were to some extent — but this guy was definitely just following orders.
Somehow, David talked me into pulling my pants down and sitting on the toilet, acting like I had painful diarrhea. “Don’t worry. The guy’s not going to come over and verify.”
It was a convincing lie. What David privately knew was that the entire plan hinged on the probability of the guard opening up the cell to verify that my problem was only diarrhea and not some more sinister ailment that could land me in a hospital. Apparently, they were scared to death of an American prisoner ending up in a hospital.
“Bad PR?” I asked David later.
“In a sense, yes. The doctors aren’t quite as crooked as the police. So when a gringo ends up in the hospital, sooner or later the whole scandal gets exposed.”
He was full of fun facts, it turned out, but I was still under the impression that he’d learned all this from eavesdropping.
When I told him so, he just smiled and said, “Eavesdropping is your friend.”
If I’d been able to eavesdrop on David’s conversation with the guard, though, we may not have escaped. I’d have known immediately that David had lied to me.
I almost panicked when the guard came into the cell. I kept one eye on David, who told me to “keep moaning” and motioned to the guard’s hip where his keys hung. “He’s going to check you for signs of insect bites and dengue fever.” I was slightly miffed at having been lied to, but I was curious to see whether David could actually pick a policeman’s pocket.
And in fact, he could.
A few hours later, we simply walked out of jail. The guard wasn’t asleep; he was watching a movie — some bootleg copy of Men in Black dubbed in Spanish. We even grabbed our backpacks, which were stashed by the door, albeit missing most of their former contents, and David stole a gun.
Once outside, I was giddy. “That was amazing!”
He shushed me. “Let’s not celebrate until we’re in Guatemala.”
I expected us to head out of town, toward some trees maybe, a river. Instead, we went straight toward the city center. I was inclined to trust the guy who just got me out of prison, but I needed to have some answers. So I asked.
He said it again: “If someone had told you when you were a kid that you’d break out of a Salvadorian prison some day, would you believe them?”
“I’ve heard this question before.”
“Is your answer the same?”
I suppose my answer was the same. I mean, someone tells you where you’ll be decades into the future, why should you believe them?
For David, though, things were not that simple. When he was 11 years old, his dad was dying of some lung disease. Maybe cancer. I’m not sure.
He went to the hospital every day after school. And since his mom couldn’t get there until she got off work at 5:00, David was alone with his father for several hours each afternoon. I don't know how long this went on for, but one day, he showed up at his dad’s room and there was this old guy sitting next to the hospital bed.
David assumed he was some acquaintance of his father’s, but being a shy boy and not wanting to wake his dad, he kept quiet.
The three of them remained in that odd, silent configuration for a long time. Maybe half an hour. David on one side of the bed, the unfamiliar old guy on the other, and David’s sleeping father in between them.
Finally, though, the stranger spoke up. “David,” he said, startling the boy, “you know how old your father is?”
Of course he knew how old his father was. “Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two,” the man repeated, shaking his head. “That’s too young to die.” Not something you say in a hospital room to a fifth-grader whose father is dying, you know? “You think you’ll live to be 52?” he asked.
By this time, David was becoming annoyed. And he started doubting that the strange man was acquainted with his dad at all. He willed him to leave. But the guy continued. “You won’t live that long.”
Little David still didn’t respond. As he explained to me, “My top priority at that moment was not to wake Dad. And besides, I was a better man back then. Much more willing to put up with bullshit.”
Except it wasn’t bullshit, as David would eventually find out.
“The future’s a crazy place,” the stranger said. “You’ll die in a bus accident in Central America. In fact, you’ll do a lot of stuff in Central America. You’ll go bungee-jumping in the Costa Rican city of La Fortuna. You’ll date a woman who will inform you after three dates and a heavy petting session that she has two kids. You’ll even be an interim news correspondent for news radio in the aftermath of a minor massacre in Honduras.”
The man got out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it, but what a thing to do, you know? I mean, the kid’s dad was dying of lung cancer.
He proceeded to enumerate countless far-fetched scenarios in which, he claimed, David would someday find himself. These ranged from the inconsequential (“You’ll accidentally brush your teeth with a tube of your roommate’s Ben-Gay your junior year in college”) to the milestones of David’s life (“You’ll lose your virginity at the age of 20 on the 7th-hole green at the Whispering Pines Golf Course one night in May”).
Were it not for the cigarette dangling menacingly from the man’s mouth, David said, he might have even been amused. The guy relayed his detailed vignettes with the sort of charm and charisma that often accompanies grandparents’ retellings of their most oft-told memories.
The unlit cigarette bobbed up and down as the man spoke. And though David’s dominant emotion at the time was a sort of bile-filled disgust, he felt something else that took him years to pinpoint. “A tinge of fondness,” he confessed to me, “that’s what it was.”
But it didn’t last long.
The stranger stood and put on his hat (Don’t all villains have a hat? It keeps them perpetually in the dark), and said, “Your foster parents will be good to you.”
Need I say this was a shock?
The man nodded at David and headed for the door.
David spoke for the first and only time. “What do you mean?”
“Son, your father will die tomorrow at precisely 2:01 in the afternoon. You won’t be here to say goodbye.” And in the predictable silence that ensued as David wrestled with whether or not to believe the guy, the stranger followed with another doozy. “And your mother will commit suicide three months from now by driving her car off a cliff.”
Three months later, his mom did indeed die in a car accident. And yes, a cliff was involved. It was never verified that she intended to die, but, of course, David was convinced. He’d been convinced for some time.
The day after the strange man appeared in his father’s hospital room, delivering personalized prophecies, David tried to get out of school early, first by lying to the school’s authorities and then by telling the truth. Finally, when the teachers’ looks turned from scolding to pitying, he simply ran away from them. He made it to the hospital at 2:04.
David told me all of this in the dark of pre-dawn as we hid in a recessed doorway near the city’s outdoor market. As early as 4:30, people started setting up their stands, giving us more and more cover. “The crazier the scenario, the more likely it is that I’ve been told about it,” he explained.
“Like this one?” I asked. “You’ll huddle in a doorway near an outdoor market in downtown Sonsonate, hiding from the police and waiting for . . . What are we waiting for?”
“A truck of some sort, the kind with a flat bed and high walls.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons, really. But mostly because I avoid buses at all costs.”
At the risk of sounding like a five year-old, I was about to ask why again, but then I remembered the prophecy of David’s death. That and I noticed the humorless expression on his face. He took this stuff seriously. For me, it was just some fascinating oddity, like the bearded lady or the boy with elfin ears. For him, it was more sinister.
“It’s not that I know exactly what will happen to me all the time. You see, the old man didn’t relay every experience of my life, just a few hundred highlights or so. I’ve never bothered counting. Hell, I’ve never bothered trying to recall them at all.” He took a deep breath, as though he were about to confess to grave crime. “But I do recall them, typically right before or right after they happen.”
“It must ruin the surprise a little.” When you don’t know what to say, state the obvious.
He paused and looked me in the eye, a smile barely discernible on his face. “Yeah, I guess. But not all surprise is eliminated. I mean, if I told you that you would someday be in a Costa Rican hostal talking to a beautiful Canadian girl about a documentary you both saw on mutations in frogs, that experience wouldn’t be less special once it happened. And honestly, various facets of the experience remain a surprise. For instance, I had no idea who the beautiful Canadian girl would be. I had no idea how we’d meet. I had no idea how beautiful she’d be. I simply knew that when I was in San Jose, chances were good that I’d meet that Canadian girl I was told about.
“It’s like watching the film version of a novel you read ten years ago. It doesn’t take the emotion out of it. You may know that the killer is waiting behind the parked car, but you don’t disengage from the movie altogether, do you?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. David doesn’t ask rhetorical questions, I found out. In the pregnant pauses following his inquiries, I eventually caught on, but never quick enough. On this occasion, I was pondering his odd choice of analogy. The killer behind the parked car? Then I noticed his expectant stare. “N-no,” I stuttered.
“Sure, when you’re told you’ll marry that Canadian girl, it takes some of the anticipation away. But she’s no less marry-able. She’s no less beautiful and captivating. Really, I’d say that it’s hard to dilute the high points of life by predicting them.”
He extracted a water bottle from his backpack, opened the cap, and sniffed its contents. He offered me the bottle after he took a swig himself, allowing me a brief moment to believe that he didn’t have it so bad.
Then he went on.
“It’s the tragedies that you don’t want to know about.” He took another gulp. “Know what the worst thing about tragedy is?”
It took me a second. “No.”
“Inevitability.” He let that word reverberate a little before moving on. “You don’t want to know that one day, on the banks of the Reventazon River, you’ll witness a young girl drown trying to save her dog and that her brother will also drown trying to save her.
“You don’t want to know that you’ll be trapped in the jungle one night because of flash flooding. Nor do you want to know that you’ll get into a car accident your senior year in high school and that one of your friends, the one sitting in the middle without a seat belt, will go flying through the windshield. Even though he’ll survive, you don’t want to know these things ahead of time. It just amplifies your helplessness.”
If I’d been envious of him up to this point, I no longer was.
“And trust me. You certainly don’t want to know that seven years after you marry the Canadian girl you met in San Jose, she’ll leave you. ‘Cause then every hour you spend with her is tainted by the dread that it’s finite, that it will end. And when things aren’t going really well between the two of you, you’ll tend to get a little touchy, you’ll tend to take it out on everyone around you without ever being able to explain that one day, some asshole came into your life and told you this all would happen.”
He offered me some more water, which felt to me like a sort of ritual communion between us. I drank. “So you don’t tell most people about this?”
“No.”
I returned his bottle. “Then why are you telling me?”
“Because,” he said. “I was told about you.” He drank.
“You just mean the prison thing?” I asked.
He wouldn’t elaborate. “Trust me. This isn’t something you want to know.” Not an encouraging thought, to say the least.
Now, besides the fact that I was growing attached to the poor bastard, the sheer strength of my curiosity drove me to tag along with him. I had to know what predetermined fate we shared.
Part of that fate was to ride in the back of a banana truck. David quickly befriended a few vendors at a fruit stand, who were quite impressed with his Spanish. I stood there looking dumb while he arranged a ride for us on a camioneta headed for Ahuachapan, which was apparently closer to Guatemala. Good enough for me.
On the bumpy ride, David asked why I’d come to Central America.
“You’re clearly not a Spanish-speaker,” he remarked.
“Nope. That’s part of the reason I’m here, though.” It had happened to me once before on a trip to Quebec with my wife, I explained. “There were parts of town where they actually didn’t speak any English — or at least pretended not to, I’m not sure. My wife found it aggravating, but I found it completely liberating.”
David raised an eyebrow. “Liberating?”
“Yeah. It kind of lifts you out of yourself, you know what I’m saying?” I’m not gonna say that ignorance is bliss, but sometimes it’s nice to maintain illusions. And ignorance allows that. “When you don’t understand anything, you can believe that people are mostly friendly to each other and to you. You can assume that communication is sincere, that people mean what they say because why wouldn’t they?
"You can believe in benevolence and kind-heartedness and good intentions.”
“You and your wife were having problems, weren’t you?”
For a second, I was speechless. You’ll understand if I was quick to theorize that David was somewhat clairvoyant himself. I mean, who knew? Maybe the old man had touched him on the way out of the hospital room and transferred some magic ability. “How did you know that?”
He smiled at me, no doubt amused by the stunned expression on my face. “I’ve been there, remember?”
The Canadian girl. Leaving him. Right.
“So you came here because of her?” he asked.
I sighed. I didn’t like to think about it. The less I thought about it, the less likely it was that my wife had actually moved out. The less likely it was that she had told me she’d met someone else and that they “hadn’t done anything yet,” but that she felt a connection to him that she’d never felt with me. And so I’d been wandering Central America with a certain disregard for my own safety, getting lost, staying out late, drinking alcoholic beverages with names I couldn’t pronounce, trying exotic new foods. Because when you’re sick on parasites and the owner of the hotel you’re staying at is speaking gibberish, you can believe not only in her patient benevolence and concern (she doesn’t care about your vomiting in her carpeted room or your scaring off other tourists); you can also believe that your problems back home are relatively small and that they’re working themselves out right now. “Ignorance is comfortable. That’s what it is.”
David nodded at me, a silent affirmation. That’s how I saw it. Of course, the truck was so bumpy that it kind of looked like he was nodding all the time. And I’m sure I looked the same way to him. So for the next five minutes, we were content to just nod back and forth at each other. I think we both realized we shared something now. We were both men who’d been dumped. No doubt we both told ourselves we were men who’d been wronged by women, but the truth was we were both men who’d fucked it up ourselves.
And yet, it eased our self-loathing to have found a fellow failure. That’s my theory. ‘Cause at that moment, I felt like I had a brother.
That must have been why he felt comfortable enough to say what he said next.
“You’ve never killed a man, have you?” He looked at me like always, with those expectant eyes.
“No. Of course not.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
More nodding at each other.
“I tracked down that bastard who told me my personal prophecies.”
I coughed. This was big news. What the hell was I supposed to say?
“He’s in Ahuachapan. And I need your help.”
“I have a feeling this involves killing.”
“No, no. Don’t worry about that. I just want to talk to the guy, find out why he ruined my life.”
“And maybe show him that gun you stole earlier?”
“Maybe. But look, you came down here to, uh, disassociate from your past, right?” He waited for my nod. “Well I came down here to disassociate from my future. Don’t you see, we’re two sides of the same coin, you and me.”
“Brothers.”
“So to speak.”
All at once, I felt really tired. I’d barely slept the previous night. Dreaming of mice navigating mazes made for fitful rest. As David regarded me with his best rendition of puppy eyes, I suddenly remembered how, in my dream, I was told to go through the maze also. I thought there’d be a human-sized version of it, but there wasn’t. I had to toe-walk like a ballerina through the mouse-sized maze.
“Look, it’s easy. I just need you to go to the door and ask for Don Zapatero.”
“Don Zapatero?”
He coached me on the pronunciation a little. “Not ‘dawn,’ not ‘done.’ D-o-n. Don. Rhymes with bone.”
The plan was for me to simply determine that a Don Zapatero lived in the house. “Once you find out he lives there, just tell them anything, like you’re selling life insurance. They’ll tell you to go away.”
“That’s all I have to do?”
“Yep. That’s it. Just be sure that you’re absolutely clear on whether he is in the house. They’ll probably even speak English.”
The task seemed innocent enough. So I agreed to it.
Unfortunately, they didn’t speak English. I knocked on the door and a young woman answered. She was somewhere between 15 and 25, I’d guess, but I have a hard time pinpointing the ages of Central Americans. When I asked for Don Zapatero, she invited me in the house and then left me standing just inside the doorway despite my cries of “No, wait. I’m selling life insurance.”
I contemplated leaving since I didn’t want to face the actual Don Zapatero, but when she returned a minute later, there was no old man in tow, thank God. She said something to me in Spanish. I just shook my head.
“Jour name iss Alan?” She spoke slowly.
“Me? No, I’m Joe. Just your average Joe.” I laughed.
She didn’t. “Joe?”
I nodded enthusiastically, thrilled that I’d communicated effectively for once. But then she left again.
And when she returned, she was speaking more Spanish and showing me the door.
“Well?” David asked.
“Well, he’s there, I think. But they kicked me out when I told them my name wasn’t Alan.”
David’s face went white. “What did you just say?”
“She asked me if my name was Alan, and when . . .”
“Holy shit!”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Alan was my father’s name.”
“Wow, that’s weird.”
David put his palms to his eyes and started rubbing them. He looked like he was trying to push them into his head.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
He slung his backpack over his shoulder and faced the Zapatero residence. “There’s only one way to find out.”
I watched him go, wondering whether I’d be hearing a gun shot soon. But as he approached the front door, he looked back at me and shouted, “What are you doing?”
I shrugged.
He motioned for me to follow him, so I jumped up and jogged toward the house. “You’re supposed to come with me.” It was an interesting choice of words (supposed to?) but I decided not to comment on them.
The woman/girl opened the door, saw me standing there, and began to close it again.
“Wait!” David shouted. “Yo soy Alan.”
She eyed us both and yelled something in Spanish. An older woman rounded a corner and came to stand by the first. I guessed they were mother and daughter.
David spoke with them. I couldn’t understand shit.
The women nodded and led us through a labyrinthine house — down one hall, through a kitchen, down another hall, out a door to a courtyard, and finally through another door to a solitary room.
Inside, an old man was lying on a bed, watching telenovelas on a small TV set that sat atop a dresser. He didn’t acknowledge us when we entered.
“Is that him?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
The women spoke quietly, addressing the man as abuelo.
He caught sight of David and smiled. “Alan?”
I’m sure he had some form of dementia. He looked disoriented. But his English was pretty good, and when David nodded, the old guy seemed to brighten up a bit. “This must be your son,” he said. I chuckled.
David glared at me.
The old man wagged a shaky finger at David. “I told him, like you asked. I told him.” Then he looked at me. “Don’t worry, the door’s been broken for years.”
Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I smiled and nodded anyway. I might have said thanks, which was kind of weird now that I think about it.
The old guy extended a feeble arm and held it there for David to take. “Alan, my friend. It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you,” David said. He was crying.
We stayed for soup and David spoke with the grand-daughter and great-grand-daughter, who went out of their way to make us feel at home.
David translated their words for me. “We knew you were coming. Grandpa can still see the future. But he doesn’t remember the past very well.”
I had a little epiphany — or maybe just a memory from high school Spanish — that <em>abuelo</em> is grandpa. David was unimpressed.
Abuelo didn’t talk much during the meal. The women had wheeled him to the table, telling us he was over 100 but they weren’t quite sure how old. They were amazed he remembered David, said he didn’t remember much these days.
I always get a little uncomfortable around invalids. I know, I know: I’m a horrible person. I’ve come to accept that. Still, the utter helplessness of the old and incapacitated, trapped in their houses or hospitals, makes me want to cry.
We ate in the courtyard, the women helping Abuelo spoon soup into his mouth. I tried not to watch, but I couldn’t stop. After the meal, the women went to the kitchen.
Abuelo perked up and cleared his throat. “Alan, I have a confession.” He didn’t look so helpless anymore. His eyes darted briefly in my direction and I pretended not to be eavesdropping. He whispered, “Half the things I told your son were lies.”
If my heart skipped a beat at this news, imagine what David’s must have been doing. I mean, if all the prophecies had come true but some of the prophecies were lies, what did that mean?
David choked out a feeble “Why?” though I’m sure he had more to ask.
Abuelo leaned in closer, but I could still hear. “You remember that man we met in Kansas City? The guy with the leather vest who was always eating pineapple from a can? What’s it he used to say? ‘Ain’t truth that’ll set you free.’
“We were given gifts, Alan. We’ve seen the face of God. But who really wants to see the face of God. It’s death.”
I would come to understand soon enough what he was saying.
In the meantime, I had David to worry about. He looked like he was ready to fall over.
I jumped up from my chair, tipping it backward and startling even myself with the sound of it hitting cement. The women had already cleared the table of anything useful — a glass of water to throw in his face, for instance — but I spotted his backpack resting near the door to the old man’s room, so I grabbed it and extracted his water bottle. “Here,” I told him. “Drink something.”
The grand-daughters arrived just in time to see David refuse the water, push back his chair, and throw his head between his knees. The older woman tended to David and the younger one began wheeling Abuelo away. “Come with me,” he whispered. I was reluctant to leave David, but I followed anyway. I suppose that’s exactly when the betrayal started.
As the girl pushed him toward his bedroom, I held the door open.
“I need your help,” he said. When I eyed the girl, he added, “Don’t worry. She doesn’t understand anything I’m saying.” Not that I was worried, really. I kind of wanted a witness to the conversation, someone to maybe discourage the full scale mindfuck I suspected Abuelo was capable of. Let’s just say I had the more common type of clairvoyance, the kind known in layman’s terms as “a bad feeling about this.”
But the pained expression on his face got me thinking otherwise. The look in his eyes as his great grand-daughter helped him into bed — a look revealing long years of helplessness due either to his geriatric immobility or to the torment of knowing the future — that look only confirmed that he was no threat to me.
“I need you to break me out of this prison,” he said, as the girl offered to change his socks.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“My family keeps me in this room. I can’t get out of bed without their help. It’s time to go.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
He said nothing more. He only snatched my hand in his and held it with a strength that didn’t seem possible. In a brief but vivid instant, I saw the future. I saw a hallway lit by florescent lights reflecting off immaculate floors. A man wheeling an I.V. unit shuffled by. Nurses and doctors hurried towards important destinations. A two-way door swung open, and a stocky, short-haired nurse told me I might want to come in now. In the room, I saw a woman lying on a bed, watching the face of a male nurse, who was coaching her to breathe. When she turned toward me, her lips pursed and face glistening with beads of sweat, it looked like she was blowing me a kiss. She called my name and reached for me, a gesture that almost made my knees buckle with heartache. Hers was a face I’d never seen before, but I knew someday I’d love this woman with my entire being.
Abuelo let go.
I gasped like a man long submerged under water, coming up for air. “How?” I choked.
“One more,” he said. He grabbed my hand again.
This time, I saw the inside of a bus, packed with passengers. A man to my right held a small, tan dog on his lap; in the seat ahead of me, a little boy was playing peek-a-bo, giggling each time he peered over the seatback. Suddenly, the bus swerved left, throwing the toddler into his mother’s shoulder. We tipped over, and bodies fell on top of me. I got kicked in the face a few times as people struggled to right themselves, but then the bus jerked to a stop and everyone fell again. We all started clambering toward the windows, now the ceiling of the bus. I lifted a few children upwards, and just as I was reaching for more, I noticed my own hands. Something wasn’t right about them. They weren’t mine. An explosion shattered the glass, and the cabin filled with thick, black smoke.
Abuelo let go again.
I resurfaced, choking over the only reaction I could vocalize. “David.”
“That,” he said, “is what the face of God looks like. Now you know why you have to help us die.” It only struck me later that he’d said “us.” I was too busy digesting the visions of the future I’d just been subjected to.
It took little justification, though, for me to extract David’s gun from his backpack and hand it to the old man. I waited for the great granddaughter to leave, of course. But I didn’t hesitate once she had.
Abuelo touched my hand — gently this time, like a father — and said, “Tell David I’m sorry.” Only once I closed the door behind me and saw David out in the courtyard, did I realize that the old man had finally called David by his name.
The grand-daughters were fussing over David when I appeared, but they immediately turned their attention to me, gasping and chirping in Spanish.
“What? What did I do?” I asked.
“You closed the door,” David said. He looked like he had a hangover. “Apparently, you just locked their grandfather inside.”
The women rattled the door and said “aye” a lot. Did they know what I’d left behind? “We’ve got to get them out of here, David.”
“You gave him my gun, didn’t you?”
If someone told you you’d break a man out of a Salvadorian prison . . . .
“Let’s go.” David stood up and put a hand to his forehead.
“What about the women?”
“Don’t worry, they’ll follow us to the door. They’ll feel it necessary to see us out.”
He was right. They did follow us to the door. Back through that labyrinthine house we went until we were uttering our awkward goodbyes at the doorway. That’s when we heard the gunshot.
They must have known we were to blame for it. Hell, they may even have known it was coming. But that didn’t make their cries any quieter or any less passionate.
“We can’t stay and help them,” David said.
“I know.”
It felt shitty to leave them there, sobbing on each other’s shoulders, the awful work of cleaning out a bloodstained room left looming over them. But where there’s a death like Abuelo’s, there would be police, and we weren’t in Guatemala yet.
“I think I understand a little more, David. I think I understand how you feel. It’s this sort of helplessness, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer immediately. In fact, he didn’t speak much for the next hour or so. He only gave the occasional directions — “Let’s go left here,” or “This way.” But when we finally hitched a ride on a camioneta headed north, he spoke up. “I wasn’t helpless, you know. I just believed I was.”
It felt reassuring to be in the back of that truck, nodding at each other once again.
“If the old man told me lies, that means there’s hope.” He clasped his hands together as though in prayer. They were my own hands, in a sense. I’d seen them from the unique perspective of their owner.
He smiled. “When we get to Jutiapa, let’s catch a bus to Belize.”
Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t. So I told him he needed to take this trip alone.
“Why?”
I didn’t answer for fear I’d say the wrong thing. If David didn’t take that burning bus north, would I never meet the pregnant, kiss-blowing love of my life? How fragile were these things?
David grabbed my hand — a gesture almost too tender to take. “Oh, no. He told you, didn’t he? Something happens on your next bus trip?”
David’s voice trembled a little, his sympathy towards me palpable. And when I looked in his watery eyes, it felt like I was looking at my own son. I had to give him some hope. So I lied. “Yeah. You need to stay away from me.”
He held my gaze for a long time. A little too long. I thought maybe he saw through me. But then he offered me one last gulp of his water bottle. “I guess I couldn’t break you out of prison after all.”
Buses were leaving for Belize with surprising regularity. We bought separate tickets north. Mine left ten minutes after his.
“You know,” David said, just before embarking, “the old man was a liar.”
“You mean Abuelo?” I thought he might be referring to his own father.
“Yeah. He told you some version of the future. But there’s a good chance it was a lie.”
“I doubt it, but yeah, it’s possible.”
That’s when he patted me on the back. “Doubt is a wonderful thing,” he said. And I saw him no more.
Later, after the explosion and the black plume of smoke, and an hour or two spent on the side of the road, the flavored ice man made another pass. He was dressed in a ridiculous blue jumpsuit with a matching bandana over his mouth and a large, straw sombrero, so I didn’t get a good look at him. But he was about David’s size, and though he said nothing to me, his shouts of “Helados! Helados!” as he walked down the roadside sounded familiar.
He couldn’t have been David, of course. It’s nearly impossible. I know in my gut that David’s gone.
But I hope I’m wrong.