Rainy Season (8 page)

We’re all quiet a moment, turning over this strange new information, and then Charlie adds, “The only thing is, though, I know if I had yellow fever, I would probably be pretty scared to die, but I’m no coward.” A vicious expression fixes on his face, like he’s daring anyone to call him a coward. “Pass me the water, too.”

“Coward fever?” Rat says, looking at Steph. “I never heard that.” Steph nods like she heard of it.

“Well, there’s a lot of kind of yellowish-skinned Chinese still living here, and they’re descendants of the Canal diggers.” Ted hangs on to his point.

“Chinese people here don’t have pure yellow skin.” Rat shakes his head. “It’s more of a goldish-brown colored.”

“I think Lane’s right, anyway.” Mary Jane nods. “Once I got sunburned real bad? And all these hives and bumps were just
trifling
my whole entire skin? And Doc Perkins says, better get this gal some kammymeal lotion, for this here could turn into a bad spell of sun-yellow fever!”

Steph gives Mary Jane the slit-eye. I can tell that she’s fueling up for another attack on Mary Jane’s inability to tell the truth.

“Hey, what was that song Mrs. Ellerson taught us about the mule and the canal last year in music?” I ask Steph. “Do you remember?” Steph doesn’t even see me; she won’t look away from Mary Jane.

“Mary Jane Harris,” she fumes. “You did not once ever get yellow fever, okay? Because before you came down here you got a bunch of shots, remember? And one of them, if you recall, was called a yellow-fever shot? And no—I repeat no—doctor’s going to look at a little bit of sun poisoning and be dumb enough to think it’s a symptom of yellow fever, unless he happens to be a cowpoke relative of yours or something. You’ll say anything for attention, I swear.” Steph’s eyes are hard as bullets.

“I know what song you’re talking about.” Rat turns to me. “‘Erie Canal,’ it’s called. About the mule.” Softly, he starts to sing, “I got a mule, her name is Sal—”

“Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.” I join in. My voice sounds too high pitched and girly, which is sort of embarrassing. “She’s a good old worker and a good old pal.”

“Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal!” Charlie bawls, totally off-key but very confident.

“Just one more stop and back we’ll go, through the rain and sleet and snow! ’Cause we know every inch of the way, from Al-ban-ee to the Buh-fu-lo—Oh!” Soon everyone’s singing, except Ted, who didn’t learn “Erie Canal” in
Escuela Balboa.
We sing-shout it through a couple times, then Rat starts off with “Don Gato,” another music class song, and this time Ted knows it.

I pull up more weeds, finding fresh energy with the singing. It’s rewarding, anyway, tugging at a weed until I feel its witch-fingered roots detangling from the dirt. I keep count of how many Mary Jane tosses in the pile so that I always stay one or two weeds ahead of her. Little private games like that always keep me working longer and faster than normal.

“The fort’s looking good!” Dan exclaims. “Check it out.” He stands and stumbles backward a little from where he’d been hammering. I stand up, too, stretching out the crick in my back. It looks better than good; I can see the beginnings of a real war fort: two solid walls of rough-cut wood sunk tight into the ground over the skeleton box Ted, Dan, and Charlie had constructed. Mary Jane’s and my work has cleared the ground to a floor of solid dirt. Steph’s and Rat’s plywood door is sanded and hinged, ready to slot into place once the third side of the fort is put up.

Ted looks up. “Time to go swimming.”

“I could use the bath,” Dan announces. “I stink.”

“So let’s get over to Miraflores.” Ted starts replacing scattered tools and nails into his toolbox. “Before it rains, right?” He pretends to pop Steph on the head with his hammer.

“I’m ready. Pack up and ship out!” Steph’s voice is hard and fast enough to make us all remember why she wants to get going.

I check Mary Jane for signs of nervousness. She’s kneeling on our new fort floor, spitting into her hands and scrubbing them together to wash off the grass and dirt stains, but doesn’t look scared about the tower or her jump. I bet she’s plotting her escape. That would be a pretty interesting, Nancy Drewish thing to do. Except that Nancy would already have jumped off the tower bravely and afterward laughed while shaking out her dampened curls.

“Creo que va a llover.”
Ted speaks to the sky.
“Tengo mucho calor y estoy sudando.”

“Huh?” Steph laughs and blinks her eyes at him. “Translation, please.”

“Just that I wish it’d rain—I’m hot and bothered.” He ruffles his hair so that it stands up in spikes.

Ted and his parents talk a lot in Spanish—they’re not like a lot of other Zonians, who only speak Spanish if they absolutely have to, and then use a flat American accent. That kind of Spanish sounds strange, though, like bad acting in a dubbed movie. It’s almost as if the Zonians are trying to insult the words while they speak them. Ted says the dialect makes Zonians feel more separate from the locals, more like Americans.

“Ted Tie, Touch and Die!” Steph tries to give herself a man voice. She picks up Ted’s toolbox. “Ted, does that mean if I touch you, I’ll die?”

“Only from ecstasy at my physique.” Ted flexes an arm, and then seizes his toolbox from her.

“Oh right.” Steph laughs and draws her own bony self up to full height.

Sometimes, especially when they aren’t arguing, the combination of Ted and Steph needles me. I’m always sort of half-waiting for the day those two decide they don’t like the rest of us. I could see Steph counting us off with her fingers—
Dan’s too weak, Charlie’s too unstable, Lane’s too quiet, and Mary Jane’s too girly. Rat can be slow
… Although Steph would never ever completely turn against Rat, she’s quick to dismiss him with her mean eyes and her teacher-talk.

As we walk back to the truck, loaded like pack mules with scrap wood and tools, Mary Jane is suddenly at my elbow.

“Lane, I was fixing to tell you something.” Her voice is secretive and I turn to look at her. She’s pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and finally I can see her face, pale and easy to read.

“You never jumped, right?” I say.

“No.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Think she’d push me off?” Mary Jane’s forehead puckers slightly as she frowns.

“No way.” I watch Steph striding ahead, talking casually to Ted and Rat in a way that nevertheless looks like she’s giving orders. “But if I were you, I’d rather jump and hurt myself than not jump and—”

“Yeah, I know. Have Steph on my back until we relocate.” Mary Jane cuts me off. “Don’t go gabbing about it to anyone, okay?”

“I wouldn’t.”

She brushes past me then, rushing to the front of the line as if suddenly she’s impatient to get the jump over and done with.

T
ED HAS THE RIGHT
identification to use the dock and the Canal patrol skiff because of his dad. During school breaks, Ted himself sometimes works as a line handler for the ships. Today, he parks the truck on the bank of the Miraflores lock and pays an old local man working on the dock fifty cents to watch over it.

We take the boat to get to the tower. The skiff has a low-power outboard motor, and there are so many of us crammed in together that I worry through the whole ride that we will sink. It doesn’t help that as soon as we move far enough away from the dock, Charlie launches into a long story about alligators. He talks on about how they swim down from Florida to live in the locks and once they snap you up, they’ll drag you down and bury you in mud flats for days before eating you. “So you’re nice and soft and rotten to sink their teeth into,” he finishes, looking at me.

“Whatever, Charlie. No alligators live here.”

“Rotting, decomposing flesh.”

“If you don’t shut up I’m going to push you overboard.” I shove away from him and stare down at the brown, murky image of myself that trembles on the surface of the water. Silent orange fish dart beneath my face; they flicker and are gone like candle flames. Then the water turns black; I look up into the sky and for the first time notice that clouds have gathered and are covering the sun. It seems like it happened in an instant.

“You were right,” I say to Ted. “About the rain.”

“We better jump quick is all I’m thinking,” he yawns. “Lightning. Of course, we could always sacrifice Charlie to the Lightning Gods and then maybe it won’t rain so hard. Tie him to the top of the tower, sling a shell necklace around his neck …”

“Please feel free to shut up anytime, Ted.” Charlie beats on his chest with his fists. “I’m too tough to sacrifice.”

“It’d be nobler than a lot of other ways you might meet your maker, Charlie. Lightning Gods—gotta love ’em.” Ted scans the water. “Land-ho! I see the Eiffel tower.”

The Miraflores water tower is a tall skinny rusty iron scaffolding that stretches up about twenty-five feet out of the river. We call it the water tower because that’s all we know about how to describe it, although Ted once said it’s a watermark to let ship captains know how deep the Canal is in this part of the lock. I don’t know if that’s truth or Zonie-truth. Zonies like to make up stuff about the Canal and the Zone and the locals, hoping military people accept it as God’s truth. They know that no matter how dumb it is, we’ll most probably believe it, since we wouldn’t know any different.

Ted ropes the skiff to one of the scaffold legs and cuts the engine. We all tip off the boat, falling into the water, shoes and all, and then we scale the iron rungs of the tower up to the halfway ledge, which is the only part wide enough to hold all of us comfortably at once.

There’s enough room to stretch out and relax. The water is patterned with the reflection of shifting clouds. I can stare over the entire width of the lock to the messy snarl of jungle that always borders the horizon. I sit and wrap my arms tight around myself. Everyone else is talking, but I let their voices blend over me, turning into one faded color. For a minute I feel like I’m part of a picture that’s existed millions of years before me, and it’s weird to think it’ll just keep being here after I am gone.

I hook my legs over the grilled ledge of the tower and lie back, my hands crossed underneath my head. Mary Jane lies down next to me while Rat lies on the other side, the opposite way. His head almost touches mine. I hear the others clank up the rungs on their way to the very top, to the jump point.

“You coming, Mary Jane?” shouts Steph from above. She has climbed past the halfway ledge to a higher point on the tower. Her voice bubbles with fake sweetness. “We’re all doing the second highest jump for practice before we do the highest.”

“I’m fixing on one jump,” Mary Jane shouts up. She makes her words strong and loud. “So y’all can practice all you need without me.”

“Suit yourself,” answers Steph. “Dan says if you do the highest jump, he will too.
He
admits he never did the biggie before.”

“We’ll go together. Suicide pact,” shouts Dan’s voice.

“Sure thing,” Mary Jane sings out. She sighs.

“Don’t think about it before and it won’t seem so bad when it happens,” I say to reassure her.

“Tell me one of your stories, Lane.” she says. “Take my mind off.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time Charlie and I cleaned the kitchen?” I ask. Mary Jane shakes her head no.

“Thing was, we didn’t have to clean it but Emily—I’ve told you about her, she was our baby sitter in Rhode Island—Emily always wanted to do these extra things for our mom and dad, being older I guess, so one day she decides we’re going to scrub the kitchen floor. It sounds boring and all, but it ended up kind of fun, see, because she took some string and tied these wood-backed scrub brushes like skates to Charlie’s and my feet, and then she poured the cleaning stuff all over the floor and turned on the radio, and we had a dance contest. Charlie and I were doing the twist and all these other dances and Emily was using the mop as the announcer’s microphone …” I look over and notice Mary Jane’s not really paying any attention to my story. Her eyes stare across the lock in a sort of vague distant way.

“It’s hard to picture Charlie doing something so goofy. He used to be a lot more, though. Goofy, that is,” I say quietly, more to myself.

“Goofy,” repeats Mary Jane. I guess she’s thinking about that jump.

From above, Ted’s tucked body hurtles past us and cannonballs into the water.

“He was younger then,” Rat says. His voice startles me; it takes me a second to realize he’s talking about Charlie. I didn’t think he was even listening to us.

“Yeah,” I agree.

Charlie’s whoop fills the air as he whistles down, following Ted’s splash. Their laughter rises up to us from the water. Dan and Steph jump together, holding hands and howling to their double splash.

“Ted and Charlie even jumped off near the Culebra Cut last year,” I mention. “Charlie said it was better than this jump because it’s higher and it’s more natural, off a cliff.”

“Jumping off this tower, or even Culebra, doesn’t seem so much fun to me,” Rat remarks. He’s so close that I can feel his breath, like dew on my cheek as he talks.

“No.” I stretch out my arms and sit up. “I’d rather listen to the quiet.” And yet, peaceful as it looks, the lock itself, dug out of the earth and soundlessly brimming or sinking with its mechanical tides, is nothing but trouble. The Canal’s the reason my family is here, the reason that all the military bases are here, the reason everyone’s so mad at Jimmy Carter right now; because he’s giving the Canal back to Panama. Supposedly the new agreements with President Torrijos say that by the end of this century no Americans should be in Panama at all. The news stories about the Canal seem so far away from the flat dark path of water stretched out in front of me.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re a million miles away from everywhere, living here.” I say, almost under my breath. “In a whole other land, off on our own practically forgotten about.”

“Doubtful.” Rat frowns at me. “The army’s not forgetting about the canal anytime soon. We’re here to protect and defend.” He lifts up his chin in a way that reminds me of Steph. “We should keep the canal, anyhow.”