by Shelby Hiatt
Four days later we arrive in the Port of Colon, Panama.
Seven
Panama is even better than I hoped, thick with humidity, raucous noise, and heavy, sultry scents. I'm not in Dayton anymore.
The Chagres River cuts through the dense rainforest and disappears in ribbons of slick licorice blackness.
Big, leathery flowers surround us. Their exotic fragrance mixes with the smell of unfamiliar foods and oils.
Outrageous color is everywhere. Gorgeous, gaudy parrots swoop through treetops and flash yellow, blue, orange, and some wildly unnatural pink.
Dozens of languages come at us from faces that are black, beige, yellow, or the Cuban Spaniards' white—it's all far more than I imagined.
Women are half naked, wrapped in brilliant colors, wearing turbans. They carry fruit and babies and walk with an undulating indifference I've never seen before. I want that, that cool half-weary walk so unlike anybody in Dayton, a state of mind in a lazy gait. Amazing.
And running through all this a few yards from the footpath is the canal itself. The center of everything. Not a ditch. Not even a big ditch. It's the largest man-made canyon on planet Earth and they call it the Cut. Filled with laborers and machinery as far as the eye can see, this teeming mix of metal, flesh, and boulder spreads gaping beside us as Mother and I ride along wide-eyed in the gleaming Canal Commission passenger train taking us to Culebra, fifty miles on the other side of the Isthmus. Panama runs east-west. The canal and the Zone and the Commission railroad run north-south. I picture it as we ride, my map study paying off.
The Zoner ladies from the ship are seated nearby and pay little attention to us or to the new world outside; it's not new to them. But we're first-timers and we're dazzled. The blinding sun, the sounds, and smells boggle us into silence.
In Culebra, Father is waiting, smiling to see us. He's so excited, he hugs us twice each. He keeps saying, "My best girls," then wipes his forehead and replaces his hat. It's not a fedora. It's a heat-worthy woven hat with a wide brim, the kind worn by the bosses, the Americans in charge. Father's a canal boss and stands out in the crowd. I puff a little with pride.
"Be careful, now," he says and helps us into a horse-drawn wagon. There's a Canal Commission emblem on the side and a canvas canopy on wobbly poles protecting us from the sun.
"Comfortable?" he asks.
"Pretty hot," Mother says.
"You'll get used to it."
I'm suffocating.
Eight
The driver clucks to his nag. We move off and Father starts talking. I've never heard anything like it, not from my reserved father. He's usually quiet and thoughtful, speaking when he's spoken to. But now, this unbridled enthusiasm that Midwesterners take pains to avoid, because it's too revealing of emotion and too fast, pours out of him. He speaks with no restraint and his enthusiasm is simply harmless bubbling energy. It's genuine. Mother knows that, although I can see it puts her off a little.
He recites details of canal construction and of his work. Mother responds with "How is that, again?" and "Good heavens." On he goes, a hyped rattle that interests me just because it's from Father and so unlike him.
"It's organized. Whole operation runs like clockwork, department for everything—supplies, personnel, living quarters, buildings, architecture"—Mother smiles at his rush of words—"machinery, of course, and maps, topographical and substrata—we use those every day ... and there's a printing and climatic-conditions department, and river hydraulics because we're so close to the Chagres, and the communications department—we'd be lost without them..." I've never heard him say this many words at one time. "...all set up before I got here, of course—engineers worked it out—" And he's about to go on but ... "Ah, look. Now you can see it."
The Cut in full view below us.
It seems we've landed on another planet.
Half a mile across at the top, thousands of laborers on the floor looking like insects. Trains stacked up the side moving back and forth, carrying off dirt and rock. All of it, men and machines, minuscule in the distance against the vast excavation.
"Yours?" Mother asks. "The trains?"
"Yep. And on the far side, see the trackshifter?" A steel pterodactyl is dozing there. "Darnedest thing," he says. "Picks up the rails every evening and moves them like toys. Workers find out where to show up in the roundhouse each morning." He shakes his head in wonder. And he's not done yet. He points in another direction.
"See those steam shovels? They're ninety-five tons each. Outfit called Bucyrus makes them for us. Three times the size of anything you'll ever see in Dayton—anywhere else, for that matter. Two men on each shovel—one controls the crane and picks up dirt, the other's got his hands and feet on levers to control the rest of the machine. They're like bronco riders, those fellas." Then, with genuine respect, "Strong, thick-skinned boys—they're in that blasting and heat six days a week. It's hard work and dangerous."
It looks like he's finished for a while and he gazes at the operation satisfied.
Mother clears her throat. She sits ramrod straight as though in our quiet Dayton home. "Well, it certainly is going to be one of the wonders of the world," she says. Father grins.
I finally pipe in. "Where does the dirt go?"
"Gatun Dam in the Chagres. Whole towns being built on that landfill."
Nine
As wonderful as everything is (I've seen nothing like the Cut ever in my life), I'm still watching for something really exotic, not sure yet what that would be. I badly want my life to change. So I can't help being disappointed when we arrive at our new-world house that looks very much like the old-world house in Dayton—typical Midwestern clapboard with a long screened porch. Maybe I was expecting a thatched roof, I don't know.
Mother isn't disappointed—it's what Father promised. "Will you look at that," she says, a big smile at the familiar structure.
Inside it's the same layout as our house in Dayton (these Canal Commission builders knew how to replicate the heartland). Nice living room, kitchen with laundry, and dining room on the first floor. Two bedrooms and bath above. Plenty of closet space. Rockers on the porch. "So you can watch the sunset," Father says. Then he says to the black men who've unloaded our cases, "Gracias. Ustedes pueden vayar."
Now, that's something different. Spanish from Father—simple, proper, but effective, and the men leave, just as he told them to.
Father begins pushing the sofa nearer a window according to Mother's orders and I see that furniture arranging could go on for a while. I go upstairs.
My room looks across the Cut and it's better than the one in Dayton, if only because it's empty. It's a grown-up room—plain, no pictures on the wall, none of my drawings trying to be young Michelangelo with sepia pencil crosshatching. Just clean, bare walls and a big window.
I've brought some light clothing and a few notebooks and that's it, no décor. I'm going to leave it simple. Adult and not Dayton.
In the evening when we are "put away" and "hung up," Mother discovers ants threading across the kitchen floor. She sweeps them out. Father plasters puttylike goo around the door and windows. I scrub up.
Mother cooks us a fine little meal from the goods Father has laid in and all's well.
When we go upstairs and fall into bed, I wonder if my parents will make love after being apart so long, but the thought is only a streak through my teen brain already packed with uneasy excitement. I keep wondering if this is it, the place I've conjured for years. Does it match my fantasy?
I lie in bed and study the shadows on my ceiling, leafy and stretched oblong, not so different from the ones in Dayton. I try to work out what I feel about this new place, think I'll never fall asleep. Then the scent of Mother's Dayton soap in the sheets blurs me and I'm anesthetized into deep, dark Panama night.
The fantasy is out there. I'll find it.
Ten
And I do. But not right away. It gets worse before it gets better. I continue to be cranky with the heat a
nd look to Mother for sympathy, but I get none. She's doing fine and that too irritates me.
Her cake falls from the daily blasting that shakes the house and the oven but it doesn't bother her. She serves "flat cake" with thick dollops of whipped cream. It's delicious. So is everything else she makes. Panama's fruit and vegetables are abundant and fresh and cause some inner chef to bloom in her, producing wonderful platters unlike any she ever concocted in Dayton. As for her new house, it's better than the one she left behind. So all in all, the place she dreaded is not dreadful in any way. She's content.
But not me.
After a week I realize with a fair amount of horror that the Zone is really just like Dayton. It's meant to be. And not just the houses. Coming to us in weekly boatloads are favorite American foods, books, magazines, clothing, and hardware, as though we were on Main Street U.S.A. All around us are the familiar men's clubs—Kiwanis, Elks, Masons—and women's groups and all in English—there's not even a foreign language. It's devastating. All the hope and expectation built up in me is drained away. Even hopes that school would be different with kids from other lands speaking different languages are crushed. (What was I thinking?) It's just like Dayton—American kids from Zoner families. No workers' kids at all, and they're the ones I want to know.
I go to school by train, the only thing that's entirely new. Balboa High is in Cristobal, forty miles on the other side of the Isthmus. But the building is wood clapboard like all the others—square and functional, with an occasional breeze through screened windows—very Midwestern.
The students are bored, uninteresting adolescents full of pranks and pimples. Nothing new there.
"Where are you from?" says one.
"Dayton," I say. "You?"
"Indianapolis."
"You're good at art," I say. "I saw your drawings. I'd really like to see what else you've d—"
"See that boy over there? I think he likes me."
"Where?" This Hoosier girl points him out.
Nothing's different. Boy-crazy girls and friendship by way of collusion. Nobody remotely like the Wrights. Certainly nobody inventing anything.
A few weeks after arrival I go sullen.
The train ride is always social hour, so there I continue to make an effort. I engage in friendly gab as best I can. Of course, I disguise what I think of these morons, while outside the train are indigenous Panamanians and workers from everywhere in the world, literally, with lives and stories I've never heard. I WANT TO MEET THEM.
I lower the train window and hang out. Hot wind whips my hair. Those women with children and baskets on their heads and the workers in the Cut aren't really so distant, but I might as well be watching from the moon. I can't reach them. I'm sequestered in the American Zone.
Twice a day on the train I go through this mental anguish, looking at the exotic world I want to know, and I wind tighter with resentment each trip. It's not good.
Provincial weeks turn into provincial months. I go from sulky to resentful. I'm morose. On a good day I brood, but Mother's narrow-eyed look keeps me in line so I don't act on my feelings or talk about them, which makes them worse.
I start a diary where I spill my discontent.
I begin to go whole days without speaking.
I overhear Mother say to Father: "She's growing up."
Yeah.
Along Comes Harry
Eleven
At last.
Harry's not the love of my life. He's more the brother I never had, better than the boys, more suitable to my near-adult self, and he'll get me to whatever it is I want—I know it the moment I meet him. He's the connection.
It happens like this.
I'm staring at our living-room rug one evening. It's a dark green leaf design. I'm thinking it's as close as I'll ever get to the rainforest, which at that point was probably true. That makes me crazy. Everything does. The hellish humidity, my boring life, everything. I'm groggy and sticky. I'm sixteen. I'm pondering two more years of this deathtrap. I feel so bad, I can't read the book beside me. Thank God I've perfected not showing my crankiness.
"How's everything?" Father says. (He noticed?) He lets the top half of his paper droop. He peers at me. "Are you doing okay, sport?"
(Sport is my kid moniker. What's going on?)
"I'm okay," I say.
"Just okay?"
"Well ... I'm kind of unhappy. I don't know."
This is his time to read the paper, wait for supper, like in Dayton. But he seems to want to know what's going on with me and I'm baffled. It's new.
"I guess I miss the boys," I say.
"Why, sure you do. I do too. New place like this, you're going to miss your friends." (We've been here a year.) "Nobody you like at school?"
The first query about my life and adjusting. What a corseted family we are.
"No, not really," I say. "Not interesting ones that I like. But that's probably just me being picky." There's a smoky smell—some clearing is going on down the hill, the usual brush burning.
"Well, I wouldn't say that. You're not picky." He puts down the paper, gives me his full attention. All the way to Panama to break the Victorian ice in our family.
I don't really think I'm picky either, but we both know I can't voice a complaint because Mother won't allow it. He knows how difficult that is and he knows how it feels living in such a strained atmosphere.
"Well now, we can't have that. Everybody needs friends."
I smile and move over to the ottoman in front of his chair.
"I complain to my diary."
"You do?"
"Write in it every day. How the men are in the Cut working all day and the women just gossip and the girls at school are too old to play dolls so they talk about romance. That's all they do. They've never heard of the Wrights' machine and they wouldn't care about it if they did..."
"Oh, for heaven's sake."
"It's true. The girls whisper about the boys and who they like or don't like and it's stupid. I miss Orville and Wil."
"Well, it's not easy to find people like them, but there are interesting people here."
"I haven't met one."
"Then we'd better take care of that. Come with me to the Canal Club on Saturday for lunch. I'll introduce you to an interesting fella."
This is so out of character, I don't know what to say. I grin. "Thanks, Pop. Who's the interesting person?"
"Harry."
"American?"
He nods. "You'll like him. Works for the Zone police. Closest thing you'll find to the boys. Smart, too. A high-quality fella, has horse sense." This is the single-most prized quality in our family.
I'm smiling, loving this. He's smiling, too. He raises his paper and I go back to my spot on the couch.
Did that really happen?
I speculate about this fellow—who he is, what he's all about. I know nothing, of course, except that he's passed Father's muster, which is considerable. In all of this there is a glimmer of hope.
"What's his name again?"
"Harry."
I sit back and grin.
The smoky smell reminds me of fall in Dayton when people burn their leaves.
WHO ARE YOU, HARRY?
Twelve
The Canal Club, Saturday, layers of white tablecloths, gauzy white curtains in the breeze, American faces except for servers.
This better be good. My nerves have been clutched for three days in anticipation—my imagination running riot, a measure of how desperate I am.
Father nods to several Commission bigwigs when we enter and we're led to a prominent table in the front of the room near a window. I realize for the first time how respected Father is, how well positioned in the Commission hierarchy. I like it. And I'm nervous.
A waiter approaches—very tall, very black, with a mellow Caribbean accent. "Good afternoon."
He places menus in our hands and leaves us to study them.
"The fish comes from the bay outside the window," Father says. "It's f
resh."
Nice to know. There are chicken plates and salads and cold cuts, a nice selection. We sit silently going over the various dishes, me nervous, and then a voice says, "Hello."
I look up.
Harry. It has to be. A big, wide smile—nothing inscrutable there.
"I'm sorry I'm late. Police nonsense ... paperwork..." He shakes Father's hand and nods to me.
"You're not late," says Father and introduces us.
Harry shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, whole sectors of me coming to attention that have been asleep for years, some for a lifetime.
Chairs scrape the floor and we settle in.
I can't take my eyes off him. He's of medium height, with clear blue eyes and perfect white teeth. He wears khaki police shorts and shirt, high boots, and the standard-issue wide-brimmed police hat, which he sticks under his chair. He's younger than the Wrights. Midtwenties, I estimate.
"Sure be glad when the rain starts," he says.
Father agrees and they make canal small talk. I want badly to join in but can't think of a thing to say, so I listen like a good girl.
Harry mentions he came down from Costa Rica, not from the States, and was "somewhere else in Central America before that."
He's an adventurer. This is getting better and better.
We order: fruit and some kind of chicken for all of us.
I ask him how he got his job. "Was it difficult?"
"Not really. I speak Spanish and a couple of other languages. That helped."
"They just signed you up?"
"Not exactly. I thought they'd want diggers—didn't know they don't use whites for that. But I filled out forms anyway and said a few words in Spanish and they hired me on the spot. It's the languages they wanted."
"Amazing."
"They made me census taker."
"First census taker I ever met," I say. I get a laugh with that. It feels good and I push the hair off my neck.
"Enumerator is what they call me."
"What do you do?"
