Blog 36-Machi Discovered the Joy of Work!

Out of Breath/ Barra Providencia
Writing on the dune, out of breath, heart beating fast. Scared, I guessed. Must be close to dinner time but Julia hadn't come back with our rations from the Señoras de los Frijoles' cooking fest. Airplanes flew low, buzzing us, three small olive planes painted with green leaves to blend into foliage. How could you fly through foliage? Did they need to be hidden on the ground? The Base wanted to terrorize us and I was terrorized. After the planes buzzed us, I put away the laptop and the flash drive in the duffel bag hidden deep in the lean-to Julia, Taina and I shared now that Machi and David built themselves a second tarp house alongside our first. Many nights now Machi spent with David someplace. I guessed the shelters Hillside.
Hurricane Marta missed us. When I saw Guille in La Fabrica this morning he joked his first wife had been the same, many threats but not much action.
I needed to move and set out to walk the maze of the Encampment in a direction I hadn't taken before. Most times I walked Beachside, or Hillside. This time I walked in the middle path toward the Base through the earliest shacks of La Barraquita. They'd been built so close together I had to stop and turn back several times to find paths among them. Guille had told me these shacks had weathered hurricane Rosa almost intact. I found it hard to tell when I was indoors, in someone's space, or outdoors in a common. I stopped and turned back and started again, at one point my breathing got heavy, rapid.
I had never before realized, stopped to think, that it had to do with David that Ori and I broke up. The change in my connection to the unnameable cad (whose name I seldom uttered) spun off his rescue of the boys; my reconciliation with Ori spunoff David's walking through the glass. Because Machi had been sick I was at our old home and happened to be standing beside Ori at the kitchen window watching David and Machi playing out back the very moment David ran through the walls of the glass house the previous owners had built smack in the center of the yard. We'd watched David run out, bleeding, watched him climb over the back fence, leaving our yard the way he usually entered it.
I was in Cayo Karaya to find Ori because of David's poster on the street. It had led to my reconciliation with Julia, to me thinking I found Machi in La Terraza when actually Machi let himself be found, or found me. David was a catalyst in my life. I was thinking about that, standing in a spot I wasn't sure was a path. I looked to my right and realized that the wooden shack less than a foot away from where I stood was the same bar I'd gone into looking for Franz. I stared and made out the faded sign graffitied onto a piece of scrap plywood, La Providencia. I let my focus soften and soon images emerged, small tables pushed close together and a small counter in the rear. Mostly men in jungle green leaf pattern fatigues gathered at the counter, the tables, by the door. A few young women danced together close to a speaker. I stared at them and saw who they were dancing for, a table of men in uniform from the Base, and sitting with them Machi, David, Franz and another young man whose face I couldn't see in the dark.
I turned my gaze away. Now my eyes made out the path. What were my boys doing fraternizing with the enemy? Pumping them? Getting confused by them? Were all the guardias guatas? I approached the door and stood a few feet away, in the shade of a tree, watching them. I was setting off toward the Base when I saw Machi and David get up and head toward me. I wanted to run away, try to keep them from seeing me, but it happened too fast. They stepped outside and caught me spying on them, or so I thought it must have looked to them. I smiled and waved as if I belonged there. Machi cocked his head and pointed his chin at me and then shrugged. “Wanna beer?” He laughed. “Ma don't drink.” He was talking to David, Franz, and to the thin, dark skinned, buzz cut young man in a green leaf pattern fatigue uniform who said, “Gotta go clock in.” He waved to me and walked off toward the Base and I realized it was Doug, Rita's novio I'd taken for Franz at the Fonda Migajas. When he and Franz stood together they didn't look alike after all. Their faces were both square but Doug was red skinned from the sun and Franz' skin was a deep reddish brown.
After he was gone, Machi, David and Franz walked away from me deeper into the maze. Machi waved to me so I followed. “You wanna know why I'm fraternizing?” He laughed. I said nothing, waited. He and David were walking fast between lean-tos so close together we could barely squeeze between them. David cut in. “Those guys are doing a sick out. Doug was due to clock in hours ago. They boycott a day a week.” Machi talked over him, “I showed him a picture of Pa. He thinks he's seen him but very skinny so he wasn't sure. You won't like to hear this. A few of the prisoners on a hunger strike aren't doing well and Pa might be one of them. I let him keep the picture. He promised me he'd find out.”
I asked where they were heading and Machi responded by asking me the same thing. I said I wasn't exactly sure, but probably, I wanted to see the Base up close. In all this time here, other than the wade-in and the stealth breach with Franz, I'd never gotten a good look at the Base, and certainly not in the light of day.
On my way to find the Base after Machi and his friends walked away I soon enough stumbled upon their destination. I saw my son on high ground, yards from one of the Hillside paths, digging a huge ditch. They were all there, Machi, David, Lagarto, Robles, Franz and a dozen other young men, digging. Younger boys were carting away piles of dirt in small buckets and two wheelbarrows and pouring them onto a growing mound Hillside. I stood, watched, and took phone photos.
Under a tree a few yards from the digging frenzy I saw some of the Señoras had set up a grill and were cooking bean filled corn masa cakes. The diggers ate them as fast as they were done. I asked one of the women whom I knew as Migdalia, what was going on, and she told me the young men were building another communal bank of toilets and showers. “The ones leftover from the Eco Preserve no bastan. Alto a la defecacion indiscriminada." Machi saw me then and came over to where I stood, grabbed a bean cake and pointed to the ditch. “Everywhere you look in Palenque there's work that needs doing. And we are everywhere doing it. A perfect world.” He streaked my cheek with dirt. I stood for a moment cherishing his tender touch. He went back to work and I stood watching, listening to the children sing as they carted dirt away. My son had discovered the joy of doing truly necessary work.
Filled with an unfamiliair feeling, singing out loud, I said the word joy out loud. This was joy! I raced back to La Fabrica to write. Sitting in La Fabrica reading from my flashdrive was not as interesting as watching life on Palenque, a human anthill. I had to force myself to ignore the half dozen people setting up chairs in the center of the tabernaculo, dragging the heavy podium from the nearby storage shed, stringing lights.
Machi had discovered the joy of work! And here I sat in La Fabrica, doing my own sort of work, wanting to go over my journals about my old jobs, wanting to find story and meaning in my past. I was more distracted than usual by the commotion all around me in the Fabrica. Tables were being moved out of the way, chairs were being arranged. Was it tomorrow or the next day that Adela was coming to speak and maybe read from her memoir, Edad de la Indignacion? I was apprehensive and thrilled at once, to be seeing her again after so many years.