She noticed me eyeing the blade and smiled. “I washed it. And hold it by the rind. Never touch what you eat with your hands no matter how clean you think they are.”
I slid the fruit off the blade. “Good call.”
The fruit was sweet, and we ate it as we walked, pitching the rinds in the woods alongside us. Behind us, a kid on a squeaky bike approached. He spoke to both of them in Spanish, tipped his hat to me, and gently rolled past. As he did, I noticed that he’d replaced the entire front axle of his bike with a short piece of rebar held in place by two pieces of thick shoe leather.
Finished with the melon, Leena walked to the side of the road, and with a swiftness and strength I’d not previously noticed, she cut a piece of sugarcane at the bottom, trimming off the leaves as we walked. Once trimmed, she peeled off the outer protective skin and held it out to me. “Just pinch the end with your fingers.” I did as instructed, and she brought the machete down quickly, leaving me with a ten-inch section of cane. As I stared at it, she said, “You suck on it.” She did the same for Isabella and herself, cutting several pieces for all of us as we walked uphill.
It tasted like candy, and I sucked it dry.
To our left, in an open field, two boys watched over a small herd of cattle, letting them graze. The boys were playing catch with two worn-out gloves that had long ago lost the stitching. As I looked closer, they were using a large lemon for a ball.
Finally, the road turned up steeply, and Isabella returned to her mother and handed her pack to her. I offered to carry it and she gladly agreed. It was a pink Dora the Explorer backpack. The water bottle was empty and the bag of candy had been opened. We climbed up through the trees and eventually into the coffee groves Paulina had pointed to this morning. “Paulina, is this the coffee—”
“Leena. And yes, this is the coffee you were drinking this morning.”
“What makes it so good?”
A smirk, but she did not answer.
By this time, we were several hours into our hike and several miles up the mountain. She stopped, breathing heavy, and turned. She pointed northeast to the smoking volcano a few miles in the distance. Between us and the active volcano sat a dormant volcano. Its sides were lush green and the crater atop was well-defined except for what can only be described as a scar coming down one side. The scar traced the lines of the mountain, rolling along the shoulders, winding like a serpent just below us, where it then descended into the valley. I remembered staring out Marshall’s plane and seeing the scar leading to the ocean. The pieces began to fall in place. “A decade ago, Huracán Carlos hovered over Nicaragua for several days. During that time, it dumped twelve feet of rain.” She turned in a slow circle. “Here.” Her eyes lifted toward the Las Casitas crater. “There was once a beautiful lake up there. The rain filled it to overflowing. The weight cracked the mantle, caused a miniature eruption, blew out the side of the mountain, and created a mudslide that ran—” Her finger began tracing the lines of the scar. “Down here. A mile wide and over thirty feet high, satellite imagery downloaded days later showed that it was traveling in excess of a hundred miles an hour.” She turned and pointed behind us where the world had opened. We could see for miles. She pointed. “All the way to the coast. Some thirty miles away.” She paused. “Coast Guard vessels would later pick up survivors floating on debris some sixty miles out in the Pacific.”
“And the crosses?”
“Over three thousand died that day. The crosses represent places where we found either bodies or parts or a piece of clothing or…” She trailed off. She turned and began slowly stepping forward, saying no more, and letting the story hang in the distance between us.
“Your family?”
She spoke without looking. “Twenty-seven members of my family.” Smoke from cooking fires hung in the trees above us. She waved me on. “Come on. We’re late.”
We climbed quickly through coffee plants as tall as me. Leena ran her fingers through the leaves, plucking a few beans. She spoke over her shoulder. “They started picking them last week.” Isabella ran ahead. Laughing in the bushes ahead of us. Leena climbed effortlessly up the steep incline. I had not regained my strength, and it was showing. I doubted I could run a six-minute mile right now. I lagged behind, slowly plodding forward. With each step, my pack felt like it was driving me deeper into the ground. She stared down at me. “What’d you say you did?”
“I didn’t, but—” An awkward chuckle. “In a previous life, I worked for a man up north. Boston. He ran a private investment firm. Which meant he—”
She spoke without looking at me. The tone of her voice told me the smile had not left her face. “I know what it means. I’m poor. Not ignorant.”
“Sorry. My bad. I didn’t mean to—”
This time she turned to look at me. “Judge a book by its cover?”
Leena was easy to talk to, and while what she said was true, she didn’t speak it in such a way that it pierced me. She wasn’t trying to one-up me. “That bad, huh?”
She raised both eyebrows and then extended her hand, offering to help pull me up a steep step. I took it. “Anyway, he had a lot of money. I was something of an errand boy. He was always hiring and firing—”
She interrupted me. “That include you?”
An honest shrug. “Eventually, yes. Pretty much. Anyway, when he would interview guys who had either been fired from their previous job or somehow found themselves between jobs, they would all use the same buzzword. Each would sit in that interview, cross his legs, and hope he couldn’t see through their polished veneer as they said, ‘I’m in transition.’ I can’t tell you how many times I heard that spoken across the table with such rehearsed polish.” I nodded as I tried to catch my breath. “But climbing up this Mount Everest with five hundred pounds on my back, I now understand what they meant because that feels about right. I’m in transition.”
She laughed and pressed on, winding through the trees.
We turned a corner on the road and were met by an old wooden sign overgrown with vines. The sign was five or six feet wide and just as tall. The paint had faded, chipped, and a few of the boards had fallen off, suggesting it had not been maintained in a long time. The name on the sign read, CINCO PADRES CAFÉ COMPAÑíA. Below that, an older sign, with hand-carved letters, read: MANGO CAFÉ.
I stumbled and caught myself. Leena turned. “You okay?”
I stared at the sign, the color draining from my face. “Yeah.”
She returned and placed her index finger on my wrist, quietly counting. After fifteen or twenty seconds, she let go but her suspicion had returned. “You sure?”
I waved her off. “Yeah. The truth would take too long.”
“Let me know if you’re feeling faint.”
I was feeling a bit more than faint, but I decided not to let her know that.
Moments later, we cleared the trees and walked out onto what would become the plateau on the shoulders of Las Casitas. Before me stood two tin-roofed, barnlike wooden structures. Two stories and thirty doors on a side. Leena spoke as we walked. “Families work the coffee. They make a dollar and a half a day. The skilled workers, the sifters, make two dollars.” She pointed at the buildings. “They live in these rooms. Sometimes as many as six to eight people will live in a six-by-six space. No ventilation. No heat. No cooling. They have no school here, no medical care, and most will never leave this mountain. But it’s better than the alternative.”
“I’d hate to see the alternative.”
She echoed my words. “You’ve been sucking on it the last hour or so.”
“Sugarcane?”
“The curse of Nicaragua.”
“How?”
She waved me off. “The truth would take too long.” She pointed to the work ahead of us. “We collect medical supplies and food from churches from Valle Cruces to León and then bring them here. It’s not much so we stretch it.”