The Gringo: A Memoir (10 page)

CHAPTER
19

T
he next morning I got a call from Winkler in Quito wanting to know what the hell had happened. As I explained it, in the background I could hear him fidgeting with things on his desk.

“Do you feel safe at your site?” he said.

“No, not really,” I told him. “It’d be one thing if this were some idiot or the town drunk making kidnapping threats, but this is a guy I’m supposed to work with. So no, I don’t feel very safe right now, unfortunately.”

“Hmm. Okay,” he said.

A couple of hours later, I received a text message from the country director: “Pilar will be at your site tomorrow to investigate. If you see that white truck again, call us immediately.” The prospect of Pilar coming out to “investigate” thrilled me. My heart raced.

The following morning Homero got back home from his brief trip down the coast. One of the other family members filled him in on the previous night’s events. In the evening, he and I stood in the driveway and talked.

“I heard everyone was freaking out last night, like
please don’t kill me
,” he said, waving his hands about. “What a bunch of pussies you all are. Pussies!”

“I wouldn’t say I was
freaking out
. But since your whole family was upstairs crying, someone had to take responsibility around here.”

“No one’s going to do anything to this family on this property.”

“So I’ve heard. But why, then, were they wearing masks and carrying weapons?”

“Eh, it’s all a bunch of bullshit.”

“All right, well, just make sure you have your gun ready tonight,” I said. “We’ve got some machetes in the main house but I don’t think they’ll do the trick.”

“Listen, Crawford, if someone wanted to kill you they would have already done it. So don’t—”

“That’s nice—”

“Look, just think about how easy it would be,” Homero said. “All they’d have to do is reach inside your window there”—he pointed to my first-floor bedroom a few yards away—“while you’re sleeping and BOOM!” He formed a gun with his hand and reached to fake-fire a bullet into my skull.

“So don’t worry! Like I said, someone would have already killed you if they wanted. Easy! For instance”—and here my ears perked up, because when the topic is murder and someone says “for instance,” what follows is bound to be a treat—“some time ago when a guy had a problem with the person who lived over there”—Homero pointed to the farmhouse next to our property—“he just walked in one night and shot him in the face.” He snapped his fingers. “It was that easy.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

I slept poorly that night and got up early the next day. In an astonishing display of tact, that was the first and only morning Esteban didn’t tell me he killed gringos for fun. All day I waited for Pilar to come blazing into town in one of the Peace Corps’ silver Toyota 4-Runners. When she did, a man was riding shotgun; Pilar introduced him as “the Colonel.” He was an old associate of hers in the national police who had trained at Quantico, Virginia, and was now head of a private security firm based out of Manta (a port town not far from us that was an infamous drug trafficking jump-off point).

When I met up with the security duo, I was in San Antonio, a small town between La Segua and Chone. Pilar had instructed me to meet them on a street corner, where she found me and told me to get in the back of the car. I went over the story of Juan, Carlos, and the intruders again as she cruised through a neighborhood at about five miles an hour; she didn’t want to stop and be spotted or trailed. While I spoke, she and the Colonel looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

I discovered that by the time they’d picked me up, Pilar had already been to La Segua and interviewed most of my host family and neighbors about the situation. After asking me a few questions, she picked up Juan and interrogated him while he sat next to me in the back. Juan stumbled over his words a lot. The Colonel blew plumes of cigarette smoke out the window and glared at Juan through the visor mirror.

Pilar had one more interview to do after finishing with Juan and me. She drove us back to the house in La Segua, dropped us off, and continued down the road to talk to Carlos.

Pilar returned around dusk. We stood out in the chicken shit–covered driveway. Dust kicked up and the sun began to set.

“It’s not safe for you here,” she said. “These people . . .” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. We both took in panoramic views of the decrepit scenery. We were standing in the same spot where Homero and I had talked the day before.

Thinking about that conversation, I said, “Yeah, it also makes me a little worried that my room is on the bottom floor here and someone could easily just reach through the window and—”

“You’re living on the bottom floor?” she said. “Oh no, no, no.”

Pilar explained that she had approved another room for me when she did a security check before I arrived. Normally, which room of the house I slept in would be trivial. But in this case it made all the difference. The room on the second floor, which was currently occupied by about nine Mendozas, was where she’d told Juan I had to live. It had its own bathroom and a real door. She’d wanted me up there, not in the dungeon room on the bottom floor, for exactly the reason Homero had illustrated in the driveway a day earlier. The only reason I’d never said anything about the room was because it’s what I’d expected out of the Peace Corps. I didn’t want to sound like a wimp. (When I later showed pictures of my bedroom and bathroom to another volunteer, she said she would have Early Terminated after one day.)

Pilar called Juan out of the house to have a word with him. She asked him why he’d had me move into that room on the bottom floor.

“Uh, I know what you said, but we didn’t know exactly when he was coming and—”

“Stop talking,” said Pilar. “You’ve been lying to him this whole time about which room he was supposed to be living in?”

I echoed the sentiment: “On my site visit, you told me it was the room Pilar had approved . . .”

I saw true fear in Juan’s eyes and the wheels turning in his head. It was slowly dawning on him that he could lose the gringo he’d been toting around like a prized possession all this time.

Juan mumbled a little more and Pilar walked all over him verbally. It was fun to watch. She told Juan to go away and pulled me aside to say she’d talk to the country director that night. Pilar was going to tell her that it wasn’t safe for me here, and in the morning, they’d make a final decision on whether to pull me out.

Pilar and the Colonel drove off as the sun went down over the wetland. I walked back into the house where, to my surprise, my whole host family of aunts and teen mothers began screaming at me.

“By making the cops come here, you’ve ruined our reputation,” they cried. “Now everyone will assume we’re involved in criminal activity.” They grew hysterical.

Particularly upset was Evelyn, the pregnant fifteen-year-old whose belly was ready to burst any day now. “Why the hell did you tell the police about the father of my child? That lady comes in here saying stuff like, ‘I hear your baby’s father was into some drugs and crime. Is it possible he’s jealous and could be causing trouble for you?’ What’s that bullshit all about? Huh?”

“First of all, Pilar works for the Peace Corps, not the police. Second, no, I didn’t tell her anything about your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh, right, he’s dead.”

“Well if you didn’t tell her, then who did?” she said.

The answer seemed pretty obvious. Juan, who’d frantically told Pilar just about every detail of every person living in the house over the phone the night before, sat there silently while all this went on. I looked at him, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t.

“Look, I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “Pilar was just doing her job.” Evelyn was yelling so loudly now that she began to lisp. Then more aunts entered the room and joined in, firing words at me. I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying.

Finally Juan piped up. “This is all going to be okay.” No one listened.

I went downstairs and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night. I could still hear the yelling through the floorboards.

In the morning, Winkler called again to check in.

I was sick of talking at this point, but I told him everything that had gone down the day before with Pilar.

“How do you feel there?” he said.

“Not good. Everybody’s freaking out. I should get out of here to somewhere I can actually be an effective volunteer. No one should have been here in the first place.”

“But this is normal,” he said.

I was stunned. He was still trying to get me to stay in La Segua—like he wanted to prove that his idea to send me there wasn’t a failure.

“These types of misunderstandings are common,” he said. “This stuff happens all the time with new sites.” He added some stuff about being able to salvage the situation.

“I don’t think this is normal,” I said. “Pilar has confirmed that much, I know.”

“Have you tried talking it out with this guy Carlos?” he said. “Are you going to let just one incident spoil your whole working relationship with the counterpart agency? We can’t just give up on this site and this counterpart organization like this!”

“Talk it out? I—well, Pilar told me to avoid anything like that for now. She told me to leave all that up to her.”

Winkler ended the conversation by grumbling something about how site changes were, ideally, a last resort and how he wanted to do everything possible to keep me in La Segua, because any other outcome would be a big hassle and generally an undesirable situation for him, as the program manager, to be in.

Soon after, the country director called. She said she’d been talking to Pilar and they were assessing the situation. Before she made her final decision on whether to pull me out of the site and find a new place, she just wanted to check in and see what I had to say. I told her about the day before with Pilar and what had happened after she left.

“My goodness, they were yelling and screaming at you?” She added something else about having spoken with Winkler as well.

“Something else I think I should add,” I said, “is that I don’t think Winkler and I are really seeing eye to eye on the whole situation. He seems to think that this is one big misunderstanding.”

She said okay, then asked a few more questions she already knew the answers to. We ended our conversation and an hour later she called back.

“Pack up all your belongings,” she said. “Pilar will be there soon to pick you up.”

In the early afternoon, Pilar cruised down the dusty driveway once again, this time without the Colonel. She wore tight black capris, high heels, and Ray Bans. She took off the sunglasses and said, “
Vamos
.”

I said goodbye to the host family. After screaming at me the night before, they seemed sad and nostalgic to see me go. Perhaps it was the forty dollars of monthly rent they’d be missing out on. (This, by the way, was another one of Juan’s lies that irked Pilar. They’d agreed on thirty-five dollars during Pilar’s initial visit, but Juan upped the sum without her permission when I showed up.)

“Will you visit us?” asked the aunts.

“Yes,” I lied.

Juan wasn’t at home that day, so Pilar called him on her cell phone as we drove east toward Chone. She told Juan the Peace Corps had made the decision to remove the volunteer due to safety concerns. She added that it didn’t help that he’d spent so much of his time lying. When he grows up and is ready, she told him, the Peace Corps may still be available to his organization. Juan argued about something; I couldn’t quite overhear. Pilar talked over him and shook her head. Her closing line was the single greatest sentence I’ve ever heard spoken in Spanish: “The safety and security of my volunteers is
numero uno
.”

While Pilar drove she said to me, “This is the right decision. The country director and I agree. But Winkler, he’s not very happy about this, I don’t think.”

“Really?”

“Winkler,” she said, shaking her head. “He just doesn’t get it.”

Pilar had to leave the Peace Corps vehicle in Guayaquil where she would take a flight back to Quito, so she dropped me at the Chone bus station and I caught the next ride to Quito.

Two and a half hours outside Chone, the bus driver pulled into a roadside diner and told everyone to grab their luggage because there was something wrong with the bus and he needed to go down the road to fix it. After an hour of waiting, we passengers figured out the bus wasn’t coming back. Police arrived. One woman began screaming at the police about how “this government promised us that citizens would have
rights
!”

A few others and I hitched a ride into Santo Domingo where we caught a different bus headed for Quito. A car accident along the way turned what is normally a seven-hour bus ride into a ten-hour one. I got to Quito at 2 a.m. and checked into a hotel a few blocks from the Peace Corps headquarters. I spent the next ten days sitting in the office and wandering around Quito waiting for Winkler, in all his wisdom, to find me a new site.

I’d lived in La Segua for less than eight weeks. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of what had happened there, but before long everything about the place would come back to haunt me.