The Gringo: A Memoir (9 page)

CHAPTER
16

A
fter one of those long nights, I woke up to the jarring sound of Juan banging on my door. If he banged any harder, his hand would have shot through the decaying plywood. The sun was barely up yet. I rolled out from under my mosquito net as he kept on banging.

“What do you want?” I said.

“You need to go water the bamboo plants,” he said, clutching a bucket in one of his giant hands. In the last few days, someone planted some of the bamboo saplings out in the wetland. Juan was very proud of this, as it had earned the association of guides a blurb in the local newspaper. (The blurb in the paper, as it happens, actually gave credit to Ignacio, Juan’s number two in command, a fact that surely pissed off Juan to no end.)

“Okay, I’ll do it later,” I told him. I explained that I was meeting with someone else that day.

Remarkably, this was the truth. During Juan’s unexplained absence, which I didn’t mind, I’d begun making plans with other people. In this case, I’d been talking to a man named Nixon Dixon (seriously) about plans for improving community tourism at his integrated farm. But whether or not Nixon Dixon would show up to meet me was another story.

“No!” Juan shouted, his neck veins bulging so much that I feared they would explode, spraying blood all over me and my shirtless body. “Your job is to go do it right now!” He threw the bucket down, sending it bouncing off the concrete and into my room.

I said under my breath in English, “Oh fuck, all right.” He walked away with his crooked, massive nose held so high I wondered if he could even see the ground in front of him.

I climbed up the stairs for breakfast, where Homero was already eating. One of Juan’s aunts handed me a plate of food.

“Juan’s back,” I said with a smile.

The aunt made a punching motion with her fist.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

Homero just shook his head.

“He wants to fight you,” she said.

“For doing what?”

“He’s mad at you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I realized. What am I supposed to do, go water the bamboo? And then what?”

The aunt didn’t answer me.

Homero sat still, shaking his head and said, “What a crock of shit.”

After breakfast, I carried the bucket out to the wetland, filled it up where the fishing canoes were tied, and watered the few bamboo saplings. When I came back nearly an hour later, Juan met me at the end of the driveway. “You didn’t do it for long enough—go do it again.”

“Look,” I said, dropping the bucket at my side, “is there something you’re upset about that you want to tell me?”

“We can’t talk about it now,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“No, let’s talk about it now, before you disappear for a week again without telling me.”

“Fine,” he said, raising his voice. “Ever since you got here you haven’t wanted to work with us.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to.”

“But every time we go somewhere—for a meeting, to see people—you’re looking for the first opportunity to leave, like you don’t want to do any of the things we’re doing.”

“If you ever told me about these meetings in advance, then I’d be prepared for them and actually have something to contribute, instead of being there and not being involved.”

“This is tourism!” he said. “We can’t plan everything.”

“They’re meetings. If you know about them ahead of time, you could just let me know.” What I’d really wanted to say was, “And where are all your tourists?”

“No. You don’t need to know anything else.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you no longer want to work with me, that’s fine. I can just continue with the obligations that I have to this community.”

“You don’t have any obligations to this community!” he screeched. “It was my organization”—he splayed his giant hand and thumped it across his chest—“my organization that requested you from the Peace Corps and now your only job here is to do what I tell you to do.”

“Juan, you and I both know that’s not true. I’m supposed to work with you and this community on several projects. I’m a volunteer, not your employee.” This last line, in fact, was something the Peace Corps had specifically told us volunteers to say in the event that a conversation like this took place.

“Do you want me to call up the Peace Corps and tell them how bad you’re being? Huh?” he said. “I can tell them that Grigsby Crawford isn’t doing a thing he’s being told to do and that he’s being very bad.”

I imagined for a split second how that conversation would play out and figured it would be amusing, but no one would come out looking good.

“No,” I said. “I’ll call my boss today and we can talk about how to work this out.”

“No, no, no,” Juan shouted, looking flabbergasted. “We don’t need to do that.”

That was all the confirmation I needed.

I went inside and took a couple of deep breaths before calling Winkler. I began by telling him that my counterpart and I were having some disagreements. I relayed the entire events of the morning to him. I told him that I’d been communicating pretty well in my time in La Segua, but that workwise, I was confronting some maturity issues with Juan, who in addition to having an interesting idea of my duty there, allegedly wanted to fight me. Somewhere during the conversation I pointed out that it was all a bit stressful.

“Yes, yes, okay, the first thing I’ll just make sure is, do you feel safe in your site?” said Winkler.

I mentioned some of the vague intimidation tactics like the multiple thrown buckets. “But overall,” I said, “I don’t feel really threatened, no.”

“Good, good,” he said. “We don’t need any Rambos out there.”

“The awkwardness,” I added, “is made a little worse with Juan living in the same house.”

“What? He’s still living there?” said Winkler. “All right, I’ll give Juan a call this afternoon and see if we can clear all this up.”

I was too caught up in the spat with Juan to realize this might have been a good time to mention the armed robberies in the neighborhood. The other thing on my mind lately was the somewhat threatening response I’d gotten when I told one of the aunts that it was customary for volunteers to leave their host families after a few months and find their own place to live. “Of course you know if you do that,” she said, “you won’t be with this family anymore. You might be living on the property of a family that doesn’t have as much respect around here as we do. And, well, who knows what could happen to you. Bad things . . .”

I paced around the property all day, avoiding Juan and fighting the giant lump of anger and frustration that had risen in my throat. In the late afternoon when the worst heat of the day was passing, a few of the other guides came over and we used machetes to clear a field where we were supposedly going to camp out later with a group of ecotourism students.

I was bent over scraping away at the ground when Juan’s phone rang; I could tell it was Winkler calling him. He went to the other end of the field to talk. I watched him. He listened. He nodded. He spoke. He used his obscene hands in gestures as if he were speaking in person. By the end, I saw him smiling and laughing. I overheard him saying how great it was to talk.

Soon after, Winkler called me back to recap his conversation with Juan. It sounded like there’d been a lot of misunderstandings, he said. It sounded like Juan was unclear on some things, but now that was all sorted out, he said. “I remain impressed—very impressed—with Juan as a counterpart,” he said. My heart sank.

“So I think he’s going to talk with you tonight and find a way that you guys can start from square one again and get a good working relationship going. I want to salvage this relationship because Juan is a really great counterpart.” He added something else about how we had an opportunity to do important things at this site.

Before signing off, he launched into a speech unrelated to the day’s incident. He talked about why he’d sent a volunteer to this site and what a fantastic resource the wetland was for these communities. It was nearly a repeat of the sales pitch he’d given me during training, after I had received my site assignment. “Oh yes,” he added, “and Juan will be moving back into his parents’ home. That was the agreement.”

That night Juan did indeed apologize. He offered to cook me dinner but I wasn’t hungry. We agreed we’d try to start over on a good foot. He hugged me. It was uncomfortable.

CHAPTER
17

T
hat weekend, we hosted a group of students from a nearby university for the campout on the wetland. It was the first time I saw USAID money go to work. Raúl Sanchez, our intermediary with USAID, came up from Portoviejo. I later discovered he didn’t work for that organization directly, but for another group it contracted out to, which had secured an entire bundle of U.S. funds to disperse among projects across the Ecuadorian coast. He used some of the funds to buy the food for the two-day/one-night campout and delivered a truckload of tents and equipment stamped with “USAID: Aid from the American People.”

The few dozen students who arrived all majored in tourism at their university. The day they showed up, Juan took a couple of them out on a canoe ride, as he’d done with me on my site visit. Toward the end of the day, he made everyone gather around in a circle while he read off a list of rules. He started by reiterating that as the president of the Association of Guides of Humedal La Segua, he would be making all the final decisions that weekend. His reading of the rules lasted well over half an hour—an impressive ratio of rules-to-camping time, considering the students would be there less than twenty-four hours. With everyone fighting heat exhaustion, we finally took turns introducing ourselves.

As the budding ecotourism devotees listed off their credentials, I began to feel enormously sad. Here we were in a country where tourism, for the most part, began and ended with a cluster of islands 1,000 kilometers off its coastline, yet someone along the way had thoroughly convinced them just the same that this was the answer. Not only that, but ecotourism (everywhere, not just in Ecuador) was becoming one of those overused phrases that no one knows the actual meaning of, like “all natural” or “clean coal.”

I looked around at all this—the students, the wetland suffering from drought, overfishing and deforestation, the USAID tents. Could turning this swamp into a tourist haven ultimately help this community in the long run? Probably. But in a world where people are literally starving to death, I didn’t see the virtue in tens of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars going toward bird watching in one of the most depraved corners of that small country.

That night I helped build a giant campfire and inevitably someone handed me a guitar and demanded that I play “Hotel California.” It was about the twentieth time this had happened to me since arriving in Ecuador. Before I had a guitar, people would just ask me to sing it. Now, every time a group of people got together and a guitar was anywhere in sight, they would badger me into playing “Hotel California,” just like the asshole at every concert who insists on yelling “Free Bird.”

The night ended with Juan spiking an Ecuadorian flag into the ground and leading a chant about ecotourism. We all went to sleep, and the next morning we packed up the stuff and the students took off.

Back at the farm, Juan’s aunts and uncles called me a faggot because I slept in a camping tent with other men. I explained that all twenty guys there, including their nephew Juan, slept in male-only tents. They only laughed more and called me a faggot again.

For nearly a month, the tension I’d been feeling caused me to clench my jaw, making it sore day and night. I had a bad feeling all over my body. And try as I did, I couldn’t shake a thick, putrid, overwhelming sense of doom.

CHAPTER
18

A
fter the campout, I sulked for a while. It was the third week of June. During those days, one of the aunts living in the house (the mother of Sandra and the pregnant teenager) mentioned that a white truck was frequently stopping in front of the property and looking around. As soon as someone spotted it, she said, the truck would speed off down the highway.

We all agreed this was suspicious. The only white truck I’d ever come across in my time there was when I was walking along the road one evening and it slowed down and swerved over next to me. A drunk guy hung out the window and said, “Hey, you motherfucking gringo. What do you want, huh? Cocaine? Marijuana? Huh, motherfucker?” I said nothing. The truck sped off as the idiot riding shotgun launched empty beer bottles at me.

When the aunt told me that we were “being watched,” I asked her if there was anything we should do about it.

“No,” she said. “Nothing will happen to this house. Plus, Homero has a gun and he’s kind of like the family vigilante.”

“Good. So he’s here to protect us?”

“That’s right,” she said.

Returning to my room that night, I saw that yet again someone had tried breaking in. This had been going on for three straight weeks. I could tell because I knew the number I’d left my combination lock on, and every time I got back, it was different.

The following Sunday, Homero left town for the night. That day, there’d been a local election, which, like all Ecuadorian elections, required mandatory voting. I spent another weekend doing nothing but reading in a hammock by Homero’s house. On Monday night, I lay under my mosquito net listening to music.

At about ten o’clock, I got a text message from Juan. This was strange since he was upstairs, only about forty feet away.

“Grigsby, turn off your light and go to sleep,” read the text. “It’s very important that you stay quiet and don’t leave your room. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Getting texts from Juan creeped me out enough as it was; one telling me to turn off my lights and go to sleep made me want to punch him in the face. So I walked upstairs to figure out what he was talking about.

“There have been some intruders on our property,” he said. “And I believe they’re coming for you.”

“What the hell is going on?”

One of the nine people sleeping in the two rooms above me first heard footsteps behind the house while I’d been listening to music. They said they looked out the window and saw at least a couple of guys in black ski masks, carrying weapons and tiptoeing around and whispering. Once they were spotted, one ran off to the bushes, and another ran to the road, where he got into the same white pickup truck and sped away.

The family upstairs had called the Chone police. They were all huddled in the same room on the second floor. Since the teenage girls and mothers were crying hysterically, I decided it wasn’t the best time to mock their comments about how no one would ever mess with the Mendoza family on their property. They were concerned about the intruder who was still lurking around somewhere nearby.

Juan and I grabbed flashlights (leftover from the campout, compliments of USAID) onto the roof and shined them around the property down below to see if we could spot anyone. We heard rustling in the bushes every once in a while, but nothing more. After shining the flashlights for what seemed like an hour, we figured the intruders had been scared off.

But I still felt uneasy. My distrust of everyone—which had grown more in the preceding days—came pouring out as I turned to Juan. I told him, “You know I think I’m going to have to call Pilar in the morning and tell her about this.”

“Are you sure?” said Juan. “Can’t we just wait for the police to come and explain it to them?”

“Right, what I’m saying is that if the police get involved, I
have
to tell her.”

“Okay,” he said, looking skittish.

“Juan, is there anything else I should know?”

“Like what?”

“Well, do you have any idea who it might be?”

“I don’t know. But I’m almost sure they were coming for you.”

“If you have no idea who they were, how are you sure they were ‘coming for me’?” I was so furious I could barely get out any words in Spanish.

He sighed. “There’s been a lot of talk around town lately about who the gringo is and where he lives—things like that, and, well, some other things, too,” he said. “They think you have a lot of money and nice things they want, so they’re coming for you.”

“Okay, I will definitely have to tell Pilar about this.”

Before becoming Peace Corps Ecuador’s head of Safety and Security, Pilar spent two decades working in antinarcotics for the national police force, where she became the highest-ranking woman. During our training, she presented several sessions on safety, covering everything from avoiding pickpockets to bus hijackings. She was kind, but I got the impression she meant business. She wore tight clothes and was sexy in a James Bond–villain type of way. I asked her once if she kept a gun in her house. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “Of course.” Then I asked her if she’d ever used it, and I got the same look. “Grigsby, I worked in antinarcotics for twenty years.” On my last day of training, I half jokingly asked her if she’d ever killed anyone with her bare hands. She just smiled.

Juan was staring at me as I pulled out my phone. “You think this might be serious?” he said.

“Yes, I have to tell her. Now, do you have any idea who the people might be?”

“No, I didn’t see them.”

“I’m not asking if you saw them. I’m asking if you have any
idea
who it could be. Make a guess.”

“I think they could be from La Margarita,” he said, referring to the neighboring town. It looked and felt like La Segua in every way, but got blamed for anything bad that happened in the area.

“Ah. They could be the same guys who raped the girl on the side of the road?”

“Yes, maybe.”

“Or the guys who were robbing the houses at gunpoint?”

“Yeah, maybe.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He was staring out into the black night like the answers to my annoying questions were hidden somewhere in the trees.

“Anyone else you can think of? Any other ideas?”

Juan took a deep breath. “There are some people in this town you can’t trust,” he said.

No shit
, I thought.

“And one of those people is Carlos,” he added, referring to the neighbor and fellow ecotourism guide in my counterpart agency who rocked the rat tail/mullet. “Sometimes he does bad things,” Juan continued. “He has bad friends, and, well, he’s in gangs.”

“What kinds of stuff do the gangs do?” I asked. I felt like wringing Juan’s neck. He was clearly hiding something.

“They put on masks and stop buses in the road, then rob everyone on board at gunpoint,” he said. This was such a common occurrence in Ecuador that during training, we got an entire talk about bus safety and were discouraged, among other things, from taking buses at night to avoid these holdups. “They also do other bad things,” he said.

“What other kinds of bad things?”

“A while back, Carlos said we should kidnap you and see how much money we can get for you. He said it would be a good idea.”

He stopped.

I waited for him to go on.

“He’d been asking us over and over again how come you hadn’t given us a bunch of money yet, and I told him that that wasn’t what you were here for and he said we should just go ahead and kidnap you one of these days.”

“He said it just once?”

“Well, after that he kept repeating it. He kept saying he was going to do it soon, that he was going to go ahead and kidnap the gringo—you.”

“He repeated this numerous times—that he wanted to kidnap me for money—in front of other people? Not just you?”

“Yes,” said Juan. “A bunch of times. He was saying, ‘Let’s kidnap the gringo.’”

“Anything else I should know? What about these friends of his?”

“I think they were planning something like this because he was starting to sound serious.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner? We work with him every day.”

Juan paused, then stuttered something I didn’t make out. In the dim light coming from the house, I could see the veins in his neck pulsating rapidly.

I recalled a conversation I’d had a day or two earlier with none other than Carlos, who’d said to me, “You can’t trust people in this area—they say one thing and do another.”

“All right,” I told Juan. “I’m going to call Pilar right now.” It was past midnight and the Chone police still hadn’t shown up. The rest of the family remained cowering in one bedroom upstairs, refusing to leave. We still couldn’t tell what was lurking out there in the bushes and fields surrounding the house.

PILAR ANSWERED AFTER ONE RING
and sounded unusually alert for that time of night. I apologized for calling so late and she said it wasn’t a problem. We spoke in Spanish so nothing got lost in translation. I relayed everything to her, including that the cops still hadn’t arrived. She proceeded to put me on hold and call the Chone police herself. (They would arrive ten minutes later apologizing for the delay.) Pilar said we’d be in touch more in a bit.

Juan and I went down to the end of the driveway to meet the police. They showed up in two pickup trucks. The blinking blue and white lights from the trucks illuminated Juan’s face; he looked pale, sweaty, and frightened.

One cop did all the talking. He wore a bulletproof vest on top of a white tank top and carried a loaded machine gun.

“What happened here?” he said.

I told him. Then I asked what our next move should be.

The cop paused. “How many guns do you have around here?”

Juan chirped up to say that his uncle across the road had a gun on his property.

“Just
one
gun?” said the cop.

Juan nodded.

“Does it have bullets?”

Juan said yes. He was blinking his eyes faster than usual.

“You should have more guns on your property to protect yourself,” the cop said. As he spoke he was waving his machine gun around nonchalantly. I kept backing out of the way of the barrel, so most of the conversation took place with me ducking about, trying to avoid an accidental discharge.

“Sure,” I said. “More guns. Got it.”

On our way back to the house, I asked Juan if he thought shots would be fired the next time someone came on the property. “We’ll see,” he said.

We walked the property one last time to see if anything was out of the ordinary. With mud on my boot, I slipped down the staircase of Homero’s farmhouse. So much blood streamed down my arm, I felt dizzy; I held it away from my body so it wouldn’t run all over me. Juan saw the blood and looked like he was going to vomit. I headed back to our house, washed it off, and then closed up the gash with a butterfly Band-Aid from my medical kit. I told Juan goodnight and went into my room.

It was the first time in my life I slept with a machete next to my bed. I kind of wished it were a gun.