"SUMMER IN SAN MORENO"
By
Bill Olson
Copyright 2005 by William David Sherman Olson
I seem to remember it raining everyday the summer we killed the little boy in San Moreno.
My husband and I were visiting the small Latin American country on our honeymoon. We flew with our neighbors on their Learjet, but we didn’t see much of them after leaving the airport. Andrew and I spent the first week either on the beach or listening to mariachi bands in some of the finest restaurants in Latin America. We fed pigeons in the park while kissing under palm trees, and one night we stood at a pier looking at the moonlight shining across the ocean. Young couples were lined up for what seemed like half a mile, holding each other, looking into each other’s eyes, embracing and kissing. It was as if we had become part of a silent community, all sharing the romance and the warm night together.
Eventually, Andrew and I grew tired of the clean urban setting, desiring adventure in the countryside. We wanted to meet someone who didn’t speak English and who didn’t live to serve tourists.
Our friends thought we were nuts; we had each other and everything else on the oceanfront. Why look for anything else? But we wanted to be together in another world, and the city had become too familiar. We wanted to conquer the unknown by making it a place where our love ruled. So we rented a car and headed east, down the General Davila Highway.
The clean white buildings that we had known gave way to shacks made of rusty corrugated steel and tiny gray homes made of crumbling cement blocks. Green lawns and palm trees became sparse in the wake of bare dirt yards and brown fields. Campesinos labored with their children in croplands along the highway. Eventually, we entered a forest that became dense and cold as we traveled deeper.
After driving for more a couple hours, we stopped at a taco stand in a small town. After eating, we toured a church that was hundreds of years old. It was an imposing stone edifice with statues of Biblical characters that looked down on us accusingly, their painted surfaces faded and peeling.
Rain came as the sun went down, and we got drenched as we ran to the car. We jumped in and pulled the doors shut. An old woman had told us we would have to drive another 30 miles to find a hotel.
The road through the woods was narrow and curvy, with numerous spots where the pavement was broken into shelves we had to drive over slowly for fear we might break an axel. Andrew strained his eyes to see through the rain that at times fell so hard it became a dark gray wall around us.
After driving for about ten minutes at a slow speed without running into any seriously bad patches, we became more confident, and our speed increased.
By then night had descended, leaving our headlights the only illumination. That was when it happened.
I was looking at the greenly lit dials on the dashboard at the time. Andrew swerved, the tires squealed and I felt a bump. We stopped immediately.
“What was that?” I asked. The terror in Andrew’s eyes caused my blood to run cold. He jumped out of the car, and I followed him. The rain was light at this point, and our surroundings were totally black outside of the car lights.
The road behind the car was lit in a dull redness from the taillights. On the asphalt lay a dark mound. When we reached it, we kneeled. It was a small boy dressed in old drab clothes.
He didn’t move.
After attempting to revive him, we scooped him up and lay him in the backseat.
“We could’ve killed him by moving him,” Andrew said.
I shivered. It didn’t seem like we had a choice, but it was even more nerve shattering to think we might have taken away his last chance for survival.
We continued down the road, hoping to encounter a house, car or tollbooth. But there was nothing, so we hoped to reach the town with the hotel soon.
The first sign of civilization was a yard light by a wooden building. We stopped and knocked on the door. Nothing happened. I suppose if I lived here, I wouldn’t answer the door at night, either, but the structure might have been unoccupied, so we pressed on.
Next we happened upon a building that looked like a warehouse, and there was a large truck parked in the gravel yard.
We pulled in and found a husky man unloading burlap bags of seed. As best we could with our broken Spanish, we tried to explain that we had run over a boy. The man followed us to the car, though he never said a word. He seemed to be unconcerned, but motioned toward the darkness, further down the road while saying something that neither of us could understand.
“But we need help,” I said. Again, he motioned for us to resume driving. Then he returned to unloading his truck and didn’t look at us again, so we got back in the car and continued driving.
It was nearly midnight when we finally reached a city. We had traveled more than 80 miles and wondered if we had missed a turn. We had been confident that we’d understood the woman at the church who directed us to the hotel, but without a good command of Spanish, we were no longer sure.
It was a small city, and as the streetlights passed over us, I looked at the boy on the back seat. He lay in darkness until a sliver of light scanned over him, showing his still, wet form. Then darkness. Than the light scanned him again, and again as more streetlights passed over us. I felt anticipation surge through me with the hope that soon the boy would be in a hospital where a doctor might place him in a medical scanner, followed by an optimistic prognosis.
We passed by houses, stores and a sprawling factory, all with darkened windows. Nobody walked the streets and no cars passed us. We looked for any signs of activity, or a hospital sign.
By now the rains had stopped, but the streets were filled with oily puddles. We counted ourselves lucky when we spotted a police station. We pulled along side the curb and got out. Andrew picked up the boy and we brought him into the station.
Across the room, an officer in a kaki shirt rose from a desk and walked over to us. Andrew set the boy down on a church pew leaning against the wall. In the light of the police station, we got our first look at the boy’s features. He was thin, but with a wide face. His black hair was short, and he was obviously an Indian.
The officer looked down at the boy, then at me. I tried to explain in Spanish that we’d hit the boy with our car on the highway. I then said we needed help – a hospital.
The officer listened patiently, then tried to take the boy’s pulse. He looked back at us and shook his head. There was no real sadness in his look.
“But what about his family?” Andrew struggled to say.
“Don’t worry,” the officer replied, then returned to his desk. He took a form from a drawer and filled it out quickly. Then he brought it over to the body and stapled it to the shirt.
Andrew then took out his passport and tried to hand it over to the officer, but the man waved it away. Then the officer gently ushered us out as if we were houseguests who had overstayed our welcome.
We found a motel where we spent the night. Early the next morning we drove to the vicinity where we believed we had run over the boy. We parked and got out of the car. We found our skid marks and even some blood on the road. After walking a little ways, we found a driveway though the woods. It was too rough for the car, so we walked down it, finding the mosquitoes thicker the farther we went. At one point we were running to escape the mosquitoes.
After about fifteen minutes, we reached a clearing with three thatched huts. The sun was hot, but there was still mud by one of the huts. When we walked up to it, we saw that the mud was dark red. We called out rather quietly, wanting to find someone, but at the same time afraid to. There was no answer, and the only noise came from birds in the woods around us.
Andrew walked around the mud and looked inside the nearest hut. I followed him. The morning sun shined in through the glassless windows. We called out again, but there was no answer. We saw nothing inside but some old furniture: a dresser, a table, some straight-back chairs and two beds. We entered and looked around. I looked down at the dust kicking up from our shoes, wondering what it would be like to live here, so far from the houses I’d grown up in on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Then I saw it.
In the corner was a mound covered by a blanket. Andrew lifted the corner and we both shrieked at what we saw.
There were bodies of two or three people who had been chopped up and dismembered. One head lay on the floor beside the pile. All the remains were covered with blood that was still wet.
I grabbed Andrew’s arm and pulled him toward the door. We stopped there and looked out, afraid we’d see a band of guerrillas. Then we ran out, passing the puddle and aiming down the driveway. As best we could, we stayed vigilant for people or sounds that might spell our doom.
We were very winded when we reached the car. We jumped in, turned around and headed back to the small city. When we reached the police station, we found four officers sitting round a table playing cards. The one we had seen the night before was not one of them. We struggled in our attempts to explain what we had seen when a seemingly higher-ranking officer arose from the table and walked over to us.
“May I help you, madam,” he said in English.
“Yes,” I said. “We just found a hut with people in it who’d been murdered.”
“I see,” he said in a calm but attentive manner.
Andrew cleared his throat.
“We think it was near where we ran over the little boy,” he said.
The officer got a confused look in his eyes. “What little boy, Sir?”
I pointed toward the pew. “We ran over a little boy last night. It was an accident. We brought him here, but the officer on duty said he was dead.”
The officer shook his head. “There was no little boy here last night. I assure you that you’re mistaken.”
“But the officer on duty last night saw him.”
“No.” The officer shook his head again.
Andrew motioned toward where the car was outside. “But there’s still blood on our back seat.”
The officer crossed his arms. “Too bad about the blood; the car renter might charge you to clean it.”
“But what about the dead people?” I asked. “They’re back along the General Davila Highway, back toward the coast.”
“That’s out of our jurisdiction. But we’ll contact the correct authorities to check it out.”
“And what about the boy?” Andrew asked.
“We’ll take care of that,” the officer said. “But you’ll have to go now and let us get our work done.” He raised his arms almost as if to embrace us, but gently led us outside. We walked to the car, but then I walked back to the station. Andrew followed and together we looked inside.
All four officers had resumed playing cards.
When we returned to the hotel on the ocean, we got packed and drove our rental car to the airport. We had to wait until early the next morning for a flight back to the states, but once we were home again, we finally felt safe.
We decided not to talk about our ordeal with friends or family, but several people remarked about how we had changed since our trip. Mother asked if we were going to divorce, but I said we were both just under the weather from drinking the water in San Moreno.
A couple months later, I was at work when Andrew called me. He gave me the name of a news website. When I looked it up, there was an account of a massacre by guerrillas in the countryside of San Moreno. A grainy photo looked like the pile of bodies we’d seen in the thatched hut.
Then I saw a picture of the supposed guerrilla leader. The picture was several years old and showed a young man wearing green army fatigues. And though he had a mustache and helmet that hid his features somewhat, he looked very much like the police officer who had taken the boy’s pulse.
Years passed and we bought our own mansion on Summit Avenue. We had Samuel and Debbie, and life was comfortable if also busy.
Then one day it was raining. I looked outside in the back yard and saw Sam standing alone. He was drenched and held his head back with his mouth wide open to catch the raindrops. Images flashed in my mind of him lying in the back seat of a car, not moving, not breathing. I remembered the squealing tires, the mosquitoes and the smell of blood.
I wanted to call Sam in, but I had to wait a little while. I sat on a love seat on the veranda and cried, wondering how many people had died that summer in San Moreno. I shuddered as I remembered the sound of the thud when we hit the little boy. I remembered the feeling of his damp, cold shirt.
I sat in silence, becoming gradually aware of the ticking clock. I dried my eyes with my sleeve. After a little while, I was ready to face my son.
THE END
-- Eau Claire, Wisconsin
2005