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Sick of the Revolution.By Deb Olin Unferth- - - - - - - - Part Seven By the time we got to Panama, we weren't engaged anymore. We had run out of money almost completely. We were both sick. We were eating bread for most of our meals. I was pretending to be pregnant for free food. My parents refused to wire us money. We were robbed over and over. We kept our money well distributed among our belongings and on our persons so the thieves made off with only a few dollars at a time, but it added up. Once, we were robbed by some men who never came anywhere near us or our belongings. We were at a border. I don't even remember where anymore. It must have had something to do with Nicaragua, although we weren't at the Nicaraguan border. My boyfriend was really sick. The idea was to get to Nicaragua, where they had socialized medicine and the doctors cost five bucks. My boyfriend couldn't move very much, so I had to kind of prop him up while we waited for the bus to leave. I was terrified, as usual. It was my conviction that as the elder and as the instigator of this whole trip he should be taking care of me and if he was lying there shaking with fever, how could he? He wanted me to buy some black-market cordobas here, where they were cheaper. He usually changed the money. I ran off and bought $60 worth from a man standing on the side of the road. He gave me stacks and stacks of bills. So many I couldn't carry them all. I tried, but they kept falling on the ground and I had to make two trips. I limped back to my boyfriend with the second batch and dropped them at his feet. What the hell is that? he said, raising his head a little. What are we going to do with all that? How much did you change, like 50 bucks? Don't tell me you changed 50 bucks. You should have changed 10. I tried to get the money into our day bags, but it wouldn't fit. I had to get our backpacks down off the top of the bus and try shoving it in those, but it wasn't going in there, either. We'll have to throw it away, said my boyfriend. Good job. A lady with a plastic tub of tamales came over. Hey, she said. Those guys say they're going to kill you. How's that? said my boyfriend, squinting at the men across the street. For the money. It's not worth that much, I said. How about if we give them half, said my boyfriend. She shrugged. So we loaded half of the stacks into the plastic tub and watched her cross over to them. A stack of bills fell in the dust. - - - - In Panama, we somehow wound up with a giant man from French Guiana. I believe we met him on a bus. He had no visas and he was going to try to make it through all those countries and then to Texas. There was a heartbreaking story that went along with it. I was the bad guy here. My boyfriend wanted to help him. He said, It's Christian charity, and I said, It's illegal. My boyfriend said, Obey not the laws of this earth, and I said, Oh my God, I'm going to vomit if I hear one more word of this. If there is one thing I do not want to hear about it's Jesus and all his sexist-pig apostles. The two of them sat up all night trying to doctor his passport and papers. He had to make it look like he had a legal Costa Rican blue-ink visa stamp in his passport. At the border the soldiers were suspicious. These days they probably have computers to keep track of these things, but they had nothing like that then. All they had was a couple of wooden shacks. The Panama side stamped us out, no problem. The Costa Rican side kept us there for hours, pulling apart our bags, asking questions. They took us into the shack one by one and asked questions and patted us down and gave us cursory strip searches—i.e., I kept my underwear on. They looked at me in my underwear and thought I was pregnant. I was very thin, but I had a smooth round stomach. I'm not pregnant, I told them. It's parasites. Or worms, they said. They let us through at last. My boyfriend was triumphant. He thought we could do this professionally. He doctored documents the rest of the way back. Entering Nicaragua, we were caught and he bribed them to let us go. Later, he did do it professionally. He kept a car at my parents' house in Phoenix. My parents let him do this. By this time, we'd broken up, I'd moved out, he'd left. And my parents still let him keep his car at their house. He'd disappear for a month. Then he'd show up out of nowhere, get the car, bring it back late that night or the next day. One day, he didn't bring it back and that was the last they saw of him.
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