The People Next Door (12 page)

Before I tell you what makes us so different from the rest of the people walking around on this earth, I should tell you that
the names here have been changed to protect the innocent. Except, in this case, concerning the events that made us what we
are, there are no innocents.

I am writing this because we don’t talk about it. My family and I do not discuss what happened to the people who were there.
Nor do we discuss the changes in our lives since it happened, the things we have been forced to endure. Decent people do not
talk of such things. Not together around the dinner table. Not in private when it is only my wife and I, alone in our bedroom
in the middle of another sleepless night, and certainly not one on one with our children, who are struggling to carry on with
things in their heads that no children should have to live with. It is all too ghastly and painful to mention. Nevertheless,
the account needs a place to reside
other than in my own mind
.

We have done our best to put it behind us, and in many respects I am continually amazed at how we have succeeded. We have
not forgotten, but we have buried it,
the way victims of incest bury their childhood and soldiers bury wartime atrocity. You come home, you take off your uniform,
you have a private drink – and then you turn it off. Not as a means to forget, but as a means to survive.

If you doubt that any person could carry on the way we have, as I am sure you will be tempted to doubt so much of what follows,
I would suggest this: think of the worst thing you have ever done, or better still, the worst thing that has ever been done
to you. Now ask yourself how often you allow yourself to think about it. The horrific details, the moment you did it, the
moment it was done to you. The second-by-second chain of thoughts that ran through you like a poisonous but addictive injection.
The smell of the room, the texture of the other person’s skin against yours, the terrifying sense of isolation when you thought,
mistakenly, no one has ever done this before, this is beyond reality as I understood it. Followed by the equally jarring realization
that you are not alone, oh no, people have always done things like this to one another, that you have simply been welcomed
into a darker fraternity of damaged souls who have known for a long time what you have just discovered. Nothing is beyond
the scope of human depravity. There is nothing unique about the horrors you have suffered or visited upon another. You are
not special.

You’re just here, and you can never go back.

So you hide it. You pick up the pieces and move on. If, in time, you are able to examine it at all, peer again at the bracing
reality of it under the magnifying scope of
honest memory, you will find yourself paralyzed, rendered immobile, emotionally and physically shackled at your desk at work,
standing over the kitchen sink while the clock ticks loudly, sitting in the hot car at the end of a long dirt road. You have
only two choices at this point. Succumb to the drowning pull of it, say goodbye to your life, and die. Or wrap the memory
in a straitjacket and lock it in an impenetrable solitary cell within a prison that allows no visitors, cutting off a piece
of yourself as permanently as the amputation of a gangrenous foot, so that the rest of you may carry on, so that you may survive.

The human mind is a fountain of wonders, capable of ingenious acts of self-deception. We are living proof of this.

Yet even here, in this confessional diary or letter or whatever this may become – a document I simultaneously hope no one
will ever see and which I believe the world will one day be forced to hunt down and examine very closely – I cannot bring
myself to use our real names. I will borrow his voice, pretend it happened to someone else. I need to see it that way in order
to see it at all.

So, for now, the ‘I’ who is narrating this is the father. His family will be referred to only as my wife, my son, my daughter,
our children. In the end, I don’t think who we are will be all that important. What is important is the others, the ones we
encountered on our trip, the things they did, and the things we – my family and I – have done since.

I planned the trip after our friends described the island as an unspoiled, humble, shaggy kind of paradise. It sounded like
the perfect place to spend a month with my wife and children. I thought it strange that Isla Nena, Puerto Rico’s little sister
island, also known as Isla de Vieques, or simply Vieques, had not been commercialized like so much of the Caribbean. She lies
just under ten miles east of the big island and stretches only twenty-one miles east to west, three or four miles north to
south. To understand what went wrong there, some history may be useful, though I promise to keep it brief, because no one
likes a history lesson and soon, perhaps very soon, history will no longer matter.

Puerto Rico ceded to the United States in 1898, after Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War, and Vieques was part of
the package. The sugar industry was consolidating to the big island, and by the time World War Two came around, the US military
decided Vieques would be the perfect spot for a new base. They claimed about two-thirds of the island with the idea that it
would be a safe haven for the British navy should our friends overseas fall to Nazi Germany. This never happened, obviously,
and the base was never constructed.

But after the war, the Navy decided this nice plot of land was convenient for various military exercises, training, and munitions
testing. Bombs, missiles, and so forth. Target practice for training pilots.

Over the decades resentment swelled among the local population and environmental activist groups. Scientists have found traces
of depleted uranium in the sand, and
some of the locals claim to have suffered from unknown biological agents. Lovely term, unknown biological agents. They say
the number of residents who develop one form of cancer or another is off the per capita scale, the water isn’t safe to drink,
birth defects are on the rise. The truth is we don’t know exactly what the Navy dropped, only that it was a lot, and that
keeping two-thirds of the island off-limits killed tourism and commercial development on Vieques for nearly half a century.
Hence the ‘undiscovered jewel’ of the Spanish Virgin Islands.

Things came to a head in 1999, when a Navy man was killed during one of the exercises and the resentment that had been brewing
for decades sparked a wave of protests. The media coverage was sensational, went international, and the Navy caved under pressure.
They pulled out and much of the territory they had rights to was converted to a wildlife refuge.

Interestingly, despite claims of how poisoned the place is, to this day Vieques has one of if not the largest bioluminescent
bays in the world. The Spanish, being the superstitious people they are, believed the teeming mass of light to be the work
of El Diablo, but I can tell you, paddle a kayak out there at night and it’s like swimming amongst the stars, splashing around
in heaven. So, maybe some things have been poisoned, maybe others are thriving. Thriving in new ways. Who can say why?

We rented a stand-alone villa on the north side of the island, perched on a hill that looked down onto a small beach and our
private pool. To the west was a cinder-block residence with a yard full of roosters being trained
by a few local men for the cockfights held on Friday nights. The roosters woke us every morning around three-thirty or four,
which drove my wife crazy, but I didn’t really mind. It only added to the local flavor.

To the other side of our property lay a complex of six villas, attached in pairs, each pair sharing their own courtyard and
pool, with volleyball courts and paved grilling areas. We’d been to a couple of the beaches, Navio and Blue. We’d been hiking.
We spent a day or two browsing the shops, enjoying the tacos and those little grilled
jamon y queso
sandwiches they love down there. But mostly we stayed around the house, reading, lounging by the pool, drinking a lot of
Medalla. I couldn’t get enough of those little eleven-ounce cans of Puerto Rican beer. Stuff goes down like water and you
have to drink a thousand to get a real hangover. You’re up with the sun, cracking the first beer by eleven, pretty much jelly
by dusk. We’d make a dinner of fried conch and red snapper the local fisherman hauled in that morning, sit on the second-story
balcony and listen to the waves, have a glass of bay rum on ice, and sometimes, though we had our own problems by then, my
wife and I would find time to make a little music together once the kids were asleep. Even if I had another fifty years to
live without the demons we now carry, I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend them.

By my count there were three, maybe four other families in those villas, but we were close enough to observe only the Percys,
a portly crew from Madison, Wisconsin. They had rented a minivan held together by yo-yo string
and bamboo, and every morning they would pile in with lawn chairs, badminton racquets, coolers, picnic bags, inflatable rafts
… a real family circus. And every afternoon around four they would return, spilling out of the van, red and cranky and run
down, one of the kids crying more likely than not.

They’d disappear for an hour or two for nap time. Then around five-thirty or so, the father, Bob Percy, who went two-seventy
if he went a pound, and his wife, Lynn, this adorable little brown mouse of a gal who could’ve sat in the palm of his hands,
they’d come out of hiding and fire up the grill by the pool, put together a feast of hotdogs or whole chicken. The kids would
come out and they’d eat quietly in their lawn chairs, paper plates and sodas. The kids were all smiles. Tanya, who was eight
or nine, and Timothy, who was three or four years older than his sister.

One morning while I was walking the grounds with my coffee, I introduced myself. Bob owned a used-car dealership in Mt Horeb,
a small town outside of Madison, and it was failing. He was holding up pretty good, but he told me in the way men do so without
saying much that this was their last hurrah. He expected to lose the dealership and, if they couldn’t pull something together
come the new year – this was in October – they’d lose the house too. Bob walked with a hitching gait and along with a hip
that needed replacing, he had a host of other health problems. Diabetes, gout, and probably a heart getting ready to blow
a valve. He didn’t mention his heart, but his
breathing was labored and I saw him massaging his chest on several occasions.

I asked which beach they were spending time at. Understand, the beaches on Vieques are small and the best ones require a kind
of short safari to reach. A lot of the roads are bumpy, full of mud puddles, and it seems like you’re not getting anywhere,
only deeper into the jungle. Which isn’t really a jungle, but more like a low forest of bushes and small trees, tightly packed.
Eventually you arrive at a little shaded area with fewer trees, and plopped right there like an ivory boomerang cupping a
crystal blue cove, is your beach.

There are half a dozen commonly known and relatively easy to get to. But there are others, maybe three or four, that don’t
have names. The locals, even the ex-pats, don’t like to give directions, especially to Americans. It’s not uncommon for you
to spend all day on one of Vieques’s better known beaches and not see more than three or four people. But these other beaches,
the ones no one likes to talk about, you could have five hundred meters of powdered sugar all to yourself.

This was what Bob Percy was telling me. Claimed he and his brood finally found one unlike any of the others. ‘Had to cut through
a rusted chain blocking the road and ignore a few old signs the Navy put up,’ Bob said. ‘Then hike through another quarter
mile of brush to get there, but it was worth every flea in my shorts. Makes Navio look like a catshit-infested sandbox. Most
beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.’

I told Bob Percy to bring his wife and family over for
dessert that night after dinner – my wife had found enough ingredients to make a key lime pie – and I’d get him drunk and
make him tell me how to find this beach.

‘That sounds good, chief,’ Bob said. ‘You won’t get it out of me, but we could use the company and you’re welcome to try.’

We agreed on seven o’clock. Bob and his tribe set out again that morning, and we stayed back, doing our usual thing. I was
having another Medalla on the balcony around four o’clock, watching the pelicans dive for supper. The weather turned windy
and overcast. Rain started, and it was a wet one. Blowing in from the ocean, soaking most of our padded lounge chairs on the
balcony. My wife was worried about a hurricane, but it wasn’t the season and this was just your average subtropical deluge.
By six Bob and his family were running late, and I was imagining them scrambling off the beach, coming home a wet mess.

Half an hour went by, and then an hour, then two, and by now the rain was really dumping all over the island. Wasn’t safe
to drive and dusk was near, so I was getting worried. I had a feeling they’d run into trouble. My wife told me to quit being
an idiot and come inside. I wasn’t cold, but I did have to use the bathroom, though; those little beers add up eventually.

So I ran inside and used the head, helped my wife crank one of the bedroom shutters tight. I wasn’t inside more than three
or four minutes, and when I went back out onto the balcony, the Percy minivan was parked in its
usual spot inside the gates to the side of their villa. The van doors were closed. The Percy villa was dark.

I waited, watching for Bob to unload, but he didn’t appear. None of them did. Well, it would be silly to unload in this weather.
But why weren’t their lights on? The power hadn’t gone out in our place, but it was possible the other villas were on different
lines and maybe one of them had gone down. I popped inside for my windbreaker and told my wife I’d be back in a few minutes.

I went down the stairs and around the gardens on the side of our place. You couldn’t get to the other villas by crossing from
lawn to lawn. There were tall stucco fences and locked gates. You had to use the access road behind the villas, and I arrived
in less than five minutes. I glanced at the entire row of six villas and saw that the lights in all of them were off.