Panama by Shelby Hiatt

necessary?
Sure.
Forty
    I walk along the track toward Federico's cabin. Mother won't expect me for another hour. I'll drop off books for him—simple enough, except that he's not expecting me. We haven't set up this type of exchange. It's a delivery.
    For weeks we've been meeting on Sundays at some designated spot—my new secret life. It's actually innocent enough. I show the usual respect for my parents, do excellent schoolwork, and meet Federico regularly with books. Sometimes we meet at the Tivoli in the evening. Sometimes below our house at the bottom of the steps—a daring exchange before supper.
    But it's always friendly—we say a few polite words, then he moves on. This delivery to his cabin is something new and personal. I wonder how he'll take it. I want to reach him where he lives, that was the real reason for going to Gatun with Harry.
    Mother, without knowing it, suggested the whole thing. Shemade it possible. "You have to see that area before it's flooded," she said. I agreed, knowing I'd have to change my schedule for one day, which is exactly what I needed.
    ***
    Trudging along the track in midafternoon heat, I hear a single locomotive engine behind me coming at high speed; I know a fast-moving engine is the Zone's ambulance. If the worker inside is dead, he goes to the morgue; only injured, he'll go to the hospital. He might even recover.
    The engine speeds by and I glimpse three workers with the engineer, all of them bent over an injured body. One of the workers is Federico.
Forty-One
    I stop walking and stare.
    A hundred yards ahead, below Federico's cabin, the engine comes to a stop and the men lift the body out. As the engine pulls away, they carry it up the steps, an awkward business; nobody notices me watching from down the track. I creep closer. The men have finally managed to get the body up and into the cabin.
    At the bottom of the steps I don't know what to do. I want to see in the cabin but it's too risky. I won't have an opportunity like this again soon and I can't bring myself to abandon my plan, so I decide to at least get a look. I start up the steps, books for Federico in my arms, stretching my neck to get a glimpse. I can hear intense voices. A few steps higher I can actually see in.
    A dead body. I've never seen one before.
    The man is lying on Federico's cot, his face half blown away. Part of his arm is missing and some of it hangs by flesh or splintered bone—it's hard to tell which. He's mangled, mutilated, dirt-blackened, and bloodied. I stare.
    They're trying to clean him, but his clothes are ripped to car-boned shreds and the bone is bare and glutinous with gore. The dangling arm makes him look like Marat in his bath but with half a face.
    They stop talking or trying to repair the body any more, and there's silence. I stay still, crouching on the steps looking in. Two of them sit on the empty bed, and Federico kneels beside the dead man and lowers his head onto the edge of the cot. I think he's going to pray, which surprises me for some reason, but he doesn't. He weeps.
    His shoulders shake.
    I don't move. No one in the cabin does, either. Minutes pass.
    Death by premature explosion—it happens all the time and it has to be what I'm looking at. Reports are in the paper every few days:
At the Culebra storehouse a porter gets impatient with opening a box of dynamite and tries to knock off the cover with a machete—three men blown away.
    A dozen men killed in the Cut when they tap a clogged charge to get it in position.
    Five killed and eight wounded when a tooth on shovel number 210 hits the cap of an unexploded charge.
    Nineteen dead and forty injured at Bas Obispo—that one in the
Canal Record
this morning. And now death from dynamite in front of my eyes.
    A hand comes down on my shoulder. I stand up so fast, I fall off balance.
    A Zone policeman catches my arm and steadies me.
    "What are you doing here?"
    "I saw trouble; I thought I should help..."
    "Do