by Mark Brazaitis
As a journalist, my father had covered fires and floods. He’d covered bloody protests and a war in the Middle East. When, in February of 1991, he visited me in Guatemala, where I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer, he asked if we could visit the capital’s infamous basurero. He didn’t say as much, but I understood: he wanted to add it to the list of gruesome places he’d seen.
I’d visited the dump as part of my Peace Corps training a year and a half earlier, but I hadn’t been back and I wasn’t sure I could find it. It wasn’t on a map. I knew what zona it was in, however, and when we saw vultures swirling in the sky from my father’s rental car, we knew we were close. We knew we were even closer when we inhaled air redolent of human excrement and animal carcasses.
We parked on a hill above the dump. I led the way in.
The landscape was pimpled with houses made of plastic bags and powdered milk cans. Trash of every variety—rusted silverware, broken bottles, deflated soccer balls—protruded from the dirt. In the distance, a crowd gathered around a truck about to spill fresh garbage. An economy was at work: men and women collected what could be sold or eaten. Wild dogs roamed the terrain like jackals on a sub-Saharan plain. Vultures darkened the sky. The ground was soft, viscous. With each step, we stirred up a new, horrible smell.
A dozen girls and boys rushed us, begging, their faces blistered by the sun, their hands scarred from the trash they’d picked, their hair sticky from sweat and scum. I’d seen my father ignore the outstretched hands of a dozen homeless people on the streets of Washington, D.C., where he lived. Now he emptied his wallet.
“I’ve had enough,” he said, tucking his wallet back into his jeans. He led the way back to his car. We’d stayed no more than five minutes. “Why did you bring me here?”
I didn’t believe he was sincere. He knew he’d asked to come. I let his question pass. I, too, would have liked someone to blame for all that shit and sadness. Even war must be prettier.
Back at his hotel, where the bellhops expected to be tipped in dollars, he threw away his shoes. He’d brought two pairs, thinking one might become drenched sometime during his travels. It was the rainy season. I’d worn my work boots and couldn’t afford another pair. I washed them outside in a shower next to the swimming pool as my father, at the poolside café, drank a beer.
Over the next few days, we didn’t talk about our visit to the basurero. But it wouldn’t let us forget. The smell never left his car. And for months afterward, every so often, its odor rose from my boots like a ghost from a grave.
Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.