Panama Read Online Free Page B

can talk."
    "Can I go, Father?"
    Harry: "There's a lot of climbing through brush to get to the labor camps..."
    Me: "Great, great." Father doesn't know what to do. "I'll write about it for school. Please, Daddy, can I go?" I haven't called him Daddy in a decade.
    Hesitation. Small dishes of pineapple sherbet are placed before us.
    "I'll have to speak to your mother."
Thirteen
    Mother could stop all of this if she decides to. Harry's my ticket to freedom, but Mother's not keen on adventure, not in a jungle, not at night with someone she doesn't know.
    A Harry/Mother meeting is arranged. It goes well, of course. What's not to like about Harry? His clean-cut looks, his manner, his background? He's from Kentucky and a sometime teacher—Mother taught until she married. He scores big with her on every point and yet, when he's gone...
    "It's just not proper for a man in his midtwenties to be out with a girl of sixteen in the middle of the night." Does she think all men are predatory animals except for Father? "It's a temptation and it doesn't look right."
    "He wouldn't lay a hand on her."
    "It's not right."
    Father hangs in, defends Harry, and because Mother trusts Father's judgment and really does like Harry, she doesn't say no, just that she wants to think more about it.
    I go up to my room, jittery. I can't sit still. I need an answer. I need it to be yes. I need to throw something, hit something, make noise, break things, do something wild and out of control, but I don't. I'm trained not to. I look in the mirror. My face is breaking out.
    Downstairs an hour later, when she gives permission for me to go, I literally jump for joy, give her a hug, and bound back up the steps two at a time.
    In my room I dance a jig, quietly. Soundlessly leap on my bed and pump my legs in place, my arms in the air, eyes squinting. I throw back my head in a silent howl of joy. This is how victory sounds in our house. My diary gets the noisy announcement:
Guess what I'm going to do?!!! Harry's going to save me! He's going to make things all right!

Freedom, Sort Of
Fourteen
    It's eight o'clock in the evening on the appointed Thursday. I'm in fevered anticipation, wearing jodhpurs and high-top shoes, ready to go out with Harry, feeling great. This is what I want, what I thought I'd get all those years of waiting and thinking about Panama. A great adventure in the dead of night. After supper, anyway.
    The jodhpurs are what I wore when I went to Huffman's pasture with the boys—practical but hot. Loose pants or khaki shorts like Harry's would be cooler but Mother won't hear of it. "Scratches and insects and snakes," she says. I have to cover my legs, wear lace-up leather footgear. I'm too happy to complain.
    Harry has told me that in the field he carries a white canvas bag with his field notebook, red cards to tag the canvassed buildings, and a certificate to show he's the official census taker. Not many workers can read, but the sight of him in police uniform with the certificates makes him look official. That's what matters. All this is more than I could have hoped for and better than helping Wil and Orville. Harry is my new Wright brother, a more worldly one.
    Mother and Father see us off, standing at the top of the stairs. "Be careful."
    From down on the track we give them a wave and start walking fast along the rails in the moonlight. This is the road to everywhere, used by everyone, on foot or by train.
    "Stay close," Harry says.
    He walks in front. We hardly exchange a word, only stride along in the sultry night. We pass a few individuals who nod or greet us in Spanish. "...
buena
..."
    Looming ahead, the abandoned French locomotives appear ghostlike, rusted, the remains of their fiasco a decade earlier. Beautiful old machines, vines growing into them. They look like sunken vessels. I slow briefly to sketch and Harry calls back: "Come on, stay close."
    We hustle along for nearly half an hour. It's pitch-black. The heat is oppressive but for