Free Betrayed by Jeanette Windle Page B

mongrels infesting the dump crawled inside and been stuck? Maybe even a child?
     
    Vicki rushed to an opening in the adobe wall, where two boys sprawled against the mud brick. She’d tried earlier to coax them into the schooling program but to no avail.
     
    “ Hola , Pepe, Luchito.” In local custom, her chin pointed the direction rather than her hand. “I think there’s something hurt out there. Would you go see what it is? Te lo pagaré .” “I’ll pay you.” The five-quetzal note dangling invitingly from her fingers should have had the boys scrambling to their feet.
     
    Apathetic stares were explained as they dropped filthy faces back to sniff at disposable plastic cups filled with a pungent golden molasses. They’d already earned the few cents needed for their ration of industrial glue and would spend the rest of the day lost in the illusion of warmth and food and comfort. The street kid’s best friend.
     
    Exasperated, Vicki stepped from the opening into a rutted alley that petered a few meters away into the path leading down into the ravine. Threading single-file up that path, a procession of basureros emerged over the rim of the ravine, backs stooped under their gleanings.
     
    “¡Señores!” Vicki called. The title was a courtesy few would give these laborers. This time she forgot her training and used a finger to point. “There’s something out there moving. I think it’s hurt. Si me podría ayudar .” “If you would help me.”
     
    Heads swiveled to follow the foreigner’s rude gesture, then swiveled back. Vicki recognized astonishment behind the impassive blankness of dark faces.
     
     “A dog, perhaps,” one man called from under his pack. “Or rats.”
     
    “But it might be a person. Maybe a child.” Vicki displayed the five-quetzal bill. “Look, I can pay if you’ll just go take a look.”
     
    The column didn’t even break its slow, measured pace as it came abreast of Vicki. Crazy, rich gringa , she read in the flicker of black eyes.
     
    Only the laborer who’d spoken paused to shake his head. “No one goes out that far, señorita. It is too dangerous, and there is nothing left of value. Los gringos preocupan demasiado .” “You foreigners worry too much.” Like most people here, the man was Mayan, stunted by life and diet to little more than five feet tall. He added, “If it is a person, it is dead. The destitute leave them there. Cemeteries cost money. Do not worry. The vultures will take care of it.”
     
    As though he considered it payment for his advice, the man snatched the bill from Vicki’s hand and fell back in with the procession.
     
    “Hey!” Vicki exclaimed, then subsided. Count it as a contribution to the local economy . The man was probably right. The movement she’d seen was far out on that wasteland of smoldering fires and rotting debris, well beyond where trucks and bulldozers or the basureros themselves dared venture.
     
    Stepping to the edge of the slope, Vicki squinted against the fumes. Yes, there it was, swimming into watery focus. A black trash bag. If the movement had been a small animal trapped inside, it was no longer moving, the vultures now beginning to settle. Her stomach roiled as beaks ripped into the plastic. Time to retreat to a more savory meal, if she could stand to eat with this stench lingering in her nostrils.
     
    But just as she was blinking the tears from her eyes, she saw a human hand thrust upward imploringly from that black bundle. This time it was no illusion that it moved.
     
    “ ¡Esperen! Wait. It is a person! And it's still alive!”
     
    The basureros did not even look back.
     
    Anger propelled Vicki across that wasteland. Not at the garbage pickers toiling up out of the ravine nor at the sprawled teens drowning one more day’s misery in a chemical haze.  At a world where a human being tossed on a garbage heap for the vultures was too commonplace for even a moment’s concern.
     
    The trail downward was as