Around us, kids came out of the trees. First two, then three more. Pretty soon, a crowd had gathered, and they were whispering among themselves.

Maybe the most striking feature was not what lay below, but what grew above. The largest mango tree in Nicaragua had grown up around the well. Literally. It was ginormous. Paulo pointed to the treetops and then to the roots below our feet, leading my eye to how the roots had encircled the concrete cap of the well and grown over. He pointed to the corner of his eye, to his tear ducts. His English was broken, long vowels were short and short long. He sounded more American Indian than Spanish. “Long ago, tree cry in the water. Roots make many tears. Water taste like mango. Very very good. Very very sweet.” He made an aggressive blender motion with his hands. “Mango clean water. Good medicine. People walk long way drink here.”

At the moment, I didn’t care too much about the water or how it tasted; I cared about the harness, so I pulled on the webbing and buckled myself in. Paulo tied the rope to the tether behind my shoulder blades and I pulled on his headlamp. Paulo held the rope and demonstrated, pulling on the rope twice: “I come up.” He pulled a single time: “Give loose.” Then he pulled for a prolonged time: “I come up right now fast.”

“Got it.”

Paulo threw the rope over the rusty wheel above me and fed the rope through the grooves. Then he wrapped the rope once around a nearby tree to cause friction in my descent. He then handed me a five-gallon bucket and tethered it to my harness. He placed a notepad and pen in my hand and said, “For talking.” Last, he handed me a small trowel, or shovel, and a hammer and patted me on the back, followed by a not-so-gentle shove. “You go.”

I stood over the opening as he tightened the rope, pulling his end up close against his hip; the four hundred feet of rope was neatly coiled at his feet. As Paulina and Isabella cleared the crest of the hill, I spoke to Paulo. “You’ll hold the rope. Right?”

He nodded. And eyed the hole. “You go.”

I sat in the harness, testing its ability to hold me, squatting over the hole. Then very gingerly, I pulled up one foot and then the other until I was suspended over the hole, sitting in my harness like a hammock. Holding my bucket, I nodded at Paulo and he slowly began lowering me into that hole. My last image of daylight was Paulina staring down on me. She spoke over me as the well covered me up. “I might have not been entirely truthful about people’s reasons for not going down there.”

“Oh, really.”

“Yeah, we have these snakes up here that—”

“Don’t. Just don’t.”

“They like the cold.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I couldn’t see her nodding, but her tone of voice told me that she was. “But don’t worry. They’re not poisonous.”

The hair rose on my neck and arms. “Now you tell me.”

I was thankful for the headlamp. As I descended, it showed the painstaking work that Paulina’s father had done and what he’d had to cut through to put in this well—much of which was rock. Every foot or two, I found an indentation in the wall. Large enough for a man’s hand or foot.

It took several minutes for Paulo to lower me to the ground floor—or what had become the ground floor after the mudslide and what had been thrown on top since. I had a feeling that the actual floor of the well was still another hundred or so feet. And to my great delight, before I set my feet down on the dried and hardened mud, I searched and found no snakes. Which was good because I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do had I found one.

I worked through the afternoon, sending up a bucket—on a second smaller line—every few minutes. Through the afternoon, we passed the bucket back and forth thirty or forty times. The mud was dense, full of rocks, and in many places, hard as rock. The moisture added with the pressure had turned volcanic mud into nearly impenetrable rock. I sent up a note, asking for something that I could work like a pick in such a small space. They sent down a dull hammer.

Breaking through that rock took a long time.

After about six hours, I was exhausted and the harness was cutting into my hips and armpits. I’d also lost count of the number of buckets I’d sent up. Toward what felt like dinnertime, I tugged on the rope twice and Paulo began the long pull upward. I did what I could to help by climbing up the small “steps” Paulina’s father had chipped into the wall decades ago. When I reached the surface, a crowd of fifty or so people had gathered. Paulina covered her mouth and laughed at my appearance. I was covered in dirt from head to foot. Many of the kids laughed. A few ran away, afraid. One of them walked up to me and touched me—poking me as if to determine if I was truly a man or if the devil had stolen my soul.

Paulo asked, “Good?”

I nodded.

He patted my biceps. “You strong dig. Bueno. Much distance.”

Paulina appeared. “How you feeling?”

“Like a shower never sounded so good.”

She laughed at my appearance. “There are a lot of women who pay a lot of money for that kind of mud bath.”

I pointed at the rope. “How far down did I go?”

Paulo waved his hand side to side. “Two hundred.”

“How far did I dig?”

“Six. Maybe eight feet.”

That was discouraging. “Felt like fifty.”

Paulina rode Paulo and Isabella down the mountain on the bike to the truck. Then Paulo drove Isabella home and Paulina returned for me.

Back at the house, Paulo had filled two buckets of water for me behind the plastic curtain. Most “showers” require about half a bucket. I guess he was trying to tell me something. It took me twenty minutes to get clean. Staring down at the muddy water swirling the crude concrete drain, it struck me that more than volcanic mud was coming off.

I devoured my rice and beans and must have eaten a dozen tortillas followed by two plantains. I heard some rustling out back, and then Leena poked her head in the door and beckoned with a curled finger. When I walked outside, she was resting one hand on a hammock stretched between the mango tree and some other large hardwood. “You need to learn how to swing in a hammock.”

“Seriously?”

She smiled. “Park it, Charlie.”

All I wanted to do was climb in my bed, but I straddled the hammock, sat, and then lay back. She was right. Everything about it was divine. She sat next to me in a plastic chair, gently rocking me back and forth, and as she did, every pain and weight lifted off me with the gentle sway of the canvas hammock.

I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, but I had a feeling there were dishes to do or clothes to wash or some responsibility I was shirking. I offered, “Aren’t we supposed to be doing something?”

She propped her feet up on the end of the hammock and chuckled. “We’re doing it.”

I doubt I’d ever been that tired. And it’d been a long time since I’d felt that good.

Chapter Twenty

Paulina woke me with a steaming mug beneath my nose, then set it on the table next to me. She said, “Paulo’s already gone and Isabella’s at school. We should get moving.” I glanced at my watch. It was already eight o’clock. I’d slept ten hours.

We piled onto the bike and resumed our search, starting where we’d left off yesterday. My hands and forearms were sore from digging, as was most everything else in my body. Our path paralleled the coast, and much of the time was spent rolling down dirt roads just inside the dunes with the sound of the waves on the other side. We stopped in several gas stations, places to eat, bars, anyplace where someone might have reason to stop. No one recognized his picture. At noon, Paulo called. He said he’d talked to a manager at a seaside hotel who had kicked out five guys who trashed two of his rooms and broke a bunch of bottles on his pool deck. He said they were traveling in an old Chevrolet convertible. He also said one of them had been pretty busted up, one eye was swollen shut. When asked what he looked like, the man described Zaul.