A Far Country (11 page)

She walked across the road and pulled herself over the divide. A truck sped past, scattering pebbles. Headlights bore down on her, but she couldn’t tell how far away they were. At last she threw her bag over her shoulder and ran across the road.

It was a small station, with a high roof, three pumps and a single light. The station attendant, a thin boy with oily hair and a yellow uniform, pointed her to the bus stop, ‘through the trucks, ’round the corner.’ He stepped toward her and she stepped back. She saw darkness only, the shadows of the wheels and the flatbeds with heavy chains and swirls of decoration. ‘Do you want me to show you?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

As she left the cone of light, a large rig pulled off the highway, thundering over the gravel to a stop. Its window reflected the light of the station, the night, the boy in the yellow suit. It looked as if there was no one inside. The door didn’t open.

She was in darkness now. She couldn’t see anything that looked like a bus stop. She slipped between the lines of trucks, their wheels as high as her chest, teeth of tread like clenched fists. Her bag bumped against the side of the trucks as she walked, and she turned sideways to fit through. She wanted to say an invocation, but the invocations she knew were against snakes and sickness and thorn ghosts. She heard a girl’s laugh and saw a figure in a colored skirt drop from one of the trucks and scurry away.

Through a break in a wall, she came upon the bus stop.
There was a single empty car, with a hand-painted sign in the window that read
TAXI BLESSED MARIA DE JESUS
. Across the street, she saw a half-lit placard advertising a dorm room, but the windows were dark and the shops that lined the pavilion were shuttered. In a tiny traveler’s chapel, she found a strange painted statue of Mary with closed, sleeping eyes. It felt safer in the shelter of the sanctuary, but she was afraid she would miss the flatbed when it came. She found a bench outside and laid her head on her bag. The night was warm, she thought, and somehow she slept.

In the morning, another flatbed stopped on its way south. At first Isabel thought it was the truck she had come down on, with the same rusted undercarriage and the same coarse, hooded faces. The driver was a heavy man with an unbuttoned shirt and a combed mustache. ‘I’m going south, to the city,’ she shouted over the idling engine. ‘No kidding,’ said the driver. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed.’ He laughed.

‘Are you going there?’ shouted Isabel, feeling sick again.

‘Am I going there? No, I’m going to Shanghai.’ Isabel fidgeted uncomfortably with her bag. A man in the passenger seat punched the driver playfully. The driver paused. ‘You’ve never heard of Shanghai, have you?’ The other man hit him again, laughing.

Isabel made her way to the back. It wasn’t crowded, and she found space to sit. As they rode, she listened to a conversation about a factory for light fixtures, and a second about a war in a place whose name she didn’t know.

In the afternoon, a woman touched her arm. ‘Did someone hit you?’ ‘No,’ said Isabel, surprised. ‘I saw your cheek,’ said
the woman, ‘And I thought—’ Isabel raised her fingers to her face. Her cheekbone was tender, soft like the skin of a ripe fruit. ‘I fell,’ she told the woman. ‘No one did anything bad to me. I didn’t know I was hurt.’

The woman was sitting next to a small girl with long black hair. The girl watched them talking. There was something different about the girl, Isabel thought: she stared as if everything were new to her. After a long time she asked the girl, ‘Are you going to the city, too?’ The girl looked away. Isabel asked again, ‘Are you going to the city?’ The woman touched Isabel’s arm. ‘She doesn’t understand you, she doesn’t speak our language. Her brother told me when he left her with the flatbed. I’ve been traveling with her for days.’

‘Which language does she speak?’

The woman shrugged. ‘Who knows? Her own language. Her brother said that very few people speak their language. Very few people are left.’

Isabel watched the girl curiously. She had never heard another language. She couldn’t conceive that the girl didn’t understand. She wanted to laugh, but the more she watched the girl, the more frightening the thought became.

Farther along the road, a good-looking young man vaulted on. He smiled at Isabel. Blushing, she looked away.

They were passing orchards, but she didn’t recognize the trees. She wondered how far they had gone. She tried to imagine the map, but she couldn’t. She sang softly to herself:

She looked at the boy who had smiled at her, but he was talking to an older girl. Once or twice he glanced at Isabel, but his smile was now the smile an older person gives a child, and she felt a mixture of disappointment and relief.

She lay on her back on the flatbed. Beneath her, she could hear the creaking of the shocks and felt grains of sand rub against her scalp. She watched the people standing above her, tall shapes silhouetted against the light. She watched the sky, how it filled and emptied with clouds, how the colors swept past, how there were stains that fled the sun and those that pursued it. She wondered what Isaias was doing, suddenly giddy to think that she soon would see him. A shorebird flew with them for a long time. Later, vultures circled in the distant corner of her eye. Tree branches flickered past, sunlight glinting through the leaves. She let her mind clear. The wind whipped up strands of her hair. When she closed her eyes, the insides of her eyelids were warm and red, and her lips tingled.

She thought of new songs to sing to herself, but all of them made her miss home, and she didn’t want to cry in front of the other people. So she thought of her brother. She remembered one of his funniest stories, about a mouse that ran up the leg of a bride. Thinking of the mouse led to thinking of thicket mice, which led to thinking of hunger, so she went back and thought about the bride instead. Then the thought of the bride led to church and praying in church, which led to the landowners and to hunger. So she went back and thought about the bride again, and this time the thought led to a dress she had seen at a store in Prince Leopold, where she and Isaias used to go to clown before a full-length mirror. Sometimes, between games, she would catch him staring at himself the way a person stares at someone coming down the road from far
away. Once he said, ‘Is this what I look like?’ At first she had thought he was joking, but he insisted, ‘I’m not playing, Isa. Is this what you see when you see me?’ Not understanding, she turned to him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not
me
, me in the mirror.’ She stared for a long time. Then she saw a thin boy with a man’s face, a worn shirt and sandals, a stranger. She didn’t answer. A customer came and the owner shooed them out. As they walked home, she looked at him again, and the other boy was gone.

Night came. ‘Are you sleeping?’ asked the woman beside her. Isabel shook her head. The woman sat up on an elbow. ‘I know you weren’t, I saw you watching the sky. I can’t sleep, either. I’m scared there’ll be a storm, or the flatbed will flip, or we’ll be robbed. Once that happened to me. First time I came. I thought, Only an idiot robs a truck of poor people, and then I thought how I was carrying more money than I had carried in my life, because I needed it for the city. Then, because I thought it couldn’t happen, it happened. That night, they blocked the road with their car and lined all of us along the highway. That’s why I can’t sleep.’

Isabel thought the woman would ask,
Why are you awake?
and wondered what the answer was. Instead, the woman asked, ‘Do you have family in the city?’ ‘My cousin and my brother.’ ‘What’s their work?’ ‘Manuela is a maid. My brother’s a musician. He’s called Isaias.’ ‘A musician? He makes money from that?’ Isabel nodded. ‘And you know that?’ said the woman. ‘Or did he just tell you?’ ‘He sent us money,’ said Isabel. ‘He was a performer on the coast. Many people say he’ll be famous.’ The woman eyed her suspiciously. ‘I’d like to see this
famous
brother,’ she said. ‘Is he going to pick you up?’ Isabel hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘So your cousin’s meeting you?’ ‘No.
She lives at her employer’s house during the week. She told my mother there’s a bus.’ The woman whistled. ‘Your parents just sent you here, and no one’s picking you up!’ Isabel protested, ‘I know where she lives. I have the name written on a piece of paper. My mother told me where to go. I’ve taken buses before.’ She felt as if she were arguing with herself.

She remembered the name of the district. ‘It’s called New Eden.’ ‘Where’s that?’ asked the woman. ‘In the city?’ Isabel nodded. ‘I think so.’ ‘You can’t just think so,’ said the woman. ‘Is it the city or the New Settlements?’ Isabel remembered: ‘The second one. The New Settlements.’ ‘That’s what I thought,’ said the woman. ‘You aren’t going to the city at all, then. The Settlements aren’t the city. The Settlements are where all the migrants go. They all have names like that: New Eden, New Jerusalem, New Grace, they’re all the same.’ I’m not a migrant, thought Isabel, I’m not coming to stay.

The truck slowed and drew up next to a pair of boys. They dragged a barrow with a broken wheel that scoured the road. As they walked, they talked to the driver. Then they shook their heads. The truck roared off.

‘They’re going, too, if that’s what you’re wondering,’ said the woman, pushing aside her wind-knotted hair. ‘But they have to walk.’ The words were accusatory, as if from another conversation that Isabel wasn’t hearing.

In the morning, they stopped at a rest station. The driver unlatched the bed and the passengers pattered out. A pair of men stood by the open door of a long truck. ‘Look, another shipment’s in,’ said one, loudly. Isabel kept her eyes down as she passed them. The hills were green, with taller trees than
she had ever seen. She slipped off her shoes. It was the first time she had taken them off since home, and her feet were cold and pink where the strap pinched. She took long strides back and forth along a sandy patch lined with morning glories. When she got back to the flatbed, she remembered her cheek. In the side-view mirror, she ran her finger along the raised welt; it looked eerily blue beneath the light blue of her eye. Her forehead was lined with creases of dust. She spit on her fingers and tried to wipe it clean. She boarded the truck and it left.

An hour later, it began to rain. At first there was laughter and raised hands, and two boys did a little dance. Then it grew cold. There was a canvas tarp rolled up by the cab, but it flapped wildly in the wind when they tried to cover themselves. Isabel huddled with the others in the center. She licked the raindrops that ran down her cheeks. Water streamed back on the floor and fanned up from the wheels. A thick smell blossomed, like a wet animal. Then the rain stopped and she watched the clouds scurry off toward a low range of mountains.

Someone said, ‘It’s coming soon.’ The highway grew wider. Isabel went to the edge of the flatbed and stared at the road, waiting for the city to appear. She glanced behind her, ready to laugh, wanting to talk to someone, but there was only an old man, and he was quiet. She stood on her toes, as if it would help her see.

They passed more towns, the green spaces giving way to lots and dirt roads, fuel stations, hills of brick houses. The traffic thickened. Now and again, buildings in half-completion stood among the rest, concrete clinging to metal skeletons.

The highway joined a wide river with heaped banks and half-buried construction pylons. The water was brown, flecked by bits of floating foam. There was no green now, and the shanties seemed to cover the hills as far as she could see. At a wide sweep of the river, she saw lines of cars stretch unending into the far distance, where towers hovered in the haze.

After a while, they passed a dump across the river. She had never seen anything like it: a mountain, its base billowing against a long broken fence. Forms moved through openings in the chain links. A web of trails ran over the dun-colored swell, and the sky above was scribbled with the silhouettes of carrion birds. Its slopes seemed torn and tattered, littered with pale confetti. In places, larger scraps—a rusted car chassis, plywood, a door—hung like lone scales. Dogs trotted over the ground. Strange that they would put a dump in the center of the city, she thought, until a second thought came: Or the city has grown around it. She felt a chill and thought she might be sick again. The smell overwhelmed her, but no one else seemed to notice. On top of the massive rise she saw a row of lean-tos and two tiny figures running.

The traffic slowed without warning. The flatbed swerved off the highway. They passed a massive building covered with cracks, as if it had been dropped from a height. She thought of home and the houses crumbling out in the forest. You could take all of Saint Michael, she thought, and grind it up and pour it into this building and there would be space for many other Saint Michaels to fit inside.

Farther along, they turned onto a wide road that paralleled the arches of an overpass. On its flanks, storefronts crowded up against paint-stripped apartments with walls streaked the color of coal. Graffiti tattooed the narrow lintels, angry, spindled
letters with swollen elbows. There were abandoned lots, backed by walls of advertisements and symbols of political parties, their cracked asphalt empty but for piles of concrete blocks and tangles of telephone wire. Alleyways gave onto cement towers and whorls of steel barbs. Antennae sprouted like an old man’s whiskers. There was no center and no order.

The flatbed stopped at a light beneath an overpass, the crowd broke around them, she heard shouting and the roar of motors. A group of boys around a motorbike caught her staring. One made a kissing motion, punched another. ‘I love you!’ he shouted, touching his heart. ‘Marry me!’ The others joined in, elbowing each other. ‘Not him! He doesn’t know how to treat a country girl! He’s a baby! Marry me! My love’s killing me!’ She began to smile, but as the cars moved on, the words turned to obscenities and they desisted only when the flatbed was far away. The girls she saw wore tight shirts and jeans, and she recognized none of the slow, familiar saunter of the women at home. They walked fast, pulling children so that they almost lifted them off the ground. The air stank of engine oil and exhaust.