A Far Country (22 page)

Isabel went to the door, put her hand out and withdrew it when a hailstone stung the tip of her finger. It seemed impossible, balls of ice falling in such heat. She turned her palm up to catch them and stare as they melted away. They left numb pink welts. At her feet, the baby reached for the hailstones. She scooped him up, caught more in her hand and slipped them into his mouth.

It rained again that night. The sheets were damp. She watched the rain in the distant static of a single street lamp.

The following morning, the rotted beams of a shack up the road gave way, and a sagging roof of tar shingles collapsed on a room of sixteen people. Leaving the baby with Junior’s cousin, Isabel joined a crowd that helped pull out muddied sheets and ruined photographs. Families began to abandon their clapboard shacks and crouch beneath tarps. The rain dissolved a wattle hut down the road, leaving only a soaked, tangled hammock and a pan. Then more rain came, a southern squall that they could see thundering over the city before it struck, the air salty like the sea. Men rolled their trousers to their knees, women tried awkwardly to hike their skirts with fingers twisted around plastic bags full of belongings. Below, the little river swelled into the road. The air turned foul. Word came around not to use the water pump. By noon, the water in the street overflowed the narrow trenches and ran across the floors of the houses. Isabel tried to sweep it back, but it was useless. She took everything off the floor and set it on the table and bed. In the washroom, roaches swarmed from the drain, and the toilet flooded. Her clothes wouldn’t dry; Hugo wailed when she wrapped him in wet diapers that she had tried to clean in the stream that ran outside the door. Later, a man parked a truck at the bottom of the hill and sold water from a plastic tank. It smelled strange to Isabel, so she didn’t give it to the baby. The next day, many people were sick. The man didn’t return.

Now on TV there were images of landslides, women weeping, a pale baby being pulled from the soil like a muddy tuber. Most of the footage was from the Settlements, the thin brick walls crumbling into the new rivers, the clapboard slipping apart and floating away in hesitant rafts. But some images came from rich communities on the coast, and the news
played a video of a white house tearing free from its foundation and sloughing off into the sea.

Isabel stayed at Junior’s store and watched the news. A famous movie star had a heart attack in the back of his car, and the closest hospital had been closed. They showed the paramedics pulling him out, his face a brilliant violet. On the highway by the river, a supermarket delivery truck overturned, and hundreds of chickens floated away into the river. The health commissioner went on TV, warning people not to eat them. The next day, the same thing happened with a truck carrying detergent, and the news showed bubbles overflowing the banks. One newspaper ran a photo with the headline
NEW WAY TO CLEAN CITY
.

She wished Manuela would call from her work, but the phone was dead.

That night, a gleaming car skirted the base of New Eden and tried to push its way through the flood at the bottom of the hill. It was a common sight: tryst-seekers took the road as a shortcut to motels near the highway. Isabel was at the window, unable to sleep. She saw a fan of water rise up, and then the car drift to a halt. The driver seemed to be struggling to open the door. Beside him, a bare arm began to point. Isabel was amused. The other houses gave her only a partial view of the road, so she leaned out the window to watch.

It was then that she saw the others: a pair of boys advancing toward the car, wading slowly through the inky water. In the light of a single street lamp, they seemed to float, legless. Their chests were bare; they wore their shirts wrapped around their heads. She saw a third boy move around the
other side of the car, his face hidden by a woolen mask, a gun in his outstretched hand. ‘My God—’ Her hand went to her mouth. The boys pounded the hood, gesticulating madly. Give them the money, she thought, give them the money, just give them—But there was a shot and then another, and then the window exploded.

The black water foamed. The tallest boy tugged at the door and then plunged headfirst into the car as a horrible, inhuman screaming shot through the dark. She could see struggling—a second boy began to swing his arms as if he were striking someone inside. They took off running in long, crashing strides. Without thinking, she ran to her door and opened it. Someone shouted; she saw the boys sprinting up the hill, struggling against soaked jeans, panting, their thin arms pumping madly. One boy’s shirt had come undone from his head. Briefly, his eyes met hers as he sprinted past, his face contorted. The wiry muscles on his back streamed with water, droplets flew from his arms. Ahead, a smaller boy fell, struggling at sagging wet pants that were too big for him. He tore them off, threw them onto the roof of a house and lunged up the hill.

From the doorways, cries followed the boys as they scattered into the shanties. Isabel had a sudden and cruel thought, They aren’t crying for the people in the car, and she went inside and vomited into the washbasin.

For two days, the car remained in the flood. In the brown water, its windshield gleamed like the onyx eye of a caiman. When the flood rose, it shifted slightly, drifting until the water poured through the window and it settled again.

In the streets, people whispered nervously to one another. They said the driver had been dead when they reached him,
and the pale woman beside him mumbled and never spoke until she was helped away. They said the boys had come from another neighborhood. They repeated this over and over again. From her window, Isabel watched the car and wished it would float away.

The rain relented. The electricity returned. The women swept the brown water out of their houses and into the street. Isabel left footprints on her floor and swept them away as they dried.

A van came in the afternoon and skirted the shanties. It had the markings of a TV station, and that night there was a report that a city councilman had been killed in the Settlements, with images of New Eden taken from far away. It took a moment for her to recognize the brick-wall labyrinth beneath the cluttered roofs. The councilman’s wife, an older woman with tan, heavy arms, moved slowly through gritty footage, weeping as she was escorted from her house. On the program a pair of experts discussed the Rise of Violence. They asked, Is it human nature or is it poverty? On a call-in to the show, a woman shouted, ‘They’re animals! They come from the north to ruin us. They just make children and waste and destroy this city.’

In an interview, the police commissioner promised to get the killers. He said that trafficking rings were operating out of the Settlements and the woods. He used the words
wipe out
and
exterminate
.

No one came to take the car. The water rose and fell, leaving a thin berm of dirt on the windshield. Children played in the driver’s seat. A man waded out and siphoned the gas tank. Then one morning the car was gone.

Manuela came home for the first time since the shooting.
‘I’ve been watching this on TV,’ she said. ‘The phones have been dead, you know, and I couldn’t leave. The city’s angry. I think something very bad is going to happen.’

The next morning, the police raided New Eden. It was still dark when a searchlight rose up the hill, its long beam illuminating the rain. Isabel awoke to footsteps. She started toward the door, but Manuela pulled her back. ‘Stay down.’ Isabel crouched and peered through a run in the curtain. A phalanx of police made its way up the hill in riot gear, raindrops shattering against their helmets and shields.

They were not far from her door when the firing began. Erratic outbursts came from up the hill. The police took shelter in the doorways and behind their shields. Bullets exploded the hollow bricks of the houses and thudded into the mud, clipped the kites on the wires, smashed the birdcages, tore sharp lips into the zinc. Out of the back window she saw a figure running away on the rooftops. There was a burst of gunfire. He spun about, clasped his leg and fell awkwardly from the roof. There were more shouts and then a long volley of firing. They were right outside the door; she could hear the scraping of riot shields against the walls. The door rattled. ‘Open up!’ Dust sifted down from the walls. Manuela lay on the bed and curled around the baby. He shrieked and struck his fists at the air. She put her hands over his ears. ‘Don’t squeeze so hard,’ whispered Isabel. ‘Shut up and stay away from the door,’ hissed Manuela. ‘Let them break it down, let them take anything, just stay out of the way.’ The banging stopped.

Isabel crawled to the window. She saw figures moving through the street. It was still dawn.

The police spread, clanking through the alleyways. Shots
came from the backstreets, and she thought she smelled fire. An officer came come down with two young men in handcuffs. Behind them, a woman followed, cursing and pointing at the sky. The police herded the children out of the way with their rifle butts. An hour later, they brought down more boys.

In the late morning, she saw a figure lying on the corrugated rooftop of the house next door. He looked very small and flat, as if somehow he had pressed himself into the zinc. He was naked except for a pair of rain-soaked underpants, and had a blurred tattoo of the Virgin on his back. He was only feet away from her, and when he saw her staring, he moved his lips, but she didn’t understand. ‘There is a boy on the roof,’ she told her cousin, who didn’t answer. He was still there when she returned. It rained, and she could see him shivering, his skin prickling, his knuckles white as his fingers tensed against the corrugation. She didn’t know if he was trying to hold himself from slipping off, or just to stop shivering. The metal sheet rattled softly.

Later when she looked, he was gone. There was only a dry outline of his body, striped by the black lines of the corrugation and the rain.

In the road below, the police vans roared away.

That night, rumors swarmed the hill. Two boys had been killed, they said, or four. Someone said a policeman shot a boy in the head as he lifted his hands in surrender. A girl was hit by a stray bullet in one of the backstreets.

There were angry arguments outside Junior’s store. ‘I didn’t come all the way from the north for this,’ shouted a woman. ‘Those boys are scum. They are making our lives hell.’

‘These boys have no work and no school,’ a man shouted back. ‘What do you expect in this filth?’

‘I had no work and no school,’ spat the woman. ‘And I don’t shit where I eat. I don’t have those dogs chasing after me with their stray bullets flying everywhere.’ She saw the mother of one of the boys coming down the hill. ‘You!’ She lunged at her. ‘If you weren’t drunk all the time, this wouldn’t have happened.’ ‘Easy,’ someone said.
‘Easy?’
spat the woman. ‘We’re turning into beasts.
Easy?
I’ve survived six droughts.’ She raised three fingers on each hand and shook them. ‘Six. You think I stole or killed? What happened to pride?’
‘Pride?’
scoffed the man. ‘You think I can afford pride? My kids are skinny like my finger, and some scum shows off his car in my face? I’d put a bullet in his mouth. I’d put a bullet in every one of their mouths. I’d bury every one of them.’

On TV came more images of young men in handcuffs, trying to hide their faces from the camera. Isabel recognized some of them; one was the son of the woman who washed by the river. She told Manuela. ‘Good,’ said her cousin coldly. ‘I hope they got all of them. I hope they never come back.’

That night someone killed Junior with a shot to the neck. Isabel awoke to the sound of the gunfire and went to the door when the screaming began. In the morning, a crowd formed a cautious circle around the house. ‘Informer,’ someone spat. Isabel took the news numbly. From her room, she could hear Junior’s cousin wailing. Then someone said she was lucky they didn’t kill her, too. She stopped wailing. They burned his mattress in an empty lot.

When the weekend came, she descended slowly from the gray mist of the hill.

At the campaign office, Josiane took her by the elbow. ‘I
was so worried. I saw the television. Did you see? They called it a war.
War in Eden.’

Isabel said nothing.

‘What about your brother?’ she asked. Isabel pinched her lips and shook her head.

That evening when they dropped off the flags, Josiane took her to the Center and stopped outside the offices of the Civil Police. It was closed. ‘Monday,’ said Josiane. Isabel protested: ‘I can’t leave. Especially after what happened. Manuela would kill me.’ ‘No, she won’t. She’s just as worried as you are.’ Isabel shook her head. ‘I’m not sure she thinks about Isaias. I don’t know. I think she is angry at him.’ ‘For what?’ ‘For disappearing.’ ‘Angry for
disappearing?
Are you angry?’ ‘It’s not his fault,’ said Isabel, quickly. Josiane pressed on, ‘Are you scared of the police because of what I told you about my boyfriend?’

She relented. When Monday came, she wrapped Hugo in a blanket and descended the hill. She wandered for nearly an hour until she found the station again. Inside, a guard pointed her toward a row of elevators. She got off, alone, in an empty hallway with a wilted philodendron. A sign read
DEPARTMENT OF DISAPPEARED PERSONS
. She followed a corridor with high ceilings. The floor was laid with loose wooden tiles that knocked against each other as she walked.

At the end of the hallway was a bank of vinyl chairs. Two middle-aged women in pastel dresses sat together. Isabel paused. ‘It’s there,’ said one of the women, pointing with her lips toward an open door.

Inside, a girl sat behind an empty desk. ‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘My brother—’ Isabel began. She took a deep breath and spoke as calmly as she could: ‘I want to know about someone who is missing.’

‘Do you have a Bulletin of Occurrence?’ asked the clerk. ‘They gave it to you at the precinct. Did you go to a precinct first?’ Isabel shook her head. ‘I didn’t know.’ The clerk said, ‘How can you expect us to help you if you don’t help us? What if the whole city came looking for someone and no one had a Bulletin of Occurrence? What would happen then?’