A Far Country (9 page)

A cashew vendor passed. Usually, Isabel would beg her mother for cashews, but now she was too afraid to be hungry.

She began to feel ill with the heat and waiting. She wanted to open the top buttons on her dress, but she felt the half-lidded eyes of the men as they sat back in their chairs with their chests and bellies open to the air. A trickle of mechanics slunk between the shops that surrounded the station. She went and looked in the concession stand. It sold good luck charms, Saint Christopher invocation cards, wooden fists and rosary beads. A small black-and-white TV played a channel where a preacher inveighed against beliefs in backlands spirits.

Night came. The men went home. The station was empty except for the two of them and an old woman. Isabel took out Isaias’s letters and arranged them in a row on the bench. ‘Put those away, or you’ll lose them,’ said her mother.

‘I’ll bring him home,’ said Isabel.

‘Sleep,’ said her mother.

Isabel slept with her head on her mother’s lap. She awoke strangely happy.

It was very quiet, and in the distance was the stain of sunrise. The flatbed idled in the square. It was crowded with bodies and blankets. The huddled figures moved silently aside to give her space.

I
t took the flatbed a half hour to reach the outskirts of Prince Leopold, winding through unpaved streets of cinder-block houses. The driver hung out the window, his low song
tothesouthtothesouthtothesouth
coaxing dawn-shadowed figures from doorways and street corners. The new passengers swung bags onto the dirty planks and settled among the others.

At the edge of the city, the truck accelerated. Fresh air rushed over the back. Outside, the scrub ran to the base of the mountains, where a thin trail threaded to a summit chapel. The road was potholed and the driver never stopped swerving.

There were no benches. The passengers slumped against the slatted railing or curled up in the center. Their faces were burnt and lined with a gray dust that covered everything. The truck had come from farther north, Isabel knew. She wondered how many days the others had been riding. She found a gray wool blanket that didn’t seem to have an owner. She checked it for spots of blood and bedbugs; it seemed clean, so she wrapped it over her shoulders. She flexed her toes uncomfortably. Her shoes were a size too small, but they were her best
pair, black store-bought loafers with the words
Daisy Girl
printed on the insoles. She had promised her mother she wouldn’t lose them, and she kept them on.

They passed through a little town. A crowd of schoolchildren swirled around boys riding bicycles with wooden blocks bolted to the pedals. On the outskirts, a billboard showed a smiling couple at the edge of an emerald swimming pool. Where the poster was torn, she could see scraps of other posters: a leg, a little owl, a woman’s painted mouth, the word
VICTOR
. Insouciant dogs trotted through the cacti and yapped at the truck. At times, she could hear music coming from the cab.

In the afternoon, a pair of men at the railing began to point. ‘A pilgrim,’ someone whispered. She saw a lone figure dragging a cross, its base worn smooth by the road. The truck slowed but the man didn’t look up. Some of the passengers crossed themselves. The scrubland stretched to the horizon, white like a dusting of ash.

Down the road, a man in a red velvet shirt and a straw hat flagged the truck, climbed onto the flatbed and threw himself down beside her. He began to talk the moment he sat, introducing himself with an endless name she forgot before he finished. He called her
my angel
and said, ‘You look like you just came fluttering down from the sky.’ He didn’t ask her name. He was a rhabdomancer, ‘at least a hundred and twenty-seven years old,’ and he added, ‘Rhabdo-rod, mancy-divination. I find water in the subsoil.’ He had, he told her, an explanation for the droughts.

He said the modern age was ‘all Carnival and no Lent.’ For many miles, he uttered proclamations about the end of the world, when a boy-king and his soldiers would return to take
revenge on all sinners, a group that included thieves and girls with shirts that showed their bellies. Behind him, one of the standing boys made loops around his ear with his finger, and Isabel tried to suppress a smile.

The rhabdomancer touched her arm. ‘Did you see that man up the road? I walked for two days with that citizen and his cross. Do you know why he is paying a promise? He went to work in the salt plants, where they all go blind from seeing too much white, and before he left he said he would pay a promise to Saint Lucy if he could return to see his beloved backlands one last time. I think he is blind, his eyes are clouded like muddy water, but he says he can see the road, or the end of the road. This place used to be filled with men like that. There is no faith anymore. That’s why this is happening. If there was faith, we would stay where God planted us in the first place.’

He settled back against the side of the flatbed. Isabel watched him curiously. She wanted him to say more, but she knew not to bother older people with too many questions. He must know about the city, she told herself, He could tell me how it will be. She could not find the words to ask.

In the evening, a girl in a tight orange polyester top sat next to her. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the girl, twirling her finger in a thin chain necklace. ‘Saint Michael. It’s just a village, near Prince Leopold.’ ‘You going all the way?’ Isabel nodded. ‘You know where you are going to work?’ Isabel shook her head. ‘I’m not going to work. I’m going just for a short time, to watch a baby.’ ‘Everyone’s going to work,’ said the girl. ‘My aunt found me a job as a waitress: prime job, tips and everything. I get to buy a dress, lipstick, probably get my hair done.’ She paused. ‘Got a boyfriend?’ she asked. Isabel
shook her head again. ‘Me neither,’ said the girl. ‘Want one?’ Isabel shrugged. The girl tossed her hair. ‘I’m going to get one in the city. The men in the city have real style. I’ve seen pictures of big white houses with pillars outside. And pools. Look,’ she said, and pulled out a folded photo of a cream-yellow house with high walls, a fountain and an aristocratic dog. ‘This is just a magazine photo. It only looks so real because I pasted it to paper. But it’s the kind I want. A girl from my village lives in a house like that now. She was a maid and the family’s son fell in love with her. His parents didn’t like it at first, but when they saw that it was such pure love, they got them their own house. I want a pure love like that.’ The girl scooted over to the railing and looked out. After a long time, she asked, ‘You scared?’ ‘A little,’ said Isabel. ‘You don’t talk much,’ said the girl.

The girl brought out a tin of cornmeal. ‘You should eat,’ she said. Isabel shook her head. She had ground manioc in her bag, but she wasn’t hungry. ‘At least something,’ said the girl, ‘or you will be sick.’

On the edge of the highway, a woman in a pink dress walked with her shoes in her hand. She waved them to a stop and climbed onto the flatbed. Her face was painted and her body filled her dress. She smelled sweetly of lavender water. All the passengers stared until she got off at a little town with a plaster statue of a horseman whose horse had crumbled away to a metal frame.

The sun set.

The girl lifted her blanket and took Isabel inside. Isabel pretended that she was sleeping and rested her head on the girl’s shoulder. She liked the feeling of the girl next to her. Through the slivers of her half-closed eyes, she stared out. The
mountains were blue; the night enormous. Forgetting that she didn’t know the girl, she held her hand, and soon she slept.

She had left home only once before, to celebrate the New Year with an aunt on the coast. It had been a different time, of rain and good jobs for her father.

She was six. For months before, she assailed her mother with questions about the sea. She made Isaias read to her from the school’s
Young Man’s Encyclopedia
, its pages rank with mold and dust. In the section for Ocean were photos of eels and sea turtles and a smiling man with a crab, his white shirt faded to an empty space against a monotone of blue.

They slept at their aunt’s home on a hillside invaded by shanties. At Christmas, they went to mass and then to the beach. It was also her mother’s first time to the sea, and she retreated as the waves approached. Isabel stood her ground. Tentatively she dipped her palm and sipped. It was salty but not disagreeable; she drank until her throat was sore. She peered into the horizon, trying to see where it ended. Isaias told her he could see the great city New York. ‘If you can’t see it, you must be blind,’ he said. ‘I see it,’ she shot back. Then she tumbled in the sand. Isaias put pieces of foam in her hair. They raced the waves and squinted at the silhouettes of children somersaulting off the pier.

That afternoon, in the fetid aisles of the municipal market, she saw her first fish, staring from a silvery pile with a clouded, deflated eye. She put her thumb in its mouth and felt the tiny teeth. Its lips reminded her of a baby’s gums. Curious, she wormed her forearm into the pile and wriggled it until her
mother slapped it away. There was a broad white fish that Isaias called a ray. It had a whip-like tail and a smiling mouth. She smiled back.

On New Year’s Eve, her parents took them to an old lighthouse. There were more people than she had ever seen. Squawking vendors with trays of sea-damp cigarettes shouldered through the crowds. Everyone was dressed in white, and on the shore they looked like a giant flock of gulls. They crowded the beach and tossed flowers into the sea. In the pools left by retreating tides, they floated in the blooms of white skirts. Tables slouched crookedly in the sand, their white tablecloths fluttering beneath picnic baskets and bottles of cheap champagne. The algae was luminescent in the lights of the promenade.

Isabel watched the surf flap against a feathered line of broken roses. Her mother bought a rose and told her to wish for years of rain. ‘How many years am I allowed to wish for?’ she asked. ‘As many as you like,’ said her mother with a laugh. She wished for seven.

At midnight, the crowd pushed up against the shore to watch fireworks flowering from a platform in the sea. Suddenly, a rocket streaked toward land and buried itself in the crowd. There were shrieks, the crowd surged. The fireworks platform has fallen! someone shouted, It’s pointing toward us! Turn it off! said someone else, laughing, but the rockets kept coming. It’s an automated show, shouted another, I read about it, The newest technology! On the rocks, a small boy wore his shirt tied around his neck like a cape. He raised his arms as the tracers of colored smoke streaked past. Laughing, Isaias pointed. Don’t you dare! said their mother, holding him tightly. Hurray for the New Year! shouted the children. Hurray!

Then it was over. Down on the beach, the wind was strong. The tide had risen, snuffing the cooking fires and candles.

There was more pushing, and Isabel’s hand slipped from her mother’s. When she turned, her family was gone. She called for them, but her voice was lost in the music and the crash of waves. The few stairways down to the beach were packed to a standstill. She ran along the shore. Around her, drunks were sleeping in the sand, couples necked at the water’s edge, children danced crazily in the waves. A girl flailed in the shallows until she was dragged onto the shore by her friends. Champagne bottles littered the beach like sandy fish.

Panicked, Isabel squeezed through the crowds and climbed the embankment. She hoisted herself onto a lamppost. The beach and streets were all bodies, she couldn’t see anyone from her family.

It was Isaias who found her. He wiped the tears from her cheeks. She clung to his hand with both of hers. ‘Stop being scared,’ he said. ‘I’m not scared,’ she protested. ‘Then stop squeezing my hand so hard. The thornmen will get you. They eat children who are scared.’ ‘Thornmen don’t live in the city, Isaias.’ He shrugged. ‘You’ll see.’

They retreated through the alleyways, past discarded decorations and figures sleeping on doorsteps, the noise and light of the festival fading. A pair of dogs followed them home. At night, when she refused to go to bed, he whispered a rhyme:

She sniffled until she fell asleep.

Back in Saint Michael, her aunts asked about the sea. Her mother showed them postcards of the churches. She kept them neatly in an envelope and insisted they hold them by the edges.

Isabel listened. She mostly remembered the darkness, the shouting, the fear of being alone in a big and crowded place. Isaias bragged that he had been on the rocks, chasing the streaking lights. She forgave him for the thornmen song and let him lie.

Later in the night, she awoke to loud voices.

They were on an empty stretch of highway. The air smelled moist, richer, but the land was still barren. Cacti lined the road. She watched them flare in the rear lights of the car and then fade into darkness. The moon was gone.

The rhabdomancer was arguing with a woman.