Criminals (3 page)

skylab

T
here it was: the blue bee. Off the clothesline and down into the flowerpots, weighing down orchids with its thumb-size abdomen. It made Amy think of fat women she had washed in nursing school. A panniculus might hang to the thighs; you lifted it on the back of your hand and wrist, swabbed carefully because of yeasts. In this country the patient's family gave the baths, women carrying basin and washcloth from home. And here you wouldn't see a swag of fat on a patient. As if it were new itself, this was a country of young, slim people.

Amy sat on the amah's terrace at the back of the house, letting her hair dry in the sun.
Skylab.
It was on every page of the newspaper. Skylab was going to fall on Asia.

Next door the shirts on the line began to jig as the amah snatched them, with an unsmiling glance at Amy. She was a Malay girl, not an Indian like most of the amahs in this circle of houses built for foreigners, and wore the snowy headscarf. She was known to have gone down on her knees, after the Australian couple stir-fried pork on her day off, to wash everything with red mud as the Koran decreed—cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, the blackened little gas stove these houses all had.

“Wholesome dust,” the Koran said. “Pure earth.” When there was no water, pure earth could be used for bathing, for purification.

Amy and John had no amah. Eleanor, the Englishwoman who ran the Koran study group, said why not hire one simply to avoid flouting custom, but Amy knew they would not, even if her own work permit finally came through and she went to work in the hospital, they would not have somebody in the house with them, in on their life, which was too frail and groggy after the labor and shame of all that had tumbled them down here, and at the same time too full of a hot, irresistible pride in their being here alone, their having left everything behind.

The blue bee challenged her whenever she hung something on the clothesline. She could see where it had been chewing the clothespins. A bee that ate wood? It was solitary, territorial, more like a shrunken comical dog than an insect.

She was starting to miss dogs, the easygoing, confident dogs of home. In contrast to the thin and craven animals here, they seemed, those golden retrievers with waving tails, to have been the kindly guards of everything untroubled and ordinary.

The bee had a routine: it would zigzag in front of her face like a bulldog on a chain, flexing its iridescent hind parts in midair. Did it have a sting? But it was cowardly, it dodged out of sight.

“You
are
eating those clothespins,” she said aloud. It ate everything. She had seen it squeeze out from under the lid of the garbage can, going at a drunken sideways crawl. Now, just like a dog giving up on barking, it had blundered downward and zeroed in on something at her feet.

An eviscerated bird. That was the smell. A bird with empty eye sockets. Yes, the beak pointed at their door. She thought without surprise
, They
left it. For us, for the infidel.

Here you saw the word in the paper every day, ever since the Shah had fallen in Iran.
Infidel.
The Shah had been spat out, he could find no harbor, now he was in Mexico trying to get to the US. In the shade of every building young men stood talking, striking their palms.
US.
You heard it, a hiss among the soft syllables. Amy wore skirts and long sleeves but eyes followed her. It didn't matter that she freely borrowed the code for virtue, keeping her eyes down and her step narrow.

Among the white scarves on the campus a black fin, too, rose now and then, the chador. The chador had to do with men as well as God. Inside it moved women like the nuns of her childhood, but more complex in their loyalties and more secret. The eyes, though, were just embarrassed young eyes, the eyes of girls, students, sending skittish glances.

Inside, blinking from the sun, she saw a cellophane wrapper on the floor of the amah's little pantry, where she never went except to trip the hot water heater after a thunderstorm. She reached for it and stood up fast. The pale crinkled thing was the skin of a snake. Along the wall lay eight or ten inches of it, silver and empty, and somewhere behind the water heater the rest of it. However long it was. Its head.

John would know what to do. He had lived here before. He remembered many things: he knew the plague of frogs in the drain would end, he could predict the first yap of the hungry house lizards, the cicaks, coming out from behind calendars and picture frames at the cocktail hour, when the air would fill with mosquitoes for them to catch. He would tell her what to do about the snake. He would say a cat had left the bird. “If it were for us”—she could hear him—“they would have put it at the front door.”

Despite the white hair John didn't look his age, but bit by bit she recognized the time hidden on him, brought in with them like contraband. It was the old-fashioned obviousness of his teasing, his careful fingers bringing up the knot of his tie. His way of waving, his saying “Drink up” and “Right-o.” She had seen it in movies. His flick to alertness if she casually said “fuck,” his inability to hear it as anything but sexual. While she, whose lust for him had been legendary among the nurses, had entered a state of quietness and caution, and become watchful, as a bird might watch its nest from another tree.

His calling certain songs “her” music. His discreet awe of pill and tampon. His wife had finished with all that. First wife.

“Oh, John, look!” While they were having breakfast one of the tribe of feral cats had come into the yard, stepping sideways with little hops. He knew what the trouble was. He said, “Somebody put
boiling water down the drain. They scald their paws.” The house sinks emptied directly into a concrete drain surrounding every house like a little moat, running into the great V-shaped monsoon gutters along the streets and roads. Strays fed in the drains, cats and the hairless raw-skinned dogs. The cats had eye infections but kept their hair.
Cats are like women
, Amy thought.
We are not as pitiful as the men.

That liquid song was an oriole, John said. That swipe of yellow paint in the profuse white flowers of the frangipani tree planted all over the
lorong
, the little circular lane where the university housed visiting faculty. And was it the tree of graveyards, as someone said? Closer to the house was a row of lime trees, the fruit like bottle caps among the leaves. Sometimes a lime flinched, blinked, became the pouch of a green lizard.

John stood up, stretched and shook himself, ran his hands through his hair already darkened with sweat. “Don't forget the Barneses are coming for a beer. I think that's still on. And the fellow from New Zealand. Carruthers. His wife's gone home without him. Don't you do that.” There was a faint tremble in the hand that tipped up Amy's chin. She sank against him.

“Let's not do anything special,” he said against her hair. “Just put out beer, they'll leave before dinner. Do we have any napkins?”

Napkins. How could he think of that? An invisible life reared up in back of him. A woman. Napkins. Silver.

“We have some paper ones. I wish . . . I wish they didn't have to come.” With her thumb she wiped the sweat from under his eyes. She would have liked to press the dark lids restfully down.

“I don't care much for the idea either,” he said. “But let's get it over with. It will satisfy everybody for a while.” He sighed and tapped his breastbone. She didn't like that, the scar there with his heart under it.

One day not long after they arrived, the students who played handball with him had made him stop. They had sat him down, fanned him. They weren't medical students but he was short of breath and they called the hospital.

The doctor who saw him had a wife in the Koran study group, who mentioned it the next day. Amy pretended she knew. When she
asked John, he said they had made him sit down not because of his breathing, as the wife reported, but because of twisting his ankle on the court. And indeed he was limping.

He waved from the gate and disappeared on the back path to the hospital. This whole slope of the city was recently cleared jungle. Part of it was cultivated, rubber trees being grown in slim-trunked orderly rows, but old stands of jungle remained here and there, little zones of furious life. Monkeys came out to rob the trash cans. Once when John took the back way at night with his flashlight there was a thrashing in the bushes and a huge lizard wagged across his path.

She could picture him, alone under the thick trees, hand on his chest. He wouldn't be looking out for anything. He thought everything was behind them.

Spiders swung against his cheek when he was hurrying to Accident & Emergency to operate on the boys who wrecked their motorbikes on the Federal Highway or flipped into the drains scattering tanks of cooking gas, baskets of pottery, plate glass.

“He died?” she would say. She was a nurse, used to the ones who died. But no, they didn't die. If she was meeting him in the hospital she would see these boys of his, shrouded in gauze and elastic burn mask, hobbling between nurses. She repeated the Malay she heard them croak, “
Perlahan-lahan
.”

“Slow-slow,” John said.

She shut her mind and began to work on her theory of suffering. The insistence on countries might be wrong, but it was no better to think of the world as one, one organism with a saline of wrongs dripping in regularly and impartially. Wrongs didn't go steadily, fairly, into solution. They went into lumps and clots. It was all right if all suffered, but some escaped.

“No one escapes,” John said, smiling because he knew the story of the spell on Amy, cast by her mother and witnessed by her brothers, that kept her from harm. She was the youngest. Her father had begun to drink, leaving things in the hands of four brothers already obliged by a decree from their dying mother, binding and irreversible:
Take care of your sister
.

When she got away from her brothers the spell continued on its own. In one of her tests of it, she forded a Guatemalan stream where flies carrying
Onchocerca
were known to breed. She unloaded a jeep and carried supplies, one bundle after another, across the waist-deep water into a village full of river blindness, and the worm in the stream did not settle in her.

Pouring out of a hole in the floor, the ants filed up past the medicine cabinet to a hole in the ceiling. No, some of them were coming down, the line was double. Sometimes they came down carrying some of their own. What drew them inside and up? Did they live up there, or were they fighting an invader? What was up there? Did they die working on it? Did they weaken and fall out of the line when the time came? What was age, what was natural death for an ant? She can walk on ants, the Malays said. It meant that lightness of step the women had no matter how much they had in their arms along with the babies proudly turned to show you if you smiled.

She could sit for a long time in the bathroom studying the ants. On the way up, huge loads, shouldered and pushed. Once a dozen of them had maneuvered a peanut up the wall. And the forearm jaws around a corpse: that carrying away of the dead looked like dignity. They should learn not to squander themselves on these crusades! But each one on the wall today might never have been there before, pushing with a head like a shiny seed. But a seed with sense organs—able to find a grain of palm sugar on the kitchen counter.

The medicine cabinet had a gap behind it where cicaks lived in the cracked plaster. Sometimes an unusually large one, gray and pink, came out when she was shaving her legs in the bathtub. Once it fell into the tub and swam, lunging to and fro like a little shark. The warm water must have dazed it; it let her lift it out by the tail.

You must leave, everybody said, if the cicaks ever leave.

One day a baby one, tiny, popped out of the ants' hole and raced down the wall. The big gray-pink one snatched it back. Look at that, she thought. Saved.

For a moment, crosswise in the adult's mouth, the baby cocked its head, flicked its black eyes. “Oh, God,” Amy said aloud, as it was deftly flipped and swallowed.