We zipped up the windows again.
“Is there any way to get up to that church?”
“I’m having trouble controlling the Jeep,” Erik yelled. “The back wheels aren’t turning—the road—”
She widened her eyes at him. “Can you reverse?”
“No!”
“Wait, wait,” I was saying. I gripped onto my mother’s wrapped journal; I tucked it back into the bag and buried it within another layer of plastic. “I’ve got to think. When did it get this bad?”
Erik was sweating. “Pretty much now.”
“Where is everyone?”
“I don’t know. Trapped in their houses. Or evacuated.”
The Jeep jerked forward once through the water, which spread around us tall and dark and deceptive. For we didn’t see what work it did beneath. The oncoming river ate at the road so its banks extended far past its borders and created a cliff that swept to the deepest and hungriest reaches of the waterway. Underneath us, the tires of the Jeep skittered and jumped. Water continued flowing through the cracks of the doors and the windows. Erik grappled with the steering wheel in an attempt to maneuver the Jeep east, until he was sure that he was not steering on much of anything, as the tires only sporadically touched the highway.
Yolanda brought her head forward, and I could feel her wet hair on my cheek. I could hear her breathing.
“Yolanda.”
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
“Get out of your seatbelt,” I told her and Erik.
“Good idea,” she said, unlatching herself. “We could be headed for some—swimming.”
“I hope not,” Erik said.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, as tough as possible. “We’ll be all right.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. I put my hand on hers.
“But if it’s not, I want you to know—” she said, hesitating.
“But if it’s not what?”
“But if it’s not fine—then I want you to know—”
The car began joggling beneath us. She gripped onto me even harder with both of her arms, in an unmistakable hug, and pressed her face close to mine again and closed her eyes. “That I—can’t—stand—you.”
“I—can’t—stand—you—either,” I bellowed.
“Hold on,” she said. “Something’s wrong. The Jeep’s moving down.”
“Hold on.”
“Hold on!” Erik yelled. “I can’t make it move!”
He reached out and grabbed me too; I held onto his hand. The cabin shifted and groaned. We jerked. We heard a long, scraping, sliding noise as a section of the road fell into the water rushing westward. And then the Jeep lost its ground completely.
It rolled over slowly, and did not stop, and as I held onto my mother’s bag I was hurled up and on top of my head with my face and shoulders against the roof of the Jeep and choking on foul black water. Everything was dark and very cold, and I couldn’t see either Erik or Yolanda, except that I felt their bodies struggling above me. I began kicking at obstructions, and struggling up through some barrier made of mud and cloth, and somehow pulled the upper half of my body through an obscure vent, but when I reached my hands out—one still holding onto the duffel—I felt nothing else but more water, and when I opened my eyes everything around me was black. A piece of canvas, or weeds, or sheets of plastic had wrapped itself around my torso, and my feet were trapped inside what I thought might be the rubber windows of the Jeep. As I thrashed inside that disaster, I had the freezing and immediate sensation that something familiar, final, and inevitable reached up through the water to greet me, as I had always known it would. It was my own personal death. I moved left. I turned right. But I couldn’t breathe. I was eating water.
And then something reached into the place that I had fallen to, and put its arm around my chest, and it dragged me up, pulling me out of whatever windings I had become caught in. I found myself above water, and in the rain, and relieving myself of some of what I’d swallowed.
And then I inhaled again.
Erik had me by an arm. His face was white and twisted behind the rivulets pouring over him. He began to yank me out of the slipping burgundy-colored cliff of mud that had just minutes before been the Carretera al Atlantico. I opened my eyes and saw Yolanda, smeared with muck and streaming with water and also, improbably, still wearing that infernal black hat of hers. She yelled at me from the higher reaches of the bank. She moved back down the ravine in quick lunges and splashed into the deeper stretches of the water to help him drag me out. All three of us swam and clawed away from the drowned Jeep and up the sheared bank until we felt the hard edge of the remaining sections of the highway. Erik took hold of me by the waist, and then my rear end, and pushed me up until I could crawl onto the flooded road, while keeping the duffel bag stuffed under one arm; he then attempted to do the same for Yolanda, who informed him with complete dignity that an ass like him wasn’t going to touch hers. I threw the bag at my feet, leaned down, and on the unsteady bank wrapped my hands around his arms. I pulled as hard as I could and he slipped and kept sliding away from me so that I heard myself shrieking, until he propelled himself forward through the water and scrambled up. Next he bent over the remaining side of the road, and while I held onto his belt he gripped Yolanda up from under her armpits and dragged her out of the water as well.
Mud covered our faces and our eyes; we wiped away the red pieces from our mouths; I saw red streaks on Erik’s chin and began to brush these off until I realized that they were blood. Then I found that I was just standing there, and not doing anything but gripping his arm, as I had a crazy sensation that if I didn’t, he would go sliding back down the ravine and I wouldn’t see him again.
“You okay?”he yelled.
“Yes. Yolanda?”
“Are you breathing all right?” she asked; she had both her hands on my arms, and looked terrified. “You took in a lot of water.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I’m not. That was sickening. But—wait.” She jerked her head back at me.
“What?”
“Where’s the map? Where’s the map?”
I brandished the Hartmann. “It’s here.”
“Show it to me!”
“You girls give it a rest,” Erik said in English, then examined a cut on my cheek with his fingers. “Just remember—we could be extremely extinct right now.”
“Show it to me,” Yolanda said again.
“No, no, no,” I said. I clutched it to my chest, but not just because of Yolanda. What had I just read in that diary about my mother? “Don’t ask me again.”
She stood there in the rain, looking down at the bag. She touched her hand to her mouth.
“I don’t see why you won’t just give it to me,” she said, slowly.
“The Jeep’s dead,” Erik said, peering over at its hull rolling in the water.
Yolanda stared at me and did not appear to have heard what he’d said.
“Yolanda?”
“Yes, what? Oh, all right. Then let’s just go.” She pointed east. “Up here.”
We waded through the water, past a bodega with its red-painted Coca Cola sign, a Ford abandoned to the storm, and into the evacuated village until we reached the white church. I climbed its brick steps and pushed open the wooden door.
Inside, the church was flooded several inches, yet remained dry enough to shelter three pigeons, at least two mice, a cabal of birds, and one orange salamander that crept along the white plaster walls with its sticky toes. A faint light passed from a high window and glimmered on the water surrounding the altar. It also shone on some long wooden pews, upon which we all collapsed.
CHAPTER 29
I’m wiped out,” Yolanda said an hour later. We were still in the church. “Has it stopped raining?”
When we’d first entered the building, she’d hugged herself tight, and wouldn’t speak. At last, she’d taken off he
r hat. I was sitting on the driest bench. She came over and sat by me, but hadn’t rested her head on my lap until she fell asleep and didn’t realize what she was doing. I petted her hair only as long as I was sure she was unconscious.
Now awake, she moved off, and I stood up and waded to one of the windows.
Erik sat three pews away from us. The poor guy looked as if he’d been flattened by a giant hand. “What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That is, no rain.” The sky had grown paler, and from above the clouds thin edges of sunlight appeared. Painful aftershocks of terror kept shooting through my body, and I could feel a sharp bruised spot on my head from the accident on the road. “It’s clearing up.”
“Try Manuel again,” Yolanda said. I opened up the soaked cell phone that Erik had pulled from his pocket. “Or dial emergency. There has to be someone around here who can help us. Weren’t there cars driving down the Carretera before?”
“Army trucks,” Erik said. “We passed at least two on our way down. Probably traveling northeast—to bring people supplies.”
She closed her eyes. “I won’t be getting inside any army truck. Not with those murderers.”
“You might have to,” he said.
“See—that you could even say that proves that you aren’t really from here.”
Erik glowered and pushed back his hair from his forehead.
“I can’t get anything on this phone,” I said.
Erik’s face began to turn a rough shade of red, and without saying anything he stood up and walked outside of the church. Now it was just Yolanda and me.
“Leave him alone,” I said.
She shrugged. “He’s almost adorably easy to irritate. Though I guess since he’s your boyfriend, I’ll do you the favor of laying off.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
She sat up in the pew. Light came in through the glass and fell across her face. She seemed to have given up yelling at me about the duffel bag, which was good. I wasn’t ready to think about its contents yet.
“Oh, relax,” she said. “It’s obvious, if distasteful.”
“We’re not together. I like—firemen. And policemen.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story. The short answer is, he’s not my type.”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
The corners of her mouth flickered up. I thought then that she was a lot like my mother. After she got over the shock and the hypothermia, being on the weirdest of adventures could put her into a good mood.
“So …,”I began.
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“So how have things been for you?” I asked.
“Been for me?”
“Your life, in these past years.”
She waved her hand. “Hard as a brick, Lola. As you can see.”
“But you must have had—friends. There must have been some times when you were happy.” I paused. “That is, I hope so.”
“Happy—oh, you mean, with men?”
“Among other things.”
Her smile concentrated itself on the right side of her mouth, and she nodded a little. “I’ve had some nice times. I’ve met some very decent, very good men. But … I never got married. As you probably suspected. Certainly there’s no law that you have to. It would have been nice, it just never happened. I was always working with my father—though I don’t know if I should be blithering to you about all this.” She grumbled out a laugh.
“Why not?”
“I’m a private person now. That’s one way you could put it. That’s the way I put it. I’m more careful about who I—” She left that last sentence unfinished.
I waited, listening.
“Did you think that we were friends?” she asked abruptly. “Back when I lived with you?”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “I was nine when you first showed up. And you were a scary little eleven-year-old.”
“Right—so, did you?”
“Think you were my friend? Not at first, no,” I admitted.
“No, not at first,” she said. Her eyes looked emerald in the church’s light.
“Later, though, I did.”
She nodded, not looking at me.
“Later,” I went on, “I saw that it was probably one of the best friendships of my life.” When I said that, I felt my arms fling out at my sides for a moment, uncontrollably, because I wanted to hug her. “I never had another friend like you. I never had that thing with another person again.”
She passed her hand over her hair. She looked naked without her hat.
“About men, you know,” she said, changing subjects again, “don’t get Oedipal or electrical or whatever on me, but I never felt much of the need for them, actually. One of those domestic arrangements. My father and I were so close that I suppose it got in the way. I enjoyed his company. Does that make sense?” She shrugged. “And then he died! And so … that’s why now I don’t seem to have much of anything at all. I’d begun to think I’d made a mistake—or that I hadn’t—because I’d taken advantage of my friendship with him when he was alive.” She shook her head. “I still haven’t answered that one completely, for myself.”
Her calm expression didn’t change much while she told me this, except for just the slightest lowering of her eyebrows.
“But then you showed up, talking about your mother. And about this map. The only thing I could think of to do was go off hunting after you so I could find that rock Dad was always nattering about. It sort of feels like this is the last trip I’ll ever take with him. And all of this running around has made me feel better. Don’t feel quite so much like drinking myself berserk.” She coughed. “And look at me now. Being congenial with a Sanchez. The old family enemy. Who thinks we might have been friends once. I don’t know—either things are looking up for me, or I’ve … swallowed too much acid rain today. What do you think?”
“Too much acid rain,” I said.
She chuckled for a little while, looking at me in a cock-headed, funny way.
“But you had still better not be lying to me about that map,” she said then.
One of the birds, sitting in a window, began to flap its wings and shake up rain and gold-colored dust into the deepening light. From outside, I heard a splashing and a prolonged, curious grinding. But the rain and heavy winds hadn’t started again.
“I just hope you didn’t lie to me to get me out here,” she said again, slowly, with an edge sinking into her voice. “Because then I will not be … congenial.”
I held her gaze.
I didn’t have much in the way of a map yet, just an idea, a few clues. But the floods had made the country rough, and we’d had two accidents in one day. I was beginning to understand in a clearer and colder way that if I told the whole truth and Yolanda left us, it could mean my mother would die.
“I have a way of getting us to the labyrinths,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” she replied, over a loud, sharp sound that came from somewhere outside.
The bird in the window took flight toward the rafters.
“What’s that?”she asked.
The splashing and grinding noises had grown even louder, and there was a metallic clanking as well, so that I had an image of some great beast pushing through the mud with iron feet. Then came the sounds of men yelling and talking.
Erik popped his ruffled head through the church door, and then the rest of his soaked bulk appeared; he regarded us for a second.
“Time to go,” he said.
Yolanda threw her hands up. “What?”
“Time to go.”
“I don’t understand—”
“The hour for departure is nigh,” he said. “Please hoist your buttocks into the air and begin to move your feet until they miraculously convey you outside of this church, after which you may deposit your fundament once again in one of the nice cozy trucks that are presently waiting to take you all the way to Flores.”
We just
stared at him.
“And don’t think I like it any better than you do,” he said to Yolanda. “But it is the army.”
She turned away from him and her lips formed silent and hell-raising suggestions until she looked at the geckos swimming around at our feet. Then she put her cowboy hat back on, and followed me through the church door to face the soldiers waiting outside.
CHAPTER 30
On the outskirts of Rio Hondo sat five olive green army flatbed trucks covered with tarps and filled with provisions and stoic uniformed men. Because of the last day’s violent wind, it had been difficult for helicopter pilots to transfer supplies to the north, where thousands had been left homeless by the storm. The army sent out these caravans in their stead. Traveling across the Carretera al Atlantico, the soldiers were not deterred by the washouts on the highway, as they employed pontoon bridges made of durable buoys that could be thrown up over the landslides and gullies that now pocked the country’s roads. About twenty men sat in the back of each truck, half obscured from our view by the tarps, though we could see their knees nudging up on the boxes and sacks of water, meat jerky, medical supplies, and tinned vegetables. One of the soldiers standing about told us to take our seats in the last van. The three of us approached it, and its tarp was partially lifted by an unseen hand. We gazed up at the dark interior of the truck and its huddle of soldiers; the men at the very back remained indistinct in the shadows, but those we could discern had rifles leaned up against their thighs as protection against any bandits or looters.
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