by George Rosen
Nutbrown, the eldest, opened his eyes. “It sounds terrifying.”
“It’s not. If you assume you’re on a different planet, it’s perfectly normal. It’s just unreal. Between the plants there wasn’t a living thing growing, not a weed, just brown dirt. The lake lay at the bottom of the hills and in its center was an island, a smaller hill drowned when the dam was built. It was gentle and green and at the highest point there was a statue of Father Hidalgo—he’s their Thomas Jefferson—with a torch raised in his hand. Fishermen would row you back and forth from the road by the dam.
“Though the sun was burning on the day we went, it had been raining for some weeks before. The water was silty and abnormally high. The river that fed the lake came straight down from the Sierra and its water was cold and seemed even more so in the new heat. We had to wear sweaters as we rowed over to the island, then, almost as soon as we set foot on the grass, we had to take them off.”
Squillace lumbered down the two short steps from his seat on the lower bench. In automatic movements, he submerged a bucket in the cistern of cold water, held it still, then lifted it brimming and emptied it over the top of his head. He dropped the bucket to the concrete floor and passed a thick hand around the shape of his skull. He shook his head briskly, scattering drops, and began to massage shampoo into the curled remnants of his youthful hair. As Squillace rubbed, an animal noise grew from his mouth, halfway between a sigh and a death-groan. Water, from the first bucketful of a minute before, dripped over his skin as over the terraces of an ornate fountain, pooling in the folds of his flesh.
Nutbrown, a man of normal weight, stared in horror. “You’re a wonder, Bobby. Aren’t you ever going to lose a couple of pounds?”
Squillace chuckled from underneath his cap of foam.
“Not in your lifetime.”
“Or yours maybe,” said Nutbrown, not pleased at the implication.
“Don’t give me grief.” The younger and heavier man glared upward, then sat down on the steps and bent over, hiding his face as his fingers pressed soap into the fur behind his ears. “Whose shampoo is this anyway?” he said, nursing his wound. “It’s gummy.”
On high, Nutbrown grinned. “Don’t blame me, Bobby. That was Ted’s.”
Alden resumed his story. “The sister and I didn’t really have much to say to each other. My Spanish was all right then, but it was as if she wasn’t actually there to talk. She was there to have attentions paid to her, of a certain Mexican kind, and I didn’t know how to manage that. So I played with the boy and tried to talk business with the brother. But I could see that they were misinterpreting my inadequacy. If I was tongue-tied and awkward, it was because I was circumspect and deep. If I felt compelled to talk about work—pointless speculations about the next day’s problems—it was not because I was ill at ease and desperate, but because I was businesslike and matter-of-fact.
“Then she asked me about the Abominable Snowman. It was not an uncommon question. It was always in the Reader’s Digest then, both in English and Spanish. There was something about it that captured their interest in Americans and snow and monsters from the North. And Alma—I think I see now—was also trying to help me, to come up with this safe, ridiculous topic to talk about. So I told them what I thought, that I had never seen one, but that they could exist in places where people seldom went. Not a man really, but a creature very like a man, upright and active, and living by himself. And while I was looking at the food set out on the tablecloth—there was a cold fish salad, I remember, and tamales that they had kept warm in napkins over the boat ride—being hungry and spouting this nonsense about the Snowman, I noticed the water rushing by. Behind the grass and the few little trees, the water of the lake was sliding away.”
Squillace lifted his face to Alden, his wide hand on his forehead keeping the soap from his eyes. “There’s no current in a lake.”
“There was in this, a slight one. They had two small wooden sluices on either side of the earth-dam, where the water turned mills, but this was different. It was as if we were in a boat or as if the lake had become a river again. It was pouring by. There was white foam and the beginning of long waves. Behind it all was a groan, a rumble of thunder that didn’t stop. It was like the tearing of an endless, strong cloth right beside your ear.”
Willi drew the copper ladle from the bucket where bundles of birch twigs soaked and flung water on the heated stones. Again the wooden cabin filled with stinging mist. “That’s good, Willi,” said Nutbrown. The washcloth now rested on his uptilted features, a small shroud. “That hits the spot.” Each word fluttered the terrycloth.
Squillace turned his face to Alden. “So what was it?”
“The presa. It had soaked through underneath and rotted with the rain. From our island we could see where it had broken, where the water rushed, and the men dancing on the edges of the gap. But what was a torrent by us, a whirl of water, seemed slowed down at the dam. Workers appeared from nowhere, as if a truck had just suddenly come by and dropped them off. It was always like that in Mexico. People without work were always moving around at the edge of your vision waiting for a catastrophe. That was how the brother made a living: sending signals to those people. But they didn’t have a clue what to do. They ran across the top to the damage, then backed away. They tried to open the sluices wider to ease the pressure, but then they must have closed them for a time because at one point the water seemed to back up. There was a reverse wave, a straight line of muddy foam that moved over the top of the downward flow, back from the dam up toward the mountains. The water was sloshing around this drowned valley as if it were a giant bathtub and someone was monkeying with the drain.”
Nutbrown slid the cloth off his eyes. “Were you safe?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It was hard to think about. If the valley was just draining, in spite of all the wildness of the water, then the safest thing would have been to climb to the center of the island—the center of a hill it really was—and stay by the statue. The real danger was downstream of the dam. But it was hard to concentrate one’s mind on what was going on. There was an attraction to the water, the way people go down to the beach in a storm. The dam break had turned the water alive. We were watching a creature.”
On sudden inspiration, Willi reached out to lift one of the tied bundles of twigs from the bucket by his feet. The pail handle jumped, clattering at the touch. “Don’t worry, Alden,” he said. “I’m still listening.” Methodically, Willi began to whisk his calves with the fragrant leaves.
“We were standing frozen, the mother, the uncle, and I, looking out toward the dam, while the boy stared at the edge of the water and the land. He was mesmerized. You have to understand this whole island was just a lawn. There was the picnic blanket, a few trees, and then a storm, as if a standard-issue suburban house and yard had been thrown into the sea. There was no sand, no border, nothing to warn him away. He inched down the grass toward the edge, his eyes fixed on the rush of water. The flow was carrying earth and branches. Stunned fish floated on the top. There were frogs and snakes, all moving by us. The boy knelt to put his hand in and lost his balance on the muddied grass. He slipped into the water and Alma screamed, a long, siren scream that flowed into the thunder of the rushing water and the breaking dam. The brother grabbed his walking stick, ran down the few feet of lawn, and leapt in after the boy.”
“That was stupid,” said Squillace.
“Yeah, it was. But it was a very Mexican thing to do. I think I understood it.” Alden leaned his head back against the moist boards and slumped down into the hot, damp breeze that pushed from the stove. He raised his eyes. Outside, through the small window that clung under the eaves, it had started to snow.
“What did you do?”
“I tried to get the boy. I ran down the island toward the dam. There was a small tree at that end, hardly more than a bush really, near the edge. I wrapped my legs around the roots and leaned the lowest branches out over the water. The boy was coming fas
t, five or ten yards behind me. I yelled at him to take hold, but with the noise and his fear, I’m sure he couldn’t hear me. The yelling was for me, to convince me I was doing something. I pushed down on the branch just as he drew near. I heard his head smash into the wood and then the current spun him around lengthwise against the branches and started to slide him away from me. I reached in the water—it was freezing cold and, above all the swarming mud, the topmost layer where the boy was floating seemed fresh from the mountains, clear and green—and yanked. All I could hold was the boy’s hair. He had long, flowing, Indian hair, slippery in my hand, but it was enough. I rolled off the tangle of branches that had propped me up and pulled him from the water.”
“You were a hero.”
“Yeah. I’d nearly opened his skull with the branch. There was blood all down the side of his face, but he was alive.”
“I’m serious,” said Squillace, soaking the shampoo from his hands in a cookpot of cold water. “You saved his life.”
Nutbrown put his hands on the rail and leaned from the top bench. “And the brother? Did he die?”
“No, he didn’t. He was badly hurt, but he didn’t die. He was thrown against one of the mill sluices and they pulled him out there with his back broken. I visited him later at the hospital and he told me how extremely grateful to me he was for saving his nephew. He kept mentioning the tree; it was as if he were saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ But at the time, on the island, when he’d jumped, we couldn’t see anything. We just saw him go. I wrapped my shirt around the boy’s head while his mother held him, and we waited.
“Within a half hour the lake emptied. The old valley came back, revealed and destroyed at the same time. At the very bottom, below the maguey fields and the toothbrush trees, below the walls of mudslide and debris, the river lost itself in what must have been its path before the dam, a ravine choked with trees and earth. There were colors everywhere, picked out by the sun. The brown dirt from the maguey field bled red streaks down into the lake bed and there were rock outcrops washed white where they were too steep to catch the mud. Scattered about, at five or six spots, were bodies, their clothes washed clean by the flood. At that distance, in the strong light and the glare from the wetness, the faces and the feet disappeared. All you could see were their clothes, dots of color as if they were something inside the eye, the clothes of drowned men. The sun was so bright.”
Alden bent his head over and shook it slowly in the comforting steam. He closed his eyes. “We waited several more hours, leaning against the statue of Hidalgo, hoping that we could be seen. The boy needed to be carried and I couldn’t see the two of us navigating the mud and managing the boy at the same time. The picnic food was still waiting on the tablecloth set on the grass. We gave the boy some water and tried to talk, but we couldn’t really. Alma thanked me for my help in florid Spanish, very politely and very formally, and held her son’s head in her lap as he slept. I was just as embarrassed, just as ignorant of what to say as I had been before the catastrophe. I had saved her son’s life and I still couldn’t make conversation. My awkwardness reassured me. It was a comfortable, small worry in the face of destruction.
“But I could still see the valley around me: the green maguey plants on dusty hillsides above us, and below, the inside of the earth, mud and rock and tangled trees, the bodies of fishes, and animals, and men. When help finally came to us—they brought with them a bag of boots and medicine and a stretcher for the boy—we walked out through the valley. Even as we walked the mud was drying. The sun burnt it from on top and underneath, the desert land drew down the moisture. A year’s drowning had softened the shape of the land and piled earth in strange, deceptive places. But what struck me was that the land was still organized. There were mounds and shapes: the foundations of lost houses, the worn traces of fields. We walked through ruins, an old world. And I thought that when the life-blood of something—of the land, of a person—suddenly drains away, that underneath everything is its death, not a flat, meaningless terrain, but a place with organization and shape.” Alden opened his eyes and with his fingertips wiped the sweat from his eyebrows.
“So is that what you think? Life is on top of death?” Squillace, puzzled, a bundle of birch twigs unmoving in his hand, peered up at Alden under a damp forehead. Nutbrown, from the hottest, highest seat, looked down. Willi, barely listening, sat silent in his corner and scrubbed dead skin from the soles of his feet with a laundry brush.
“I guess so. What I saw weren’t Mayan ruins or cities. Ancient isn’t the right word. It was everyday. The remnants of people’s lives; the old habitations worn smooth. When I think of the valley of death now, that’s what I see. That is what I remember.”
Nutbrown exhaled, a thin, trailing sigh. Then he gulped in awe. “Jesus Christ, it’s snowing!”
Alden bridled. “I thought I told you that.”
“No you didn’t.” The older man turned his face, annoyed.
Willi laid down his brush and, in equanimity toward his friends, spoke to the stove. “Had enough heat?”
“For a while,” muttered Nutbrown. He eased himself off the upper bench with stiff arms and descended the short steps to the cement floor. Squillace drew up his bulk and fell in behind him toward the door. Willi and Alden awaited their turns in the narrow room, a parade of old, naked men.
They stepped out into the changing room at the front of the cabin. Squillace drew a towel from a pile and, wrapping it with difficulty around his waist, he sat in the quiet cool. In a line around the walls, hung from wrought iron hooks, the sauna-goers’ funeral suits and respectful ties sprawled with their boxer shorts and the torn ribbing of old and favored undershirts. A whistle of wind coursed under the metal of the roof.
Squillace shifted. He rubbed the white hairs of his chest. “So did you marry the sister?”
Alden cocked his head and stared him down. “You know I didn’t. I came back here and married your sister.”
“Just curious.” Squillace lowered the folds of his chin down to his breastbone and smiled.
“You gutless wonders!” harrumphed Nutbrown. He stood and threw open the front door.
The wind snapped it wide. Outside a storm was growing. The snow fell over Willi’s back lawn, the flowerbeds, the ghost-shapes of rocks, out to the gray pond and the late autumn woods beyond. Nutbrown padded out into the twilight blow, his lined skin shining copper in the purified light from the changing room’s bulb. He whirled a couple of steps, his vulnerable body braced in the wash of snow, the soles of his feet about to freeze fast. “It’s grand,” he said, “from the ankles up.” In the sudden atmosphere of winter, the sauna steam rose from Nutbrown in billows. It poured off his chest and swirled from his arms to mingle with the cloud of his speech. He hopped again, his feet in snowy pain. The steam danced about his head and shoulders, a warm, wet halo in the cabin’s light, until he looked, to the younger men staring out the door, for all the world like an aged angel consumed in God’s moist fire.
Kenya, 1971
Mobley’s Troubles
Mobley kicked the box a couple of times, made a kind of barking noise, then waited a few seconds before picking it up. He was terribly afraid of snakes. You could stumble across them anywhere, like tripping over your own clothes in a morning bedroom. A boy down the road from the mission station had run over a black mamba with his bicycle during the short rains, a few months before. The animal bit and the fangs grazed the child’s heel, piercing the skin before the snake’s body was twisted in the spokes. The boy died within fifteen minutes, fallen over the bike at the side of the road, the dead snake caught in the wheel.
So Mobley would give them warning and time to go away. Because of the heat he was packing in the yard while Martha walked up and down the doorpath into the house, carrying out their possessions one or two at a time. She piled them on the newly mown lawn beside him—Bibles and prayerbooks, a thin twisty cane blacked with shoe polish to look like ebony that a Kigeli elder had given him, o
ld suits and dresses with moth flakes in the pockets, a boy’s baseball bat, a couple of toolboxes. A furry hyrax which he’d shot and stuffed stood on the walk getting wet in the sprinkler, marbles for eyes.
The old frame house had been built by the founders. Surrounded by the paved sidewalk and the bluegrass lawn, it looked more American than African, except for the sprinkler which whirled its water erratically, too slow, too fast, echoing the pulses sent from the ram pump down at the waterfall behind the house.
Jody Ross came up from the school building to help in the packing. Ross was a Scotsman under government contract to teach science at the secondary school. Except for the Mobleys he avoided the missionaries and spent his spare time stringing together the past of the Kigeli from the tales the old men told him over gourds of sugar beer. At night he’d get quietly drunk on his own whiskey, poring over the maps he’d drawn of the path the tribe took when they climbed into the highlands from the northern desert. Jody was a good listener and unlike the missionary men he could handle long silences. Mobley was fond of long silences. Jody and he got along.
The old couple and the Scotsman made a few more trips into the house, then Martha brought out iced tea, and they sat down on folding chairs while Mobley cut off lengths of Indian twine to wrap the boxes.
“This is a beautiful place,” he said. Dropping the rope and knife on his lap, he looked out over the blue hills to Lake Victoria, a bright gash of silver at the sky’s edge. The sky itself was brilliant, royal—white dancing clouds everywhere.