Keeper

by Mal Peet

  On the workbenches were lumps of engine guts, dismantled chain saws, the broken arms of machinery. Already, men were working at these benches, wrestling with screaming power drills that hung from chains, welding in storms of brilliant sparks, bent over lathes cooled by jets of dirty water.

  On the opposite side of the camp stood a row of huge, damaged machines smeared with red mud. Many had terrible weapons attached to their snouts: thick, gleaming spikes of steel, pairs of jaws fed by rubber hoses, scoop-shaped blades. Some had had wheels amputated. Their stumps were propped on wooden blocks, bleeding oil. They all looked like casualties of a disastrous war. Men in orange overalls climbed over and wriggled under these wounded machines, reaching into their innards. I remembered animal corpses I had seen in the forest, and the ants and maggots that were working on them.

  Of the forest, here, there was no trace. No, that’s not quite true: I was standing in its ruin. Beyond the camp, in every direction, there was a wasteland: stumps whose roots groped the air, shattered branches rotting in puddles of brown water, torn bark all over the place. The remains of fires smoked the air, which was dense with the stink of sour ashes and diesel oil.

  My father and another man were unloading crates of bottled water and big plastic canisters of fuel from the back of the truck.

  ‘Where are the trees, Father?’ I asked him.

  He looked around at me, smiling blankly. ‘What trees?’

  ‘The trees, Father. The forest. Where is it? Aren’t we there yet?’

  ‘You mean where we are cutting? That way. About a mile.’ He gestured.

  I peered into the smoking distance and could just make out a low, dark, ragged line between the gray haze and the gray sky.

  My father looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes before I have to go,’ he said. ‘Come and meet your boss.’”

  “My father had managed to get me a job in the tool shop. He was very pleased that he had done this because it showed that he was respected. Most boys, he said, had to start with the cutting crews. They began as what he called ‘saw-monkeys.’ Saw-monkeys had to dash from place to place carrying chain saws that were still running, because the cutters lost time if they had to start up the saws in every new place. Saw-monkeys were always the first to be sent in to where a tree had fallen — and everyone knew that it was a good idea to wait for a while after a tree had fallen. That is because not everything that had lived on or near the tree vanished into the forest right away. Snakes, in particular, were very stubborn and would often hide close to the fallen tree. Many saw-monkeys were bitten by snakes.

  Saw-monkeys had to carry heavy steel cables to the fallen tree and lock them on, so that the big dragging machines could tear the tree out of the forest. And if the cutting was on a slope, and if there had been rain, the logs were sometimes pulled down on top of the saw-monkeys, and they would be crushed to death. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, a cable would snap and whip back; in the past couple of years, three saw-monkeys had been killed by broken cables. One had been cut in half at the waist like a piece of cheese sliced by a wire. The captain of that crew had told my father that the top half of the saw-monkey’s body had landed on the ground while the bottom half was still standing on its legs.

  So my father was pleased that he had wrangled me a safe job at the camp. The pay was better, too.

  The problem was, Paul,” said El Gato, “that I was now, in my mind and in my heart and in my soul, a soccer player. When my father first came home and told us that he had secured this job for me in the tool shop, he was very proud. My mother thanked God and hugged me. I am ashamed to say that I felt no gratitude, or even any interest. And I know this hurt my father, although he did not show it. I did not even bother to ask him what the tool shop was. So on that first day, when he led me across the camp toward the drilling and the hammering and the workbenches, I had no idea what to expect.

  My father led me to the door of one of the blue-painted metal sheds. We went inside, and he took off his cap and knocked at a door to our left. No one answered. He knocked again, louder. We heard shouting approach the door. It was pulled open by a short, stocky man who was yelling into a two-way radiophone. He was completely, shiningly bald. He hardly looked at us, just jerked his head to tell us to enter. He stalked across to an open window and stuck the upper half of his body out of it, still yelling into the phone. Father and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the office, staring at the man’s backside.

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ The boss spoke with some foreign accent that made him sound angrier than he already was.

  We could not hear the reply through the hiss and crackle that came from the phone.

  ‘Of course it’s impossible! Of course it is! I’m in the middle of a godforsaken jungle!’

  More hiss and crackle.

  ‘I don’t care what he says! I want all of that stuff here in a week. All of it, do you hear me? And you can tell him that if it isn’t, I’m gonna come up there with some of these crazy jungle guys and trash his stinking office!’

  Hiss, crackle, squawk.

  Among the papers on the boss’s desk was an ashtray, and balanced on the lip of this ashtray was a burning cigarette with a long, gray worm of ash. I noticed my father watching this cigarette, and I could see that it was making him nervous. As soon as that ash fell off, the burning stub would tip onto the mess of paper.

  ‘Yah, tell him that I threatened him. You do that. You do just that, okay?’

  My father darted forward, flipped the cigarette into the ashtray, then shot back to my side and stood perfectly still, like a child pretending that he had not done something naughty. I looked at him, but he would not meet my eye.

  The boss pulled himself out of the window, cursing horribly, went to the desk, slammed down his phone, stubbed out the cigarette, and turned to face us. I was amazed to see the rage vanish from his face in an instant, to be replaced by a sweet smile.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Señor Hellman,’ my father said. ‘This is my son, the one we have spoken about. He starts today.’

  Hellman came across to me and ran his hand up my right arm, like a farmer checking the meat on an animal. He looked up at me; I was much taller than he was. I could have rested my chin on his smooth, round head.

  ‘He’s a big one,’ he said. ‘What do you feed him?’

  ‘He is a good boy,’ my father said. ‘He is grateful to you for this work in the tool shop.’

  ‘Yah,’ Hellman said. He didn’t sound as though he believed it. ‘What can he do? Does he know welding? Electrics? Hydraulics?’

  ‘He is a good learner, Señor Hellman. And very strong, as you see.’

  ‘Yah,’ Hellman said again. ‘Can he write?’

  ‘I can write,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Because the first thing you do is fill out this form.’ He took a sheet of yellow paper from the desk and gave it to me. I think he was surprised that I did not move my lips when I read it.

  A siren sounded from outside, and my father twitched. ‘Excuse me now, Señor Hellman,’ he said. ‘That is my call.’ He turned to me, and clearly there were several things he wanted to say to me. But all he said was, ‘I’ll see you later. Listen to what Señor Hellman tells you.’ Then he left.

  Hellman pulled a metal chair to the desk and gave me a pen. The radiophone crackled, and a voice like a robot’s said something. Hellman picked it up, pressed a button, and again thrust himself half out of the window and began shouting. I filled in the form and signed my name at the bottom. I felt that I had signed my own death warrant.

  The boss was still hanging out the window. I looked around the office and saw that the wall behind me was plastered in photographs of soccer players and teams.

  Hellman took me outside to a workbench and turned me over to a mechanic called Estevan. He was a small, very dark-skinned man, older than my father. He had a gold ring through the top part of his ear, and when he smiled — which was not
often — he showed a gold front tooth. On his left hand there were just two fingers and a thumb.

  Hellman told Estevan, ‘This is your new boy. Let him watch what you do, okay? And answer his questions, no matter how stupid they are. Maybe give him some simple thing to do. His father says he’s a good learner.’

  Estevan looked at me but spoke to Hellman. ‘This is a giant,’ he said. ‘You should give him a job pulling up trees by hand. I tell you what. Get some more of these boy giants, and I won’t have to spend so much time fixing these damn tractors.’

  ‘Yah, yah,’ Hellman said, almost smiling. He turned away toward the office, then turned back. ‘Another thing, Estevan. Don’t give this kid any of that cheap stinking brandy you think I don’t know you got in your back pocket, okay? He would maybe like to keep both his hands.’

  Yes, I thought. I would like to keep both my hands.”

  “It was a long day, that first day. It is hard to ask sensible questions about how a man does things when you have no idea what he is doing in the first place. Estevan was working on what he called a ‘junction.’ This was a plate of steel as long as my arm and as wide as my hand, studded with metal connectors and sprouting rubber hoses. I could not imagine what this thing was, but I didn’t like the look of it.

  As Hellman had done, Estevan felt my arm. He gave me a little glimpse of his gold tooth and told me to hold the ends of the steel plate. He then began unlocking the hose connections with a big adjustable wrench. The plate bucked as he worked at the nuts, but I put my elbows on the bench and held the thing steady. We took the whole thing to pieces. It took a long time.

  ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s cracked,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  Estevan sighed dramatically, a man talking to a complete imbecile. He held the stripped-down plate in front of my face. There were ten holes in it where the hoses had been. Estevan ran his finger under three of the holes. I could just see a line, like a hair, running between them.

  ‘Is it serious?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He just looked at me sorrowfully, the way you might look at a dog with three legs. Then he put the faulty plate under his arm and set off down the line of workbenches. I supposed I was meant to follow him, so I did.

  The smith’s bench was bigger than the others. Sheets and bars of different metals were stacked behind it.

  The smith was a big man whose face was all beard and glasses. Estevan gave him the plate. He and the smith had a conversation that to me seemed like a violent argument, with lots of arm waving, but it ended in smiles, with the bearded man’s arm around Estevan’s shoulders.

  Estevan gestured to me in a secretive way, and I followed him around to the back of the metal sheds, where the gravel ended and the mud and ruin of the forest began. He faced this wasteland and took a long pee into it. When he had finished, he sighed with pleasure, pulled a flat bottle from his back pocket, and took a swig. Then he squatted in the shade of the sheds and became as still as a waxwork statue. I didn’t know what else to do, so I did the same.

  We sat there for an hour, I guess. I stared out at the vast expanse of water-filled craters and smoldering fires that had once been a forest. The only living things that still existed were the flies that were interested in my mouth and eyes. I wondered where everything else had gone. I suddenly realized that this was the hour of the day when I should have reported to the Keeper, and I felt a sickness, a guilt, a twist of misery in my guts. I imagined him standing in the clearing, looking around with his shadowed eyes, waiting for me. I put my forehead on my knees and tried to give up hope.

  Estevan stood up; an alarm clock that nobody else could hear had gone off in his dark head. He stretched and looked around, and seemed slightly surprised to see me there.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if that hairy-faced so-called smith has cut our plate.’

  The new steel plate — blank, with no holes, and no cracks — was waiting for us. We took it back to our bench along with the old one and spent the rest of the day drilling and building the new junction. Estevan worked with extreme care, and incredibly slowly. He said maybe ten words to me the whole time. I thought I would go crazy. I was deeply, deeply bored and completely mystified. But for my father’s sake, I struggled to stay focused. Toward the end of the day, Estevan made me use the big electric drill that was bolted to the roof of our bench. I did okay. Driving through the steel plate, the drill produced curls of metal. One touched my left hand and immediately drew blood. When this happened, Estevan smiled and nodded as if he had revealed to me one of the secrets of the universe.

  When the light began to drain from the sky, Hellman came out of his office and went to the big, gray generator at the far end of the work sheds. There was a change in the rhythm that came from the generator, and arc lights came on all around the camp. The light was shocking. It took the color out of everything. The surrounding emptiness took on a greater darkness; it was as if nothing but the camp existed in an endless space.

  Because of the racket from the other workbenches and the growling of the generator, I did not hear the tractors returning from the forest. So I was surprised to look up and see my father and Hellman watching me work. The light from the bright lamps bounced off Hellman’s shiny head and lit up the wiry hair on my father’s. My father’s face was full of anxious questions, and hope, and a terrifying desire to be pleased.

  Hellman said, ‘So how was the boy, Estevan? You want to keep him? Or is he a saw-monkey?’

  Estevan yanked on the big adjustable wrench and locked the last nut into place. I pretended not to care about what he was going to say, but I did, desperately.

  ‘He will do. He is less useless than the last one. Leave him with me.’”

  “On the long journey back in the truck, I fell asleep with my head against my father’s shoulder. He must have been very tired from his own work, but he sat upright the whole way so that I would not fall onto the floor of the truck.”

  “SO THE WEEK passed. Estevan taught me, almost wordlessly, to do things I did not want to do. Hellman watched, from time to time. I think he was pleased with me, but it was hard to tell. Toward the end of each day, the harsh lights came on, and I would look up to see my father’s face, watching anxiously. Then the long trip home to the meal my mother and grandmother had prepared. I ate ravenously while my family nudged each other and smiled. Then I went to sleep to dream tortured dreams of the Keeper, pacing the clearing, waiting.

  On Saturday we all went to work as usual, but at midday a siren blew as the logging crews returned from the forest on their trucks and tractors and trailers. I went to stand in a line with Estevan and the other tool-shop men outside Hellman’s metal shed. The pay man stood at a window above us and handed down a brown envelope to each of us in turn. Most of the men opened their envelopes as soon as they had them and counted the money inside. I did not, but then my father found me and encouraged me to open my pay packet and rejoice at the money.

  I thought that once all this was done, we would go home. And some of the men did go, in a hurry to get back to town and give the money to their wives or to the girls who were already polishing the beer glasses at the café. But most of the men did not leave. Instead, they set back out in the direction of the cutting. I had not gone this way before, but my father put his arm around my shoulders and led me. We all zigzagged down a winding dirt path and into a sort of square pit that had been cleared of tree stumps and other rubbish. The dirt floor of the pit had been leveled, and at each end a goal had been made out of scaffolding poles and netting. A soccer field had been marked out more or less accurately with lines of crumbled chalk. A number of men and boys were already kicking a couple of balls about in this rough arena. Half of them wore scruffy green T-shirts; half of them wore scruffy orange ones. There wasn’t much else in the way of gear. Many of the players wore cutoff denims as shorts; some wore socks, others didn’t; some wore sneakers while others still had their work boots
on. Just one or two men had proper soccer cleats. I sat down with my father on the sloping side of the arena, and he turned to greet and exchange friendly insults with other spectators.

  There was going to be a game. I felt my blood wake up.

  For quite a long time nothing much happened. The two teams, the Loggers, in the green shirts, and the Camp, in orange, seemed to have more or less eleven players each, and they continued to kick the two balls about in an aimless way. I recognized two of the Loggers, boys who had left school and started work at the same time as me. One was the tall boy who had kept goal at the church end of the plaza. The other was a boy called Jao. I knew him well. He was not big, he was not skillful, but he was fierce, and he was a dirty player. In the plaza games, his nickname was El Carnicero, the Butcher, and he liked it. I looked at him now. He had torn the arms off his T-shirt and cut the legs off a pair of jeans. He had heavy work boots on his feet. The exposed parts of his body looked liked bunches of hard wire covered in skin. He had had his hair cut off, and his mean, narrow head was covered in short bristles like a wire brush. A saw-monkey.

  Then there grew a chorus of cheers and hoots and whistles from the crowd. A short, stocky man dressed, amazingly, in an immaculate referee’s uniform trotted down the slope of the arena. Watch on each wrist. Whistle on a red ribbon. Black shirt, black shorts with a white stripe, black socks taped just below the knee. Like a ref who had walked off the TV screen and into this crazy place. The sunlight bounced off his perfectly bald head. It was Hellman.

  Hellman collected one of the two balls from the warm-up and with a blast from his whistle commanded the other ball to be kicked away. The Loggers got into a ragged formation and shaped up for kickoff, with the Butcher in the center of the field, his foot on the ball. But the team from the Camp had a problem, it seemed, and they gathered around Hellman, gesturing and shouting and pointing at the empty goalmouth at their end. They didn’t have a keeper.