And we had to get him back before what came down? Too much was happening—the Army poking around after leaving us alone for a year, heavy equipment for the MI priests suddenly showing up on our eighty pitiful acres of dead grass and rusting tin, talk about heavy demolitions . . . and now Polaski back. To do what I told him to? Not likely. I was an Army hardware engineer, no more. I took care of the island’s machines, from the cooling rods in the big antennas to the drones we put up at night to listen in on the Japanese. I tuned them and I studied them, and I spent my nights alone with them and the sounds of the jungle, not wanting to sleep. And that was all.
Polaski’s truck skidded to a stop in front of Bolton’s bungalow across the clearing. Smoke trailed from the motors. He strode through the grass and jumped onto Bolton’s porch.
“Tyrone?” I said.
“Yup.”
“Why would anyone steal the plans to counter-biologicals?”
He was quiet for a minute.
“I been hearing a long time,” he said, “how you’re one of the real smart ones, Torres. I think maybe you got yourself a good question there. Japanese sure as hell don’t need to defend against their own shit, huh?”
“Why’s Polaski here, Tyrone?”
He shrugged. “Blow something up, I expect. It’s what he does.”
Clouds scudded along the horizon over the ocean. I tried not to think about Polaski, and tried to remember the daydream he’d interrupted, instead.
There’d been a time when missions to the stars had been planned by the western nations, out through America’s “space tunnel.” It was a moon-sized torus near Venus that was supposed to pass the ships onward, along with their cargos of colonists and seed and livestock embryos. The project had died from poverty and warfare, but it was those same trees and horses I’d been thinking about that morning. Trees and horses and Katherine Chan, and a piece of land far from Earth and the war. All of it impossible.
“Well,” said Elliot, “I guess I don’t know what demolition’s got to do with MI folks, after all, now that I think about it. But you might have noticed the priests had something to do with a bunch of sonic diggers out behind Bolton’s bungalow.”
“Diggers?”
“Yup. Big suckers.”
T
orres.”
Elliot’s voice, far away. The dog snarled and pushed its face in through the spokes of the wheel, in under the wagon where I’d crawled.
“Jesus Christ, boy, wake up. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”
I was four, and the dog’s teeth were red and its breath was hot on my face. Its neck was bloody with open sores. Dogs behind it fought each other and tore at the entrails of an infant they’d dragged away from its carreta, away from its sleeping parents in their tin and cardboard house. My mother and father were nowhere. The little girl’s unseeing face jerked in the dust and blood spattered under the wagon. Helpless men across the road shuffled their feet and threw rocks at the dogs.
“Come on, Torres.”
There was foam in the dog’s mouth, under its lip where it curled back from its teeth.
“Shit, what’s the matter with this boy?”
L
ater that morning I sat with Polaski on the slope of an island to the east of the company camp, watching the glare of the sun from under my eyelids. It reflected off the straits between the island where we sat and a deserted peak rising from the ocean two miles away. I was trying to keep from slipping down the stony hillside while I pressed my hands over my ears to keep out the roaring behind me. Two days had passed since Polaski’s arrival.
The sound changed pitch again, then surged from the roar into a howl, setting my teeth on edge and sending new pain into my temples. It warbled lower for a moment only to seize on a new frequency and lash out again, tearing the air apart with its shriek and bringing a sweat to my forehead.
On the island across the straits, angry jets of smoke tinged with purple shot into the air each time the digger found a frequency that worked, leaving behind a smoldering socket where tons of earth had been disintegrated. Now and then Polaski let the digger dip its massive barrel too far, and its beam swept across the ocean to send a wall of steam curling into the sky. It settled across us later in a cloud of humid air that mingled with our sweat and stung our eyes.
Squatting on its thick legs behind us, like a tank without treads, the digger probed with its beam higher up the far island until it found a new weakness in the rock, then leapt into its screaming again. The clanging of its cooling pump was like the metallic thumping of a cat’s tail as it hurled itself into its kill.
“God damn it, Polaski, turn that thing off!” Having Polaski take potshots for fun was more than I could stand. The noise was like an alien presence inside me that stole my concentration and dragged me closer to a pit I needed all of my wits to stay out of. A pit I’d slipped into that morning and stayed in until Elliot had finally kicked me awake.
“Jesus Christ, boy!” he’d shouted. “Wake up!”
Foam in the dog’s mouth, the wagon collapsing with the dog’s head still caught in the spokes . . .
“Torres!”
Polaski hit the switch in his lap. The digger choked in mid-wail and spun down, muttering and spitting and grumbling in its disappointment. The armor on its haunches clattered, then with a hiss and a crump as the armature locked up, the machine was quiet and Polaski and I were left alone with the flies and the sun.
On the blackened ruin of the island across the straits, gullies glowed red and ragged pits steamed along the waterline. I struggled to my feet and climbed the hillside to sit next to Polaski.
“So aside from target practice, Polaski, how come you dragged me out here?”
He squinted at the pitted island with one eye closed, judging his work.
“We have to take test shots once the surface warms up.” He squinted with the other eye.
“It’s warm,” I said. Polaski had asked Bolton to have me assigned to him, but I didn’t want to be there.
“Another two hours,” he said.
“Christ.” I lay back and watched the clouds piling up to the north, wondering what possible use the military could have for such a little island. Polaski lay back, too, then began lobbing rocks up over his head. He was trying for the clang when they hit the digger, but most of them thumped into the hillside and came skittering back down past us. I couldn’t see them after they left his hand, so after waiting for the clang I had to wait again to see if one would smack into me on the way down. Each time one found its target I thought he was going to stop, and when he didn’t I wanted to snatch the rocks up and throw them back at him . . .
Don’t. I sat up and looked at the ocean. There was another scene from Piedras Negras that came back sometimes, more often than I liked. Running from the stinging sand that blew across the desert, into the heat of our tiny house with its iron roof. Running toward my father where he sat at the table with his hand gripped around his glass, staring at the tabletop and not moving. My mother at the basin, her head turning with the warning in her eyes: Don’t. That’s what I remembered—her dark eyes turning toward me and their warning: Don’t.
I let out my breath and ran a hand through my hair, then turned to look along the flank of the hill. Polaski was watching me.
“Pretty little thing,” he said, “isn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Miss Chan.”
The image of Mexico faded. “You stay away from Chan.”
“Really? I was thinking maybe I could diddle her for you, Torres, tell you what it was like.”
“I said leave her alone.”
“Sweet on Miss Chan, are we?”
When I didn’t answer he picked up a rock and pitched it carefully down the hill.
“Man-u-factured Intelligence,” he said. “Man, those MI fucks have got it made. Jobs when they get out . . .” He reached for a bigger rock. “Don’t go crapping out on me again, Torres.”
“I
didn’t crap out on you. You fucked up and the Army busted us.”
He toyed with the rock. “So what do you see in her, anyway?”
“Someone who’s still all right, Polaski. Someone whose insides haven’t been taken out and pissed all over like the rest of us.”
“Nice,” he said. “Nicely said. So what’s she see in you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Come on, Torres, I’ve seen the way she looks at you all the fucking time. What’s she see in you?”
“I don’t know. Come on, Polaski, what did you drag me out here for?”
“Because I need you, all right? I need your brains. Is that what you want to hear?”
“For what?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“For what?”
He rummaged in his pack. “You tell me.”
“Forget it, Polaski. All I want any more is out.”
He got his radio into his hand and called Tyrone Elliot; he’d seen Elliot’s helicopter beating its way toward us across the ocean, just above the waves.
“Yes, boss,” said Elliot.
“Make a detour, Elliot. Get Torres’ ass out of here. He needs something to do.”
“Yes, sir, Herr Feld Marschall, sir. Tell him we’ll snap his little wetback ass off the ridge, sir.” The radio shut off with a squeal.
“Get out of here,” said Polaski. The helicopter changed course and headed toward us. “Go back where you came from, maybe.”
I stood up. “So what about you, Polaski? Where did you come from?”
He was sitting a few yards away from me, facing down the hill, and now he put the radio down carefully between his feet. His movements were slow, calm. He looked down at the radio, then stayed that way, his head down, the muscles working in his jaw.
It was what I’d expected. The only other time I’d asked him about himself was at the school, after we met, when I asked him if he had family, and his reaction was the same. His face lost expression and his eyes narrowed, and he didn’t look at me or speak. He just walked away. When he returned three days later our relationship had changed: There were things that belonged in it, and things that didn’t.
I left Polaski stewing on the hillside and slogged up past the digger toward the ridge, while I scratched at my bites and thought back to when I met him.
I’d been in the U.S. two years when the Army picked me up and selected me out for Tech-War School. Until then I’d been working the reforestations in the summer and trying to stay warm in the winter, asking at doors for books and food and huddling under blankets at night to read them. I walked the streets during the day and tried to sound Anglo and think Anglo, trying to get out of the trap. In cities filled with poor I was the poorest, a wetback off the Gulf boats that snuck around the border wire, and I knew my only chance for a job was English and machines.
Then without warning I was in the Army. Polaski appeared a few days later, as though out of nowhere. Streetwise and confident, quick on familiar ground and sly when out of his depth. He picked me out for my skill with the books, then over the weeks grew prickly and watchful as though mindful of losing a new possession. The pointed guns began, the half-serious threats, always in private.
The pounding of Elliot’s helicopter brought me back to the present. It kicked up a trail of fine sand along the ridge, then threw up a biting cloud as it reared above me. A black arm reached down from the after door and heaved me in, and Tyrone Elliot’s equally black face appeared as he snapped a tether onto my belt. I grabbed at it just as the helicopter spun and plunged down the far side of the ridge. Elliot grinned.
“Getting on Polaski’s nerves, huh?”
“Nothing gets on Polaski’s nerves, Tyrone.” The cabin was packed with soldiers from Elliot’s platoon, including Specialist Ellen Tanaka, a tiny woman almost inseparable from him and currently clinging to the back of his belt as she peered out from the open door.
“Who’s Bolton kissing up to to get all this air time?” I said. “Airmobile kills quicker than giving up fuel.”
“Oh, this ain’t Bolton. This here’s straight from Battalion, and it’s sure enough major business. Mighty peculiar, too.”
“Why?”
“Well, what we’re doing here, see, is searching for civvies and yanking ’em up off the island, then hauling their asses back so the Army can see if we got the fellow they’re looking for. And we gotta jerk ’em out real quick like, so not one whisper of nothing gets off the island.”
“Not one whisper of what?”
“You’re asking a man who don’t know, friend. I just work here, if you know what I mean.” He flashed another grin. “But I do hear that in thirty-six hours a whole lot of this here island ain’t gonna be here no more.”
With that he turned and shouted at the pilot. The helicopter reared up above the beach with its nose toward the trees, kicking up sand. Elliot shouted into the cabin.
“DeLauder! Your sector! Call in for pickups—go!” Tess DeLauder and two others fought their way forward and dropped from the swaying machine, rifles smacking against the deck.
“They need professional grunts to do this kind of work, Tyrone.”
“No, sir. No one’s supposed to know that don’t have to.”
“So why do we have to?” A wall of hot sand slammed in through the door as the helicopter spun.
“Lord almighty, boy! Because whatever screwed up thing’s happening to this island, it’s us that’s doing the screwing! Salvatore, you folks are next! Let’s go!”
We went on around the island and dropped the rest of the crews, then ended up over the shoreline less than a mile from where I’d left Polaski. Elliot was about to have the pilot go around again when we saw roofs in the jungle and a satellite dish on the sand, tucked in against the tree line. He slapped the pilot and pointed, and the three of us were dropped on the beach—Elliot, Ellen Tanaka, and me. The helicopter beat its way down the beach and off over the water, and the silence closed in with the droning of insects.
Tanaka nodded toward the tree line.
“What if there’re people in those houses?”
“Well, now,” said Elliot, “I suppose that’s the whole point. Torres, move it back along there and cut the leads to that dish, before someone starts telling someone else there’s choppers fooling around out here. Then let’s go on back in and see who it is might be doing the telling.”
“Tyrone,” I said. “You don’t move islands in thirty-six hours.”
His eyes widened in mock surprise.
“Why son, we ain’t going to move nothing in thirty-six hours. We’re going to move it in five minutes. And we’re going to do it sitting right on top of it, too!”
“We’re going to blow this island while we’re on it?”
“Yes, indeed! You’re gonna need faith, boy, faith.”
“Why are we blowing it, Tyrone?”
He shrugged. “Shoot, Torres, details like that they ain’t telling us. Now get going.”
I sawed through the cable leading from the dish into the underbrush. It was a small commercial device and nothing military, so we were probably dealing with civilian recluses or sportsmen. We were so close to the equator that the dish was pointed only slightly north, but it was pointing a fair bit east, probably at one of California’s big commercial machines. Someone was using it to listen to the radio and order his milk and eggs.
Elliot and Tanaka had headed straight into the trees, and I cut into the jungle to meet them. I was struck by how quiet it was. No birds or crickets, no scurrying among the trees. Only the snapping of twigs and the crackle of dry leaves under my feet. The jungle was thin and brittle, close to burning. And it stank; down at the waterline, rotting fish lay half out of the water.
“Okey-doke,” said Elliot beside me, “let’s walk real quiet, like.” We pushed in through the underbrush until a bungalow appeared through the trees. Beyond it a rutted track climbed up to the dirt road, after which the hillside continued up to the island’s rid
ge. The tangle of jungle followed the slope up a way, then petered out into rock and shale. The door to the bungalow was open, and Elliot motioned me in.
I peered into the gloom. It was empty, stripped of furniture, covered with dust.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone,” I said when I came back. “This place is too crummy for air-dropped supplies, and there’s not much of a town or boat dock anywhere close.”
“Yeah. Maybe we got us a long-time-gone nut case retreat or something.”
“Tyrone,” said Tanaka, “that was a pretty new McAllister dish on the beach.”
“Yeah, true. Okay, here’s another one.” Tanaka and I waited among the trees while Elliot pushed open the door.
“Nope.”
I took the third bungalow. Its door was open like the others. I stepped onto the porch to look, but it was too dark to see in. Yet from the doorway came the steady purring of ventilating fans, and a current of warm air with an odd, sweet smell in it. I held up a hand for Elliot and Tanaka to wait, then stepped in.
There was the luster of wooden floors and off to the side, a little up from the floor, tiny equipment lights. The familiar green lights of MI cabinets. On the wall behind them hung charts and drawings, while papers and books lay scattered on the tables. By the door stood a terminal with a cable hanging from it, most likely to the severed antenna on the beach.
At the far end of the room, a man sat on a straight chair turned slightly away from me, at a table with books and a glowing screen. Small and elderly, he had the dusty yellow skin and fine features of the Vietnamese. He wore a rumpled black shirt and a soiled shawl over his shoulders. Limp, grey strands of hair clung to his scalp.
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