But even having Hard Road right in the middle doesn’t stop us. If we need to deliver to the other side, like if we’re delivering to Delta, where all the new arrivals go, or Echo, which is another compound where men with no families go, then we have to make a drop behind the kitchens or reach through the wobbly wire at the back of our toilet block, where it edges up to the back of their toilet block. That’s the hardest, and sometimes if the toilets haven’t been cleaned, then you can end up with all sorts on your arms.
Eli has worked out how to deliver to every compound there is, all except Beta Compound. That’s where the Jackets take people they reckon are trouble. There are extra fences and extra Jackets, and the fences have electricity and the Jackets have dogs. The people in there live in small containers by themselves and only get to come out for a cigarette and a walk in the morning and afternoon. Beta Compound must just about be the loneliest place on earth.
Eli has to keep changing where he keeps his stash. If the Jackets find it, then there’ll be trouble for sure, especially because sometimes Eli finds a way of snatching extra things from the provisions truck. Like when he managed to steal a whole box of underwear. “Plan B, Subhi. You always need to have a Plan B. Do you know how many orders we have for underwear? There are people here walking around with more holes than undies, and no one wanting to swap. What else could I do?” And he was right. That week we ran more packages than ever before.
This week the stash is kept at the back of the kitchens, down under where all the garbage is dumped. As soon as we get there, the rats give us a look, knowing that we’re about to disturb their lunch, and I can feel that buzzing in my legs that I get every time I’m about to run a package. That kind of excited, scared buzz that makes everything feel a little bit sharper and more real.
Eli sorts right through that stench down to the very bottom of the pile. I stand back, my hand over my nose to try and stop the taste of rot from getting in my mouth. Eli reaches into a bag and holds up a shirt, tied into a ball. “This one is for Pietre, over in Alpha. He’s going to give you toothpaste, which is to go to Assad in Family Two, got it?”
“Got it. Assad, Family Two.” I poke at the shirt, trying to work out what’s wrapped up inside, because there is a hardness in the middle. Eli’s rule is never open the packages, but there’s no rule about guessing.
“Assad has mosquito spray, which you bring back here. ’Kay?”
“Sure thing.”
“And, Subhi? Watch your back, little bruda.” Eli says that every time he gives me a package. He always musses my hair when he says it too. Eli used to have a little brother for real, but he doesn’t anymore. He still keeps his brother’s glove in his pocket though. It’s red and small, and Eli says it brings him luck. I reckon he’s right too, because Eli has the walk of someone who knows they have luck at their back.
I still can’t work out what’s in the package, even when I’m halfway back to Alpha. Alpha has more cameras on the tops of its fences than we do in Family, but Eli and I found where the blind spot is—right over in the corner where the fence hits the brick wall of the shower blocks, and kind of half hidden behind a couple of bushes.
I go to the corner and give the whistle so they know there’s a package coming through the fence. I can see Pietre walking up to meet me, his eyes all red and puffy from the dust sickness, and I just about think I’ve worked out that there’s a box of cigarettes or a pack of playing cards inside this shirt when I see Pietre stop, frozen to the spot. He turns slowly, slowly and shakes his head at me.
I know that look. I know by the way the scared covers Pietre’s face. A Jacket is here.
I don’t want to turn around. I can feel those eyes burning into my back. Here I was so caught up in what was inside this stupid package that I stopped watching out for who might be watching out for me. I forgot to watch my back. I hate it when I do that. When my brain wanders off and leaves me behind to pay for it.
I turn slowly, my eyes on the ground, but I can see the black boots flashing from the sun and the black pants with the cuffs browned from the dirt, and I can tell from the sour smoke smell that it’s not just any Jacket.
It’s Beaver.
My chest gets all tight and I start up coughing and trying to suck in more air, and all I can think is that Queeny was right. That the sparrow was a sign of death. All I can think is, I’m about to die.
When I was little I had nightmares. Nightmares about people screaming, about being stuck in a dark hole, about losing Maá and Queeny, about running and never being able to run fast enough. One nightmare kept coming back. That nightmare was always about Beaver. Beaver coming and catching me. Sometimes I still have that nightmare even though I’m grown.
Eli says Beaver hates all of us because one time he almost got killed when a man in here turned crazy and grabbed a hammer. Beaver ended up losing his eye because of it, and now just has his eyelid sewn down flat over where his eye used to be. Eli reckons that’s what makes him so mean.
But I reckon Beaver was always mean, and the almost-being-killed just made him meaner. Beaver’s the kind of person who gives you an extra kick for not getting out of his way fast enough, or tips your maá’s dinner into the dirt so she has to pick it up with her fingers and eat it fresh from the ground in front of him, all covered in grit and all.
And what Eli reckons doesn’t really make sense either, because Harvey was almost killed in the same craziness, and he’s as nice as ever. It was Beaver who saved Harvey. Harvey was crouched down looking at something, and the man went for him from behind. Harvey never even saw it coming. But Beaver did, and he jumped in front when the man went for Harvey. I guess Beaver’s meanness just picks its moments. Or maybe it just picks its people. Eli reckons Beaver saving him is why Harvey can’t ever say bad against Beaver, even though he wouldn’t stand for any other Jacket treating people the way Beaver does. Eli reckons that makes Harvey spineless and not worth spit, but I kind of get it. I think.
Eli said I was never to run packages when Beaver was on. If ever something had to be delivered when Beaver was working, Eli would take it himself and keep me well out of it. I saw what happened when Eli got caught with a package. Beaver handcuffed Eli with his arms twisted behind his back and shoved him into the Jackets’ offices. And after, when Eli came out of the office, he just rubbed at the red raw on his wrists and wiped the blood from his nose and told me I wasn’t to ever run a package when Beaver was on. Not ever.
But I guess Beaver changed his hours without us knowing. Because here he is, looking down at me with his one eye and a smile without even a smidge of happiness in it.
Everyone in Alpha is watching, their cigarettes in their mouths and their heads shaking. I hope more than anything that this is an Inside package.
An Inside package is a package swapped between us. Stuff we all get anyway, like flip-flops or a bar of soap. But sometimes the packages have stuff from Outside. I don’t know how Eli gets that stuff in here or what gets swapped in return, because I can’t imagine people on the Outside need to swap us for our soap. I don’t even know what’s in the Outside packages. I asked Eli once and he said it’s the stuff of kings, which didn’t make any more sense than my ba’s messages sent on the Night Sea. Usually Eli only gives me the Inside packages. But sometimes…
My throat is as dry as the dirt. Eli always tells me, “Never let anyone see you’re scared,” and I try as hard as I can but trying isn’t doing, and I’ve never been handcuffed before and I’ve never been taken into the offices, and thinking on all of that is fouling my stomach close to spewing.
“What are you doing back there?” Beaver’s voice sounds as dark as the Jackets’ dogs when they don’t like a person. I can’t talk. I can’t say a single thing. His hand is hard and scratchy, grabbing at my shirt and pulling me toward him so that my teeth clang on my tongue and I can taste blood, and my brain is buzzing louder and louder.
“I asked you a question.”
I still can’t talk. He shov
es me backward so hard that my feet leave the ground and my head cracks into the bricks behind me, and for a moment all I can see are little lights flashing in and out. When I crash into the dirt, Beaver has the package. And he’s opening it.
It’s Queeny who saves me. Queeny, who looks as close to a superhero as I’ve ever seen. She swoops down to my side, her hair flying out behind her, and stands in front of me, my shield from Beaver.
Beaver opens the shirt. I see what’s inside. And I feel my heart start to beat extra fast because for a while there I think it had just about stopped. It’s laundry detergent. Safe, safe Inside laundry detergent. Beaver takes the detergent and tips it into the dirt. Then he stomps the shirt into the dirt as well, and I can hear it ripping. I hope that Pietre has something else to swap because that shirt won’t be much good anymore.
Queeny says to me, “I told you to go straight to do the laundry,” and says to Beaver, “He always comes out here to play. I told him to go to the laundry to wash that shirt…” Queeny keeps talking and her hands keep flapping and she only stops when Beaver spits onto the dirt and some of it goes on her foot.
Then he walks away. I can feel tears snaking down my cheeks and Queeny’s arm wraps around me, pulling me back to our tent. I suddenly get a feeling like when I was little and I’d wake from my nightmares. Queeny would always be right there next to me to hush me back to sleep, and even though I was scared, I’d get all warm in my belly, knowing my sister was looking after me.
I haven’t felt like that in a long time.
Queeny puts me into our bed, my legs and hands still shaking, and she whispers to get some rest. To get some sleep, and that everything is all right now. She tells me to think on one of my stories and put Beaver out of my head for a bit. And even though it’s still day, I can feel my brain closing and all I can do is shut my eyes.
My ba used to tell me his stories. A long time ago, before I was even born. He would huddle over Maá’s stomach, me curled inside, and he’d rub his hands all over her belly and pull the heat right out of it, taking away all the pain that roared through her.
All the time Ba was pulling on that pain, he was telling me stories. Telling them right through Maá’s belly so they could reach my little baby ears. The stories from a time so long gone that he couldn’t know except by being told them himself. And even though I know I can’t know what that was like, even though I know I can’t really remember from before I was born, in my head I do. In my head I can hear my ba’s voice washing up against me.
When I was little, I used to ask Maá to tell me the stories Ba whispered. She always said no, that she could never get the words just right. “Your ba is writer. Poet. You wait when he tell right. Soon he come. Soon he whisper his poet, right to your ear. I tell my stories instead,” she’d say. “Not so good, not so bad.” Queeny and I would scrunch up on the bed, our legs all twisted together, flopping over Maá, and we’d lie back with our eyes closed, letting those stories burn themselves into us. They were perfect. Each one.
We called them her Listen Now stories, because each and every one started with “Listen now, Subhi. Listen now, Noor,” which is Queeny’s real name, but only Maá calls her that. Most of the stories were good and happy. All about their dog and their donkey in Burma, and swimming in the sea and watching shooting stars fall from the sky. Some were Rohingya stories, passed down from maás to their kids since forever back. And some weren’t so happy. They were stories we had to hear though. About being told the Rohingya don’t exist. About having their house burned down, and their animals killed. About not being allowed to go to school or to work or to the hospital. About being arrested and made to build roads and dig holes for no money. About running from the police and soldiers. Lots of running. About people disappearing and people dying. About my ba being arrested for writing his poems, and not coming back. About soldiers finding Maá and Queeny and putting them on a boat with other Rohingya. About being told if they come back to Burma, they’d be killed. About coming here. About every country in the world saying we don’t belong. Not in this place. Not in any place.
And then one day Maá stopped the stories. The good, happy ones as well. One day she just said, “No more. Looking back only brings sad, Subhi. Now look forward. No more back.” That was when Maá stopped talking to me in Rohingya too. She reckons that if I only speak English, then no one will think I am any different when we get out. “Someday, Subhi,” Maá says, “someday they see we belong.”
I tell myself the stories as best as I can remember, but the words aren’t right the way I remember. Not like the way Maá told them. And when I ask her again to tell me a story, she says she’s too tired. She says she can’t remember right, her fingers rubbing at her eyes like it’s too bright to think. Someday Maá will tell me again, her mushed-up English and Rohingya words all in together. Someday I’ll learn Rohingya for myself so I’ll be able to talk it without even trying to think how. Someday Maá will see that looking back is just as important as looking forward, no matter how much sad it carries. Someday my ba will figure a way to get free, to get out of Burma, and then we’ll all of us be together. And he will sit and tell me his own stories and his own poems for himself, just like Maá used to say he would. Then I won’t ever forget. Not a bit.
But until then I keep on at Maá every night, asking her for a story. Just a single one. Because sometimes, in here, when people stop talking, and stop asking, and stop remembering, that’s when they start to lose that piece of themselves. That’s when their brains start to mush. It happens a lot.
Even though Maá doesn’t even hear my asking anymore, I keep trying, without even thinking on an answer. I keep asking every night, because if I don’t…
But I guess I was tired. I guess after Beaver my brain just decided it had had enough for the day. There was an ache at the back of my head that wouldn’t let up and blood on my fingers from when I touched the bump where I hit the bricks. Everything in my body was screaming at me to stop. To close my eyes and stop thinking so loud. So I curled up in my bed and slept through dinner and curfew, and I only woke up in the middle of the night when a Jacket shone his flashlight in my face and made me tell him my number. DAR-1.
It is only then, when I’m trying to fall back to sleep, that I realize. For the first time, I hadn’t asked Maá. I didn’t ask her.
And then everything changed.
Jimmie likes school. She just doesn’t get there much since her mum died. If Jonah doesn’t get her to the bus stop on time, then there isn’t much she can do because that bus only comes past once a day and there’s no way Jonah’s driving an hour to get her there.
Sometimes the school calls, but they only have Dad’s old cell phone number, the one Jonah has been using since Dad threw it against the wall and smashed the screen. And when Jonah answers, the school doesn’t even ask to leave a message. It’s not like Jimmie is the only one not going to school. Most times she goes, they’re lucky if half the class is there, and they only go over the same stuff they’ve gone over the day before anyway. It doesn’t bother Jimmie. School just isn’t that important.
But reading is important. Her mum loved reading. Every night they hopped into bed and Jimmie would choose from the pile of books they’d borrowed from the mobile library, and her mum would start reading. When Jimmie started school she’d thought that she would learn straightaway. But it didn’t work like that. Not for Jimmie. “It just takes time, love,” her mum would say. But it was more than that. And then her mum died and nothing really seemed to matter anymore.
Now, Jimmie wonders if her dad even remembers that she can’t read, or maybe he just figures that the school fixed her. Like the way Jonah fixes the TV by sticking a coat hanger in the top. Yesterday her dad saw Jimmie looking through one of the books from the shelf above the TV. She liked the smell of the pages, all dusty and warm. “Is it any good, love?” he asked her.
Jimmie didn’t answer. She looked at the picture on the cover and wondered why her dad couldn’t
work out that it wasn’t a kids’ book she was sniffing. She guessed he just hadn’t noticed.
Her dad never seems to really notice much these days. Sometimes that is a good thing. Like last week when she took his bike for a spin out along the track and stacked it against a rock because she thought you had to pedal backward to work the brakes. That was how Jimmie’s old bike had done it. But she’d grown out of her old bike years ago. When her dad saw the wheel, all bent to the side and out of shape, he rubbed his eyes and shook his head, like he couldn’t quite remember when he’d done that. Jonah smiled at Jimmie and whispered, “I’ll get you a bike for your birthday, if you like,” and Jimmie felt a buzz in her legs just thinking about it.
Before coming here, Jimmie’s family had moved around a lot. Jimmie couldn’t remember how many times they had stuffed everything they owned into their trailer and gone. She couldn’t remember how many schools she’d started at, or how many friends she’d made, just to up and leave without so much as a good-bye. When they found this place, though, Jimmie’s mum said they were staying put. “This is where we’ve been headed all along, kids!”
Jimmie’s dad said, “Nonsense. It’s just where the work is.” But they hadn’t moved again. They’d bought an old birdbath, and Jimmie helped her mum keep it full and clean. Her mum planted a lemon tree, because all houses need a lemon tree, she’d said, and as soon as the first lemons were ripe, their mum started making pancakes with lemon and sugar every Sunday for breakfast. She even started a veggie garden, filling an old bathtub with dirt that stank and singing to the seeds until they all pushed their way up toward her voice.
When she died, Jimmie and Jonah and Dad had planted an acacia out the front because acacia were Mum’s favorite tree in the whole world. That was when Jimmie knew they wouldn’t leave again. They couldn’t. Even when Jimmie’s dad lost his job along with the rest of the town and had to find a new job working shifts, which took him away from home for days at a time. This is where their mum had been happiest. And so they would stay. Because this is where their mum was. No one else would want to move into an empty town full of nothing but memories anyway.
The Bone Sparrow Page 3