by Daniel Mason
A cashew vendor passed. Usually, Isabel would beg her mother for cashews, but now she was too afraid to be hungry.
She began to feel ill with the heat and waiting. She wanted to open the top buttons on her dress, but she felt the half-lidded eyes of the men as they sat back in their chairs with their chests and bellies open to the air. A trickle of mechanics slunk between the shops that surrounded the station. She went and looked in the concession stand. It sold good luck charms, Saint Christopher invocation cards, wooden fists and rosary beads. A small black-and-white TV played a channel where a preacher inveighed against beliefs in backlands spirits.
Night came. The men went home. The station was empty except for the two of them and an old woman. Isabel took out Isaias’s letters and arranged them in a row on the bench. ‘Put those away, or you’ll lose them,’ said her mother.
‘I’ll bring him home,’ said Isabel.
‘Sleep,’ said her mother.
Isabel slept with her head on her mother’s lap. She awoke strangely happy.
It was very quiet, and in the distance was the stain of sunrise. The flatbed idled in the square. It was crowded with bodies and blankets. The huddled figures moved silently aside to give her space.
It took the flatbed a half hour to reach the outskirts of Prince Leopold, winding through unpaved streets of cinder-block houses. The driver hung out the window, his low song tothesouthtothesouthtothesouth coaxing dawn-shadowed figures from doorways and street corners. The new passengers swung bags onto the dirty planks and settled among the others.
At the edge of the city, the truck accelerated. Fresh air rushed over the back. Outside, the scrub ran to the base of the mountains, where a thin trail threaded to a summit chapel. The road was potholed and the driver never stopped swerving.
There were no benches. The passengers slumped against the slatted railing or curled up in the center. Their faces were burnt and lined with a gray dust that covered everything. The truck had come from farther north, Isabel knew. She wondered how many days the others had been riding. She found a gray wool blanket that didn’t seem to have an owner. She checked it for spots of blood and bedbugs; it seemed clean, so she wrapped it over her shoulders. She flexed her toes uncomfortably. Her shoes were a size too small, but they were her best pair, black store-bought loafers with the words Daisy Girl printed on the insoles. She had promised her mother she wouldn’t lose them, and she kept them on.
They passed through a little town. A crowd of schoolchildren swirled around boys riding bicycles with wooden blocks bolted to the pedals. On the outskirts, a billboard showed a smiling couple at the edge of an emerald swimming pool. Where the poster was torn, she could see scraps of other posters: a leg, a little owl, a woman’s painted mouth, the word VICTOR. Insouciant dogs trotted through the cacti and yapped at the truck. At times, she could hear music coming from the cab.
In the afternoon, a pair of men at the railing began to point. ‘A pilgrim,’ someone whispered. She saw a lone figure dragging a cross, its base worn smooth by the road. The truck slowed but the man didn’t look up. Some of the passengers crossed themselves. The scrubland stretched to the horizon, white like a dusting of ash.
Down the road, a man in a red velvet shirt and a straw hat flagged the truck, climbed onto the flatbed and threw himself down beside her. He began to talk the moment he sat, introducing himself with an endless name she forgot before he finished. He called her my angel and said, ‘You look like you just came fluttering down from the sky.’ He didn’t ask her name. He was a rhabdomancer, ‘at least a hundred and twenty-seven years old,’ and he added, ‘Rhabdo-rod, mancy-divination. I find water in the subsoil.’ He had, he told her, an explanation for the droughts.
He said the modern age was ‘all Carnival and no Lent.’ For many miles, he uttered proclamations about the end of the world, when a boy-king and his soldiers would return to take revenge on all sinners, a group that included thieves and girls with shirts that showed their bellies. Behind him, one of the standing boys made loops around his ear with his finger, and Isabel tried to suppress a smile.
The rhabdomancer touched her arm. ‘Did you see that man up the road? I walked for two days with that citizen and his cross. Do you know why he is paying a promise? He went to work in the salt plants, where they all go blind from seeing too much white, and before he left he said he would pay a promise to Saint Lucy if he could return to see his beloved backlands one last time. I think he is blind, his eyes are clouded like muddy water, but he says he can see the road, or the end of the road. This place used to be filled with men like that. There is no faith anymore. That’s why this is happening. If there was faith, we would stay where God planted us in the first place.’
He settled back against the side of the flatbed. Isabel watched him curiously. She wanted him to say more, but she knew not to bother older people with too many questions. He must know about the city, she told herself, He could tell me how it will be. She could not find the words to ask.
In the evening, a girl in a tight orange polyester top sat next to her. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the girl, twirling her finger in a thin chain necklace. ‘Saint Michael. It’s just a village, near Prince Leopold.’ ‘You going all the way?’ Isabel nodded. ‘You know where you are going to work?’ Isabel shook her head. ‘I’m not going to work. I’m going just for a short time, to watch a baby.’ ‘Everyone’s going to work,’ said the girl. ‘My aunt found me a job as a waitress: prime job, tips and everything. I get to buy a dress, lipstick, probably get my hair done.’ She paused. ‘Got a boyfriend?’ she asked. Isabel shook her head again. ‘Me neither,’ said the girl. ‘Want one?’ Isabel shrugged. The girl tossed her hair. ‘I’m going to get one in the city. The men in the city have real style. I’ve seen pictures of big white houses with pillars outside. And pools. Look,’ she said, and pulled out a folded photo of a cream-yellow house with high walls, a fountain and an aristocratic dog. ‘This is just a magazine photo. It only looks so real because I pasted it to paper. But it’s the kind I want. A girl from my village lives in a house like that now. She was a maid and the family’s son fell in love with her. His parents didn’t like it at first, but when they saw that it was such pure love, they got them their own house. I want a pure love like that.’ The girl scooted over to the railing and looked out. After a long time, she asked, ‘You scared?’ ‘A little,’ said Isabel. ‘You don’t talk much,’ said the girl.
The girl brought out a tin of cornmeal. ‘You should eat,’ she said. Isabel shook her head. She had ground manioc in her bag, but she wasn’t hungry. ‘At least something,’ said the girl, ‘or you will be sick.’
On the edge of the highway, a woman in a pink dress walked with her shoes in her hand. She waved them to a stop and climbed onto the flatbed. Her face was painted and her body filled her dress. She smelled sweetly of lavender water. All the passengers stared until she got off at a little town with a plaster statue of a horseman whose horse had crumbled away to a metal frame.
The sun set.
The girl lifted her blanket and took Isabel inside. Isabel pretended that she was sleeping and rested her head on the girl’s shoulder. She liked the feeling of the girl next to her. Through the slivers of her half-closed eyes, she stared out. The mountains were blue; the night enormous. Forgetting that she didn’t know the girl, she held her hand, and soon she slept.
She had left home only once before, to celebrate the New Year with an aunt on the coast. It had been a different time, of rain and good jobs for her father.
She was six. For months before, she assailed her mother with questions about the sea. She made Isaias read to her from the school’s Young Man’s Encyclopedia, its pages rank with mold and dust. In the section for Ocean were photos of eels and sea turtles and a smiling man with a crab, his white shirt faded to an empty space against a monotone of blue.
They slept at their aunt’s home on a hillside invaded by shanties. At Christmas, they went to mass and then to the beach. It was al
so her mother’s first time to the sea, and she retreated as the waves approached. Isabel stood her ground. Tentatively she dipped her palm and sipped. It was salty but not disagreeable; she drank until her throat was sore. She peered into the horizon, trying to see where it ended. Isaias told her he could see the great city New York. ‘If you can’t see it, you must be blind,’ he said. ‘I see it,’ she shot back. Then she tumbled in the sand. Isaias put pieces of foam in her hair. They raced the waves and squinted at the silhouettes of children somersaulting off the pier.
That afternoon, in the fetid aisles of the municipal market, she saw her first fish, staring from a silvery pile with a clouded, deflated eye. She put her thumb in its mouth and felt the tiny teeth. Its lips reminded her of a baby’s gums. Curious, she wormed her forearm into the pile and wriggled it until her mother slapped it away. There was a broad white fish that Isaias called a ray. It had a whip-like tail and a smiling mouth. She smiled back.
On New Year’s Eve, her parents took them to an old lighthouse. There were more people than she had ever seen. Squawking vendors with trays of sea-damp cigarettes shouldered through the crowds. Everyone was dressed in white, and on the shore they looked like a giant flock of gulls. They crowded the beach and tossed flowers into the sea. In the pools left by retreating tides, they floated in the blooms of white skirts. Tables slouched crookedly in the sand, their white tablecloths fluttering beneath picnic baskets and bottles of cheap champagne. The algae was luminescent in the lights of the promenade.
Isabel watched the surf flap against a feathered line of broken roses. Her mother bought a rose and told her to wish for years of rain. ‘How many years am I allowed to wish for?’ she asked. ‘As many as you like,’ said her mother with a laugh. She wished for seven.
At midnight, the crowd pushed up against the shore to watch fireworks flowering from a platform in the sea. Suddenly, a rocket streaked toward land and buried itself in the crowd. There were shrieks, the crowd surged. The fireworks platform has fallen! someone shouted, It’s pointing toward us! Turn it off! said someone else, laughing, but the rockets kept coming. It’s an automated show, shouted another, I read about it, The newest technology! On the rocks, a small boy wore his shirt tied around his neck like a cape. He raised his arms as the tracers of colored smoke streaked past. Laughing, Isaias pointed. Don’t you dare! said their mother, holding him tightly. Hurray for the New Year! shouted the children. Hurray!
Then it was over. Down on the beach, the wind was strong. The tide had risen, snuffing the cooking fires and candles.
There was more pushing, and Isabel’s hand slipped from her mother’s. When she turned, her family was gone. She called for them, but her voice was lost in the music and the crash of waves. The few stairways down to the beach were packed to a standstill. She ran along the shore. Around her, drunks were sleeping in the sand, couples necked at the water’s edge, children danced crazily in the waves. A girl flailed in the shallows until she was dragged onto the shore by her friends. Champagne bottles littered the beach like sandy fish.
Panicked, Isabel squeezed through the crowds and climbed the embankment. She hoisted herself onto a lamppost. The beach and streets were all bodies, she couldn’t see anyone from her family.
It was Isaias who found her. He wiped the tears from her cheeks. She clung to his hand with both of hers. ‘Stop being scared,’ he said. ‘I’m not scared,’ she protested. ‘Then stop squeezing my hand so hard. The thornmen will get you. They eat children who are scared.’ ‘Thornmen don’t live in the city, Isaias.’ He shrugged. ‘You’ll see.’
They retreated through the alleyways, past discarded decorations and figures sleeping on doorsteps, the noise and light of the festival fading. A pair of dogs followed them home. At night, when she refused to go to bed, he whispered a rhyme:
Close your eyes, Isa
Or the thornmen will get you.
They’re killing the women
and the children, too.
She sniffled until she fell asleep.
Back in Saint Michael, her aunts asked about the sea. Her mother showed them postcards of the churches. She kept them neatly in an envelope and insisted they hold them by the edges.
Isabel listened. She mostly remembered the darkness, the shouting, the fear of being alone in a big and crowded place. Isaias bragged that he had been on the rocks, chasing the streaking lights. She forgave him for the thornmen song and let him lie.
Later in the night, she awoke to loud voices.
They were on an empty stretch of highway. The air smelled moist, richer, but the land was still barren. Cacti lined the road. She watched them flare in the rear lights of the car and then fade into darkness. The moon was gone.
The rhabdomancer was arguing with a woman.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you can believe me or not believe me. But I know water. I’ve been able to see it my entire life.’
‘See it,’ said the woman. ‘You mean you guess where it is.’ ‘No,’ said the man, ‘I’m telling you, I see it—like I see you in front of me. Like I see my hand.’
Isabel sat up. The passing country was black. She saw only the distant light of a house.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t believe in this magic.’
The man ignored her. ‘There’s a seam running beneath us. Like a ribbon, twisting on itself. It widens there by the cattle fence. It divides out by the pasture and branches like vessels of blood. Like roots. Like I could thrust my hand into the ground and tear out a great mass of shining roots.’ He paused. ‘There is an underground lake at the base of those hills. Shaped like a dog, a blue sleeping dog.’
The woman interrupted. ‘On my farm we paid for one of your type, and he did nothing but lie. Not one of his wells gave water.’
The man shrugged.
‘What good does it do you now?’ the woman asked, and then grew silent.
Later, as the flatbed rode through a long and empty stretch, Isabel opened her eyes to find the man awake. Sand dunes crept onto the roads, and the wet air smelled of her single memory of the sea. The woman was sleeping.
‘You can see it, too,’ he said to Isabel, when he saw her watching him. She didn’t answer. He repeated, ‘You see it. You see it, don’t you?’
Isabel shook her head.
‘I thought …,’ he said, and stopped. Isabel wanted to tell him about Isaias in the cane fields, but he began again. ‘In the jungle, when we mined the rivers, I could find each trench in the underwater banks, even in the darkness. In the quarries, they sent me in with the drills to keep them from hitting a water seam and flooding the tunnels. In the navy, too, I dove, to search out leaks in the hulls of the ships when others couldn’t find them. I can see in the city: the pipes, water mains, sewers. I can see the rivers that run below the ground. I dove there, too. In the tunnels of the waterworks, like we used to mine.’
She waited for the rest of his story, but he had stopped. She wondered what it was like to live under the water. Somehow, she imagined it like the truck’s coursing, a terrifying fall through darkness, the cold currents streaming past.
In the morning, she awoke to a gentle shaking. It was the girl. ‘Look,’ she said.
The flatbed had slowed; the side of the road was crammed with zebu cattle. The dark fields shifted like a mirage. Isabel wondered if there had been a fire. Then she saw it wasn’t a burn, but cows as far as the horizon—it was all cows, the dark brown bodies crowding the fields, turning up clods of broken soil, in such numbers that they reminded her of blowflies that covered the meat at home. She was jolted by a wave of nausea. She heard a lowing that she first took to be the engine of the truck. An animal was pushed up against the slats, its face inches away, smeared with green manure. It flapped its tail with nonchalance. There are too many of them, she thought with sudden anger, There is not enough space.
They left the cows. She saw how the land had changed. The earth was wet. They passed cane fields, the stalks higher than those at home.
A group of laborers filed along a narrow red path. She remembered stories about this place: it was sugar country, tobacco country, once slave country; the earth was so fertile, they said, you could spit and it would grow a man. They passed a cane-processing plant and the site of an abandoned fairground. Swallows arced and chased each other over the fields.
The girl offered her food again, but she was nauseated with the memory of the zebu. How many days had it been since she last ate? she wondered. She was already confused about how long they had been traveling.
In the afternoon, they stopped at a hot, barren intersection, and a group of people came running from a concrete pavilion. They piled bags into the back and climbed on. It was very crowded now, and there was scarcely any room to sit. Isabel gave her space to an old woman with a sun-worn face and a rosary made of black and red seeds.
Isabel stood and clung to the metal bar. The air was stagnant and smelled thickly of people. She felt dizzy and looked for someplace to rest her gaze, but everything was swaying. The sun was very hot on the top of her head. She thought: I should have eaten. What if I have to ride like this, standing, all the way? She saw how the wind whipped the hair of the people at the rail, and wanted to be there. She wondered if later they would rotate, how they would sleep. She was thirsty, but she was afraid that if she drank she would have to pee. She had two cane liquor bottles’ worth of water, but they were in her bag, beneath the other bags. She hadn’t touched them.
Farther along the road, a young man fainted, crumpling onto a pile of bags. Then an older man fell. When they stopped next, the driver argued with the passengers. ‘I can’t go carrying sick people,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I am a bad person, but if one of you dies, they’ll take away the truck. I have a family.’ They gave the young man water and he was able to stand. The old man got off with his son at a roadside canteen.
They slowed again, for a family that waited at the side of the road. ‘South! To the south!’ shouted the driver, and the family crowded in. Their children were so small that they seemed to take up no space at all. They stopped again, for a lone couple. She heard grumbling. ‘Hey, driver,’ said a man beside her, ‘what do you think this is? Are we goats?’ The new passengers looked miserable. ‘The last perch was even more crowded,’ said the woman.