by Daniel Mason
They were climbing a low hill, and at each turn the flatbed swayed. They held tightly to the bars. Isabel felt strangely cold. She wondered if Isaias had been sick, too. She leaned briefly on a woman beside her until the woman shifted away. Her stomach tightened and a bitter taste filled her mouth. It’s good I didn’t eat, she thought. ‘You okay?’ asked a man beside her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s only my stomach. It will go away.’ She pressed her forehead to the back of her hand. Her head was spinning now, and the voices on the truck seemed distant. She took short, quick breaths, but there wasn’t any air. The truck moved slowly up the hill and she could smell the exhaust. She swayed, and caught herself on the woman’s arm. ‘This girl’s not doing well,’ said a man. ‘I’m all right, I—’ said Isabel, and couldn’t finish the sentence. Somehow she was on her knees, surrounded by legs, and then she felt her face on a shoe that pulled away. The smell was stronger. She heard murmurs and felt hands pulling on her. This girl’s sick, said a voice, and another, See I told you, Someone stop the truck, Move, Give her space, You move, There’s no space, Tell the driver, Stop the truck I said. There was a banging on metal and the truck slowed. ‘I’m fine,’ she said to no one. She heard the creak of the grate and the thudding of feet on the ground outside. A breeze, and a voice. ‘You all right?’ ‘No she’s not, she’s sick. She’s going to make the rest of us sick. This flatbed’s too crowded.’ ‘Bring her up front,’ said the driver. They helped her stand but she stumbled again and they had to lower her from the truck, where she took a step, and fell. ‘You better take her to the next hospital,’ said someone. ‘I don’t need a hospital,’ mumbled Isabel. ‘Just water.’ They brought her a bottle. She drank from it and vomited.
They carried her to the cab. The seats were hot and smelled of oil. She steadied her hand on the door as the driver put the truck in gear. ‘You don’t need to stop,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ ‘Still got another day and a half to go,’ said the driver. ‘As much as they talk about the backlander being a strong breed, many people die from the heat. I’ve seen it myself.’ Isabel said, ‘I didn’t eat anything. I didn’t drink anything.’ The road was barren. ‘I don’t want to be left here,’ she protested. She thought of her brother waiting.
Half an hour later they pulled into a small gas station. There was a single pump and a low-lying restaurant. It looked closed, except for a sign on the front door that read WELCOM. A dog sniffed its way through the lot. It stopped, snapped at a mange-black leg and then growled at them as if they were to blame for the mange. The driver led her to the door. It was locked. He rang a bell, but no one came. He told her to wait and went around the side of the building.
At the edge of the lot, a pair of carrion birds landed heavily on the ground, their nails scratching at the pavement as they walked. The dog whimpered and ran away, its tail between its legs. The carrion birds approached her, cocking their heads. She hissed at them. She reached down, picked up a broken shard of cement and hurled it. The birds hopped to the side and watched her inquisitively. Wind blew sand off the dunes and onto the lot. She saw the other passengers watching.
The man returned. ‘No one in the restaurant,’ he said. A whirlwind rattled an open shutter. Against the curb, dried leaves gathered alongside the torn cover of a motorcycle magazine and a broken Styrofoam cup.
He led her around to the other side, where a small door said OFFICE. ‘Hello?’ he shouted and opened the door. There was a cash register and an empty glass cooler. There was faint music in the background. On the wall was a six-year-old calendar with a naked girl bent over the back of a red truck. Someone had colored in her teeth; her mouth was gaping and obscene. Again the driver shouted, ‘Hello?’ The music stopped.
In a little room through the back door, they found a young woman alone at a desk, one hand on a radio dial. The shades were pulled, the other door shut. She held a black ink marker in her hand. She had stacks of paper around her, warped with circles of ink. She looked at them slowly. ‘My lord. You’re getting high,’ said the driver. Dizzy from the fumes, Isabel sat on the floor.
‘Do you have a phone?’ asked the driver.
The woman stared at them blankly.
‘This girl is sick,’ he said. ‘Is there a clinic?’
The woman stared.
‘Child,’ said the man, ‘where’s the phone?’
The woman closed her eyes and opened them. She sniffed twice and blinked again, nodding toward a phone behind the desk. Isabel could hear the other end of the line ringing and ringing. She hoped no one would answer. She wanted to keep going. She wanted to climb onto the flatbed and sleep.
The driver hung up angrily.
‘It’s just down the road,’ said the woman slowly.
He helped Isabel back into the cab. Down a narrow side road, at the edge of a town, they found the clinic, a low building set at the back of a dusty yard. The truck parked in a driveway with loose flagstones. He helped her to the entrance, where a guard indicated where to wait. Isabel had to lie on a bench.
Finally a nurse came. She had a bored, impatient manner. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ she asked. The driver stood and held his hat politely in his hands. ‘She was on my truck. Now she is sick.’ The nurse pinched her skin. ‘She’s dehydrated, of course,’ she said, and added, ‘I’m not surprised.’ The wood of the bench felt cool on Isabel’s head. ‘Come,’ said the nurse. Isabel struggled up. ‘I’m not sick, my brother is waiting in the city, I don’t want to stay here.’ ‘You’ll be okay,’ said the driver. ‘Let them take care of you, you can catch another flatbed.’ ‘I can’t.’ She paused. ‘I can’t pay for another flatbed.’ The driver waited, and then said, ‘Here,’ and counted out a small stack of bills for her. ‘It’s your fare, and there is a little extra if you need it. I have to go, or else everyone will start complaining.’ Isabel wanted to protest, but she only closed her eyes. He left and returned with her bag. ‘You’re very nice,’ she said. He started to walk away, but then he turned. ‘It’s not too often that I get to do something good for someone else,’ he said.
The nurse led her into a larger room. There were five wooden beds in a row. The floor was concrete, the walls made of unevenly laid white tile. In the corner was a metal examining table, piled with boxes. On the farthest bed, a thin shape curled up under a red blanket and convulsed with coughing.
‘Lie there,’ said the nurse, pointing to another bed. Isabel lay down without removing her shoes. The nurse uncoiled an intravenous line, slid the needle into Isabel’s hand and brought her a glass of sugary water. Cold rose up her arm. She drank and thought she would throw up again, but she slept.
When she awoke, it was dark. The needle was gone. The nurse sat at an empty desk and stared at the door. Across the room, the figure was coughing. He was thin, with hollow eyes. A mask had slipped sideways to cover his cheek. He sat up and tried to spit into a small cup, but his cough was dry. He lay back down and covered himself with the sheets. He watched Isabel. He was beautiful in a way, she thought, with his delicate cheekbones and sunken eyes. Above his bed was a prayer card for Saint Jude. He began to cough again.
‘I think that man needs help,’ Isabel said to the nurse. ‘He won’t stop coughing.’
‘You think I can’t hear that?’ said the nurse. ‘Also, it’s not a he, it’s a she. She cut her hair off—I don’t know why. She’s always making trouble.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked Isabel.
‘No responsibility.’
‘I mean, what’s she sick with?’
‘What do you think? Like the rest who go to the city and think they can slut around. Now her family won’t take care of her, so I have to.’
Isabel didn’t understand. ‘I think she’s trying to say something,’ she said.
‘She’s always trying to say something. She’s trying to torment me. She thinks she has the right to make my life hell.’ Isabel stared at the nurse, incredulous. ‘Do you need anything else?’ asked the nurse.
; ‘No,’ said Isabel awkwardly. ‘I’m better … I have to go.’
‘Go ahead,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re not sick, anyway.’
She rose and lifted her bag as the nurse watched. ‘Can you show me where the bus station is?’
‘I can’t leave. Ask one of the people waiting. They’ll point you on the way. It’s a small town. It’s not dangerous.’
Isabel was dizzy, but she could walk. The clinic was empty. A hallway led into a courtyard. There were no lights, and she almost tripped over a chair. Outside, a guard sat and talked with a woman and a little girl. They wore matching dresses, cotton printed with red trucks. Isabel thought, Like my mother, who cut everyone’s clothes from the same roll of duck. The memory of her mother almost made her cry. I can’t tell her I was sick, she thought. She asked for the bus, and they pointed to the fluorescent lights of a filling station. The street was dark except for a small light at the entrance to a private hospital, a white windowless building with the name of a brigadier general.
She walked across the road and pulled herself over the divide. A truck sped past, scattering pebbles. Headlights bore down on her, but she couldn’t tell how far away they were. At last she threw her bag over her shoulder and ran across the road.
It was a small station, with a high roof, three pumps and a single light. The station attendant, a thin boy with oily hair and a yellow uniform, pointed her to the bus stop, ‘through the trucks, ’round the corner.’ He stepped toward her and she stepped back. She saw darkness only, the shadows of the wheels and the flatbeds with heavy chains and swirls of decoration. ‘Do you want me to show you?’ he asked, and she shook her head.
As she left the cone of light, a large rig pulled off the highway, thundering over the gravel to a stop. Its window reflected the light of the station, the night, the boy in the yellow suit. It looked as if there was no one inside. The door didn’t open.
She was in darkness now. She couldn’t see anything that looked like a bus stop. She slipped between the lines of trucks, their wheels as high as her chest, teeth of tread like clenched fists. Her bag bumped against the side of the trucks as she walked, and she turned sideways to fit through. She wanted to say an invocation, but the invocations she knew were against snakes and sickness and thorn ghosts. She heard a girl’s laugh and saw a figure in a colored skirt drop from one of the trucks and scurry away.
Through a break in a wall, she came upon the bus stop. There was a single empty car, with a hand-painted sign in the window that read TAXI BLESSED MARIA DE JESUS. Across the street, she saw a half-lit placard advertising a dorm room, but the windows were dark and the shops that lined the pavilion were shuttered. In a tiny traveler’s chapel, she found a strange painted statue of Mary with closed, sleeping eyes. It felt safer in the shelter of the sanctuary, but she was afraid she would miss the flatbed when it came. She found a bench outside and laid her head on her bag. The night was warm, she thought, and somehow she slept.
In the morning, another flatbed stopped on its way south. At first Isabel thought it was the truck she had come down on, with the same rusted undercarriage and the same coarse, hooded faces. The driver was a heavy man with an unbuttoned shirt and a combed mustache. ‘I’m going south, to the city,’ she shouted over the idling engine. ‘No kidding,’ said the driver. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed.’ He laughed.
‘Are you going there?’ shouted Isabel, feeling sick again.
‘Am I going there? No, I’m going to Shanghai.’ Isabel fidgeted uncomfortably with her bag. A man in the passenger seat punched the driver playfully. The driver paused. ‘You’ve never heard of Shanghai, have you?’ The other man hit him again, laughing.
Isabel made her way to the back. It wasn’t crowded, and she found space to sit. As they rode, she listened to a conversation about a factory for light fixtures, and a second about a war in a place whose name she didn’t know.
In the afternoon, a woman touched her arm. ‘Did someone hit you?’ ‘No,’ said Isabel, surprised. ‘I saw your cheek,’ said the woman, ‘And I thought—’ Isabel raised her fingers to her face. Her cheekbone was tender, soft like the skin of a ripe fruit. ‘I fell,’ she told the woman. ‘No one did anything bad to me. I didn’t know I was hurt.’
The woman was sitting next to a small girl with long black hair. The girl watched them talking. There was something different about the girl, Isabel thought: she stared as if everything were new to her. After a long time she asked the girl, ‘Are you going to the city, too?’ The girl looked away. Isabel asked again, ‘Are you going to the city?’ The woman touched Isabel’s arm. ‘She doesn’t understand you, she doesn’t speak our language. Her brother told me when he left her with the flatbed. I’ve been traveling with her for days.’
‘Which language does she speak?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Who knows? Her own language. Her brother said that very few people speak their language. Very few people are left.’
Isabel watched the girl curiously. She had never heard another language. She couldn’t conceive that the girl didn’t understand. She wanted to laugh, but the more she watched the girl, the more frightening the thought became.
Farther along the road, a good-looking young man vaulted on. He smiled at Isabel. Blushing, she looked away.
They were passing orchards, but she didn’t recognize the trees. She wondered how far they had gone. She tried to imagine the map, but she couldn’t. She sang softly to herself:
So the boy became a fish
And he swam against the rivers
From the sea until the creek
That would take him to his home.
She looked at the boy who had smiled at her, but he was talking to an older girl. Once or twice he glanced at Isabel, but his smile was now the smile an older person gives a child, and she felt a mixture of disappointment and relief.
She lay on her back on the flatbed. Beneath her, she could hear the creaking of the shocks and felt grains of sand rub against her scalp. She watched the people standing above her, tall shapes silhouetted against the light. She watched the sky, how it filled and emptied with clouds, how the colors swept past, how there were stains that fled the sun and those that pursued it. She wondered what Isaias was doing, suddenly giddy to think that she soon would see him. A shorebird flew with them for a long time. Later, vultures circled in the distant corner of her eye. Tree branches flickered past, sunlight glinting through the leaves. She let her mind clear. The wind whipped up strands of her hair. When she closed her eyes, the insides of her eyelids were warm and red, and her lips tingled.
She thought of new songs to sing to herself, but all of them made her miss home, and she didn’t want to cry in front of the other people. So she thought of her brother. She remembered one of his funniest stories, about a mouse that ran up the leg of a bride. Thinking of the mouse led to thinking of thicket mice, which led to thinking of hunger, so she went back and thought about the bride instead. Then the thought of the bride led to church and praying in church, which led to the landowners and to hunger. So she went back and thought about the bride again, and this time the thought led to a dress she had seen at a store in Prince Leopold, where she and Isaias used to go to clown before a full-length mirror. Sometimes, between games, she would catch him staring at himself the way a person stares at someone coming down the road from far away. Once he said, ‘Is this what I look like?’ At first she had thought he was joking, but he insisted, ‘I’m not playing, Isa. Is this what you see when you see me?’ Not understanding, she turned to him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not me, me in the mirror.’ She stared for a long time. Then she saw a thin boy with a man’s face, a worn shirt and sandals, a stranger. She didn’t answer. A customer came and the owner shooed them out. As they walked home, she looked at him again, and the other boy was gone.
Night came. ‘Are you sleeping?’ asked the woman beside her. Isabel shook her head. The woman sat up on an elbow. ‘I know you weren’t, I saw you watching the sky. I can’t sleep, either. I’m scare
d there’ll be a storm, or the flatbed will flip, or we’ll be robbed. Once that happened to me. First time I came. I thought, Only an idiot robs a truck of poor people, and then I thought how I was carrying more money than I had carried in my life, because I needed it for the city. Then, because I thought it couldn’t happen, it happened. That night, they blocked the road with their car and lined all of us along the highway. That’s why I can’t sleep.’
Isabel thought the woman would ask, Why are you awake? and wondered what the answer was. Instead, the woman asked, ‘Do you have family in the city?’ ‘My cousin and my brother.’ ‘What’s their work?’ ‘Manuela is a maid. My brother’s a musician. He’s called Isaias.’ ‘A musician? He makes money from that?’ Isabel nodded. ‘And you know that?’ said the woman. ‘Or did he just tell you?’ ‘He sent us money,’ said Isabel. ‘He was a performer on the coast. Many people say he’ll be famous.’ The woman eyed her suspiciously. ‘I’d like to see this famous brother,’ she said. ‘Is he going to pick you up?’ Isabel hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘So your cousin’s meeting you?’ ‘No. She lives at her employer’s house during the week. She told my mother there’s a bus.’ The woman whistled. ‘Your parents just sent you here, and no one’s picking you up!’ Isabel protested, ‘I know where she lives. I have the name written on a piece of paper. My mother told me where to go. I’ve taken buses before.’ She felt as if she were arguing with herself.
She remembered the name of the district. ‘It’s called New Eden.’ ‘Where’s that?’ asked the woman. ‘In the city?’ Isabel nodded. ‘I think so.’ ‘You can’t just think so,’ said the woman. ‘Is it the city or the New Settlements?’ Isabel remembered: ‘The second one. The New Settlements.’ ‘That’s what I thought,’ said the woman. ‘You aren’t going to the city at all, then. The Settlements aren’t the city. The Settlements are where all the migrants go. They all have names like that: New Eden, New Jerusalem, New Grace, they’re all the same.’ I’m not a migrant, thought Isabel, I’m not coming to stay.