Chapter 9 The Island of White Stones
They went in by boat, which meant Mina had to be lifted, which she hated.
Mang Rey did it without discussing it. He brought the bangka broadside against the truck’s rear step, put out a hand, and said, “Ate, ang braso,” and took her weight on the good side, and she was in the boat before she had finished deciding to be irritated about it.
Hal came in after her and the whole hull dropped three inches and everybody laughed.
“Ano ba,” said the boy in the bow, delighted. “Kuya, ano ka ba, refrigerator?”
“He is asking if you are a refrigerator,” Mina said.
“Tell him yes.”
The boy did not need the translation. He was about fourteen and he laughed at his own joke for the next four minutes while poling them out over what had been, on Monday, the road.
Mina sat in the middle of the boat with her arm in the sling and looked at her country going by three feet under her.
The stitches had started talking to her somewhere around Espana.
Twenty of them, thirteen on the deep run and nine on the tear she had not mentioned, and Tita Baby had said fourteen days and no load bearing, and Mina had spent five and a half hours in a truck holding the grab handle with her right hand every time Hal braked, which was itself a small ongoing lie of the kind she had stopped being able to tell him.
Here is what six feet does that four feet does not.
At four feet a house is flooded. People move upstairs, or onto tables, or onto the roof, and they are wet and they are angry and their things are ruined and the whole business is a catastrophe of a familiar shape that everybody in that barangay had a set of procedures for.
At six feet, in a place built on stilts over water, the ground floor stops being a floor and becomes part of the bay.
Mina had seen it before. That did not make it better. They poled up what had been Calle Sampaguita between two rows of houses whose windows were at chest height, and through the windows she could see the tops of doorframes, and above each doorframe, on the second level, faces.
Not panic. That was the thing that always undid her, and it undid her again, and she had to look at the water for a moment.
Somebody had strung a line of blue rope down the length of the street at shoulder height, tied off at five points, so that people crossing on foot in chest-deep water had something to hold.
Somebody had put a plank walkway across two roofs.
Somebody had a generator going, and there was an extension cord snaking off it that must have served nine households and that somebody had wrapped every splice in a plastic bag and electrical tape.
Two boys were fishing off a roof. Not for food. For fun, because they were fifteen, and because the water was there.
“You have power,” Hal said.
“Two generators.” Mang Rey poled them left around a corner. “One is mine and it is old. One is the barangay’s and it is newer and it is for the health center.”
“How much fuel?”
Rey looked back at him over his shoulder.
“You are the one from America.”
“Georgia.”
“Ay, Georgia.” Rey turned the boat with one hand. “My brother-in-law was in Norfolk, Virginia, for nine years on the ships.”
“That is a long way from Georgia.”
“Everything is a long way from everything,” said Mang Rey. “Diesel for two days. Maybe three if we run it four hours on and four off, which we are doing, and which people are being very good about, and which will stop being good about on Friday.”
The barangay hall was the only two-storey concrete building on that side and the water was on its fourth step, and the upstairs was full.
Mina came up the stairs into a room with about seventy people in it and it went quiet the way rooms do.
Then a woman by the window said, “Naku, si Mina,” in a flat voice, the way you would say oh, it is Tuesday, and the room started up again, and somebody moved a plastic chair, and somebody else said something to the effect that if she was here the food had better be here too, and a very old man in the corner announced that he did not watch her show and never had, which his daughter contradicted before he had finished.
That was the whole reception. Mina had been mobbed in eleven countries and she had never in her life been so glad to be spoken to like a neighbor.
Rey got them into the corner where the barangay’s business happened, which was two tables pushed together with a whiteboard behind them, and Mina looked at the whiteboard for a long moment.
It was a manifest.
Somebody had ruled it into columns in marker. Household. Number. Over sixty. Children under five. Medication. Location now. Boat assigned.
Two hundred and seventeen rows.
“Who did this?” Hal said.
“Luz.” Rey said it the way you say a fact about weather. “My daughter. She did it on Tuesday night when the water came over the second step, and she has been keeping it since, and she has not slept and she will not, and if you have any influence over people you might try.”
“Where is she?”
“Where do you think,” said Mang Rey.
Luz Ramos was thirty-four and she was standing in her own flooded store with water at her waist, taking inventory.
The store was the ground floor of the house and the ground floor of the house was now the bay.
She had gotten most of the dry goods up onto the top shelving on Tuesday, and she was working through what was left with a torch in her teeth, calling numbers up through a hole in the floor to somebody above who was writing them down.
“Ma,” said the somebody above, “sabi ni Lolo may bisita.”
“Sandali.”
“Ma.”
“Sandali nga.”
Mina put her head up through the hole in the floor and found herself eye to eye, at a distance of about nine inches, with a nine-year-old girl holding a school notebook and a pencil.
The girl looked at her for four full seconds.
“You are the one from the noontime,” she said, in English, with enormous suspicion.
“I am.”
“Why are you here.”
“Divina!”
“It is a fair question,” Mina said, and climbed the rest of the way up.
They talked for seven minutes and Divina Ramos did not once ask for a photograph.
What she asked about was the notebook. She had four pages of it filled with her mother’s inventory, in a careful nine-year-old hand, and she had ruled the columns herself with a ruler, and she wanted Mina to know that the third column was a mistake because she had put the units in the wrong place and had to start again on page two.
“That is the correct thing to do,” Mina said.
“Lola says I should not have started again. She says nobody will read it.”
“Your lola is wrong and you should tell her I said so.”
“I am not going to tell her that.”
“No,” Mina agreed. “That was a bad idea.”
Divina considered her.
“Is the water going to come up here?” she said.
And Mina Hermosa, who had lied to reporters and producers and network executives and a bodyguard in a corridor, looked at a nine-year-old sitting cross-legged on the second floor of a house in Isla Puting Bato with a school notebook on her knees, and did the arithmetic in her head about the tide, and said:
“Yes. Tonight, a little. Not as far as here.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to know how much?”
Divina looked up.
“About to the fourth step,” Mina said. “Then it will stop, and it will go back down about half of that by morning, and then tomorrow night it will come up higher than tonight, because of the tide, and I do not know yet how much higher and I am going to find out.”
Divina wrote 4 steps in the margin of her notebook.
“Thank you,” she said.
Hal Rivera found Luz’s generator problem in about ninety seconds and spent two and a half hours on it anyway.
The problem was not the generator. The generator was a nine-year-old Honda clone that had been maintained better than most equipment in his own warehouse.
The problem was that it was on the second-floor landing where the fumes went into the house, and it was running a refrigerator through eleven meters of extension cord in three joined lengths, and the third joint was in a plastic bag suspended over standing water.
“What is on the fridge?” he said.
“Everything.” Luz was on the landing behind him with the torch. “Vaccines from the health center, because their unit is on the barangay generator and the barangay generator is older than mine. Somebody’s mother’s heart medicine. And mine.”
“Yours?”
“I am Type 1.” She said it the way you say your shoe size. “Since I was nineteen. I have eleven insulin pens in there and it is Wednesday, and the next delivery that was supposed to come to the health center was Tuesday, and it did not come, and it is not going to come until the water goes down.”
Hal sat back on his heels and looked at the plastic bag over the joint.
“Ma’am,” he said, “how long do those keep if that fridge stops?”
“In this heat? A day. Maybe two.”
“And after that?”
Luz Ramos shrugged, once, and did not answer, and went back to holding the torch.
Hal rebuilt the run onto a single gauge with a proper terminal block that a man two houses down produced from a coffee tin within twelve minutes of being asked, and he moved the fridge onto its own leg off the panel, and he labelled it in marker: INSULIN + VAX. PRIORITY. DO NOT SWITCH.
Then he went and found Mang Rey and made him look at it.
“You are telling me my daughter’s medicine was on a bad wire.”
“I am telling you it was on a joint that was running warm, and that it would have been fine for another week and then it would not have been, and that nobody could have seen it because it was inside a bag.” Hal wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Sir, that is not a criticism of anybody. Ninety percent of what is rigged in this barangay is better than what is in my own warehouse. You have got one problem and it is a materials problem, not a knowledge problem, and I can write you a list of fourteen things to buy on Monday that will fix it in every house on this street.”
Mang Rey looked at the label on the panel for a while.
“Write the list,” he said.
“Who did the bags?” he asked.
“Everybody does the bags.”