Chapter 9 The Island of White Stones #2
“The bags are good. The bags are not the issue.” He was on his knees on the landing with a torch.
“Ma’am, the issue is the joint under the bag.
You have got two different cord gauges married together, so the whole run is limited to the small one, and the fridge pulls hard on startup, and that joint has been getting warm for two days. Feel it.”
Luz put two fingers on the joint through the bag and took them off again fast, and said something under her breath that Hal did not need translated.
“Can you fix it?”
“I can fix it in six minutes if there is a proper connector in this barangay, and if there is not, I can fix it in forty with a terminal block and some sense.” Hal sat back on his heels.
“And then I want to talk to you about where the exhaust goes, because you have got a two-stroke on an interior landing and you have people sleeping eleven feet from it, and ma’am, that will kill this whole house in a night and it will do it quietly. ”
Luz Ramos looked at him for a moment.
“Get the block,” she said. “Then show me the exhaust thing. Then show my father, because he will not believe it from you.”
That was how Hal spent the afternoon. He rerouted the generator exhaust out a window with a length of stovepipe and a bracket he made from a bed frame.
He rebuilt the extension run onto a single gauge.
He labelled the load on the panel in marker, and then, because Luz asked, he did the same for the barangay’s newer generator at the health center, and then, because the health center’s midwife asked, he went and looked at three more.
And every one of them, he found, was ninety percent right.
That was what he had not been prepared for.
He had come in with a vague idea of being useful in the way outsiders are useful, which is to say arriving with competence into a vacuum, and there was no vacuum.
There were four hundred people who had been solving this exact problem, without help, eight times a year, for thirty years.
What they did not have was one specific piece of knowledge about cord gauge and one about carbon monoxide, and they took both of those the way any professional takes a good tip from another trade, which is to say at once, and with follow-up questions, and by immediately telling four other people.
At about five o’clock a man he had never met came up to him in a boat and asked, without preamble, in careful English, whether the cord gauge thing also applied to the pump at the chapel.
“Show me the pump,” said Hal.
He looked at the pump, which was fine, and told the man so, and the man’s face fell, and then cleared, and then he insisted on giving him coffee.
They drank it standing in a doorway on the second floor of a chapel with the water two feet below them, out of two cups that did not match, watching the rain come across the roofs.
“You are with Ate Mina,” the man said.
“I am.”
“She was here in June.”
Hal turned his head.
“She was here in June?”
“Not to the chapel. Down at the end, by the pump house.” The man drank his coffee. “In a car with no driver, by herself, at maybe six in the morning, in a cap like a person who does not want. She was there about twenty minutes. She took photographs of the screens.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“No. My wife said leave her, she is probably having a problem.” The man laughed. “My wife said, that poor girl, she has come to Tondo at six in the morning to cry about a man.”
Hal stood in a chapel doorway in six feet of water holding a cup of coffee and felt something rearrange itself in his chest.
Six weeks ago. Six weeks ago, before he had booked the flight, before the shared document and the argument about balut, she had gotten up before dawn and driven herself into Tondo alone and photographed the intake screens of Pumping Station 14, and had gone home, and had put it in a file, and had then spent six weeks sending him voice memos at three in the morning about absolutely nothing.
“Kuya,” he said. “Can I ask you something.”
“Sige.”
“If somebody told you that the flooding here was on purpose.” Hal turned the cup around. “That somebody changed the settings on your pumps in January so they would not come on. Would that surprise you?”
The man thought about it for a while, which Hal had not expected. He had expected either outrage or a shrug.
“No,” he said at last.
“No?”
“Kuya, I am fifty-six years old.” He tipped the last of the coffee out into the water below the doorway.
“It would not surprise me. That is not the same as knowing it. You understand? For thirty years the water comes and the pumps do not work and every year they tell us the budget, the budget, the budget. And every year some of us say, it is on purpose, and the rest of us say, ay, do not be like that, it is just the government being the government.” He handed Hal the cup.
“So no. It would not surprise me. It would be worse than that. It would make me a fool for thirty years for arguing with the ones who said it.”
Mina came back from Josephine Bayani’s roof at half past six and found Hal sitting on the barangay hall stairs with his boots in the water and his hands still black, looking at nothing.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” He moved over. “Sit.”
She sat. Below them the fourth step had gone under while she was out, exactly as she had told a nine-year-old it would.
“You were here in June,” Hal said.
Mina did not say anything.
“A man at the chapel saw you. Six in the morning, by yourself, taking pictures of the pump screens.” He was not accusing her of anything. That was somehow the worst part. “That was three weeks before you asked me to come.”
“Yes.”
“So when you booked that restaurant in Poblacion in June.”
“Hal.”
“No, I am working something out, let me work it out.” He rubbed his face and left a smear of engine black on his jaw. “You knew in June. Not everything. But you knew enough to get up at five in the morning and drive to Tondo alone. And then in July you asked me to come for seventeen days.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mina looked out at the water.
“Because I thought I had a year,” she said.
“That is the honest answer and it is not a good one. In June I had three photographs of a dry intake screen and a feeling, and a feeling is nine months of work, and I thought I had until the dry season.” She turned the sling strap.
“And I wanted one ordinary thing. I wanted seventeen days where somebody who liked me was in my kitchen. So I booked a table and I sent you the flight and I told myself that Kiko was not going to matter, because Kiko was not even a storm yet, Hal, it was a low-pressure area off Palau with a nine percent chance of developing.”
Hal sat with that.
“Okay,” he said.
“That is it?”
“Baby, what am I going to do, be angry at a low-pressure area?” He knocked his shoulder against hers. “I am not upset that you wanted seventeen ordinary days. I am upset that you have been getting up at five in the morning by yourself for six years and telling people at weddings that ganun talaga.”
Mina laughed, and it went wrong on her, and she put her head down.
Below them the water moved against the fifth step and did not reach it.
She found Josephine at six.
It took asking three people, and the third one poled her over himself, and Mina sat in the bow of a bangka going down a flooded street in the last of the light rehearsing four different versions of a sentence and discarding all of them.
Josephine Bayani was fifty-one and had a face like a closed door and was sitting on her own roof.
Not for effect. She had a plastic chair up there and a tarpaulin rigged on bamboo and a transistor radio, and she was shelling something into a bowl, and she looked down at the boat and at the woman in it and did not get up.
“Ate Josephine,” Mina said. “I read your letter on Tuesday.”
“I know. I heard it.”
“I said on television that the show would look into it.”
“I heard that also.”
Mina made herself hold the woman’s eyes.
“Boyet called four numbers,” she said. “He was transferred thirteen times. The last person he spoke to was a woman at the department who was not unkind, and she told him the matter was with the department, and that is where it stopped, and that is what happened to your letter.”
The radio played. Somebody two houses down was cooking.
“Then why are you here,” Josephine said.