Chapter 10 Where the Power Flows #2
It was the most useful forty minutes of the week.
At two minutes past nine a bus came in through the main gate. Not a van, not a pickup. A forty-seat bus with the interior lights on, and it went to a marshalling area on the north side of the compound and twelve men got off it and about fourteen other men got on.
“They are bussing them in,” Hal said.
“From where?”
“That is the wrong question.” He had the monocular now and Mina let him have it, which surprised them both.
“The right question is where the bus goes empty. Look at the gate, baby. There is a barrier and there is a booth and there is a man in the booth with a clipboard, and he is checking that bus out the same as he checked it in. He is counting.”
“Counting people.”
“He is counting cards.” Hal handed the monocular back.
“That is a muster. That is exactly, precisely, boringly the same thing I do at Forest Park at six in the morning, and I have got a guy named Terrence who does it and hates it, and the reason he does it is that at the end of a shift you have to be able to say that every badge that went in came out.”
Mina lay very still.
“Which means,” she said.
“Which means that if a card goes in and does not come out, somebody in a booth has a line on a sheet that does not close, and at some point on his shift he has to do something about it.” Hal wiped the rain off his face. “And it also means that a card that has never been in cannot come out.”
“Hal.”
“I am not saying anything. I am describing a gate.”
Down on the water Mang Rey shifted the pole and said, without turning around, “There is a second gate.”
Both of them looked at him.
“On the north face, by the water,” Rey said.
“For the barge. When they were doing the fill, in January and February, the aggregate came by barge, four a day, and it came in at a ramp on the north side because the road could not take the trucks.” He resettled the pole.
“I fished past it every morning for two months and complained about the wash.”
“Is it still there?”
“The ramp is still there. It is concrete, you do not take a ramp away.” Rey shrugged. “Whether there is a gate on it now, I do not know. But in February there was a gate, and in February there was no fence between the ramp and the water, because how would you fence water.”
Mina lay in the rain on a rubble bund and looked at a fifty-six-year-old boatman for a long moment.
“Mang Rey,” she said, “would you be able to find that ramp at night?”
“Ate,” said Rey, “I could find it dead.”
Hal did not remember getting back to the barangay.
He remembered the boat, and Rey’s silence, and the fact that at some point in the crossing Mina had started talking to Simone in French, which she did about once a week and which he had always found charming and which he did not, now.
He remembered eating something on the stairs of the barangay hall at about ten and not tasting it.
What he remembered was standing in the doorway of the room upstairs where they had put a mattress for them, at eleven o’clock at night, and Mina saying, in an ordinary voice, with her back to him:
“There is a flight at six tomorrow evening.”
“A flight.”
“Clark to Doha to Atlanta. It goes out of Clark, not NAIA, because NAIA is closed for the storm and Clark is above the weather.” She was folding something one-handed.
“It is a repatriation charter that the embassy has put on. There are four hundred seats and they are for American citizens and dependents and you are an American citizen.”
Hal stood in the doorway.
“When did you book it,” he said.
Mina did not turn around.
“Mina. When did you book it.”
“Tuesday night.”
“Tuesday.”
“After Poblacion.” She was still folding.
“I called Simone from the bathroom of a restaurant on Tuesday night at ten past six and I told her to get you a seat on the first thing out that was not a commercial flight, and she did, and it has been sitting there for two days, and I have looked at it eight times.”
“With what?”
“What?”
“With what.” Hal’s voice had gone somewhere he did not recognize. “Baby, you cannot book a seat on an embassy charter with a name. What did you use?”
She stopped folding.
“Your passport number,” Mina said. “And your date of birth. And the emergency contact.”
“My mother.”
“Your mother.”
Hal put his hand on the doorframe.
He was aware of being very tired, and of the rain, and of the fact that four hundred people were asleep on the other side of a plywood wall, and he made himself keep his voice down, and it came out worse quiet than it would have come out loud.
“I gave you those on a video call in May,” he said.
“You asked. You said if I am going to be in your country for seventeen days somebody there should have my details, and I thought that was the single most thoughtful thing anybody had ever said to me, and I sat in a warehouse break room and read you my mother’s phone number off the back of an insurance card. ”
“Hal.”
“And you put it in a file.”
“I put it in a file that got you a seat on an aircraft out of a country that is going to be under water on Saturday morning.” She had turned around now and her voice had come up.
“Yes. I did that. I did that on Tuesday, before the men in my kitchen, before any of it, because it was the correct thing to do and because I am the only person in this building who has done this before.”
“That is not what I am.”
“Then say what you are, because from where I am standing you are angry that I kept you alive.”
“I AM NOT.”
It came out of him at full volume and Mina stopped, and downstairs somebody’s baby started crying, and Hal shut his eyes and put both hands over his face for a second.
“I am not angry that you booked it,” he said, quieter. “Listen to me. I am not angry that you booked it. Book it. Book two. Baby, I would not even be angry if you put me on the plane.”
“Then what?”
“You did not ask me.”
Mina stared at him.
“That is it,” Hal said. “That is the whole thing, and I need you to actually hear it, because I have been standing here for four minutes trying to find a way to say it that does not sound small.” He took his hands off his face.
“You did not ask me. You made a decision about where my body goes on Friday, and you made it forty-eight hours ago, and you have looked at it thirteen times, and at no point in eleven times did it occur to you to say Hal, there is a plane, what do you think.”
“Because you would have said no.”
“I would have said no!” He laughed, and there was nothing in it. “Of course I would have said no. That is not the point. That is so far from the point I cannot see the point from there.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is that I do this for a living.” Hal spread his hands.
“Mina. That is my job. That is the entire content of my job. Nine years. Somebody hands me a thing and I decide where it goes and when it goes and what it goes on, and it does not get a say, because it is a pallet.” He was not shouting now.
It was much worse. “You didn’t ask me. You routed me. ”
The rain went on the roof.
“And the worst part,” he said, “is that you are good at it. That is the part I am going to be thinking about. You did it clean. Tuesday night, bathroom, ten past five, while I was at the table waiting for you and thinking about how you had put yourself between me and a microphone at the airport.”
“That is not fair.”
“No,” Hal agreed. “It is not.”
Mina stood in the middle of a plywood room in Isla Puting Bato with her arm in a scarf and twenty stitches in it, and she had faced four men in a kitchen thirty-six hours earlier without her hands shaking, and her hands were shaking now.
“I have eight days of leave left,” Hal said.
“What?”
“Eight days. My flight is Sunday the eighteenth, six forty in the morning, out of NAIA.” He shrugged, and it was an awful shrug.
“That is the least important true thing either of us is going to say tonight, and I am saying it anyway, because I want it in the room. Nobody had to send me anywhere. I had eight days left and I was going to spend all eight of them here.”
He picked his boots up off the floor.
“Where are you going,” Mina said.
“Downstairs. Mang Rey has got about fifteen households with no dry sleeping space and a list I said I would write.”
“Hal.”
“I am not leaving, baby. I want to be extremely clear about that, because you are going to lie awake up here and decide that I am.” He stopped in the doorway without turning around.
“I am going downstairs, and in the morning I am going to be here, and on Friday I am going to do whatever the thing is, and on Saturday if we are alive we are going to have to talk about this properly and it is going to take a long time.”
“Hal.”
“I just cannot be in a room with you right now,” said Hal Rivera, “and that is a new one on me, and I do not like it at all.”
He went down the stairs.
Mina Hermosa stood in the dark and listened to the rain and to a baby settling somewhere below and to a man’s boots going down wooden steps into six feet of water, and did not go after him.
Twenty-eight hours.
Hal wrote the list by torchlight at the two tables pushed together under the whiteboard, and it took him an hour and seventeen minutes, and by the end of it there were fourteen items on it and four of them had prices, because Luz had come down at midnight and started correcting him.
“That is not eleven hundred. That is eight hundred if you buy it in Divisoria.”
“Then it is eight hundred.”
“And that one you cannot buy at all, not this week, everybody is buying them.” Luz turned the notebook around. “Put the number of the man in Navotas. He will have them and he will overcharge and he will deliver by boat, which nobody else will do.”
They worked in silence for a while.