Chapter 12 Bayanihan on the Water #3
Every boat captain on that net heard it. Hal, in the bow of Rey’s bangka a kilometer up the north channel, heard it, and heard the traffic change instantly and completely, and understood that thirty-one strangers had just stopped being his and become hers.
It was the correct thing and it happened without him and it was, he thought, sitting in the rain, about the best sentence anybody was going to write about the whole night.
“Group three, moving.” That was Luz. “Group one, nine of you break and support, two stay on those launches. Group two hold the harbor mouth, do not come in, we will need you at eleven.”
Somebody said something about the wall on Sampaguita.
“I know about the wall,” said Luz Ramos. “Go the long way. Sabihin mo sa kanila, mabagal, huwag magmadali.”
Hal took his hand off the transmit key.
“She is better at this than me,” he said.
Mang Rey poled them north along a five-storey concrete wall in the dark.
“Ay, she is much better than you,” Rey agreed.
“She has been doing it since Tuesday and she has been doing it with no sleep and no marker and no whiteboard, kuya, and she did it twelve times before this one.” He leaned into the pole.
“You gave her a number and a shape. That is not nothing. But do not confuse yourself about who has been holding that barangay.”
“No, sir.”
“Good.”
He was in the bow of Mang Rey’s bangka in the dark with a boat hook and a torch he was not using, at the mouth of the chilled water intake on the north face, where a bar grille had been cut open at ten to three that afternoon, where a woman had gone into a pipe six hours and forty minutes earlier and had not come out.
He kept coming back to the arm.
That was the thing his mind would not put down.
Not the men, not the building, not the eighty-two on a roster that had turned out to be bait.
The arm. Twenty stitches on Wednesday afternoon and a medic saying fourteen days, no pulling, no climbing, no hanging, and Mina saying opo with her whole heart, and then Thursday night on a rubble bund when he had put a hand down past her face and she had not taken it for a full second.
She had gone into a two-meter pipe against a current with one arm.
Hal had spent nine years around men who worked hurt, and he knew the arithmetic of it better than most, and the arithmetic was that a person with one arm in a place like that does not get a second mistake.
Rey held the boat off the concrete with the pole.
They had been there fourteen minutes.
“Kuya,” Rey said at last. “The tide.”
“I know.”
“In one hour that pipe is under.”
“I know.”
Hal Rivera sat in the bow of a wooden boat under a five-storey wall in the rain and looked into a two-meter concrete throat that went two hundred meters into a building he could not enter, and did the only arithmetic left.
If she was in there, she was coming out of that pipe, and the pipe went under in an hour, and after that it was not a pipe, it was a drain.
If she was not in there, then he was sitting in the one place in Manila that did him no good at all.
And there was no third possibility that he could stand to hold in his head, so he did not.
“Mang Rey,” Hal said. “Take us to the barge ramp.”
“Kuya.”
“You said in February there was no fence between the ramp and the water.” Hal put the boat hook down and picked up the coil of rope he had checked three times. “You said, how would you fence water.”
Mang Rey did not move the pole.
“Kuya,” he said. “I want to say one thing and then I will take you.”
“Say it.”
“If you go up that ramp you are one man, at night, in a place with eighty men in it, and you are not a fighter.” Rey said it without any drama at all, the way he said everything. “Ate Mina went in there with two sticks and a broken arm and she has been gone for seven hours.”
“I know.”
“So what is it you think you are going to do?”
Hal was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: “Mang Rey, when a truck goes down on the interstate with a load on it, I do not go and lift the truck. I have never lifted a truck in my life.” He coiled the rope over his shoulder.
“I get on the phone and I find out what is on it, and where the nearest yard is, and whose gate is open at three in the morning. I do not fix it. I make it so somebody else can.”
“And here?”
“Here there is a woman in that building who has been alone since three o’clock and who does not know that thirty-one boats came out.
” Hal looked up at the wall of the Monolith.
“Sir, she has got a bad arm and she is deaf on one side and she has been in there seven hours and she thinks nobody is coming. And that is the only part of this that I can actually change.”
Rey looked at him for a long moment in the rain.
Then he put the pole down and took up the second one, which is what a man does when he intends to move properly.
“Then we will go fast,” said Mang Rey, “and I will tell you now that I am coming up the ramp with you, and you will not argue about it, because it is my barangay and my boat and I am fifty-six years old and I do not have to listen to you.”