Chapter 12 Bayanihan on the Water
Out on the water, in the rain, in a bangka under a tarpaulin, Hal Rivera looked at his watch.
Ten minutes since the last check. Then nine. Then twelve.
“Mina, comms check.”
Nothing.
“Baby, comms check.”
Nothing.
He sat in the bottom of a wooden boat with a dead channel in his ear and the campus burning orange on the water in front of him, and he was aware of Mang Rey watching him, and of the fisherman in the second boat watching Mang Rey.
Thirteen minutes.
The rule was two. Two missed checks and he was coming in. He had agreed to a different rule out loud, and he had agreed to it because she had asked him to say it properly, and he had said it properly, and he had meant about sixty percent of it.
Fourteen minutes.
Hal took the earpiece out and held it in his fist and made himself think, in order, about the things he actually knew.
He knew the campus had one road gate with a man in a booth counting cards.
He knew there was a barge ramp on the north face that had been there since February, because a boatman had complained about the wash for two months.
He knew that at six o’clock, in three hours, the tide would start to make.
And he knew that four hundred meters behind him, in a two-storey concrete building with eleven steps, a nine-year-old was writing numbers in a notebook and checking them at seven and at one.
Hal put the earpiece in his pocket.
“Mang Rey,” he said. “How many boats can you get on the water by six?”
The answer was fourteen, and then it was twenty-two, and by half past five it was thirty-one, and Hal had stopped asking because the number had gotten away from him in a direction he had no framework for.
He had asked for boats to run an extraction. What arrived was a barangay.
They came in from Baseco and from Parola and from the fish port side, poled and paddled and a few under outboards, and half of them had no idea what they were coming to and had come because Aurelio Ramos had put out four sentences on a handheld and because it was Friday and because the water was up and because that is what you do.
Hal stood on the second-floor balcony of the barangay hall at twenty past five with Luz’s whiteboard turned around to the blank side and a marker in his hand and thirty-one boat captains in the room and on the stairs and in the water below, and understood that he was about to have to be extremely good at his job in a language he did not speak.
Luz translated. Rey corrected the translation about a third of the time, mostly on the boat names.
Here is what Hal Rivera did with thirty-one boats.
He did not put them all on the campus. That was the thing everybody expected and it was wrong, and he said so in the first ninety seconds, because thirty-one boats converging on a perimeter is not a rescue, it is a target, and because he had spent nine years learning that the whole trick of moving anything is that you never commit your capacity to one node.
He built four groups.
Group one, twelve boats, the north channel. The barge ramp. These were the ones with the most water under them and the best hands, and their job was to be present, visible, and slow, right where a security launch would have to come out if it came out at all.
Group two, six boats, the harbor mouth. Nobody near anything. Sitting in the dark past the container cranes with no lights, doing nothing.
“What are they for?” Rey said.
“They are for after.” Hal did not look up from the board. “Sir, every plan I have ever built has failed in the last four minutes, and the reason it survives is that I keep six trucks in a yard doing nothing while everybody screams at me about the six trucks.”
Rey looked at him for a second and then said something to the room in Tagalog, and about eleven men laughed, and Luz declined to translate it.
Group three, nine boats, the barangay. The most important group and the one nobody wanted.
Their job was to move two hundred and eleven people, by Luz’s manifest, in order, starting at six o’clock, from the barangay hall to the elevated section of the port access road, which was two meters up on fill and which was the highest ground within two kilometers.
That took six minutes to argue and Hal lost most of it.
What he had proposed was full evacuation.
What he got, because Rey and Luz and four boat captains explained to him with enormous patience that people will not leave a house they can still stand in the upstairs of, was elderly first, then children under five, then anyone on medication, and the rest at a number.
“What number?” Hal said.
“You give the number,” said Mang Rey. “You are the one who knows the tide.”
Hal looked at the whiteboard.
“Ninth step,” he said. “When it touches the ninth step of this building, everybody goes, no arguing, whether the boats are back or not.”
Group four was five boats and it was Hal’s and it did not have a job on the board, because its job was to sit off the north face in the dark and wait for a woman who might not come out.
Divina found him on the stairs at ten to six while he was checking a rope he had already checked twice.
She had the notebook.
“You gave everyone a number,” she said.
“I did.”
“You did not give me one.”
Hal stopped with the rope in his hands.
“No,” he said. “I did not.”
“Everybody has a number.” She opened the notebook and turned it around and he saw that she had copied his four groups off the whiteboard in her careful hand, and had added a fifth column he had not put there, headed, in English, WHERE THEY ARE NOW.
“I can do this one. I am doing it already. Nobody is doing it and I have been doing it since five o’clock. ”
Hal looked at a nine-year-old holding a live tracking board for thirty-one boats.
“Anak,” he said, “does your mother know you have done that?”
“My mother told me to do it.”
“Right.” He sat down on the step. “Okay. Then you are group five and you are the only one in it, and your number is that you stay in this building, on this floor or higher, and you do not go outside it for any reason at all, including if somebody shouts at you from a boat. Especially then.”
“Okay.”
“Say it back.”
“I stay in the building.” Divina wrote something in the margin. “Even if somebody shouts.”
“Good.”
She did not go. She stood there.
Hal, who had four sisters’ worth of cousins and had been through this particular silence before, waited.
“Is Ate Mina coming back?” Divina said.
And Hal Rivera, on a wet concrete step in Isla Puting Bato at ten to six on Friday evening, with a dead channel in his pocket and two hundred and eleven people on a whiteboard and three hours and ten minutes until the tide, discovered that he had exactly one thing in the world he could give a nine-year-old and that it was not an answer.
He reached up and took the chain off over his head.
“You know what this is?”
“It is a cross.”
“It is my grandmother’s cross. Her name was Carmen Rivera and she was four foot eleven and she was the toughest person I ever met, and she wore this every day for fifty-one years in San Juan and in Savannah, and she put it on me herself in a hospital room in 2019 and I have taken it off twice.
” He put it over the girl’s head, and it went almost to her waist, and she caught it in both hands.
“Now, listen. I am not giving you that because I think something is going to happen.”
“Then why?”
“Because I have got a job to do tonight and I am going to do it badly if I am worrying about that.” He stood up. “So you hold it. And on Sunday you give it back to me and you tell me I was ridiculous.”
Divina looked at the crucifix in her hands.
“And if you do not come on Sunday?”
“Then it is yours,” said Hal, “and you were the last one to be given it, and that means you get to decide who is next, and anak, that is not nothing. That is how it works. That is the whole of how it works.”
She put it inside her shirt.
“Okay,” she said, and went back up the stairs to her column.
The launches came out at twenty past seven.
Two of them, aluminum, twin outboards, running lights on, which told Hal everything about how they intended to be seen.
They came out of the north face where the barge ramp was and turned toward the barangay side, and group one, thirteen bangkas that had been sitting in that channel for ninety minutes doing nothing but exist, did not move.
Hal watched it through Rey’s monocular from four hundred meters out.
He had thought this would be a fight. He had spent the whole day braced for it. What it actually was, he understood by about the fourth minute, was a traffic problem, and it was one that had been decided before anybody arrived.
The launches could do maybe twenty-five knots in open water and they were doing about three, because they were in a flooded barangay and the water was full of a neighborhood.
“There,” Rey said, at his shoulder. “Watch. Watch him.”
The lead launch turned to go up what had been Calle Sampaguita and got about forty meters and stopped, hard, with the stern coming around.
“What was that?”
“Basketball post,” said Mang Rey.
Hal put the monocular down.
“There is a basketball court under there.”
“There is a basketball court under there and there is a post at each end and there is a low wall on the Sampaguita side that is one meter and five, and the water is six feet, so it is nine inches under, and you cannot see it, and it will take a leg off an outboard.” Rey said it flat, the way a man reads out a road he has walked every day for forty years.
“Every child in this barangay knows where that wall is because we tell them, do not run there, you will break your foot.”
The second launch went wide to avoid the first and found the market.
Not the building. The stalls. Forty-odd steel and bamboo frames that had been folded down and chained to a rail on Tuesday, in a row, under three feet of water, and the launch went over the first four and hit the fifth and the whole boat stopped like it had been caught.
Both launches were now stationary in the middle of a flooded street.