Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
They left at first light in Okonkwo's old Hilux, because the Hilux sat higher off the road than the van did, and the river roads were going under. He had made the trade without being asked twice. The van would keep in his shed until somebody came back for it, or didn't.
Okonkwo stood in the doorway with a mug of coffee steaming in both hands and did not come out into the rain to see them off.
One night was the size of the favor he had been willing to have done to him, and he was too old and too experienced a man to pretend otherwise.
He told Logan to bring the truck back if there turned out to be a truck to bring back, and he said it plainly, without any particular hope in it.
The eastern road, he said, was the only one still open.
He did not like the eastern road this week, and when Logan asked him why, he stood there a moment with the rain coming down off the eave between them and said that he couldn't say why, only that he didn't like it.
Then the door closed, and the lamplight behind the window went with it, and the bungalow was just a gray shape on a ridge falling away behind them into the cloud.
The rain had not stopped in three days. It came down the windscreen faster than the wipers could push it aside, so that the glass ran like a stream stood on end, and the world narrowed to ten meters of red mud caught in the headlights and nothing beyond it.
Beto, who had refused to be left behind at the station and had refused just as flatly to explain the refusal, drove with both hands locked at the top of the wheel and his lips moving on something Elena took for a prayer.
The first blocked road they took for bad luck, and nothing more.
It was a landslip across the switchback below the station, a clean wet shoulder of the mountain lying down across the route where it had let go in the night.
They backed up carefully, Beto craning over the seat, and took the long way around.
In this weather the mountain came down somewhere every day, and this was only somewhere.
The second was harder to explain away. It was a felled tree laid across the only other route east, and it was recent — the leaves on it had not yet begun to curl.
Elena leaned forward between the seats and looked at it through the streaming glass, and even from the cab she could see that the cut end was pale and square and unmistakably sawn.
Behind it the road ran down into a depth of standing brown water that nobody in the truck wanted to drive through in any case.
Logan got out into the rain and crouched down at the stump. He ran his thumb along the cut, once, the way a carpenter checks an edge. Then he got back into the cab and pulled the door shut and said nothing at all.
Elena did not ask him. She had seen his face when he sat back down, and she had seen the tree herself, and she knew what he had gone out to confirm.
Nobody clears a fallen tree from a road by adding a second cut and laying it down neatly across both lanes.
A tree that falls, falls once. This one had been made to fall, and then made to lie exactly where it lay.
A third route showed on Okonkwo's hand-drawn map as a logging spur that ran off north and then rejoined the highway somewhere past the gorge.
Beto found the mouth of it, a rutted red gap in the trees, and he stopped the truck square in front of it and would not turn in.
When Elena asked him why, he told her, in the flat careful voice of a man explaining something he wished he did not have to be the one to explain, that he had grown up two valleys over from here.
That spur, he said, did not rejoin anything.
It dead-ended at a quarry a few kilometers up.
A vehicle that went up it came back down it the same way or it did not come back down at all.
He would take the bridge road. He would not take the spur, and he would rather they did not ask him again.
On the radio, in the gaps between long bands of static, a regional bulletin repeated itself.
There was a washout closure on the southern highway — the long, safe, populated route, the one that ran through towns, past police stations staffed by men who had never been offered enough to matter, in front of drivers who might see a thing and remember it later.
Closed since morning, the bulletin said. Impassable.
Elena made Beto turn the volume up and listened to it go around twice.
"They're not blocking us," Rosa said from the back, and she said it quietly, the way she said things she had thought all the way through before speaking.
She had the paper map open across her knees now, because the phones had dropped to no signal at all an hour out of the station and had stayed there.
"Look. Slip here. Tree here. And the bridge washout on the radio for the southern road, which nobody in this truck can go and check.
Every door but one." She laid her finger down on a thin blue line crossed by a thinner black one, where the contour lines crowded in tight and dark against a gorge.
"They're not closing roads to stop us. If they wanted to stop us they'd have closed this one too. They're closing them to aim us."
Elena reached back and looked at where her sister's finger sat. It was a single crossing over the river, drawn at the narrowest and deepest place in thirty kilometers of the map. One lane, by the width of the line. A gorge with no shoulder marked and no second way through to the eastern slope.
"How far?" Elena said.
"Twenty minutes. Less than that, the way Beto's driving."
"Then we don't go."
"There's nowhere else to go, Ellie. That's the whole point of what they've done.
If we go back, we go back to Okonkwo's, and then we're sitting in a box with one door and no truck of our own, waiting for them to decide when to open it.
Or we go forward through the door they've left standing open for us.
" Rosa folded the map along its wet creases, and her voice stayed level while she did it, but her hands did not.
"I vote forward. A box is worse than a door.
At least at a door you're still moving."
Beto said something fast and unhappy under his breath that needed no translation, and eased off the accelerator.
Ahead of them the road tipped downward toward a sound that had been growing under the engine for a minute or more without Elena naming it — the river, high and brown and loud, running fast at the bottom of the gorge.
And across it, pale and narrow and shining with the rain, lay the one-lane bridge.
There was a truck parked at the far end of it. It sat sideways across the road, filling it, going nowhere.