The taptap turned onto a thoroughfare and it took her a moment to identify Revolution (which her grandfather still called Walter—if the blue and whites came would her grandfather think it was her fault?) They lumbered a few blocks on Revolution and then the bus heeled like a sailboat and U-turned into an interchange, a steep descent like a parking garage, rumbling in low gear against the transmission. Making their way down a level.
She rested her forehead against the glass, even though it was cold. She wished she could just find a place to stop for awhile. She had to be smart. She had to use her head, make herself do things her body didn’t want to do. She wanted to go back to her grandfather’s and go to bed.
The taptap didn’t have any stops on the second or third level, but rumbled down to the fourth. She didn’t know anything about the fourth level, she thought she had been there but she couldn’t remember what for.
She got out at another little shopping plaza because she thought there had to be an exchange there. The neighborhood was Spanish, she thought from the mainland because people didn’t seem island, but she wasn’t sure.
“Excusa,” she tried—oh God, she wished her Spanish were better. “¿Un central?” The first person she asked just looked at her. A man pointed off and rattled directions at her. She understood straight, derecho, derecho, so she walked for awhile, out of the plaza, and then she stopped and asked someone else. She could feel the sweat running under her sweater.
She finally found an exchange and got change. She took a booth and pulled out her list of fish farms. She called the first one. “Hi,” she said, “I’m with Julia Aquacultural Supplies, I believe I was talking to someone out there about some salmon trays? An Asian named Kim? I’m afraid I accidentally cut him off.”
The first call the girl couldn’t help her, no one named Kim there. The second call was answered by a Haitian girl who didn’t speak English. She shook her head a lot, and Mayla didn’t know if it meant that there was no Kim there or if she just wanted Mayla off the line.
There were thirty-one numbers on her list. She called fourteen. “Kim Park? Si, está aquí, un momento por favor.” The young man transferred the call and Mayla killed the video.
“Park.” There was a moment’s pause. “This is Park. Hello?”
It was David Dai. She cut the connection. She knew where he was.
She had found him. The blue and whites couldn’t, but she had. She was thinking, she was using her head. She was going to be all right.
* * *
She didn’t know where to sleep. Any place where she paid anything but cash would leave a trace. She had never stayed in a place that took cash, criminals stayed in places that took cash. That thought made her perversely pleased with herself. She paid for the booth and asked the old man taking money where she could find a place. “¿Donde esta un hotel?” She couldn’t remember the gender of nouns, couldn’t remember when to use ser or estar. But the old man answered her in equally broken English.
“Go,” he said pointing with his hand out the door and then left.
“Izquierda,” she offered, the word rising out of some place she didn’t know she remembered.
“Sí,” he smiled, “izquierda, and go two, ah two, calle, y a la derecha, one.”
“Two,” she motioned left out the door with her hand, “and one,” she motioned right.
“Si, señorita.”
Being a criminal might turn out to be pleasingly easy.
The plaza was small, but the air felt better than it had inside the booth. Until she got outside she hadn’t even realized how stale the air had seemed inside.
People were outside, shopping, walking around. A lot of people for a work day. Maybe some of them worked second shift somewhere. Maybe a lot of them simply weren’t employed.
She wasn’t employed. Strange to think that.
At the second street she turned. She didn’t know what kind of place to expect. The side street had a roof much lower than the plaza and it was narrow, the kind of place a skid would come through, but too small for a taptap. All along the street were warehouse doors. At the end of the block was another primary, wide and well lit. On the corner was a coffin hotel.
It was completely automated, of course. Put a debit card in the slot and rent herself a six by five by three. She needed to pay cash. Was there a human operator? No number listed on the console. If she put her card in, it would give her a number to call for problems, but that would just be some management company, and besides, she didn’t want to leave a trace.
She tried to think of what to do. She hated walking around here with a shoulder bag carrying over 12,000cr. But she didn’t want to stash the thing, she’d just need to find a place where she could stay. She tried to think of the word for room. Cuarto, she thought, as in ¿Dónde está el cuarto de baño?, but she didn’t know if that meant the same room as “room for rent.” Maybe she could find someone who spoke English. They were all supposed to learn English in school.
She turned onto the primary, which was called Sorrento, and walked. Maybe she would see a notice for a room for rent or she would pass a place. But she walked through neighborhoods, past little shops with steel grates pushed up for the day’s business. Places that rented medical supplies like wheelchairs, hospital beds and crutches, their windows full of dusty bedpans and a chipped anglo mannequin, smiling in her nurse’s uniform. That might be a way to make herself invisible, if for some reason her description was given out. Get a pair of crutches and people would only see the crutches, not her face. She had read that, or seen it on the vid. Hardware stores. Yellow signs with red hands—palms covered with zodiacal symbols—advertising reader-advisors. Places where you could get coffee, and fish sandwiches on Jamaican coconut bread, and stew.
She walked a long time without seeing a place to stay. She was on the wrong road, but she didn’t know where to look.
She had no idea where she was, but that wasn’t so bad. If she didn’t know where she was, neither did anyone else.
What was she going to do after she started hiding? What are you going to do? David had asked. She didn’t know. It didn’t make any difference. The blue and whites wouldn’t give her much in the way of options; maybe she would have come out of the police station the next time, and maybe she wouldn’t. This way she wasn’t in.
She stopped in a restaurant that served Cuban black beans and rice. She was running out of small change, pretty soon she would have to break one of her 500cr notes, and she didn’t want to do that where other people could see it.
But the beans and rice made her feel better, and after that she started taking side streets. Residential streets, where people’s flats looked out and people were coming home from work. She stopped a young man and asked if he spoke English. He shook his head.
“¿Dónde está un cuarto?” she asked, “Where is a room?” But he just shook his head, smiling uncomprehendingly. Afterwards she thought she should have asked for un cuarto de hotel but by then it was too late. She didn’t want to talk to too many people, she was conspicuous enough.
It was the fact that she was so conspicuous, and that it was after seven and there were fewer people on the street, that convinced her to take a side street that took her behind shops. She found a dumpster and sat against the wall behind it. Her legs were so tired that they ached.
She planned to sit for awhile and then keep looking, but she just kept sitting. Her mind felt curiously empty. Eventually it was after eight, and she didn’t really want to be wandering around with a bag full of money after the lights went to night. She took out two more sweaters and put them on, since once she wasn’t moving she felt cold.
Some people lived like this, she could do it for a night.
Through the night people came through the alley, sometimes just one, sometimes two. Once, at a little after one there were four or five; she heard their feet and heard them talking, soft Spanish voices, just boys, laughing and kidding each other. She wasn’t even really afraid anyone would find h
er, her biggest problem was that her neck was stiff and she couldn’t really sleep. Her thoughts would wander and she would be dreaming but then she was awake again. She was so tired, she would ask someone about a hotel. She’d find someone who spoke English.
At a little after two she had to go to the bathroom so badly she couldn’t stand it. She tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t.
She came out from behind the dumpster and looked until she found a drain. If someone came they would see her, but she didn’t know what else to do, so she pulled down her tights and crouched. The air was cold on her bare skin. She was careful and didn’t get any on her shoes. She didn’t have any paper, hadn’t thought even to bring a tissue, but the relief was incredible. Still, she felt better when she was back out of sight behind the dumpster.
At four-thirty in the morning she got up and went back out to the street. Someone would come before too long to open up the shop and she didn’t want to be found.
She found a place to have breakfast, a safe place, full of people dressed as if they were going to work. The front window was steamed and the place was warm with the heat of bodies and the flat fry table. Her hips ached. She had a pastry and coffee.
The bathroom was tiny, a toilet and a stained sink crowded together. She ran water until it was warm and cleaned her hands and face. She still felt filthy, but not so bad, and she didn’t think she smelled yet, although sometime during the night she had stopped smelling the dumpster. It was still only five-thirty, and she wasn’t ready to go back outside so she went back to the little table and had some oatmeal and fruit.
The waitress spoke some English. She came, refilled coffee and took empty plates. “Do you need the table?” Mayla asked.
“No,” the girl said. “It’s okay.”
“Can you tell me someone who would rent me a room?” Mayla said.
The girl shook her head.
“A hotel?”
The girl thought and then nodded. “I write you map, miss,” she said. She drew carefully on a napkin, ink lines blurring into the paper.
“Also, an exchange?”
The girl nodded and said, “Here,” adding a street to her map and drawing an X. “Is here.”
“Thank you,” Mayla said, and she was so grateful she left a huge tip.
She felt better when fed. The map helped. It gave her purpose. She followed it carefully and found the exchange, but it was only a little after seven, there was no sense in calling the fish farm.
No sense in getting excited yet about the hotel since it was probably a coffin hotel like the last one. If worst came to worst she could sleep behind her dumpster again.
She didn’t know what to do with herself so she thought she’d at least check the hotel and see if it was a place where she could stay. The farther she walked, the more she worried she was going to see another coffin hotel. She had all day to find some place, so if it wasn’t a hotel where she could stay that didn’t mean she would have to sleep behind the dumpster again.
She almost turned and walked the other way, but there was no other way to walk.
But it wasn’t a coffin hotel, it was a string of flats that someone had bought and painted pale pink, with dark-green trim around the doors and windows. The paint was peeling and mildewed, and the place didn’t look very well kept. The owner was an overweight Indian wearing a housecoat who lived in the pink flat on the end, next to a bodega run by a man as slight as she was overweight. Mayla wondered if they were husband and wife or brother and sister. The flat where Mayla paid her money smelled of cumin, but the woman seemed to think nothing strange of an anglo woman with a 500cr note.
She did not ask if Mayla wanted a receipt.
* * *
Mayla felt strange sitting in the bar in Saucone Street. People were staring at her, she knew. There were other women here, but they all had a thick-skinned look. Not coarse, just thick. She was the only anglo there, not even the reps ranged along the bar were white.
Ah, but David had to have been the only oriental. If he could do it, so could she. Besides, women were supposed to make better divers than men, better able to stand the cold. She just had to figure out which was the rep from the fish farm where David worked and then she had to get him to give her a job.
The reps were flashier than the divers; one wore long burgundy braids, a maroon. The one next to him wore a broad-brimmed khaki hat, the front pulled low over his eyes. She didn’t like him, didn’t like the way he rested his bare elbows on the bar and laughed into his fist.
She didn’t like the maroon either. Or the one with the belly and the walrus moustache, or the one with the white hair and goatee. She tried to decide who she’d have the best chance with, but didn’t feel as if she had much chance with any of them. She couldn’t talk to them, she didn’t know how.
She asked the bartender who was the rep for David’s fish farm. He indicated the bare-armed one in the hat and she thought she should have known. But she bought him a rum. Carrying it down the bar felt a little inappropriate, as if she were soliciting him. He was listening to something the maroon said and didn’t seem to notice her, although the maroon’s eyes flickered across her.
No more interest than if she were a barstool.
She went back to a table to wait. The tables were filling, people saying hello to each other as if they knew each other. No one sat down at her little table.
She watched the rep, she didn’t care what happened as long as she got this job. If she got the job it would give her a place to hide. The blue and whites hadn’t found David, no one would ever think to look for her on a fish farm.
No one would ever think to look for her where she was now, either, but staying in that room was making her crazy. She didn’t even dare call her grandfather and tell Jude where she was. She had been gone five days, did her family think she had been kidnapped? If so, they had probably called the blue and whites, who probably thought she had gone underground with La Mano de Diós which meant she couldn’t go home now even if they hadn’t been planning to pick her up.
So it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she needed a place to go. And David had found a place to hide.
She watched her rep for an hour and ten minutes while he sipped from a glass and a jock approached him and they retired to a side table. He finally picked up a glass and sipped it and she started to get up and then realized she wasn’t sure if it was hers. She waited, afraid that if it was hers and she waited too long that he would decide on someone else. No one else stood up, so she got up—and then someone did get up and she froze, but they were headed for the back, for completely different purposes.
He jerked his head and she followed him to the side table where apparently negotiations went on. “I’m not hiring right now,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She had never thought of this. What was he doing here if he wasn’t hiring?
“I’m looking for a couple of handlers, are you a handler?”
She thought about saying yes but she didn’t know what a handler was and that wouldn’t work.
“I, ah, I need some experience,” she said.
He smirked. “Yes?”
She knew what he was thinking, that it was obvious that she wasn’t a fish jock. “I can maybe pay a learning fee?” she said. She had rehearsed this in her head. “I need the work and I need to get some experience, but I know that you shouldn’t, or, I mean, the farm shouldn’t train me for free?”
“How much?” he asked.
Madre de Diós. “500cr,” she said.
He shook his head.
“1000,” she said.
He said. “Let’s see some papers on who you are. I don’t hire people in trouble.”
She pulled out her workcard.
“It’s temporary,” he said, suspicious.
“I was robbed,” she said. “They took my purse, everything. It’s taking forever to get a new card.”
“Why do you want to be a fish jock, lady?” he said. “You no fish jock.”
He studied her for a moment. “You got man trouble?”
She looked down at the little table. “He beats me,” she said, her voice cracking with the lie. “He said if I ran away he’d find me.” Jesus, she couldn’t act, and her face flooded red with embarrassment. He beats me?
But the rep nodded, his face suddenly softer. “Okay, lady. 1000cr.”
She reached down for her bag but he had already stood up. “Tip the bartender,” he said. “Be at the shuttle dock Sunday night.
She went back to her table and carefully folded the 1000cr into a 5cr bill. It looked too thick to be a tip but she kept it hidden in her hand and walked back to the bar. She was even more embarrassed, now. She couldn’t wait to get out, to go back to her hotel. The bartender was busy so she had to wait a long minute, but finally he came back down to her end. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Thanks,” she said, and handed him the money.
“Good luck,” he said.
13
Transfer
“You were in the war in South Africa, right?” Santos said.
David nodded. Sunday night, and they were hanging around in the men’s bunkroom after dinner. The television was on at one end, but they were all in the space between Santos’ bunk and the next bunk.
“Did you ever kill anyone?”
Too many weekends spent playing war games. They had been logged in five hours today and David could still feel the phantom weight of the helmet. But it had been Argentina again and the light was so wonderful.
Had he ever killed anyone? He remembered firing into the face of a startled Prot across a city street. In Durban. The Prot had seemed right there, so close to him, but he had not stopped running and he didn’t know if he had hit the man or not. “I don’t know. It is not like that,” he said.
“I guess you can’t tell in a firefight,” Santos said.
David shook his head. Even firefights were not what Santos thought.
Half the Day Is Night Page 27
