Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  That wasn’t something she was inclined to do. Certainly not since she didn’t expect to work here the rest of her life.

  In the yard, Ms. Facon barked, “Ling.”

  “Yes ma’am,” she said. Ms. Facon should have been a sister in a Holy Order. She reminded Mayla of the heavy-legged middle-aged women who taught her at the convent and who used the Church as an excuse for a kind of sadism. Ms. Facon would have been disappointed if they were to all behave and be on time. It contradicted her view of essential human nature.

  Mayla’s muscles were clenched and her teeth were chattering. She grabbed a bike off the rack and let it tow her out to the construction site. Streaming along behind it she consciously loosened her muscles, made herself relax against the cold.

  It was only a couple of hours, then the shift would be finished. Anyone could get through a couple of hours. And if Lopez had come up with something then this might be the last day she had to do this.

  At the site she reported to MacKenzie, the shift boss.

  “MacKenzie,” Luz called, “I’ll show her the sealer, put her with me.”

  “Okay,” MacKenzie said.

  The walls were already halfway up, and the ceilings were in on the first floor. They swam through the cave of a building hanging work lights, and then Luz showed her how to spot bond stirrups. Mayla had seen them before. Luz also showed her how high off the floor to put them and where. “We need them when we run the sealers,” she said.

  People used the stirrups as footholds when they did stationary work; they were all over the frame. The spotweld was a tube of stuff, Mayla squirted some on the stirrup and then used a little heater like a gun to touch the junk until it just started to glow. As soon as it started glowing—the water would be steaming around it, a stream of bubbles rising in the cave of the building—she touched it to the wall. Luz had told her to touch them straight, where she put them they stuck. If she really screwed one up, she went and got Luz who put some sort of paste around it and worked it and worked it until it came loose. She screwed up two the first half hour, but then she got the hang of it.

  It wouldn’t have been so hard if she didn’t have trouble with the cold. Her hands got so cold that it was hard to keep coordinated. She thought about hypothermia a lot. Lots of the divers came out of the water with blue lips, particularly after second shift. When she had been learning to dive, that was one of the signs of hypothermia. It was hard to tell if their speech was slurred, because nobody talked much after the shift was over.

  She didn’t see David, but he might be working above her, putting up walls. In the chatter of the divers she didn’t hear him, either, but he didn’t talk much. She wondered about Lopez. It was best just to assume that Lopez couldn’t help them, she wouldn’t be so disappointed then.

  Working with the heat gun should have made things better. She kept heating little pockets and trying to put her hand in the ghost of the heated water. (The water rose so fast she couldn’t really catch it.) She could feel the difference in the water temperature when she did. That should have helped her hands, but it didn’t, maybe because she had something to compare to so she felt the cold worse than if there was nothing warm. She was afraid to do it too much, it was wasting time and she’d get in trouble.

  They were on two hours in the morning, David said that they did short shifts in the morning for two weeks and then switched to short shifts in the afternoon. She thought she’d like short shifts in the afternoon better because she was so tired in the afternoon. But right now, she was glad when the shift was over and MacKenzie sent them back to the yard.

  David was at the moon pool, but Santos was there so he just said, “After lunch we can talk.”

  After lunch. She took a nap after lunch. How was she supposed to do a three-hour shift without some sleep? Unless maybe he would tell her something that meant they could quit. But he could have let her know somehow, couldn’t he? She didn’t know, he could be so deadpan. Son of a bitch. She didn’t think he knew anything. Even if he did, it would be best to do second shift, to not draw attention to themselves, wouldn’t it?

  Maybe she could say she was sick.

  She was too tired to know that she was hungry but she knew she’d be hungry as soon as she started to eat. But stripping off her gear was tedious in her exhaustion. A hot shower made her muscles feel soft, particularly in her legs. Luz was coming out of the shower at the same time she was. Like most of the women, Luz was heavy, and the fat collected under her arms and in her thighs. She was tough and muscled, but her stomach still looked soft; and stripped of her make-up her nose and cheeks showed a fine tracework of red lines, a spiderweb of broken capillaries. The people who’d been diving awhile all had them. Was it the cold or the pyroxin?

  Diving did not make you pretty, even if it did make you strong.

  David wasn’t in the dining hall when she got there.

  The smell of food made her stomach contract and suddenly she was empty. She shouldn’t eat so much, she’d end up like the other women, with that layer of fat. It was good to have it if you were going to be a diver for the rest of your life, but she wasn’t. Still, she piled it on; enchiladas, fish, a bowl of soup, a slice of cake, some beans. Cheap food, filling food. Nothing expensive like vegetables, mostly complex carbohydrates. But she was too tired to resist getting anything that looked good. For dinner she’d do better.

  Maybe she and David should just quit and get out of here, after all, David acted as if they were in more trouble the longer they stayed here. As soon as he told her that Lopez couldn’t do anything, she’d suggest they leave. She had money, they could find a place to stay for a couple of days, she’d get in touch with Saad Shamsi. But she didn’t want to think about that.

  It was all too much to think about after a dive.

  She saw David come in with Santos and another diver, so she sat down at an empty table and when they came out of the line she waved them over. She half expected David to ignore her, but they tromped to the table, Santos chattering away about some game they played on the weekend.

  “How was your morning?” she asked David, hoping for some clue about Lopez.

  He shrugged. “The same.”

  The same. What did that mean? Goddamn it, couldn’t he have arranged to meet her before lunch and tell her what was going on? For one thing, she was so goddamn tired.

  She decided if he wasn’t going to talk, she wasn’t going to waste time talking, either. She dug into her soup. Her effort was wasted, though, as Santos chattered through the meal, and if David noticed her silence he probably thought she just couldn’t get a word in.

  Santos walked with them as they left the dining hall.

  “We need to talk,” David said politely. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Oh, sure,” Santos said, unoffended.

  David watched Santos walk on. “He is really very young,” David said.

  Mayla thought it was obvious and at the moment she really didn’t care. “What did Lopez say?”

  “He’d like us to meet someone tonight,” David said.

  “Someone who can get documents?” She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t dare.

  But he was shaking his head anyway and she felt it in her stomach. “No, this is the guy who supplies Lopez. But maybe he can take us to someone who can supply documents. Lopez, ah,” David shifted. “I have to, you know, have some reason for the documents, and I do not want to give Lopez an idea, so, I tell him, I mean I told him, that I was trying to get away from my ex-wife. He thinks I am really still married and that you and I are, you know, like boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  He was embarrassed. “That’s okay,” she said. “Actually, I think it’s pretty smart.”

  He looked down and nodded, unwilling to meet her eyes.

  “So how are we supposed to meet this guy?” she asked.

  “Lopez will take care of it, but he said it would be late, like after ten, so you have to get out of the bunkroom after ten.”


  She would be there.

  * * *

  She had never met a drug dealer, besides Saad Shamsi’s partner the Argentine with the moustache. She lay on her bunk, attempting to read, until ten, but all she could think of was Saad’s partner and the girl in the slave bracelet. The girl who had called her sister. She suspected that people who went into drug trafficking had to be a little crazy.

  At ten she got up and walked out of the bunkroom, past the vid and found David waiting in the hall.

  “Where’s Lopez?” she whispered.

  David didn’t know. “He said he would come find me.” David handed her a beer. “I bought it earlier.”

  She didn’t want a beer—her stomach was hurting and a beer would probably make her sick—but she opened it and sipped it. She wished this were over. She wished that they knew what they were doing.

  Maybe David knew what he was doing, he had gotten this far, had gotten a job without a workcard. She didn’t even know how to do that.

  Oh God. What if David were right and she should not have left home? What if she could be home, safe, right now? If she went home and never left again, became a recluse. She could do it, the government would leave her alone if she never did anything. Then, maybe in a few years, she could leave. Or maybe she could stay at her grandfather’s house, become a dotty old lady, the daughter of the banker, who never left her house.

  She could stop this now, she could say to David, “I won’t meet him.” She could walk away, this was a mistake. It was a serious mistake. What was she doing caught up in something illegal like this? Buying forged documents was a crime.

  She would tell him. But she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth. Oh Christ, she would die because she was too embarrassed to say stop.

  Remember, she thought, that before you knew this was the best way. It’s either this or Saad Shamsi. Now that she had run, surely she had indicted herself in the eyes of the blue and whites. Only the guilty run. But it seemed impossible that she hadn’t been playing some elaborate game, that she couldn’t just quit now and go back to regular life.

  A couple of jocks came out into the hall and walked past them towards the dining hall.

  She studied the label of her beer bottle, she studied the floor. She wished David would say something. Who were they going to meet?

  At ten-thirty Lopez still hadn’t shown up. “He’s going to stand us up,” she told David. She was tired, and they had to get up for first shift.

  David just shrugged.

  Which was not an answer. It occurred to her that he never answered, never explained, never even asked. And he always thought he was right. He was so self-contained. Really it was arrogance, thinking he was always right, not caring about what other people knew or thought. It was very male, very macho of him.

  And who was to say that he was always right? She thought this was wrong and she thought this was stupid and she had told him that, but she had let him decide and now here she was waiting for some two-bit pyroxin seller who was supposed to be able to get her documents out of the country.

  She was angry, scared and angry and she was beginning to think that she had had enough.

  “I’m going to go to bed,” she said.

  “If they come,” David said. “And I can’t go get you because of the curfew.” Because no one was allowed in the women’s bunkhouse this late.

  “No one is coming,” she said. “Lopez can’t get us documents.”

  “He said he is bringing someone who can help us,” David said.

  “Why would he know someone who can help us.”

  “It is all we have,” David said.

  “Saad.”

  “If Saad could get documents, he would be in the United States.”

  “No,” she said. “Saad wants to immigrate legally. I have family in the States, you and I just need travel documents. And if Saad can’t get travel documents, what makes you think Lopez would be able?”

  “Wait,” he said.

  She thought it was a command and for a moment she was so angry she was speechless. And then she heard feet and a quiet voice and realized that someone was coming and he had really meant “wait a moment.”

  They were not coming from the dining hall or the moon pool or the yard, but from the other direction, where the fish ponds were. Where the fish were spawned and tended until they were old enough to go out into the pens outside. The jocks weren’t supposed to go back there. Mayla had never even seen the ponds.

  The lights were down, although there were supposed to be jocks on watch at the pens. She thought it was probably two jocks coming off watch. The regular fish jocks stayed four to a room in farm housing, not bunkrooms like the construction jocks. But the farm housing was back the other way. Maybe they were headed for the dining hall?

  But it was Lopez and a fish jock she thought she recognized and someone not dressed like a diver.

  He was Haitian, tall and lanky and moving like a street corner boy. As they came into the light she could see that his hair was all deep blue braids, velvet, midnight blue. He wore a sleeveless white vest and the light curved across his biceps. He looked like the cliché of a drug dealer. A wild maroon.

  He looked straight at her and smiled: a wicked, appreciating smile, a barracuda smile. His eyes were funny but the light was not good enough for her to make out why, and she looked away.

  How had he gotten here? She couldn’t imagine that he’d just gotten on a sub with a bunch of supplies and ridden out to the farm.

  Lopez said, “This is a friend of mine. You can call him Henri.”

  “Hello,” David said.

  Henri nodded. He acted as if he was swimming, every motion slow. He turned his face up into the light and his eyes were the same unnatural color as his hair. Slips in his eyes.

  “I know you before,” Henri said to her.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “I remember you,” he said. “Where are you from?”

  “Costonos,” she lied. She wasn’t going to say where she was from, and she wasn’t going to say her grandfather’s neighborhood, and she didn’t know any drug dealers.

  “I swear you are familiar,” he said, stepping towards her. “I think I see you before. Did you ever live in Marin-cite?”

  “No,” she said. On the floor where it met the wall there was a spider, soap pale and still. She watched it rather than look at him. She wanted to say that she didn’t know any drug dealers.

  “It’s nice beer you have,” he said.

  It was just beer.

  “That is my favorite beer,” Henri said.

  Lopez was grinning as if this was some sort of joke.

  “You’re not drinking your beer,” Henri said.

  “I don’t really want it,” Mayla said.

  “It’s good beer,” Henri said. “You shouldn’t waste it. You don’t want it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  She handed it to him. She tried to hold just the neck of the bottle so that he didn’t touch her but he did, anyway. Deliberately, she was sure. His fingers were hot. The beer was warm, she’d been holding it all the time they were waiting, but he didn’t seem to care. He took a drink, unconcerned that he was drinking after her, and she looked away again. It felt too intimate. Her eyes went back to the spider. She wasn’t even sure it was a spider, it might have been just the empty husk.

  “You need some help,” Henri said.

  “We would like to talk to you,” David said.

  Henri ignored him. “What do you need, sister?” Patronizing. Apparently polite.

  I am not your sister, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She looked from the spider to David. He was watching her but she didn’t know what he thought she should do. “I need to get to the States,” she said.

  Henri nodded, thoughtful. “The States is a good place, in some ways. In some ways it is not. It is not a spiritual place.”

  She nodded as if she understood. She f
elt as if he were testing her.

  “I have been there,” he said.

  She doubted it, but she nodded again.

  “I have been to New Orleans,” he said. “It is a strange, strange place, sister. It is almost underwater, now. You know? It is almost like Caribe. The cemeteries are all above ground. Little cities. When you go to the States, maybe you will go to New Orleans.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “I am sorry, though, I cannot help you.”

  She should have been angry, they’d waited all this time and now he couldn’t do anything, but she just felt relieved.

  Lopez was still smiling, and now David was watching Henri.

  “That is too bad,” Henri said.

  Everybody waited, although she didn’t know what they were waiting for.

  “I have a friend,” Henri said. “Maybe he could help you. Maybe tonight you come back with me. You think you could do that?”

  “We have to work tomorrow,” Mayla said.

  “You want to be a fish jock or you want to go to the States, woman?” Henri was suddenly sharp, contemptuous.

  She couldn’t look at him, but when she looked at the floor the spider was gone. She peered up and down the corridor, but there was no sign of it. It couldn’t have gone very far, she had just been looking at it, but the fact that it was gone felt as if it meant something. Her knees were trembling. “I want to go to the States,” she said.

  “So you come with me,” Henri said.

  Mayla looked at David. Was this what people would normally do? Was this some sort of trap?

  “Okay,” he said. “We need to do some things first.”

  “No time,” Henri said.

  David shrugged. “We don’t have money here.”

  Henri thought about that. “We talk to my friend, you and he work out the money.” Then he held his hand out to Lopez, who grabbed it. “See you next week.”

  Nobody had paid any attention to the other diver. He stood behind Lopez, watching. Not like a guard, like a bystander. Was he buying something?

  “Come on,” Henri said.