OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 20

  “So why is he gone, then?” Balthazar asks me and, truly, I cannot say. I try to imagine Emmanuel striking Raul with a club and I can’t. Emmanuel always apologizes, even when he has done nothing wrong. I remember being harsh with him when I was drunk. He just looked down, said no word. I told him to go away, to get out of my sight. He kept his head down and ran, like a little boy, away from me. We have neither seen nor spoken since then. I wish we had. I want to tell him I’m sorry for making him run. He is a good boy. I don’t know why I made him run away. I think of what Yalai told me, and I think I am becoming a wicked man.

  One of Boss’ helpers catches me in the hallway as I am headed for the kitchen.

  “You have good clothes you can change into?” he asks.

  I say “yes, I do,” which is true. I bought them before I came to the camp, although I never wear them. I have a fine shirt and some good pants and shiny good shoes. I don’t want to say how I got them.

  “You need to wash up, though,” he says to me. This is also true. I smell of rum and sweat from the hillside. I ask where I am to go. He says, “Kitchen duty. Go to Balthazar. He’ll tell you what you need to do.”

  “No, you tell me.”

  He tells me. I laugh. “They can’t serve themselves coffee?” I ask.

  Boss’ man looks at me sternly. “They are too important!”

  I am about to say that he can find someone else. But I don’t. I want to see these Company Men. I want to hear them talk.

  #

  The last hunt with Fletcher was for Leopard-Cat. I did not know it was the last hunt. Maybe he did.

  It was a night hunt. There are no dances when one hunts Leopard-Cat. Leopard-Cat is wise, and he listens at the edge of the firelight and listens to people talking. When Fletcher told me what we were going to do, he whispered it in my ear through his cupped hands. Then we made loud talk about how tired we were and how we were going right to sleep. That is how you fool Leopard-Cat.

  We met him by the stream that runs down from a seep on Spirit-Tree Hill. The moon was half-full, which is the right time to be hunting Leopard-Cat. When the moon is full, he can see everything in the forest and will stay away from you. When the moon is dark, you will never see him, even if he walks beside you on the track. But at half-moon, you can see him in the water and that is the only time you can kill him, because his Death is blinded by the sight of the moon on the water. It is like looking into the sun is to us, but when Leopard-Cat is thirsty, he will risk blindness for water.

  Fletcher and I had hunted so many years together that we no longer spoke. He knew what I was going to do before I did it, and I could feel him move before he moved. When we moved together through the forest, our thoughts were mingled like breath, and like breath, we felt the other’s movements without seeing them.

  So when Leopard-Cat came to the water, I knew it was I who would be taking him. And then it happened the second time. I saw right into Leopard-Cat’s eyes and he knew me, and he gave me his life with his eyes. The shaft struck him between the ears, and like Civet ten years earlier, he was dead before the arrow pierced him.

  Fletcher saw what had happened, and the cold light of the moon on his face was terrible to see. And I understood something, then, that he never had to explain. Death was in Fletcher, like a Little-Man that had not been purged. Death had grown steady and patient and fat in Fletcher, and his time had come.

  Right there, he skinned Leopard-Cat with my good steel blade and put the bloody skin over my head, the fore-claws knotted under my chin, the tail and back claws on my back.

  “Now you will carry the Little-Man of Leopard-Cat in you. Like Leopard-Cat, you will walk unseen and silent. No one will see or hear you, and you will deliver them their death.”

  “Am I to be Fletcher now?” I asked, but he said nothing.

  I know the answer. The last arrow I will ever make had already been broken and burned.

  #

  Balthazar shows me how to hold the tray.

  “Remember,” he says, “always come from their right. Let them fill their cup on the tray and put in sugar or milk. Let them do it for themselves. That is what they prefer.”

  I nod. I almost want to laugh at how serious he is treating this. He sees my face, and he is troubled, more frightened than angry.

  “Don’t laugh. Please don’t laugh. It will go badly for us if you laugh.”

  “I won’t laugh. Don’t worry. But why so serious?”

  “These are big men. Very powerful men.”

  “I know. VEE EYE PEAS. You said.”

  “Listen to me. Without these men, there would be no camp. There would be no logging at all. These are the men that began this camp. More than that. Many camps. I have children, brother. I need these men. They feed my family, and without them, we would starve.”

  “You could hunt,” I say.

  He looks at me like my father catching me killing sparrows, and I feel the shame I felt then. It was unworthy to show him his weakness.

  “There are a hundred camps like this,” he says in a whisper, “a hundred Balthazars. If they decide that they don’t like this camp, they could close it. Like that,” he says and snaps his fingers under my nose. “Don’t get me in trouble. Not me or any other Balthazars.”

  “Don’t worry, Balthazar. They will not hear or see me.”

  This much, I know, is true.

  #

  The first time I heard an “iron dragonfly”, or so we called them, was the morning that Fletcher died. I heard the noise coming from below and I thought it was a night-spirit coming to take me to the dream-place where they live. I had heard that noise once, in a dream. A Little-Man grabbed me once while I was sleeping and the noise was everywhere around me, like I was caught in a drum being played. I was terrified, and he shook me a long time before he let me go. Fletcher told me it was just a mischievous ghost and I should ignore it.

  But after that, I was frightened of the night-spirits, so when I heard the noise again, I got up quickly so he could not catch me. Then I noticed the noise was coming from outside the longhouse, not from a dream. I had just made it down to the ground by the light of daybreak when the first rockets hit.

  I am a logger. I have grown used to the sound of wood being torn apart by dynamite, but this was the first time I had heard that noise. I believed the world was over. The world was over, in a way. I could not tell the difference between the scream of wood and the scream of the dying.

  Again and again the rockets came. Each one a burst of flame and a noise so loud I thought my bones would shatter. After the first two, my ears couldn’t hear anymore except for the thump of new rockets. The longhouse was ripped apart behind me. I saw everyone screaming silently in the firelight. Mama was screaming. Papa was screaming. Fletcher’s wives were screaming. Only Fletcher was not screaming. He stood at the mouth of his hut and looked up at the helicopter. He raised his arms to it and I think he was asking it to come. The hut around him burst into a ball of flame and I saw the old man fly from the door like a broken sheaf of branches.

  I ran to him. To him. Not to my mother and father. Not to the longhouse. I did not try to save anyone but him. I ran to the broken body of Fletcher and knelt by him while the helicopter flew off, happy and fat with our deaths.

  He was burned on one side and one arm was a broken tree-stump. But one eye was clear and one hand reached out to touch me where Civet’s lifeblood had been put on me. I leaned in and he whispered in my ear to tell me what I am. That’s when I learned I was never to be Fletcher. There would be no more Fletchers for my clan.

  Yalai found me there, long after sunrise. She had been calling for help, but no one came. She cursed me. She told me I was worse than an old woman. While I sat there, her little brothers had burned alive, and I had done nothing. Her shouting brought me to motion, but not to life. I helped her to get whoever was left out of the collapsed longhouse. Her mother was alive in there, but her father was not. I found my mother and father as well, but they had d
ied. Sango was gone, too. Half of his face was smiling, the rest was cut away as if with a fine steel knife. I fainted to see this. Yalai kicked me awake again. Then we got everyone together and walked to the village. It took all day.

  #

  Coffee is over. I am waiting in the bar, pretending to wash glasses in the small sink there. Boss is with Chelo, speaking the yellow-caps’ language to a Company Man. The Company Man smiles. He looks satisfied and kind, but his eyes are small, black, and shiny like Pig’s, and they watch. He says something to them and walks across the room to another Company Man. Chelo and Boss step aside and start to talk quietly.

  Without looking at anyone, I step out of the room. But only partway. There is a small dark space near the door where I can stand out of sight at the edge of the room and listen. I listen to Boss.

  Boss is speaking the villager’s tongue, because he does not want the Company Men to know what he is saying. I understand most of it. He is happy I served coffee so well. He thanks Chelo for bringing me. Chelo does not say anything.

  Boss then says something I never heard before. He says that maybe all the logging camps will soon shut down, and the company men are here to decide if this will be so. They came here today because this mill is better than the others and they want to know why. Boss knows why. He says the Company Men think we are the same tribe as the down-landers, and they don’t understand we are very different.

  So he asks Chelo to have dinner with them. He needs Chelo to tell the Company Men that people from our tribe are happy the mill is here. Boss says it’s important that Chelo and I show that we are better than down-landers. Maybe Chelo will go back with the Company-men to their country, where he can tell everyone how happy our tribe is to have logging jobs. Then, when their countrymen all see we want the logging jobs, they will decide to keep the camps going.

  Boss then talks quietly and says maybe Chelo will be boss himself someday, with a mill of his own. But first he must show how happy we are that the Company Men are here. One tree at a time, Boss says. One tree at a time clears the forest, he says.

  Chelo says he will help. And he says he will get me to serve at dinner to show we are good workers and how happy we are that the camp is here for us.

  He will not run. I will not ask him to.

  I walk back into the room and Chelo and Boss stop talking. But they look at me. They are the only ones. I walk through the room and pick up the empty cups and put them on my tray. Nobody sees me, nobody notices I am there. Even in my white shirt and my shiny shoes, I am invisible.

  #

  When we got to the village, everyone came out to see us. They stood in their doorways and watched us, eyes wide. There were only twelve of us left, and three were only children. Of these, I carried one, and Yalai carried another, and Chelo led the third by the hand.

  The big man of the village came out and met us. When we explained what had happened, he did a strange thing. He opened his mouth as big as it could go and bent over like he was going to be sick. Then he wiped tears from his eyes and welcomed us. He went to the main square and told everyone there to make us welcome and to spare us what they could spare, and to take us in if they could.

  Then he went back to his house and did not come out for some time. I wondered at that, but by nightfall, I understood from what I heard from the women talking with Yalai. The helicopter had made a mistake and thought the longhouse was the village. They had been spared, and now they owed us a debt that they did not want to pay, but they also could not refuse. For a while, we were given food and we were given shelter, but not happily and not for long, except for the Murphy, who took in the children and made them his own.

  Yalai sold her gold bracelets, even the two I gave her, and bought a house for her and her mother to live in. Chelo’s mother left and married a logger only two days after we arrived. She told Chelo not to come. Not to the wedding, not to the logger’s house. Chelo was not to be her son anymore. The logger was jealous and did not want a stepson.

  We lived on the street in the village for a while, me and Chelo and the other men, until the winter rains came. Yalai invited Chelo to live in her house for a while. She had heard how he tried to see his mother, but his stepfather beat him and his mother did nothing. Yalai did not want me there, but Chelo did, so she let me sleep on the floor in the main room and let the other men stay, too. Chelo slept by my side. He clung to me close like a child for the first few days, and then he stopped talking for a while. None of us spoke much, together, anymore.

  A lot of people came through the village that winter. The war was ending, they said. They said that everyone was now “Citizens of the Prosperity Zone”. They meant that the warriors from the north had made this land part of their country. So, when the New Year Moon was new, the villagers lit firecrackers and made the beast they call Dragon, which is their way to chase away the Little-Men that the war had made.

  Yalai gave the dragon-men money to do this in her house. Also, she only cooked beef now. No pork. No civet. No bush-meat of any kind. I understood. She was telling us that she did not need us anymore. But I know she really meant me, and the same for anyone who was with me. She wouldn’t tell me to my face. She would only talk to me if I was with Chelo or someone else, and then she would talk to all of us at once. She never spoke to me as a person. Bile sat in my throat when she talked without looking at me.

  I left. We all did, but only Chelo stayed with me afterwards. After that, Yalai turned the house into a shop with rooms to rent. She bought and sold with the boat-men and she made a place for people to eat and sleep, but only if they had money. The war was over, and people were traveling again.

  Then there was talk of yellow-capped men in the forest. Even when people began to talk about the new logging-camp they were building, I never saw one of the yellow-caps until I went to their camp. They flew in with their helicopters and began logging. I sold my bow and I sold the skin of Leopard-Cat, and I sold my good knife. I bought good down-lander clothes and I hired a truck to take Chelo and I to the new camp. Fletcher was dead. Yalai wished I was dead. The man I thought I would be had never really been.

  But I still lived, or so I thought, so I became a logger like the rest of the men from the longhouse. Chelo followed me, like he always did. Even when we walked into the camp for the first time and we saw that they had built it right on top of Spirit-Tree Hill.

  It was the hardest thing I ever did, walking into that terrible mill. That mill made of white planks of the lauan tree cut from the tallest tree on the hill. From Fletcher’s tree.

  Walking through the doorway, Chelo behind me, I could hear the Little-Men buzzing like biting-flies. All those deaths, all those vengeful spirits. They filled the air. They filled me. But I was dead; just as dead as they were, and it no longer mattered. They did not see me and they did not hear me. I had become nothing more than an arrow, flying blindly in the dark.

  #

  “Keep the cover down until you’re ready to serve it. I don’t want any flies getting on the chicken,” says Balthazar as he hands me the tray. I nod. He trusts me now, and doesn’t watch me as I go out the door.

  Between the dining-room and the kitchen is the pantry. There is a door there to the outside, to the garbage-hut and the path down the hill to the sties. Instead of walking past it to the dining-room, I turn into it with my shoulder. The latch is undone by my hip and it opens out, the long spring chiming against the frame. Flies are so thick they darken the air. They swirl around me in the hot afternoon sun like Little-Men in the darkened dormitory. I run, holding the cover on the tray with my thumbs.

  Halfway down, my polished leather shoes skid on slick roots in the track. I fall, but catch the ground with one hand. Sauce slops out of the side of the tray and the lid nearly comes off. I stop, catch myself with my breath, and remember who I am. I rise, balancing against the weight of the tray. My next footfalls are clean, precise, quick as Mouse-Deer’s, stepping from root to root until the track flattens out and I am again by the st
y.

  I empty the tray over the fence. The pigs come running, crowding together, jostling as they wolf down the chicken-parts whole. I hear the little bones crack as they try to fill their mouths, trying to keep one another from getting any. Their squealing is the squealing of beasts proud of themselves, glad to be taking their fill.

  From behind the board, I get out the other tin, the one I put there last night. Everything is in it and ready. All I need is the lighter, the one Raul dropped when I hit him. I try it out. It is small, but the flame is high, and I feel the flame bite at the callus on my thumb. I grin. I am ready.

  By the time I make it back, Balthazar is looking for me. He is coming out the door, wiping his hands on the towel in his belt. When he speaks, his voice is a whisper so loud it might as well be a shout. His eyes are wide with anger and fear. His open hand quivers in the air like the head of a snake about to strike. I know he wants to strike me, but he is afraid to.

  My grin is fixed. I say “Sorry, brother. I must go. I will explain later.” Cursing, he lets me by. He does not see the flies swarming around me, blacking out the edge of my vision. I go in. I push the tray through the double doors into the cool air of the dining room. I turn the bolt and pull out the key, letting it fall to the carpet. I turn and almost lose my nerve when I see Chelo. He is there, saying something to a Company Man. He looks like a boy at missionary-school, talking sweet to the Missus Murphy. There is a smile on his face that falls when he sees me watching. But it is too late to save him.

  I let the lid fall as the lighter flares in my hand. I rake the flame across the detonators and throw the tray onto the table, laughing with relief as Leopard-Cat springs into the room. Sparks fly from short fuses. Dynamite scatters, rolling on the table, falling into the company-men’s laps. They rise, but they are caught here in my net.