Wildefire (15 page)

simmering heat and your restless turning, you might as well be a pig on a spit. Even as the window-shaped box of sun slithers its way across the floor, the whispers and the giggling from the other room don’t quit.

It is a small house.

It’s when you hear the first pop of the wine cork—

Pepe was saving that one—that your village trembles for the first time. Nothing catastrophic or destructive, just tremors from the restless earth, a digestive fit as though it doesn’t like what it ate. And still you lie there, your eyes fixed on a crack growing in the plaster ceiling, even while you hear Mama shriek with laughter in the kitchen.

The pastor calls on Mama three more evenings before March roars to an end, and the tremors come with him every time, each one a little angrier than the last, but never enough to break more than a dish or two. And each time, you watch the fissure in the ceiling stretch like a wicked smile, plaster dust raining down on you as the rift grows.

Over the course of the next week, you overhear some villagers call them “the shakes.” Some say it’s a volcano blossoming offshore. Some think Jesus is announcing the Second Coming and he’s chosen Haiti for the maiden port of his voyage. Big Flo says, “That the devil coming for my son.”

But you know better.

Maybe Mama thinks the pastor’s love for her is so strong it moves the earth. She won’t find you out until the pastor calls for dinner on Friday.

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The three of you sit around the crippled table in the kitchen. It has one leg shorter than the other two, and wobbles every time you pass a dish or sneeze. You’ve considered on more than one occasion that Mama might have sawed the third foot off herself, so she could glower at you the moment you, God forbid, put your elbows on the table.

It takes a lot to curb your appetite, but the griot pork on your plate hasn’t been touched, and the corn fritters are cooling. The pastor asks a lot of questions about school. School’s out for summer so there isn’t a whole lot to say. The pastor’s collar is damp. He makes a habit of slipping his finger in between the cotton and his neck to let in the air. You imagine a hissing sound every time he does, as if he were a teakettle releasing its steam.

Mama doesn’t drop the bomb until she brings out the
beyen
for dessert, still sizzling in the pan. “He’s not going to replace your papa,” she’s saying while spooning the
beyen
into your bowl, as if fried plantains could soften the blow of a statement like that.

But you tune her out, focusing on the heat rising off the plantains. Your ears are so hot, they might as well be smoking themselves. And the earth trembles.

Lightly first. Then the floor shifts sideways, bucking hard, like God is pulling the tablecloth of the world out from under you. The
beyen
dish, perched precariously on the table’s edge, crashes to the floor in a big pan-fried tropical disaster. The cheap plastic chandelier, the one Mama thought added a touch of “class” to the kitchen, 141

snaps off the fishing wire hanging it from the ceiling and collapses onto the tabletop, right onto the corn fritters.

She must see the way your hands so wrathfully grip the wooden armrests of your chair, how your body trembles just as the earth trembles, how your head jerks convulsively just before the big quake roars through the house and the village beyond.

There is a silence at the table, the eye of Hurricane Mama passing you over. But her expression slowly puckers with the first wrinkles of horror, cascading down into seething fury, and suddenly she’s staring across the table at you like you’re no longer her son but a cancer, some leper who barged in on her dinner, on her life.

Then she’s got you by the ear, yanks you so hard you come out of the chair, down onto your knees. Her pin-cers close even tighter as she drags you to the door. The shakes aren’t the vibrations of the pastor’s love. They are the echo of your disgust.

Out in the dusty road leading up to the church, you’re partly stumbling and partly being dragged through the dirt. It’s starting to drizzle. Mama’s words still resonate through the village—sharp words, horrible words, hateful words. “Got the voodoo in you,” she repeatedly mumbles, and, “No son of mine,” followed by strings of curses in Creole and English and every language in between.

The pastor follows, a little ways behind, his hands impotently by his sides. You catch his eyes flitting side to side as the townspeople come out of their houses, summoned by Mama’s shrieking.

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On the stone stoop to the church, Mama stops in the silhouette of the steeple, but doesn’t let go of your ear.

She twists sharply so you drop to your knees. The Pastor is quiet. He looks almost sorry for you, like he wants to intervene.

Everybody’s watching. Even Fabiola, beautiful Fabiola with the long braids and that smile like sugar cane, is gawking at you like she’s seeing you, the
real
you, for the first time. The past is already gone, run off with Pepe’s work boots, but now your future is slipping away too as Fabiola backs into the protected shadows of her doorway.

You release a hollow scream, letting the hate froth and bubble out of your belly.

The church trembles, and you hear the first crack.

Then the second. The shadow of the steeple distorts, blossoming, growing.

The pastor has time only to look up before the steeple comes down on him, the same steeple that Pepe helped build five years ago, one shingle and one two-by-four at a time, with his hands of love, his hands of faith.

LILY MAYATOAKA

It’s cool here. Not the cold of a cloudless winter night but the processed cool of two goliath industrial air conditioners, breathing lukewarm air in, breathing Freon-chilled air out. Knowing Dad and his architectural genius, he probably has those AC units masked and soundproofed in some faux gazebo outside.

Like all of Kyoshi Mayatoaka’s other creations, this 143

new indoor arboretum is a masterwork of steel and glass, an amalgam of crisp lines and twists. It is a miracle of modern structural engineering—not a pillar in sight. Just light and sun and glass walls and sterling “perfection.”

The investors your father is addressing in Japanese as you tour the arboretum—which you understand perfectly, because you’ve spoken Japanese your entire life—love the design and seem ready to move into the adjacent luxury condominiums themselves, with or without their families.

You hate it, everything about it. The eco-friendly façade. The way it begs for some sort of architectural innovation award, recognition it will most likely receive.

The way the trees are spaced evenly in three ruler-straight lines, identical in height and pruned into matching orbs, like a row of golf balls, teed up and ready to be driven.

He’s attempting to replicate nature in modernity. Instead he has only caged nature, omitting the glorious overgrown perfection of it. This arboretum rips the “wild” right out of “wilderness.”

It is later that evening. Father opted to stay in one of the model condominiums for the night, and you’re along for the voyage. You want to take the metro into the city, but Tokyo is no place for little girls, says father. Tokyo may itself be a testament to man triumphing over nature, but at least it doesn’t pretend, and at the
very
least it’s not boring. Nothing says fun like watching a muted tele-vision while your father crunches numbers and scours a blueprint or two.

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You wait until he’s asleep. It’s the fault of his own flawless engineering that the door is as silent as death as you slip out into the foyer. The elevator offers only a disapproving hiss as it ships you down to the bottom floor.

Father designed the arboretum for enhanced acoustics, in the hopes that the Tokyo Philharmonic might decide to host a symphony here. Trees do like music after all, don’t they? Fortunately, there’s no one around at two a.m. to hear the
clip-clop
of your little black shoes.

The trees really are beautiful in this light, the faint pall of the full moon casting a halo over this would-be forest. You walk between two trees that are leaning just a fraction of an inch toward each other in silent conversation (something Dad will rectify and chastise the gardener for when he spots it). You lie down between the trees, savoring the feeling of fresh mulch against your back. And you close your eyes.

You wake up to the water from the sprinklers hitting your face. Before you can even open your eyes, you’re soaked. Morning light pours in through the open atrium roof, but you can barely see the glass ceiling through the chaos above you.

Where the tame little matching trees had been before is only savage wilderness. Their trunks have exploded outward, no longer smooth matchsticks but spiny columns of wood as thick as baobabs. They were dwarfed by the high cathedral ceiling of the atrium yesterday, but somehow overnight their branches snaked their way up to the 145

roof, twisted jagged things with huge leathery leaves that look like Jurassic ferns. They have nearly blotted out any sign of the sky above.

In fact, when you stand up and brush the mulch from your back, you discover glass littering the earth around you. The trees, in their supernatural growth spurt, have pierced the roof of the structure, with no intentions of stopping there.

A shadow looms over you. It is Father, and his normally crisp pin-striped suit is damp from ankle to knee.

You don’t have enough time to raise your arms and protect your face as his hand comes down.

ROLFE HANSSEN

“I told you it smells like you, Rolfe,” Biscuit says, holding you in place over the open manhole. “Take it in, dickwad.”

“I think the little runt likes it,” Dozer says, on your other arm. “Look at the face he’s making. Like home-made apple pie, huh, Rolfey?”

The face you are making is not one of pleasure.

“What I don’t get,” Biscuit says, “Is why a smelly little fish like you can get attention from a girl like Katie Burton. I’m stronger, my parents aren’t practically home-less like yours, and I play Pop Warner.”

You know you’re going to regret it, but you smile at the larger boy through your blood-tinged teeth. “Let’s 146

start with the fact that they call you
Biscuit
. Maybe she doesn’t want to have children who sound like they’re fresh from the fucking bakery.”

The blow from Biscuit’s knees rattles your brain, and your eyes swim with worms of light.

“It’s not my real name, dipshit,” he growls at you.

“I guess it’s a step up from Bradford,” you say.

You wait for the second blow, which you know is imminent. But it doesn’t come. Instead the rumble of an approaching engine interrupts your merry meeting of boys.

“Shit,” Dozer says. “What if it’s the cops?”

The pressure on your shoulders releases, and you drop to the cement. Your knees hit first, hard. But where your head and chest should have painfully struck pavement too, there is only the horrible sensation of open air, and falling.

Like that, you slip headfirst into the manhole.

The fall isn’t anything prolonged like it is in the car-toons. Almost as soon as you know you’re falling, you feel the awful wetness of the shallow sewage lining, followed instantly by the impact of the hard concrete underneath.

One of your fingers snaps, but you have only a moment to experience the agony before your head thuds to the ground too.

Darkness ensues. As you fade in and out, you catch fragments of the conversation transacting up top, the rest of it lost in the static of semi-consciousness.

147

The whoop of the police siren as the cruiser comes to a halt.

Interrogations of whether or not the boys had removed the manhole cover.

The stammering protests from Biscuit. Dozer’s com-plicit silence.

The harsh order from the cop for them to beat it.

The pause before their feet skitter away.

And then a grunt and the awful grating as the metal cover scrapes against the asphalt, followed by the
thunk
as the lid drops into place.

You wake up. Could be several minutes later, could be several hours. No way to know in the darkness. There’s only the pervasive stink of the sewage.

Two choices. You can either try to escape through the manhole or you can look for another way out. You opt for door number one. You hop for the manhole with your good hand raised—the other is still mangled from the fall—but it’s high enough that your fingertips only brush it. When your feet and calves tire from that game, you start yelling until your voice gives out. Then back to jumping again.

When you’ve exhausted the possibilities of escaping the same way you entered the sewer, you start to make your way down the pipeline. Your hands grope along the slimy wall for guidance.

You make it only twenty yards down the sewer main before you collapse against the wall, sliding down until 148

your ass is entrenched in the muck, your arms wrapped around your knees. Your eyes well. Your fingers throb on your broken hand. So this will be your tomb, this foul-smelling catacomb, and all because Katie Burton pecked you on the cheek in the hallway.

Despite your situation, you grin softly in the dark.

Almost worth death, that kiss. Almost.

Something rattles to your right, in the direction from which you came. You know you should cry out for help, but a strong calm has flowed over you, like an armor.

Now you hear voices—familiar voices—and more grating and grunting as the sewer lid is moved up and over the cement.

“Hey, dumb ass,” you hear Biscuit hiss. “You down there?”

You open your mouth to say,
Yes, yes I am.
But you close it without a sound, and instead take a tentative step toward the manhole.

“Okay,” Biscuit says, his voice quivering with panic.

“You happy now? He’s probably dead and washed halfway out to sea.”

“This is the old sewer, moron,” Dozer says. “If he’s .

. . if he’s gone, he wouldn’t have washed anywhere. We gotta go down and check.”

Biscuit says nothing.

“This was
your
idea, Biscuit.
You
found the manhole.