Dark Water - Laura McNeal [68]
“Amiel?” I called. I checked the fork of the flapping sycamore tree where he’d hidden from me once, but the fork was empty.
I went to the thicket where he normally hid his bicycle, but it wasn’t there, and again I heard my phone beep. This time, I looked at it and saw the message: low battery.
Sometimes, when my battery is low, the best thing to do is turn off the phone. I always have more power when I turn it back on later. I held the button down like I was smothering a small plastic animal.
“Amiel?” I called, feeling a new level of panic. I tried to think he could be at work. He could be doing his regular Tuesday job, which was gardening for a friend of Hoyt’s, and that’s why his bicycle wasn’t there. If Amiel was at work, maybe he didn’t know his house had been torn apart by people with poor grammar skills.
It didn’t seem likely, though. If you get a reverse 9-1-1 call to evacuate your house, do you tell the gardener to keep trimming the hedge?
I stuffed my sandy feet into my shoes, leaving my wet socks in the wreckage of his house, and I forced my way through the willows to the other slope, the one that led up to the homestead where we cooked. “Amiel?” I called again.
I heard a strange foghorn call, a low hoot like a cowbird or a bird-cow. It was coming from inside the roofless house.
When I stumbled through the open door, I found Amiel sitting on the floor, holding his hands to his lips like a mini–conch shell.
“What happened?” I asked.
He put one finger to his lips. I expected his body to be warm, but when I crouched down and tried to hug him, his arms and chest were as chilled as my sockless feet. He was solid and tense and still. It felt very good to be out of the wind.
“Yesterday,” he whispered. “While I am working.”
“We have to get out of the river,” I said. “The fire is really big. Really, really big.”
He nodded. He didn’t move.
“Where should we go?” I asked. I was feeling all prickly inside.
He didn’t shake his head or nod or make a suggestion. He stayed down.
“No,” I said. “I mean we can’t stay here.”
It could be that Amiel always had a radio, and I just didn’t notice it before. He had a small handheld radio now, in any case, and he turned it on. Two men were speaking Spanish to each other and then to a caller, who was a woman, and she sounded pretty upset. There are certain words everyone knows if you live near the border. La migra, for example, means “border patrol.”
“I don’t think the border patrol would arrest people fleeing from a fire,” I said.
He looked at me with conviction. “Sí,” he whispered. “Listen.”
I listened to the Spanish voices, but I couldn’t get more than a few words.
“Three people!” he said, and held up three fingers. “Se los tomaron.” The words, or maybe the smoke, made him cough.
“They won’t take you if you’re with me.”
Again, the expression that he knew so much more than I did. I stood up to look east, in the direction the fire had been burning when I left home hours before, and I couldn’t see a plume. For all I knew, that meant we were in the plume. “We have to get out of here!” I shouted. “Don’t you understand me?”
Amiel took my hand and led me to the water and set me down on the bank. Then he stepped in and slipped his body lower and lower until he was sitting on the bottom. With his legs out, he could lie back and be completely submerged. “Así,” he said, when he raised his head above the water and breathed. “Like this.”
He meant we could survive in this shallow part of the river if the fire came, and I remembered something. During the Fallbrook fire we had watched from our house when I was twelve, a group of people who didn’t evacuate fast enough got surrounded, the road was blocked, and they all survived by huddling in a backyard pool.
“No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.”
“Go,” he told me, his voice raspier from all the smoke. “Yo estoy bien.”
An hour had passed