The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [183]
The crow left the road and drove into a basin, a field of shallow water as far as one could see. When I questioned the driver, he pointed to the map I’d given him. “This is it,” he said.
We looked out the back of the crow. The sky flashed white.
Jujack said, “We’ll get diphtheria in all this runoff. Look, I bet there’s nothing out there, this is a probably a wild goose chase.”
“We won’t know until the shovel hits the mud,” I told him.
“But we’re probably just wasting our time,” Jujack said. “I mean, what if they moved it at the last minute?”
“What are you talking about, moved it?” Q-Kee asked him. “Do you know something you’re not telling us?”
Jujack looked warily at the darkening sky.
Q-Kee pressed him. “You do know something, don’t you?”
“Enough,” I told them. “We only have a couple of hours of light.”
Then the three of us jumped from the crow into ankle-deep water that was sheened with oil and sewage foam. Everywhere around us was muddy water, as far as you could see. The map, long since soaked, pointed us toward a stand of trees. Using our shovels as probes, we made our way. Passing between us were the humps of river eels wrestling through the shallow water. The beasts were like biceps with teeth, some two meters long.
The trees, it turned out, were filled with snakes. Their heads hung down to watch us splash from tree trunk to tree trunk. It was straight out of my awful dreams, as though the snakes from my sleep were visiting me here. Or did it work the other way—would these snakes visit me again tonight? How I hoped not. Endure what one must during the day. But please, can I not have some peace when darkness falls?
“Those are rock mamushi,” Q-Kee said.
“Can’t be,” Jujack said. “Those only live in the mountains.”
Q-Kee turned to him. “I know my deadly snakes,” she said.
When distant lightning flashed, you could see them all, silhouetted in the branches, hissing, poised to drop on unsuspecting citizens as they went about their civic duties.
“A snake is a fucking snake,” I said. “Just don’t provoke them.”
We looked around, but there was no sign of a fire pit or a corral. There was no chuck wagon, no guns or fishing poles, no stack of scythes.
“We’re in the wrong place,” Jujack said. “We should get out of here before we get electrocuted.”
“No,” Q-Kee said. “We dig.”
“Where?” Jujack asked.
“Everywhere,” Q-Kee said.
Jujack stomped the blade of his shovel into the mud. With great effort, he pulled a single scoop of mud, sucking from a hole that filled with water. When he turned the shovel upside-down, the mud stuck.
Rain battered my face. I kept spinning the map, trying to see if I’d made a mistake. This should’ve been the place—the trees, the river, the road. What we needed was one of the dogs from the Central Zoo. It’s said their savage instincts can detect bones, even ones long under the earth.
“This is impossible,” Jujack said. “It’s all just water. Where’s the crime scene? Where’s any scene?”
“That might work to our advantage,” I told them. “If a body were in the mud, the water might help float it free. All we need to do is go around loosening the soil.”
So we went our ways, individually probing the mud for any sign of an actress below.
I started turning shovels of mud, one after the other. Each time I did I could visualize success, each time I felt discovery was at hand and I’d be able to leverage the actress to get Commander Ga’s story, and then his biography would be mine, with Ga’s real name in gold on the spine, and then Sarge’s office would become mine. As the rain fell and fell, I kept coming up with pithy lines I’d say as Sarge placed his meager possessions in an old food-aid box and removed them from my new office.
Finally, I felt, here was an event in my life worthy of inclusion in my own biography.
The crow’s drivers watched us from behind their windshield. It grew dark enough to see the red glow of their cigarettes. As my arms weakened, I switched from my right hand to my left. Every bone I struck turned