“Yes, but-”
“Hunt, then. Catch food. The woods are full of wild game.”
“But don’t you understand?” The man sounded angry now. “My wife is seven months pregnant. She’s not been well lately. She needs a doctor.”
At that moment the woman pulled herself from the car, using the door to lever herself upright. “Jim, tell him about my brother.”
“OK, Tina, just you take it easy.” He looked at the boy. “Mark, go look after your Mom while I talk.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the retired police chief spoke now in that polite but firm voice he must have used a million times before in his career. “You’re going to have to turn your car around and leave the island.”
“What goddam fucking island?” The stranger’s patience had reached burn out. “It’s not an island. It’s a fucking town at the edge of a fucking lake…”
“Jim,” the woman pleaded, “Don’t get mad at them. They’re just being cautious.”
“Tina, OK. Sit back in the car.”
“They don’t know us, Jim. For all they know we might be-”
“Bread bandits? Hey, guys. Do we look like bread bandits?”
“No,” replied the old police chief, “but you can’t-”
“Then let us in. Please.”
“Sorry.”
“But you can see my wife isn’t well.”
“We’re taking no chances.”
“But do we look South American? We’re from a place that’s three hours’ north of here.”
“What place?” asked the ex-chief.
“Golant, just off Route 3. Look, I’ve got a driver’s license that-”
The ex-chief gave a regretful sigh. “Sorry. No can do.
We’ve reached a decision to seal this town off from the outside. We can’t risk contamination.”
“Contamination! Do you think my wife and my son and my unborn child can contaminate you?”
“Jim,” called the woman from the car. “Tell them about my brother.”
Jim turned back to us. “My wife’s brother owns a vacation home here.”
“He’s living here now?”
“No. He was in New York with his family when the crash came. We haven’t heard from him since.” His voice softened into those pleading tones again. “Don’t you see? We wouldn’t beg a place to stay, we could move into my brother-in-law’s cabin. I know how to weld… look!” Suddenly eager, he gripped the gate bars with his two hands and gave it a shake. “I could make this even stronger. I could make it so strong it would keep an army out. You need to weld reinforcing bars diagonally across the-”
“Sorry.” The ex-chief spoke gently. He sounded genuinely regretful. “I truly am sorry. I can’t permit you to enter the town. You look like good people, but we just don’t know if you’re carrying the disease.”
“So you’re going to turn us away, and leave us to starve?”
The officers looked at each other; then the ex-chief spoke again. “We can give you food and medicine if you know what your wife needs.”
“I don’t know what drugs she needs. I need a doctor to see her. Hey, listen… listen!”
But the three officers moved back to our group. I glanced at Ben. His expression revealed that the incident sickened him. He had a good heart. If you ask me, he’d have allowed the family in.
The stranger returned to the car, spoke in an agitated way to his wife, then came back to the gate to yell, “We’re not moving, do you hear? We’re going to sit outside these gates until we starve to death or you let us in. Did you hear me? Did you?”
The ex-chief spoke to a couple of guards. “Bring them some food, boys. Pack it in fish crates so we can shove it through the gap under the gate.”
Sergeants dismissed us from guard duty; the idea was we’d return to our own jobs, but most of us hung ’round, not enjoying what we were seeing but feeling as if we somehow had to see it out.
Returning to his car, the stranger sat on the hood. Inside his family must have cooked in the heat of the car’s interior, but they weren’t quitting the standoff yet. Clearly, the guy thought we’d cave. That we wouldn’t stand here and watch the pregnant woman suffer.
After a while a truck returned with the wooden fish crates into which dried foodstuff and cans had been packed. Using broom handles so as not to get too close to the strangers and so risk possible infection, a couple of guards slid the crates through the gap under the fence in the direction of the strangers’ car.
We sweated it out for hours. At one point the guy tried to climb the gate, but there was so much barbed wire coiling ’round the bars, he didn’t make it halfway to the top before he had to slither down again. The boy came up to the gate to call at us, “Let us in. Let us in. My mom’s sick. Let us in!” And so on for a good twenty minutes. The woman looked tired and a kind of quiet resignation rotted the expression on her face. Later the guy cried. They sat in front of the car hugging each other. It was about that time the woman started saying something to the guy. For a while he shook his head, then he started to nod.
When next he climbed out of the car he never even looked at us. Nor did we look directly at him. There was something embarrassing about the situation now. No one made eye contact. No one spoke. For the next ten minutes the boy and the man loaded the car with food, then quickly they climbed back in, and the engine fired into life. Without even so much as a reproachful glance the family drove off into the distance to whatever hazardous future waited for them out there.
A shame-filled silence hung over us. It took a while, but eventually we returned to the trucks for the drive back to town.
Some invasion.
That night after the heat of the day it felt good to work on my mother and sister’s tomb. Cool air. Cool stone against my palms. It was good to be alone, too. As I worked on my three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle-my goddam obsession, as Ben had dubbed it-I couldn’t help but think about the family we’d turned away. I guess the woman might wind up losing the baby. She might even lose her own life with it. There’d be the man and the boy with the screaming woman in a lonely cabin in the woods. I slotted a cube of rock into the tomb structure. It fitted as neatly as a plug into its socket. I patted it down the final inch or so with the palm of my hand.
I immediately picked up another chunk of rock. This had a more complicated shape, with seven sides. With luck it would stop me thinking about the family.
But it wasn’t easy. What if we’d relented? Let them in. What if a few hours later that knot of tension came into my belly? That alarm signal at some deep, deep animal level that said: Beware, Valdiva, you’ve got yourself a batch of Jumpies here. Kill them before it’s too late…
So what’s worse, Valdiva? Turning the family away to maybe die a lingering death out in the woods? Or finishing them all with a few savage blows with the ax?
Some cousin of that instinct that gave me the ability to divine when a person was infected with Jumpy also identified the perfect-shaped void in the wall for the lump of rock I rolled ’round in my hands. In it went. Snick. Perfect fit.
I stood back to look at the tomb. There it was, the size of a truck, a perfect square, gleaming like cream in the starlight.
An old woman once walked down here as I worked.
She complimented me on my labors and said the structure reminded her of an ancient Egyptian tomb called a Mastaba. Mastabas, she said, were used to entomb Egyptian dead long before they built the Pyramids. I don’t know anything about that. Instinct told me to build it that way. Like instinct told me when a person was hot with Jumpy. I didn’t think or plan what to do. I only acted on instinct. And if God or the Devil shaped that instinct, I don’t know. That’s just the way it was.
Stars shone brighter than diamonds. I sat with my back to the tomb, feeling the cool stone through my shirt back. Even though it was close on two in the morning I didn’t feel like sleeping. That cabin of mine could be a lonely place; somehow it felt less lonely up here on the bluff by the graves of Chelle and Mom. Here, I counted shooting stars. “Wow, Chelle, did you see the size of that one?”