She started up the recording and spoke into the phone. Mike and Jenny have moved. See? Even this sounds happy? Drove by yesterday. They’re gone. Packing cases on the porch which makes it look like they were in a hurry. There were four signs of foreclosures along Ravenswood. That’s four in one block.
She’d seen a dog in the park just like Nut, except he was on a lead and barking. Nut never barked. Far across the park the dog strained against its lead, gave the man a struggle, and while it wasn’t Nut, couldn’t have been, she felt guilty for not making sure.
Cathy ended with the realization that everyone had gone. It’s me, she said, and Maggie. Ten years in this town and I know one person. How can this happen so quickly? We had a full life, didn’t we? Now I know one person.
She paused the recording and then deleted the message, and resolved to start again in the morning.
* * *
The satphone worked only in the late afternoons, communications dropped and stuttered alternately compressing and stretching distance and expectation. Watts sat with Rem beside the water tanks and tried to help Rem send messages back to ACSB, when the news came back that it was closing.
‘You knew this?’ Watts asked.
‘First I’ve heard.’
‘Clark said something when we were leaving.’
‘He knew?’
‘Rumour.’
They looked down the highway.
‘Haven’t seen one vehicle.’
The highway trailed back, an empty spine. Not one thing on it.
* * *
Geezler wanted to know about the map. He’d consulted the maps at HOSCO and none of them had a highway running alongside the Saudi border. Rem asked Watts where the maps had come from.
‘Stores.’ Watts shrugged. ‘The usual.’
Rem asked Kiprowski: if the maps came from Stores, then where did Stores get them?
Kiprowski took the map and looked it over, held the paper close to his face to read, and found printed in the corner a small tagline, S-CIPA. This one came from Southern-CIPA, he said.
Rem managed to send his reply before the lines dropped. Pleased to have a result, he’d forgotten to ask the main question he’d had since they’d arrived: now they were here, exactly what were they supposed to do?
* * *
On the second morning they were woken by the arrival of six yellow garbage trucks. Groots. The same back-loading garbage trucks he’d seen on the streets of Chicago. The convoy arrived early, pre-dawn, and the men duly rose, curious, to greet them. At first sight they thought this funny: dump trucks with the municipal labels and signs stripped from the sides, here, in the middle of Iraq. And yellow? The driver of the first truck, a Ukrainian, Stas, was surprised to find the camp occupied, and when he jumped out of his cab he asked if Rem needed a permit or a manifest now, like at Bravo and SCB Alpha. Rem admitted that he didn’t know, and Stas assured him that there wasn’t too much to it.
‘Here we come with no permits.’
Stas carried about a small towel, which he used to wipe his hands and forehead. He spoke briefly with the other drivers, called Chimeno to him, and asked him to drive the tanker from the Quonset and follow them down to the pits. A line of blocked shapes, dim in the pre-dawn, headlights busy with insects, slowly followed the track downhill, their vibration humming through the night air.
Pit 4, closest to the Beach, was the deepest. Stas explained in broken English how he’d helped excavate the pit.
‘You dug this out?’ Rem couldn’t quite follow. ‘You made this?’
Rem’s question made him laugh. ‘You dig! Yes? You. Every week, maybe.’
The idea horrified Rem. ‘Every week we dig a new pit?’
‘No, you dig the same pit.’
This was the reason for the two diggers parked behind the Quonset.
‘How do you know when?’
‘To dig? You’ll know.’ The pits, Stas indicated, became full, and with a chopping motion he demonstrated how the pits were extended by cutting and in-filling, and by this process they grew at one end and shrank at the other. Continually dug out of the sand they crept, caterpillar-style, into the desert. Now it made sense why they were placed in a star-like configuration, radiating away from one another.
‘How often?’ Rem wanted to make this clear.
‘Depends.’ Stas pinched his nose. ‘Sand will stop the smell. But not so much.’ He wiped the back of his neck then waved the towel in the air. ‘The fire will stop the flies. You have clothes?’
Rem had found a crate of protective suits in the Quonset. Firemen’s bunker gear, rubberized suits with reflective belts and black zippers. He sent Chimeno back to the compound and told him to hurry.
Stas tied the towel over his mouth, bandit-style, and supervised the dumping. The trucks began to unload one at a time at the near end of the pit. The first truck shivered as the pistons struggled to tip the container high enough and the contents slipped out in a dense and mudlike mass.
Pakosta started laughing. ‘That’s disgusting.’ The men watched as the black waste flopped into the pit. ‘Man, that’s graphic.’
The second truck spewed out a muddle of white bags and they watched them roll and slop, getting now a sense of depth and scale.
‘My parents,’ Pakosta shouted above the noise, ‘won a vacation on a game show. A week in Kenya. For five days they saw nothing. Some giraffes. A couple of hyenas. Someone brought them a dead snake. On their last night they stopped at this water hole and saw, like, fifty hippos — and all these hippos did was back up to the water and shit in it for something like half an hour. They made a video.’
Chimeno returned with one suit folded over his arm. Reflective strips caught the light from the trucks. ‘There’s five complete, and another one without the mask-thing, and a whole bunch of different filters.’
Stas told Chimeno to dress in the suit, then showed him how to unhook a hose from the side of the tanker, then clamp the mouth to a faucet on the back. Satisfied, Stas walked a good ten metres from the pit and scored a line in the grit with his heels. ‘Here,’ he shouted to Rem. ‘Everyone come here.’
Once the hose was fastened, Stas warned everyone to keep their distance. ‘No smoke! OK?’
He stood Chimeno at the edge of the pit, kicked the kinks out of the hose, and made Chimeno hold it up, indicating how he should stand, and how the hose should be gripped with both hands, and secured under one arm. When he turned the spigot on, Chimeno staggered back, but managed to stabilize himself and hold the nozzle up to send out a broad spray of fuel. The remaining trucks drove back to the camp. A sharp, head-splitting fume rose from the pit.
‘Jet fuel.’ Pakosta clapped his hand over his mouth and nose.
The men naturally backed away.
After two minutes Stas closed off the spigot and called Chimeno back for assistance. Once the men had tucked the hose under the tanker he drove a good distance away, then returned running to the group.
‘Now this,’ he held up his hand. ‘Watch.’
It took Rem a moment to recognize that Stas was holding a hand grenade.
Stas held the grenade upside down, twisted the base, then lobbed it softly overarm into the pit. A gesture so casual, Rem expected nothing to result from it. As Stas stepped carefully back, Santo, Watts, Clark, Pakosta on one side, and Chimeno, Samuels, Kiprowski and Rem on the other, all followed suit.
‘And now we see.’