Criminals (6 page)

Eleanor Barnes had angled her calves and pressed her small ankles together, crimping her toes. She had on stockings in this heat, and a khaki skirt nipped in with a belt. She came from far back, from a time when toes were tucked in, ankles and waist meant something, maybe that you were in control of yourself.
Those little legs of yours would snap right off at the hip if a slab of concrete fell on you. You would pop like a boil.
But up and down Eleanor's legs she could see big mosquito bites.

Sweat had run along her hairline all afternoon; she could feel the hair frizzing. “The heat this month's a bit much for me,” Barnes said, and she saw he was breathless and pale.

Then, as if a striped tent had gone up over them, the subject was Skylab.

Skylab was circling downward, coming nearer and nearer to the Malay Peninsula. Quite possibly it would crash here. “Jittery Asia Waits for Skylab,” said the black headline. It took up the whole front page of the
Star
on the glass table. Where the point of entry would be no one could say for sure, not even in America. Eleanor flapped the paper open. “Oho—‘Skylab jitters!'”

“Read on,” said Carruthers.

“‘Singapore, Tuesday. Skylab jitters spread across several Asian countries today,'” she read. She used a marveling voice, with which she must have read, Amy thought bitterly, to the five children she and Barnes both liked to say they had inadvertently produced, “‘and the dying space station was reported to have claimed its first casualty in the Philippines. A fifty-four-year-old man died of a heart attack after shouting “Skylab Skylab” in a nightmare at four
AM
' Oh dear oh dear. Blah blah . . . ‘In largely illiterate and superstitious rural India, people have fled their homes and begun chanting prayers . . .,' and so on and so on, ‘. . . largely Buddhist Thailand . . . attitude fatalistic . . .' Oh! Oh my dears! Here we are! ‘Many business-minded Singaporeans say if they find a piece of the space station they will try to sell it.'”

“There's a good chance it will fall here,” Amy said loudly. “This isn't a little ticking clock coming down. One section weighs
five thousand pounds
.”

“Good lord, look out!” cried Carruthers.

“It won't land on us,” said Barnes. “It's a real American who thinks it will seek her out in Southeast Asia. States paranoia. All of you have a touch of it, my dear,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “It's only right for it to fall on you Americans.”

“What about a woman out tapping rubber trees. A child.” Amy took a long, sullen pull on the bottle. “If it's going to fall on anyone, it'll be somebody who is just going about his business while we're sitting here, while it's still up there. Somebody as alive as we are, but the same as dead.”

The beer was giving her the feeling of a barely delayed repetition: the same fleeting expression crossing each face like a goldfish coming round in a bowl, the same bottle closing with a little suck onto the water ring on the glass table, herself saying what she had already said, “. . . the same as dead.”

She had stopped the billowing of the tent of excitement. They drank their beer becalmed. Then Carruthers started talking about a gyroscopic guidance system used in missiles, and the thing whirled again in the room with its giant film vault, its seven-meter aluminum ring, its nuclear reactor. This last had been mentioned only once, in the morning, and then had disappeared from the news coverage. She thought the film vault and the reactor might be the same thing. Why would you need two tons around
film
?

Eleanor cut Carruthers off and began to tell them about the couple who had left their cat behind when they went home. Packed up and left it in the empty house. Of course it could get in and out through the louvers and rejoin its thin sisters in the wild, but the wildness had left it, and it stayed. It was getting spoiled rice somewhere; it had the smell of the drains on it. “And the next thing, of course, was that it slunk in one morning and arranged itself on
our bed
. My dear!”

Amy said nothing.

“Then of course it was ours, it just fastened on us! We had to shut it in a back room and there it howled while we waited for the animal control people to make an appearance. You can imagine. You know these people. But Charles fed it faithfully, didn't you, Charles?”

“All but the one day.”

“Shame on you, dear. Whatever day?”

“When we were off having Hari Raya. . . .” Barnes scratched his yellow arm.

“Guess what I found today!” Amy got up unsteadily. “In the house. In the amah's pantry. Look at this.” She grabbed the box and tipped the snakeskin out onto the table, making loops on the glass. When she stepped back, Barnes gave a weak shout and jumped up, knocking over his chair and beer bottle.

“Oh, for pity's sake, Charles.” Eleanor leaned forward to sop up the beer with napkins and scrutinize the skin. “I'd be willing to bet that's a cobra!” Barnes was over against the flagstone wall. “Charles is phobic,” Eleanor said wearily. “She said, dear, that it went behind the water heater. By now it's off hunting, like Kaa. After rodents, not us. Quite gone.”

“I'm just—I'm going out for just a moment to see—we have a dog here,” Amy said, putting up her hands to keep them in their seats.

“Whatever is the matter? Where are you off to?” It was Carruthers, pushing aside the palm leaves and coming out with her. “Look here, a cobra doesn't swallow a dog.”

“Do keep that
bee
from launching an attack!” cried Eleanor's voice from inside. “One of those pesky great bees has been assaulting poor Amy over the washing!”

“Over my dead body!” Barnes had recovered himself and came blinking out into the sun swinging his wife's big embroidered purse by the straps.

Amy grabbed for the purse, in slow motion because of the beer. “Don't! You can't
swat
it!”

But Barnes held on. “Oh no
no.
There's no need! No, my dear, this is what you do. The clothesline, is it?”

The clothesline was in the same place in all the yards. He got away from Amy while Carruthers trotted backward blocking her path and waving his arms. “Amy! Now then! A cobra won't go after a dog! Not to worry.” But the dog was gone.

All day the bee had its routine, leaving its perch and returning. Over and over all day long it left and returned on some errand, until the sun went down. Then it went somewhere secret. It slept.

“I have the culprit in view,” came Barnes's voice. “He's not an insect, he's a V-2!”

Amy shook Carruthers off her arm. Barnes had Eleanor's purse hairspray straight out in front of him in both hands. “Try this in the propeller!” The bee was visible in the jet of spray. It wobbled on the clothespin, shivering its wings one at a time, and dropped to the ground where it began to crawl past the bird with no eyes, which Amy had failed to wrap up and throw away. It crawled over the mess of fallen orchids, laboring now, and over the network of roots leading under the bush.

“Oh, God!” Before Amy's eyes everything went dark gold, like gasoline. She slapped the spray can out of Barnes's hands, straight up in the air, and shoved him in the chest. He staggered backward against the garbage cans, which clattered over and spilled with him between them, at the same time as Amy dropped to all fours so that she could spread the branches, so clamped to the ground they were half roots already. She couldn't see anything under the bush, but she could hear a metallic resounding from the trash cans. Then streams of words from all sides. “I'm afraid,” Carruthers's voice kept saying, “I'm afraid that she was rather fond of it,” while Eleanor Barnes was murmuring in a stricken way, pulling her husband up by the hands.

Carruthers insisted on stroking Amy's back and speaking very slowly to her. What was the dog's name? And what breed of dog?

“Why did you have to do that?” She stayed down on the ground while a voice came out of her, flat and mean. “Why would you hurt a bee? I bet you think you're a good person. I bet you don't know what the Prophet said. He said the man who tied up his cat and starved it would be
thrown into hell
.” After she said that she had a return of dead sobriety and opened her eyes. Maybe they would not be there.

But there they were. There was an open-endedness to the scene, as if they might be in the process of rehearsing it. There was Barnes
blindly cleaning his glasses. There was Eleanor wordlessly holding him by the arm, both of them looking shocked and old. Of course. And herself, below them, in the dirt with anthills and shreds of ancient plastic.

Eleanor's blouse was untucked, her nose was purple under melting powder. Her face had puffed up so that she resembled those bedraggled women who sat in the dirt outside refugee tents.

“I'm sorry,” Amy said. “I'm awful. I'm awful.”

“You aren't yourself,” Eleanor got out finally. “I must say.”

“Ready?” Carruthers said, and he hoisted Amy to her feet with so much momentum it almost threw her into his arms, but she pulled free. She bowed her head and held out her hand to Barnes, who took it weakly and smiled at her. Of course it would happen that way. He would smile at her.

“Don't forgive me,” she said.

“We'll be off, and you have a rest,” Eleanor said, getting back some of her authority. “Heat will combine with alcohol, you know, or . . .” She looked Amy up and down.

“I'm not pregnant, if that's what you think,” Amy said. “Don't touch me,” she said to Carruthers, lifting his hand off her arm. “I'm unclean.” She laughed a short burst and then another, on the way to the front door. Hurriedly the three guests bent, the Barneses propping each other, and put on their shoes.

It had been Eleanor Barnes. The voice in a kitchen in the
lorong
, at a meeting of the Koran study group.

“Oh, I think in her twenties. Poor man, she just made off with him. A silly little thing. A little floor nurse, I think she was. But
look
at her, of course.” “Do you think they
are
married?” “Heaven knows, my dear. And there were children. And the wife was so involved here years ago, I'm told. Quite his equal.”
Then there was silence, the silence of someone pointing, because Amy had gone in through the kitchen ahead of them, it was the amah's day off and she went into the amah's bathroom.

A silly little thing.
Of course in that bathroom there was no toilet. But now she was in there. There was a pit, quite clean, and a little
hose. She kept thinking of turning the hose on herself, drenching herself from head to foot.

A silly little thing.

She, who in another country had wrapped a brown leg severed at the knee in her shirt, and carried it under her arm, pressed against her and dripping down her ribs like a bloodied infant. She and her partner were in their underpants; they had taken off their jeans to make a kind of hammock. With him she was carrying the one-legged boy, shocky and grinning, who kept sighing, “
Gracias, gracias
.”

A silly little thing.
She, who had, at home in her own city, shriveled a boy the same age as that one to a skeleton by uttering in savage joy, as she stood with his father in a crowded place, the ordinary syllable, “Yes.”

Later that day she had a different reaction to it. She warmed to the idea.
A silly little thing
. The comfort of being that.

But at the time she stayed in the amah's bathroom for a while, and when she opened the door she thought about going home, but went around to the front of the house instead and came in again, and sat down to tea as if she had merely been out finding something forgotten in the car, though she had no car, she had come on foot, and in an hour she would walk back, in the loud afternoon shrilling of that insect, whatever it was, that drowned out thought.

She could hear a mosquito under the net with her. It was late, the plush navy darkness. She was awake because the ceiling fan and the radio had suddenly come on.

She sat up and yanked the net aside with her feet: John had not come back. And the telephone had not rung. No call from his family. Nothing about his son. But Skylab had fallen. Of course it had; it had fallen in the afternoon, even before they were sitting with their beer arguing about it.

It had not landed on anyone.

Several BBC reporters were doing a sort of reprise of the day, hour by hour as Skylab lumbered down the sky, now over this city, now over that. What was it the voices reminded her of? As they had been predicting
with more and more certainty all along, Skylab had come down far from any human settlement, in Australia. It had done no harm.

But something was wrong. Something had filled Amy with an awful, stifling regret while she slept.

“. . . the way we expected it to. And that's a relief to a lot of people in that part of the world who have a crick in their neck. But there's work to be done to set the public's mind at rest, and I think, don't you? that NASA would be the first to agree it's their job to do it.”

Charge nurses sometimes had that reined-in satisfaction when everything was going to pieces. The nuns—that was it—the nuns had had it when they rounded everyone up for an assembly after a girl had been expelled. That insistence on the hidden order that included whatever had taken place, but still required them to search their consciences, each one, to see if the punishment that had fallen on that other girl was really meant for her.

Amy got up and stood under the wobbling fan. It was too dark to see in the room. She didn't want to step on anything alive. Did the ants labor up and down the bathroom wall all night? Why did they climb the leg of the bed in the morning, when you had left? What kept them from coming while you were there, following the scent of lips, eyeballs, sticky membranes? Why didn't they eat you alive?