LITMIR.BIZ

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adaptation of Jesus’s Lord’s Prayer. Jo had come to know it well, since it was now intoned at every family celebration and every gathering of her extended family in the visits to Barahona. Particularly poignant for her this moment was the petition to “Our Father (Guakia Baba) [for deliverance from evil] (Juracan-ua—bad spirit no; Maboya-ua—ghost no, Jukiyu-jan—good spirit yes), of God (Diosa).” Evil was the worst spiritual bad business—the great cosmic upsetter of all plans and all lives that turned hope to grief and joy to misery. It stopped everything in defiance of good and of progress and it had only one antidote—final grace to match its own finality. And her father called upon that now. When he finished, he embraced Jo and kissed her tenderly and then stepped out. Jo did not try to stop him and ask any of the questions racing through her head because she knew he had to spend the rest of the night securing plane reservations and packing.

      But, just before they left, her stepmother stepped back in and said in a low, quick voice, “Jo, you know I love you as if you were my own daughter, and I want you to succeed in everything. Wait a bit, dearest. Before you make any plans to sell, there are some absolutely crucial things you need to know.” Her striking eyes pleaded with Jo through her thick glasses. Then she hurriedly kissed her too and left.

      Jo simply stood there in the doorway, gaping after them.

      5

      If Basil and Star thought the little patch of unfinished road up which they had nipped to see the little faces was a cause of concern in the otherwise well-paved highway north of Descubierta, they were totally unprepared for what lay to the south. They had begun the afternoon’s adventure in good enough spirits, remarking how beautiful it all was, as the sight of the lake, now continually in view of the road, filled them both with its promise of a brand-new opportunity about to blossom. That they may have been misreading what that promise was exactly did not occur to them. So, even the poorer little towns to the south, desperately trying to ignore the lake’s own ineluctable agenda and carry on business as usual, did not daunt their enthusiasm.

      “Nobody’s developed this,” Basil kept marveling, as Star now guided their little truck up the narrowing road that ran along the lake’s western shore. “Honey, I was looking at the map in the guidebook while you were sleeping this morning, and I think we should give Pedernales a miss.” He waved down Star’s immediate chagrin before it turned into a protest from which he feared there’d be no return. “I know, I know, it’s on the Caribbean Sea and all that, but there’s a huge mountain range between us and it—look at the map in the book—it’s called the Sierra de Bahoruco, and I don’t see any towns marked on it and no roads going through it, so, if they got ’em, they’re worse than what we’ve been through already. Plus,” he added quickly before she could speak, “the only way in is to cross the border into Haiti, and it’s a long meandering way back from there.”

      “Wow,” said Star glumly, reaching over to open the glove compartment, where she now stowed the guidebook so it would always be at hand. They’d folded the pages around the map so it fell open at the spot to reveal that Basil was, sadly, absolutely right. As he had calculated, all her fears of Haiti were back into play, so she closed up the book, dropped it into Basil’s lap, and kept on driving.

      “But, look, Star,” he added quickly, now that he’d taken one toy out of her hand, to replace it swiftly with another—a good strategy that he’d often used in a con. “If we take that talky innkeeper’s advice and keep going around the lake, I’m sure we can find some more decent-looking towns and figure out an angle for all this. Besides,” he laid down his argument’s clincher card, “this lake road runs straight to Barahona. That was one of our two targets. It looks huge, and it’s right on the beach.”

      “Okay,” said Star to all this, as she too was convinced as much by the little map as by Basil’s argument that this underdeveloped area was their only choice if they were going to find a place to hide on the peninsula.

      Basil had no idea what the northern shore was like, past the caritas, the mountain of little faces, but he suspected it was a lot like this western one: basically barren, relieved only by a few poor villages—but, hopefully, as well, some bigger cities. “Nobody’s developed this at all,” he murmured over and over again like a mantra, as he looked around pointedly for possibilities. As they drove, he would see an occasional little house between the villages and a few cows or a sheep or a goat with a kid scurrying behind it, making way for them. But, besides several large vehicles barreling by in the Dominican way, missing them by a hairbreadth and making the little truck shake, as the road was narrow, there were few if any cars on the road.

      And then Star snapped him out of his reverie, announcing, “There’s the detour!”

      Basil wrested his eyes away from the lake and realized that the comforts of Descubierta were long gone. The road was deathly white. The detour led into what appeared to be a quarry. The detour itself was no more than a very wide service path, filled with stones. The sides of the path were blanched with a cement-like dust. In fact, the whole area was a desolate plain, broken only by the road construction. No oasis like the lovely little town of Descubierta was anywhere in sight—and to their right, in the distance, a forbidding-looking chain of high mountains rising into the clouds.

      “What’s that?” asked Star in a querulous voice, slowing the little truck nearly to a stop.

      “That’s Haiti,” Basil said glumly, the map in the little book open in his lap.

      She shuddered and started up the road, bumping and sliding along the stones and the ruts.

      Basil glanced over at the lake. It looked equally forbidding now. It lay sullen, dissipating into a huge floodplain that had engulfed everything around it. All along its shore was a huge marshland of short swamp grass and the tops of engulfed trees. The water was obviously expanding at what must be a frightening rate. As he gauged it on the map, he noticed something else. “Starling,” he cried, “there’s another lake just like this, just to our right in Haiti! We’re actually going through a little bridge of land between these two lakes. I think they’re trying to meet!”

      “Can’t these countries do anything about this?” Star demanded.

      He stared at her. “I think the land is disappearing,” he said. He studied the map more closely and then came to another realization. “Star, do you remember when we were up on that ‘faces’ mountain?”

      “Sure, what of it?”

      “Did you see an island?”

      “No, just water, and plenty of that.”

      “Well, there’s supposed to be an island in the middle of this lake, right next to where we are right now—a place called Isla Cabritos.”

      “Goat Island?”

      “Yeah, you see an island?”

      Star craned over, slowing the truck to a bumpy halt, and surveyed the great body of water. “No.”

      “Me neither.”

      “What are you saying?”

      “I think it’s gone.”

      “You mean the land is disappearing?”

      “Right—it’s submerging.”

      Star opened her mouth and then closed it again. She started the little truck bumping along the road at a heightened speed, but had to slow it down almost immediately, as they were so jostled about that she was having trouble keeping it straight. “We gotta get outa here,” was all she muttered.

      The road at times dipped down below the cutaway hill and the mound of whitened dirt, making Basil feel like they were rattling through a valley of concrete, as indeed they were: thousands of small stones on a cement surface. But, always to the left, he could sense the lake, faceless, unfeeling, inexorably sending its water out to claim more and more land. The two lakes were reaching to each other with an underground handclasp only hinted at by this surface expansion. He shuddered. He did not like this lake anymore. Now he feared it.

      “A

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