Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Rizal Rojas lumbered over on his knees. “I am Manny- manananggal, ” he said. “ I can save you, Negrita.” He knelt at Pedro’s standing legs and looked up. “Negrita, let me drink your blood! I’m a womb-eating vampire, after all — and look! I’m the perfect height! Somebody get me a straw!”

The girls howled in squeamish, scandalized delight. Ruben Delacruz clapped his hands. “Well done,” he said. I tried to picture myself as an actual manananggal, flying my half-body high above the school-yard laughter. This little piece of vaudeville wasn’t the worst they’d inflicted on me, in my school career, but I felt new and unaccustomed to it. In the short time I’d spent with Annelise, I had forgotten what it was to be lonely.

After school, a group of students followed me home on their knees. They went as far as the gate and then abandoned me, knowing that our gardener would shoo them off with a giant pair of pruning shears. Once they had gone, I started to wheel myself past the front yard to the house, then stopped. Annelise lived down the other side of the hill, on the banks of the ravine dotted with squatters’ shacks. Without pausing to consider why, I turned my wheelchair and pumped past the houses on our street, then coursed down the yellow grass to the ravine.

It took some doing: each rut in the hill’s soil bumped me forward. I pressed my weight back to gain some balance. The slope seemed to grow steeper the further I rolled. I hooked an arm behind me, the wooden backrest in the bend of my elbow, while steering forward with the other hand. The grass gave way to rocks and mud, which clung to my wheels at every turn. Every few years, during the wet season, mudslides swept some houses clean off this bank into the creek. I feared toppling forward and landing in the water with my chair overturned, its dirt-caked wheels spinning.

By the time I reached the first shack, the air had thickened, with an overwhelming stench of smoke and urine and spoiled milk. The shacks were patched together from cardboard and plywood and other scraps, raised by stilts, and roofed with corrugated tin. Clotheslines joined one shack to the next like crude telephone wires. An old woman, her lips puckered inward where the teeth had fallen out, stood in front of the first shack. Some children kicked around a metal can beside her. When they saw me, they stopped and gathered to stare.

I recognized Annelise in their large bottomless eyes. Perhaps all the ravine’s children learned to look at people this way. Suddenly I remembered what was said about the squatters: that their kind would dive into canals and landfills, scavenging scraps to sell or use or eat. What would they do with me, an outsider in a school uniform, with a steel chair and books hanging from his mouth? I resolved to give them anything they wanted, so long as I could see Annelise and make it back up the hill, using my bare hands if I had to. Like a dog who’d just fetched for its master, I released my books into my lap.

“I am looking for Annelise Moreno,” I told the children. “Do you know where she lives?” One boy, wearing a shirt but no pants, pointed down the row of houses. A small girl said she’d show the way if I let her push me. I agreed, blinking away another vision of my chair upended in the ravine. My wheels sank slightly into the earth and caught every so often on rocks within it. But my young guide pushed with surprising force. She left me beside a woman yanking clothes off a line. “Over there,” said the woman, jerking her head to the next shack. “Girl kept us up all night with her moaning and crying!”

I tapped lightly on the side of the house. Instead of a door, a faded green tarp covered a gap between the tin walls. Because of the stilts, I could not go inside even if I were someone who entered other people’s houses uninvited.

When the tarp lifted, none other than the famous Dr. Delacruz emerged from the doorway, with his kind eyes and waves of gray hair. “Anak,” he said, surprised to see me there.

“Doctor?” I said, then explained: “Annelise and I are partners. For the fiesta. And her mother…works for mine.”

“But how on earth did you…?” The doctor looked from my wheelchair to the hilltop, in the direction of my house.

Annelise’s mother, our laundress, lifted one side of the tarp and looked out, her arms cradling an infant. I could hear groans from behind the tarp.

“Anak,” the laundress said, looking frightened, as if I’d come to scold her.

“Who’s out there?” I heard Annelise call from inside. “Danny?” I was not prepared for the smell that came from beyond the tarp, magnified since the gymnasium to something like raw meat and burning sugar. But I was even less prepared for the wail that Annelise let out just then, a sound of pain so mighty that it seemed the walls and tin roof might not hold it.

“Let’s go, anak, ” said Dr. Delacruz. “The medicine might take some time to work. Right now your friend’s not in a state for visitors.” He wheeled me around and pushed me through the dirt, where Annelise’s smells gave way to the surrounding air of mud and smoke.

The doctor brought me up the hill and home. “And here I thought I was the only one from town who visits the ravine,” he said, kneeling to clean the mud off my wheelchair before we entered the sala.

“I’d never visited before,” I said. “I haven’t known Annelise long.”

Inside, he sat down on the sofa next to me. “How are the fiesta preparations coming?”

He was so kind I didn’t feel the need to lie. “Annelise can’t learn the dance everyone’s learning, thanks to me.” I told him how my day had gone, the new manananggal insult, the children hobbling home beside me on their knees. I didn’t mention Ruben, but the doctor winced anyway, as if my suffering were his fault. He stayed and listened until my mother came down from the bedroom with the electrician, who nodded quickly at the doctor as he hurried out.

When Dr. Delacruz greeted my mother, she barely nodded in return. On other days the doctor would bring food to us— leche flan, a macaroni salad — or send his cook to deliver them, but when my mother saw he had nothing like that on offer this time, she went back upstairs. We heard water running. Of all the men who visited our house, only Dr. Delacruz never followed my mother up the stairs. And for all his kindness and attention, my mother was as cold and distant with the doctor as she was warm and inviting with almost all other men. Sometimes she refused to greet or come down to see him at all. Instead, he’d sit with me, flipping through comic books Ruben had already read and thrown away, or asking how my day had gone, how I was feeling.

“What will you and your mother eat tonight?” the doctor asked, after she’d gone.

“Whatever Marivic prepares.” My mother had taught me always to present to the world that we had plenty, in the way of food and help.

“Are you sure?” asked Dr. Delacruz. “I can send Celia over with something after I get home.”

“No need,” I said, repeating words I’d heard my mother say to him before. “We have enough to feed a village. Thank you, Dr. Delacruz.”

We said good night.

—

With the doctor’s help, I got better at navigating the slope between my house and the squatters’ colony. On my third visit, I saw we weren’t Annelise’s only guests. Squatters had gathered at the steps of her shack, holding buckets of water. I recognized the old woman with the sunken mouth, as well as the young girl who’d pushed my wheelchair, among the others forming a passageway from the ladder and the tarp.

“This is good news,” said Dr. Delacruz. He rested his palm on the back of my chair. “It means your friend is doing better.”