Gardens of Water by Alan Drew Read Free Book Online Page B

silence Sinan could hear the grains settle on the debris, as though the sky were raining pebbles. Thrushes sang in still-standing trees, an outboard motor whined offshore—sounds of normal life that angered him now. Then an unsteady ping, ping of tapped metal rose from the rubble. A few men cheered, but the American threw his hand in the air and they quieted.
    “We’re coming,” the American said. And then he yelled something in English Sinan couldn’t understand.
    Sinan climbed into the hole with the man and together they scraped away disintegrated cinder blocks, piling the coarse stuff behind them. He shoved his torn knuckles into the pile, and then the American filled the space with his own bloody hands. One of the American’s fingers was snapped sideways, but he kept jabbing his hands into the debris. They pulled and twisted and threw and tugged for what seemed like hours until they finally came to something soft: a white thigh.
    The leg poked through a section of broken wood, and exposed wires wrapped around the blue knee like tendrils of seaweed. For a few seconds Sinan and the American froze at the sight, unsure what to do next, and Sinan had the grotesque thought that this leg was no longer a part of a whole body, that it was just the severed meat of what had once been a person. He was sure, though, it wasn’tsmail’s leg. It was a woman’s leg—the blue spider veins, the delicate kneecap, and the dark stubble of shaved hair left little doubt. The thigh was the American’s wife. You didn’t need to see her face to know that—few other women in the neighborhood would have left their legs uncovered, even to sleep at night.
    The American whimpered something in English and softly ran his hands over the thigh, dug his nails between skin and debris to jostle it loose. The color of the skin and the way it moved under the man’s touch left little doubt that the woman was dead. The American repeated a phrase, air escaping from his mouth as if he were hyperventilating.
    “I’m sorry,” Sinan said.
    The man did not look up, but he bent the knee out of the destruction to reveal a broken foot, the ankle blue and swollen the size of a fist. He hugged the knee, pulled it to his chest, and kept repeating a single phrase in English while he rocked back and forth.
    “I’m sorry,” Sinan said again, resting his hand on the man’s back. “But we’ve got to dig her out.”
    The American stopped and nodded. Sinan pulled at a piece of sheet metal that shook the leg.
    “Gently, gently!” the American screamed. “Gently, please.”
    Together they lifted the twisted metal from her body. Then they brushed away cement dust that had buried her thigh. Her shorts were pulled high to expose her underwear and a little of what was hidden beneath. Sinan choked with pain for the man, and worked her shorts down over the smooth edge of her thighs. They removed ropes of rebar and lifted the wet cloth of a rug that clung around her stomach. They did it so softly, with such slow, deliberate care, that Sinan remembered the night he cleaned his father’s body for burial—the way he scrubbed between the cold fingers, and washed his penis and the soft skin of his testicles. He remembered squeezing the water from the wet cloth over a bullet wound where his eye should have been, the black blood turning red and trickling across the mottled skin of his cheek and down over his white lips.
    A tent of wooden slats leaned above the woman’s chest, and they tried to dislodge them gently so as not to cause damage to her face. Each one they pulled revealed more of the woman—an arm with a silver bracelet looping around the wrist, the blade of a shoulder, her sunburned neck pushing through a shirt. The other side of the woman’s body and her face was covered by a wet shower curtain and one heavy block of broken cinder. The shower curtain was painted like a coral reef and colorful fish with smiles on their faces swam in the imaginary water. They