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 truck!” cried Star, nodding her head forward.
A cloud of white dust shot up in the distance.
“A cow!” yelled Basil, pointing. There on the mound of dirt was a black cow lumbering along the crest. As the white mound beside them tapered off, they saw four more cows grazing on the stiff grass beyond the dust.
The truck rumbled by, and Star waved in delight. Then a motorcycle with two soldiers on it jolted by, and the road turned to the left.
“This looks like a city dump!” grumbled Basil. And, indeed, mounds of garbage replaced the mounds of dust. Some of it was burning, giving off an acrid odor. Cans and food waste and paper and clouds of flies spread for a quarter mile before they came to a perpendicular road with trees and shrubs on the other side.
Star turned left and started up the road, momentarily disoriented, assuming she was on the other side of the lake now and wanting to pick up the shoreline drive.
“Look, a crane,” said Basil, pointing to Star’s left. A beautiful white crane sat on a small tree limb, regarding them.
“There’s one on your right—a brown one,” said Star, and Basil turned to see an even larger brown crane in another small tree.
“There are cranes everywhere in these woods. . . .”
“Bo, look at the road ahead,” cried Star. She stopped the truck in the middle of the road. What they saw was a panoramic view of what looked like the dissolution of civilization. Twenty yards ahead, the road simply disappeared. No wonder nobody was on this road except for them.
Basil got out and started walking forward. To his right, no more than six feet from the highway they were on, water was among the trees. As he walked the first ten yards, the water came right up to the edge of the road. All the little trees and bushes were standing
