The Killing Sea by Richard Lewis Page B

watered and his throat convulsed, but he took the coconut to the girl.
    The girl first let her brother drink. He guzzled and then turned his head away. She finished the rest. The woman whacked open the nut, making a scoop spoon out of discarded husk, and the girl slurped at the soft white meat.
    The woman opened two more nuts, one for Ruslan and one for herself. “I hope you at least know how to climb a coconut tree,” she said. “We’ll need more.” She put down the machete and said, “Where were you when it happened?”
    Ruslan didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Meulaboh.”
    â€œMe too. I’d gone to the market.” She opened her mouth to say more but then squeezed her lips shut and lowered her head, pressing the crook of her trembling arm to her eyes.
    Ruslan sat a distance away to give the woman her privacy and ate his coconut, forcing himself to take slow, measured scoops, wasting not a single delicious bit of it.
    â€œHello, excuse me,” the girl called out to him. “My brother is sick. He needs a doctor. I need to go to Calang for a doctor.” The girl spoke slowly and loudly, her tone capitalizing each word.
    â€œThat’s where I’m going myself,” Ruslan said.
    The girl blinked. It seemed almost like magic, the way those blue eyes vanished and reappeared again. “You speak English?”
    â€œYes.” Again he waited for her to recognize him—after all, how many employees in Meulaboh harbor-front cafés spoke English?
    â€œGreat. You can help me. What’s your name?”
    She still didn’t place him. “My name is Ruslan.” He didn’t tell her that he’d served her family cold Cokes at the harbor, didn’t tell her that his father had fixed their engine, didn’t want his disappointment to deepen.
    â€œMine’s Sarah. He’s Peter.”
    What had happened to their mother and father?But that he could imagine quite clearly, the sailboat taken by the flooding sea, the children becoming separated from the parents.
    The girl Sarah rose to her feet. “We’d better get going, then.”
    The going was slow. Here the beach had sunk under the sea, which now lapped against swamps and toppled oil palms they had to navigate. Ruslan and the woman, whose name was Aisyah, took turns helping the fevered boy, whose main concern was his cat. Matter of fact, it seemed to be the cat who found the easiest traverses. At one point Aisyah muttered to Ruslan, “I think the creature’s actually a djinn.”
    An hour before sunset it was Aisyah, and not the cat, who pointed out a grove of coconut palms several hundred yards inland. “We need some of those nuts,” she said. “And we might as well spend the night.”
    They made what camp they could, using a torn piece of tarp they found in the grove for both ground cloth and roofing. Ruslan tucked the machete in the back of his jeans and wandered out of sight. Each village had men who specialized in climbing coconut trees to harvest nuts—pilots, they were called, because they were always up in the air—and he knew many boys who could do thesame, but he’d never climbed a palm tree in his life. He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the others.
    Still, he managed, even though he slipped twice, scraping his arms. He whacked a couple of clusters out of the first palm, the nuts thudding on the ground. High on the second palm, a swarm of biting ants attacked him. Not wanting to climb a third tree, he gritted his teeth and chopped down the first cluster.
    He was just raising the machete for another chop when he heard Sarah screaming.

Chapter 16
    While Ruslan went in search of coconuts, Sarah went to find a secluded place to go to the bathroom. On her way back she momentarily lost her way and came across a well with a plastic bucket still attached to a rope tied to a wooden beam. She tested the well water. Salty