Devil's Keep Read Free

occupied by people filling out forms on clipboards. At the front wall, a plump middle-aged woman sat at a desk. A nameplate on the desk read: REGIONAL MANAGER. She impatiently motioned Marivic inside and gave Marivic a clipboard and a form— BIOGRAPHICAL DATA AND APPLICATION FOR REPRESENTATION , the form said—and Marivic took it to the last empty chair and began to fill it out, balancing the clipboard on her knees.
    The air in the room was dense and torpid. An electric fan turned lazily overhead. Marivic wiped her damp forehead with the back of one hand to keep the beads of sweat from dripping onto the form. When she was finished, she brought the clipboard to the desk and stood waiting as the plump woman examined the form. Finally the woman sent her to a clinic on the first floor for a physical exam. A doctor took her medical history, examined her eyes and ears and throat, listened to her heart and lungs, and drew a blood sample. Marivic trudged back up to the top-floor office. The woman curtly told her that the application would be sent to the head office. Whatever happened would come out of Manila.
    It didn’t sound encouraging.
    Marivic felt foolish as she walked out. What chance did she have?
Everybody
in the Philippines wanted to work abroad. She had wasted a day off.
    Three days later, the Manila office called. They had a job for her, but it had to be filled quickly. Could she be in Manila in two days?
    Marivic stammered a yes.
    She was instructed to return to the Tacloban office, where the regional manager gave her a reserved-seat bus ticket and one thousand pesos—more than a week’s wages at the restaurant—for incidental expenses. The plump woman told her that an agency employee would meet her at the bus terminal in Manila. While Marivic waited for her passport, she would stay free of charge at the agency’s dormitory.
    “Be sure that you’re on that bus,” the woman told her.
    Marivic hurried home to pack. The next morning she was headed north, stunned by her good fortune.
    The journey to Manila was twenty-two hours, nearly a full day and a night.
    Marivic stayed awake through the daylight hours, eagerly taking in the countryside she had never seen before. It included a crossing of a spectacular bridge high above the San Juanico Strait, terrifying but thrilling, and a two-hour passage on a large ferry that carried the bus to a landing at the southern tip of the island of Luzon.
    Manila was on Luzon, so the rest of the trip was overland. Something about that thrilled Marivic, knowing that there was no more water between her and the big city. MANILA 670 KM said a road sign at the ferry landing. Marivic pulled her cell phone fromthe pocket and powered it up. It got a signal, three bars.
    This didn’t surprise her. In the past ten years, cell service had proliferated throughout the country, with towers appearing even on remote mountaintops. The Philippines was cell crazy. All but the very poorest owned a phone with a prepaid SIM card. Airtime for conversations was relatively expensive, beyond the budgets of most, but a text message cost only a few centavos. For the price of a scoop of steamed rice at an outdoor food stall, you could send dozens of texts. So Filipinos were now a texting nation, universally adept, able to walk, talk, eat, drive—sometimes even make love—while their thumbs danced on the phones’ numeric pads.
    Marivic, seeing the three bars, thought about Ronnie. He had always wanted to make the journey to the big city.
    She sent him a text:
    manila 670 km
    Moments later, the reply flashed back:
    lucky u
    The bus ground on. Twice more that day, as road signs passed her window, Marivic sent texts to her brother.
    manila 512
    Ronnie answered:
    :-(
    And just before dark:
    manila 402
    That got no answer at all. Ronnie was pouting, she thought, and was missing her. She would feel the same in his place.
    She slept on and off after nightfall, waking when the bus stopped in towns and small cities.