The Yard

El Fraile, and the road home. Spring, 2041.

The road down to El Fraile got drier with every kilometer. Stef had grown up knowing this fact and could not, even now, fully accept it: that you could leave Querencia in fog and arrive on the south coast in the kind of dry pale sunlight that suggested the island was actually two islands sharing an address. The laurisilva did not exist in El Fraile. The laurisilva would die in El Fraile.

Below Santiago del Teide the road ran him into a romería getting under way, and he did what you did: he slowed to walking pace and became, briefly, part of it. Ox carts half-dressed in palm fronds and flowers, boys up on the wheels tying the last of it on; men in the black-and-white mantas their grandfathers had worn; women bright as banderines in the old corseted trajes, standing about in the early light waiting on somebody's uncle; the whole village getting ready to walk downhill to the hermitage with its food on its back. Nobody minded the truck. A woman he had never met handed a paper cone of garbanzas through his window without breaking stride, and an old man topped up the enamel cup on Stef's dashboard with country wine, unasked, at twenty past eight in the morning, and the village flowed around the Santana like water around a stone it approved of. The romerías had never stopped. They were the one institution that had been rehearsing the quiet for three hundred years ⁓ everyone walking, everyone carrying food, everyone giving it away ⁓ and when the world finally arrived at their economics, the romerías simply failed to notice.

At the mouth of the next barranco a wayside cross stood in its cairn of volcanic stones with fresh flowers at its foot, the way it always had, tended by somebody Stef had never once seen in twenty years of this road.

He took the last switchback in second gear. The truck made the noise it made when it was happy.

It was a Santana, which is to say a Land Rover that learned Spanish. Solihull licensed them to a factory in Linares, in Andalusia, back in the fifties, and Spain built Series IIs and Series IIIs under its own sun and its own name for half a century, and the islands took to them the way the islands take to anything that refuses to quit: by the late twentieth century half the bananeros on the north coast ran one. Leaf springs. Four cylinders. Gearing borrowed from a mule. Stef's was a '71 Series III pickup, seventy years old now, hand-cranked when the starter was being a bastard, with an electrical system you could read like a children's book and a diesel that burned banana biodiesel without ever once asking what it was. The moderns had been fussy eaters full of chips nobody could replace, and when the parts stopped coming they had died in their thousands, politely, in driveways, like good appliances. A Santana you could fix with a spoon under a tree on the side of the road. Stef had, twice, and one of those times it had actually been a spoon. The north was full of the bones of old ones ⁓ donors, everyone called them, stripped gentle and kept for each other ⁓ and a running Santana in 2041 was worth more than the house it parked beside. Mateo kept one, the '78 he called Paloma. Tibor kept one above the cave. The troupe rolled its whole life behind one. This was not coincidence. This was the island voting.

He had taken the gravel out of the air filter twelve months ago and it had not gone back in.

He had to fill it at Ten-Bel, because there is nowhere else.

That is the whole arrangement of the south in one sentence, and everybody who lives down here says it the same flat way, the way you say it looks like rain. The Prophets press the fuel. They press all of it. There are four presses on this island that work and the congregation owns four.

So you go to Ten-Bel.

The pump stands under the old clubhouse canopy with a hand crank and a glass measure on top, and a brother of the congregation operates it, and the price is the price, and there is no arguing with it because there is nobody else to argue with. Stef has watched a fisherman from Las Galletas argue with it for eleven minutes once. The brother had listened to every word with enormous patience and enormous sympathy and had then charged him the price.

Today it was a young one Stef did not know, who cranked the handle and watched the glass fill and said, pleasantly, over the noise:

"You're the northern one. Reinhilde's boy."

"Forty liters."

"Because I've seen you here a few times now and I've never once seen you come in."

"Forty liters," said Stef.

He got forty liters. It took eight minutes, because the crank is slow, and it is slow because it is a hand crank, and a hand crank takes exactly as long as it takes ⁓ eight minutes in which you stand next to a man who is being kind to you and cannot be got away from, at a pump you cannot go around, in a colony you have to drive into, holding a hose.

The young brother talked the whole time. He talked about the vigilance and about how a man alone on the roads has more time to think than most and this was a gift and not a burden, and he asked after Stef's boys by name, both of them, which Stef had not told him, and he said that the door of the Hall was open on Sundays and had been open the whole time.

Stef said thank you. Stef paid. Stef has been paying that price and saying that thank you every six weeks for nine years.

He got back in the Santana with the smell of it on his hands and drove the four kilometers to the yard, and did not think about his mother.

The yard was on the south edge of the village, at a place where two of the old hotel-strip's access roads met and gave up. The fence was a kilometer of mismatched chain-link salvaged in the same way as everything else inside it. The gate had been a billboard once. Stef pulled up at the gate and tapped the horn twice, which was the agreed signal, and waited.

There was no immediate response.

Stef waited.

It was a quality he had.

After about a minute, a small woman in paint-spattered gray overalls appeared from behind a stack of Trinitron monitors, dust goggles shoved up into her hair, and shaded her eyes and squinted at the gate and then said:

"Stef, mein lieber Schatz, give me thirty seconds."

"Take a minute," Stef called back. "The truck is comfortable."

"I have coffee," Gertrude said, as a threat. "I have coffee from Margarethe."

"Take half a minute, then."

She vanished.

Stef sat in the truck. The engine ticked, cooling. From somewhere behind the central yard came the consistent small flare of someone using a torch on something, and a Spanish voice saying vale, vale, otra vez, without irritation. From somewhere closer came what Stef thought was either a goat or a small child making an extended complaint about a thing. He could not tell, from this distance, which.

He looked at the side of the nearest container.

Painted on it, large enough to be visible from the road, was Maisie Ardilla

Maisie Ardilla was holding a magnifying glass over a footprint in the sand. The footprint was clearly that of a goat. Maisie Ardilla's expression was one of professional concentration tinged with personal disappointment. Above her, in white spray-paint capitals, Gertrude had written:

The mural was new since Stef's last visit, six weeks ago. Stef looked at it for a long time and then he made the small face he made when he found something genuinely funny, which involved no muscle movement his sons would have recognized but which Godelieve had known since 2009.

The gate creaked.

Gertrude was holding two enamel mugs and walking very fast.

"Drink. Walk. We have a Wahnsinn morning, Stef, Wahnsinn. Two boxes. Two boxes from the Splendora Royale, Tomás brought them in yesterday afternoon, no quiero hablar de the second box because I will weep, also the first box. Coffee."

He took the mug.

It was Margarethe's, sent down on the Guagua, brewed by Gertrude in the El Fraile pour-over way, strong, slightly ashy, exactly correct.

"From Linnea's plantation?"

"Not yet, you fool. Not yet. Not till the winter. Barley off the Orotava flour run, roasted black in Margarethe's drum and cut with chicory. Drink the imitation. Come, come."

She walked. He walked.

The scrapyard at El Fraile was organized the way a brain is organized, which is to say not visibly but rigorously. It had grown by division. Anahita had the pipe and the steel and the construction salvage, which was the western half and most of the noise. Tomás had the forge. Gertrude had the electronics, and had for six years, and had categories that no other person on the island could fully reconstruct: will boot, might boot, physical media intact / format unknown, worth the silver, worth the copper, worth nothing but Anna might want it. The last was always the largest pile. Stef walked through it without particular concern.

The path to the shed went through the statues, because everything at El Fraile went through the statues. There was nowhere else to put them.

They had come off the coast in the first years, when the resorts were being taken apart for anything a person could carry, and nobody had been able to make themselves break them up, so they had ended here, in rows, on the flat inside the eastern fence. Naga Bay had given up the most: a green-and-gold serpent in eleven numbered sections, laid end to end in the dirt in the order it went together; four garudas; an elephant with a fibreglass seam down its spine. The Splendora Royale had given up its lobby ⁓ two women in wet plaster robes holding up nothing at all, a Poseidon with the trident gone, a run of Corinthian columns stacked like firewood. From the Steel Thunder there was a bear on its back legs, three and a half metres of it, that had once held a sign. Somebody had put a straw hat on the bear a long time ago and it had become the bear's hat, and it got replaced when the sun finished one.

They all faced roughly east, because that was the way the flatbed had been pointing on the days they came off it.

The graffiti kids painted them. That was the arrangement and it had held for years: you can paint anything in the rows, you cannot paint the machines, you clean the brushes after, and if it is going to be after midnight you come and get me and I will bring the good cans. So the serpent was a serpent in eight colors it had never been in Thailand, and the plaster women had been given eyes, and one of the garudas carried a full sleeve of small careful lettering that turned out, if you walked its length, to be the names of everyone who had ever painted it.

Stef had come through here a hundred times. He still slowed down at the bear.

Anahita came the other way up the row with a two-metre length of guardrail on her shoulder, off the TF-1 by the look of the paint, and she and Stef did what they did, which was nod and not stop walking.

"Stef."

"Anahita."

She had put him in front of four people once, in a year he did not talk about, who had no reason at all to help him and had helped him anyway. Neither of them had ever mentioned it since. That was the arrangement and it suited them both.

The torch he had heard from the gate turned out to be at the far end of the rows, where Tomás was running a bead along a cracked steel armature that had held up something once and would now hold up something else. There was a boy of about fourteen with him, whose name was somewhere on the garuda. Tomás lifted the torch away and pushed the mask up.

"Norteño."

"Tomás."

That was the greeting and had been the greeting for nine years. Tomás put the mask back down and the boy struck the arc and lost it, and Tomás said it again, vale, vale, otra vez, with no more irritation in it than the first time.

Tomás was sixty-two, and had been a luchador before he was a metalsmith, and he had the only forge at El Fraile hot enough to do anything about the statues. In thirteen years he had never once mentioned them.

She led him to her shed, which was the cleanest building on the property by a margin so wide it functioned as a moral statement. Inside, the air was dry. Two banker's boxes sat on a long bench, under a hand-lettered sign that said FOR STEF with a small painted squirrel beside it.

"Box one," said Gertrude.

She lifted the lid.

Inside were CDs, in their original cases, in alphabetical order. Stef counted at a glance: maybe two hundred. Spanish names, English names, German names. Bach. Björk. Cesária Évora. Daft Punk. And halfway down, a block more worn than all the rest ⁓ the cases gone soft at the corners the way only the most-played ones go ⁓ where the islands lived: Los Sabandeños. Pumuky. Quevedo. Taburiente. The rest were dusty but intact. A few of them had the small white sticker of a Madrid record shop that had closed some time around 2015.

"From the Splendora?"

"From a storage unit behind the Splendora. The unit had been padlocked for, I think, fifteen years. Tomás found the owner in the registry. The owner has not been seen since 2027." She blew a short breath out through her nose and left it at that. "I will not weep. The other box."

She lifted the second lid.

Inside, in foam, was a single object: a 2.5-inch external hard drive, slightly scratched, USB-A cable still attached, in a black aluminum enclosure. A small handwritten label on the top said, in faded biro:

Stef set down his mug.

"Boots?"

"I have not tried it, Stef. I have not tried it. That is for Anna. I will not be the one who finds out the bearings are seized. You take it up. You take it up carefully."

"It's a hard drive, not an egg."

"It is somebody's family, Stef."

He looked at her.

"It is somebody's family," she said again, and the second one was not for him.

He put the lid back on the second box, and on the first.

Then Gertrude went down the bench and moved a tray of drive caddies and took down a tin, and Stef knew what was going to happen before she had the lid off it.

"No," he said.

"Sit down."

"Gertie."

"Sit down, Stef."

He sat down on the crate.

The tin had come out of a pallet of them under a fallen roof at Las Chafiras, and there had been forty-one, and thirty-eight had gone to weather. Freeze-dried. Granules like small brown gravel. She had opened one in 2036 and one in 2039, and this was the last one, and everybody in the yard knew it was on that shelf and nobody had ever once suggested opening it.

She boiled the water on the little gas ring and did nothing clever with it. She lined up every mug in the shed, which came to five, and spooned it in and poured, and the smell came up and went across the shed and out the door, and out in the yard the torch stopped.

It did not taste like Margarethe's malt. It did not taste like very much at all, in truth ⁓ it was fourteen years past anything the label had promised, and thin, and a little like the tin. It tasted like a Tuesday morning in a kitchen in a country that was still there.

They came in without being called. Anahita drank hers standing in the doorway with her eyes shut and her hands still black to the wrist. The boy drank his much too fast and then looked stricken, and Gertrude told him there would be what was left in the pot, and he cheered up. Tomás held his in both hands and took a long time over it, and at the end he said, "Gracias, Gertie," and went out. That was the whole of his commentary. A moment later the torch started again.

Then it was the two of them.

Stef held the mug in both hands and drank about half and did not talk, and Gertrude sat up on the bench with her boots not reaching the floor and did the same.

"Why today," he said.

"Because somebody's family came in a box," said Gertrude, "and Tomás carried it in, and you are going to drive it up a mountain, and Anna is going to sit with it until she finds out whose it was." She turned the mug around in her hands. "And because when you get down to the last one of a thing, you are only ever saving it for a day you will not recognize when it comes."

Stef thought about that.

"That's good."

"I know it's good. I have had five years to get it right."

He drank the rest of it. Then he carried both boxes out to the truck and set them on the bed, and came back for the empty enamel mug.

Gertrude was at the door of the shed, leaning, watching.

"How is she?"

She did not have to specify which she.

"She's on the root beer," Stef said. "Forty-seven."

"Forty-seven. The first time I taste the forty-seventh batch it had better be at her kitchen table."

"It will be."

"You tell her."

"I will tell her."

"And tell her I want to hear about the song. The one she said came off a drive I sent up."

Stef nodded. The aya-yait was, as far as he understood it, the song Maddy had been working on for a few weeks. Anna had played him part of it once, briefly, without explaining what it was, and he had not asked. He had understood only that it was old, and that it was not his.

"She'll tell you tonight on the mesh."

"Sehr gut. Now go. The Guagua is coming through at eleven and I do not want to be here for the proselytizers."

"Vigilant Prophets?"

"They read the beacon like everybody else. On your network, Stef. They come down on the eleven o'clock with the pamphlets already in their hands. Idioten. Last week one of them tried to give Tomás a pamphlet, and Tomás is sixty-two and was a luchador before he was a metalsmith, and he explained to him in the kindest possible way ⁓ Tomás wins like a luchador, he puts you down soft and he picks you up after ⁓ that the apocalypse had already happened and his pamphlet was, with respect, fifteen years late."

"Tomás is a national treasure."

"Tomás is my treasure. Drive carefully. Tell Anna I love her. Tell Saga her Tía Gertrude says hi, and that she had better come down to La Caleta for the next puppet show, because Maisie Ardilla has a new villain and the new villain is un acapallo, which I am told is the term."

"Acapallo?"

"It means a person who is annoying in a specific way that they do not realize they are being annoying. Saga taught me. Saga also told me I am using it wrong."

"Saga is correct."

"Saga is thirteen."

"Both."

He got into the truck.

He hand-cranked it on the third try.

He pulled out of the gate and turned north.

In the side mirror, Maisie Ardilla watched him go from the side of the container. The witness was unhelpful. The detective continued her work.

The road out of El Fraile ran flat between banana plantations, towering walls of tan sun-occlusion fabric closing on both sides into a long brown corridor that smelled of warm leaves and diesel. Stef drove through it the way you always drove through it, slowly, because anyone coming the other way on a bike or a hand-cart could not be seen until they were already in front of you. He came out of the corridor onto TF-1 and turned west. On a road like this you could feel the absence of the gravel in the pickup of the engine and in the quiet exhale of the exhaust.

The TF-1 ran west along the south coast and gave way, eventually, to other roads further on. Six lanes, in the old counting. The island drove on the inside pair and had given the rest back ⁓ the outer lanes fenced off into long thin goat paddocks with the guardrails doing the fencing, chicken runs staked out along the breakdown lane, the median gone over to tabaiba, nopal cactus, and dry grass. The asphalt was greening from its seams outward, weeds in ruler-straight lines where the expansion joints were, and the lane paint had faded to a rumor. The kilometer markers were the one signage anybody polished. When your address is the garlic stand at kilometer sixty-two, you keep the number legible.

The whole drive would take just under three hours if he did not stop. He generally did not stop. Today he had two boxes in the bed, the second of which he had been thinking about since he put the lid back on it, which was: how quickly the bearings on a 2.5-inch drive that had been sealed in plastic for fourteen years might or might not seize when you finally plugged it in.

Anna would handle that part. He was just the truck.

Ten-Bel came up.

The Belgians had master-planned it in the 1960s ⁓ Tenerife-Belgium, the name said it plainly: a holiday colony poured in cement, low pale blocks around gardens and walkways and communal pools, laid out with the tidy optimism of a rainy country that had finally found the sun and did not intend to waste a minute of it. The cement had spent sixty years fading and the gardens fifteen going feral, and the town had decayed the way certain faces age, into something almost more beautiful than what it started as. And it was alive. West Vlaams drifted over the courtyard walls with the smell of frying; the old swimming pools held the town's water now; the bowling green grew greens. It was still, after everything, full of Belgians.

The bypass was on the left. The bypass had been built in the 2010s when the resort traffic had been heavy and the locals had wanted not to be in it. A man could take the bypass and not see the Hall of Vigilance, and not see the brewery, and not see the road that led up to a particular concrete house with a particular small garden where, in 2041, his mother still lived.

Stef did not take the bypass.

There had been years when not taking it was a decision. He made it every six weeks, and it cost him something every time, and he was quietly proud of the cost. That ended when the presses did. Now he came through Ten-Bel twice on every run ⁓ once with an empty tank and once with the smell of it still on his hands ⁓ and there was no arrangement of the day in which he did not. The bypass was a road for men who had somewhere else to buy fuel. He drove through because it was the road and because he had grown up on it, and because when they took the last of the choice away from him, somewhere around 2032, he had noticed that a part of him was relieved.

The Hall of Vigilance went past on the right. Brutalist concrete. White-painted lettering, redone every few years. The community-theater bones were still visible if you knew what to look for: the stage platform inside, a soundbooth window, a loading dock at the back where, in another century, a touring company had unloaded a folding stage. Stef knew it had been a community theater because he had been there once, when he was seven, on a school outing, and had seen a puppet show. He remembered the puppets. He remembered, also, the smell of the room. The smell of the room had not changed when the building's purpose had.

The brewery was beside the Hall, in an annex that had been built in 2031. Bier-Bel and banana biodiesel were the two trade currencies of the south. The Vigilant Prophets brewed the one, pressed the other, and took the price the island would pay. Wouter, who was Stef's cousin on his mother's side, was in there somewhere at this hour, probably writing rhymes. Wouter wrote rhymes about spiritual warfare on a Sankyo MelodyMate MM-3 that he believed was a weapon against the world. It was, in fact, a children's keyboard from 1998. Wouter was earnest. They had been close as boys ⁓ the same bunk at the summer conventions, the same jokes for eleven years ⁓ and now they saw each other three or four times a year across a counter or a yard, and were kind, and neither of them knew what to do with his hands. Nothing had happened between them. That was the whole trouble. Wouter had gone further in and Stef had gone out, and there was nothing left to argue about, only less and less to say.

His mother's house was three streets back from the road. He could not see it from the road. He had not needed to see it from the road for many years. He thought of his mother, briefly, and of the kitchen of that house in a December he could no longer date, which had been the kitchen of his childhood and which had also been the kitchen of his sister's childhood.

He thought of Alice.

He thought of a December night in that kitchen, when Alice was thirteen and he was seventeen, and they were doing the dishes after a Vigilant Prophets potluck. Alice was quieter than usual that night, in the particular quiet she had, which was not silence but a kind of careful audit of a room. They stood at the sink a long time. He handed her dishes and she washed them and neither of them said anything. He could not now remember the moment itself, only the kitchen, and the angle of the light over the dishrack, and that she said it very small.

I want to leave.

Stef said, I know.

That was the conversation.

Years later she left, on a flight to Boston, and after some more years she was Alice in fact as well as in name, and after some more years she married Anna in a city hall in Provincetown with three witnesses. Stef was one of the witnesses. He flew out from Belgium for it and cried, quietly, in the way he did things, in the back of the city hall.

Now Stef was in a 1971 Land Rover on the TF-1 with a hard drive labeled FAMILIA in his cargo bed, and the kitchen of his childhood was three streets to the right, and his mother was inside it doing whatever a Vigilant Prophet did at that hour of the morning.

He drove.

The Guagua came around the corner ahead of him going the other way, a 1991 Mercedes O404 that smelled, even at the distance of a passing road, of banana biodiesel and damp upholstery. Marisol was driving today. She raised one hand in the small island wave that meant you, I see you, all is acceptable. Stef raised one hand back. The Guagua went on east toward Santa Cruz. He went on west.

He was through.

The road kept along the coast for another half hour. At the venta outside Guaza, a dead service station with stalls in the shade of the old fuel canopy and a woman who sold cheese she aged in the cool of the underpass, he slowed and did not stop, and the woman raised one hand anyway, because the Santana was known. Los Cristianos went past on the left, the harbor working, the big ferry ramp standing empty the way it had stood for years. A solar radar sign near Las Américas still had power. Its segments stuttered, dropped out, came back, and told him, approvingly, 22. Twice he slowed for goats being driven up the asphalt, the herd parting around the truck and closing again behind it, the goatherd lifting his stick in the island wave. Past Las Américas the dead resorts were rotting in the sun and the scrappers were turning the metal back into something useful. Adeje went past on the right. Stef saw, at one of the higher exits, the white concrete corner of the building Klaus lived in, which had been built around 2020 by a Belgian architect who had not understood the island and had then died of a heart attack in Brussels in 2024 without ever returning to confirm what he had built. The villa was, in Stef's view, the kind of architecture that was made by a man who had never known love. Klaus came out onto its terrace sometimes in the mornings to glower at the scrappers through binoculars. Tomás had told Stef this. Tomás knew all the scrappers; the scrappers knew Klaus by his cycle of mornings.

Stef did not have an opinion about Klaus, exactly. He noted the building and drove on.

Just short of Santiago del Teide, the autopista ran out. It ran out honestly: the last thing it did was lift an offramp thirty meters into the air, curve it north, and stop ⁓ open air, rebar whiskers, a painted horizon line some kid had added at the very end. El Trampolín. It had been built to feed the ring closure ⁓ in under the massif and out again at El Tanque, an hour of mountain turned into six minutes ⁓ and they had got as far as a mouth in the hillside and a ramp to reach it with. The works stopped in early 2027. The ramp had spent fourteen years aimed at a hole in a mountain like a sentence nobody finished, and in the evenings people climbed it with blankets and watched the sun go down over La Gomera. Beneath it TF-82 took over, the old road, running south toward Chío and Guía de Isora and north up the mountain toward Erjos, which was the way home and always had been. The dry scrub gave way to the pines of the Corona Forestal as the road went up. He came over the Erjos pass with the engine working hard and started down the other side into the mar de nubes, and the laurisilva forest closed in around the road. The air went cool. The windshield went, briefly, into a fog that the truck pushed through without comment. He slid the window open a finger and listened to the engine work the down-pull, and then at the old iglesia of Ruigómez the up-pull again.

He thought of the box in the bed.

He thought of his mother in her kitchen, in a house she had probably not been a kilometer from in five years.

He thought of Alice.

He drove the rest of the way without thinking of anything else, because he had decided long ago that the right amount of thinking about Alice in any given hour was enough thinking and not too much.

The turn-off for Querencia de los Helechos came up on the right. He took it. The road roughened and narrowed and rose and the trees closed in. The old electrical pylon came into view at the top of the rise, outfitted with three Pringles-can antennas pointing at three different angles, humming the way it always did. Years ago, Stef had scaled that pylon to install them. He noted the cantennas, glanced at the alignment on the south-facing one, made a small note in the part of his head he kept for such notes.

Anna's house came into view above the upper fork. He pulled up at the foot of the path.

He got out. The cat at Anna's door looked at him with the expression cats had for people who had been there before. He carried the first box, then the second, up to the porch and set them down.

Anna came out.

"Two boxes," he said. "The second one is from Gertie. Splendora storage unit, sealed since 2027, owner unregistered. She did not boot it. She wanted you to."

Anna nodded.

He looked at her for the small extra moment that was the way they said things to each other that did not need words.

She looked back.

"Root beer?" he said.

"Forty-seven."

"I'll come by in six weeks."

"Bring Godelieve."

"I will."

He went back to the truck. He hand-cranked it on the second try, which was acceptable. He pulled away from the path and started down the slope toward the main square, and the truck noise carried for a while in the stillness, and then the road turned, and the noise was gone.