Free Devil's Keep by Phillip Finch Page B

She didn’t know how to operate a speedboat, and even if she could get it to work, she didn’t know where she was, which way to go.
    Then a tiny flare of red light got her attention, about halfway down the hillside. The glare revealed the face of a man. He was striking a match, cupping it in his hands as he lit a cigarette. The match died, replaced by the glowing tip of the cigarette. Now she could make out his dark form seated under a palmtree, looking out over the water. A gun, a rifle, was cradled in his lap.
    The armed man was facing out toward the ocean. He didn’t seem worried about anyone escaping. He wanted to keep others out.
    She realized that her calves were aching. Too long up on her toes. And she had seen enough. She stepped down from the chair, off the table, back down to the floor. She quietly moved the chair and table back where they belonged, and she lay in the bed, staring up for a long time at the fan turning overhead, until finally she fell asleep.
    Several days passed uneventfully in the little cell. Marivic was puzzled. She knew that she must have been brought there for some reason, and although she dreaded it, she wanted to know what was supposed to happen next.
    Nothing happened.
    The days followed an unvarying routine. About an hour after sunrise, the lock turned in the steel door, and the two foreigners entered. They removed the dishes from the previous evening’s meal, took out the chamber pot and the water pitcher, brought in fresh water and a clean chamber pot. They worked quickly and never spoke a word, in and out in less than a minute, and when they left her cell they went to Junior’s and worked just as quickly and silently.
    Around midday the lock turned again and the two men entered once more. A woman was with them this time. They stood and watched as thewoman checked Marivic’s pulse and blood pressure, listened to her lungs through a stethoscope, and took her temperature.
    Marivic tried to speak to the woman in English, telling her “I’m not sick, I feel fine. Why are you doing this to me?” as she unwrapped the pressure cuff from around Marivic’s arm. But the woman didn’t answer. She just led Marivic out of the cell, down a short corridor to a shower stall. The woman stood outside while Marivic bathed Filipino style, dipping cool water out of a bucket. When Marivic was finished, the woman handed her a towel and a clean gown and took her back to the cell, where a meal was waiting on the table.
    In the evening came the third visit of the day. This time it was just the two men, bringing food and water.
    Junior Peralta in the next room got exactly the same treatment: the meals, the shower, the checkup. And the same oblivious attitude. “Like I’m not even there,” Junior said.
    Marivic didn’t feel threatened. She felt ignored.
    The three visits left gaps of long hours when she was alone in the cell. Long conversations with Junior helped to fill the time, and in the evenings he would amuse her by playing the human jukebox, whistling the tunes that she called out. But inevitably he was ready for sleep before she was, and she would be left awake in the silent darkness, unable to avoid her thoughts any longer.
    She didn’t want that. Thinking led in just twodirections, one frustrating, the other painful. There were the questions about her situation:
Why was I brought here? What is this place? Who are these people? What happens next?
All good questions, but impossible to answer, so that when she pondered the possibilities she felt as if she were running blindly into the high concrete walls—again and again and again.
    Then there were the thoughts of her family and the village, all that she had left behind when she stepped onto the bus that early morning beside the gulf. But these memories and visions were unbearably poignant, impossibly distant from the reality of the cell. She couldn’t dwell on home; it hurt too much.
    “Marivic! I’m leaving! It’s my turn to