Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page A

recently cleared jungle. Part of it was cultivated, rubber trees being grown in slim-trunked orderly rows, but old stands of jungle remained here and there, little zones of furious life. Monkeys came out to rob the trash cans. Once when John took the back way at night with his flashlight there was a thrashing in the bushes and a huge lizard wagged across his path.
    She could picture him, alone under the thick trees, hand on his chest. He wouldn’t be looking out for anything. He thought everything was behind them.
    Spiders swung against his cheek when he was hurrying to Accident & Emergency to operate on the boys who wrecked their motorbikes on the Federal Highway or flipped into the drains scattering tanks of cooking gas, baskets of pottery, plate glass.
    â€œHe died?” she would say. She was a nurse, used to the ones who died. But no, they didn’t die. If she was meeting him in the hospital she would see these boys of his, shrouded in gauze and elastic burn mask, hobbling between nurses. She repeated the Malay she heard them croak, “ Perlahan-lahan .”
    â€œSlow-slow,” John said.
    She shut her mind and began to work on her theory of suffering. The insistence on countries might be wrong, but it was no better to think of the world as one, one organism with a saline of wrongs dripping in regularly and impartially. Wrongs didn’t go steadily, fairly, into solution. They went into lumps and clots. It was all right if all suffered, but some escaped.
    â€œNo one escapes,” John said, smiling because he knew the story of the spell on Amy, cast by her mother and witnessed by her brothers, that kept her from harm. She was the youngest. Her father had begun to drink, leaving things in the hands of four brothers already obliged by a decree from their dying mother, binding and irreversible: Take care of your sister .
    When she got away from her brothers the spell continued on its own. In one of her tests of it, she forded a Guatemalan stream where flies carrying Onchocerca were known to breed. She unloaded a jeep and carried supplies, one bundle after another, across the waist-deep water into a village full of river blindness, and the worm in the stream did not settle in her.
    Pouring out of a hole in the floor, the ants filed up past the medicine cabinet to a hole in the ceiling. No, some of them were coming down, the line was double. Sometimes they came down carrying some of their own. What drew them inside and up? Did they live up there, or were they fighting an invader? What was up there? Did they die working on it? Did they weaken and fall out of the line when the time came? What was age, what was natural death for an ant? She can walk on ants, the Malays said. It meant that lightness of step the women had no matter how much they had in their arms along with the babies proudly turned to show you if you smiled.
    She could sit for a long time in the bathroom studying the ants. On the way up, huge loads, shouldered and pushed. Once a dozen of them had maneuvered a peanut up the wall. And the forearm jaws around a corpse: that carrying away of the dead looked like dignity. They should learn not to squander themselves on these crusades! But each one on the wall today might never have been there before, pushing with a head like a shiny seed. But a seed with sense organs—able to find a grain of palm sugar on the kitchen counter.
    The medicine cabinet had a gap behind it where cicaks lived in the cracked plaster. Sometimes an unusually large one, gray and pink, came out when she was shaving her legs in the bathtub. Once it fell into the tub and swam, lunging to and fro like a little shark. The warm water must have dazed it; it let her lift it out by the tail.
    You must leave, everybody said, if the cicaks ever leave.
    One day a baby one, tiny, popped out of the ants’ hole and raced down the wall. The big gray-pink one snatched it back. Look at that, she thought. Saved.
    For a moment,