gray skirt. He could see strands of dark hair against the whiteness of the shirt, but could not see her face.
As he rose, straightening, wiping his mouth, he said, 'May we use some of your water, please?'
The woman didn't answer him.
He moved away from the pump to the hardpack, hearing the ching of his spurs, removed his hat and gave her a little bow. 'Ruben Vega, at your service. Do you know Diego Luz, the horsebreaker?' He pointed off toward a haze of foothills. 'He lives up there with his family and delivers horses to the big ranch, the Circle-Eye. Ask Diego Luz, he'll tell you I'm a person of trust.' He waited a moment. 'May I ask how you're called?' Again he waited.
'You watched me,' the woman said.
Ruben Vega stood with his hat in his hand facing the woman, who was half in shadow in the doorway. He said, 'I waited. I didn't want to frighten you.'
'You watched me,' she said again.
'No, I respect your privacy.'
She said, 'The others look. They come and watch.'
He wasn't sure who she meant. Maybe anyone passing by. He said, 'You see them watching?'
She said, 'What difference does it make?' She said then, 'You come from Mexico, don't you?'
'Yes, I was there. I'm here and there, working as a drover.' Ruben Vega shrugged. 'What else is there to do, uh?' Showing her he was resigned to his station in life.
'You'd better leave,' she said.
When he didn't move, the woman came out of the doorway into light and he saw her face clearly for the first time. He felt a shock within him and tried to think of something to say, but could only stare at the blue lines tattooed on her face: three straight lines on each cheek that extended from her cheekbones to her jaw, markings that seemed familiar, though he could not in this moment identify them. He was conscious of himself standing in the open with nothing to say, the woman staring at him with curiosity, as though wondering if he would hold her gaze and look at her. Like there was nothing unusual about her countenance. Like it was common to see a woman with her face tattooed and you might be expected to comment, if you said anything at all, 'Oh, that's a nice design you have there. Where did you have it done?' That would be one way--if you couldn't say something interesting about the weather or about the price of cows in Benson.
Ruben Vega, his mind empty of pleasantries, certain he would never see the woman again, said, 'Who did that to you?'
She cocked her head in an easy manner, studying him as he studied her, and said, 'Do you know, you're the first person who's come right out and asked.'
'Mojave,' Ruben Vega said, 'but there's something different. Mojaves tattoo their chins only, I believe.'
'And look like they were eating berries,' the woman said. 'I told them if you're going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble.'
It was in her eyes and in the tone of her voice, a glimpse of the rage she must have felt. No trace of fear in the memory, only cold anger. He could hear her telling the Indians--this skinny woman, probably a girl then--until they did it her way and marked her good for all time. Imprisoned her behind the blue marks on her face.
'How old were you?'
'You've seen me and had your water,' the woman said, 'now leave.'
IT WAS THE SAME type of adobe house as the woman's but with a great difference. There was life here, the warmth of family: children sleeping now, Diego Luz's wife and her mother cleaning up after the meal as the two men sat outside in horsehide chairs and smoked and looked at the night. At one time they had both worked for a man named Sundeen and packed running irons to vent the brands on the cattle they stole.
Ruben Vega was still an outlaw, in his fashion, while Diego Luz broke green horses and sold them to cattle companies.
They sat at the edge of the ramada, an awning made of mesquite, and stared at pinpoints of light in the universe. Ruben Vega asked about the extent of graze this season, where the large herds were that belonged to the Maricopa and the Circle-Eye. He had been thinking of cutting out maybe a hundred--he wasn't greedy--and driving them south to sell to the mine companies. He had been scouting the CircleEye range, he said, when he came to the strange woman. . . .
The Tonto woman, Diego Luz said. Everyone called her that now.
Yes, she had been living there, married a few years, when she went to visit her family, who lived on the Gila above Painted Rock. Well, some Yavapai came looking for food. They clubbed her parents and two small brothers to death and took the girl north with them. The Yavapai traded her to the Mojave as a slave. . . .
'And they marked her,' Ruben Vega said.
'Yes, so when she died the spirits would know she was Mojave and not drag her soul down into a rathole,' Diego Luz said.
'Better to go to heaven with your face tattooed,' Ruben Vega said, 'than not at all. Maybe so.'
During a drought the Mojave traded her to a band of Tonto Apaches for two mules and a bag of salt and one day she appeared at Bowie with the Tontos that were brought in to be sent to Oklahoma.
Among the desert Indians twelve years and returned home last spring.
'It put age on her,' Ruben Vega said. 'But what about her husband?'
'Her husband? He banished her,' Diego Luz said, 'like a leper. Unclean from living among the red niggers. No one speaks of her to him, it isn't allowed.'
Ruben Vega frowned. There was something he didn't understand.
He said, 'Wait a minute--'
And Diego Luz said, 'Don't you know who her husband is? Mr.
Isham himself, man, of the Circle-Eye. She comes home to find her husband a rich man. He don't live in that hut no more. No, he owns a hundred miles of graze and a house it took them two years to build, the glass and bricks brought in by the Southern Pacific. Sure, the railroad comes and he's a rich cattleman in only a few years.'
'He makes her live there alone?'
'She's his wife, he provides for her. But that's all. Once a month his segundo named Bonnet rides out there with supplies and has someone shoe her horse and look at the animals.'
'But to live in the desert,' Ruben Vega said, still frowning, thoughtful, 'with a rusty pump . . .'
'Look at her,' Diego Luz said. 'What choice does she have?'
IT WAS HOT DOWN in this scrub pasture, a place to wither and die.
Ruben Vega loosened the new willow-root straw that did not yet conform to his head, though he had shaped the brim to curve down on one side and rise slightly on the other so that the brim slanted across the vision of his left eye. He held on his lap a nearly flat cardboard box that bore the name L. S. Weiss Mercantile Store.
The woman gazed up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. Finally she said, 'You look different.'
'The beard began to itch,' Ruben Vega said, making no mention of the patches of gray he had studied in the hotel-room mirror. 'So I shaved it off.' He rubbed a hand over his jaw and smoothed down the tips of his mustache that was still full and seemed to cover his mouth. When he stepped down from the bay and approached the woman standing by the stick-fence corral, she looked off into the distance and back again.
She said, 'You shouldn't be here.'
Ruben Vega said, 'Your husband doesn't want nobody to look at you. Is that it?' He held the store box, waiting for her to answer. 'He has a big house with trees and the San Pedro River in his yard. Why doesn't he hide you there?'
She looked off again and said, 'If they find you here, they'll shoot you.'
'They,' Ruben Vega said. 'The ones who watch you bathe? Work for your husband and keep more than a close eye on you, and you'd like to hit them with something, wipe the grins from their faces.'
'You better leave,' the woman said.
The blue lines on her face were like claw marks, though not as wide as fingers: indelible lines of dye etched into her flesh with a cactus needle, the color worn and faded but still vivid against her skin, the blue matching her eyes.
He stepped close to her, raised his hand to her face, and touched the markings gently with the tips of his
