I Shall Not Want

Dr. Scheeler glanced up at her. 'Uh-oh,' he said.

'No.' She shook her head. 'It's not that. His hand.' She could only see one. The other was rubber-banded inside a brown paper bag. 'The tattoos. The symbols on his fingers. I saw two guys with the same tattoo. Last night.'

VIII

The barn was on the edge of a pasture ringed with woods, the last things left, he guessed, from a long-ago homestead that hadn't worked out. From his side, a half-hidden trail led down the mountain, over the stream, and onto the McGeochs' land. On her side, a rutted sheep-churned path broad enough to admit a hay cart. Leading, he guessed, to her home.

The barn stood beside an oval fire pond levied up around a creek some long-ago summer. From inside the open doorway, Amado watched the sluggish trickle, water in through one bank, out through the other.

The first time Isobel had brought him here had been a few hours before dawn, the night they met. She had left him there, to sleep away the morning, and when she'd returned that afternoon, they had found a fox skeleton against the cut-stone foundation. The skull, smooth and yellow-white, was their signal. Right now, it hung on a nail on the pasture-side door, letting her know, if she saw it, that he was here. Waiting for her.

It was a pole barn, straight up and down, designed for one thing: to store hay against the hard, long winter. The doorways, front and back, were set hay-wagon high, and he had to haul himself up to the edge and then climb a stack of square bales before getting to his feet. Then he could either climb again, to sit on one of the massive beams transversing the barn, or spread out the quilt she had left on the mound of loose hay in the corner. He usually chose the beam or sat cross-legged on the hard bales. The soft mow and the quilt were too casual, too… sexual. No need to chase temptation.

This had been her special place before she had ever shown it to him. She had a crate filled with books, CDs, a CD player, and water bottles. He knew she smoked here, too, though she never did so in front of him; there was a lingering smell of marijuana above the green and dusty scent of the new and old hay.

He balanced on the beam and peeked through the small off-center window that looked out over the pasture. His rib cage lifted, expanded, when he spotted her making her way across the field, stepping over sheep droppings and swishing at early daisies. It was stupid, he knew. Stupid and dangerous. At home, if she had been one of them, he could have courted her, met her brothers, taken her to his parents' home. Here, they couldn't even be seen together.

No, it was more than that. Here, he couldn't let himself think about her in that way. She was anglo, a North American, part of a family that owned, as near as he could tell from their halting conversations, an entire mountain and the rolling farmlands around it. And she was tangled in darkness and violence. If he hadn't gotten that message on the night they met, he would have figured it out today, when Raul had stumbled across a murdered man halfway between her property and the McGeochs'. No. She was out of bounds, for more reasons than he could count.

It wasn't as if she were a great beauty. She was too pale, the bones in her face too square. It was, he guessed, because she reminded him of girls he had admired at home. She was rounded, womanly, but tough. A hard worker. Quick to smile, but not cheap and available, like so many of the women up north. And she needed him, needed his strength, in some way he hadn't yet identified.

She vanished from his line of sight, to reappear in a moment at the back door, swinging a paper sack up onto the hay before lifting herself over the edge of the doorway. 'Amado?' She blinked in the dimmed light. 'I have lunch. Um, la comida.'

He dropped down from the beam. 'Oh!' She clapped her hand to her chest and said something in English too rapid for him to follow. He held his hand to his ear. 'Eh?' he said.

'Eh?' She laughed.

'Lunch,' he said. 'I am hungry.'

'?Yo hambre?'

'Tengo hambre,' he corrected. He grabbed the quilt and snapped it open, letting it float down on the hay bales to make a picnic cloth. She opened the sack and removed paper napkins and sandwiches and corn chips and apples. They sat on opposite sides. Not touching. The sandwich was delicious, real bread stuffed thick with meat and cheese. He wondered if she had made it for him or taken one that was meant for another of her family. He wondered if she felt the high, hard bars that kept them apart. He wondered what she thought of him when she was alone.

'Por que… you… here now?' she said, around a handful of corn chips. 'No work por la dia?'

'Hide,' he said. He swallowed the last of his sandwich. He didn't know if he was bringing trouble to her door, or if he was helping her avoid it, but he had to tell her about the dead man. It was too near to her land and too soon after her flight through the woods to be coincidental.

He spoke in Spanish, wanting to tell the whole story before trying to pick out the words and concepts he could convey to her in English. He told her about the smell, and the way it seemed to linger inside his nostrils all the way back to the barnyard. He told her about the surprise of seeing his brother Octavio's lady priest, and Mrs. McGeoch's near collapse, and about rounding up the men-again-and having to deal with their whining about the heat and boredom of the ancient farmhouse they bunked in. He told her about hiding in the woods until the last possible moment, watching the black truck roll up and disgorge two policia.

All the while, she listened intently, though he doubted she understood one word in ten. And when he finished, she tilted her head to one side, looked at him as if she knew exactly what he'd been going through, and said, 'I'm sorry. Lo siento.'

He took a deep breath. 'I find a dead man,' he said in English. 'By the water.'

Isobel went very still. No surprise. No horror. Instead, her eyes, usually as brown and deep as rich coffee, went flat. As if she was looking in, rather than out. 'By the water,' she said. 'Where? ?Donde es?'

He didn't know the English word, so he made rippling, winding motions. 'El arroyo.' He arched his hand up and over, representing the mountain, then traced the water's course along the imaginary edge of the property.

She drew her knees up and bent her head forward. Her face disappeared behind a curtain of hair. '?La policia?' she asked, after a while.

'Yes.' He felt sick at the thought she had something to do with the bloated thing he had seen that morning, but he had to curl his hands into fists to keep from taking her by the shoulders and drawing her near. She looked up at him. Her eyes shone with tears. She said something low and rapid he couldn't make out, and he realized, at bottom, it didn't matter what she had done, he would still help her in any way he could.

'I help you,' he said.

She shook her head.

'Please,' he said.

She smiled, just a little, and the change in her expression broke the water in her eyes so that tears rolled down her cheeks. She said something else-he caught the word 'man' and the word 'good'-and then reached out and took one of his hands in hers.

He squeezed it. 'I help you,' he insisted.

She looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. 'Okay.' She rose, tugging him up with her. She released his hand, scooped up the empty paper sack, and walked across the bales to the open doorway. She jumped to the ground with an easy grace, and he followed her as she slipped around the corner. She stopped, dropped the sack on the grass, and traced the edges of the clapboards where they butted against the stone foundation.