He was struck by the desire to see her face. He had the feeling that if he did not see her face, he might never again have the chance. And then he asked himself what the big deal was. It was just a young Hispanic girl in a floppy straw hat giving people water. So what?
But he wanted to see her face, because he had the feeling that he would see in it a beauty he had forgotten existed.
“Will you dumb-asses move it?” Berke had gotten out and was standing next to the Scumbucket, one hand on her hip and the other holding her own bottle of water, which had about two good swallows left in it. The children had retreated a few paces. “You want to get heat stroke?”
“We’re coming,” Ariel said, but she did not leave Nomad’s side.
And then the last person got his cup filled and went to join the workers who sat on the ground under the oak tree talking with each other and eating their lunches, and the girl at the well dipped her ladle into the pail and looked directly at the band members.
She held the ladle toward them, offering a drink.
No one moved or spoke for a few seconds, and then Mike said, “Well, shit, I’ll get me some if she’s givin’ it out.” He walked forward.
“It might not be clean,” Ariel warned.
Mike said, “Hey, I was raised on well water. Didn’t stunt my growth too bad.” He nodded a greeting to the women who’d brought the food and cups, and took one of the cups from the table. Then he walked to the well, said, “Buenos dias,” to the girl and held out his cup. Nomad saw the girl say something to Mike as she filled it, but it was spoken so quietly Nomad could not hear. Mike swigged the water down and came back to the group.
“It’s cold,” he said. “She says to tell you everybody’s welcome, and not to be afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Nomad asked. He watched the girl, who seemed to be waiting for them. She still had not taken a drink herself.
“I don’t know. That it’s not clean, I guess.”
“I think we’d better stick to bottled,” said Ariel.
“Hey, we’re cooking over here!” Berke came closer. “What the fuck’s wrong with you guys?”
“Let me wash my mouth out,” Nomad said.
He took Mike’s cup and approached the girl.
She dipped the ladle anew and held it out for him. He could not make out her face in the shadow of her straw hat, only the shape of a face. As he got nearer, he took off his sunglasses so he could see what she looked like, but even then he only caught the shine of her eyes.
And then within reach of her he abruptly stopped, because something that was not fear but was very close to fear had shot through him and he was stunned by the intensity of it. He could go no further.
She was staring at him, from the shadow pool beneath the ragged straw hat.
The ladle was still offered, and from it a few drops of water fell to the dirt.
It seemed to Nomad that, yes, he was thirsty, and he wanted to get the taste of that cheeseburger out of his mouth but—as crazy as he felt it to be—he thought there was a price to be paid for accepting, and he feared knowing what that price might be. He was focused entirely on her, still trying to distinguish the hidden details of her face, but he could not. He felt also that she was focused entirely upon him too, and it terrified him even more. Her attention seemed to be almost a physical thing; he imagined he could feel it probing around in the innermost parts of himself, mind and soul, as if he were a puzzle to be figured out, or a walking Rubik’s Cube to be assembled. But it was more than that, too; it was like a stranger rummaging through your dirty laundry, or getting too close to the box of porn DVDs up on the closet’s shelf behind the folded-up hoodies.
She didn’t speak. She only waited, and it seemed she had plenty of time.
He felt the sweat oozing from his pores. Well, who wouldn’t be sweating in hundred-degree heat? He said to himself No, I am not going out into those thorns. Because that’s what he thought she was asking him to do. There’s a trick to it, he thought. Always a fucking trick to everything, because nothing is free. If he took that water from her, he would have to go out into that field and labor like a zombie, and maybe he hadn’t looked hard enough, maybe those people he’d imagined were needful of her strength and grateful of her kindness were only stupid fucking zombies, and at one time or another all of them had simply been passing by on the road of their own lives until she’d lured them here and given them drugged-up water that blasted their brains and put them to work in the brambles. Made them want to go back, even when they were out. Made them happy with their misery. It was crazy what he was thinking, because she was just a kid, she was nobody to him, he could swat her down with one hand if he had to. And her sacrifice was false too, because she probably was the type who always had to be the center of attention, like Madonna of the junkyard or something, and so all this deal of standing at the well and giving to the others was a self-serving sham. He hated falsehood, even more than he hated bad waitresses. Nothing is free in this world, he thought. Not even a cup of water. And now all sounds were becoming muffled, as if from a great distance, and everything around them—the church, the well itself, the other structures, the trucks and cars, the dogs and children, the people underneath the oak tree—shimmered in the heatwaves and began to blur and melt together like the chunks of multicolored glass that made up the windows of the tarpaper shacks.
Oh no, he thought. Not me.
He took a backward step.
Everything came into sharp focus again, and all the sounds—dogs barking, the kids yelling at each other as they played, the voices of the workers talking under the tree—returned in a jarring crash. The girl was still staring at him, and as he stepped back another pace he crumpled the paper cup in his fist and let it drop to the dirt.
“What’s wrong with you?” Berke asked as she passed him. She went to the girl, offered her the nearly-empty bottle of water and asked in Spanish, “Would you fill that for me?” When it was done, Berke came back with the cool bottle pressed against her forehead and she went past Nomad as if he were invisible.
George was standing between Ariel and Mike, bright beads of perspiration on his face. “Hi, how are you?” he said to the girl. “Guys, we shouldn’t be bothering these people. Let’s go, man!” This last entreaty was directed at Nomad.
“Did you see that?” Nomad asked them. His voice, upon which he depended so much, sounded like a cat being strangled.
“See what?” George frowned. He looked over Nomad’s shoulder at the girl, who had turned away to refill someone else’s cup.
“What happened just then.”
“Um…” George gave Mike a brief glance. “Listen, you ready to hit it?” Berke and Terry were already walking back to the van.
“I saw what happened,” Ariel said, giving him her patented look of disapproval. “You left your trash on the ground.” She walked to the crumpled cup, picked it up and took it to the girl at the well, who held her hand out and accepted it in her palm. “¡Perdón,” Ariel said. Even if she hadn’t taken Spanish in both high school and college, life in Texas had a way of teaching you the language. “El tiene maneras muy malas.” An apology for Nomad’s bad manners.
The girl angled her head to one side, and Ariel caught a glint of ebony eyes in a dark face with a flat, broad nose. It was a face that might have been carved on ancient stone in a Mayan jungle, except for the outbursts of teenaged acne on both cheeks.