Water Rites (10 page)

CHAPTER TWO

T
he ride was a bad one. Nita Montoya sat stiff and straight in the seat of the decrepit Winnebago as it groaned around another bend in the road. Twilight was falling, and the air reeked of cheap perfume. A bottle must be leaking somewhere in the jumble of black-market items that filled the rear of the RV. Beside her, clutching the wheel, the man reeked of lust. Rachel squirmed in Nita’s lap, fussing, her face screwed up, fists waving.

“Easy, love.” She bounced her daughter gently on one knee, watching the dark, bearded driver from the corner of her eye. Andy, he had said his name was. He was a trader, doing the little town markets, selling black-market clothes, electronics, pharmacy-labeled medicines and cosmetics. He had offered her a ride this afternoon and she had accepted, because she was tired, and she had a long way to go yet. He had felt all right, then.

“You sure you want to chase after this old man of yours?” His grin turned into a grimace as the old RV tried once more to lumber off the narrow, broken road. “Anyone who’d walk away from a sweet thing like you ain’t worth it. I make a pretty good living, doin’ the markets. These dryland hicks can’t trade for squat. You wouldn’t believe what I can twist ’em out of.”

Asshole. “I think I’ll get out pretty soon.” Nita hugged the fussing Rachel to her chest. “She’s going to cry like this for a long time.”

“No problem.” His smile revealed his yellowed, uneven teeth. “I don’t mind kids.”

He was lying. A darkness had been building inside him for the last hour — a gathering storm charged with sex and threaded with the red lightning of violence.

She felt it. Since she could remember, Nita had felt all of it; Mama’s pain, Ignacio’s anger at the dusty world, and Alberto’s terrible resignation. Joy, lust, fear, anger. The world around her shrieked with the noise of humanity. It had driven her into herself as a child, the more frightening because the adults in her life hadn’t understood. It wasn’t until much later that she had learned why, that she was a freak.
Unique, a mutation,
David had said, trying to be kind.
That’s how the species evolves.

Unique was another word for alone.

The Winnebago was slowing. The dark storm inside this man was about to break. Nita sucked in a quick breath, stifled by the stuffy air, struggling with the urge to fling the door open, leap out with her daughter and run.

She could die without her pack and her water jugs. They would both die. Rachel was screaming now, back arched, feet kicking. “Easy, love, Rachel, it’s all right.” Feeble words — they didn’t touch the fierce brilliance of her daughter’s distress. But they covered the motion as she tucked her struggling daughter into the sling she wore across her chest and slid her hand into her pocket. The switchblade clicked open. This close to him, she felt the hot ache of his erection, couldn’t help but feel it. The RV was edging off the road. Nita swallowed and leaned toward him, her throat dry with this storm. “We’re getting out now.”

He started to laugh, then flinched as the blade pricked through his shirt. The RV swerved and the muscles in his arms bulged, corded tight with fury. Rachel shrieked. Teeth clenched, Nita tried to keep her hand from shaking. I will kill him, she told herself. If he moves. This decision made, her hand steadied. He made a small sound in his throat as she edged the blade deeper, his rage collapsing into fear.

“Stop now and turn off the engine. Keep your hands on the wheel.”

He did, and sat very still as she reached behind herself to open the door. He was all fear now. Perhaps he believed she would stick the knife into him, kill him anyway. As he would have done? Disgust clenched her belly. She groped behind the seat, awkward with the weight of Rachel in the sling and swung her pack one-handed out the door. It thudded onto the dusty asphalt, the tied-on water jugs bouncing. Carefully she backed out of the door. “If you come after me, I will kill you,” she said.

“You bitch.” His lips trembled. “I’ll get you. You little tramp.”

She slammed the door and stepped back, clutching Rachel to her. He might have a gun in the RV and who would know if he shot her, left her here? He could run her down with the RV. Only fields lined the roads, lines of sugar beets hugging the buried soaker hoses, nowhere to hide. Stupid! His emotions had filled her head and made her stupid. Nita shoved the now-useless knife into her pocket, slung her pack onto her shoulder and ran, cutting across the fields, toward a small clump of struggling trees in the distance. Behind her, she heard the Winnebago’s engine growl and then catch. Rachel hiccupped and cried as Nita pounded through the dust between the rows.

A house! She hadn’t noticed the shack tucked into the shade between the old, weary trees. Sagging and weathered, tethered to the black wings of solar panels, it would belong to the beet farmer. It night save her. If he was afraid of witnesses. Yes. The Winnebago roared on up the road, raising a choking cloud of dust that stung her eyes and coated her throat. Panting, she staggered to a halt.

“Are you all right?” A figure limped out of the deepening dusk, an old man with wispy white hair. “That was Andy Belden’s rig, wasn’t it? The trader?” He stopped in front of her, weathered and stooped, only worry clouding the deepening darkness. “He’s a slimy bastard. Gonna get himself hung one of these days. Or shot. Did he . . . did he hurt you?”

“No. No, he didn’t.” Nita tried to laugh, but it wanted to come out a sob. “I just decided to walk.”

“It’s too dark for walkin’. You come inside now. My name’s Seth.” His smile seemed to lighten the darkness. “I got an extra bed for you and the baby, and I’d love the company.”

His worry was soft against her mind, like gentle winter sun. “Thank you.” Nita let her knees begin to tremble. “I would be very pleased to stay.”

The house was pleasant inside. The front room held a table and cupboards, besides the old sink with faucets that probably didn’t work, a propane stove, and painted cupboards that shone white and spotlessly clean in the light of the small battery lantern he turned on. A shirt hung from the back of a chair and a Bible lay on the scrubbed table top. He ushered her into a small, adjoining living room. A sofa, upholstered chairs, and a woodstove and a china cupboard crowded the small space. Curtains hung at the windows, striped with darker fabric at the edges where the sun hadn’t bleached out the blue-flowered print.

“You sit,” Seth told her. “Stew’s almost done. I’ll bring you a glass of water.”

Nita sank into one of the oversized chairs. Rachel was hungry, groping at her shirt. She looked around the small room as she lifted her shirt and tucked her daughter’s small warmth against her. A woman had done this, Nita thought. Her absence ached in the dustless surfaces and unused feel of this room. The glass shelves in the china cupboard were filled with small, china animals; dogs, horses, ducks, even a white goat with curly horns and a golden bell around its neck. Hers she thought. Her picture stood on the shelf. It had to be her — a respectful space around it made it the centerpiece of this unused room. Nita studied her as Rachel nursed. She had a wide smile, but a subtle sadness clouded her eyes. In the picture she was young, with only a few gray hairs in her dark curls.

“Here we are.” Seth appeared in the doorway, a tray in his hands. A blue ceramic pitcher stood on the tray, flanked by two matched glasses. “I thought we’d do it formal. I never use these.” He set the tray down on the table. “How’s the young one?”

“She’s fine.” Nita watched him pour a silver stream of water into the glass, her throat tightening. You were always thirsty out here in the drylands. You put it away in the back of your mind, ignored it, until someone offered you a glass of water. And then, suddenly, you were dying of thirst. She picked up the glass, forcing herself to drink it slowly. It tasted so sweet, water. No, not really sweet — honey was sweet. It tasted of life. “Thank you.” Nita set the empty glass down. “For the water. For letting us stay.”

“Like I said, I get lonely. Leah was always proud of this room.” He gave the picture a quick smile, as if she was listening to him. “I don’t use it much, and that would make her sad. She’d be pleased to see me use the pitcher, too. I gave that to her for our twentieth wedding anniversary. Bought it in Portland.”

“It’s lovely,” Nita said. His grief was new and sharp, but the love beneath it had an old, weathered feel to it. The last of her tension drained away, leaving her tired. Secure.

Seth was watching her over the rim of his glass, legs crossed, eyes sharp and dry as the land outside. “You on your way somewhere?” He leaned forward to tickle Rachel’s belly. “Or on your way from somewhere?”

“To somewhere.” It wasn’t quite a lie. “We’re on our way to The Dalles.” She settled the sleepy Rachel more comfortably on her lap. “David — my husband — heard of a job there.”

“The Dalles, huh? What kind of a job?” Seth leaned forward to refill their glasses.

“Working for the Corps. Pipeline work.”

“Yeah?” His sparse eyebrows rose. “I heard there’s trouble up that way. Trouble about the Pipe. Hope he got his job. Where you from, anyway?”

“The Willamette Valley, west of Salem.” Nita stirred uneasily. She knew the questions that were coming, knew them too well. She didn’t want to hear them from this man’s lips, but Rachel had fallen asleep, and her sleeping weight pinned Nita to the chair.

“All the way from the Valley? That’s some hike.” Seth whistled. “How come you got stuck on your own? Seems like this David of yours’d be worried about his wife and kid on the road alone. There’s not a whole lot o’ law outside the big towns like The Dalles, Bend, LaGrande. Lot can happen out here.”

Nita’s lips tightened. “I . . . haven’t heard from David.” She said the words because they had to be said, had to be faced every morning with the silent, rising sun. “I couldn’t go when he got the word about the job. Rachel was too little and it was honey flow season. We were bee hunters. We’d have missed the harvest if we both left. So I stayed on until it was over.”

He was supposed to have sent word when he got settled. He had planned to come back for her, if he could. For four months she had waited. Nita stroked Rachel’s sleeping face, listening to the murmur of her daughter’s small dreams. “We hunted bees way up in the coast range,” she said and heard the defensiveness in her tone. “It wasn’t like we had a cell phone or anything. Messages get lost all the time.”

He heard it, too, and his sympathy was like the soft hum of bees on the still air. “Yeah, messages get lost.” He picked up the tray and got stiffly to his feet. He didn’t tell her that people get lost, too. He didn’t have to.

“I’ll go dish up the stew,” he said and put out a hand as she started to rise. “You stay put. When I got the table ready, you can put her down on the bed.”

Nita blinked back teas as he shuffled out of the room. A lot of dusty miles lay between their tent in the mountains and The Dalles. Andy and his stormy violence wasn’t the worst she could meet out here. It was easy to die in this dry land. But it wasn’t his death that haunted her dreams. Nita stroked a wisp of hair back from Rachel’s face.
She looks like you
, David had said, and he had been afraid. He had always been afraid of her deep down inside. Ever since he had understood what she was — that she would know how he felt. Always. It’s all right, he had told her. I don’t mind. And part of him didn’t. Part of him was happy when she translated the bees’ soft song for him, told him how the hive was content or nervous or happy. Part of him liked it that she knew when he needed a touch, or love, or a little private space.

And part of him feared her.

He wouldn’t look into that shadow, wouldn’t face it. But it had always been there. After Rachel’s birth, it had grown darker. He had been full of a nervous restlessness, like the bees before they swarmed.

She looks like you.

It was easy to die here. It was easy to walk away, too. The drylands ate yesterday. They buried it in dust, dried it up, and blew it away.

“Think you can put the little one down?” Seth stuck his head through the door.

“I think so.” Nita scooped Rachel gently into her arms and carried her into the tiny back bedroom. Seth didn’t seem to have noticed her tears. Nita laid her sleeping daughter on the bed and wiped her face on her sleeve. “You’re not like me,” she murmured. “You’re normal.”
Normal.
The word hurt her.

Rachel whimpered softly in her sleep — she would look like Nita, yes, and like David, too. “I love you,” Nita whispered. She tucked the spread around her daughter and tiptoed out of the room.

Seth had cleared off the table and spread a flowered tablecloth across it. He had set out thick, white china and a cut-glass bud vase full of golden grass stems. “You get sloppy, living alone.” He ladled bean and vegetable stew into a bowl. “I’m glad I got an excuse to set a proper table.”

Nita took the filled bowl with a smile at the spotless room, but something was wrong. A stiff uncomfortableness had replaced his peace.

“This is great.” She spooned up stew and smiled. “You’re a wonderful cook.”

“Thanks. It’s garlic does it. You can’t never get too much garlic in a dish.” He put the pot back on the small propane burner and sat down. “You know, if you want to hang around until tomorrow afternoon, I can give you a ride on into Tygh Valley. You could likely find someone heading north on 197, who could get you closer to The Dalles.”

He was lying to her. Why? Nita’s earlier sense of safety began to leak away. “We’re close to 197, then.” She made her voice light. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Yeah, you’re close.” Seth put his spoon down, eyes fixed on his stew, as if a fish had suddenly jumped in the middle of his bowl. “We got a good weekly market there. Folk come in from all around. Few weeks back we had some excitement.” He poked his fork tines into a thick cube of squash. “Some guy come through doing magic tricks. Cards and stuff, but more than that.” He looked up suddenly, frowning. “He made stuff . . . appear. Frogs and butterflies and such. Out of the air, like. It was a gadget, he said. Little black box.” He reached for his water glass, took a long swallow. “Good thing for him. Couple of us kind of got him aside, eased him on out of town. He got the message real quick, and beat it.”