I Shall Not Want

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Oh, I’ll get a ride.”

  He sighed. Motioned to his junior officers. “I want you two to see that Reverend Fergusson gets back to her car. And then that she goes home.”

  “You want us to stay for the search, Chief?” Kevin sounded as if there was nothing he’d rather do more. Hadley Knox, on the other hand, looked appalled.

  “Yeah. I do. Knox, you’re the only other Spanish speaker here. Make yourself available as necessary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you headed for the hospital, Chief?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going to the McGeoch place and let them know all their farmhands have run off.”

  Clare’s face, outlined in the gathering dark by the flash of red-and-whites, changed. She got it.

  “You know him, Chief?” Flynn continued.

  “Oh, yeah.” He sighed. “He’s my brother-in-law.”

  V

  Amado heard him before he saw him. One of his own, no flashlight, no badly accented shouts of, “We are not I-C-E! We want to help you!” Just the thudding of footfalls and the whipping, crackling sounds of someone running through the forest. Idiot. There was a little moonlight shafting through the bare branches and pines, but not enough to make it safe to race all out as if you were sprinting down a street. He had spent enough time hiding in the dark. The trick was to go slowly. To let yourself see where you were headed and then to move like smoke, silently, safely.

  Thank God it wasn’t his little brother thrashing through the trees. In the confusion after the accident—men swearing and groaning, Sister Lucia insisting she was all right despite her bloody head and shallow breath—he had seen Octavio’s arm. Known at once the boy would have to go to the hospital. Where, without papers or a green card, he faced deportation. Amado had stuffed his own GW-1 permit and identity card into his brother’s pocket. “You will be Amado,” he had said. “I will be Octavio.” Octavio looked at him blankly, eyes glazing over with shock. “Just keep saying it over and over,” Amado had urged. “You are Amado Esfuentes. You are Amado Esfuentes.”

  “I am Amado Esfuentes,” Octavio parroted.

  Amado had stayed as long as he dared, until the lights of the police car came over the hill. Then he, along with the rest of the able-bodied, fled into the woods. His ID would ensure his brother’s safety. They resembled each another, and the pitiful excuse for a beard Octavio was growing blurred the differences between their faces. Anglos had a hard time looking past the color of a man’s skin, anyway.

  A loud thud, followed by a grunt, brought him back to the present: Esteban. He was the only one stupid enough to blunder through the dark like that. Amado debated, for a moment, staying put in his half-hollowed log. Then he heard a faint whimpering noise. Mother of God. Why his family had ever let the boy out of the house, let alone sent him north, was beyond Amado’s understanding. Resigned, he heaved himself out of the shadows and headed—slowly, silently—toward the snuffling sounds.

  The poor kid was sprawled out on the forest floor, trying to stuff his weeping back into his mouth. It took some of the younger ones that way. Amado had seen it before. Tell a boy he’s a man and carry him two thousand miles away, into a cold and alien place. He misses his mother, he misses his girl, he misses his home. He swaggers around like a fighting cock, to hide his fears, and cries in the dark when he thinks no one can hear him.

  Amado had been that boy—once. He paused behind a cluster of pines and coughed, to give Esteban the chance to set himself to rights while he still thought himself unseen. “Is someone there?” Amado said.

  The figure, anonymous in jeans and a quilted jacket, shoved up abruptly and scrambled backward, face pale and terrified. Shit! An anglo. He faded farther back into the shadows, ready to disappear, when the boy, still moving backward, slammed himself into a tree, making Amado wince. He wasn’t Esteban, but he certainly moved with the same grace and coordination. His baseball cap flew off, revealing a tumble of long blond hair.

  Not a boy, then. Not a boy at all. The girl held her hands up in front of her and whispered something in impossibly fast English. Pleading, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but for what? Help? Amado stepped into the shaft of moonlight so she could see him, his hands out and open, his arms relaxed. “I won’t hurt you,” he said, but of course, she couldn’t understand him. She balled her hands up into fists—badly—and said something, a thread of defiance over her fear. He recognized one word: police.

  “I’m not the police,” he said. Slowly, keeping his arms spread wide, he sat on the rusty mat of pine needles beneath them. Making himself smaller. “No police.”

  “No police,” she said in English.

  He nodded. “No police.” He smiled at her. “I milk cows for a living.” He mimed the old-fashioned way of milking teats. “I pitch manure.” He flung a few invisible loads with an imaginary pitchfork. “And I roll hay”—no way to indicate that—”and I wipe the shit off my boots at the end of the day.” He wiped the soles of his boots on the forest floor. Quiet talk, the kind of nonsense he murmured to the stock while he worked. All the words that, together, meant I’m no threat to you.

  She stepped away from the huge pine that had been holding up her backbone. She bent a little, getting a closer look at him. In the moonlight, he could see she wasn’t a girl, either, but a woman, around his own age. He also got a clue as to why she was hiding from the police in, presumably, her own country. She reeked of marijuana.

  She said something. He caught the word Mexican.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m Mexican. Oaxacan.” Not that she’d know where that was. He pressed one hand to his woolen jacket. “Amado Esfuentes, at your service.” He bowed as best he could while sitting tailor-style on a cold patch of ground.

  “Amado Esfuentes,” she repeated.

  He nodded. Wondered if he ought to have introduced himself as Octavio. He ought to get into the habit. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she was about to turn him in to the authorities, was it?

  She smiled, a bit, and edged an inch closer, like a new calf examining him around its mother’s hindquarters. She mimicked his motion, flattening her quilted jacket, revealing she was most definitely a woman. “Isabel,” she said. “Isabel Christie.”

  English vowels always sounded so flat. “Isobel Christie,” he said.

  She smiled, more broadly. “Yeah, Isobel.”

  Slowly, one hand still raised where she could see it, he reached into his coat pocket. She shrank back. “It’s okay,” he said, in the same voice he used to soothe a skittish cow or a frightened horse. “It’s okay.” He pulled out a king-sized Pay-Day bar and held it out toward her. “Are you hungry?” He waggled the candy. “Go ahead. You can take it. I have more.”

  She stretched her hand out and grasped the chocolate with the very tips of her fingers, and it was gone, out of his hand and into hers faster than the eye could follow. He nodded again and dug out another candy bar for himself.

  She tore open the wrapper and downed the confection as if it was the only meal she had had all day. He had guessed, when he smelled the pot on her, that she’d be hungry. She eyed the candy bar in his hand. He pulled out another PayDay—his last—and handed it to her. This time, she took it, rather than snatching it, and sat down facing him. She consumed the second one almost as quickly as the first, watching him all the while as he ate his more slowly, crunching the peanuts between his teeth.

  “Well,” he said in Spanish. “Now I’ve introduced myself and talked about my work and my home, and shared a meal. The last time I did that, it was a setup with my friend Geraldo’s sister-in-law. Now I suppose I’ll have to walk you home and introduce myself to your parents.”

  She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She said something to him in a tone of voice so pleasant he wished he knew what it meant. Then she smiled, full on.

  “Maybe this is the secret to maintaining good feelings between a man and a woman,” he said. “Not understanding a word of what
the other is saying.”

  In the distance, he heard a high, thin voice. “Izzy!” it called. “Izzy!”

  The smile vanished from her face. Her eyes went wide and white-edged. He didn’t need to know English to translate her frightened whisper. Oh, God.

  They both scrambled to their feet, as the voice continued on, wheedling, cozening. It reminded him of the way his grandfather would croon lovingly to the chickens right before catching one and putting the hatchet to it. The woman was looking wildly around her, long blond hair swinging through the moonlight. Too bright. Amado snatched her hat off the ground and handed it to her. She twirled her hair into a rope and stuffed it beneath the cap.

  “Isobel,” he said, softly. She looked at him, on the verge of panic. He held his finger to his lips and pointed, through the trees, toward his earlier hiding place. He held out his hand to her. Come with me.

  She took his hand. Yes.

  He turned and traced his way through the trees, taking his time, seeing where he wanted to go and then moving. She shoved against his arm, pushing, trying to hurry him, a whimper trapped in her throat. He squeezed her hand and patted her arm, once, twice, turning the pat into a gesture that took in the woods stretching out in front of them. Slowly. Silently.

  He stepped over a fallen pine and around a dense thicket of sharp-thorned scrub that had sprung up in its place. Hard on the other side of the thorn, a massive maple had split from age or lightning or ice, leaving one half upright and budding, the other angled against the trunk. The dead branches were weighted down with a decade or more of maple leaves, pine needles, tiny twisting weeds, so that the forest floor itself seemed to rise up in a swell. He pointed toward it.

  She turned her hands up in puzzlement. What?

  He angled his body, making himself as flat as he could, and slithered past the spiny brush. Small branches shook and flexed as the thorns caught his woolen coat, but then he was through, ducking down, squatting in the opening of the leaf-mold-and-tangle tent.

  She nodded. Followed his path, stepping where he had stepped, her arms outstretched to give herself a flatter profile. The thorns zizzed over the nylon of her jacket.

  “Izzy? Izzy!” The voice was louder, nearer, meaner. He—it was a he, Amado was sure of it—had stopped pretending he wanted to feed the chickens. Now they could hear the hatchet in his hand. The woman froze for a moment, her face puckered in fear, but before Amado had the chance to whisper courage to her, she opened her eyes and took another step. One, two, and then she was through, reaching for him. He took her hands and held them, tight, before pointing into the hide.

  She crouched, twisted about, and scooted in on her backside, deeper and deeper, snapping off tiny twigs that sounded, with the voice raging in the air around them, like rifle shots. Amado crawled in after her, as far as he could go, and they sat, face-to-face and knee to knee, in a dark so profound all he could make out was the pale blur of her face. The smell, mold and rot and marijuana, made his head swim.

  “Izzy! Goddammit! Get out here, you bitch!”

  Her hands fluttered against his, and he caught them, squeezing hard. She had calluses, as he did. A woman used to hard work, as he was. Even in his tight grip, her hands shook. He tugged her, gently, firmly, until she leaned forward, and he could wrap one arm around her shoulders and press her head into the crook beneath his neck. She shuddered and breathed deeply. Stopped shaking. He held her, this stranger, against the voice, raging and snapping and threatening things he could not begin to know.

  VI

  The Washington County Emergency Department charge nurse did a double-take that would have been funny, if Clare hadn’t been so tired.

  “Reverend Clare? Is that you?” Alta came around the intake counter, her eyes never leaving Clare’s uniform, whose coffee-stain design now also sported several streaks of crushed-grass green and leaf-rot brown after almost two hours spent crawling through the woods, searching in vain for the missing men. “Good lord, you haven’t left the ministry, have you? Weren’t you just on call last week?”

  Clare held the rotating—and unpaid—post of hospital chaplain, along with the Reverend Inman of High Street Baptist and Dr. McFeely of First Presbyterian. She sighed. “Hi, Alta. Yes, I was here last week, and no, I haven’t left the ministry. I’m a weekend warrior.”

  Alta looked dubious. “It’s Tuesday night.”

  “I’m a weekend warrior who is way, way behind on her flight hours. I’ve been heading to Fort Dix or Latham on my days off to get in more air time.”

  “Flight hours? You’re not a chaplain?”

  “Nope. They’ve got me in the pilot’s seat again.”

  “Well. God bless you.” Alta, for the first time in their almost-three-year acquaintanceship, hugged her. “Stepping forward when your country calls.” She held Clare out at arm’s length. “I’m proud to know you.”

  Clare made a miserable attempt at a smile. “Yeah, thanks. Look, I’m here to see Sister Lucia Pirone. She was brought in—”

  Alta stepped back behind the counter. “Broken hip and internal hemorrhage of indeterminate origin, ayeh. She’s been transferred to Glens Falls for an MRI.” Evidently, the special tribute was over.

  “How about the injured men she was driving?”

  Alta bent over her computer. “The unconscious-with-contusion’s been admitted for observation overnight.” She looked up at Clare. “Routine. Checking for symptoms of concussion.” She straightened up. “The abrasions-and-contusions got patched up and was R.O.R. ’bout half an hour ago. I have no idea where he is now.”

  “You just let him go?”

  Alta looked over her shoulder and beckoned to Clare. Bemused, Clare moved in closer. “An agent from Albany showed up.”

  “An agent?”

  “ICE.” Alta rolled her eyes. “Formerly known as INS. Some twenty-five-year-old with an MBA probably told them to rebrand themselves.” She dropped her voice. “So, anyway, I gave the guy ten bucks and the homeless shelter pamphlet. Don’t know if it’ll do him any good, since he didn’t speak English, but—”

  “The hospital reported these guys?”

  Alta drew herself up to her full five feet two inches. “Of course not! Someone at the accident site called it in, apparently.”

  One of the MKPD? No. None of Russ’s officers would make a call like that without his say-so. Now John Huggins—that was a whole ’nother kettle of fish. “What about the third man?” she asked Alta.

  “The broken arm? He’s getting casted. He’ll be ready for release as soon as Dr. Stillman clears him.”

  “So soon?”

  Alta gave her a glance that said, And your medical knowledge is . . . ?

  “It’s just that when Chief Van Alstyne broke his leg last year, he went into surgery and had to stay overnight.”

  “The chief”—was it her imagination, or did Alta put a peculiar spin to those words?—“had an open fracture requiring pins. The illegal has a plain-as-vanilla greenstick fracture. Slap some fiberglass on it and he’s done.”

  Clare found herself looking over her shoulder just as the charge nurse had. “What’s going to happen to him? When he’s discharged?”

  Alta threw up her hands. “Lord knows. The lady from the ICE already looked at his papers.” She shook her head. “All the way up from Albany for three farmworkers. I wish the government had moved that fast when my ex-husband was skipping out on child support. Their sponsors are on the way over to talk with her.”

  “Their sponsors?”

  “The folks who hired ’em. They’re responsible for their work permits. Leastways, that’s how it was explained to me.”

  Sponsors. Would that be the business that arranged the paperwork and the transportation? Or would that be—

  The Emergency Department’s old-fashioned swinging doors thumped open, admitting Russ Van Alstyne. He didn’t look happy, and his frown grew even deeper when he caught sight of Clare.

  He strode up the institutional green hallway t
oward the waiting room. An anxious-looking man with more hair in his mustache than on his head entered in his wake, along with a rangy blond woman who looked enough like a female version of Russ to be his—

  —sister. Oh.

  “What are you doing here?” Russ demanded. “I thought I told Knox and Kevin to take you home after the search.”

  She squelched the first reply that came to mind: You’re not the boss of me! “Don’t blame them,” she said instead. “They tried.”

  The doors to the examination and treatment area clunked open. A white-coated doctor stepped inside, headed for Alta’s desk. He paused when he saw Russ, and opened his mouth, but the chief of police went past him without a second glance and stopped in front of Clare. “Oh, I don’t blame them, believe me.”

  Clare did a lot of counseling as a priest, and she was good at it. She recognized the weapons of grief: anger, lashing out, keeping the world at bay. She knew the postures of guilt: bending over, ducking away, doing almost anything to avoid confronting the festering wound to the heart. She recognized. She knew. And it didn’t do her a damn bit of good, confronted by Russ Van Alstyne acting as if she had somehow done him wrong.

  “If you have a problem with me, spit it out,” she snapped. “Otherwise, get out of my face.”

  “A problem with you? A problem with you? How about the fact that you’re once more elbowing your way into police business that has nothing to do with you—”

  “I am here to visit Sister Lucia! It has nothing to do with you.”

  “—despite the fact that the last time you decided to get involved—”

  “Don’t you say it.”

  “—it ended in a bloody mess, you—”

  “Saving your life, you—”

  “—idiot woman!”

  “—overbearing jerk!”

  They both stopped at the same moment, breathing heavily. If this were a movie, they would have grabbed each other, but Clare had never felt less like throwing her arms around Russ Van Alstyne. Unless it was to knock him to the floor.