Leo introduces me: “Bell, this is Sarah Jac. She’s going to help you figure your way around a horse.”
The girl doesn’t reply. She just gazes, blankly. I’ve seen vacant looks like this in kids’ eyes before, but usually in those of Chicago orphans, and usually after they’ve figured out that someone has left them and is never coming back, or that their stomachs are always going to growl, or that the blood they’ve been coughing up is a sign of something much worse than a common cold.
“Hey!” I wave my hand in the girl’s face. She hardly blinks. “Have you ever even been on a horse?”
Leo leans in. “She has, but there was an accident.”
“You were bucked?” I ask. “Your sister mentioned something.”
“Charged, I think.”
I point to the white stallion. “By this one?”
“A different one,” Leo replies. “They got rid of it.”
I walk toward the stallion, clicking my tongue and trying to get its attention. As I pass Bell, she mumbles something I can’t hear. I stop.
“Did you say something?”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” the little girl says quietly.
“Then you should learn to answer questions.” I grab the girl’s chin and force her eyes up to meet mine. “And to look at people when they’re talking to you.”
Bell’s expression isn’t exactly blank, I now realize. It’s simmering. Anger radiates from her pale, cactus-green eyes. I understand anger, and I understand her anger—her sister is very sick, after all. That’s got to saw at a young girl’s nerves. But Bell is spoiled. Her entire life, she’s been protected and valued and assured a future full of hot food and soft beds. She has expectations. James and I have always had our plans, but plans are different from expectations. Expectations are firm. You expect the stars to appear at night because they’ve always appeared at night. If they didn’t, you’d think the world was ending. Plans are more like half dreams. They can change; the best ones are flexible. If a plan is derailed, your heart may crack, but it won’t fully break because you can always modify the plan and create a different route to the end.
These are complicated distinctions I would never expect a little girl to understand.
I release Bell and continue over to the white horse. His nostrils flare as I approach, and he kicks the ground. When I touch his neck, the skin ripples under my hand. He’s sending out warning signs, but I know his type. He’s powerful and in search of an opponent.
But I don’t feel like being this horse’s opponent today. I leave him and head to Britain. She’s much different from the stallion; her energy smolders below a calm surface. I stroke her long face. Her breath is warm and even.
“You don’t have anything to prove, do you?” I coo.
My gaze shifts back to Bell. She’s staring at the ground, drawing circles in the dust with the toe of her boot.
“We’ll ride together,” I call out. “You can sit on the saddle in front of me.” Bell doesn’t respond, just keeps making her circles. “No running. Just walking. Maybe a trot. We don’t even have to talk to each other if that’s what you want.”
Those were the magic words.
WE HEAD OUT together, me and this sack of bones called Bell. Even though Britain is young, I trust her sense of direction and let her take us anywhere she wants to go. Whenever the horse approaches a trot, Bell tenses up, so I keep us reined in to a mid-tempo walk.
Our ride, as I promised, is silent, but after an hour or so, my head starts to throb. The direct sun and my growing thirst have started taking their toll, so I steer the horse around to what I’m fairly certain is the direction of home. We’ve seen no animals—not even a lizard—but eventually, a group of three black birds soars soundlessly through the sky, from right to left, north to south.
When the ranch house is visible in the near distance, Bell speaks for the first time.
“I like birds,” she says.
This is actually a sort of perfect thing for her to say.
“So do I.”
THAT NIGHT, LEO gets in another fight, and this time, I’m around to witness it. It happens at the campfire, after dinner. Some words are exchanged. I don’t know what they are, and it doesn’t really matter. All I see is Leo reach into the fire, snatch up the end of a thick mesquite branch, and hurl it toward some guy I’ve seen around but have never spoken to. The guy shields his face as the glowing hunk of wood explodes against his arms. He releases a feral growl and then leaps across the fire to tackle Leo. Together they slam into the dirt and become a tangle of limbs and fists. James rushes over from where he’s sitting with Odette, clamps on to Leo, and pulls him away. Once free, the other guy stumbles to his feet, pauses, and then launches his fist into James’ face. I wince, and so does half of camp. It’s a good, square hit. James’ head twists up and back, and Leo falls from his arms. Odette lets out a squeak, and then, for the shortest of moments, the camp goes quiet. I take a breath in and hold it.
Leo’s sprawled on the ground, and James neatly steps over his long legs. His hands are clenched into fists. The other guy stands alone, back to the fire, taking heaving breaths. His forearms are white, covered in ash and newly forming blisters.
“Why would you defend him?” the guy shouts to James, spitting into the dirt. “He’ll pretend to be your friend, but it’s all an act!”
If James knows what the guy is talking about, he doesn’t let on. James has been challenged. His friend, Leo, has been challenged. He has to prove his strength and his loyalty. For so many of us, these are the only things we have.
James huffs out a breath, draws a line in the dirt with the toe of his boot, and steps back. The other guy comes forward, shuffling on unsteady feet, and makes a clumsy attempt at a right hook with an arm obviously in pain. This time, James dodges away easily and then lands a punch of his own. It connects with the guy’s left eye socket. He goes down hard, his legs crumpling underneath him. He’s out cold before his head even hits the ground.
I’m about to run over to James, but Odette beats me to it. She flies into his arms, planting kisses all over his face, examining him for cuts and bruises, overdoing it as usual. Leo stands, dusts off his clothes, and claps James on the back. The other guy’s buddies hover around him, slap him in the face, pour water on him until he’s shocked awake.
Odette’s kisses have found their way to James’ mouth, and she is stuck there. She crushes him with her worry and reaches up to twine her fingers tightly into his hair. James has his hand on the small of Odette’s back. His fingers are splayed; their tips press into the worn fabric of her cotton dress.
I never have gotten used to the sudden, piercing pain in my chest that comes along with a scene like this. I can feel my eyes pool up. I can’t help it, and I’m pissed that I can’t help it.
Just know the whole thing will be over the second you say it’s over, James told me no more than a week ago.
The desert, Leo said before that, it seems so simple and boring, but really it’s full of secrets.
I turn away from the campfire and march back to the bunkhouse.
Hard hearts.
PART TWO
The Prophet
EIGHT
On my first night at the Real Marvelous, we were served spit-fired beef, collards, and cornbread sweetened with agave nectar. In the fields, the foremen would give us jerky and dried fruit—figs, sometimes even apricots—during our breaks. Now, over two weeks later, we eat mostly beans, flavored with what tastes like rancid salt pork, and there are no more snacks out in the field.
The cornmeal is officially ruined. Almost every burlap sack the mess crew opens has something in it that’s not supposed to be there: ants, beetles, centipedes, cicada husks, moths. There’s a rumor that one of the sacks was filled with sand instead of meal, and out of the sand crawled a lizard the size of a brick. When the lizard opened its mouth, a bee flew out. That bee stung one of the mess kids on the hand, which then swelled up so bad
, it had to be lanced. The kid nearly died. Now no one can get him to talk anymore. He won’t even say his name. We wonder if he even remembers it.
We can live off pork-flavored beans if we need to, but that’s not the point. Not having enough food—or even the threat of not having enough food—makes people get weird. They hoard—not just food, but bits of soap from the bathhouse, buttons they find in the dirt, and strands of other people’s hair. Rosa, who bunks above me, keeps a mouse in her pillowcase. She feeds it scraps from dinner, and I’m forced to hear it munching and squeaking all night.
Almost every evening at supper, the overseer, in his mirrored sunglasses and with his mastiffs at his side, attempts to soothe us. He says the ranch is doing the best it can. The wells are still producing water. There are scouts out trying to find reliable sources for grain. These are drought conditions, he tells us, as if we didn’t already know that. Aside from maguey, nothing is really growing. The small number of livestock is getting thin and sick. The earth won’t change.
While that explanation is sound, that doesn’t make it good. Fuses are getting short. Tempers are flaring. Fights are breaking out in the fields and in the coa lines.
One morning, Bruno got knocked in the head with a rifle butt for working too slow and then had his pay docked for telling off the foreman who hit him. Parents are starting to teach their kids how to con the mess crew into second helpings of food. There’s more sex. I can hear it at night in the bunkhouses and in the shadows behind the buildings: moans, slaps, shouts, laughter.
And then there are the accidents. Cutting maguey takes a certain amount of skill and focus, and if you’re tired or weak or green, you can make a mistake. A mistake with a coa can have gruesome consequences. Every few days, a scream rises from somewhere in the field. The red-black color of fresh blood stands out against the dust, and I’m always surprised how fast blood can gush out of a wound to the shoulder or the shin—and I’m also surprised how quickly the ground can soak that blood up.
WE’RE ON A water break, the second in an hour. The day has been particularly hot—the kind of hot that pulses on the horizon. A couple of workers have already gone crazy from it. They started blabbing and stripping off their clothes and then stumbled off in the direction of that pulsing horizon. The other workers had to round them up, calm them down, coax water down their throats, and usher them to the trucks so they could be driven back to camp. I’m trying to ignore the creeping tendrils of a headache that always seem to be wrapping around my skull.
“It’s not fair you get to work at the house,” Odette says before gulping down water from her tin cup.
“I’ve only been there a few times. And it’s not like I’m actually in the house. Honestly, I’d rather be cutting maguey.”
Odette starts talking about James. I’ve been doing a good job of ignoring the two of them at mealtimes, but Odette still finds ways to seek me out in the bunkhouse or the bathhouse and pry: Has he said anything about me lately? He told me last night he had a girlfriend back in Chicago. Why did they break up? Did she look anything like me?
I tune her out by focusing on the horizon. There’s something out there, a bobbing and shimmering shape in the distance, coming our way. It may be a coyote or a horse, but as I watch it, I realize it’s a person: a woman—or maybe a girl. She doesn’t come from the direction of the train tracks, but from the direction of the mountains. She’s alone.
Despite the oppressive heat, she’s wearing what appears to be a fur cap on her head.
Before she can reach us, one of the foremen goes out, intercepts her, guides her into a truck, and takes her back to camp. Another foreman blows his whistle and tells us to get back to work.
When I get back to camp that afternoon, I notice that the stranger who walked straight out of the mountains has chosen a bunk near mine. She’s asleep on her back, with her mouth closed and her arms across her chest like a corpse posed in a casket. Her fur cap hangs on the edge of her cot, and her head’s shorn of all hair. She’s still asleep when I come back from supper. She gets up, finally, just as the rest of us are settling in for the night. She sits on the edge of her bunk, staring at me as I yawn and remove my boots. When I notice her, I stop and stare back.
“I’m Eva,” she says.
“Hi, Eva,” I reply.
“You’re full of hate,” she declares, so simply, so without guile, as if it’s just some ordinary observation.
“Oh, yeah?” I grin. “Well, you’re full of shit.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Eva steps up onto an overturned crate and announces to us all that she has “gifts” to share. She sees things, she tells us, things that other people don’t have the ability to see. She can help us. Her timing could not be better. Eva has arrived at the exact moment when camp is tilting toward ruin and the jimadors are searching for someone to set their world right again.
Three nights later, a group of girls crowd around Eva’s bunk, where she’s lying, faceup, spouting her prophecies. She’s been speaking nonstop of magic and doom, and the jimadors, if they love anything, it’s a story about magic and doom.
She says, “There will be a plague.”
I roll over on my cot and pull the thin blanket over my head.
The girls beg to know: What kind of plague?
I wonder why that even matters. A plague’s a plague. All kinds are, by definition, terrible.
“A plague of pests, small pests,” she tells them.
Rats, Eva? They sound so worried. Or locusts?
Eva says, “The details are unclear.”
They ask: When will the plague come?
“Soon,” Eva says. “There is a witch in our midst. She’s the one who will bring the plague. She’s the one who has cursed the ground. She’s causing the crops to die. Soon, there will be no water. Soon, the winds will rise up, and there will be a storm that lasts for weeks. After that, the ranch will be no more. It will be covered by dunes. This storm will break our hearts and our bodies. To prepare, you must get clean. Only those who are pure of heart will be spared.”
The girls mutter among themselves. I hear them shuffle, searching for something. I open an eye and see one of them holding a pair of rusty scissors she must have stolen from the supply shed.
The next morning, the fields are full of girls who’ve cut off their hair. All that’s left are ragged clumps and nicks in scalps.
That same day, in the high afternoon, while Odette and I are in the maguey fields working just down the row from each other, I hear a horrific scream. Odette’s coa falls to the ground next to where her boot is coated in blood. A chunk of flesh sits in a cut piece of leather in the dust—a toe. Odette stumbles to the side, goes pale, and then throws up. I manage to rush over and catch her just before she passes out.
Later, in the bunkhouse, Eva celebrates Odette for her injury. She tells her that only through pain can a person get pure.
I don’t know if Odette feels pure, but she certainly feels pain. Her wound bled for a long time, the blood pulsing in time with her heartbeat and soaking into the dirt until a truck came to take her back to camp. Her toe was left behind. I eventually kicked a pile of dirt on top of it because that seemed like the decent thing to do rather than just leave it there for the ants.
Odette’s foot has been stitched and is wrapped in cloth bandages, but she’s still pale and trembling. Her long blond hair is damp and stuck to her cheeks. Her eyes are unfocused, her gaze zigzagging. She might not even be hearing a word of Eva’s praise.
But Rosa listens, from the bunk above mine. I can hear her up there, the sound of her fingers tapping the bundle of sticks that hangs around her neck. The twigs crunch and pop. Her little mouse squeaks.
“You should welcome the pain, Odette,” Eva says. “You should continue to find the root of your evil and cut it out.”
NINE
Bell watches a black bird circle overhead. She says, “There’s something wrong with my sister.”
The little girl is sitting in fron
t of me on the saddle. The sweat from the back of her shirt transfers to the front of mine. Even after a handful of rides, if the horse comes close to a trot, Bell stiffens. So, we walk. I feel bad for Britain. This must be torture for her.
“She’ll get better,” I offer.
“Do you have a sister?” Bell asks.
“Yes.” I shift in my saddle. “She’s . . . somewhere else.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Sometimes.”
“Where are your parents?”
In all our days of so-called riding lessons, maybe four in all, this is the most I’ve ever heard Bell talk. I try to compare her voice to Lane’s, but I’ve forgotten what Lane’s voice sounded like.
“I don’t have parents,” I say. “I grew up in a home for girls. Lots of girls from cities grew up in places like that.”
This is only sort of true. My grandmother raised me until I was thirteen. I buried her myself, under an oak tree at the edge of her property. She told me where she wanted her body to go and taught me how to dig a grave so I’d know how when the time came. After that, Lane and I lived by ourselves on our grandmother’s farm until one of our neighbors called the authorities. Then we were dragged off to Chicago. I barely had time to send the horse off and let the animals out to pasture.
“My mother was bucked from a horse,” Bell says. “Papá says it was my fault because I got mad right before she went out to ride.” Then, like flipping a switch: “I think we should go back now. The shadows.” She points to the ground. She’s right. We’ve been gone longer than I’d planned, and the shadows made by our bodies have stretched long and thin.
“Papá loves Farrah, but he doesn’t love me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I say, thinking of Gonzales and his eggs, and about the lengths he’ll go to preserve the rarest of the rare. “Some people show their love in strange ways.”
I make a clicking sound and pull Britain into a turn, but we’ve only gone about half a mile when the horse jolts backward and then trips. Bell shrieks and pitches sideways in the saddle. I work to steady the horse while scanning the ground for a snake. Britain snorts, shakes her head frantically, and, as Bell cries out again, takes off into an uneven canter.
All the Wind in the World Page 7
