Dark Water - Laura McNeal [58]
The tin held a small, flat piece of wood. On one side, in charcoal, it said only,
SÍ.
I held the wood in my palm and considered the crow poking through the avocado leaves for food. My last question to Amiel had been, Can I come back here?
And now I had his answer in my hand, sharper than a Scrabble tile.
Sí.
Thirty-six
I tried conversation, of course. I’d never spent time with anyone who was so quiet. When Amiel took me fishing, I said, “What kind of fish is it?”
He shrugged.
“I guess you wouldn’t know the American names.” I watched the water reflect the sky. I watched the dragonflies buzz the reeds. But I could only keep still for about two minutes before a question rose to the surface like a swimmer up for air. “Do you think they’re native?”
He shrugged. Again, how would he know? It went on like that until finally he pointed to the water, raised his left eyebrow, and whispered, “Silencio.”
“I love it when you speak the Espanish,” I whispered back.
He rolled his eyes because I wasn’t being quiet, so I sat still and didn’t say a word until, forty or fifty years later, we had a big flapping fish on the line. “Woo-hoo!” is what I said then, and he had to give me the silencio sign again.
“What?” I said. “We’ve got it now.”
He pointed to the other side of the river, where the trail cut through the trees.
“Oh,” I said. True. We didn’t want other hikers to notice us.
Next we went to gut the fish. He had me dig a hole with a sharp, flat rock he brought out from its hiding place. Then he started to cut the fish, and I started to look away. I was studying the tree limbs in order to keep my mind off the vomit impulse when I asked him how he got to the United States.
He was wiping his hands by then. “Caminando,” he said, and he made his fingers walk like little legs.
“But how did you know which way to go? Did you have a coyote?” I knew that’s what newspapers called the smugglers who brought illegals across, but I didn’t know what Amiel was likely to call them.
In any case, he didn’t answer. He made me bury the guts, and then he took the edible parts of the fish in a piece of newspaper up to the fire pit in the old stone house. It was six o’clock on a Monday, and the gnats glowed like fireflies. I could hear a rooster and a dove, both cheerful sounds. I did some sweeping with a little broom I’d brought and Amiel built the fire.
“So you didn’t tell me how you got here,” I said once I’d done my sweeping. “Or about your childhood. Like how you learned to do circus stuff. Or the accident when you hurt your throat.”
I sat cross-legged beside him and he fed little bits of dry bark to his fire.
Without a word, he poked at the fire until it was big enough to ignite sticks. He set an array of firewood on the coals, and then his hands were empty.
“I’d just like to know about you,” I said.
Amiel took my hand, and at that moment, the doves seemed to be making their sound just for me. He drew the shape of a 2 in my palm, and when I read the number aloud, he whispered, “Long.”
“Too long,” I said. It was like texting for early man, and I wanted to do it some more.
Amiel just nodded and looked at the fire.
“If it’s long, you could tell me a little at a time,” I said.
He kept holding my hand and watching the fire, and we were happy.
Thirty-seven
August came. At work, I wore flat, baggy, plastic gloves to layer meat and vegetables on sandwiches that were too often for people I knew at school, who always thought I owed them free extra portions of bacon and avocado. I don’t know if my father was in Paris, but Robby was. Robby always spent most of August there with my uncle, my aunt Agnès, his grandmère, and Monsieur Pouf the tortoise, whom I imagined on a leash held by Robby, scraping its slow way past the Eiffel Tower.
Robby and I had barely spoken all summer, but he sent me a postcard of Tintin and Snowy. Bonjour le you, he wrote. France is le bon. Plan going très bien so far. Will parlez-vous