Dark Water - Laura McNeal [62]
“One day I saw him to hurting her,” he said, and he coughed, paused, started again. “I said I was going to tell my tío.”
I knew tío meant “uncle,” so I waited. Amiel balanced the stick upright on his palm. He bounced it once, caught it, and bounced it again.
Looking at the stick, not me, he said hoarsely, “Mi abuelo let go of my mother to come after me with a rope.” Amiel found a piece of string on the ground and tied it tightly around the stick. “Así,” he said. Then Amiel let the stick fall, jerked on the string, and pulled the stick around in the dirt.
I just stared at him for a few seconds. “So there wasn’t a car accident or a steering wheel?”
“No,” Amiel said. He untied the string, wadded it up with his fingers, and let it fall. He drew a circle in the dirt with the stick, then took my hand and pulled me gently until I stood in the center of it. He drew my arm straight out and turned my palm upward. Then he stepped into the circle behind me until his bare chest was pressed lightly against my back. While my hand trembled, Amiel tried to balance the stick upright on my palm. It stayed upright for only a second and then fell outward, and I was unwilling to step away from him to catch it.
Still pressed against my back, Amiel drew my arm back toward us and with his index finger began to trace letters on my forearm, his fingers as cold as rain. I felt the letters he was making on my skin, felt them all the way to the backs of my knees, but I was powerless to read them. The lines might have been hieroglyphics or flying birds. My arm trembled with each stroke until he reached the end of what he was writing and held still, my arm still propped in his arm, his breath near my left ear, his upper body bare. I waited, and he waited, and then he started again. I don’t know if it was a new word or the same word, but I saw clearly this time that he was spelling, as I once had, PLEASE.
This time when we kissed, he didn’t pull away, and I was close enough to his mouth for him to whisper what the tiny old vaquero had said a long time ago, the part about being of two worlds.
Tú eres de dos mundos.
I closed both of my eyes, the blue one and the brown one, so I could be in just one world, his, and as he kissed me, I understood what the silkworms were conjuring when they swayed and spun a coffin egg so tight and hollow they could disappear into its filaments. I touched with my finger the black disk on the hollow of his neck, he kissed my mouth and my neck and my eyes, and for the time that he held me there in the circle he’d drawn, what I wanted and what I had were the same.
A motorized roaring, loud and furious, finally made us pull away. Helicopters fly over Fallbrook all the time, usually marines training at Camp Pendleton, but sometimes they’re the small white police helicopters looking for criminals who are being chased on the ground.
I opened my eyes to look up, and I saw the white body of a police helicopter zipping north in the air above us. It wasn’t low enough for me to think the pilot was looking right at us, but it was low enough for me to feel exposed in the roofless house. I still didn’t want to let go of him, but Amiel broke free and began scrambling into the hollow where the tree roots led to the river.
I followed him, and I heard the helicopter move above us to the south. We crashed our way through the willow shrubs and ducked into his safe little house, as dark as a rabbit’s burrow, silent and cool until you heard, coming closer again, the ominous thwapping overhead.
“Have they done that before?”
“Sí,” Amiel said. He pulled a dry shirt from a bag and put it on.
I wanted to resume kissing, and I tried, but he held himself like a person turned to stone. His gold-flecked eyes were dark as mud.
“They can’t see us now,” I said.
Amiel shook his head. He picked up my computer and slipped it into my backpack.
“Okay,” I said coldly. “You want me to go.”
He nodded very slowly.
“But I don’t get it. They’re not looking for you. They can’t be.”
He