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“Yes, I was there. I’m here and there, working as a drover.” Ruben Vega shrugged. “What else is there to do, uh?” Showing her he was resigned to his station in life.

“You’d better leave,” she said.

When he didn’t move, the woman came out of the doorway into light and he saw her face clearly for the first time. He felt a shock within him and tried to think of something to say, but could only stare at the blue lines tattooed on her face: three straight lines on each cheek that extended from her cheekbones to her jaw, markings that seemed familiar, though he could not in this moment identify them.

He was conscious of himself standing in the open with nothing to say, the woman staring at him with curiosity, as though wondering if he would hold her gaze and look at her. Like there was nothing unusual about her countenance. Like it was common to see a woman with her face tattooed and you might be expected to comment, if you said anything at all, “Oh, that’s a nice design you have there. Where did you have it done?” That would be one way—if you couldn’t say something interesting about the weather or about the price of cows in Benson.

Ruben Vega, his mind empty of pleasantries, certain he would never see the woman again, said, “Who did that to you?”

She cocked her head in an easy manner, studying him as he studied her, and said, “Do you know, you’re the first person who’s come right out and asked.”

“Mojave,” Ruben Vega said, “but there’s something different. Mojaves tattoo their chins only, I believe.”

“And look like they were eating berries,” the woman said. “I told them if you’re going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble.”

It was in her eyes and in the tone of her voice, a glimpse of the rage she must have felt. No trace of fear in the memory, only cold anger. He could hear her telling the Indians—this skinny woman, probably a girl then—until they did it her way and marked her good for all time. Imprisoned her behind the blue marks on her face.

“How old were you?”

“You’ve seen me and had your water,” the woman said, “now leave.”

IT WAS THE SAME type of adobe house as the woman’s but with a great difference. There was life here, the warmth of family: children sleeping now, Diego Luz’s wife and her mother cleaning up after the meal as the two men sat outside in horsehide chairs and smoked and looked at the night. At one time they had both worked for a man named Sundeen and packed running irons to vent the brands on the cattle they stole. Ruben Vega was still an outlaw, in his fashion, while Diego Luz broke green horses and sold them to cattle companies.

They sat at the edge of the ramada, an awning made of mesquite, and stared at pinpoints of light in the universe. Ruben Vega asked about the extent of graze this season, where the large herds were that belonged to the Maricopa and the Circle-Eye. He had been thinking of cutting out maybe a hundred—he wasn’t greedy—and driving them south to sell to the mine companies. He had been scouting the Circle- Eye range, he said, when he came to the strange woman….

The Tonto woman, Diego Luz said. Everyone called her that now.

Yes, she had been living there, married a few years, when she went to visit her family, who lived on the Gila above Painted Rock. Well, some Yavapai came looking for food. They clubbed her parents and two small brothers to death and took the girl north with them. The Yavapai traded her to the Mojave as a slave….

“And they marked her,” Ruben Vega said.

“Yes, so when she died the spirits would know she was Mojave and not drag her soul down into a rathole,” Diego Luz said.

“Better to go to heaven with your face tattooed,” Ruben Vega said, “than not at all. Maybe so.”

During a drought the Mojave traded her to a band of Tonto Apaches for two mules and a bag of salt and one day she appeared at Bowie with the Tontos that were brought in to be sent to Oklahoma. Among the desert Indians twelve years and returned home last spring.

“It put age on her,” Ruben Vega said. “But what about her husband?”

“Her husband? He banished her,” Diego Luz