She took a drink from her glass and her eyes brightened and her cheeks filled with color, in the same way a thirsty plant might respond immediately to water. He could feel the coldness of her breath when she exhaled. “They feel unloved,” she said.
“You have a lot of insight for such a young woman.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m in charge of the french-fry basket.”
“You smell like orange blossoms.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m chewing an orange rind.” She turned on the stool toward him, her knee hitting his. She let her eyes hold on his. “I bummed a ride here with a friend, but he’s gonna stay at the meeting for another hour. I live six miles away, and I don’t have money for a cab. I’d like a ride, but when I get home, I go in by myself.”
“You’re the captain of your soul?”
“No, I’m just not somebody’s backseat fuck.”
He picked up a small cooked tomato on the tines of his fork and placed it in his mouth and chewed slowly. “I wouldn’t ever say or even think something like that about you,” he said.
“So you’re gonna give me a ride?”
“If you’ll do one thing for me.”
Her eyes shifted sideways with a level of dependence that made his heart drop. “What’s that?” she said.
“Walk through the open-air jewelry market with me. I’m a sucker for Indian junk. I need an
expert hand to guide me.”
“You have a daughter?”
“No.”
“I thought that’s what you were gonna tell me.”
“Why?”
“Most of the time they say I remind them of their daughter. They can’t do enough for you.”
“Who?”
“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”
“How old are you?”
“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
KRILL HAD PARKED the car in a grove of dead fruit trees no more than fifty yards behind the house of the woman Negrito kept referring to as la china. After the setting of the sun, the wind had dropped, and the sky had turned as stark as an ink wash. The gingerbread house and trees and windmill and barn and horse tank, even the hills, seemed drained of color and movement of any kind. The horses and chickens were gone from the yard, and there was no birdsong in the trees. The only sound Krill could hear as he and Negrito approached the house was water ticking from a rusted pipe that extended over the surface of the horse tank. A nimbus of dust hung above the house like a great cloud of gnats.
Krill stopped and knelt on one knee behind a car that had no wheels or glass in the windows and whose metal was still hot from baking in the sun all day. He stared at the house and the absence of electric lights or movement inside. Negrito knelt beside him, the leather cord of his hat swinging under his chin, the heavy gray fog of his odor puffing out of his clothes. “Krill, you got to tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why we are here. I don’t see no percentage, man.”
“There isn’t one. Not for you, anyway, my old friend.”
“The others have deserted you, but still you talk down to me like I’m the enemy and not the maricones who ran away.”
Krill placed his hand on Negrito’s shoulder, which felt like a flannel sack filled with rocks. “Like me, you are a killer. But killing is not a problem for you. You sleep without dreaming and rise each morning into a new day. But I relive all the times I watched the light go out of my victims’ eyes. My thoughts have become my enemies.”