It was not until the next day that Anamari had time to notice the young Yanqui boy wandering around the village. He was wearing rumpled white clothing, already somewhat soiled with the greens and browns of life along the rivers of the Amazon jungle. He showed no sign of being interested in anything, but an hour into her rounds, checking on the results of yesterday's benaxidene treatments, she became aware that he was following her.
She turned around in the doorway of the government-built hovel and faced him. "O que e'?" she demanded. What do you want?
To her surprise, he answered in halting Portuguese. Most of these Yanquis never bothered to learn the language at all, expecting her and everybody else to speak English. "Posso ajudar?" he asked. Can I help?
"Nao," she said. "Mas pode olhar." You can watch.
He looked at her in bafflement.
She repeated her sentence slowly, enunciating clearly. "Pode olhar." "Eu?" Me? "Voce, sim. And I can speak English." "I don't want to speak English." "Tanto faz," she said. Makes no difference. He followed her into the hut. It was a little girl, lying naked in her own feces. She had palsy
from a bout with meningitis years ago, when she was an infant, and Anamari figured that the girl would probably be one of the ones for whom the benaxidene came too late. That's how things usually worked-the weak suffer most. But no, her joints were flexing again, and the girl smiled at them, that heartbreakingly happy smile that made palsy victims so beautiful at times.
So. Some luck after all, the benaxidene had been in time for her. Anamari took the lid off the clay waterjar that stood on the one table in the room, and dipped one of her clean rags in it. She used it to wipe the girl, then lifted her frail,
atrophied body and pulled the soiled sheet out from under her. On impulse, she handed the sheet to the boy. "Leva fora," she said. And, when he didn't understand, "Take it outside." He did not hesitate to take it, which surprised her. "Do you want me to wash it?" "You could shake off the worst of it," she said. "Out over the garden in back. I'll wash it
later."
He came back in, carrying the wadded-up sheet, just as she was leaving. "All done here," she said. "We'll stop by my house to start that soaking. I'll carry it now." He didn't hand it to her. "I've got it," he said. "Aren't you going to give her a clean sheet?" "There are only four sheets in the village," she said. "Two of them are on my bed. She
won't mind lying on the mat. I'm the only one in the village who cares about linens. I'm also the only one who cares about this girl." "She likes you," he said. "She smiles like that at everybody.
"So maybe she likes everybody." Anamari grunted and led the way to her house. It was two government hovels pushed together. The one served as her clinic, the other as her home. Out back she had two
metal washtubs. She handed one of them to the Yanqui boy, pointed at the rainwater tank, and told him to fill it. He did. It made her furious. "What do you want!" she demanded. "Nothing," he said. "Why do you keep hanging around!''
"I thought I was helping." His voice was full of injured pride. "I don't need your help." She forgot that she had meant to leave the sheet to soak. She began rubbing it on the washboard.
"Then why did you ask me to ..." She did not answer him, and he did not complete the question. After a long time he said, "You were trying to get rid of me, weren't you?" "What do you want here?" she said. "Don't I have enough to do, without a Norteamericano
boy to look after?"
Anger flashed in his eyes, but he did not answer until the anger was gone. "If you're tired of scrubbing, I can take over." She reached out and took his hand, examined it for a moment. "Soft hands," she said.
"Lady hands. You'd scrape your knuckles on the washboard and bleed all over the sheet." Ashamed, he put his hands in his pockets. A parrot flew past him, dazzling green and red;
he turned in surprise to look at it. It landed on the rainwater tank. "Those sell for a thousand dollars in the States," he said. Of course the Yanqui boy evaluates everything by price. "Here they're free," she said.
"The Baniwas eat them. And wear the feathers."
He looked around at the other huts, the scraggly gardens. "The people are very poor here," he said. "The jungle life must be hard." "Do you think so?" she snapped. "The jungle is very kind to these people. It has plenty for
them to eat, all year. The Indians of the Amazon did not know they were poor until Europeans came and made them buy pants, which they couldn't afford, and built houses, which they couldn't keep up, and plant gardens. Plant gardens! In the midst of this magnificent Eden. The jungle life was good. The Europeans made them poor."
"Europeans?" asked the boy. "Brazilians. They're all Europeans. Even the black ones have turned European. Brazil is just another European country, speaking a European language. Just like you Norteamericanos. You're Europeans too."
"I was born in America," he said. "So were my parents and grandparents and great- grandparents." "But your bis-bis-avos they came on a boat."
"That was a long time ago," he said. "A long time!" She laughed. "I am a pure Indian. For ten thousand generations I belong to this land. You are a stranger here. A fourth-generation stranger."
"But I'm a stranger who isn't afraid to touch a dirty sheet," he said. He was grinning defiantly. That was when she started to like him. "How old are you?" she asked. "Fifteen," he said.
"Your father's a geologist?" "No. He heads up the drilling team. They're going to sink a test well here. He doesn't think they'll find anything, though."
"They will find plenty of oil," she said. "How do you know?" "Because I dreamed it," she said. "Bulldozers cutting down the trees, making an airstrip,
and planes coming and going. They'd never do that, unless they found oil. Lots of oil."
She waited for him to make fun of the idea of dreaming true dreams. But he didn't. He just looked at her. So she was the one who broke the silence. "You came to this village to kill time while your
father is away from you, on the job, right?"
"No," he said. "I came here because he hasn't started to work yet. The choppers start bringing in equipment tomorrow." "You would rather be away from your father?" He looked away. "I'd rather see him in hell."
"This is hell," she said, and the boy laughed. "Why did you come here with him?" "Because I'm only fifteen years old, and he has custody of me this summer." "Custody," she said. "Like a criminal." "He's the criminal," he said bitterly. "And his crime?" He waited a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. When he spoke, he spoke quietly