and looked away. Ashamed. Of his father's crime. "Adultery," he said. The word hung in the air. The boy turned back and looked her in the face again. His face was tinged with red.
Europeans have such transparent skin, she thought. All their emotions show through. She guessed a whole story from his words, beloved mother betrayed, and now he had to spend the summer with her betrayer. "Is that a crime?"
He shrugged. "Maybe not to Catholics." "You're Protestant?" He shook his head. "Mormon. But I'm a heretic." She laughed. "You're a heretic, and your father is an adulterer." He didn't like her laughter. "And you're a virgin," he said. His words seemed calculated to
hurt her. She stopped scrubbing, stood there looking at her hands. "Also a crime?" she murmured. "I had a dream last night," he said. "In my dream your name was Anna Marie, but when I
tried to call you that, I couldn't. I could only call you by another name." "What name?" she asked. "What does it matter? It was only a dream." He was taunting her. He knew she trusted in
dreams. "You dreamed of me, and in the dream my name was Anamari?" "It's true, isn't it? That is your name, isn't it?" He didn't have to add the other half of the
question: You are a virgin, aren't you?
She lifted the sheet from the water, wrung it out and tossed it to him. He caught it, vile water spattering his face. He grimaced. She poured the washwater onto the dirt. It spattered mud all over his trousers. He did not step back. Then she carried the tub to the water tank and began to fill it with dean water. "Time to rinse," she said.
"You dreamed about an airstrip," he said. "And I dreamed about you." "In your dreams you better start to mind your own business," she said. "I didn't ask for it, you know," he said. "But I followed the dream out to this village, and you
turned out to be a dreamer, too."
"That doesn't mean you're going to end up with your pinto between my legs, so you can forget it," she said. He looked genuinely horrified. "Geez, what are you talking about! That would be
fornication! Plus you've got to be old enough to be my mother!" "I'm forty-two," she said. "If it's any of your business." "You're older than my mother," he said. "I couldn't possibly think of you sexually. I'm sorry
if I gave that impression." She giggled. "You are a very funny boy, Yanqui. First you say I'm a virgin-•, "That was in the dream," he said. "And then you tell me I'm older than your mother and too ugly to think of me sexually." He looked at her ashen with shame. "I'm sorry, I was just trying to make sure you knew
that I would never-" "You're trying to tell me that you're a good boy." "Yes," he said. She giggled again. "You probably don't even play with yourself," she said. His face went red. He struggled to find something to say. Then he threw the wet sheet
back at her and walked furiously away. She laughed and laughed. She liked this boy very
much. The next morning he came back and helped her in the clinic all day. His name was Sam Monson, and he was the first European she ever knew who dreamed true dreams. She had thought only Indios could do that. Whatever god it was that gave her dreams to her, perhaps it was the same god giving dreams to Sam. Perhaps that god brought them together here in the jungle. Perhaps it was that god who would lead the drill to oil, so that Sam's father would have to keep him here long enough to accomplish whatever the god had in mind.
It annoyed her that the god had mentioned she was a virgin. That was nobody's business but her own.
Life in the jungle was better than Sam ever expected. Back in Utah, when Mother first told him that he had to go to the Amazon with the old bastard, he had feared the worst. Hacking through thick viney jungles with a machete, crossing rivers of piranha in tick- infested dugouts, and always sweat and mosquitos and thick, heavy air. Instead the American oilmen lived in a pretty decent camp, with a generator for electric light. Even though it rained all the time and when it didn't it was so hot you wished it would, it wasn't constant danger as he had feared, and he never had to hack through jungle at all. There were paths, sometimes almost roads, and the thick, vivid green of the jungle was more beautiful than he had ever imagined. He had not realized that the American West was such a desert. Even California, where the old bastard lived when he wasn't traveling to drill wells, even those wooded hills and mountains were gray compared to the jungle green.
The Indians were quiet little people, not headhunters. Instead of avoiding them, like the adult Americans did, Sam found that he could be with them, come to know them, even help them by working with Anamari. The old bastard could sit around and drink his beer with the guys-adultery and beer, as if one contemptible sin of the flesh weren't enough-but Sam was actually doing some good here. If there was anything Sam could do to prove he was the opposite of his father, he would do it; and because his father was a weak, carnal, earthy man with no self-control, then Sam had to be a strong, spiritual, intellectual man who did not let any passions of the body rule him. Watching his father succumb to alcohol, remembering how his father could not even last a month away from Mother without having to get some whore into his bed, Sam was proud of his self-discipline. He ruled his body; his body did not rule him.
He was also proud to have passed Anamari's test on the first day. What did he care if human excrement touched his body? He was not afraid to breathe the hot stink of suffering, he was not afraid of the innocent dirt of a crippled child. Didn't Jesus touch lepers? Dirt of the body did not disgust him. Only dirt of the soul.
Which was why his dreams of Anamari troubled him. During the day they were friends. They talked about important ideas, and she told him stories of the Indians of the Amazon, and about her education as a teacher in Sao Paulo. She listened when he talked about history and religion and evolution and all the theories and ideas that danced in his head. Even Mother never had time for that, always taking care of the younger kids or doing her endless jobs for the church. Anamari treated him like his ideas mattered. But at night, when he dreamed, it was something else entirely. In those dreams he kept seeing her naked, and the voice kept calling her "Virgem America." What her virginity had to do with America he had no idea-even true dreams didn't always make sense-but he knew this much: when he dreamed of Anamari naked, she was always reaching out to him, and he was filled with such strong passions that more than once he awoke from the dream to find himself throbbing with imaginary pleasure, like Onan in the Bible, Judah's son, who spilled his seed upon the ground and was struck dead for it.
Sam lay awake for a long time each time this happened, trembling, fearful. Not because he thought God would strike him down-he knew that if God hadn't struck his father dead for adultery, Sam was certainly in no danger because of an erotic dream. He was afraid because he knew that in these dreams he revealed himself to be exactly as lustful and evil as his father. He did not want to feel any sexual desire for Anamari. She was old and lean and tough, and he was afraid of her, but most of all Sam didn't want to desire her because he was not like his father, he would never have sexual intercourse with a woman who was not his wife.