Not a boy, then. Not a boy at all. The girl held her hands up in front of her and whispered something in impossibly fast English. Pleading, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but for what? Help? Amado stepped into the shaft of moonlight so she could see him, his hands out and open, his arms relaxed. "I won't hurt you," he said, but of course, she couldn't understand him. She balled her hands up into fists-badly-and said something, a thread of defiance over her fear. He recognized one word: police.
"I'm not the police," he said. Slowly, keeping his arms spread wide, he sat on the rusty mat of pine needles beneath them. Making himself smaller. "No police."
"No police," she said in English.
He nodded. "No police." He smiled at her. "I milk cows for a living." He mimed the old-fashioned way of milking teats. "I pitch manure." He flung a few invisible loads with an imaginary pitchfork. "And I roll hay"-no way to indicate that-"and I wipe the shit off my boots at the end of the day." He wiped the soles of his boots on the forest floor. Quiet talk, the kind of nonsense he murmured to the stock while he worked. All the words that, together, meant I'm no threat to you.
She stepped away from the huge pine that had been holding up her backbone. She bent a little, getting a closer look at him. In the moonlight, he could see she wasn't a girl, either, but a woman, around his own age. He also got a clue as to why she was hiding from the police in, presumably, her own country. She reeked of marijuana.
She said something. He caught the word Mexican.
"Yes," he said. "I'm Mexican. Oaxacan." Not that she'd know where that was. He pressed one hand to his woolen jacket. "Amado Esfuentes, at your service." He bowed as best he could while sitting tailor-style on a cold patch of ground.
"Amado Esfuentes," she repeated.
He nodded. Wondered if he ought to have introduced himself as Octavio. He ought to get into the habit. On the other hand, it wasn't as if she was about to turn him in to the authorities, was it?
She smiled, a bit, and edged an inch closer, like a new calf examining him around its mother's hindquarters. She mimicked his motion, flattening her quilted jacket, revealing she was most definitely a woman. "Isabel," she said. "Isabel Christie."
English vowels always sounded so flat. "Isobel Christie," he said.
She smiled, more broadly. "Yeah, Isobel."
Slowly, one hand still raised where she could see it, he reached into his coat pocket. She shrank back. "It's okay," he said, in the same voice he used to soothe a skittish cow or a frightened horse. "It's okay." He pulled out a king-sized PayDay bar and held it out toward her. "Are you hungry?" He waggled the candy. "Go ahead. You can take it. I have more."
She stretched her hand out and grasped the chocolate with the very tips of her fingers, and it was gone, out of his hand and into hers faster than the eye could follow. He nodded again and dug out another candy bar for himself.
She tore open the wrapper and downed the confection as if it was the only meal she had had all day. He had guessed, when he smelled the pot on her, that she'd be hungry. She eyed the candy bar in his hand. He pulled out another PayDay-his last-and handed it to her. This time, she took it, rather than snatching it, and sat down facing him. She consumed the second one almost as quickly as the first, watching him all the while as he ate his more slowly, crunching the peanuts between his teeth.
"Well," he said in Spanish. "Now I've introduced myself and talked about my work and my home, and shared a meal. The last time I did that, it was a setup with my friend Geraldo's sister-in-law. Now I suppose I'll have to walk you home and introduce myself to your parents."
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She said something to him in a tone of voice so pleasant he wished he knew what it meant. Then she smiled, full on.
"Maybe this is the secret to maintaining good feelings between a man and a woman," he said. "Not understanding a word of what the other is saying."
In the distance, he heard a high, thin voice. "Izzy!" it called. "Izzy!"
The smile vanished from her face. Her eyes went wide and white-edged. He didn't need to know English to translate her frightened whisper. Oh, God.
They both scrambled to their feet, as the voice continued on, wheedling, cozening. It reminded him of the way his grandfather would croon lovingly to the chickens right before catching one and putting the hatchet to it. The woman was looking wildly around her, long blond hair swinging through the moonlight. Too bright. Amado snatched her hat off the ground and handed it to her. She twirled her hair into a rope and stuffed it beneath the cap.
"Isobel," he said, softly. She looked at him, on the verge of panic. He held his finger to his lips and pointed, through the trees, toward his earlier hiding place. He held out his hand to her. Come with me.
She took his hand. Yes.
He turned and traced his way through the trees, taking his time, seeing where he wanted to go and then moving. She shoved against his arm, pushing, trying to hurry him, a whimper trapped in her throat. He squeezed her hand and patted her arm, once, twice, turning the pat into a gesture that took in the woods stretching out in front of them. Slowly. Silently.
He stepped over a fallen pine and around a dense thicket of sharp-thorned scrub that had sprung up in its place. Hard on the other side of the thorn, a massive maple had split from age or lightning or ice, leaving one half upright and budding, the other angled against the trunk. The dead branches were weighted down with a decade or more of maple leaves, pine needles, tiny twisting weeds, so that the forest floor itself seemed to rise up in a swell. He pointed toward it.
She turned her hands up in puzzlement. What?
He angled his body, making himself as flat as he could, and slithered past the spiny brush. Small branches shook and flexed as the thorns caught his woolen coat, but then he was through, ducking down, squatting in the opening of the leaf-mold-and-tangle tent.
She nodded. Followed his path, stepping where he had stepped, her arms outstretched to give herself a flatter profile. The thorns zizzed over the nylon of her jacket.
"Izzy? Izzy!" The voice was louder, nearer, meaner. He-it was a he, Amado was sure of it-had stopped pretending he wanted to feed the chickens. Now they could hear the hatchet in his hand. The woman froze for a moment, her face puckered in fear, but before Amado had the chance to whisper courage to her, she opened her eyes and took another step. One, two, and then she was through, reaching for him. He took her hands and held them, tight, before pointing into the hide.