"That's what it looks like, with a Q and an X, which aren't letters you get to use very often. Anyway, one day Don Quixote got it into his head that he, too, would be a great knight. He was by this time more than a little bit batty from all his reading, so he really believed that he could do this. He made himself a helmet out of an old bucket and climbed onto an ancient old nag of a horse he called Rocinante, imagining it to be a magnificent steed trained as a warhorse. He talked one of his neighbors, a man named Sancho Panza, into becoming his squire by saying that he would make Sancho the governor of an island when they returned, and Sancho believed him.
"Now would you hand me the crescent wrench? It's that flat metal thing with the shape like a moon on the end. No, I think I need the bigger one. Thanks.
"Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode forth, Don Quixote on his bag-of-bones Rocinante, Sancho on a donkey, and the first thing they did was come out onto a flat plain, where they saw two or three dozen windmills. Do you know what a windmill is?" Dulcie looked uncertain. "There's one here, though it's a very modern one. You know that thing on the high tower up on the hill past the barns, with little arms that turn really fast when the wind blows? That's a windmill for making electricity; these windmills Don Quixote saw were shorter but wide as a shed, and instead of little metal blades that fly around fast, they had four huge arms stretching almost to the ground, made out of wood and cloth like the sail of a boat, and they went around and around slow and strong, turning a stone that the people used to grind their wheat into flour."
Most of this would be beyond the child's comprehension, but that didn't matter. Ana stuck her head back into the engine and went on with both repairs and story.
"The windmills that poor old confused Don Quixote saw looked to him like an army of giants, each of them with four enormous arms turning around and around. Of course, Don Quixote immediately decided that he would attack them all, wiping this scourge of giants from the face of the earth. Can I have that smaller crescent wrench now, Dulcie?" She waited a minute, caught in a tricky bit and unable to look around. "Do you see it? The one on the top?" she prompted, and was preparing to back out, when the wrench nudged her outstretched hand. She wrapped her fingers around it and continued.
"Don Quixote pulled down the visor on his bucket helmet, stretched out his lance, and jabbed his spurs into poor Rocinante's sides. Off they pounded, straight at the nearest windmill, while Sancho Panza sat on his donkey and covered his eyes so he didn't have to watch.
" 'Cowards and vile caitiffs,' shouted Don Quixote." Ana stuck her arm out behind her to gesture swordlike with the crescent wrench, then reapplied it to the task. " 'One knight will conquer you all!' And he flew across the field at them and charged into the nearest giant. The wind was turning the sail, and it caught Don Quixote's lance, broke it to pieces, and flipped both Don Quixote and his horse over and over, rolling across the ground.
"Sancho was so frightened. He came running up and helped Don Quixote to his feet. 'Master,' he cried, 'what are you doing? These are not giants, they're windmills. You can't destroy them!' And Don Quixote, groaning from his injuries, looked again and saw that they were indeed windmills, and he shook his head 'My great enemy, the magician Preston, has robbed me of my victory by turning these giants into windmills before our very eyes. But never fear, dear Sancho; my sword will prevail.'
"And off they went to the inn, to bind their wounds and eat their supper."
Ana had timed her conclusion carefully, to coincide with the end of the temporary repair. She emerged from the engine, dropped her tools into the box, closed Rocinante's engine cover, and turned to look in triumph at her audience.
Except that her audience had grown, and was no longer just a quiet five-year-old girl. Standing behind Dulcie was a dark, well-muscled, devastatingly good-looking young man with his hands in his jacket pockets and suspicion in his eyes.
"This is Jason," Dulcie said proudly.
Ana felt simultaneously fourteen and eighty-four, clumsy, awkward, stupid, and ugly, and could only hope that none of it showed on her face. She picked up the screwdriver and tape and dropped them into the box, got to her feet, brushed off her trousers, removed her fingerless gloves and looked at the state of her hands before deciding that she ought not to inflict her grease on the young man. He looked nothing like Dulcie, except perhaps the eyes. His hair was as black as her tangled mop, but his lay slick against his head, gathered into a short ponytail at his neck, and his skin was a couple of shades lighter.
"Hello, Jason, I'm Ana. I heard that Dulcie had a brother. Did you have a good time down in Tucson?"
"It was okay," he said, a typical teenager's reaction, and although it was not accompanied by a shrug, something about the gesture made Ana wonder if he wasn't younger than the eighteen or nineteen he appeared.
"You're an artist, I think Carla told me," In an instant, she could see it was the wrong thing to say: His face, already closed in, went completely blank. She hastened to create a diversion by clearing up the tools and chattering. "I was in the shop in Sedona and bought a coffee mug, and Carla told me that Dulcie's brother had sketched the bird on it. My favorite cup got broken when I had to slam on my brakes the week before—I got coffee all over the car and broke the handle off the cup, but I missed the deer,"
She pushed the tools down and snapped the top shut, flipped the manual closed, and put tools, book, gloves, and ground cloth into their place beneath Rocinante's seldom-used passenger seat.
"I think I better go clean my fingernails before I offer to help with dinner. Good to meet you, Jason. See you later, Dulcie,"
"Good-bye, Ana. Bye, Rocinante," said Dulcie. Her hand snuck out and surreptitiously stroked the bus's faded paint, and then she and her protective, self-contained, aloof, unconsciously handsome and unbelievably sexy older brother walked away up the road to the main compound.
Ana let out a deep breath as she watched them go. He walked like a young athlete, or a street tough, with straight spine and a slight swagger to his hips. However, his head was ever so slightly bent to listen to the now-chattering Dulcie, and when the child's hand came up to his, he allowed it to stay there.
Again, Ana wondered how old he was.
That night after dinner a basketball game was held in the dining hall. While the pans were being scrubbed and the smallest children put to bed, the tables and benches were pulled back to the walls and two men with a roll of masking tape measured off the sidelines and laid out two keys around the baskets that other men were bolting to the walls. It was a practiced exercise, finished before the cleanup was, and when Ana came out of the kitchen, she stepped into a basketball court compete with a facsimile of bleachers and two teams of wildly mixed players warming up by doing passes and lay-up shots. One of the players was Jason.
Ana worked her way around the room to where Dulcie sat.
"Hey there, Sancho," she said. "Why aren't you out on the court?"
"Hi, Ana. They said I could stay up to watch my brother. Do you want to sit down?"
The woman at Dulcie's side stared at Dulcie, stared harder at Ana, and turned to whisper to the woman next to her. Ana joined them and sat down.
"How is Rocinante, Ana?"
"My trusty steed? Ready to tilt at a hundred windmills, Dulcie. Hey, I forgot to tell you something. You know how I said that Don Quixote thought of himself as the perfect knight. Well, a knight has to have a lady to defend and to dedicate his victories to. And do you know what the name of Don Quixote's lady was? Dulcinea. Dulcie."