The Water Knife (16 page)

M
aria heard the hyenas long before she saw them. Their giggles rose and echoed, chittering over the abandoned subdivision.

The Vet had claimed an entire neighborhood, turning it into his own gated community, stretching a double barrier of chain-link fencing topped by concertina wire around the stuccoed homes and Spanish tile roofs.

I’m going to die
, she thought. And yet she kept walking as the chatter of the hyenas became a chorus.

The animal noises resolved themselves into animal shapes. Surreal loping monsters behind chain-link, running in the no-man’s-land between the two fences. They peered through at her, yipping, showing teeth, all matted hair and swaying heads, loping beside her, keeping pace as she wound her way up the lane.

When she’d been sitting with Sarah after her disastrous day, clutching the yuan and dollars that she’d earned, Maria had thought about running. The money was a joke. Too little for her own needs, let alone Sarah’s. A tiny pathetic pile of cash sitting on their sandy sheets.

“We can run,” Sarah had said finally.

But they couldn’t. Not really. If Sarah couldn’t work the Golden Mile, she was dead. And if Maria couldn’t sell water beside the Taiyang, she was dead, too. It was all borrowed time.

“I’ll talk to Damien,” Maria said. “See if we can get an extension.”

“I can’t go there.” Sarah didn’t meet Maria’s eyes as she said it, just picked at her ankle where her strappy high heels cut into her tan skin. “I—”

“It’s not on you. I’ll talk to him,” Maria said.

“I can’t—” Sarah broke off. “He opens their pens at night. I seen
them. He opens up the pens and lets them run through the houses.” She shuddered. “I can’t go back there.”

“You told me,” Maria said.

Except she hadn’t. Not with words, anyway.

Instead, Sarah had returned from the Vet’s all-night party and huddled up against Maria, shivering in their tangled sheets, even though it was bakingly hot in the basement. The girl who’d gone to the party wearing the best clothes she owned—sleek black dress, pretty and sophisticated, something a fiver had bought for her, treating her like a princess. Her going to that party, hoping to meet guys who were tight with the Vet. Hoping to find her golden ticket. And then, that same girl stumbling back after dawn, curling up against Maria as if Maria could protect her from whatever she’d seen.

“They couldn’t run fast enough,” Sarah had kept blubbering.

Later Maria heard from other witnesses that the hyenas had been let loose inside the compound and that Doña Arroyo and her blond boyfriend, Franz, had died. The hyenas had run them down and fed on them, a lazy easy hunt, because hyenas were used to more difficult pursuit than just tearing apart a couple dumbass Zoners who thought they could hold back from the Vet.

But even without knowing the stories, the hyenas frightened Maria. Their yellow eyes seemed to hold ancient knowledge, as if their memories of want and drought and survival were so much more than Maria’s. As they paced her, they seemed to say that she would soon be dead, but they would last forever.

The snarling increased as more hyenas caught wind of her. They emerged from the hollowed-out houses that the Vet had given over to them, yipping and whistling, laughing and chuckling. Swarming. And then they were running past her, racing ahead to some new attraction.

Maria looked ahead to the main gates of the compound. Beyond the iron bars, a man with white hair was hurling bloody hunks of meat over into the hyenas’ part of the compound. The beasts clustered and jostled one another, giggling and surging, leaping for the chunks of ragged flesh as they sailed over the chain-link and razor wire.

Big monsters, more than a dozen. Some of them tall enough that they would have stood face-to-face with her. Dusty and wild and fast, lunging in for a morsel and then pulling back to crouch and feed,
cruising back and forth behind the fence, alert and excited, entirely focused on the Vet as he lobbed more meat.

The animals arched and leaped.

Maria wanted to put the hyenas’ movement into some category that she understood. To say that they leaped like dogs or crouched like cats. Something to match against her own life experience, but they were their own strange thing.

Another gob of bloody meat spun over the coils of razor wire. A hyena stood upright for a moment. Jaws snapped. Jaws that would have fit around Maria’s head.

The Vet laughed at the animal’s clever capture, his arms red to his elbows. A group of the Vet’s men were smoking cigarettes, handing a pack between them, keeping an eye on the street as the hyenas called and begged for their master to feed them. Esteban was one of them. When he saw her, he smirked and called to Damien.

“Yo. That little water
puta
’s here.”

Behind them the Vet pulled something stiff out of the bucket. A human arm. The hyenas went after it, giggling and tearing.

Damien ambled over to the gate. “Thought you made the run across the border, with all your money.”

Despite herself, Maria scowled. “Ask Esteban about that. He took everything. He’s right there.”

“So…you want me to go get him? Maybe sit down and hold a peace rose? Talk it through like little kids in school?” The way Damien was smiling at her…he wasn’t even surprised that she was short on cash. He
knew
she was short.

He’d set it up with Esteban. He’d
meant
for her to end up short.

“You already got your money.”

Damien was grinning now, enjoying the whole charade. “You want to complain?” He jerked his head toward where the Vet was flinging more gobs of meat over the fence to his pets. “There’s your complaints department.”

Maria glared at him. It was rigged against her. It was all rigged against her. She wasn’t supposed to make money. She wasn’t supposed to get out. She and Sarah were supposed to keep sweating and screwing and dying until there wasn’t anything left of them. And then?

They’d get more Texans and do it again.

She saw the world clear. For once, she realized she was seeing the world clear. No wonder Papa had kept himself pretending.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Mr. Vet!” She started waving her arms. “Mr. Vet!”

The Vet turned at her words.

Damien stiffened. He glanced from Maria to the Vet and back, his face schooled into a tight pissed-off smile. “You have no idea what kind of hurt you’re getting into.”

The Vet set his bucket down and waved for a couple of his other
cholobis
to take it away. They handed him a rag, and he idly wiped at his gore-soaked arms as he strode over.

Maria tried to hide her fear as the Vet ambled to the gate and peered through the bars.

“Who do we have here?” he asked.

“No one,” Damien said. “Girl’s behind on her rent.”

The Vet’s eyes went from Damien to Maria. “And what does this have to do with me?” He wiped more gore from his hands and arms. Fat and meat and thick rich blood on the rag.

“I had my rent. I sell water over by the Taiyang,” Maria said. “I had my rent, but he took my money. He had Esteban take it.”

“And now you’re coming to me.” The Vet smiled. “I don’t know that many people who would consider coming directly to me.”

He was solidly built. A bull of a man, with thick shoulders and a shock of white hair and blue eyes. Pale blue eyes as cool and high as a cirrus sky. Pinprick pupils. The man was staring at her through the links, looking at her with as much hunger as his hyenas. A starved creature, considering what it would do if it reached the other side of the fence.

Maria suddenly understood her mistake. The Vet wasn’t a person at all. He was something else. A demon, climbed up out of the earth. Some kind of creature that ate and ate and ate, and now the demon was staring into her. Licking his lips. The fence was nothing as far as a barrier. He could reach through and take her.

“Come here.”

Blood-smeared arm extended, stained palm open, crabbed and
expectant, beckoning. “Let me see you.” To her horror, Maria found herself obeying the command of his gory fingers.

His hand stroked her cheek, gripped her beneath her chin. “What’s your name?”

“Maria.”

He tugged her closer still, his eyes pinprick bright. Animal and hungry.

“What do I see?” he murmured. His eyes appeared fascinated as he turned her face this way and that with his blood-slicked hand. “What do I see?”

“I can’t earn if he keeps taking my money,” Maria whispered, as he continued to grip her chin. She felt as if she were outside her body, looking in.

“Maria,” the Vet whispered, “Maria…I’m not stupid. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No.” She could barely force out the words.

“So why do you come to me, telling me things I already know?” His grip tightened, pinching her viselike. “You think I don’t know everything that happens in my domain, Maria? You think I thrive because I fail to see?”

He stroked her cheek again, running the backs of his fingers down her face. “I know you sell water by the Taiyang. I know you’d like to earn more. I know everything about you. I have visions, you see? La Santa Muerte whispered in my ear, and she said you’d be coming. The Skinny Lady likes you and your little red wagon.” His wild blue eyes scanned the dusty cul-de-sac. “But there’s no wagon. I saw you with a wagon full of bottles, all glittering in the sun. But all I see is you. Visions have variations, I find. Do you find that’s true, too?”

Maria swallowed. Nodded.

“So why don’t you work for me, Maria?”

“I just want to sell my water.”

“Damien could put you on corners, Maria. High traffic. Easy money. Or you could carry packages for me. You’re smarter than that friend of yours who hides from me. I could use a girl like you. There would be benefits. You could live closer to a relief pump. You could save money for a coyote. There’s no way you’ll make it north if you
insist on earning small money. It’s the big money that matters. Big money crosses borders.”

“I’m just selling the water.”

“You aren’t freelancing, are you?” The pinprick eyes studied her. “Maybe holding cash that you should have passed to our friend Damien?”

Maria swallowed, terrified that he somehow knew she’d gone with Sarah that one time and met the fiver. That she’d had dinner with him and listened to him tell her stories about aquifers, for money.

“I’m not stupid,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ask a stupid girl. It’s only the smart ones who think they can go it alone.” Again the empty smile. “It’s only the smart ones who think they can carve out their own little niches in our little family down here. Our little ecosystem.”

His eyes darted to the hyenas. “Those ones think they could do well outside their walls too, of course.” His eyes went back to her. “They yearn for their freedom here. To hunt and run. They see us, such little puny, soft, and confused things, and they see opportunity. We are not evolved as they are. We aren’t adapted to the hardships of eat-or-be-eaten that have toughened their kind. Look at them.” He turned her face so that she could see the hyenas staring at them both.

Maria swallowed. The Vet smiled. “You see it, don’t you? We both see things, I think.”

The hyenas studied Maria with their yellow piercing eyes, and Maria knew the Vet was right. She could see their ancient minds at work. She thought she could almost hear them dreaming of how mightily they would thrive if the Vet would just allow them to go hunting beyond the fence lines.

This is their world
, Maria realized. The broken Phoenix suburbs were their promised land. They didn’t fear the lack of water. They simply waited behind their fences for the time when they would inherit the earth.

We are not like you, sister. We don’t need water. We need blood alone
.

“If I let them run free, I think they would thrive,” the Vet said. “Don’t you? Maybe someday they will, and all of this city will be their domain.”

He released her.

“You have an extra day,” he said, turning away. “Pay Damien what you owe him.”

“But he’s got the money already.”