I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming Page B

enough time hiding in the dark. The trick was to go slowly. To let yourself see where you were headed and then to move like smoke, silently, safely.
    Thank God it wasn’t his little brother thrashing through the trees. In the confusion after the accident—men swearing and groaning, Sister Lucia insisting she was all right despite her bloody head and shallow breath—he had seen Octavio’s arm. Known at once the boy would have to go to the hospital. Where, without papers or a green card, he faced deportation. Amado had stuffed his own GW-1 permit and identity card into his brother’s pocket. “
You
will be Amado,” he had said. “
I
will be Octavio.” Octavio looked at him blankly, eyes glazing over with shock. “Just keep saying it over and over,” Amado had urged. “You are Amado Esfuentes. You are Amado Esfuentes.”
    “I am Amado Esfuentes,” Octavio parroted.
    Amado had stayed as long as he dared, until the lights of the police car came over the hill. Then he, along with the rest of the able-bodied, fled into the woods. His ID would ensure his brother’s safety. They resembled each another, and the pitiful excuse for a beard Octavio was growing blurred the differences between their faces. Anglos had a hard time looking past the color of a man’s skin, anyway.
    A loud thud, followed by a grunt, brought him back to the present: Esteban. He was the only one stupid enough to blunder through the dark like that. Amado debated, for a moment, staying put in his half-hollowed log. Then he heard a faint whimpering noise. Mother of God. Why his family had ever let the boy out of the house, let alone sent him north, was beyond Amado’s understanding. Resigned, he heaved himself out of the shadows and headed—slowly, silently—toward the snuffling sounds.
    The poor kid was sprawled out on the forest floor, trying to stuff his weeping back into his mouth. It took some of the younger ones that way. Amado had seen it before. Tell a boy he’s a man and carry him two thousand miles away, into a cold and alien place. He misses his mother, he misses his girl, he misses his home. He swaggers around like a fighting cock, to hide his fears, and cries in the dark when he thinks no one can hear him.
    Amado had been that boy—once. He paused behind a cluster of pines and coughed, to give Esteban the chance to set himself to rights while he still thought himself unseen. “Is someone there?” Amado said.
    The figure, anonymous in jeans and a quilted jacket, shoved up abruptly and scrambled backward, face pale and terrified.
Shit! An anglo
. He faded farther back into the shadows, ready to disappear, when the boy, still moving backward, slammed himself into a tree, making Amado wince. He wasn’t Esteban, but he certainly moved with the same grace and coordination. His baseball cap flew off, revealing a tumble of long blond hair.
    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