Bright Segment Read Online Free Page B

was soft and useless and cruel the way only lazy people can be cruel. And the wife was hickory with thorns, inside, with another kind of cruelty. Miguel would never go out of his way to be kind. The woman would travel miles, work days on end, to be cruel.
    “Kids.”
    Somewhere a lizard scuffled, somewhere a gopher sent the letter B in rapid, expert Morse. I held two fingers together, and with one eye closed used the fingers to cover the sun limb to limb. When the lower limb peeped under my finger, Grantham’s breath hissed in and out quickly, once each, and he said, “They had kids. Two or three pigeon-breasted toddlers. One other. But I met her later.
    “That was when I first came, when I was doing that collecting and reporting that impressed you all so much. I arranged with Miguel the same deal I had with others before: he was to keep his eyes open for this plant or that, or an unseasonal flower; and certain kinds he was to cut and save for me, and others he was to locate and lead me to. He’d get a copper or two for what I liked, and once in a while a dime just to keep ’em going. Quite a trick when no one speaks the other’s language and the signs you make mean different things all around. Still, the law of averages figures here, too, and I always got my money’s worth.
    “I made my deal and he called in the family, all but one, and when all the heads were nodding and the jabbering stopped, I waved my hand and headed this way. Miguel shouted something at me a moment later, and I turned and saw them all clustered together looking at me bug-eyed, but I didn’t know what he meant, so I just waved and walked on. They didn’t wave back.
    “I’d about reached where we’re sitting now when I heard a sort of growl up ahead. I’d been looking at the flora all the way up, and never noticed the things I’d smell or hear or just—just
feel
now. Anyway, I looked up and the first thing I saw was a little girl standing here in the cut. The second thing was a black roiling wall of water and cloud towering up and over me, coming down like a dynamitedwall. The third thing was a gout of white spray thirty feet tall squirting out of the landscape not a quarter of a mile away.
    “How long does it take to figure things out at a time like that? It was like standing still for forty minutes, thinking it out laboriously, and at the same time being able to move only two feet a minute like a slow loris. Actually I suppose I looked up, then jumped, but a whole lot happened in that second.
    “I shouted and was beside the girl in two steps. She didn’t move. She was looking at the sky and the spume with the largest, darkest eyes I have ever seen. She was a thin little thing like the rest of Miguel’s litter. She was by no means pretty; her face was badly pocked and either she’d lost a front tooth or so or the second set had never made up its mind to go on with the job.
    “Thing is, she was a native and I wasn’t. To me the flash flood was a danger, but she was completely unafraid. It wasn’t a stupid calm. If ever there was a package of sensitivity, this was it. How can I describe it? Look, you know how a beloved house-cat watches you enter a room? The paws are turned under, the eyes are one-third open, and the purr goes on and on like a huge and sleepy bee. The cat can do that because it means no violence to you and you mean no violence to it.
    “Now imagine coming suddenly on a wild deer—how would you feel if it looked up at you with just such fearlessness? It was as if violence couldn’t occur near this girl. It was unthinkable. Before her was this hellish wall of water and beside her a rather large bearded stranger shouting like a rag-peddler, and there she stood, awake, aware, not stunned, not afraid.
    “I scooped her up and made for the bank. I—I had help. I thought at the time it was the vanguard of that tall press of wind. Later I thought—I don’t know what I thought, but anyway, the yuccas folded toward me,