The fat person spoke up. “What do you fear, Luciente, that you watch carefully when they work together? What makes you nervous?”

Luciente covered her face with her hands, frowning with thought. A full five minutes passed. Connie stole a look at Parra, presiding over the table but not butting in. She felt a melancholy belief that she would never see the new Tejas del Sur, departamento de Rнo Grande, which had borne this woman who had so much simple confidence and dignity early in her life.

“I’m not sure,” Luciente said slowly, uncovering her face. “I believe sometimes Bolivar seeks to recreate the earlier time when Jackrabbit and Bolivar were always together, each other’s core. To me that’s sliding back to a time now past, when growth means going forward. They seem to me to bind each other.”

“Like what you and Diana did?” Jackrabbit arched his brows.

“Maybe I fear that.”

“But Diana and Bolivar have different gifts. The intensity we slip into together lets us keep up our intimacy although weeks pass apart. Our intimacy has always been centered on work. Even at our most intense and coupled, we turn outward and give to the community.”

“True, Luciente,” Sojourner said. “Your binding with Diana kept you from working well. Never did you work together, yet you fed on each other.”

“Bolivar gets nervous too,” Hawk said tentatively. “Bolivar teases Luciente a lot, and it makes per feel silly. That’s how Bolivar pays Luciente back or punishes per or something.”

A gray‑haired person with a deeply weathered face next to Bolivar smiled broadly. “It’s true, how not? Bolivar out‑maneuvers Luciente. Bolivar’s clever, quick‑witted. Luciente’s talkative but not witty. Luciente can’t strike back quick enough to win verbal battles. Now, Luciente thinks through things politically much more carefully than Bolivar. Everybody in Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett knows Luciente was recruited for the reaching‑back proj not only for per sending, but because of political soundness. Person can rep us clearly and fairly. But Luciente uses that political weight as a weapon against Bolivar. You smite each other with your different gifts. Isn’t that perverse, no?” The gray‑haired person beamed from one to the other.

“Then Bolivar too is afraid,” Parra said. “We go too fast. Let’s ask Bolivar what person fears.”

“If I’m Jackrabbit’s past, how frail. Luciente is the present. The past disappears. Health is Luciente, growth is Luciente–according to Luciente! Yet Jackrabbit and I work well together. What’s backward about that? We love each other differently at twenty‑five and nineteen than we did at nineteen and thirteen, but–”

Jackrabbit said to Luciente, “You’ve never stopped loving anybody you loved, you know that. Why can’t you inknow how it is for me? You don’t think you’re stale on Bee because it’s years old.”

Sojourner narrowed her eyes at Bolivar. “Suppose you won this little war? You have Jackrabbit all to yourself. Luciente goes off. Jackrabbit can’t travel with you all the time without giving up per workshop. Jackrabbit just put in for defending and mothering. How can person combine mothering with a wandering life like yours? You’re with us maybe a week out of the month.”

“I never tried to comp Jackrabbit into traveling with me all the time. Only sometimes we’re warmed to work together.”

“But it’s Jackrabbit’s work more than Luciente keeping per here in Mattapoisett, no?” The fat person spoke.

“Fasure.” Bolivar sighed. “Jackrabbit is more bound to place. Always when we traveled together, person would get irritable. Would sleep badly, grow a mean temper, and sling me.”

“Luciente,” Sojourner went on. “Suppose you won your war against Bolivar and whittled per down in the eyes of Jackrabbit. Will you give up Bee and spend all your free time with Jackrabbit? Will you give up the reaching‑back proj or your work in the genetics base to work with Jackrabbit, the way Bolivar does?”

“That isn’t what I want!” Luciente said hotly. “Bolivar doesn’t respect me!”

“Do you respect Bolivar?” Parra asked with interest.

“Why … yes.”

“Why?”

“Person is a good artist.”

“Luciente and Bolivar, sit down face to face inside the ring. Look at each other. Then let’s be quiet a few minutes. I’m not sure whether we should continue or just leave you to talk. The source of friction seems to lie in your lack of rapport–no friendship yet constant contact. You must set aside time to speak. To deliver your critting and praising privately.”

Luciente and Bolivar pulled the table apart and sat down face to face in the middle, where they looked at each other with itchy embarrassment. Connie turned to Parra to say softly, “Something puzzles me. It seems like everybody is careful not to say what seems real obvious to me–that Jackrabbit and Bolivar have … well, they’re both men. It’s homosexual. Like that might bother a woman more.”

“But why?” Parra looked at her as if she were really crazy. “All coupling, all befriending goes on between biological males, biological females, or both. That’s not a useful set of categories. We tend to divvy up people by what they’re good at and bad at, strengths and weaknesses, gifts and failings.”

She felt as if she had run into a blind wall. Yet Parra fascinated her. She could be no more than twenty‑one or twenty‑two, yet she was serving as people’s judge. Doctor of rivers. She herself could be such a person here. Yes, she would study how to fix the looted landscape, heal rivers choked with filth. Doctor the soil squandered for a quick profit on cash crops. Then she would be useful. She would like herself, as she had during the brief period she had been involved in the war‑on‑poverty hoax. People would respect her. There’s Consuelo, they’d say, doctor of soil, protector of rivers. Her children would be proud of her. Her lovers would not turn from her, would not die in prison, would not be cut down in the streets, like Martin.

How she had stood over him in the morgue, shaking with rage–yes, rage–because he was dead without reason. Because everybody was poor and the summer was hot and tempers flared and men without jobs proved they were still men on the bodies of other men, on the bodies of women. They had both been twenty when they married. From the cruelty of the Anglo boy who had got her pregnant and then ran in fright, saying she could prove nothing, Martin had healed her. She had told him the truth, yet he had married her. They were both twenty‑one when he was dead. A knife in the heart. He had been so beautiful.

Tears flooded her eyes in a hot flush and then eased back. She was lying on the hospital bed. Laughter rattled from the nursing station. “I caught you with your pants down, baby! Gin!”

“Shit! You got me with a mittful of face cards.”

Martin had been dead almost half the time she had lived. What was the use of crying now? Yet she mourned him freshly, thinking that in the future they might have lived side by side few: half a century. There he could have that respect he longed for, the respect whose lack tormented him like a raging thirst. He loved her enough to marry her soiled by another man but not enough to back down once from a challenge, an insult, a threat. There Martin could have had his respect, his dignity, he could have had his work and his leisure. His life. He had admired in her those months at the community college, paid for in blood. In Mattapoisett she too would have respect. And learning.

“Listen,” a female voice was saying from the nursing station, “we only got another week or two stuck over here. Then it’s back to K building and we’ll have a foursome for bridge again. I get tired playing gin every night.”

“I don’t know why, sugar. You beat me all the time. If we weren’t playing penny a point you’d have cleaned me out!”

ELEVEN

“We already have your brother’s signature on the permission form,” Acker told her, rubbing his squared‑off beard. “But we want you to give us your permission too. We want to be sure you understand how we’re going to help you. We want your wholehearted cooperation.” His eyes, the color of milky cocoa, waited on her.