He got the team halted well back and went down alone with the bucket and his hat in his hand, and came back up shaking his head.
"We don't drink here," he said. "Nobody drinks here."
The barrel on the wagon's side held what it held — he had been nursing it since the morning, a fact the team did not understand and Anna, to her credit, did. She got down out of the bed without being told, in the thin shade of the canvas, and stood looking at the white crust and the dead bird with her jaw set.
"How far to sure water?" she said.
"There's a windmill tank at the old Herrero place, half a day if the team can. The way they're going to feel it, we won't make it tonight. We'll dry-camp here and roll at dark, when it's cool. Mules travel better on hope in the dark."
"And the water we have?"
"Goes to the team first, a measure apiece at sundown. Then us, what's left. That's the road's arithmetic and there isn't a second edition of it."
She nodded once, like a person signing a paper she agreed with. All afternoon they sat the heat out in what shade there was, and the mules stood hip-shot and dull, and the pan shimmered, and Las Palmas shone below them, sweet-looking and poison, the worst kind of liar. At sundown Gid measured the water out with the dipper, a share to each mule, slow, letting them take it the way you let a man take bad news — in sips. When he came to the near wheeler, the black mule who had balked at the collar, the animal's knees were trembling and its eyes had gone somewhere far off. It drank half its share and stopped, and swayed.
"Gid," Anna said quietly. She had her own cup in her hand — her share, the whole of it, a pint of warm barrel water. "Give him mine."
"No," he said. "You'll need—"
"He weighs eleven hundred pounds and he's our engine, and I'm one hundred and thirty and I'm the freight." She was already at the mule's head, gentle and businesslike, holding the cup up and letting him find it, a swallow at a time, talking to him the whole while in a low, steady voice about nothing — about water, about rest, about the work being nearly done. The black mule drank the pint like a sacrament and sighed and put his head down against her shoulder for a moment, the way a tired child does, and then he steadied. His knees stopped their trembling. It was not a cure. It was a bridge — and she had built it out of her own share.
When Gid looked at her a few minutes later, standing by the wagon with the empty cup, he saw the cost arrive all at once, the way heat takes a person — not gradual, but in one buckling moment, her hand going out for the wheel and missing it by an inch. He got an arm around her before she reached the ground, and even half-carried, half-fainting, she tried for dignity. "I'm— it's nothing, I'm—"
"It's the heat and no water, and it's not nothing, and lie still."
He got her into the shade beneath the wagon where the ground had given up the day's heat, and he wet a cloth from his own share — the last of his cup, every drop accounted in his head — and laid it on her forehead and her throat. Her color came back by degrees. Her eyes opened and found him, and were clear, and were not afraid, which he noted and noted again later.
"You poured your water into a mule," he said.
"You poured yours onto a handkerchief," she said, barely above the dust. "We're a pair of poor economists, Gid Mercer."
"Freight's supposed to look after itself. That's the arrangement."
"Then the arrangement's changed," she said, and closed her eyes, and slept right there in the dirt like a person who had decided, at last, whose hands she was in.
He sat with his back against the wheel and watched the dark come down on the white basin, and the team rest, and the stars take up their posts. He did not know what she was running from, or what she was. He knew she had given her water to a mule and her trust to him inside the same hour, and that a rule is a fence, and a fence has a gate in it or it isn't a fence, it's a wall — and Gid Mercer had never in his life built a wall around anything he valued. He rolled them out at full dark, with her sleeping under the canvas and the black mule stepping steady in the traces, toward the windmill water half a day ahead and the rock pass beyond it.
Chapter 11 — Not Anna
The alkali water had left its taste in everything. Gid could taste it in the coffee, in the back of his throat, in the wind coming off the flats. He scraped the tin cup with sand and set it by the fire and watched the woman across from him eat like a person who had been reminded what hunger was for.
She had slept the afternoon away in the shade of the wagon, where he had carried her, and woken with color back in her face and fury in her eyes at having needed carrying. She had said thank you the way a person pays a debt they resent. Since then she had harnessed the off-side mules by herself, competently, without being asked, which was her way of balancing the account.