Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. That's what the piece of paper my sister, Trumanell, taped on my steering wheel says. Trumanell's into Mark Twain right now. She is forever taping life-affirming self-help shit all over my truck to cheer me up on the road.
Not a word from the girl. No begging for water. Nothing. The sun is flicking off the sparkles on her damn scarf, making it hard to see her straight.
I reach over and yank it down. The girl makes a sound then, her mouth opening like a hole in the ground. A passing eighteen-wheeler takes her scream with it. And I see what she's hiding.
One of her eyes gleams like an emerald. The other is three-fourths shut, sunken, nothing to hold it open. I know what that means.
My daddy lost an eye when he was a kid. Depending on his mood, he wore a patch or a bad fake. The fake looked like he ripped it off a brown-eyed teddy bear minding his own business. Nothing was safe from Daddy, especially if it was minding its own business. Daddy overheard a joke I made about this when I was eight, which was a mistake on my part.
He liked to remind Trumanell and me that most pirates didn’t wear an eye patch because they had a missing eye—they wore it to condition themselves for fighting on ships and killing people in pitch-black night. This was his way of telling us he was good in the dark.
The girl’s missing eye makes me full aware she’s another of God’s tests, some kind of omen.
I focus on the other side of her nose, on the eye that is shiny and full of terror.
“Our daddy was missing an eye,” I say conversationally: “People all around here have lost bits and pieces. Arms. Thumbs. Legs. Toes. Farm equipment, war, firecrackers—they bite off stuff and you go on about your business. Out here, nobody cares. My daddy said one eye made him stronger.”
What my daddy really said was that his teddy-bear eye could blind me if I looked straight at it.
All the while I talk, I hear Trumanell in my head. Don’t touch. Don’t touch. You’ll catch it. We both know the rules of bad luck by heart, and bad luck burns off this girl like a terrible flu. She caught it from someone else. That’s how bad luck works, a germ that travels as fast as it can from one of us to the next, hoping for a mortal wound, but happy with whatever it can get.
I could still walk away:
That good eye of hers is a flickering green jewel, powerful. It says she’s already made her choice. She’ll take her chances with a big guy like me in a truck rather than alone out here on this land with the gang of rattlesnakes and buzzards that run it.
“My name is Wyatt,” I say. “Until you tell me otherwise, I’m going to call you Angel because that’s what you look like. Your head sparkling. Your arms spread out like you were doing snow angels in the dust. Were you?” I’m joking with her, trying to set her at ease so I can throw her in the truck without a scene. Getting nothing back, not even the curve of a smile. Hell, she might not have ever seen a fleck of snow. Some kids in West Texas don’t feel rain on their face until they’re five.
She grabs the water bottle I offer and pours it down her throat way too fast. When she settles down from choking, I hand her the scrap of beef jerky, what I intended to use to coax my new damn dog out of the field.
That’s when I get a fresh spook down my bone. I steady my arm to stop the quivering.