He did not hesitate to take it, which surprised her. "Do you want me to wash it?"
"You could shake off the worst of it," she said. "Out over the garden in back. I'll wash it later."
He came back in, carrying the wadded-up sheet, just as she was leaving. "All done here," she said. "We'll stop by my house to start that soaking. I'll carry it now."
He didn't hand it to her. "I've got it," he said. "Aren't you going to give her a clean sheet?"
"There are only four sheets in the village," she said. "Two of them are on my bed. She won't mind lying on the mat. I'm the only one in the village who cares about linens. I'm also the only one who cares about this girl."
"She likes you," he said.
"She smiles like that at everybody.
"So maybe she likes everybody."
Anamari grunted and led the way to her house. It was two government hovels pushed together. The one served as her clinic, the other as her home. Out back she had two metal washtubs. She handed one of them to the Yanqui boy, pointed at the rainwater tank, and told him to fill it. He did. It made her furious.
"What do you want!" she demanded.
"Nothing," he said.
"Why do you keep hanging around!''
"I thought I was helping." His voice was full of injured pride.
"I don't need your help." She forgot that she had meant to leave the sheet to soak. She began rubbing it on the washboard.
"Then why did you ask me to . . ."
She did not answer him, and he did not complete the question.
After a long time he said, "You were trying to get rid of me, weren't you?"
"What do you want here?" she said. "Don't I have enough to do, without a Norteamericano boy to look after?"
Anger flashed in his eyes, but he did not answer until the anger was gone. "If you're tired of scrubbing, I can take over."
She reached out and took his hand, examined it for a moment. "Soft hands," she said. "Lady hands. You'd scrape your knuckles on the washboard and bleed all over the sheet."
Ashamed, he put his hands in his pockets. A parrot flew past him, dazzling green and red; he turned in surprise to look at it. It landed on the rainwater tank. "Those sell for a thousand dollars in the States," he said.
Of course the Yanqui boy evaluates everything by price. "Here they're free," she said. "The Baniwas eat them. And wear the feathers."
He looked around at the other huts, the scraggly gardens. "The people are very poor here," he said. "The jungle life must be hard."
"Do you think so?" she snapped. "The jungle is very kind to these people. It has plenty for them to eat, all year. The Indians of the Amazon did not know they were poor until Europeans came and made them buy pants, which they couldn't afford, and built houses, which they couldn't keep up, and plant gardens. Plant gardens! In the midst of this magnificent Eden. The jungle life was good. The Europeans made them poor."
"Europeans?" asked the boy.
