The child was sitting at a picnic table about thirty feet away underneath an awning next
to the dried-up riverbed. His blue denim pants and yellow-and-red plaid dress shirt made him
seem older than his years.
Forbes scrolled his eyes over the people in attendance. There must be a thousand.
Maybe two thousand. The whole community. McCole was there. Coming up behind was Nick
guiding Adam.
He studied the boy hard, the people — all of them without any water, any crops, any
hope of wealth, all given to celebrating the life of this young boy who was stirring in them the
promise of a deeper hope. Their fallow fields and dried up wells and shrinking bank accounts.
The hopelessness and the heartless prayers. All these people waiting for the rain to fall. This
boy meant everything to them. If he was brave enough to go for the water that wasn’t there,
and by a miracle survive, then what else was possible?
Charles opened a football and a Dr. Seuss book. And he opened a bear with a small
green tent.
It was the green tent that struck Forbes, remembering Dylan inside a tent like it in shape
and color the night before it had happened. The memory of his palm pounding on the glass cut
his mind like a sharp knife.
Then the boy noticed Forbes. He studied him with a ghostly fascination — how the sun
had chewed his face and how the cracks had cut back his chin into his neck and cut the fallow
lines in his cheeks. The boy held up a glass for him to take, but Forbes didn’t see it.
The mother touched hi s arm. “Forbes, would you like a drink?”
He jolted. He became conscious of his shell and of his past that the people still
seethingly remembered. The sweltering afternoon was baking his odor into them.
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