The Tigris and the Euphrates
Children on the broken road. Eight or ten of them in a cloud, all ages, raising dust as they went. A little army moving between green fields, half of its motion forward and the other half a busy side to side tussling.
Penny’s face brightened when her father pointed to them from the top of a rise. The swarm of them down below, moving along the valley floor. She caught their movement and their long shadow and heard the sound of their voices, a song filtering up, and she took her father’s hand and they walked a little faster. Aiming to meet them at a fenced-in crossroads. The fences were tagged with the PharmAgra wheat stalk and her father was certainly aware of trespassing on this road, but how much trouble can you get into when eight or ten little children are doing the same. No tire tracks on the gravel whatsoever. It had been forever since this road was last traveled by anyone but the likes of these.
They came near, and the children shied. Penny and her father at the center of the crossroads and the children hanging back a few yards, milling, as if they’d met some invisible resistance. Weller raised his hand and called out to them. The sun so low that at this distance he stood practically in their shadow. His own stretching a mile behind him. They didn’t answer. They just shied, their eyes like horses.
Penny broke the spell, dropping her father’s hand and running forward. The children swarmed around her and enfolded her.
They were brown children, and they made Weller think of Indians. They were creatures of the outdoors and they looked it, even though they’d been on their way home from school. Chattering like birds now that they’d been let out. Imagine that. A school out here. One room, they said. It must have been like in the old days, before education turned into an industry and then into an industry that failed. Just a little antique falling-down one room schoolhouse, as if there was something to learn and some reason to learn it. Something up ahead to get ready for.
He and Penny followed them home. Down the broken blacktop and through a hole in a chain link fence and up rows of tall corn. The children invisible beneath the plants this late in the summer and Weller almost invisible too. They said there were other ways. Other ways for other seasons and other cover. They passed through a wirecut fence again into a different field and down into a mansized culvert running slow with mud. They passed a couple of men coming the other way with backpacks and exchanged not a word. Came up in a tobacco field.
*
There were fences all around, but they were different. Tall fences tagged PharmAgra but poorly kept. Rusted in spots and painted over and rusting through again. Weller guessed the pieces had been dragged here from some great distance. Salvaged elsewhere and brought here for camouflage. To make this place look ordinary. He thought of how much work that must have been. Work and stealth combined.
And all because there was something different about the tobacco here. The leaves were too small, the plants too weak and spindly. It was nowhere near as dense and vigorous and large-scale profitable as the big engineered plants growing everywhere else. It wasn’t PharmAgra. Weller didn’t know much about agriculture, but he knew this. He thought of those men with the backpacks, going out. Pictured them with their payloads of old-growth plants or disengineered plants or whatever it was they were growing here. Risking a run-in with some bounty hunter like that old Black Rose. The amount of trouble that men doing a job like that would face. And the rewards.
“Children.” A voice came from behind him, soft. “They trust everybody.”
Weller turned.
“Grownups like us, not so much.” The woman speaking was small and intense, her dark hair shot through with gray. She watched the children pick up some game they’d left off before school. Penny included.
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