Chapter 5: The Envelope

On Saturday the whole North Valley came to Armijo Farms to buy chile.

The line for the roaster went out to the road.

The drum turned over the propane flames with a loud, steady rumble.

Green pods blistered and split inside it, and the smoke smelled of sugar and burned pepper.

I stood in line with a fifty-pound sack on my shoulder and a face I hoped looked normal.

Two hundred people were talking about the weather and the Fiesta and me.

Eloy came out of the shed wiping his hands on a rag.

He didn't look at the crowd.

He walked straight to me, took the sack off my shoulder and set it on the scale.

An old woman in front of me turned around and smiled at him.

"Buenos días, mijo," she said.

"Buenos días, Doña. I'll be right with you," Eloy said.

He turned back to me and leaned an elbow on the scale.

He was close enough that no one else could hear him.

His voice was perfectly ordinary, and his eyes were not.

"Tonight, in your hangar," he said, "I'm going to put you on your back."

I did not move.

"I'm going to put my mouth on you until you've said my name more times than you can count."

The old woman was looking at the roaster.

The man behind me was looking at his phone.

Nobody could have known.

"Then I'm going to let you ride me," Eloy said. "I think you want to. And I want to watch you do it."

"Eloy," I said.

"That's one," he said. "Ten o'clock. Don't be late."

He charged me for the chile with a straight face and carried the sack to my truck.

I drove home with the windows up.

At nine-fifty I closed the hangar door.

That afternoon I had spread the pepper across the concrete floor to check her seams, as I did every August.

Ninety feet of red nylon lay under the bulb.

I stood in the middle of it in bare feet and a cotton dress.

I was shaking, but I was not nervous.

He knocked at ten.

I opened the side door, and he stood there in a clean shirt with his hat in his hand.

"You said I could say no," I said.

"I did."

"I'm not going to."

He said my name very quietly.

He stepped in, and I turned the bolt behind him.

I took the hat out of his fingers and dropped it on the workbench.

Then I took his face between my hands and kissed him.

It was nothing like the kitchen.

In the kitchen we had been afraid of it, and now we weren't.

He lifted me against the door and kissed me until I stopped keeping track of anything.

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