“And why should I give you water, mate? You’re not one of us. No-one asked you to wander around out here, trying to kill yourself. You’re way out of your comfort zone, kid.” Calling him a ‘kid’ was a bit rough, but I reckoned I had at least a decade on him. That’s when it started to get weird. He stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants and sat his hat back on his head. He just looked at me. Just looked. Not creepy. Not angry. Not even unwelcome, to be fair. He was goodlooking lad. But he wasn’t checking me out. More like he was reading me. Getting the lay of the land. I dropped the barrel towards the floor. He wasn’t giving off bad vibes. Just the opposite. Then he said just about the strangest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. At least to me. He just looked straight into my eyes and said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Now, I’d been brought up religious before my family went to pieces and we exploded to all parts, but not mainstream religion. We were always a bit of a fringe group. So, it’s not like I’d never heard anyone talk about God before, but … he freaked me out. It wasn’t the weirdness of what he said, but the absolute conviction with which he said it. Like he was offering me something real. I was looking at this dusty wanderer and thinking, “What’s the catch,” because there’s always a catch, and I’m almost always caught. So, I just went with the first thing that came into my head. “Mate, you have no bucket, and the well is deep and dry. Where are you gonna get that living water you’re offering? Are you smarter than the elders who showed my dad where to sink that well, who shared their water, and watched as we drained it for rice and cotton and stock? There is no ‘living’ water here anymore. Groundwater’s gone. Everything here is dead.” I pointed to the tank, “That’s it, mate, and there’s little enough of that. Last half-decent rain out here was about four months back.” His eyes never left me. I was still fighting the urge to raise the gun again or run inside but something stopped me. There was a charge in the dawn 59
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