The old motor home stood with hood propped open, rusted fender prominent, tires with but a vestige of tread, sidewalls cracked, appearing abandoned save for the two wooden stools, small table with tea service set upon its varnished surface. The woman, as slowly became apparent for, at first glance, he had mistaken her for a man, turned and rose in one graceful motion to face him.He bowed his head briefly in acknowledgement. The habit would not be broken; his grandparents, both born in Kyoto, had insisted.

The woman’s height and slender build, her short cropped greying hair, her dark eyes mirrored his own; but where his face was a flat plane with rounded cheek bones and jaw, hers was oval yet angular. His was bland and undistinguished; hers was predatory and insisting.

An alter ego, he thought, my doppelganger. My grandmother and her yokai. How odd.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” He took a step forward. “I heard a shot. Two shots.”

The trace of a smile.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes.” She turned her head slightly, opened a hand to the table. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

Yuki hesitated. He had heard loud reports that seemed very like rifle shots. This woman … an awkward moment. She must have seen him come up from the cabin. And made tea?

She arched eyebrows, an inquiry.

He nodded.

They sat together quietly. 

The cups, he noticed, were small well shaped inexpensive utensils that yet retained a charm, elegance even. He turned one in his hand.

“Suitable for … chanoya is the Japanese tea ceremony; integral,” he explained, “to our traditions.” He lowered his head, looked up, and said, “I have never been to Japan.”

“In Buenos Aires,” the woman replied, ” a small community of Japanese  adds a good deal of aesthetic panache to the drab character of Argentinians. My father sponsored a family. 1959, that was.” Her smile, just a slight lifting of her cheeks, a widening of her dark eyes, accompanied a memory. “I was ten years old and enchanted by the grace of these people.”

The green tea brought the earthy reminiscence of his grandparents sitting on tatami, legs dangling in the recess beneath the horigotatsu, the low table on which they ate their meals, always rice and vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts, and pickles, the large white pickled radish named takuan after the zen man who made them for his wanderings.

“They were contained by their rituals.” Absently said, looking away, a copse of juniper giving way to the pinyon pine, that imperiled tree, enclosing the dirt roadway, the shade inviting, and beyond he knew was the high pasture where the sheep grazed, and then the granite uplifts, and jutting peaks  still snow patched.

His grandparents had emigrated to Canada in the 1920s, the sixth child, the fourth son, prospects dim. Farmers, they worked their way south from the Fraser valley to Bellingham. Not able to buy, they rented and saved; a produce stand became a store. His father and two aunts all worked and saved and educated themselves.

But 1941 changed all that.

Yuki sipped tea. Internment was not Auswitz. He had argued that point a score of times. Still …

She lifted the pot and poured. Swirls of steam rose from the half filled cup.

“I never left,” he said.

The candid admission surprised him. He exchanged looks with the woman. Lucia? Was her name Lucia? She had two sons: they farmed near Basin. His memories drawn out by an acceptance in her eyes.

At war’s end, his grandparents had moved to Ontario, just beyond the former exclusion zone. Raised there, Yukio had ventured as far as Corvallis, to Oregon State, for his education. Then returned to settle just east at desert’s edge, in Twin Falls. From there he had begun watering the seeming waste that had blossomed in green verdure.

“Those green crop circles, one after another seem aberrations,” she said, a slight, questioning tilt of head, ears without lobes, “caricatures, I think, artificial design.” A shrug. “Mal aconsejado, as we once so glibly labeled all false notions of our compatriots. Have you read Borges?” she asked.

He had not. He had not heard of the man.

She nodded slowly.

“But they feed millions,” he said, adamant. “Those ‘aberrations.’ They have transformed this entire crescent of desert.”

“Perhaps it were better off desert.” A slight lifting of her shoulders.

Uncommon, her way of speaking. Spanish her first language? But well educated.

“Our Pampas, now fenced and parceled. It, too, might have preferred to be left alone. Borges and his intellectual compatriots argued quite persuasively for modernization. Jorge Luis Borges. He has become the centerpiece of Argentinian literature.” A short laugh followed. “But I seem to have gotten some distance ahead of myself. Your passion for green circles—a product of your rigid rituals, perhaps— have led me astray.”

“Japanese would disagree with your ‘rigid’ I think. Traditional rituals are well rounded. It is modern Japan that remains all angles.”

‘You have given this some thought.”

“Long straight roads between here and Twin Falls.”

“And we would ride from dawn to dusk. The Pampas seemed never ending.”

“Not Basque then.”

A laugh.

“No. Gaucho, from Patagonia.”

“I am sorry.”

“Not at all. A common misconception. I take it  as a compliment. Not much to chose between Gaucho and Basque. I am morisco, a person of color, as were, as are, the Basque, and we, as were they,  were ostracized and often despised.”

“Ga-u-chos,” attempting her pronunciation.Three syllables?”

A nod. “On the Pampas vowels are allowed to to roam free. Borges did not understand. Modernization, industrialization was our internment, we gauchos. Not as dramatically as were your grandparents, but interned all the same. Barbed wire and greed ended the free range of the Pampas, ended our way of life.”

“And you came here?”

“Ah, I was brought here. After an idyllic childhood on horseback,  with guitars and singing, dancing, growing as did the strength of our maté, chewing charqui, your jerky. eschewing vegetables as effeminate and beneath us, then the university and immersed in words, enchanted by poetry.” She paused, reflecting. “Then I married. My husband lived here. Here I came.”

“I have heard of your yerba maté. A store in Ontario sells it, where I buy my matcha, my green tea.”

“And does this store also stock the gourds and bombilla  used to prepare mate, the utensils now sold at exorbitant prices for such common implements?”

“I don’t think so. No gourds.”

“Our maté and your matcha make an interesting pair, both with their ceremonies, different yet not so different. Perhaps … ” She left her thought unfinished. A trace of her smile. “Our little rounded rituals. Very effective at melting the indifference or reticence of strangers.”

Between these two a silence then ensued. The heat of the day waned. To the west the crescent of what once was desert now pocked with the green inevitable circles of center pivot irrigation. Just to the north, Minidoka, and beyond, the moonscape of ancient lava flows.

He nodded at the propped hood. “Overheat?”

She followed his gaze. “No,” she said. “The report you heard … “

“Ah,” nodding.

“A recalcitrant spark plug escaping the confinement of a despotic old motor.”

“Yes. On the exhaust stroke, Newton’s third law. Of course. The plug had loosened and was ejected.” He sat forward. “I can fix that for you. A simple business. And then you can be on your way.”

She raised eyebrows. “And you, too, can be on your way. Things to do. People to see.”

“No, no, I didn’t mean … “

She laughed, her head tilting back, her tawny face embracing the startling white crescent of her teeth.

He dropped his head, and with a slow shake left and right, deplored his usual indiscretion.

“I am content here,” she said. “My sons will come.”

He stood and shoved hands into pockets, looking off across the valley.

Then, “Stop by sometime,” he began, “for … tea …  the cabin in the stand of juniper, just … ” hesitating, “Come for tea, you’d be welcome, if you wished to,” trailing off.

Tensions muddle our tenses. His grandmother’s phrase. Jisei wo magirasu.

And shimatta quickly thought but but bitten off, not said.

“Maté and matcha,” she said softly. “But perhaps without the ceremony.”

“Yes,” he said. “No ceremony. Just tea.”

“The post with the weathered boot upturned over its top.”

He nodded. “Just beyond the junipers.”

“I’d like that,” she said. “Just tea.”