Above his cave, a chimney of rock rose toward a gangly congestion of stars.
Hoa’s Walk
Leaving Dale behind, Hoa set her eyes ahead, marking in her mind her gait’s rhythm. She would keep going at this pace, she told herself, without slowing until she reached paved road. Route 67, north — south. North to Ojinaga. South to wherever she wasn’t going. She never looked back for Dale because she would see him soon. That was certain. She put him out of her mind to keep from going crazy, and then she was thinking about him the night before they started on this trip. Before dinner, she had latched onto his neck in the kitchen, sucking briefly at his throat, and told him it was a lamprey kiss. Dale had kissed her back, his lips warm and full, and she’d felt the arousal in her body molding her to him. Something sustaining and real, a substance almost, passed from him into her breasts and belly.
“Baby, sometimes when I think of you I smell different,” she said.
He said, “You mean your sense of smell changes?”
“No,” she’d answered. “The way I smell.”
How many days ago was that?
Her fedora protected her head, but her scalp was swampy. She looked down the trail. Now she needed to put her thirst out of her mind. Visualizing it, she opened the firebox door, set her thirst inside, and shut the door. Now there was only the heat to deal with. It wasn’t worse than a firing. She could ignore it. She focused on the highway that must be ahead, but soon she began to hear the repetitive pattern of her footsteps fill in with the four-four witch-you-babe-bee. The same jerky refrain over and over, against her will. She couldn’t stop it. Or her gurgling stomach. She was aware of passing many kinds of plants she not only couldn’t name, but had never seen before.
Signs
The rancid musk woke Dale before he heard anything. It was night. No, his eyes were swollen shut. Why was he sitting up? Then the sound jolted him wholly awake. Something large. Very close. He clutched for his rock and clenched his teeth. The narcos were coming for their stash. It was light enough to see, but nothing entered the cave. What he was hearing turned into a fury of grunts and high squeals. In the cave’s ashy mouth, Dale wriggled forward on his belly with the rock in his hand just far enough so he could peer down the slope. A pack of black javelinas — five, six — were shoving each other and shoveling their noses, snorting and snapping in a frenzy. Christ, he thought, it’s my shit, that watery shit they’re fighting over. Immediately, they sensed him and bolted, weaving down the embankment through the brush. They’ll head for water, Dale thought. I can follow their tracks. If Hoa is okay. . I have to get out of here. . If she’s okay. . Out of here.
He stepped into the dawn without his shirt, shivering at the edge of his cave, collecting himself. The early morning came on without motion, formfast but intensifying. Below, he saw the trail, and on the other side, a steeper slope to flat desert, which stretched to a horizon of dull mountains. There was a thin stroke of dark green he could see to the south. There. Could be. He could get there, he thought. He squeezed his arm and felt it. Good. He swatted his filthy shirt against the wall to clean it off and pulled it on, feeling little cactus spines all along his shoulders. He took off his boots, cargo pants, and underwear. Standing in his shirt and socks, he managed to get his pants back on, sat down, pulled on his boots, and patted the soiled white boxers onto his head like a wilted chef’s hat. He felt dizzy, but he thought his ankle was better. If he could make his way back down to the trail without twisting it again. He started for the sluiceway directly below the cave where he would have to negotiate boulders and dead brush, but it looked clearer than any other way down the hill. Here I come, he thought, you rattlesnake motherfuckers.
Hoa’s Walk
Hoa walked steadily west and northwest. She stopped only a few times to sit on a broken stone in the shade of some brush, or to rest against an outcrop by the trail. In the late afternoon, she passed a little wooden plank, anchored by stones, on which someone had painted the word agua. She almost didn’t see it. Off the trail, some twenty feet behind the sign, she spotted a wooden box the size of a microwave. A two-inch plastic pipe angled down from it into a dry rock trough. Sliding the cover back, she found an inch-deep seep-puddle inside, curded with foam and algae. There was no can or ladle or bucket to dip into the water, so Hoa knelt, digging her toes into the dirt for grip while she lowered her face into the box. The water was tepid and scummy. She rested there for half an hour, drinking what she could. Sticking her head in the box. Hoping Dale would catch up with her. Her runner husband.
Before she went on, she arranged a small line of pebbles in the trail, an arrow pointing toward the white agua sign. Dale wouldn’t miss it. All afternoon, in a kind of reversal of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus she thought would appeal to Dale, she looked over her shoulder, but never caught sight of him. He had to be coming. Even on his bad ankle, he could make it this far. He was a runner. Over and over in her head, as she walked, she imagined him catching up with her, calling her. She pictured the two of them stumbling out onto the dusty paved highway together, a pickup pulling over for them right away. They had been soldered together in love early on, and they had been soldered again in grief. Whatever their lives came to mean after the toll of disappointments and elations, she thought, their bond was a singular thing at the core of who they were, whether separately or together.
Hoa had gone maybe half a mile from the spring box, when she heard a pair of nighthawks trilling like frogs. Her socks had slipped down and bunched into her shoes. She looked up to see that the sun had begun to set. A single vulture drifted across the darkening blue sky like a scrap of ash lofted up from a fire, seesawing ever so slightly above her.
Leaving the Cave
Stumbling down the sluiceway from the cave, Dale kept in mind that thin green band of vegetation a mile or so into the desert. It was a sure sign of water. An arroyo. The cactus fruits had helped him, but if he couldn’t restore more of his fluids, he was really in trouble. How could Hoa have walked for a day in the sun without water? Where would she have slept? He kept imagining the narcos meeting up with her on their way to the cave, kept forcing himself to come up with positive scenarios. She doesn’t threaten them, so they are happy to help her out. They don’t want to stir up trouble by killing a gringa. She’s in the truck with them headed this way. The variations looped and looped until Dale stood back on the trail again, scratched and bleeding, his ankle throbbing, pulling thin cactus needles from his fingers with his teeth.
He paused about halfway down the second embankment, catching his breath and looking out across the plain below. His head smarted. He could no longer make out the green band of the arroyo he had seen from the cave’s mouth. All around him, listing at weird angles to the steep slope, the cactus plants looked like they were about to fall over. There was a hard painful lump in his throat and not enough saliva to swallow it. Some pearl of mucus and dust and acid, he thought, accreting layer over layer, hour by hour, until it plugged up his esophagus. The morning had barely begun, but the sun already sizzled, and the hill, heating up like a loaf of bread, exhaled at him. Dale kept on going down to the plain, kept going, although it seemed impossible. Simple animal effort and reaction. With each crunching step, sand and pebbles shifted under his boots. Flat and puce-colored rock fragments littered the slope and clattered like baked xylophone keys as he made his way around the thorny brush. His vision was blurring.