When Dale had gone a hundred yards or so from the bottom of the slope into the desert, he turned to look behind him. Had he heard Hoa calling his name? His cave had disappeared, winked out from the contours of the volcanic sill. Now, the shape of the mountain behind him was anonymous, unfamiliar. He could just barely perceive the trace of his own descent from the trail, which was only visible as a brush line, a telltale unconformity in the vegetation halfway up the slope. With his right hand, he repetitively and unconsciously rubbed at red stripes and welts on his forearms. His shirt, even though he had shaken it and beaten it against the cave wall to dislodge the fine nopale spines, pricked his shoulders and chest. His fingertips ached. All good, he thought. It was feeling.
Sidestepping a chunk of red-black volcanic rock about the size of his own head, he had an idea. He looked around for another good-sized rock he could lift, unsettled it from the sand, and carried it over to the first rock. Soon, he had assembled a knee-high cairn of three base rocks with a rock on top. Standing next to it, he rechecked his position relative to the slope. He marked a long crevice in the mountain, just east of its highest knob. It would be too easy to drift and lose his way coming back and never find the car again. Stay found. Stay found.
He turned back to the desert, mentally projecting a straight line to where he figured he had seen the arroyo from the cave. His eyes were bleary. He turned on his phone, checked the time, and turned it off again. He could walk for an hour at most. If he didn’t find the arroyo by then, he would be wasting his energy. For the next forty minutes, he sighted ahead to a century plant, a spray of ocotillo, a cactus, leaving at each subsequent site increasingly smaller cairns. As he walked, he flattened the underwear over his head and pulled the legs over his ears. The sun was unrelenting, the desert so silent, each of his steps exploded beneath him. It was like hearing himself chewing an apple into a microphone.
Whenever Dale closed his eyes, an expanding yellow circle appeared behind his eyelids. Even though he was dehydrated, he felt bloated. He stopped and checked behind him again. If he got lost, that would be it. The crevice in the ever more remote cliff face was still visible, still marking his return to the trail and the car. He pulled up the bottom of his pants and examined his right knee. There were bruises and lacerations across it, and underneath the kneecap, a nasty boil had formed.
Dale put together three stones and realigned himself facing south. Ahead of him, the brush thickened. He guessed he had come about three miles from the trail.
The arroyo wasn’t visible through the green sea of chest-high mesquite, but he knew it was there. So he walked west, looking for an animal trail through the thicket. Somewhere, the javelinas must have plowed a tunnel to the streambed. The sun was blaring, and after a few minutes, he decided he had no choice, his time was running out. Straight into the rampant mesquite he plunged.
The Arroyo and Back
As he waded twenty, thirty, fifty feet into the mesquite, it gave way to fan-spray yuccas and sotols and century plants edging a precipitous bajada that was fenestrated with the holes of pocket mice. Dale halted and peered down from the crumbly lip, his cheeks, torso, and arms bleeding. Below him, he could see a dry alluvial flat, its sand rippled by past torrents. It stretched south into the wide desert glimmering with heat.
From the scarp of the bajada, Dale took a few test steps into the loose sand and half slid, half plummeted down into the arroyo, trying to bear the brunt on his good foot, his boots sinking deep in the soft slope with each step. At the bottom, he brushed sand from his pants, and was amazed that he hadn’t re-injured his ankle. It would be easy to find his way back here, he thought, looking at his glide mark in the bajada’s flank. He sat down to take off his boots and tap out the sand. While he was putting them back on, a long gray-brown snake tongued its way past him on the far side of the dry river bed, disappearing into a depression like a wrinkle tugged flat in the sand itself.
Dale took it for a sign. He stood up and followed. The snake seemed impervious to his presence. Both snake and man stayed close to the bajada slope, the snake rippling ahead, faster than Dale could hobble, but then pausing and testing the air with its tongue. Dale was never closer than twenty feet before it zipped from sight, only to reappear ahead of him. Folds and runnels crisscrossed the sand in the old riverbed like lines in a hand, the snake pouring itself into and out of them.
At the top of the bajada on Dale’s left, a squalor of spiky greenery cast a weak shadow onto the slope. The sweat-wet underwear covered his head, but Dale still felt the sun blowtorching the back of his neck. Beneath his boots, the composition of sand was changing. It went white as talcum, then it darkened and pebbled. The snake was gone. Dale dropped onto his bruised knees in a little bend where the shadow from above almost reached, and he began to dig into the sand with his fingers. Under the fine top layer of sand, a grainier substratum tore his already raw fingertips. He managed about six inches or so before getting up and continuing to limp in the direction the frozen ripple patterns indicated was downstream. How long had he been walking? How much time had he lost?
* * *
During their relationship, Dale and Hoa had both become more interested in plants, in the names of trees and weeds and flowers. Dale had assiduously studied Hoa’s field books and slowly mastered distinctions that he quickly forgot again as the seasons changed and the years passed. But the names stuck with Hoa. On their walks, she would notice flowering plants and occasionally remark on them. Her commentaries weren’t the straightforward identification feats that he had practiced, which would lead him to casually call out cottonwood or red mulberry. She was more likely to pluck a leaf from a tree they passed and say, Swallowtails love these leaves. He’d say, What is it? and she’d look at the leaf and say, Toothache tree, it’s a pepperbark. Hoa touched plants the way she touched clay or stray cats, as if each were her lost pet. Always with a reflective, lavish gentleness.
* * *
At the point Dale decided he couldn’t afford to turn back to the trail, he noticed a discoloration in the sand up ahead. He trudged forward to find two holes and two piles of loose sand crisscrossed by tracks — coyote, dog? Both holes were narrow, dug down at least a foot, and at the bottom of each, he saw water. He threw himself down on all fours in the scratched sand and sniffed at the holes. He couldn’t smell anything, but there were no dead bugs. He looked carefully, steadying himself. The right sign, he thought. He lay down on his belly. There was just enough space for him to lower his head into the wider hole. He knocked sand into the little pool with his cheeks and his forehead and then his shoulder, the air turning to earth, the earth turning to water, and he shut his eyes, sucking up a mouthful of watery sand, swallowing it in small gulps, keeping his head in the hole in a painfully stressed position, and trying to move as little as possible.