When Dale found his way back to the cairns, it was evening. Tremors of desperation or ecstasy or fever were shivering up the back of his neck. He felt like he had been limping for weeks. The little rock heaps helped him, and when he reached the last one — the first that he’d made — he felt a surprising urge to pee. He peed against the cairn, a little stream of urine the color of cola. Then, at the bottom of the slope, he bent forward from the waist, leaning like the twisted cholla and barrel cacti, using scrub bushes for handholds. He told himself he would not stop ascending until he made the trail.
He had lugged himself partway up the slope when he heard something. Maybe sensed it before he heard it. He paused and shaded his eyes with his hand. Thirty feet above him, a hedge of ocotillo and mesquite marked the trail’s edge. He wasn’t going up the slope on the same trajectory that he had come down, so he wasn’t sure if he would be closer to the cave or the car when he reached the trail. When he heard a man’s voice, faint, at a distance, a chill and a hope went through him at the same time. Dale was completely exposed coming up the hill. Anyone who stood at the edge of the trail and looked down would see him immediately, his silly white underwear hat. Even if he got to the thicker brush adjacent to the trail, it would be tricky to stay hidden. He hunched low and ascended the last fifteen feet holding his breath, terrified he would slide again or make a noise. For the last five feet, he was crawling between clumps of grass and scraggly mesquite. Low branches tripped him and thorns ripped his ankles. He jammed the upper part of his knee, the same knee with the boil, into a little barrel cactus and couldn’t believe the clarity of the pain.
What were the chances the men would be with Hoa, come to help?
He peered out from behind the bush, his face low to the sand. His head was killing him. A metallic blue pickup was coming from the east, toward him. And it was towing his rental car. Good sign, right? Inertia held him in place. The truck stopped a stone’s throw away. He couldn’t see his rental car behind the truck now but he heard the car door open and shut. A young man appeared in the middle of the trail behind the pickup. He had a thin mustache and wore a long-sleeved blue patterned shirt and a hemp-colored gaucho hat with a round rim.
Then the door to the pickup opened and another man stepped out onto the trail.
The two men met between the vehicles and spoke to each other, gazing at the upper slope. The man closest to Dale, the one he saw exiting the pickup, seemed to have a strange tick. His head bobbed on his neck as though he were constantly catching himself from falling asleep. He was wearing jeans and boots. The sides of his white cowboy hat curved up against the crown. He went around the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. They both disappeared behind the truck and reappeared in the brush in the sluiceway going up toward the cave. They were gone in the creosote, and then Dale caught a glimpse of them again, moving upward much more quickly than Dale had managed to come down the same way.
Dale didn’t see many options. The pickup was facing away from Sierra Mojada, but that didn’t mean the narcos had come from there. They might have come from route 67 and turned around when they tied the rental car to the truck. He couldn’t make out any tire tracks, but he didn’t have a good angle looking through the brush. If they had come from Sierra Mojada, they wouldn’t have crossed paths with Hoa as she trudged her way to route 67. That was good. But they were heading toward route 67 now, with the rental car in tow. That meant everything bad. If Hoa hadn’t reached the highway yet or was lost or had turned back, they would run into her.
Dale saw both men emerge from the cave — the guy with the waggling head in front of the young guy with the mustache — with shiny brown packages the size of carry-on luggage under each arm. That’s going to be hard, Dale thought, coming down that sluice carrying that stuff. They disappeared from Dale’s sight and less than ten minutes later, the bob-head stepped out of the creosote onto the trail right behind his truck. He dumped the packages onto the lowered gate and climbed in, readjusting them in the bed near the cab. The younger guy showed up behind him, looking like maybe he’d fallen. He was disheveled, his gold chain hanging outside his shirt and his hat jammed low on his forehead.
The two men didn’t speak. The younger one put his packages into the truck bed and Bob-head moved them beside the others. Then, both went back up the sluice to the cave and came down again loaded the same way. The fifth or sixth time they went up, Dale backed out of the brush, dropping down the precipice about ten feet. He weaved his way closer to the truck, and when he was about parallel with it, he wedged his way between bushes, lying on the ground, and waited there without even the beginning of a plan.
He could slip into the back of the rental car and hide on the floor. No one ever looked in the backseat when he got in to drive. But what then? Even if he put a choke hold on the skinny guy at the wheel and squeezed until he passed out, there’d be only one chance to get it right and he’d still be in a car attached to the bob-head’s truck. He’d be entirely visible in the truck’s rearview mirror.
* * *
The two men carried packages out of the cave for almost two hours. Steadily, without rest. Shadow darkened the sluiceway now as the sun dropped toward the horizon. In the meantime, Dale’s breath had gone out of him. There was sand and dust in his mouth and eyes. He almost closed them.
Bob-head got into the bed of the truck and made some adjustments to the packages, while Mustache made a solo trip back up to the cave. Dale’s attention was drawn back to the truck. Was that a soccer ball? Bob-head was picking up soccer balls from the truck bed. There were five or six of them. He was distributing them like spacers between the stacked packages. When Mustache emerged from the creosote bushes, handing his two packages over the back of the truck, they spoke to each other, but Dale couldn’t make out what they said. Mustache got into the passenger side of the truck and Bob-head hopped to the ground, coming around and sliding behind the wheel. The truck started up.
This is it, Dale thought. It’s now or never. His right hand was trembling.
* * *
All but paralyzed with tension, Dale fixed his eyes on the door of the truck. He had a rock the size of a pear in his right hand and he was squeezing a smaller shard of chert in his left.
He had slid furtively along the line of brush far enough to see that the rental car’s cross-member was tied to the truck’s rear bumper with about six feet of knotted red strap — the Prizm seatbelts. The two men sat in the cab as the western sky began to reflect against the windshield. Dale could see both caves, the one he had spent the night in and the small inaccessible one above it. The one the bats used. Over the rock rim, the air was blue and darkening. The men were smoking with their windows down. How are they going to tow the car with both of them in the fucking truck? Dale asked himself. Who’s going to keep the car on the trail?
He was shuffling through the possibilities, far-fetched as they were. If he stayed in place and did nothing, his chances weren’t good. And Hoa might be in serious trouble. He imagined leaping from his hiding place as the rental car got pulled past him, throwing himself onto the trunk in a balletic way. It was getting dark. And then he tried to imagine himself holding onto the trunk as the car got towed to the highway. There was no way he had that much strength or quickness.
Bob-head’s door opened and Dale heard the truck engine cut. Both the man and his partner got out. What was this now? They were coming to find him. Dale glanced down the trail in the direction of Sierra Mojada. There was nothing to run toward, not that he could run. His only chance was diving down the cactus slope below, trying to get behind some cover lower down. He looked west, up the trail, and there was Hoa in her white short-sleeved shirt, walking around the bend in the twilight.