He couldn’t make out her face, but her hair was a mess and her posture was off-kilter, her face held up, angled like she was trying to read something in Vietnamese. Jesus Christ. Terrified, he looked at the Mexicans, but they hadn’t seen her. They were already through the bushes, starting up the sluice toward the cave again.
Hoa’s Turn
Hoa hadn’t reached the highway. After hiking six or seven hours, she agonized about turning back. The pace of her walking slowed, but a kind of frenzy took hold of her. Dire scenes howled through her mind.
As long as she went west, it was impossible that she’d miss the highway. Yet, before twilight, alone, in the middle of a desert, she made a decision to leave the trail. It must have been bending north the whole time, that was the only explanation for why she hadn’t reached the highway. She checked herself against the sun and tried to walk as straight west as she could for two more hours. It was slow going. Over slippery, lichen-covered slabs of rock, between vicious clumps of shrubs, along dead floodways and up snakey hills, she thought she picked up sections of animal trails, mule deer, or javelinas, but they faded out each time. She was having to make her way so slowly through the terrain, divagating around so many obstacles, she was afraid of losing her bearings altogether. As the sun dropped lower, she reached a rise and stood, rocking slightly in the long day’s heat like a vase in a fire. She stared out at an unordered wilderness. She did not want to come together with it. If only there were a sign of some kind, some sign of presence or direction. The exposed skin of her arms had burned. Her heart was pounding as though she’d been running full out for miles. She wasn’t going to reach the highway. She felt something begin to crack inside herself. She almost broke.
And then she hardened.
By twilight, she made her way back to the trail and she lay down in the rut. She passed the night between bouts of foreboding and the kind of sleep in which she dreamed she was awake, lying there unsleeping. She was absolutely certain now that she should have gone south where the trail first split.
The next day, when she finally reached that fork in the trail again, she realized that Dale and the car were only a few miles further east. She kept going back. She prayed she would run into Dale, that he was limping her way. But after trudging in his direction for a while, she knew he had stayed at the car or gone to the cave he’d pointed out. Or he’d already taken the southern fork and come out at the highway with no idea that she was still wandering. Her damp fedora shaded her brow, but she kept her eyes fixed on the trail in front of her. Her knees ached and her feet were blistered. When she saw the pickup truck and two men in hats climbing out of the cab, she almost broke into a run. She didn’t spot Dale anywhere and her pace slowed, but she couldn’t stop walking forward. The two men in hats — or was it a man and a boy? — stepped off the trail. She kept on stumbling forward like a wind-up toy. It was getting dark, but she saw the men reappear higher up the slope, one behind the other, climbing. Amber sunbeams lit up sections of the ridge.
Then Hoa stopped dead in her tracks. She was still fifty yards away. Dale — it was clearly Dale and yet there was something wrong with him — emerged in a crouch from the side of the trail. What did he have on his head? He glanced toward her once — had he actually seen her? And then he opened the truck’s door and leaned into the cab. He was hidden by the door. She couldn’t see what he was doing. But then she saw him hobble behind the truck. Bent forward like an old man with a bad back. Their red rental car was behind the truck. Dale opened the car door, got in and out again, minus whatever he’d been wearing on his head, and limped back to the truck. She had never seen him move like that. Such wounded animal ferocity. She held up, frozen. Until she heard shouting. One of the men who had gone up the escarpment was shouting. She heard an engine rev, and the blue pickup lurched forward, Dale behind the wheel, and she heard a gunshot, three gunshots. Four.
* * *
The truck’s engine wound so high in first gear, it was screaming. Dale let out the clutch, and the truck scrabbled straight toward Hoa. When it slowed, the rental car slammed into the back of it and the nose of the truck lurched forward, slewing to the left and almost knocking her off the trail.
“Get into the car and steer,” Dale called thinly, sticking his head from the open window of the cab. She couldn’t move. His face was scratched and purple and terrible, a purgatorial counter of itself. There was cold intent in his eyes. He opened the truck door. “Get into the car and steer,” he screamed hoarsely. “Keep it in neutral!”
She heard another gunshot. She couldn’t recall moving but then she was at the Prizm, ripping open the door and sliding behind the wheel. Dale revved the truck again, the car jerked forward, and Hoa almost fell out through the open door. She grabbed the steering wheel with her right hand and yanked the door closed, her deadened right foot testing the brake. She aimed the car right behind the truck. The seatbelt chime was going off, but she couldn’t find her seatbelt. As they rounded the first turn in the trail, the truck’s taillights came on. The hills were swallowing the sun.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, when they came to the fork where Hoa had walked northwest to nowhere, she honked the car horn. Dale was driving slowly anyway, trying to keep the towrope taut, and when he stopped, Hoa pressed the brakes. She put the car in park and ran up to the truck. Dale looked even worse closer up. The hard landscape — its scars and rifts and dust — had entered his face, taking it over. He was as carved and rindled as the volcanic rocks, weird and ancient, his eyes squinty and red. He looked reptilian, his forehead bubbled, his lips smeared with white film. His expression was unrecognizable to her.
Dale said something first, but she couldn’t understand him, so she simply flung herself at him.
“What happened?” She was crying uncontrollably, shivering. Happy.
He pushed her off. “Can you keep driving?” His voice was squashed and cold. She looked at the ghastliness of her husband, the purple vascular bundles in his cheeks, and she swallowed. “Yes,” she said, still leaning into the truck, trying to bury her face in his chest. “Yes. But let’s just take the truck and leave the car.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Dale said. “They’re making calls.”
“There’s no reception,” Hoa blubbered, letting him go, stepping back to look at him again. He didn’t sound right.
“We can’t untie the seatbelts. They’re knotted up tight, there’s nothing to cut them with.”
As suddenly as she had started, she stopped crying and looked up the trail. “We have to go left up here,” she said more firmly. “South. I walked the other way and it goes nowhere.”
She turned back to him. “Baby, what happened to you?”
“We get to 67, we’ll be okay,” he said.
He looked like he’d been run over. A couple of times. And dragged.
Then she saw something flicker in his face, as though he were just now focusing on her. “You made it,” he said, his eyes welling. He was shaking all over.
She raised up on her toes and leaned forward again through the open door, smashing her face into his shoulder, his sullied shirt, reaching up blindly with her fingers for his face. He pressed his hand against her cheek but didn’t say anything. Then she stepped back and jogged to the car, sliding in, racking the seat forward, and shifting into neutral. The seatbelt chime started up again. Dale’s grungy once-white boxer shorts were in the seat next to her.