Then Dale was getting out of the truck. He came limping around the back and let down the tailgate. When she saw what he was doing, she put the Prizm in park again and got out, climbing up into the truck bed to help him. The packages were weighty, caked with dust.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Bar codes?”
She lifted the end of one of the shiny brown packages, flopped it upright against the bedrail, then she lifted the bottom end and dropped it over the side of the truck into the dirt. The packages were compressed and heavy, each with a white bar code taped to the plastic. It took the two of them a few minutes to clear the truck bed of everything but the soccer balls. Dale bent down and scooped up the balls one at a time and tossed then into the desert.
No more words passed between them.
Then Hoa said, “Go.”
* * *
The next three quarters of an hour, in moonlight, in tandem, the filthy Prizm lashed to the Dodge pickup, they bounced up and down through potholes, crossed a cattle guard, and passed a boarded-up shack. Whenever Hoa touched the brakes, they squealed. She used Dale’s boxer shorts to wipe the dust from the inside of the windshield. They snaked their way through the foothills, dropping into gullies and ravines, and coming up the far banks slowly in first gear. Dale started slapping himself hard to keep from falling asleep, but he barely felt the slaps. It was like hearing them happen to someone else. He ran the truck’s windshield wipers to clear the phosphorescence from the windshield. Then the first little adobe house appeared. The trail emptied itself into a wider, packed-dirt road.
They rounded a switchback, and Hoa heard a mule braying. There were palo verde pens and several adobe houses. Hoa kept the car lights off, her eyes trained on the red-lit back of the truck, seeing snatches of whatever the truck’s headlights illuminated. A store on the left. A hound yowling on a chain. It felt to her like they were traveling in some altered time. Her flesh was chalky, and in the rearview mirror, in the darkness, she saw a surreal glimmering phantom of herself. And the living, where were they?
Sunday Morning
They parked on the street across from a closed Pemex station around three in the morning. Dale slept upright against the door, while Hoa, next to him in the truck, kept watch. She stared at the industrial plant and the fires on its flare stacks a mile or so to the north. At five a.m. the office light in the gas station came on. Hoa waited until she saw a car pull alongside the pumps before she woke Dale.
Dale gassed up while Hoa went inside. In the fluorescent brightness, the man at the register looked unreal to Hoa. Then she caught a reflection of herself in the sliding-glass doors to the cold drinks and she realized that she looked far worse. She bought six bottles of a red sports water and some pastries, but when she pulled one out of the bag at the gas pump, Dale said he couldn’t eat it.
The attendant came out and Dale paid for the gas with sweat-soaked peso notes from his wallet. While Hoa laid four of the sports drinks on the cab bench, Dale opened the trunk. Their duffel bags were still there. He unzipped the inner pockets and took out their passports. The air reeked of diesel fuel. Up the road, toward the exit ramp, Dale saw sixteen-wheelers lined up end to end facing north like paralyzed caterpillars on a branch.
“You need to eat something,” Hoa said. “And maybe we could get the car fixed here.”
“Not on Sunday,” Dale said. “Presidio. We get across the Ojinaga Presidio bridge and then we’re safe.”
Dale slammed the Prizm’s trunk and stepped into the space between the truck and the car. There were handprints where the tailgate had been raised and lowered, and he smudged them away with the bottom of his shirt. Next, he squatted and checked the knots in the seatbelt towropes. Hoa noticed that the numbers and letters of the license plates of both vehicles were caked with filth, completely unreadable.
“Without anyone recognizing this truck. Before those guys get word out,” Dale said.
Hoa thought Dale looked at least ten years older. He was repeating himself, too. How were those guys at the cave going to get word out without a car or phone reception, but she didn’t say anything. If Dale needed to cross the border now, they were going to cross the border now.
“We get the car fixed here — ” he was down on his hands and knees studying the underchassis of the car in the bad light — “people see us. We pay with a credit card, they find out who we are and where we live.”
The car behind them at the pumps honked.
“Hand me the charger,” he said outside her window. She reached for the console, and he pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it on.
“The drinks are in your seat, Dale,” she said.
For the next hour, Hoa was stabbed by the sun coming through her windshield. The sky was light blue with gorgeous clouds and shafts of light gleaming down between. As they came into Ojinaga on Avenida Libre Comercio, the traffic backed up. Despite that they were in different vehicles, Dale’s paranoia worked its way into her. Slowed up in the congestion, conspicuously being towed, she felt visible, vulnerable. A yellow bus ahead flashed its lights, letting out a dozen girls carrying identical metal lunchboxes. A few adults in neon-orange shirts waited to escort them across the two-lane.
One car had scraped another at an intersection and a bottleneck in both directions had formed. Car horns were bleating from both ends of the tangle. The cars involved in the accident didn’t move, no one got out of either one, but the traffic began to flow around them on either side. At the next stoplight, a street vendor hawking T-shirts pressed Dale to buy one. Three boys spilled over to Hoa’s window, chanting to wash her windshield. She reached into her pocket, pulling out a small wad of dollars, giving one to the first boy, another to the second. They had started washing only her side before the light changed and the truck tugged the car forward. Dale was getting better at this. He could see the cars ahead queuing into two lanes for the bridge.
The inspection station was an open-air bay under a long tin roof, and the Mexican officers passed them through. Just ahead were the toll booths. Dale went to take another sip from the last of his bottles, but it was empty. He tossed it into the footwell. His phone was charging in the passenger seat. He picked it up. Searching, searching. A signal. Presidio was just across the bridge. One missed call. From Declan. Dale glanced at Hoa in the rearview mirror, her head turned toward the shops on the left side of the street.
They passed a sign that said Puesto de Control Militar and Dale pulled into the far-right lane. Tinny brass radio music mixed with the calls of hawkers and the grainy hum and percussion of idling engines and bad mufflers. Vendors in bicycle carts were selling iced drinks. A man with long hair and a knapsack held out a can of Coke, walking the line of cars and trucks. Dale was afraid to make eye contact. From the tin and glass of tiendas, from the hoods and windows of cars, the sun’s glare spindled into sharp beams. Up ahead, Dale could see pedestrians walking into Mexico along the covered left corridor of the bridge. On the right side, a crowd stood behind three barred gates. A few Federales in black uniforms were striding back and forth between the lines of cars and the steel barrels and orange cones that blocked the middle lane. The brake lights of the car in front of Dale flashed faintly on and off in the hard sun. Dale held his breath. He could see the rise of the bridge through the concrete portico. Just before the tollbooth, there was a cluster of men in neon-orange road-crew vests carrying white buckets. One of them approached his open window sucking a lime, spitting the seeds into his hand. Dale looked away and adjusted the rearview mirror.