The Trace

“Para las mujeres,” said the man in the orange vest standing at his cab window.

“What women?” Dale asked, turning his ravaged face toward the man.

Unperturbed by Dale’s appearance, the man pointed ahead of him at the pier in the main arch of the tollbooths. A massive pink wooden sculpture was assembled there in the shape of a cross, hammered with oversized nails from which hung purses and necklaces and high heels and tags with women’s names. Jessica Morales, Marcela Fernández, Verónica Beltrán, Maria Irma Plancarte. . On the ground in front of the cross was a mannequin with its breasts cut away.

“God,” Dale gasped.

“Las que mataron,” the man said solemnly.

Dale fumbled to extract his wallet. After paying for his gas earlier, he’d counted sixty-three U.S. dollars and only a few more pesos. He took out a ten and gave it to the man, who dropped the seeds in his hand and nodded, saying in English with almost no accent, “Happy Father’s Day.” Dale took his foot off the brake and immediately jammed it down again. Behind him, the Prizm rammed the bumper of the truck. An old woman passed crossways in front of him carrying on her back a basket of avocados lashed to her forehead with a tumpline. Beside her were two young girls toting plastic shopping bags, loaded with things that banged against their calves.

Dale fell asleep and jerked awake, but no time had passed. He glanced in the rearview, and there was Hoa, alert, watching through the windshield, steady on. He felt a knot in his solar plexus melt, waves of emotion radiating into his torso. He adjusted the mirror and caught a glimpse of himself. He looked like a wildman, a Neanderthal, but for the first time in untold hours, he thought he was going to live. His face was beet-red and there were tear tracks in the grime on his cheeks. He paid the man at the toll with American dollars and added a twenty-dollar bill, explaining that their car had broken down. No problem, no problem, the Mexican toll keeper assured him, looking up from the bills. When he got to the American side, the toll taker added, he should pull over into the secondary inspection area. The border patrol might let him call a tow truck.

Dale thanked the man, the beautiful pock-faced man. He let out the clutch and yanked the rental car through the booth. Midway across the bridge, Dale looked right and left and saw the placid brown river and its little islands of trees.

His phone vibrated against his thigh and rang.

epilogue

Wearing a sombrero, he rides a horse smaller than the one on which he entered Mexico. He spurs it south from Chihuahua City after posting his letter to Carrie. The dirt road from Chihuahua to Delicias and further southeast all the way to Escalon is tolerable. But already, it’s been a long ride for a man in his seventies. In Escalon, Bierce rests and drinks, but turns down dinner. The next morning, he points his horse northeast into the desert and keeps field-side of the railroad tracks. Some ten miles on, spikes and tie plates are rooted up and the ballast dug away. The track is busted, the rails splayed outward like the antennae of a centipede. Here the horse’s hooves begin to unearth and kick forward pale fossil shells in clouds of pale dust. The remaining railroad tracks stretch across scrubland toward the mountains where, beyond a few fenced ranches, they slip through a circuitous pass into Sierra Mojada. He walks the horse by a dozen identical miners’ houses separated by empty palo verde pens. Men are conducting afternoon business outside one- and two-story adobe buildings along a main dirt street that leads — Bierce lifts the brim of his sombrero — toward a cemetery maybe a quarter mile away. Bierce has heard from a reliable source that a band of Federales has taken control of Sierra Mojada, threatening the two American superintendents of the mining company. If they try to leave, or if any miners escape to join Villa, they will be hunted down and shot. But that doesn’t worry him.

Bierce is a few days ahead of Villa’s troops, anticipating that something might play out here in the lee of a four-thousand-foot massif from which someone can see to the National Railway and seventy miles in any direction. He is a tired man on a tired horse. He unmounts at an adobe hovel and goes inside, paying for a bottle, claiming an empty table with four chairs. He drags one chair a foot away from the table, then pulls out another and sits down, putting his boots up on the seat of the first one. The vamps are slathered in dust, but the boot shafts are oily brown where his cuffs have risen. He grumbles to himself. None of the Federales in the bar is wearing a uniform. They keep an eye on the gringo as he smooths out maps on the table, sketching in trails from his notes, and asking gruff questions of the bartender in a language that is incomprehensible except when he uses the word Villa. He uses it again. And again. Outside the bar, two boys unhitch Bierce’s little horse from the post and lead it into another future.

When they are certain that the old man is alone, not simply ahead of his party, a half-dozen Federales approach the table. The drunkest man in the room, hat in hand, lurches directly up to Bierce, asking questions in Spanish and spitting incidentally. When Bierce gazes up into his glassy eyes, he sees all of the men closing in. The only word he understands is Villa and he hears it again and again. Yes, Villa, he answers. I want to see Villa. Two young men on each side stand him up, each gripping an arm and twisting it behind his back.

He notices that his horse is gone as they shove and then drag him out of the bar, down the dirt path toward the cemetery. A gang of boys is skipping behind. There is some discussion at the cemetery’s entrance before Bierce is hustled along the waist-high adobe wall to its southeast corner where the dirt is strewn with white rocks. Sweating, Bierce is barking the words “Journalista” and “Americano,” but the Mexicans are all arguing with each other. He pushes back against them and shouts with all the military authority he can muster. “Americano. Journalista.”

But the men are already sliding like water spiders away from him, and he is alone, stone-like, ancient, immobile, exhausted, his back to the adobe wall. He half sits against the edge. He takes off his sombrero and settles it on the capstone. His palm flat over the brim. Shifting his weight a little, he looks from one to the other of the two soldiers’ single open eyes, no more than fifteen feet from him, aiming through the inverted V-blades of their long barrels at his chest.

acknowledgments

Thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship supporting this work. Thanks to the Rockefeller Fellowship from United States Artists that allowed me time to work on this book.

Thanks to the Lannan Foundation for a residency at Marfa, Texas.

Thanks to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference, where I wrote the poems appearing in this book.

Thanks to John Balaban and Brian Turner for the Ojinaga & Closed Canyon adventures.

Thanks to Ashwini Bhat, whose ceramic sculptures can be seen at ashwinibhat.com.

Thanks to David Gottesman.

Thanks to Professor Jerry Johnson of University of Texas at El Paso and his herpetology students, Tony Gandara, Steven Dilks, Art Rocha, and Vicente Mata-Silva.

Grateful acknowledgment to Don Swaim for keeping active an Ambrose Bierce website and to Leon Day for his fanatical research into the death of Bierce, from which I have borrowed.

Thanks to the late Padre James Lienert for sharing his stories of serving as pastor in the desert communities around Sierra Mojada.