Toby Olson - Tampico

“Good Christ,” Frank said. “How far do you think that is?”

“I don’t know, but we won’t get there tonight,” Carlos answered.

They made camp in the middle of the plain. It could have been anywhere on the plain. It was just rock and cactus and flatness, and the wind rose and began to blow constantly as the sun sank. Alma circled the animals, their heads facing into the circle, muzzles touching and brushing against each other, their lids half closed, approaching sleep already, and staked them there. Then, while the men sat slumped in the sand and Carlos worked to unhitch needed belongings, he went to the water and feed that was a donkey’s burden and removed pottery vessels from the wooden rack there and went back and fed and watered them. Then he stepped away into the growing darkness surrounding their campsite, and in a few minutes came back, arms loaded with sticks and bleached branches that he had found somewhere. Then he got to work on the fire.

It was later. The fire had flamed high into the night at first, but then had settled into a bright, hot glow that was circumscribed, like a fire in a hearth, bright enough to bathe their faces where they sat in a circle facing in at the fire and across it at each other. Alma had set a stone vessel in the embers, and in minutes there was steam rising from it. It was a kind of stew, delicious and warm in their bellies, spicy and sweet, and they ate heartily. They’d cast away stones and dug the trenches in sand in the way Alma had demonstrated. They’d lain in their sleeping bags in them, to test them, finding them comfortable and deep enough to break the wind. They were behind them, still in the fire’s light, and they each knew they’d just have to roll over and crawl in, not much effort and unexpected pain.

“This is some fucking thing,” Gino said, smiling at Alma, who sat beside Carlos beyond the embers. Alma smiled back, as if he understood.

“Does he say we’ll get there tomorrow?” Larry asked.

Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t quite get that out of him.”

A breeze blew at the blanket at John’s shoulder, and Frank reached over and pulled it and tucked it under his arm. John was smoking again, and he passed the pack and saw Alma tear the filter away before lighting up, using a stick with a glowing tip.

“Should we talk?” Gino said.

“About what?” Frank said. “Our fucking aching bones?”

“Could be it’s a good hurt,” John said. “Like work? Remember that?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said. “But it could be a comfort, to think of it that way, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frank said.

Carlos was watching them, in their hats and blankets in the fire’s glow. The light from the fire bathed their cheeks and brows, and shadows cast by their noses caused angular planes, reconstructing their features. Heads turned and mouths opened on dark holes, and their hair was invisible in darkness above their bone-hard and receding brows. Calaveras , he thought. They’re even dressed for some historical occasion. But they were not that. In the firelight, in expression, they were animate and particular. Only when they were poised and listening, or falling asleep with their eyes open, as was Gino now, did they seem part of that other life.

“Shit! I’m falling asleep here like a horse!” Gino said, and they all laughed. Then they ordered their clothing and rolled over and crawled into their sleeping bags. Alma went into the darkness again for more wood, and when he returned they were all sleeping.

They spent another day and night on the barren plateau, and when they awoke near dawn on the morning of the second day they found they were under the mountains and that the wind had died. The men were slow and heavy-footed, blankets over their shoulders and their hats screwed tight, and in the first dawn shadows they looked like old tintypes.

Larry turned, and Carlos saw his hollow cheeks across the coffee fire, grit now in the creases near his eyes and a dark hue, like old blood, where sand had blasted his brow. His face had hardened into a fixed expression, as if a clay casting had replaced it, and he was looking to where Frank sat on his sleeping bag, tending to Gino, who was coughing. His tracheotomy tube had gotten clogged with sand, and he’d removed it, and Frank was reaming and washing it in water in a clay bowl. “The fucking thing,” Carlos heard, and then more coughing. When they were finished and the tube was back in place and Gino had blown through it, Frank rose and hobbled off beyond the staked animals, to relieve himself in privacy on the plain.

The mountains started up in slabs of rock and low growth, much like the ground they’d left behind, but by mid-morning they had come upon a distinct trail. Two horses wide, it moved through sand and shoulder-high rock at first, then, when the rock fell away to either side, they found the ground had turned to dirt, the rock become pine and honeysuckle, and they were in a small fertile valley, densely populated with trees of various kinds, birds flitting in them, and singing, and they were in cool shade, protected from a sun that had heated up as they ascended. They could smell the horses now, and the donkeys back behind them, and they could hear them blow and wheeze.

“Pollen.” It was Alma at the head, the first word they’d understood, and Gino looked back and grinned, his sombrero tilted, and Carlos thought he saw weak laughter in John’s shoulders.

They ate lunch in the saddle, just bread and a tepid fruity brew produced by Alma, and by early afternoon they could see the valley narrowing, dark rock escarpments rising to either side, spied through the trees, and when they came to the valley’s far end, what seemed at first an impenetrable rock wall gave way where the trees ended, and they found themselves in a narrow arroyo, pebbles and petrified wood, and were climbing once again, single file.

The arroyo twisted and turned, clearly a snow runoff river that coursed quickly in winter, and at times Alma and Gino were out of Carlos’s sight up ahead. The horses kicked and shuffled in the uncertain footing, fighting for purchase, and Carlos saw Frank’s legs gripped tight to his animal’s barrel, saw John ahead, his hand come up to hold his threatened hat. Then the arroyo straightened, ascending even more steeply, and by the time they’d reached the place where it ended and there was firm ground again, the horses were lathered and blowing and the men were too, sweat-soaked and shaking. Alma reined in and pulled up there, and they all sat in their saddles, wheezing through their tracheotomy tubes and pulling at their clothing.

They were standing in a quiet glade, tall pines rising around them and dark green moss under the horses’ hooves. Larry coughed and seemed ready to speak, but Alma’s hand was in the air, gesturing for them to get going. There was light up ahead where the glade ended, and he kicked his horse gently and started them off in that direction, and when they got there and the trees fell away behind them, they found they were out under a cooler sun, high above a broad open valley that sloped up in the far distance, becoming another mountain, but a verdant and low one, a kind of broad dome under the sky, and they heard water off to the right, the gurgling of a small stream or quiet river. Alma turned them away from the edge of the steep descent, rock and twisted scrub and pine running down the slope to the valley’s floor, and they moved back from it and along it, heading toward the sound, ghost figures in their dusty clothing and sweat-stained faces. Then the sun left, blocked by an outcrop of massive rock, and Alma led them back into the trees and shade and around the rock that increased the shade, and when they could see the lip of the steep descent again and were back in sun, they came to the source of the water sound.