Forrest Gander - The Trace

When the police chief returned to the open front door, the sweeper and his cart were gone. A woman carrying a basket on her back hurried along the sidewalk on the far side of the street, away from the plaza. The chief looked at this watch. It was 6:35, Tuesday morning.

There were no paved Mexican roads across the Chihuahua Desert connecting Ojinaga and Sierra Mojada, so they had to return to Texas to catch the U.S. highway running east above the border. Back in Presidio, Texas, Dale pulled into a Fina station just after noon. In the Win Dixie parking lot across the street, two cop cars were parked alongside each other, front to back, the drivers jawing through their open windows.

As Hoa opened her door, she caught a whiff of herself. It was the second day of wearing her coral blouse and time, she thought, to change it. She asked Dale to lift the trunk and she opened her duffel bag, rummaging around for a crinkly purple polo shirt she bought on a whim at the hotel gift shop in El Paso, thinking Dale would like it.

She walked into the mart and spied the sign for the ladies room around the corner from the drink station. Inside the bathroom, she stood at the grimy sink and looked at herself in the spattered mirror. She didn’t want to set down the new shirt on the sink or on the floor so she stuffed it and her purse between her knees, untied the bottom knot, and lifted her blouse over her head quickly, glancing at the door to make sure she had locked it.

Putting the blouse over her purse, still between her knees, she pulled on the purple sleeveless polo, which felt tighter now than when she tried it on in El Paso. She considered herself in the mirror, the worn blouse and purse still gripped between her knees. She looked uncomfortable, she thought. Someone startled her by knocking on the door.

“Just a second,” she said.

She quickly checked herself again in the mirror, adjusting her hair but sensing something was askew. The polo wasn’t right, it was too thin, too tight. Or maybe she wasn’t wearing the right bra. Her breasts looked mashed in the front and rounded at the sides like sponge cakes.

Whoever it was knocked on the door again lower down.

“Just a second,” she repeated. She glanced anxiously at herself once more, and plucking up her coral blouse and purse, she turned and opened the door. It was a Mexican woman with her little girl and they all nodded as Hoa stepped out.

“Hola,” Hoa said in a friendly voice to the girl, suddenly missing Declan acutely. Seeing him as a boy with his hand in her hand. She felt a stitch in her belly. She was heading toward the glass door when she noticed a stack of little Playmate coolers by the cash register. Adjusting her purse on her shoulder, she picked the blue one on top and set it on the counter by the register.

“Wait a second, un momento,” she said to the clerk, embarrassed to hear herself for the second time in a minute using bad Spanish to speak to Americans in Texas. She shouldn’t presume anything, she scolded herself, and walked over to the refrigerated section; she slid open the door to grab a couple bottles of water, gratefully accepting the cool air on her face.

An adolescent boy came up behind her while she paid for the cooler and drinks at the counter. She was half-conscious of an exchange of some kind going on between the clerk, probably a high-school student, and the boy behind her. She dropped the change into her purse beside her book, set the bottles in the cooler, and headed for the tinted glass door which opened into a piercing brightness. Pausing there a moment, she overheard the clerk squawk to the teenager, “¿Viste las tetas?”

Dale was putting the nozzle back into the pump, turning his face away from the sweet tang of atomized gas around him. He glanced up to see Hoa marching out of the mart toward him, carrying the little plastic cooler. She yanked open the car door, looking angry, and put two bottles of water into the cup holders between their seats.

Dale slid behind the wheel and started the rental car, pulling out of the Fina, heading the way they’d come. Two Harley Davidsons drew up behind him with their low potato-potato rumble, and Hoa started to say something, but Dale interrupted.

“Just one quick stop.” Two blocks up the street, he pulled in at Cheapo Dos Liquors. He left the car turned on with the air conditioning running and, a few minutes later, came out of the store smirking behind his sunglasses, opening the back door on the driver’s side.

“What’d you get,” Hoa asked with disinterest. He hadn’t noticed the new shirt.

He pulled out of the bag an amber fifth of Tres Generaciones tequila, held it out for her to appreciate, and slid his knee onto the back seat to open the cooler on the floor. “Not so cheapo. But we can consecrate your new cooler.”

“You want me to drive?” she asked as he got in behind the wheel.

“Sometime. I’m good.”

The road was truckless and clear. Hoa took off her seatbelt and leaned forward while the seatbelt alarm chimed. She pulled her new polo over her head. She unballed the coral blouse in her lap, wriggled her arms through the sleeves, then sat back and started tying the front knot.

“I thought — ” Dale started.

“I didn’t like,” she said, reaching for her seatbelt again, tossing the purple shirt into the back seat.

When something was bothering her, Dale noticed that Hoa’s lips tightened and her mouth parted just enough so that her teeth showed. It was slightly vampiric.

“I liked,” he said.

* * *

The desiccated country rolled out before them. Against background ochers, discrete umber telephone poles snapped by. Screens of creosote bushes sprawled into the desert. Occasional sunstricken buildings beamed off-white and the sky, which was almost colorless at the horizon, blued intensively toward its zenith. They passed a restaurant with a gleaming tin roof, two eighteen-wheelers, and several cattle trucks hulked beside each other in a dirt parking lot. There were long stretches of emptiness, and then a few shacks set back from the highway or what might have been an abandoned gas station.

From the corner of her eye, Hoa watched Dale loosen his grip on the steering wheel. His right hand slid down to five o’clock and, as though feeling the need for balance, he brought his left hand up from his lap and touched three fingers to seven o’clock. Hoa adjusted the air-conditioning vent so it struck her in the forehead. Sitting with her legs crossed in a semi-lotus position, she did her scale pose, pressing her palms to the seat and lifting herself. She held it for half a minute, rocking slightly like a temple bell.

In the early afternoon, modest hills gave way to sloped mesas. There was a sharp curve in the highway. Volcanic massifs drew up in the distance on one side of the car, then the other, and segued to a long run of serrated mountains. No plant Hoa could see grew more than head-high. Traffic raced along lightly in either direction, and Hoa caught Dale checking his speed repeatedly because there was so little to measure it against. As the afternoon wore on, the highway itself seemed to be browning at the center even while it went chalky along the sides.

When they drove through small Texas towns, the speed limit changed and so did the vegetation. There were small cacti and yuccas, a few neon-pink wildflowers, sometimes mesquite trees or oaks around municipal buildings and banks. On either side of Sanderson and Dryden, the north slopes of hills were furred with dry grasses. Once, they passed a faded green motel with heavy plastic curtains where the doors should have been. From the number of cars and pickups parked at the rooms, nose-in like nursing puppies, it looked to Dale like it was doing a brisk business.