Forrest Gander - The Trace

“I don’t make the rules,” Dale said, putting on his Judge Bean voice. “I just follow ’em.”

Something between a smile and a flinch showed on Hoa’s lips. She called the waiter over to ask for another Modelo Negro.

“Me too,” Dale agreed. “Dos cervezas por favor.”

Just before the beer arrived, Dale wiped his eye with a finger tainted by his camarones a la diabla. End of evening. In bed, he lay awake, exhausted, listening to Hoa softly snore, with what felt like a campfire roaring under his right eyelid. He was thinking of Sunday night in Marfa when they were making love, when she broke down and couldn’t stop crying. And then he was thinking of a night before then. At home, lying on her side facing him, she had taken his hand and placed it awkwardly on her left breast and said something into his shoulder.

“What?” he had asked

“Do you still mean it, Dale?”

It took him a couple seconds before he answered. “Yes.”

In the morning, after coffee and huevos rancheros, Hoa went outside to the car for the Playmate cooler. She carried it past their room to the ice machine and scooped ice over the fancy bottle of tequila. Right then, she remembered a part of her dream. Dale was rolling on top of her and where his nose swiped her face, her skin sparked. He smelled like autumn. Her hands cupped the angular blades of his back, which were huge, almost like wings. She and Dale were face to face, breathing the same air. But his mouth opened strangely from the sides of his head like a dragonfly’s. Then his weight lifted, he was gone, she couldn’t find him, and she was cold, looking up at unfamiliar stars.

“Two hundred fifty miles, all good highway, from Nuevo Laredo to Icamole,” Dale announced as she slid into the car. He was reading his maps with his sunglasses on and, she thought, a determined airline-pilot look on his face.

“Want me to drive?”

“Sometime. Not now.”

Outside the hotel, they cruised past a crowd of a dozen or so people waiting for the bus, and then it was another seven hours in the car with a few breaks for gas and restrooms. Dale drove it all. Eighteen-wheelers and buses roared toward them in the opposite lane like testy prehistoric beasts. The hills gave way to benches, arroyos, level stretches of desert clotted with brush and rock and scraggly trees. Crumpled Kraft-paper mountains squatted behind all the flatness. Toward Monclova, the vegetation lushed into various shades of green and yellow. There were trees along the road — oaks, even palms. A fat, burned rump roast of a mountain brooded over the city of Monclova, clouds garnishing its crest.

Through downtown Monclova, they were bumper to bumper. Dale pulled over onto the shoulder at a big construction site where, below a gantry crane, half a dozen blue and aquamarine portable toilets were lined up. They returned to the car and drove on, beyond a corner where people were protesting something, chanting, shouting through a megaphone, banging pots and frying pans, and blowing vuvuzelas with anarchic zeal. At the city limits in a parking lot, a band played in the back of a pickup truck for a crowd of forty or fifty people. Three blocks later, Hoa spotted a busy food stand advertising tacos, enchiladas, and queso fresco. It was only after they ordered that they noticed — hidden behind the crowd of customers and chained to a tree — a huge dust-covered heap of fur, lying listless in the heat.

“Is that a fucking bear?”

“Tomorrow will be easier,” Dale said for the second time in as many minutes. He stood behind her, massaging her shoulders, turning her just enough so that the bear wasn’t in her field of vision. The traffic was noisy, the air strafed with dust.

“A fucking bear.” Hoa’s head throbbed. She felt like her brain had been rattling against her skull for the last few hours and Dale’s hands felt good. He used to brag, at the beginning of their relationship, that he had his Swedish grandfather’s hands, and maybe he did. She felt a ligament in her left shoulder — which she had injured loading the kiln two years before — popping back and forth.

“I can hear that,” Dale said. “Does it hurt.”

She made a small groan that didn’t sound like pain. Then she turned and pulled him against her.

A few feet away, at the edge of the dirt parking lot, a single picnic table was occupied by a middle-aged couple with three children. They were eating tamales. A big plastic bottle of Coke sat at the center of the table. Everyone had a black plastic cup.

Dale picked up their order and they ate, standing in the sun with the food on the trunk of the rental car, since Hoa didn’t want to be anywhere near the bear.

Soon Dale was again behind the wheel driving. Only a few minutes had passed when he said, “That one makes an even dozen.”

“What?”

“You didn’t see that little box with a jar in it and the cross there?”

She looked backward out the window at the side of the highway. She knew what Dale was talking about.

“One of those memento mori?”

“Yeah,” Dale said. “ Animitas milagrosas they’re called. I’ve counted twelve of them today.”

“For people who died in car accidents?”

“I guess. Usually there’s a cross, and sometimes a little statue of a saint, and the family comes to put flowers there or shoes or cigarettes, all kinds of things.”

“For whoever died.”

“Yeah. The soul lingers in the place where it was last alive.”

Hoa saw mountains looming in the south, bigger ones than any they had passed. An hour or so later, she felt herself leaning forward to make out the words on a highway sign up ahead. V. Garcia 44, Monterrey 84. She glimpsed two young men, ten feet between them, dressed identically in jeans and long-sleeved white shirts. Against the whoosh of passing cars and trucks, each held his white straw cowboy hat to his head with his right hand. She imagined them in a music video.

“We’re there,” Dale sighed. “Forty-four miles. Icamole’s part of Villa Garcia. Just forty-four miles. Check it out on the map.”

“Great,” she said, underwhelmed. “That’s like hearing there’s only forty-four more whacks.” Nevertheless, she paged through the maps Dale had printed out, and she located Icamole.

Alright, Dale thought. A lot of car time.

From then on, the pavement alternated with long stretches of hardpacked sand and pitted dirt roads. The barren adobe and wattle structures beside the road were roofed with tin or pine branches. There was an occasional painted house, or cinderblock beer mart, and then long stretches of empty space.

It was close to 5:30 when — mutually grumpy, sore, blasted from sitting all day — they finally parked at the dusty Ninja-turtle-green and pumpkin-orange Tienda Campesino in Icamole. The last forty-four miles had cost them two hours with the sun drilling through the car windows and taking its toll despite the air conditioning. Dale felt terrible about how long the drive had been. Wanting Hoa to enjoy the adventure, as he kept calling it, he felt responsible for the trip to turn out well.

Dale slammed the door, shook out one leg, then the other, rolled his neck and then his torso, bending forward low enough to feel the stretch in his lower back. He walked stiffly into the shadowy tienda, mesmerized by the low gleam of cans and bags of snacks. From the dust-caked and barred windows, a dull yellow light spilled over the top row of merchandise. Against the wall, cases of Tecate were piled to the ceiling. Dale felt himself being observed, so he turned to the dueño and offered a Buen día. An old man with a gray mustache and a gray baseball cap sat behind the counter with a magazine opened to a full-page photograph of — what was it? It looked like a steer being butchered on a hook, but it was too dark to be sure.