Forrest Gander - The Trace

Hoa went to the door and opened it for him. She was wearing the turquoise necklace that Dale had bought her at Christmas, when their lives were pure agony and their son was still in the hospital. Dale was lifting two paper grocery bags and a big green plastic bag from the bed of the pickup. He looked to Hoa like he was dressed for a safari. Cargo pants and a black T-shirt and that thin beige travel vest he’d ordered from a men’s catalog.

“Got a roast chicken,” he said. “I stopped at Fresh Market. Plus, I inherited an espresso machine from Mike.”

The evening was heavy and damp. It wasn’t raining, but the air was saturated with tiny drops of water hovering as a mist and gently floating to the ground.

“Why’d he give you his espresso machine?” she asked, taking the plastic bag out of his hand.

He moved past her and put the groceries on the kitchen counter. “Got a new one, I guess. How was your day, you had a firing — no. You’ve got a firing coming up, right?”

“Yeah, I did the tumble load today. I got to place all the wad balls.”

“Want a glass of wine?”

“There’s white in the fridge,” she said. She put the plastic bag down on the kitchen floor and went to the cabinet to get the only two wine glasses that hadn’t broken from a set of six.

“It’s like,” she started, getting back to Dale’s question, putting the groceries away while he uncorked the wine. The familiar choreography of their daily lives. “I don’t know. Wherever you wad the piece, you know it’s going to leave a mark.”

Hoa put the milk and yogurt into the refrigerator. “You spend a lot of time visualizing where you want your wad marks since they’re part of what you get in the end.”

“Right. What’s this pesto out for?” Dale asked.

“Ray wants to build a little anagama now, too. Which would be great.”

Dale was pouring the wine and holding one glass out to her.

“You know,” he said, “I found the name of the guy who put up that memorial stone in the Sierra Mojada cemetery for Ambrose Bierce. Turns out, he’s still around, and he moved back to the States.”

Hoa said, “Dale?”

“What?”

“Did you or did you not ask about my day?”

He slid into the chair at the breakfast nook across from her. She could see him trying to backtrack the conversation. He took a long sip from his glass.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was excited about hunting this guy down.”

He poured them both a little more and she clinked his glass.

“Tell me about the little anagama,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“No, really.” He was looking at her earnestly.

She wished she hadn’t said anything. Suddenly she didn’t want to be talking about kilns or oxidation or glaze and slip. She set her glass on the table, stood up and leaned forward. He stroked the tendon along the left side of her throat with his thumb.

“Kiss,” she said.

He stood up awkwardly, feeling it in his lower back, and they both moved around the edge of the table. Dale put his arms all the way around her and squeezed her to him.

“Whoa,” Dale said as she started biting his neck, “what’s that?!”

“Lamprey kiss,” she said, pulling him closer.

One of her fabulous squeaky laughs erupted into his shirt as she rubbed her nose against his chest.

He parks near the playing field at the edge of town. Shuts the door and lights a cigarette, leaning into his truck, his lower back against the side panel. The back of his head and his hat mirrored behind him in the tinted window. He can hear the calls, the shouts of young men floating above the tree-lined scarp. He listens intently, as though for a special sound or as though he were drawing out a note of particular merit to him.

As soon as he flicks the butt to the ground, he goes around to the side of the truck and reaches over the rail into the bed. He comes down the dirt path to the soccer field with a new soccer ball in the crook of his elbow, whistling. There’s a bulge in the waistband of his jeans. The playing field is dusty, dust suspended in the air against the scarp and kept from drifting over it by bleary oaks. The trees line the rim road like sentinels from a bygone age. The scene below develops a sepia tone. The man in his long-sleeves, in his white Bailey hat with its cattleman crown, seems like a visitor from some other world descending, but at ease there. He is dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved print shirt. Some of the players are also wearing long sleeves and baggy jeans, and others are in shorts or in T-shirts. Only the man with the new soccer ball has on boots. They are black with white-rooster stitching. When he approaches the playing field — its borders vaguely suggested by four head-sized rocks placed in the corners — he is little interested in the game. Not in the primary game. But beyond the far goal posts — those two vertical palo verde limbs supporting a horizontal third — there is another, less organized game played by the children of the men or their younger brothers or, in one case, a teenage boy mangled by some ill fate limping after the rest.

The man drops his soccer ball into the dirt, kicking it forward with his left foot as he strolls the edge of the playing field. He passes the far goal post and keeps on toward the scrappy kids playing their makeshift game. When two of the boys notice him approaching and pause, straightening up to face in his direction, he boots the new soccer ball to one of them. His long bending shot bounces just once before the midfielder knees the ball into submission. A good sign, the man thinks. He waves as if he knows the boy, and then he turns aside to the taco trailer, El Atoron. It has been set up behind the playing field for as long as anyone can remember. That’s where a half dozen of the older, more delinquent boys — los vagos and gandúles — stand around smoking and drinking beer. A place to recruit halcónes. The man buys an orange soda, taking his time, thumbing through a wad of cash as though he cannot find a bill small enough.

Reached her

fork toward his plate

to claim a piece

of his poblano

and saw herself in

the mirroring window

behind him. Un-

recognizable. And

she drew back

her fork and sank

low in her seat

as if being pulled by

some personal

nucleus of gravity

away from him.

She thought

that whoever forcefully

smiled out from old,

even recent, photographs

wasn’t her but

a dead woman, a woman

who didn’t exist

anymore, a woman, a girl

who maybe never

had existed, had never

been known by

anyone, herself

least of all.

“So here’s how Bierce dies in Icamole,” Dale was saying.

They had just hit paved road again and Hoa was driving. It was getting dark now.

“I stay straight, right?” If he distracted her from getting back to Monclova, she was going to leave Dale in Mexico and hitchhike to the border.

“Derecho, derecho, todo derecho,” Dale said, mimicking the hand gesture of the man with the grasshopper in the tienda. “Remember? There’s nothing but flat desert and straight road.”

“Alright, alright,” she said. Her blue bungee was around her wrist again. Her hair was down over her shoulders.

“So there’s a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin , a guy named George Weeks.”

“This is back then?”

“Yeah. 1914, when Bierce disappears. Remember, December 1913 was his last posted mail. When we get to Sierra Mojada, I’ve got a story about a letter that wasn’t posted, but that’s tomorrow.”