Forrest Gander - The Trace

Dale ate a few bites of his tacos and beans. The Mexican man said something to him using the word repugnante, and Dale stood up, carrying his plate inside to the counter. He put it down. Beside the plate, he left a few coins.

When he came out of the bathroom, he and Hoa walked together out of the restaurant. Dale made an effort to ignore the paper hawker who was pointedly inspecting them. They walked the narrow edge of the dusty street back to their car, single file again, without speaking.

For the next five hours, they let themselves steep in a cenote of silence. In the discomfort and brooding that follows confrontation, they sat next to each other in a dead space with the omnipresent sun melting the windshield. The episode at the lunch table looped through Dale’s mind, even as he forced himself to make comments now and then about the scenery, about anything else, in a voice that he tried to adjust so that he didn’t sound defensive or hurt. Hoa’s accusations, he told himself, were merely the product of long, relentless miles through the desert, the cramped confines of the car, and a wound they both carried. Her lashing out at him in that way was just so much water under the bridge. But every word he spoke sounded stilted or testy, and they sat two feet away from each other like strangers on a bus. And once again, the drive was taking far longer than he anticipated.

The paved road degraded into what they called in rural North Carolina “improved road” and the “improved road” yielded to a swervy runnel of gravel, sand, and potholes that went on chirring and dinging the underchassis for miles. At the side of a dirt road in the sun, they saw a brown dog sitting beside a dead dog that looked at lot like it. The living dog looked directly at Hoa as the car passed. Their eyes locked, each of them thinking what?

Hoa was sick, regretting what she’d said to Dale. But she couldn’t say anything more. The bouncing and jolting, the dog and the sun, all made her feel punch-drunk. Once it goes out of tune, she thought, it takes a long time to readjust the quiet to the sound of me. The trail bent south, and they climbed into mountains slashed by dark plutonic seams and glimmering quartz veins. From the corner of his eye, anxious about her, Dale could see Hoa lean one way and the other as he maneuvered slow twists in the graded dirt road unspooling between calamitous drops and intimidating masses of metamorphic rock.

“What are we averaging, fifteen miles an hour?” Hoa asked matter of factly. Her voice sounded gargled with the car’s shuddering. Her first words since lunch. “There’s no way trucks with ore from Sierra Mojada could be using this road.”

He was quiet a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes behind his sunglasses. Was that more exasperation and weariness in her voice? Was she simply trying to make conversation? She turned to her window.

“I don’t know,” Dale said. They hadn’t glimpsed a pueblo since Ocampo. In fact, they’d seen few human structures at all, but for occasional barbed-wire fences and cattle guards, or smaller dirt roads that led, he supposed, to ranches, although whether that meant wide tracts of fenced desert or little compounds where someone actually lived, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes modest adobe houses were visible, limned by dusty mesquite trees, or by stunted, thin-boled oaks.

They descended slowly along that guttered track near a throng of scraggly trees and onto a plain where they joined paved road again. The hues slowly shifted as they crossed what seemed to Dale to be a sparse prehistoric sea floor. On the driver’s side into the distance, sets of small brown dunes paralleled the road. On the passenger side, a broad alkaline plain stretched out into mirage and glimmer. Up ahead, a black volcanic cordon oriented them, pulling them slowly forward across the wan vastation. As they drew nearer to the ancient volcano, the road began to curl north around its wide base.

“There’s probably another road,” Dale said, picking up the conversation that he had dropped several minutes earlier. He felt sunburn on his forearm and stuck his arm under the steering wheel. “Another road for trucks from the mine.”

Hoa came out of a trance thinking she couldn’t stand to be in the car a minute longer. At first, she didn’t know what Dale was talking about. Her throat was scratchy and her eyes itched. She plugged her phone into the console port and scrolled through her music.

“I guess they have a railroad for the ore,” Dale went on. “They probably use that.”

“Hey, Hoa, you don’t want to rub your eyes like that,” he added.

She stopped rubbing her eyelids. When she glanced at Dale, she saw that his face had taken on a faint phosphorescence. Somehow, the fine dust on the road was being sucked into the car, and Dale looked a little like a butoh dancer. She lifted her legs and sat cross-legged again, her right knee jammed uncomfortably against the door’s armrest.

The landscape around them continued its slow transformations. On the far side of the volcanic upthrust, there were flattened hills of brush, through which sand barely showed. In the distance, there were moonscapes of raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite. The road darkened and rose as small cacti and yucca and grasses appeared and disappeared. The tires bounced. Over stones and pits, the car jolted its two bleary passengers.

Another roadrunner. Hoa was amazed by its size. It loped along in front of them for several hundred yards, then swerved behind a clump of sotol and let them pass. Dale overheard her speaking to it, as though she were leaving an old girlfriend. “Bye-bye roadrunner.”

The next long stretch of road spooled between wide bays of sand rippled by paleo-winds. The road was covered in several inches of powder that, even though the windows were closed and the air conditioning on, continued to find its way into the car. Now Dale could taste it. The hood of the car took on a patina.

He reached into his pocket for his phone, which felt like it was vibrating. Blank screen, it was turned off.

Hoa looked at Dale look at his phone. Thinking of Declan, she turned her face to the side window again. Nothing grew out there. For several miles, a few black strands of wire connected vaguely vertical Palo-Colorado fenceposts spaced every ten feet. The horizon was an uninterrupted panorama of postcard mountains. Hoa readjusted the air vents in the middle of the dashboard so they blew more in the direction of her chest.

They crossed a bench and began to climb a dirt and gravel road. Ahead, the hills took up again, but steeper and more rugged, spewed with artemisia and mesquite. Here and there, they made out the black mouth of a cave or old cinnabar mine. The car zig-zagged at a snail’s pace through the switchbacks. Dale’s neck and shoulders ached. He was feeling battered, physically and emotionally.

Driving out of the hills, they reached pavement once again. The asphalt was whited with tire-marked dust. There must have been magnesium or mica in the dust because for about twenty minutes, at the angle the sun was hitting the road, it glowed ethereally, as though an archaic hallowed dimension were rising from the place where the road had been.

Hoa asked Dale to stop. While he was putting the car into park, she jumped out, yanked down her pants, and squatted to pee at the edge of road while John Abercrombie’s eerie “Show of Hands” carried through the open door into the desert. A strange sound to let out in this place, Dale thought. He got out too and stood by the front door, leaving the car running, rolling his neck, stretching, and looking around. There was a crick in his lower back. Ahead, a pair of crested quail scuttled around a mound of rock.