Forrest Gander - The Trace

“I thought it was dust. Or a mirage.” He was shading his eyes with the flat of his hand and surveying the desert, talking loud enough so that Hoa, still in the car, could hear him. “I’d been watching it blow over the hood, but it didn’t sink in. What it was. What I was looking at.”

In the torpid late afternoon, a nearly invisible steam was venting from the grill and from the seam all the way around the hood. Dale squatted in front of the car and poked his hand under the hood, feeling for the latch.

From the passenger seat, Hoa saw him crouch, then reel back like he’d been bitten. She’d been looking at the Google Earth printouts Dale had made of Coahuila, trying to track the shortcut they’d taken from Sierra Mojada west toward Jiménez. Now she threw them to the floor, opened her door, and got out. She, too, left the door open and skirted a brown puddle that was branching, amoeba-like, in the pebbled dirt by the front tire.

“Fucking scorcher,” Dale said. He was squatting and reaching for the latch again, but he still hadn’t opened the hood.

“Smells like sorghum,” she answered. Her voice was flat, with a little surprise in it.

Dale hadn’t noticed it before, but when she mentioned it, he thought he could smell the sweetness of cooked engine coolant.

“I can’t get the hood yet.” He stood up again, wiping his hands.

He’s saying something just to say something, she thought. To show me he isn’t scared. Which means this is really bad.

Dale took a few steps back from the radiant heat of the engine, tucking his burned fingers into his already damp left armpit.

“I don’t know. I figured. .” He didn’t know what to say he figured. “I should have stopped way back there.”

“This is incredible,” Hoa said quietly. She pushed her sunglasses up over her forehead into her hair. She’d left the fedora in the car. With her sunglasses off and the recent tanning around her cheeks, the flesh around her eyes looked vulnerable and moist. She lowered her sunglasses again. On her side of the trail, the setting sun gilded the brush on the upper flank of what had once been a volcano. The formation peaked several hundred yards above the trail in half a dozen pinnacles of rust-colored rock. Most of the escarpment was sprinkled with creosote, ocotillo, and yucca. The brush was densest just in front of Hoa, a chest-high barricade on each side of the trail. Afternoon shadow was spreading along the hills toward them.

On the downslope side of the trail, Dale stepped close enough to the steep edge to peer through tall stalks of orange-flowered lechuguilla into a valley, a sunnied-over desert stretching to the south. An extensive plain hemmed by dark mountains. Hard to judge the distance, but the mountains looked far off.

In the direction the car was headed, the sky was lustrous and amaranth-pink. Hoa noticed the sunset and said to herself that it was a good sign. At least they knew they were facing the right way. West.

Dale looked behind him, where Hoa was looking. She’s worried about the night coming on, he thought.

“So what’s going to happen when they find out we took a rental car into Mexico?” she asked.

“They’re not supposed to rent cars that overheat. Luckily — ” he paused, groping to come up with anything that might seem lucky about their circumstance, “it’s not mid-afternoon. So we might get the car started when it cools down a little. We’ll get it back one way or another.”

“We can’t afford to pay for a lost rental car,” she said, as though finishing Dale’s thought.

They stood for a minute, not saying anything more — he in front of the car and she at the side where a foot-high berm of soft dirt, dotted with stones, marked the edge of the trail. Over a low-pitched gurgling, she could hear steam quietly hissing out from beneath the hood. Even now, in the late afternoon, the sun’s rays were gnawing at her — not in one particular place, but everywhere, her head, face, neck, arms, shoulders.

“Yeah, lucky for us,” she said.

She glanced at her watch, even though she knew the time. Her body always told her when it was around five o’clock. Pavlovian conditioning. Time for a glass of wine, time to think about making dinner. She remembered the bottle of tequila in the cooler.

“What about the water from the ice in the cooler?” she blurted. “Couldn’t we use that?”

The way her voice lifted, he couldn’t tell whether there was panic or excitement in it. Probably both.

“Great,” he said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. He saw himself from outside himself: a man standing by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with the hood of his car up. An icon of failed presumptions.

“Good idea,” he said starting to move, calculating how much water there might be in the cooler.

The ice from the hotel in Monclova, how many scoops had she put in there? Water slapped the sides as he pulled the little blue and white Playmate across the back seat. He thumbed the release button and slid back the top. Maybe half an inch, a pint or two, sloshing against the bottle of Tres Generaciones Añejo tequila.

Leaning in from the other side, Hoa was reading his face for an assessment, feeling a last trace of the car’s conditioned air slip past her cheeks.

“Maybe,” he said, glancing across the seat at her face. Considering their predicament, it was weird that he noticed her cleavage through the loose top of her blouse.

“Might be enough to get us puttering down the road anyway,” he said.

He reached into his pocket for his cell phone and turned it on. Searching, searching. He knew there wouldn’t be a signal, but he had to check. Nothing. Zona de Silencio.

Now Hoa was sitting in the front seat, extracting her own cell phone from the console port. “We haven’t passed a single car. Not a single one. In what, like two hours?”

From the edges of the car’s hood, steam wisped upward.

“It’s not going to work here,” Dale said.

“Thing is,” she answered, “we should have seen signs to Laguna de Ventura or La Perla a long time ago. According to these stupid maps. We should have hit 67 by now.”

Dale returned to the front of the car and eyed the front grill logo, a blue cross. The engine had stopped hissing for the most part. Maybe that was good. Maybe it meant they hadn’t lost too much water. Or maybe it meant there wasn’t any more. Hoa came over and stood next to him, putting her hands on the back of her head and lifting her hair from the sweaty back of her neck.

“This is fucked Dale,” she said.

She dragged her hands through her hair, gathered and twisted it into a knot, sliding the bungee from her wrist over it.

* * *

“No holes anywhere,” he spoke loudly into the engine. He was leaning over the still-ticking radiator, squeezing the hot black hose that led to the thermostat housing. “Could be the water pump. Could be the gasket’s shot. Or maybe the thermostat.”

“What about duct tape?”

His head turned in her direction and he straightened his back and looked at her incredulously where she was sitting in some soft sand, shading her eyes with her hand.

She saw the look in his eyes. “Maybe there’s some in the trunk,” she said defensively. “If there’s a hole in the hose.”

Dale changed tack. “You can check. There’s nothing but a spare tire. And our duffel bags.”

“So let’s look,” she said.

His hands were already filthy, but he fished the keys from his cargo pants and opened the trunk. He pulled out their two duffle bags and set them in the dirt. He lifted the mat, the flap underneath it. There wasn’t even a full-size tire.

“I remember reading that you can plug leaks in a radiator with peppercorns,” he said.