Forrest Gander - The Trace

He went around to her side of the car and squatted down, grabbing the maps from the floor.

“Okay,” she said, squatting beside him. “What are we going to do?”

“We should have rented a pickup,” he said. “If we can’t get it started, I think we should walk on. Toward La Perla and route 67. It’s got be closer than going back to Sierra Mojada. Or maybe I should run ahead.” He thought about that for a second. What would she do while he ran ahead? “Either way, we can’t do anything tonight. Not on these fucking forking goat trails in the dark. We can sleep in the car and start early morning.”

“What if this stupid trail doesn’t go to the highway. Or anywhere.”

Dale walked back to the front of the car and looked into the engine, taking his time with her question. The radiator was going to need to cool some more before he tried to restart the car. Hoa came up behind him ominously, waiting there, not saying anything, not touching him. He stepped to the side and surveyed the way they’d come. It wasn’t much of a trail, just tire tracks bordered on both sides by stubby branches that had scraped the car’s sides. Snippets of the trail were visible as it rose and fell through the knolls behind them. He thought, you look at the desert and it seems absolutely still. And then you look again and every centimeter is vibrating. Some flicker of movement drew his attention toward his left boot. A nacreous beetle scuttered out from the car. The sunlight hit it, and it reversed direction and disappeared under the car again.

“We stuck to the main trail all the way, so far,” he said slowly, thinking it through, studying the coolant-stained dirt under the engine. “We went through two gates. And crossed maybe three, four cattle guards.” He was just processing facts, but facts are stabilizing, he told himself. “If the trail keeps going west, southwest, it’s going to link up to the highway. It has to.”

“No,” she said.

He had been avoiding looking at her face, but now he did. She wasn’t contradicting him. It was an Oh no this isn’t happening kind of no.

“This was such a bad idea,” she said in an undertone. “Your shortcut. We don’t even know if we’re on the main trail, it’s nothing but a dirt path. It’s just a trace. You can’t even tell if anything has come through here in months.”

Panic. It was panic in her voice.

“We both looked at the maps,” he said, thinking you’re the one who couldn’t stand being in the car, who made me take the shortcut. Deliberate. Making himself sound calm.

She knew he was begging her: Don’t blame me for this.

“I asked those guys in Hercules,” he said. “It looked pretty straightforward on the map. But Hoa, even if we lose a day. Even if we lose a whole day here, we’ll be back sooner than if we’d driven back east all the way through Piedras Negras.”

“I can’t believe this.”

Dale was surveying the darkening hill behind her. “I wouldn’t mind seeing some goats,” he said. “Or cattle.”

A yellow jacket appeared from nowhere, hovering in front of Hoa’s face, and she backed up, swatting at it. Then she fell backward on the berm at the edge of the trail. She covered her face with her hands.

That scared him. Then he was right beside her, on his knee. To some stranger happening by, it might look as if he were proposing. “Hoa, Hoa.” He was trying just to get her to look at him, drawing out her name, her familiar name. He started talking quickly and softly. Assuring her that their lives weren’t at risk. That she was frustrated, of course she was frustrated, and part of that was just all the damn driving. “We’re going to lose a day. And we’ll be okay. A rental’s supposed to be in perfect shape. You don’t want to blame this on me, that the car overheated.” His brow was awash with sweat. He held out his hands black with engine smut. “I’m hotter and at least as frustrated as you.”

He sat down next to her on the apron of the trail, as though it were natural that they would be sitting and talking on the side of two tire ruts running through an endless desert.

“It’s not even a road,” she said, sitting forward, gulping air, clutching at her trembling knees.

Then she pushed herself up suddenly, ignoring him. She went around the front door and slid into the passenger seat. What’s she looking for, he wondered just as she popped out again and stalked to the back of the car to stare into the still-open trunk. There was nowhere to escape the heat. They would get out of this, he was thinking. Really, they had to be close to route 67.

They’d driven north from Sierra Mojada on a road so powdery, Dale used up most of the wiper fluid washing the windshield. The view from the inside of the car had become streaked in brown arcs and, in the corners where the wipers didn’t reach, the glass was browned out.

The bad road from Sierra Mojada turned into something far worse: twenty miles of brutal sandy track, the car wheels locked into furrows on either side of a rocky hump. They had crawled north through a break between mountains into the mining town of Hercules, where they stopped for empanadas at a comedor. Crescents of iron rebar separated the weedless dirt from the swept concrete sidewalk before the doors of the eatery. Late for lunch, early for dinner, they had shared the dining room only with a pair of miners, each wearing a blue company cap.

On the way out, Dale asked directions, and Hoa heard one of the miners say, as the other nodded, “Al oeste en el camino de tierra, derecho derecho derecho.” No mention of any forks or turns.

Now, Dale felt dread spilling out into the air around them. He went over to the trunk and tried to give her a hug, but she turned away from him and looked down the trail. He wondered if he should run ahead for a while, before it got too dark, to see if there were any hopeful signs. He reached into the driver’s side and grabbed his sunglasses from the dash. Then he changed his mind and put them back.

“I’ll check the belts. Soon as it cools off, we can put in the water from the cooler and we’ll keep the AC off and the windows down and we’ll putter on to the highway.”

Putter? Hadn’t he used that word a few minutes earlier?

Dale squatted at the driver’s side tire, unscrewed the cap on the valve, and pressed the pin with his fingernail to bleed a little air. He felt Hoa looking at him and he quickly said over the hiss, “It’ll ride better on the dirt.” Going around to each tire and listening for the same length of hiss gave him something to do while the engine cooled. He couldn’t see Hoa’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but she had put on her fedora, stepped into a rut mark in front of the car, and was gazing across the desert. He screwed on the last stem nozzle and stood up, following the trajectory of her gaze. The evening was sinking into crevices in the outlying mountains, making them look like fists, one beside the other, thick, broken fingers clutching the earth.

If they abandoned the car, the ridge behind them would offer some immediate shade — if they fought their way through the bushes. He noted, here and there on the slope, a low mesquite tree or some kind of white-flowering bush, maybe cat’s claw. From somewhere close, a mockingbird whistled a short repertoire. Zenzontles . The word came to him. That’s what Mexicans called mockingbirds.

Neither of the two main belts that Dale could see in the early evening light seemed particularly loose. He pressed and poked at both of them. He hadn’t worked on his own car since college and the Prizm engine was a new world. He ran his fingers along the ridge below the water-pump belt, thinking, What am I going to do if I find something wrong anyway? I don’t even have a screwdriver.