Forrest Gander - The Trace

He knew they were stuck there for the night, but he thought he might as well look engaged. If they started walking now, the dark would catch them, and there was really no telling where they were. Zona de Silencio.

“Xái tháng chó đẻ,” he heard Hoa say, coming toward him carrying the Playmate cooler, with a harried, earnest look. Dale was focused on her face and didn’t realize she was trying to figure out whether to hand the cooler to him or to set it down. By the time his body moved, the cooler was on the ground.

“Thanks,” he said.

Dale hunched over it and slid the top back. She had already fished out the tequila. Alright, he thought. One chance at this. The empty coolant reservoir was on the driver’s side. He wondered whether it would be better to pour the water into the reservoir or directly into the radiator. Pulling off his T-shirt, he balled it over the radiator cap and gave it a tentative twist. There was no hissing. He didn’t feel any pressure. He twisted the cap all the way off and set it very intentionally on the dirty air-filter cover. Then he wiped his face with the shirt and pulled it back on. Keeping it slow, relaxed.

Hoa said nothing, standing aside while he tipped the cooler and poured the water carefully, carefully, into the radiator. It was obvious to both of them that there was far more coolant pooled and evaporating in the dirt than there was water to replace it with.

“Let’s wait a few more minutes and then start it,” he said.

Hoa was already behind the car, lugging the duffel bags from the dirt onto the back seat. Dale stood to the side and watched her rifling through them. The shirts and socks and underwear they’d worn yesterday, his running shoes and shorts. All their toiletries crammed into eight-ounce plastic bags for airport security. She had spread everything around the back seat and the floor like an augury.

Dale sat sideways behind the steering wheel, his back to her.

“Looking for anything in particular?”

She peered up. The effort of twisting in his seat to see her behind him made his brow furrow. She saw his reddened face and neck wrinkle into turkey folds. He looked suddenly old to her.

A tube of hair gel, a blue razor, his deodorant, his running watch, her face cream. “I don’t know,” she said. She tossed her fedora, a short-sleeved white blouse she’d worn in El Paso, and her tie-front blouse into the front seat. They slid onto the floor. Even with its doors open, the car seemed to be collecting heat. Dale lifted his feet to the chassis edge and observed a nopale cactus at the side of the road. It did nothing. The seat fabric was marked with his sweat.

“Will you pass me my dirty shirt and the tequila? I need to wash this crap off my hands.”

“Here.”

Dale put the shirt in his lap and held the tequila in his hand, reading the label. Then he broke the black seal and unseated the cork, pressing his balled-up shirt to the mouth of the bottle and tipping it three times. He reinserted the cork and put the bottle between his legs, wiping each of his fingers with the tequila-dampened shirt. Then he pulled the cork again.

In the back seat, Hoa sat with the duffel bags and the mess all around her. Dale felt her eyes on him, watching him take a sip. And then another. A sunbeam fell across his knees and hands. His wedding band gleamed.

* * *

Hoa moved to the front seat. She was glancing at Dale, glancing at the keys in the ignition, waiting for him to turn the key and try to start the car. She forced herself to turn away, to look out the open door. Which is when Dale turned the key one notch. The battery lights came on, and he powered down all the windows, turning the radio and the air conditioner off. Then he turned the key another click and then another, and the car started. They looked at each other, Hoa’s eyes glistening. The engine sounded normal. Dale leaped out to close the hood and the back door. When she saw what he was doing, she jumped out and slammed the other back door.

Neither of them said a word. Both were sitting up stiffly, looking straight through the windshield as though the intensity of their concentration might help propel the car forward. The trail in front of them was darkening, losing its color even as the sky ahead of them roiled in magentas, purples, and deeper blues.

Dale shifted the car into gear and felt the tires snap into the sandy track. The steering wheel revolved under his hands as the wheels locked into the ruts, and they were moving forward. There was no guarantee the trail wouldn’t just keep going until it petered out in the middle of nowhere. The miners at the comedor had told him to follow the main trail, but at some of the forks, there was no way to distinguish a difference. He was glad he’d let air out of the tires. The traction felt better.

Almost immediately, the coolant icon — an aquarium shape with low black waves — began flashing in the instrument panel. Dale quickly looked up through the windshield again. There was no point in letting Hoa know. He felt his internal organs deflate, and he suppressed a sob. Before they had gone a quarter mile, the temperature indicator spiked into the red zone. The way the steering wheel was adjusted, he hadn’t noticed the temperature gauge. But now, with the tension in his stomach drawing him forward toward the dashboard, there it was. Emphatic as a rattlesnake. Dale glanced at Hoa. Her eyes were drilled ahead at the rocks and clumps of weeds between the trail’s ruts. He debated turning on the headlights and decided to wait.

They slowly climbed a pitted, sandy slope, the undercarriage scraping, a vertigo-inducing drop-off on Dale’s left. They could have jogged faster than they were moving. Parts of the trail were washed out, and he aimed the tires around the worst of them. At the ridge of a small hill, they saw miles of darkening cacti and

creosote-studded desert, a stupendous view that went on for countless miles. The sky was kaleidoscopic. Giant. Blueing. At the southern horizon sat a black pile of rock.

Dale had driven only a minute or two along a ledge beyond the rise when the car needed more pedal to keep going at all. Then his right foot was to the floorboard and the car was slowing to a stop. The engine cut. In all, they hadn’t driven fifteen minutes from where they first broke down. A long breath, and neither of them moved.

* * *

They got out one at a time, not because there was anything to do. There just wasn’t any point in sitting in the car. On the passenger side, the trail was banked against a sandstone outcrop with blocky horizontal layers in various shades of umber. Dale considered it. If he scaled about twenty feet of rock, he would reach the upper part of the hill — where century plants were spiking the evening light — and he could scout ahead. He eyed the rock face, identifying a narrow, angled ledge that looked to hold him.

“I’m going to check up here,” he said.

He went past her. She might have turned to watch him, but he wasn’t sure. He stepped up to the wall of sandstone and got a foothold, gripping the rock above him with his hand. He was trying to remember if there were tarantulas in the Chihuahua Desert. He leaned his chest into the rock and balanced, stepping up incrementally until he made the lip, and then he stood on the hill. Fluff grass, cacti, yucca, mesquite. He jogged around the plants until he stood at the hill’s apex. A light breeze brushed his cheeks, and he felt almost good, with the panorama slung out far in front of him. A taste of limitlessness. And then what he felt sharpened into grotesque awe. There was not a human sign anywhere. Nowhere below or ahead could he see the trace of a road. No ranches, no mining operations. He saw yardangs beyond yardangs. There was a monstrous canyon to the north with side canyons and tawny battlements, its pink chimneys fading pale. The skyline was blueblack. Dale struck out a hundred yards to the west. Just ahead, the trail disappeared, spooling around a hillock. It wasn’t a breeze he felt at all, he thought. It was the suck of emptiness. The tiny damp hairs of his forearms stood at attention.