Forrest Gander - The Trace

Hoa wasn’t looking as Dale cat-walked back down the narrow ledge to the trail, his face to the rock. So she didn’t see the thin ledge crumble under his step or see him spill backward into the trough of riprap beside the trail. What she heard was his shout of surprise and the rattle of falling stones and she rushed over, wordless, with fresh panic. There, twenty yards behind the car, Dale was lying on his side and gripping his ankle. Shaking. Or was he crying?

A pony stands in traces on the street beside the central plaza. The jacaranda trees are fully leaved and raucous with grackles. Paths from each corner of the plaza lead past tented stalls to a garden of oleander, bottlebrush, and raked dirt. A balloon-shaped man tows a bouquet of colored balloons. Men old enough to have grandchildren stand hunched at bootblack stations with their eyes downcast, their thick fingers stained dark as their eyes, while barely school-age boys haul their wooden shoeshine kits on lopsided shoulders and scan couples strolling the paths, sizing up potential customers.

It is about five o’clock when a broad-shouldered man carrying a soccer ball approaches a bench where an old Maya woman sits, her eyes vacant. He takes off his white hat and places it carefully on the slats of the bench. Then he drops the ball beside the bench and kicks it to life, dancing a little, subtly, not drawing too much attention to himself, but deft, absorbed with the ball. He is a grown man but his knees are limber and his eyes focused. He catches the ball on the toe of his right boot, kicks it twice, three times, gently lets it drop, then bounces it forward with his heel. He stops the ball with his toe. A pair of teenage boys on their way somewhere pause to inspect him. Without seeming to notice them, he kicks the ball directly to the taller boy, the one with a thin mustache.

The street vendor squeezing lime over a roasted ear of corn observes the two boys and the man. One of the boys is holding the soccer ball now. The vendor cuts his eyes to ask his customer something and then sprinkles brown chile powder from a sandwich bag onto the corn. When he looks up again, the boys and the man and the soccer ball have disappeared. Instinctively, he glances toward the church. A clean, blue Dodge pickup truck starts up and pulls away from the end of the street. The two boys are seated in the bed. They are laughing and cursing and looking backward at the corn vendor and the diminishing plaza.

A huge cacophony of noise surrounded them. Where had the insects come from? There had been no bugs in the daylight — just a few wasps, he remembered, or yellow jackets, or whatever they were. Now there were thousands of creatures scratching out the sonic frequencies of their species in this ultra-night, each chirp and whirr distinct as a fingerprint. Having cranked back his seat as far as possible, Dale lay, looking up at the car ceiling and listening. With her feet just beneath his headrest, Hoa was stretched across the back seat.

Something like a floating spiderweb tickled his nose and he brushed it away. Maybe it was just a stray hair. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It would be a memorable day, one way or another. A snake-tongue of cooler air flicked in through the window. Black air. The din was impressive. The tequila was only a quarter gone. Dale found himself able to isolate individual calls from the palimpsest of sounds. A pair of owls hooting from somewhere along the driver’s side hill. An electronic ticking — maybe cicadas — that gradually ratcheted into an anxious blender whine and fell off again. Loops and variations of this sound extended into the distances. The bleating of what — was it some kind of toad? What had the waitress called it, toad with a sack? Then there was the infrequent, far-off yapping of. . coyotes? Something nearby hissed in pulses like a grass trimmer. And now and again, he could make out the chirps of bats.

Behind him, Hoa shifted around, her face to the back seat. She was curled into a near fetal position. She had insisted she could sleep better there than in the reclined front seat. She had a point. He knew he would never fall asleep lying on his back like this. Even drunk. He probably hadn’t fallen asleep on his back since he was a baby. They were both grappling around for position with their seats, but the seats were winning.

Dale wiped at his nose again, catching a whiff of his own grunge. An alien scent this time. If mosquitoes found them tonight, they were in trouble. But as far as he knew, there weren’t mosquitoes in this part of the desert except maybe near standing water, which was rare, or near a ranch with cattle troughs. Actually, if mosquitoes bit them, it would mean water or people were nearby.

Dale pivoted his head to look out the side window. What incredible stars. Her eyes are probably closed, he thought. Earlier, he had heard her doing yoga breathing exercises.

He had to struggle to sit up and reach for the bottle in the passenger seat. He pulled the cork, took a swallow, and the burn went down his throat in two gulps. He put the bottle between his legs and reached for the ceiling light, twisting in his seat to check on her. The action felt cumbersome and the twisting put pressure on his face, making his eyes bug out and his sunburned forehead wrinkle. He couldn’t see if her own eyes were closed, but she looked too uncomfortable to be asleep. Before he switched the overhead light off, he spotted a few gnats, or things smaller than gnats, crawling its plastic surface. A moth fluttered along the side of the windshield, sliding down to the wipers, remaining there.

Dale took another sip and contemplated raising his seat so he could sit more comfortably. He wasn’t going to sleep anyway. The tequila was helping. They would probably walk by a ranch tomorrow before noon and get a lift to the highway and the nearest gas station. Worst case scenario, they would walk four or five hours all the way to the highway.

“Moon, moon,” he quoted, “when you leave me alone all the darkness is an utter blackness.”

She might have said something.

“What did you say?” he asked. Nothing.

He said, “I saw a beauty shop in El Paso called Hairway to Heaven. What’s your favorite beauty shop name?”

No response. Then, softly, “The one makes me think of you. Hair Today Gone Tomorrow.” Her voice sounded different to him when her eyes were closed, or when she was lying down.

“I know that one. In Franklin.”

“Loose Ends,” she said. Then, after a full minute and more faintly, she said “Curl Up and Dye for You.”

Dale stayed quiet. He listened to Hoa’s breathing change. Unsteady and shallow at first, and almost imperceptible, then gradually deeper. He could hear a kind of hollow vibration in her nose. The last thing he heard before he fell asleep was her stomach rumbling.

He woke twice needing to pee. The first time, he somehow remembered to turn off the overhead switch so when he opened the door, the ceiling light didn’t wake Hoa. The second time, he took two hops on his good foot away from the car, but he lost his balance, and his bad foot touched the ground. The pain in his ankle cleared his head in a swoosh. As he tried to recover himself, he glimpsed something fluttering directly in front of him. A second shock paralyzed him before he even recognized what he was looking at.

It was a cartoon drawing, a dimensionless black nexus of thick lines. He’d never seen a spider so big, never imagined a tarantula lifting itself into a defensive posture, rearing back with its forelegs pawing the air like a tiny horse, quivering, waiting for him to make the next move. Some kind of yelping sound erupted from him. But he only heard it afterward, in a kind of echo loop, as he banged through the open car door into the steering wheel, toppling clumsily into the front seat against the dashboard.