Forrest Gander - The Trace

Already the sun forced her to raise her hand to her eyes to look across the desert to the spine of mountains in the south. Up above the ledge of limestone on her side of the trail, she saw cacti and a flowering yucca. It was only a little way further, but the vegetation was different here than where they first broke down. She squinted. The broken ledges of rock were soft, golden in the early sun. By the wall where Dale had fallen, she pulled down her pants and peed, and when she stood up again, buttoning the last of four buttons, she heard something close by. Big and very close, and she stopped dead.

Up on the hill where Dale had climbed last night, in profile, beside a dead ocotillo, a large black shape was pawing sand against its belly. It swung its enormous head toward her in slow motion. Wait, there were more! Behind the first, near a fat barrel cactus, a still larger animal was yawning. Hoa didn’t move, she couldn’t move, but she might as well have thrown a grenade, because the javelinas exploded, clattering up the hill and disappearing over the chine.

“Get up, Dale!” She was yanking open his door, but with the seat reclined, Dale’s head was practically in the back seat.

“I’m up, I am up.” He squirmed around in the seat, but seemed stymied as to how he might move himself into a vertical position.

“Get up. We’ve got to go.” Hoa seemed to be looming in through the open door at him, retreating and then looming forward again. Dale found the lever for the seat, cranking himself into a sitting position behind the wheel. He needed to puke. What was in his mouth? His head stuffed with cotton, cotton soaked in formaldehyde. The gleam from the hood stabbed his eyes. Fuck!

“Give me the keys,” Hoa said.

He leaned forward and took the keys from the ignition. Shit, Hoa thought. I could have turned on the battery and closed the windows last night. Reaching in, she pulled the half-empty bottle from between his legs. Turning, she threw the bottle as far as she could down the slope.

Dale wiped his eyes. The next thing he knew, Hoa was lifting the trunk lid, and he could hear her rummaging around again through the duffel bags. Do I need anything from mine, he wondered? He couldn’t think what. His ankle was swollen and ached, and he struggled to reach down for his boots — no point in changing his socks — bringing one knee up from beneath the steering wheel. He tied the laces of his right boot very lightly. Both feet back on the floor. Now to orchestrate the act of getting out of the car. A gush of nausea started up in him.

Hoa slid into the back seat, leaving her door open. Prepped and ready. “We should start,” she said again. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Give me a chance, I feel sick,” he said. “Let me have the keys back for a second.”

She reached forward, handing him the keys.

Dale didn’t want to make a big deal about trying to start the car again. He put the key in the ignition. “You were talking in your sleep,” he said. “You remember your dream?”

He turned the key. The dashboard light came on and the starter clicked, but didn’t engage. Dale leaned back in the seat again. From the middle of the back seat, Hoa stared forward through the windshield. She did suddenly remember her dream.

“I was taken captive by these really bad people. They kidnapped children too.”

“Why did they want you?”

“I don’t know.” She put her fedora on and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. “I wasn’t my age in the dream. At some point, you were captive too, and you tried to escape on a skateboard going down a wall.”

Dale looked to see where the sun was.

“I got away finally, but then there was a bear. Let’s go.”

Dale wanted to say something like “exit pursued by bear,” but he couldn’t muster the energy. In the rearview mirror he could see his own haggard face mottled by hangover.

“What happened with the bear?” he finally asked, trying to gain a minute.

“It was attacking a crowd, and then it skinnied up a big pole.”

He tried to turn to look at her, wincing though he meant to grin. “We say shimmied in English.”

“Shimmied. Let’s go. It was a big thick pole and I knew it could climb up and down really fast.”

“Were you on the pole?”

“No, come on, Dale.”

“Then how come you were afraid of the bear?”

“I knew it would come after me.”

“Why?”

“Because it was my dream, idiot.”

As if iteration

might introduce us

to a sensation

not limited to sameness.

Which is when

the branchiomandibular

muscles contract

forcing forward the hyoid bones

in their sheath so

the woodpecker’s

long tongue, forked

at the base of its throat and

wrapped over the top of its skull

and around the eye socket,

squirts through the drill hole

into a gallery of

insects within

the dead cactus.

Hoa had sunk deeper into the couch after they returned from their son’s non-graduation. She thought about her boy, thought about her boy. She spent weeks putting together scrapbooks of his writing and she framed crayon pictures he had drawn in elementary school. Dale would come home from work and find her on the couch watching the Lifetime Channel, which he could identify by the sappy music and the ridiculously sentimental dialogue before he entered the room, no matter what movie was playing. They would take turns making miserable dinners for each other or picking up takeout. Otherwise, when they were home, Dale read or worked on his Ambrose Bierce book in the basement. When he got up in the night to go to the bathroom, he would turn off the light in the TV room and let Hoa go on sleeping on the couch. If the blanket had fallen, he’d cover her.

He assured her that, of course, Declan would get in touch again. That despite all the boy’s anger and righteousness, he loved them. That it just might take awhile. “You weren’t thinking about your mom in your twenties,” he reminded her. “You weren’t calling her all the time.”

But she had never shunned her mother either. Argued with her, yes, constantly through her twenties and beyond. But she hadn’t completely cut off contact with her. Her mother always had her phone number, knew where she was living. Hoa said, “We don’t even know if Declan’s safe. If I only knew that.” Her eyes glassed over. “I have to know that.”

Their son had returned to college after his release from the hospital only to drop out toward the end of his last semester. They didn’t find out he was gone until they went up for graduation. They spoke to two of his teachers, one of whom said that their son was an unusually gifted young man. Argumentative, anti-authoritarian, serious, those words came up in every conversation. The professors had no idea where he’d gone. Neither did his former roommates, or they wouldn’t say.

For months afterward, Hoa mechanically went to her studio, throwing ugly pots and smashing them back into shapeless clay. She’d come home in the late afternoons to sprawl on the couch with her books and anti-depressants. Dale would bring home prepared food from Whole Foods or the Thai place or Be-Bop Burrito, and they would eat on TV trays watching the news. In the evening, Hoa took her sleeping pills, and Dale took his anti-anxiety pill.

It took months, but gradually, Hoa began to come back to life. Wounded, yes. But she became increasingly functional. At Dale’s suggestion, she started yoga classes — hot yoga even though it was summer. Dale would come home from teaching summer school and find her rimpled green yoga mat drying out on the back of a kitchen chair, and he would hang it up in the closet and come across it, the next day, on the kitchen chair again.