Forrest Gander: The Trace

Veena was stoking six plus six, the wood meeting flame hissing like bacon in a frying pan. Between stokes, Hoa selected staves, setting them upright against the kiln on Veena’s left. As Veena shoved one stave into the firebox, Hoa held out the next one. Then they switched places, Veena pulling the collar of her shirt up to wipe her glistening face. Hoa opened the firebox and used a stout piece of green wood to stir the ash over the grate, a sheet of smoke unwinding from the firebox and enveloping her.

Veena slid sideways between the kiln and the wall and tapped open the side damper another inch. She slid out and drained her water bottle in breathless gulps. In mutual exhaustion, both women sat on separate stools watching the pyrometer, waiting for the moment when the heat would stop rising and they would need to stoke again. In the open pit beneath the firebox, embers flared and shifted. Heat. Bring it on. Hoa could take the heat.

The weekend before they left for Mexico, Dale had flown to DC to visit his parents. He had called her from a downtown bar, a little drunk, and it was hard to hear him over the bar noise. He was saying “I’m at this place called, believe it or not, Wisdom. With my sister. We had to get out of mom and dad’s house. So we’re drinking ginger mojitos. Here I’m standing at the bar and all I can think about is you. I can’t be having a good time without wanting you with me.”

She felt such tenderness inside her when he said that. Softly, she told him “I’m witchoo baby.” She’d once heard Dale’s Virginian cousin say it like that, and ever since, she and Dale would pass the phrase back and forth to each other. “Witchoo baby.” “Witchoo too.” But he hadn’t heard her with all the bar noise.

Witch-you-babe-bee. Each step she took now seemed to deliver one syllable of that phrase. Over and over, as she walked the sandy rut of the trail. The flat-topped mountains off to the north were low enough to call hills or mesas. She could see bushes climbing the slope. It was beginning to darken with evening. Her feet were sweaty inside her shoes. Witch-you-babe-bee.

She spotted a single shining dragonfly wing stuck between two small stones in a berm. She noted two fluffy underfeathers in the dirt. A black skink, and later another one, fluttered across the trail and disappeared. Some kind of camouflaged grasshopper clung to branches of the chaparral.

I won’t sleep, she told herself. I can walk through the night.

She felt the low angle of the sun on her cheek and thought about how it must be on Dale’s cheek too. What was he doing? Was he limping along behind her? This same sun, this same sun. And her boy? What was he doing? The more she imagined Declan, letting herself think about his state of incommunicado, the more her breath shallowed as she walked. She felt as though her heart were sinking toward her solar plexus, drawing a draft of pure sadness after it. Not her own life, it wasn’t her own life she would miss most if she never found her way out of this desert.

From the grooved highway at sixty-five,

a hum rises. Except intimacy

there is nada. That

was a scissortail the woman says.

The boy in the back seat stops

blowing his Coke bottle

as they pass

the mowing machines. Spiked

lobelia, crown vetch, trumpet vine

under the blades of the Ditch-witch tremble.

What is the true jelly of an animal?

asks the boy, tonguing his tooth

on its last string. The woman

turns her face smiling.

The skyline jumps over the moon.

The man drives with his finger

inside her. Years

of together. The theories

were unfit to live on.

Only dust was given duration.

They know that

they are naked.

Outside the cave, in the fading day, Dale stood teetering on the hill of talus. Quickly, he thought. He bent, going light-headed, and picked up a flat rock larger than his palm, limping with it to the closest nopale cactus. There were dozens of nopale dispersed in the slather of brush on the hill, and barrel cacti too, although they looked more formidable. The prickly pears on the nopale were green and orange, dotted with brown nubs anchoring displays of spines. The fallen fruit was desiccated and withered, and none looked edible. Dale dropped the rock by his boot, struggling out of his shirt. Bending forward to keep from going faint, he spread the black shirt on the sandy brash. Before the light goes. He picked up his rock, tapping at a ripe fruit. It detached instantly, falling onto his shirt. He knocked off six prickly pears, piling them together. Then he tested the edge of the rock against one of the green, flipper-like pads from which the fruit grew. The pad, too, dropped readily from the cactus. He limped back to the cave carrying the rock in one hand and his shirt, folded around the nopale pad and fruit, in the other.

Dale eased himself against the near wall where he could see in the dimming light. His senses beginning to revive. He scoured the back wall anxiously for the rattlesnake, but didn’t find it. Against the blackness of the back wall, he did make out a man-sized passage of more profound blackness, a tall, skinny tunnel leading further into the cave. Leaving the open shirt of nopales, he tentatively crawled toward the passageway, the sharp rock floor chaffing his knees through his torn cargo pants, and he sniffed the skunky pungency. Somebody’s stash.

Get out of here, he told himself. But the rental car was on the trail. Hoa, was she still walking ahead? Which way would they come from if they came? An adrenal rush lifted the hair at the back of his neck. He crawled back toward his shirt, trying to clear his head. Beyond thirsty. Strategizing frantically.

If the cave was situated halfway between Sierra Mojada and highway 67, the narcos might come from either direction. If they came from the highway, they would run into Hoa. Or not necessarily. There were several trails. They might come from Ciudad Camargo, farther south. Or they might come from Jiménez. But if they came west from Sierra Mojada, they would find the rental car on the trail less than a mile from the cave. Then again, the car was close enough that they would see it no matter how they approached. And the keys were in it.

In the flat light at the mouth of the cave, Dale studied the nopales spread out on his shirt. First this, he thought. This first. One thing at a time. He took his sharp-edged rock and mashed open a prickly pear on his shirt. It split on first impact, and he teased it further apart, pressing out the succulent wet green with its slimy nest of brown seeds. With his thumb and finger, he tweaked some and brought it to his face. His lips felt as though they had been sewn shut. His tongue was bulky in his mouth, and he could barely swallow. He sucked at his slimy fingers and rested. Then he smashed open two more, sloppily scooping the middles with his fingers. At first he couldn’t taste the moistness, and then he could feel it inside his lips, reviving the aftertaste of his own sour puke. He gagged, but he bit down, keeping the gleet in his mouth. He sucked it around either side of his tongue and swallowed a little at a time. Electric jolts rippled his brain and dissipated again.

When there were no nopales left, he took up the rock and tapped at the flat green pad. It spurted onto the cave’s floor, and he panged for the lost fluid. He pinned the pad with another stone and scraped back part of the skin. It was a mess. He was mucking it up. There was more pulp in the pad than in the pear, but it was hard to get to without inadvertently spreading tiny spines through the mash. He used his finger and thumb and dug out some pulp which tasted greener, more vegetal than the fruit. So he was tasting again. A good sign. He banked the slimy pulp around his swollen tongue, swallowing it in tiny gulps, counting to fifteen, then ten between each miniature swallow.