Forrest Gander - The Trace

When Hoa had turned and seen that he really wasn’t going to make it, her face had taken on a corundum hardness. Maybe she had already made it to the highway now by herself. If she was okay, people would be looking for him soon. If she was okay. . His stomach turned. He touched the top of his head. There was hair there, but he felt scalped. He felt thirstier now than before. He wanted to put his shirt back on. While he was planning what to do next, he passed out.

* * *

It was his long-term complaint that at home, they could never watch a movie together. While he sat in his chair, she would lie on the couch in a harem of pillows and afghans and within thirty minutes, no matter how gripping the movie, she’d be softly snoring. She sounded like a baby alligator. If Dale called her name, her eyes would snap open and she would immediately ask him a question as though she had just been ruminating, with her eyes closed, on some detail in the plot. Did the gigolo take the other guy’s coat at the coat check? Were the notebooks blank? What’s the name of that actor in the little car, the one playing the mobster? It was remarkable how, in that blink of waking consciousness — with her first, not yet even full breath — she could hatch ingenious questions that were nuanced and perceptive, that Dale had to consider before he could respond. Just the same, it was such an obvious ruse by now that it reminded Dale of the way their old blind beagle, now dead, would sometimes bark at them when they came up the porch steps, and then, realizing her mistake, she’d pretend — no one who has raised dogs doubts that they are capable liars — that she was barking at something behind them, at something which had since disappeared.

In his dream, he was part of a small group of guests being led through an expensive Palladian home full of art. In each room, he felt compelled to offer polite comments about bad paintings to the hostess, an immaculately dressed, white-haired woman wearing so much make-up she resembled a bald eagle. Each time he spoke, he saw himself become more diaphanous and phantasmal. And he felt Hoa’s eyes burning through him, hating him.

When he woke, the back of his head was pressed to sharp rock, and he was dizzy. He tried to sit straighter, but found he was too weak. Had days or only hours passed? He had the feeling of being somewhere inside the body whose head he looked out from. Through the vertical almond-shaped eye of the cave, he viewed a clean, transparently blue evening. Undulant. He rested his head back against the rock and gathered his breath. He was adrift, but the dizziness was passing. The world began to present to him as though for the first time, glassy and lovely. The evening and all its creatures beat to a single pulse, pounding in the arteries of his throat. Slowly he came to feel his tongue ache and he wondered if he’d bitten it accidentally. Then, as though a huge gear were wheeling into place, engaging his memory, he felt the roiling in his intestines, his throbbing ankle, his sickly dizziness, and the fever chewing his brow.

He managed to sit up against the wall and stare out as the sky buckled in a drama of shifting hues, going pink to red to bruise. Nauseous and serene at once, he decided to watch everything very carefully, to keep a mental record. He needed to pay attention. The details were important for Hoa’s sake. Or would be. He thought he heard a distant train, but around him, the cave was lowly rumbling. Something brushed his face, spilling into the twilight. He recoiled, leaning back against the wall and wiping his cheek. There were more. Black shapes expelled from the cave like spadefuls of dirt. Falling lengthwise against the wall, he began to squirm from the cave and the roar.

Flat against the rock beyond the cave’s mouth, Dale turned his cheek and squinted at a thrumming inky torrent erupting from somewhere above him, from an invisible portal. He was shaking, everything was shaking, as though he’d fallen to a jet’s floor right beside the wing, overcome with thunder and trembling. A few bats continued to shoot out into the night, but the source of the main funnel was elsewhere, some higher egress. The air droned, and the massive funnel forming outside the cave diverged into countercurrents curling off. The rock around Dale seemed to be thumping and squeaking, flapping and rippling through him. Was he coming apart? No, he was breathing. Another breath, slower now.

The bats continued to siphon upward in a vast mass that would drift and reappear like smoke sucked back into a fire. For an endless time he was paralyzed by the din, as the thick hypnotic lariat, twirling in semi-darkness, loosened into the darkness. By the time the clatter diminished into perceptible squeaks, the night was responding with its electronic orchestra of insects, nightbirds, and toads.

Dale wanted to crawl back into the cave, but his colon spasmed, as though the long gush of violence expelled from the cave had stimulated a sympathetic response in his body. He dropped to a knee and bent over. His eyelids were leaden, his scalp and face tingling. Pushing himself to his feet, he limped to the first congregation of mesquite and cacti in the moonlight. The talus was loose, but the slope adjacent to the cave wasn’t so steep. By the nopale plant that he had stripped earlier, he undid his belt and pulled his cargo pants and sweaty underwear down, squatting as he faced uphill, holding his hand against the ground for balance. It took all of his concentration to keep from falling over. A few long syrupy spurts erupted as he reached behind on either side to draw his butt cheeks apart. He continued to squat after he knew he was finished. When he raised his head and opened his eyes, he felt wetness at the corners of his eyes leaking down his cheeks. More wasted fluid.

Above his cave, a chimney of rock rose toward a gangly congestion of stars.

Leaving Dale behind, Hoa set her eyes ahead, marking in her mind her gait’s rhythm. She would keep going at this pace, she told herself, without slowing until she reached paved road. Route 67, north — south. North to Ojinaga. South to wherever she wasn’t going. She never looked back for Dale because she would see him soon. That was certain. She put him out of her mind to keep from going crazy, and then she was thinking about him the night before they started on this trip. Before dinner, she had latched onto his neck in the kitchen, sucking briefly at his throat, and told him it was a lamprey kiss. Dale had kissed her back, his lips warm and full, and she’d felt the arousal in her body molding her to him. Something sustaining and real, a substance almost, passed from him into her breasts and belly.

“Baby, sometimes when I think of you I smell different,” she said.

He said, “You mean your sense of smell changes?”

“No,” she’d answered. “The way I smell.”

How many days ago was that?

Her fedora protected her head, but her scalp was swampy. She looked down the trail. Now she needed to put her thirst out of her mind. Visualizing it, she opened the firebox door, set her thirst inside, and shut the door. Now there was only the heat to deal with. It wasn’t worse than a firing. She could ignore it. She focused on the highway that must be ahead, but soon she began to hear the repetitive pattern of her footsteps fill in with the four-four witch-you-babe-bee. The same jerky refrain over and over, against her will. She couldn’t stop it. Or her gurgling stomach. She was aware of passing many kinds of plants she not only couldn’t name, but had never seen before.

The rancid musk woke Dale before he heard anything. It was night. No, his eyes were swollen shut. Why was he sitting up? Then the sound jolted him wholly awake. Something large. Very close. He clutched for his rock and clenched his teeth. The narcos were coming for their stash. It was light enough to see, but nothing entered the cave. What he was hearing turned into a fury of grunts and high squeals. In the cave’s ashy mouth, Dale wriggled forward on his belly with the rock in his hand just far enough so he could peer down the slope. A pack of black javelinas — five, six — were shoving each other and shoveling their noses, snorting and snapping in a frenzy. Christ, he thought, it’s my shit, that watery shit they’re fighting over. Immediately, they sensed him and bolted, weaving down the embankment through the brush. They’ll head for water, Dale thought. I can follow their tracks. If Hoa is okay. . I have to get out of here. . If she’s okay . . Out of here.