Forrest Gander: The Trace

She rolled to her side again, facing him, lifting herself just enough to pull the duvet, which had caught beneath her, over her head, and she disappeared under it. A while later, still awake, Dale watched her arm stretch out, shapely and dark, and fall across the white duvet. Her arm was crooked upward at the elbow so her hand was even with her face, which had also emerged, her thumb available for sucking — if she sucked her thumb, which she didn’t. The pre-linguistic urrmmmnn she almost spoke might have been an acknowledgement of some kind. Or an oneiric murmur that all was as well as it could be, considering.

At 5:30 a.m., Dale was in El Paisano Hotel’s courtyard warming up. A half hour before, just after waking, he’d slipped into the bathroom, not disturbing Hoa, filled his shaker with tap water, and opened a packet of vanilla whey protein. He shook it, drank it, and then, stepping back into the veneer of daylight edging the drawn curtains of the room, soundlessly dressed for his run.

In the hotel’s courtyard, the coffee tables were empty. It was less than an hour after daybreak, and the air was already warmer than it had been last night at the viewing station. The courtyard fountain was surrounded by dead grass and made a bright, cheery splashing that would go unheard later in the day when the restaurant bustle and parking cars ratcheted the noise level up a few notches. From the courtyard, Dale looked up along the stucco wall for his room. Faint shadows slanted under wrought-iron balconies. The room was dark where Hoa went on sleeping.

While Dale stretched, two women in uniform — a few minutes apart from each other — hustled through the architrave into the courtyard, crossing the bleached tile patio, each at ease in her regular body, just before the job altered her voice, gestures, and rhythms into those of a hotel maid.

Dale rotated his neck and then squatted to the right to stretch out his left inner thigh, reversing his stance to stretch the other way. Supporting himself with one hand on a wrought-iron chair, he crooked his leg up from the knee, gripped the toe of his shoe, and felt the pull deep in his quad. He swiveled his torso over his hips in a slow, cautious circle, going easy so as not to provoke a crick in his back, then stood up straight with his legs apart, rolling his shoulders up toward his ears, rotating them forward, down, and back. The stretches were part of a familiar ritual and he performed them noting the temperature and humidity — not yet hot but dry — and the breeze: none in the courtyard. The big-top clouds in the already lapis sky weren’t drifting anywhere. The pleasure he felt was anticipation, in part. A grafting of memories from many years of running onto this fresh occasion, a curiosity about the landscape and the path he had scouted out yesterday. But perhaps the pleasure was less emotional than physical. His lungs hungered for big drafts of air, the muscles in his legs were addicted to the ketone of morphine that strenuous exercise released. In the weeks after Declan’s accident, he knew that his insistence on taking daily runs kept him from falling apart completely.

He put on his headphones and scrolled down the playlist, to DJ Krush with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. Clipped the player to his shorts, tucking a loop of extra cord under the waistband, picked up his visor from the table, and adjusted it on his forehead. He pressed the start button on his watch and jogged out through the architrave into the street, turning right on West Texas and right again at the corner. On West Lincoln, he went left, leaving the sidewalk for the street and taking inventory of his moving parts.

His lower back was a bit stiff as usual. The twinge in his left knee that he’d noticed during his last run had moved to the center of the patella. He looked to see how his step was falling, could see himself coming down first on his heel. He shortened his stride and lifted his knees a little higher so the impact zone shifted forward to the balls of his feet.

Then he quickened his pace to match the drumbeat in his ears. He neared a high school and took a left toward a rec center and some railroad tracks. Just before the railroad crossing, Dale veered onto a dirt road paralleling the tracks. He could smell tar and oil in the air. The sun was behind him, throwing his thin, foreshortened shadow ahead and to his right. It was hot, but too dry to feel himself sweating profusely.

When Dale’s watch beeped the first mile, he checked his time. He was leaving behind the last unplumbed, peeling houses at the edge of the town. Across the tracks to his left, he saw a rock wall marking the old part of the Marfa cemetery. He crossed the tracks near the cemetery on a graded pebble road, picking up the dirt road on the other side. For the rest of his outward run, there were fenced fields with cattle or scattered horses on his left, and beyond the fields, he saw Highway 90 with its occasional early-morning drivers in their pickup trucks. Both the highway and the dirt road were ruler-straight as far as the eye could see.

For the second mile, Dale kept his head up, trained on the middle distance, but he also tracked the ground before him, scanning for rocks, holes, and snakes. The tempo of his footfall doubled the backbeat of the music. Checking his step, he noticed his gait was neutral and he was coming down on the midsection of his soles. The sun was on his neck and, with an economy of gesture, he reached up to turn his visor backward to protect his nape. The dirt road, like every dirt road he ran in North Carolina, was a weedy hump between two tire track depressions. It was easier to run where the tires had pressed pebbles and stones into the dirt, but he sometimes crossed the hump when he saw pitted-out or stony stretches ahead. On either side, along the shoulders, were busy anthills and shallow bar ditches full of weeds.

A scattering of thoughts and images passed through him: the three of them — Hoa, Declan, and Dale — walking the side of a rural road in Asheville, and Declan — he must have been eight or nine then — slipping down the embankment to a creek, slowly, ankle-deep in brown water, sneaking up to an enormous bullfrog that surely saw him coming but didn’t leap in time. Dale with his arm around Hoa, standing at the edge of the road watching. And Declan hooting in celebration and clamoring back up the embankment to show off the bullfrog before he let it go again. The fat green and brown frog looking a little glum and embarrassed maybe, and Declan beaming.

Then Dale remembered the time when he and Hoa had taken Declan and a gang of his friends to the lake for a birthday picnic. Dale had put on a hair-and-rubber monster mask and chased the boys up and down the lakeside paths, roaring and wheezing, swiped by branches, half blind inside the mask that reeked of sweat and toxic polymers. The boys screamed and ran in mock terror. And that night, scheming to scare him back, Declan hid a red plastic iguana under Dale’s pillow and a rubber snake under the sheets on Hoa’s side. When he and Hoa lay down, surprise surprise. But Declan was already asleep by then.

After the third mile, Dale turned around regretfully. For the last few minutes, he had been keeping his eyes fixed on a tethered surveillance aerostat floating like a white beluga whale several hundred feet over the desert a mile or so ahead. He would have liked to run closer to it, but as soon as he turned around the sun was in his face and he felt much hotter. He readjusted his visor to keep the overhead sun out of his eyes, his pace slackening. The desert had become a reflective surface and big waves of heat radiated upward from the path. The fence posts, the cacti, the occasional corrugated drainage pipes lying in intervals under the path, everything seemed to beam its heat at him. With the bottom of his shirt, Dale wiped the sweat from his brow. He squinted against the ground glare and tried to spit, but his saliva was too frothy. Wiping his wet mouth with the wet back of his hand, he figured the air was already hotter than his body temperature. Unadulterated dogbreath.