Forrest Gander: The Trace

He stepped into the dawn without his shirt, shivering at the edge of his cave, collecting himself. The early morning came on without motion, formfast but intensifying. Below, he saw the trail, and on the other side, a steeper slope to flat desert, which stretched to a horizon of dull mountains. There was a thin stroke of dark green he could see to the south. There. Could be. He could get there, he thought. He squeezed his arm and felt it. Good. He swatted his filthy shirt against the wall to clean it off and pulled it on, feeling little cactus spines all along his shoulders. He took off his boots, cargo pants, and underwear. Standing in his shirt and socks, he managed to get his pants back on, sat down, pulled on his boots, and patted the soiled white boxers onto his head like a wilted chef’s hat. He felt dizzy, but he thought his ankle was better. If he could make his way back down to the trail without twisting it again. He started for the sluiceway directly below the cave where he would have to negotiate boulders and dead brush, but it looked clearer than any other way down the hill. Here I come, he thought, you rattlesnake motherfuckers.

Hoa walked steadily west and northwest. She stopped only a few times to sit on a broken stone in the shade of some brush, or to rest against an outcrop by the trail. In the late afternoon, she passed a little wooden plank, anchored by stones, on which someone had painted the word agua. She almost didn’t see it. Off the trail, some twenty feet behind the sign, she spotted a wooden box the size of a microwave. A two-inch plastic pipe angled down from it into a dry rock trough. Sliding the cover back, she found an inch-deep seep-puddle inside, curded with foam and algae. There was no can or ladle or bucket to dip into the water, so Hoa knelt, digging her toes into the dirt for grip while she lowered her face into the box. The water was tepid and scummy. She rested there for half an hour, drinking what she could. Sticking her head in the box. Hoping Dale would catch up with her. Her runner husband.

Before she went on, she arranged a small line of pebbles in the trail, an arrow pointing toward the white agua sign. Dale wouldn’t miss it. All afternoon, in a kind of reversal of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus she thought would appeal to Dale, she looked over her shoulder, but never caught sight of him. He had to be coming. Even on his bad ankle, he could make it this far. He was a runner. Over and over in her head, as she walked, she imagined him catching up with her, calling her. She pictured the two of them stumbling out onto the dusty paved highway together, a pickup pulling over for them right away. They had been soldered together in love early on, and they had been soldered again in grief. Whatever their lives came to mean after the toll of disappointments and elations, she thought, their bond was a singular thing at the core of who they were, whether separately or together.

Hoa had gone maybe half a mile from the spring box, when she heard a pair of nighthawks trilling like frogs. Her socks had slipped down and bunched into her shoes. She looked up to see that the sun had begun to set. A single vulture drifted across the darkening blue sky like a scrap of ash lofted up from a fire, seesawing ever so slightly above her.

Stumbling down the sluiceway from the cave, Dale kept in mind that thin green band of vegetation a mile or so into the desert. It was a sure sign of water. An arroyo. The cactus fruits had helped him, but if he couldn’t restore more of his fluids, he was really in trouble. How could Hoa have walked for a day in the sun without water? Where would she have slept? He kept imagining the narcos meeting up with her on their way to the cave, kept forcing himself to come up with positive scenarios. She doesn’t threaten them, so they are happy to help her out. They don’t want to stir up trouble by killing a gringa. She’s in the truck with them headed this way. The variations looped and looped until Dale stood back on the trail again, scratched and bleeding, his ankle throbbing, pulling thin cactus needles from his fingers with his teeth.

He paused about halfway down the second embankment, catching his breath and looking out across the plain below. His head smarted. He could no longer make out the green band of the arroyo he had seen from the cave’s mouth. All around him, listing at weird angles to the steep slope, the cactus plants looked like they were about to fall over. There was a hard painful lump in his throat and not enough saliva to swallow it. Some pearl of mucus and dust and acid, he thought, accreting layer over layer, hour by hour, until it plugged up his esophagus. The morning had barely begun, but the sun already sizzled, and the hill, heating up like a loaf of bread, exhaled at him. Dale kept on going down to the plain, kept going, although it seemed impossible. Simple animal effort and reaction. With each crunching step, sand and pebbles shifted under his boots. Flat and puce-colored rock fragments littered the slope and clattered like baked xylophone keys as he made his way around the thorny brush. His vision was blurring.

When Dale had gone a hundred yards or so from the bottom of the slope into the desert, he turned to look behind him. Had he heard Hoa calling his name? His cave had disappeared, winked out from the contours of the volcanic sill. Now, the shape of the mountain behind him was anonymous, unfamiliar. He could just barely perceive the trace of his own descent from the trail, which was only visible as a brush line, a telltale unconformity in the vegetation halfway up the slope. With his right hand, he repetitively and unconsciously rubbed at red stripes and welts on his forearms. His shirt, even though he had shaken it and beaten it against the cave wall to dislodge the fine nopale spines, pricked his shoulders and chest. His fingertips ached. All good, he thought. It was feeling.

Sidestepping a chunk of red-black volcanic rock about the size of his own head, he had an idea. He looked around for another good-sized rock he could lift, unsettled it from the sand, and carried it over to the first rock. Soon, he had assembled a knee-high cairn of three base rocks with a rock on top. Standing next to it, he rechecked his position relative to the slope. He marked a long crevice in the mountain, just east of its highest knob. It would be too easy to drift and lose his way coming back and never find the car again. Stay found. Stay found.

He turned back to the desert, mentally projecting a straight line to where he figured he had seen the arroyo from the cave. His eyes were bleary. He turned on his phone, checked the time, and turned it off again. He could walk for an hour at most. If he didn’t find the arroyo by then, he would be wasting his energy. For the next forty minutes, he sighted ahead to a century plant, a spray of ocotillo, a cactus, leaving at each subsequent site increasingly smaller cairns. As he walked, he flattened the underwear over his head and pulled the legs over his ears. The sun was unrelenting, the desert so silent, each of his steps exploded beneath him. It was like hearing himself chewing an apple into a microphone.

Whenever Dale closed his eyes, an expanding yellow circle appeared behind his eyelids. Even though he was dehydrated, he felt bloated. He stopped and checked behind him again. If he got lost, that would be it. The crevice in the ever more remote cliff face was still visible, still marking his return to the trail and the car. He pulled up the bottom of his pants and examined his right knee. There were bruises and lacerations across it, and underneath the kneecap, a nasty boil had formed.

Dale put together three stones and realigned himself facing south. Ahead of him, the brush thickened. He guessed he had come about three miles from the trail.