Forrest Gander: The Trace

The arroyo wasn’t visible through the green sea of chest-high mesquite, but he knew it was there. So he walked west, looking for an animal trail through the thicket. Somewhere, the javelinas must have plowed a tunnel to the streambed. The sun was blaring, and after a few minutes, he decided he had no choice, his time was running out. Straight into the rampant mesquite he plunged.

As he waded twenty, thirty, fifty feet into the mesquite, it gave way to fan-spray yuccas and sotols and century plants edging a precipitous bajada that was fenestrated with the holes of pocket mice. Dale halted and peered down from the crumbly lip, his cheeks, torso, and arms bleeding. Below him, he could see a dry alluvial flat, its sand rippled by past torrents. It stretched south into the wide desert glimmering with heat.

From the scarp of the bajada, Dale took a few test steps into the loose sand and half slid, half plummeted down into the arroyo, trying to bear the brunt on his good foot, his boots sinking deep in the soft slope with each step. At the bottom, he brushed sand from his pants, and was amazed that he hadn’t re-injured his ankle. It would be easy to find his way back here, he thought, looking at his glide mark in the bajada’s flank. He sat down to take off his boots and tap out the sand. While he was putting them back on, a long gray-brown snake tongued its way past him on the far side of the dry river bed, disappearing into a depression like a wrinkle tugged flat in the sand itself.

Dale took it for a sign. He stood up and followed. The snake seemed impervious to his presence. Both snake and man stayed close to the bajada slope, the snake rippling ahead, faster than Dale could hobble, but then pausing and testing the air with its tongue. Dale was never closer than twenty feet before it zipped from sight, only to reappear ahead of him. Folds and runnels crisscrossed the sand in the old riverbed like lines in a hand, the snake pouring itself into and out of them.

At the top of the bajada on Dale’s left, a squalor of spiky greenery cast a weak shadow onto the slope. The sweat-wet underwear covered his head, but Dale still felt the sun blowtorching the back of his neck. Beneath his boots, the composition of sand was changing. It went white as talcum, then it darkened and pebbled. The snake was gone. Dale dropped onto his bruised knees in a little bend where the shadow from above almost reached, and he began to dig into the sand with his fingers. Under the fine top layer of sand, a grainier substratum tore his already raw fingertips. He managed about six inches or so before getting up and continuing to limp in the direction the frozen ripple patterns indicated was downstream. How long had he been walking? How much time had he lost?

* * *

During their relationship, Dale and Hoa had both become more interested in plants, in the names of trees and weeds and flowers. Dale had assiduously studied Hoa’s field books and slowly mastered distinctions that he quickly forgot again as the seasons changed and the years passed. But the names stuck with Hoa. On their walks, she would notice flowering plants and occasionally remark on them. Her commentaries weren’t the straightforward identification feats that he had practiced, which would lead him to casually call out cottonwood or red mulberry . She was more likely to pluck a leaf from a tree they passed and say, Swallowtails love these leaves. He’d say, What is it? and she’d look at the leaf and say, Toothache tree, it’s a pepperbark. Hoa touched plants the way she touched clay or stray cats, as if each were her lost pet. Always with a reflective, lavish gentleness.

* * *

At the point Dale decided he couldn’t afford to turn back to the trail, he noticed a discoloration in the sand up ahead. He trudged forward to find two holes and two piles of loose sand crisscrossed by tracks — coyote, dog? Both holes were narrow, dug down at least a foot, and at the bottom of each, he saw water. He threw himself down on all fours in the scratched sand and sniffed at the holes. He couldn’t smell anything, but there were no dead bugs. He looked carefully, steadying himself. The right sign, he thought. He lay down on his belly. There was just enough space for him to lower his head into the wider hole. He knocked sand into the little pool with his cheeks and his forehead and then his shoulder, the air turning to earth, the earth turning to water, and he shut his eyes, sucking up a mouthful of watery sand, swallowing it in small gulps, keeping his head in the hole in a painfully stressed position, and trying to move as little as possible.

When Dale found his way back to the cairns, it was evening. Tremors of desperation or ecstasy or fever were shivering up the back of his neck. He felt like he had been limping for weeks. The little rock heaps helped him, and when he reached the last one — the first that he’d made — he felt a surprising urge to pee. He peed against the cairn, a little stream of urine the color of cola. Then, at the bottom of the slope, he bent forward from the waist, leaning like the twisted cholla and barrel cacti, using scrub bushes for handholds. He told himself he would not stop ascending until he made the trail.

He had lugged himself partway up the slope when he heard something. Maybe sensed it before he heard it. He paused and shaded his eyes with his hand. Thirty feet above him, a hedge of ocotillo and mesquite marked the trail’s edge. He wasn’t going up the slope on the same trajectory that he had come down, so he wasn’t sure if he would be closer to the cave or the car when he reached the trail. When he heard a man’s voice, faint, at a distance, a chill and a hope went through him at the same time. Dale was completely exposed coming up the hill. Anyone who stood at the edge of the trail and looked down would see him immediately, his silly white underwear hat. Even if he got to the thicker brush adjacent to the trail, it would be tricky to stay hidden. He hunched low and ascended the last fifteen feet holding his breath, terrified he would slide again or make a noise. For the last five feet, he was crawling between clumps of grass and scraggly mesquite. Low branches tripped him and thorns ripped his ankles. He jammed the upper part of his knee, the same knee with the boil, into a little barrel cactus and couldn’t believe the clarity of the pain.

What were the chances the men would be with Hoa, come to help?

He peered out from behind the bush, his face low to the sand. His head was killing him. A metallic blue pickup was coming from the east, toward him. And it was towing his rental car. Good sign, right? Inertia held him in place. The truck stopped a stone’s throw away. He couldn’t see his rental car behind the truck now but he heard the car door open and shut. A young man appeared in the middle of the trail behind the pickup. He had a thin mustache and wore a long-sleeved blue patterned shirt and a hemp-colored gaucho hat with a round rim.

Then the door to the pickup opened and another man stepped out onto the trail.

The two men met between the vehicles and spoke to each other, gazing at the upper slope. The man closest to Dale, the one he saw exiting the pickup, seemed to have a strange tick. His head bobbed on his neck as though he were constantly catching himself from falling asleep. He was wearing jeans and boots. The sides of his white cowboy hat curved up against the crown. He went around the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. They both disappeared behind the truck and reappeared in the brush in the sluiceway going up toward the cave. They were gone in the creosote, and then Dale caught a glimpse of them again, moving upward much more quickly than Dale had managed to come down the same way.

Dale didn’t see many options. The pickup was facing away from Sierra Mojada, but that didn’t mean the narcos had come from there. They might have come from route 67 and turned around when they tied the rental car to the truck. He couldn’t make out any tire tracks, but he didn’t have a good angle looking through the brush. If they had come from Sierra Mojada, they wouldn’t have crossed paths with Hoa as she trudged her way to route 67. That was good. But they were heading toward route 67 now, with the rental car in tow. That meant everything bad. If Hoa hadn’t reached the highway yet or was lost or had turned back, they would run into her.