Forrest Gander: The Trace

Dale saw both men emerge from the cave — the guy with the waggling head in front of the young guy with the mustache — with shiny brown packages the size of carry-on luggage under each arm. That’s going to be hard, Dale thought, coming down that sluice carrying that stuff. They disappeared from Dale’s sight and less than ten minutes later, the bob-head stepped out of the creosote onto the trail right behind his truck. He dumped the packages onto the lowered gate and climbed in, readjusting them in the bed near the cab. The younger guy showed up behind him, looking like maybe he’d fallen. He was disheveled, his gold chain hanging outside his shirt and his hat jammed low on his forehead.

The two men didn’t speak. The younger one put his packages into the truck bed and Bob-head moved them beside the others. Then, both went back up the sluice to the cave and came down again loaded the same way. The fifth or sixth time they went up, Dale backed out of the brush, dropping down the precipice about ten feet. He weaved his way closer to the truck, and when he was about parallel with it, he wedged his way between bushes, lying on the ground, and waited there without even the beginning of a plan.

He could slip into the back of the rental car and hide on the floor. No one ever looked in the backseat when he got in to drive. But what then? Even if he put a choke hold on the skinny guy at the wheel and squeezed until he passed out, there’d be only one chance to get it right and he’d still be in a car attached to the bob-head’s truck. He’d be entirely visible in the truck’s rearview mirror.

* * *

The two men carried packages out of the cave for almost two hours. Steadily, without rest. Shadow darkened the sluiceway now as the sun dropped toward the horizon. In the meantime, Dale’s breath had gone out of him. There was sand and dust in his mouth and eyes. He almost closed them.

Bob-head got into the bed of the truck and made some adjustments to the packages, while Mustache made a solo trip back up to the cave. Dale’s attention was drawn back to the truck. Was that a soccer ball? Bob-head was picking up soccer balls from the truck bed. There were five or six of them. He was distributing them like spacers between the stacked packages. When Mustache emerged from the creosote bushes, handing his two packages over the back of the truck, they spoke to each other, but Dale couldn’t make out what they said. Mustache got into the passenger side of the truck and Bob-head hopped to the ground, coming around and sliding behind the wheel. The truck started up.

This is it, Dale thought. It’s now or never. His right hand was trembling.

* * *

All but paralyzed with tension, Dale fixed his eyes on the door of the truck. He had a rock the size of a pear in his right hand and he was squeezing a smaller shard of chert in his left.

He had slid furtively along the line of brush far enough to see that the rental car’s cross-member was tied to the truck’s rear bumper with about six feet of knotted red strap — the Prizm seatbelts. The two men sat in the cab as the western sky began to reflect against the windshield. Dale could see both caves, the one he had spent the night in and the small inaccessible one above it. The one the bats used. Over the rock rim, the air was blue and darkening. The men were smoking with their windows down. How are they going to tow the car with both of them in the fucking truck? Dale asked himself. Who’s going to keep the car on the trail?

He was shuffling through the possibilities, far-fetched as they were. If he stayed in place and did nothing, his chances weren’t good. And Hoa might be in serious trouble. He imagined leaping from his hiding place as the rental car got pulled past him, throwing himself onto the trunk in a balletic way. It was getting dark. And then he tried to imagine himself holding onto the trunk as the car got towed to the highway. There was no way he had that much strength or quickness.

Bob-head’s door opened and Dale heard the truck engine cut. Both the man and his partner got out. What was this now? They were coming to find him. Dale glanced down the trail in the direction of Sierra Mojada. There was nothing to run toward, not that he could run. His only chance was diving down the cactus slope below, trying to get behind some cover lower down. He looked west, up the trail, and there was Hoa in her white short-sleeved shirt, walking around the bend in the twilight.

He couldn’t make out her face, but her hair was a mess and her posture was off-kilter, her face held up, angled like she was trying to read something in Vietnamese. Jesus Christ. Terrified, he looked at the Mexicans, but they hadn’t seen her. They were already through the bushes, starting up the sluice toward the cave again.

Hoa hadn’t reached the highway. After hiking six or seven hours, she agonized about turning back. The pace of her walking slowed, but a kind of frenzy took hold of her. Dire scenes howled through her mind.

As long as she went west, it was impossible that she’d miss the highway. Yet, before twilight, alone, in the middle of a desert, she made a decision to leave the trail. It must have been bending north the whole time, that was the only explanation for why she hadn’t reached the highway. She checked herself against the sun and tried to walk as straight west as she could for two more hours. It was slow going. Over slippery, lichen-covered slabs of rock, between vicious clumps of shrubs, along dead floodways and up snakey hills, she thought she picked up sections of animal trails, mule deer, or javelinas, but they faded out each time. She was having to make her way so slowly through the terrain, divagating around so many obstacles, she was afraid of losing her bearings altogether. As the sun dropped lower, she reached a rise and stood, rocking slightly in the long day’s heat like a vase in a fire. She stared out at an unordered wilderness. She did not want to come together with it. If only there were a sign of some kind, some sign of presence or direction. The exposed skin of her arms had burned. Her heart was pounding as though she’d been running full out for miles. She wasn’t going to reach the highway. She felt something begin to crack inside herself. She almost broke.

And then she hardened.

By twilight, she made her way back to the trail and she lay down in the rut. She passed the night between bouts of foreboding and the kind of sleep in which she dreamed she was awake, lying there unsleeping. She was absolutely certain now that she should have gone south where the trail first split.

The next day, when she finally reached that fork in the trail again, she realized that Dale and the car were only a few miles further east. She kept going back. She prayed she would run into Dale, that he was limping her way. But after trudging in his direction for a while, she knew he had stayed at the car or gone to the cave he’d pointed out. Or he’d already taken the southern fork and come out at the highway with no idea that she was still wandering. Her damp fedora shaded her brow, but she kept her eyes fixed on the trail in front of her. Her knees ached and her feet were blistered. When she saw the pickup truck and two men in hats climbing out of the cab, she almost broke into a run. She didn’t spot Dale anywhere and her pace slowed, but she couldn’t stop walking forward. The two men in hats — or was it a man and a boy? — stepped off the trail. She kept on stumbling forward like a wind-up toy. It was getting dark, but she saw the men reappear higher up the slope, one behind the other, climbing. Amber sunbeams lit up sections of the ridge.

Then Hoa stopped dead in her tracks. She was still fifty yards away. Dale — it was clearly Dale and yet there was something wrong with him — emerged in a crouch from the side of the trail. What did he have on his head? He glanced toward her once — had he actually seen her? And then he opened the truck’s door and leaned into the cab. He was hidden by the door. She couldn’t see what he was doing. But then she saw him hobble behind the truck. Bent forward like an old man with a bad back. Their red rental car was behind the truck. Dale opened the car door, got in and out again, minus whatever he’d been wearing on his head, and limped back to the truck. She had never seen him move like that. Such wounded animal ferocity. She held up, frozen. Until she heard shouting. One of the men who had gone up the escarpment was shouting. She heard an engine rev, and the blue pickup lurched forward, Dale behind the wheel, and she heard a gunshot, three gunshots. Four.