Forrest Gander: The Trace

* * *

The truck’s engine wound so high in first gear, it was screaming. Dale let out the clutch, and the truck scrabbled straight toward Hoa. When it slowed, the rental car slammed into the back of it and the nose of the truck lurched forward, slewing to the left and almost knocking her off the trail.

“Get into the car and steer,” Dale called thinly, sticking his head from the open window of the cab. She couldn’t move. His face was scratched and purple and terrible, a purgatorial counter of itself. There was cold intent in his eyes. He opened the truck door. “Get into the car and steer,” he screamed hoarsely. “Keep it in neutral!”

She heard another gunshot. She couldn’t recall moving but then she was at the Prizm, ripping open the door and sliding behind the wheel. Dale revved the truck again, the car jerked forward, and Hoa almost fell out through the open door. She grabbed the steering wheel with her right hand and yanked the door closed, her deadened right foot testing the brake. She aimed the car right behind the truck. The seatbelt chime was going off, but she couldn’t find her seatbelt. As they rounded the first turn in the trail, the truck’s taillights came on. The hills were swallowing the sun.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, when they came to the fork where Hoa had walked northwest to nowhere, she honked the car horn. Dale was driving slowly anyway, trying to keep the towrope taut, and when he stopped, Hoa pressed the brakes. She put the car in park and ran up to the truck. Dale looked even worse closer up. The hard landscape — its scars and rifts and dust — had entered his face, taking it over. He was as carved and rindled as the volcanic rocks, weird and ancient, his eyes squinty and red. He looked reptilian, his forehead bubbled, his lips smeared with white film. His expression was unrecognizable to her.

Dale said something first, but she couldn’t understand him, so she simply flung herself at him.

“What happened?” She was crying uncontrollably, shivering. Happy.

He pushed her off. “Can you keep driving?” His voice was squashed and cold. She looked at the ghastliness of her husband, the purple vascular bundles in his cheeks, and she swallowed. “Yes,” she said, still leaning into the truck, trying to bury her face in his chest. “Yes. But let’s just take the truck and leave the car.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Dale said. “They’re making calls.”

“There’s no reception,” Hoa blubbered, letting him go, stepping back to look at him again. He didn’t sound right.

“We can’t untie the seatbelts. They’re knotted up tight, there’s nothing to cut them with.”

As suddenly as she had started, she stopped crying and looked up the trail. “We have to go left up here,” she said more firmly. “South. I walked the other way and it goes nowhere.”

She turned back to him. “Baby, what happened to you?”

“We get to 67, we’ll be okay,” he said.

He looked like he’d been run over. A couple of times. And dragged.

Then she saw something flicker in his face, as though he were just now focusing on her. “You made it,” he said, his eyes welling. He was shaking all over.

She raised up on her toes and leaned forward again through the open door, smashing her face into his shoulder, his sullied shirt, reaching up blindly with her fingers for his face. He pressed his hand against her cheek but didn’t say anything. Then she stepped back and jogged to the car, sliding in, racking the seat forward, and shifting into neutral. The seatbelt chime started up again. Dale’s grungy once-white boxer shorts were in the seat next to her.

Then Dale was getting out of the truck. He came limping around the back and let down the tailgate. When she saw what he was doing, she put the Prizm in park again and got out, climbing up into the truck bed to help him. The packages were weighty, caked with dust.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Bar codes?”

She lifted the end of one of the shiny brown packages, flopped it upright against the bedrail, then she lifted the bottom end and dropped it over the side of the truck into the dirt. The packages were compressed and heavy, each with a white bar code taped to the plastic. It took the two of them a few minutes to clear the truck bed of everything but the soccer balls. Dale bent down and scooped up the balls one at a time and tossed then into the desert.

No more words passed between them.

Then Hoa said, “Go.”

* * *

The next three quarters of an hour, in moonlight, in tandem, the filthy Prizm lashed to the Dodge pickup, they bounced up and down through potholes, crossed a cattle guard, and passed a boarded-up shack. Whenever Hoa touched the brakes, they squealed. She used Dale’s boxer shorts to wipe the dust from the inside of the windshield. They snaked their way through the foothills, dropping into gullies and ravines, and coming up the far banks slowly in first gear. Dale started slapping himself hard to keep from falling asleep, but he barely felt the slaps. It was like hearing them happen to someone else. He ran the truck’s windshield wipers to clear the phosphorescence from the windshield. Then the first little adobe house appeared. The trail emptied itself into a wider, packed-dirt road.

They rounded a switchback, and Hoa heard a mule braying. There were palo verde pens and several adobe houses. Hoa kept the car lights off, her eyes trained on the red-lit back of the truck, seeing snatches of whatever the truck’s headlights illuminated. A store on the left. A hound yowling on a chain. It felt to her like they were traveling in some altered time. Her flesh was chalky, and in the rearview mirror, in the darkness, she saw a surreal glimmering phantom of herself. And the living, where were they?

They parked on the street across from a closed Pemex station around three in the morning. Dale slept upright against the door, while Hoa, next to him in the truck, kept watch. She stared at the industrial plant and the fires on its flare stacks a mile or so to the north. At five a.m. the office light in the gas station came on. Hoa waited until she saw a car pull alongside the pumps before she woke Dale.

Dale gassed up while Hoa went inside. In the fluorescent brightness, the man at the register looked unreal to Hoa. Then she caught a reflection of herself in the sliding-glass doors to the cold drinks and she realized that she looked far worse. She bought six bottles of a red sports water and some pastries, but when she pulled one out of the bag at the gas pump, Dale said he couldn’t eat it.

The attendant came out and Dale paid for the gas with sweat-soaked peso notes from his wallet. While Hoa laid four of the sports drinks on the cab bench, Dale opened the trunk. Their duffel bags were still there. He unzipped the inner pockets and took out their passports. The air reeked of diesel fuel. Up the road, toward the exit ramp, Dale saw sixteen-wheelers lined up end to end facing north like paralyzed caterpillars on a branch.

“You need to eat something,” Hoa said. “And maybe we could get the car fixed here.”

“Not on Sunday,” Dale said. “Presidio. We get across the Ojinaga Presidio bridge and then we’re safe.”

Dale slammed the Prizm’s trunk and stepped into the space between the truck and the car. There were handprints where the tailgate had been raised and lowered, and he smudged them away with the bottom of his shirt. Next, he squatted and checked the knots in the seatbelt towropes. Hoa noticed that the numbers and letters of the license plates of both vehicles were caked with filth, completely unreadable.

“Without anyone recognizing this truck. Before those guys get word out,” Dale said.