Forrest Gander: The Trace

Hoa thought Dale looked at least ten years older. He was repeating himself, too. How were those guys at the cave going to get word out without a car or phone reception, but she didn’t say anything. If Dale needed to cross the border now, they were going to cross the border now.

“We get the car fixed here — ” he was down on his hands and knees studying the underchassis of the car in the bad light — “people see us. We pay with a credit card, they find out who we are and where we live.”

The car behind them at the pumps honked.

“Hand me the charger,” he said outside her window. She reached for the console, and he pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it on.

“The drinks are in your seat, Dale,” she said.

For the next hour, Hoa was stabbed by the sun coming through her windshield. The sky was light blue with gorgeous clouds and shafts of light gleaming down between. As they came into Ojinaga on Avenida Libre Comercio, the traffic backed up. Despite that they were in different vehicles, Dale’s paranoia worked its way into her. Slowed up in the congestion, conspicuously being towed, she felt visible, vulnerable. A yellow bus ahead flashed its lights, letting out a dozen girls carrying identical metal lunchboxes. A few adults in neon-orange shirts waited to escort them across the two-lane.

One car had scraped another at an intersection and a bottleneck in both directions had formed. Car horns were bleating from both ends of the tangle. The cars involved in the accident didn’t move, no one got out of either one, but the traffic began to flow around them on either side. At the next stoplight, a street vendor hawking T-shirts pressed Dale to buy one. Three boys spilled over to Hoa’s window, chanting to wash her windshield. She reached into her pocket, pulling out a small wad of dollars, giving one to the first boy, another to the second. They had started washing only her side before the light changed and the truck tugged the car forward. Dale was getting better at this. He could see the cars ahead queuing into two lanes for the bridge.

The inspection station was an open-air bay under a long tin roof, and the Mexican officers passed them through. Just ahead were the toll booths. Dale went to take another sip from the last of his bottles, but it was empty. He tossed it into the footwell. His phone was charging in the passenger seat. He picked it up. Searching, searching. A signal. Presidio was just across the bridge. One missed call. From Declan. Dale glanced at Hoa in the rearview mirror, her head turned toward the shops on the left side of the street.

They passed a sign that said Puesto de Control Militar and Dale pulled into the far-right lane. Tinny brass radio music mixed with the calls of hawkers and the grainy hum and percussion of idling engines and bad mufflers. Vendors in bicycle carts were selling iced drinks. A man with long hair and a knapsack held out a can of Coke, walking the line of cars and trucks. Dale was afraid to make eye contact. From the tin and glass of tiendas, from the hoods and windows of cars, the sun’s glare spindled into sharp beams. Up ahead, Dale could see pedestrians walking into Mexico along the covered left corridor of the bridge. On the right side, a crowd stood behind three barred gates. A few Federales in black uniforms were striding back and forth between the lines of cars and the steel barrels and orange cones that blocked the middle lane. The brake lights of the car in front of Dale flashed faintly on and off in the hard sun. Dale held his breath. He could see the rise of the bridge through the concrete portico. Just before the tollbooth, there was a cluster of men in neon-orange road-crew vests carrying white buckets. One of them approached his open window sucking a lime, spitting the seeds into his hand. Dale looked away and adjusted the rearview mirror.

“Para las mujeres,” said the man in the orange vest standing at his cab window.

“What women?” Dale asked, turning his ravaged face toward the man.

Unperturbed by Dale’s appearance, the man pointed ahead of him at the pier in the main arch of the tollbooths. A massive pink wooden sculpture was assembled there in the shape of a cross, hammered with oversized nails from which hung purses and necklaces and high heels and tags with women’s names. Jessica Morales, Marcela Fernández, Verónica Beltrán, Maria Irma Plancarte. . On the ground in front of the cross was a mannequin with its breasts cut away.

“God,” Dale gasped.

“Las que mataron,” the man said solemnly.

Dale fumbled to extract his wallet. After paying for his gas earlier, he’d counted sixty-three U.S. dollars and only a few more pesos. He took out a ten and gave it to the man, who dropped the seeds in his hand and nodded, saying in English with almost no accent, “Happy Father’s Day.” Dale took his foot off the brake and immediately jammed it down again. Behind him, the Prizm rammed the bumper of the truck. An old woman passed crossways in front of him carrying on her back a basket of avocados lashed to her forehead with a tumpline. Beside her were two young girls toting plastic shopping bags, loaded with things that banged against their calves.

Dale fell asleep and jerked awake, but no time had passed. He glanced in the rearview, and there was Hoa, alert, watching through the windshield, steady on. He felt a knot in his solar plexus melt, waves of emotion radiating into his torso. He adjusted the mirror and caught a glimpse of himself. He looked like a wildman, a Neanderthal, but for the first time in untold hours, he thought he was going to live. His face was beet-red and there were tear tracks in the grime on his cheeks. He paid the man at the toll with American dollars and added a twenty-dollar bill, explaining that their car had broken down. No problem, no problem, the Mexican toll keeper assured him, looking up from the bills. When he got to the American side, the toll taker added, he should pull over into the secondary inspection area. The border patrol might let him call a tow truck.

Dale thanked the man, the beautiful pock-faced man. He let out the clutch and yanked the rental car through the booth. Midway across the bridge, Dale looked right and left and saw the placid brown river and its little islands of trees.

His phone vibrated against his thigh and rang.

Wearing a sombrero, he rides a horse smaller than the one on which he entered Mexico. He spurs it south from Chihuahua City after posting his letter to Carrie. The dirt road from Chihuahua to Delicias and further southeast all the way to Escalon is tolerable. But already, it’s been a long ride for a man in his seventies. In Escalon, Bierce rests and drinks, but turns down dinner. The next morning, he points his horse northeast into the desert and keeps field-side of the railroad tracks. Some ten miles on, spikes and tie plates are rooted up and the ballast dug away. The track is busted, the rails splayed outward like the antennae of a centipede. Here the horse’s hooves begin to unearth and kick forward pale fossil shells in clouds of pale dust. The remaining railroad tracks stretch across scrubland toward the mountains where, beyond a few fenced ranches, they slip through a circuitous pass into Sierra Mojada. He walks the horse by a dozen identical miners’ houses separated by empty palo verde pens. Men are conducting afternoon business outside one- and two-story adobe buildings along a main dirt street that leads — Bierce lifts the brim of his sombrero — toward a cemetery maybe a quarter mile away. Bierce has heard from a reliable source that a band of Federales has taken control of Sierra Mojada, threatening the two American superintendents of the mining company. If they try to leave, or if any miners escape to join Villa, they will be hunted down and shot. But that doesn’t worry him.