Forrest Gander: The Trace

It was a redundant question, but her lack of response didn’t deter him.

“So it’s 1913, Bierce was in his seventies, right? At the peak of his fame. He’d been a journalist at the Chronicle, he’d published his Civil War stories, and his Devil’s Dictionary was a hit. He was traveling the lecture circuit with this pretty secretary young enough to be his granddaughter.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And he’s a serious drinker, remember, and the rumor is he’s having an affair with the secretary. Her name’s — ”

“Something Christiansen.”

“Right. Carrie. But Bierce needed action. He was looking for some inspiration, a kick in the ass in his old age. And along came Pancho Villa with the Mexican Revolution. By 1913, the war had been going on three years.”

They had reached the far wall of the old cemetery, close to the railroad tracks. Now they turned around and looked back toward the rental car. The old cemetery was all hardened clay and crumbled markers and spare brown grass growing in clumps like armpit hair. The new section, where they’d parked, was full of plastic flowers and gleaming sandstone monuments, all the way to the scrim of cypress trees by the highway. Dale wiped his wet forehead with the back of his palm.

“Let’s get back to the car,” Hoa said, feeling sweat beads roll down her lower back. “Were you thinking you were going to find a headstone for Bierce that no one else had noticed?”

Dale was already thinking about something else.

“I want to make a quick trip to Ojinaga. It’s only an hour from here, across the border. Then we’ll come back, go east around Big Bend and south to Mexico through Piedras Negras. We’ll spend tonight there. Tuesday we’ll visit Icamole. And Wednesday, we make it to Sierra Mojada. Okay?”

Another redundant question.

Inside the car, the seats had been baking and the steering wheel was hot under Dale’s palms. While he started the engine, Hoa fastened her seatbelt.

“I just wanted to see what was left of anyone who was buried here in Marfa after the Battle of Ojinaga. Bierce was probably there.”

Hoa said, “He went down to Mexico to cover the Revolution? Hot damn!” She jerked in her seatbelt. “The buckle’s scalding.”

“Yeah. He rode a horse into Mexico at seventy-whatever years old, not speaking a word of Spanish, and he trotted around looking for Pancho Villa. Who didn’t speak English. Like he was going to get an exclusive interview. Just check the maps for a second,” Dale interrupted himself. “After we come back from Ojinaga, we go from Presidio to Lajitas, right? Then north around Big Bend to 90 east, right?”

“Lajitas.” What was familiar about Lajitas? Hoa wondered, plucking Dale’s sheaf of maps from the glove compartment. “Isn’t that where Ted Kaczynski lived in a hole in the ground?”

“I don’t recall,” Dale said as Hoa foraged for the right map. “I know it’s full of end-timers and survivalists. Hard-edged hippies. It’s supposed to be one of the real — ”

“Can’t wait.”

“So, we go straight through it.”

He leaned toward her. She leaned toward him too, the pages in her hand, until their shoulders were touching. The air conditioner was full blast.

Dale pointed his finger above Big Bend. “At Marathon, we go southeast through Langtry — that’s where Judge Roy Bean lived, guy who called himself ‘The Law West of the Pecos.’ Held court in his saloon.”

Dale sat back. Through the windshield, he saw a crypt guarded by three green marble angels.

“Bean set up a legendary boxing match. On a little island in the river, when boxing was against Texas law.”

“Wasn’t there a TV show named for him?”

“Judge Roy Bean? I don’t know. He pulled some wild shit. Like he’s famous for acquitting an Irishman of murdering a Chinese coolie since — get this — he said homicide is defined as taking a man’s life but he couldn’t find any specific law in the book about killing a Chinaman.”

Hoa glanced up from the map catching Dale’s eyes straight-on and then she looked through the windshield at the three angels. They seemed to have a doleful message to tell.

A few minutes later, beyond the Marfa town limits, Dale was speeding. On the passenger side, Hoa took in the dirt roads crossing cow guards and paying out into the desert or curling away behind maroon hills. She looked over a big empty plain with bunch grass and giant yucca with stick bouquets of creamy flowers. Along a rise, there were four scraggly trees and three black cows, each under a separate tree, staring into the dry air. Under the fourth tree, a recumbent black cow held up its head, absorbed by quien sabe .

Hoa felt a lot like that these days, as if she didn’t know what she was thinking about. As if she were caught in a drift current. “You know something?” she said. “Every bit of this desert is fenced off.”

“That’s Texas,” Dale answered. “It’s all private property in Texas. Last time I was out here, I met a man in the Marfa bookstore. He had a little two-seater Piper Cub, and he offered me a ride. The next day we flew over Solitario, that incredible blown-out volcano and I got a sense, up in the air, of the geology. You see waves of thick rock angled up, cut away, curving hundreds of miles into the horizon. And you see these enormous ranches with feudal houses and outbuildings, sitting way out in the middle of absolutely nothing.”

The chickadee’s scratchy racket.

Flare of rosacea along the side of her nose.

A few dry leaves waving from the top of bare privet.

Her intolerable sclerotic routines.

Long rebukes of morning rain.

That sleep inside of which she is certain she is still awake.

The tidal waiting for something to change.

Biting back the same questions.

The faint glow along a fragment of sincere feeling in a personality she thought had been extinguished.

Between steep plateaus, Dale and Hoa passed rises of layered and striated rock and pocketed canyons. Ahead, at the side of the road, an enormous purple-beaked buzzard took a few slow-motion running steps away from something dead, flapping its black serrated wings. And then it seemed to change its mind and folded its wings and turned to watch them from the shoulder with serene disinterest as they sped by.

“So you never did tell me. Why would Bierce be buried in Marfa with the Mexicans?”

“Ah,” Dale answered, checking his speed and slowing down.

“So the very last letter Bierce mailed to his secretary, Carrie Christiansen, remember? It was mailed from Chihuahua City, Mexico, and he wrote, ‘Expect next day to go to Ojinaga, partly by rail.’”

“Yeah?”

“When he says ‘next day,’ he means December 27th. Because the letter was posted December 26th. So Bierce was in Chihuahua City Christmastime in 1913. And so was Pancho Villa. Villa was there rounding up men to attack the Federales in Ojinaga. You’d expect Bierce would want to follow him looking for the action. And just a little later, the second week of January — now it’s January 1914, right? — Villa and his army attacked Ojinaga. Completely overwhelmed the fort. All the surviving Federales, their cronies and their families were hauling ass across the river looking for sanctuary on the American side at Presidio, which was basically a U.S. army base back then. And the U.S. army was rounding them up as soon as they made it across the river. All the refugees got packed off to Marfa, the nearest town with a train depot and a telegraph office. With me?”

“And Bierce?”