Forrest Gander: The Trace

“So there’s a record of a U.S. mercenary who says he heard an old gringo was shot in the Battle of Ojinaga. And a customs agent in El Paso claims to have heard the same thing.”

“Oh that’s really reliable.”

Dale turned his head toward Hoa and caught the play at the corners of her mouth. She had taken her off her running shoes and was sticking her sock feet up on the dashboard. With her sunglasses on, she was peering through her splayed feet as through a gun site. But her face was animated behind her sunglasses.

“No,” Dale admitted, “you’re right. Those aren’t eyewitness accounts. But then, years later, in 1957, an American driving through Arizona picked up this old man. The old man said he served with the Federales and fought against Villa in 1913. Okay? Forty-four years earlier.”

“How’d the History Channel miss this?”

“Listen, here’s where it gets good. The old hitchhiker happened to mention he was in Ojinaga when Pancho Villa attacked. Said he was running to get away across the river when he noticed an injured gringo. Or maybe the gringo was sick, he wasn’t sure. In any case, he remembered the gringo’s first name was something like Ambrosia. At the moment, with Villa’s men after him, the Mexican was thinking that if he crossed into the U.S. with a U.S. citizen, it was bound to go easier for him, so this guy, the Federale, loaded the old gringo into a two-wheeled cart, a wooden wheelbarrow basically, and half floated, half pushed him across the river.

“But on the other side, the U.S. army was inundated with refugees and they just swept up the moaning gringo and the Federale along with everyone else and escorted them all to Marfa for, as we say now, processing. By this time, the gringo was completely delirious. He had a boiling fever and was just about in a coma. Sure enough, when they reached Marfa, the gringo gasped his last and kicked the bucket. Since he didn’t have identification, the U.S. soldiers had no choice but to bury him in the old Camp Marfa cemetery.”

“Ambrosia,” Hoa said, weighing the word with her lips and tongue.

“Eyewitness account. This corroborates Bierce’s intended location according to his last letter. So that’s Bierce’s first death. Just after the battle of Ojinaga, which is where we’re headed now. He was wounded in Ojinaga and buried in one of the unmarked graves we just walked over at Marfa.”

“Wow, look!” Hoa pushed forward in her seat. “A roadrunner! What’s that in its mouth?”

While they were working on the body in the dirt, he reached down for the head, which had taken a roll to the side. He plucked it up by its ropey black hair and noted the sand sticking to just one side of the face. He swung the head gingerly back and forth a couple times, like a signalman with a lantern, to spin the rest of the blood out. In his other hand, he held the man’s Redskins T-shirt, which he had told the man to take off before they killed him.

The shirt and the head he carried over to the side of a blue metallic Dodge pickup, holding the head away from him. He planted it neck-down in the sand facing the others, who were busy chopping into pieces the body to which the head recently had been attached. He plucked a seven-inch abalone-handled pocketknife from the front pocket of his jeans and sat down in a half-slice of shade against the front wheel of the truck, his legs scissored open and the head between his knees. His own head, and the white cowboy hat on it, bobbed noticeably in time with his pulse. When he got agitated, as he’d been a while before, his condition — which the gringo doctor called aortic regurgitation , a leaky heart valve — made him feel sick. It was like having the worst case of hiccups imaginable, and his head would nod out of control. It freaked out people who weren’t used to it, but that gave him a kind of power he knew how to use. They called him El Palomo, the cock-pigeon.

Now he was feeling calmer. He stuck his thumbnail into the blade notch, opening his knife, cupped the forehead, and pulled the head toward him. He made an incision at the top of the head, pressing the point of the blade until it met bone. Then he drew it down the back of the head to where the neck began, feeling the tip of the blade scoring the hard skull. He put down the knife on the shirt and, at the back of the neck where the hair was thickest, he jammed his thumbs into the incision and pried the thin flesh to the side. There wasn’t much blood and only a few quick velcro-like sounds.

Picking up and laying down his knife several times, he gradually scraped away the tissue underneath the hair and, using his fingers, worked the flesh away from the back of the skull. It was easy enough work, clearing scalp from bone, until he reached the ear canals in their beds of fat. They were like little rubber hoses. These he severed one at a time at their bases, close to the skull, then he peeled the ears forward. The other men and the teenage boy were laughing about something. A plane whined across cloudless sky.

Peel a little and cut. Peel a little and cut. That’s how he learned it. At last, the forehead turned inside out and revealed two bizarre eyes sunk deep into their sockets, their irises afloat on white jelly. He slowed down. He didn’t want to ruin the eyelids. Between the left lid and the eyeball, he pressed his index finger and, with his other hand, he guided the knife slowly around the socket. Then he did the right eye. One inadvertent gash at the corner, that was his only mistake and it didn’t matter much. The eyelashes and lids and eyebrows all slid forward with the skin, making a soft slurping sound.

When he came to the nose, he wasn’t as sure how to go about it. With a deer, you just cut through the nose, because later, you glued a standard black plastic nose on. At first he tried scraping the skin from the nose cartilage with his fingernails, but he was afraid the skin was going to tear. He decided to cut into the cartilage at the tip to release the skin.

The red thing between his hands had stained his jeans at the insides of his thighs, despite that he’d been careful. His neck itched. He carefully put the mess down upright in the sand and wiped his hands on the Redskins shirt — white cotton with a red Indian face on the front. Now more red on the shirt. He spread it out again and put the head on top. He’d have to burn his jeans. But first he’d sleep. He needed sleep.

He reached up to scratch his neck and pinched at something foreign there, flicking it away. Near his left boot, he noticed an anthill, more ocher than the ground around it, and a few tiny turquoise beads, or chips from beads, at the edge of it. No ants wandered out into the sun at this time of day. The man considered the turquoise beads for a moment. A burial site, it could be he was sitting over a burial site.

A beetle scuttled near his boot between clumps of wiry tabosa grass and paused to take its bearing or perhaps it sensed something threatening, a boot heel rocking in the sand.

The teenager approached, regarded the messy situation, and changed his mind. El Palomo checked the tips of his fingers before he adjusted the brim of his hat. He carefully tugged the Redskins shirt with its gruesome consignment toward him and leaned back against the tire.

Behind the ear holes, there was a little fresh blood where he had nicked vessels running through membranes under the skin, but the whole skull was slimy with dark clots and a bland yellow suet around the jaw and mouth. El Palomo rolled the flesh forward over the face, turning it inside out until he could see more clearly where the lips connected in a ring of tissue around the teeth. There was sand on his fingers now. He took up his blade again and swiveled it around the lining close to the jaw. As he split the lips from the gum, the knife scraped hard against buried teeth and he flinched.