Forrest Gander: The Trace

He took a slow breath and looked up away from the others and into the desert. A roadrunner was standing still about twenty-five feet away, looking sideways at him. He considered, for a moment, whether it might be a sign of some kind and whether it was good or bad. He started to stare it down and it dropped its gaze.

As the skin pulled away, the skull immediately began to dry out in the heat. The flesh, too, was blanching. El Palomo glanced around for a clean surface. With both hands, he gathered the whole piece of raw skin, completely separated now from the skull, and stood up. He spread the pelt out on top of the front tire under the wheel well, and then he brushed his hands together, wiping them on the shins of his ruined jeans. He slipped the toe of his right boot under what remained of the man’s head, and with what looked to be a practiced soccer move, lifted and flung it with a quick, fluid motion toward the roadrunner, which suddenly wasn’t there anymore. The kicked hunk of whatever it was, now that it no longer resembled a man’s head, landed against the base of a mesquite twenty feet away.

The others had finished what they were doing and one of them glanced toward El Palomo. There were five of them altogether, and two lugged something in doubled black garbage bags to the bed of a crew-cab Silverado. They went back several times, returning with more bags. They closed the gate, a puff of dust rising into the dry air, and without speaking they got into the truck and drove off across the desert in the direction of La Esmeralda.

One of the men and the teenage boy were left behind, talking and smoking and looking tired at the back of El Palomo’s truck. From six feet away, El Palomo, standing up again, could smell the older one’s cologne. It made him nauseous. Looking down at the pelt, he noticed something on his right boot. He bent and wiped it away with a clean swath of the shirt. Then he wiped the tip of his right boot against the back of his left calf, polishing it against his jeans. His boots were clean, obsidian-black, with two white roosters stitched into the vamp.

“Casi listo,” El Palomo said to no one in particular. He wiped his knife on the sleeve of the Redskins shirt with some diligence, and then he stretched his arms and twisted his torso one way, the other. He put his hands together behind his back like he was handcuffed and raised them as high as he could, which wasn’t very high, and he turned and rolled his neck, listening to the vertebral joints pop. There were no clouds to ease the blaze of the sun, which was still approaching the meridian. He felt the burn on his shoulders through his shirt. The sky was indifferent, colorless. He examined his blade, wiped it once more against the shirt, then folded and pocketed it. He opened the passenger door. In the glove compartment, he felt past the.38 Super for the wooden haft of his sewing awl. He pulled out the awl and sat again in the sand, patient, at ease, dialed down. He adjusted the brim of his hat against the sun’s pitch.

“Unos de los balones,” he said quietly as though talking to himself.

The man and the boy smoking at the back of his truck flicked their cigarettes to the ground at the same time. The older one, with the wilting mustache, reached into the truck bed and selected one of the dozen new soccer balls flocked against the tailgate. He walked over and offered the ball with both hands to the man with the jerking head. Afterward, he went back and picked up his cigarette from the sand. The teenager had been observing him sidewise, his own half of a cigarette still burning in the sand. He took a casual step away, turning his back on the older man, and took off his hat. He combed his hair with his fingers, set his hat back on, and touched his shirt pocket to check for his pack and lighter. When he glanced down, he noticed that his long-sleeved shirt had a few bloodstains on the cuffs and front. Facing away, he lit up, drew, and blew smoke.

El Palomo plastered the human skin over the soccer ball, stretching it smooth. He took his awl and punched carefully through an edge of the scalp, pressing the needle at an angle through the outer cover of the ball so that it emerged an inch from where it entered. He pinched a loop of thread loose from the threading post, holding it taut with the fingers of his left hand as he withdrew the needle from the hole. When he had punched another hole, he fed his loop of thread into the needle’s eye. As he extracted the needle from the second hole, the first lockstitch pulled tight.

When at last he finished, El Palomo stood up grinning. Brilliant white teeth. He held the soccer ball out toward the other two. Only then did he notice that they must have taken their hats off when they were working because he could see their shirts and pants were spattered, but their hats were clean.

What the two sicarios regarded in El Palomo’s hands was a man’s face badly sewn around a soccer ball. It didn’t much resemble the face of the man they had picked up a few hours earlier. The skin was pale and thin as parchment and the eyeholes gaped, one backed by a black square and the other by a white one. The nose hung with no shape to it and the mouth was just a dilated rictus. No one’s mouth looks like that, the teenager thought.

“Muy guapo,” snickered the other, releasing the smoke in his lungs. There was a tic firing in his cheek.

The one holding the soccer ball turned it around, the ball’s face level with his own. The others waited.

“Creo que necesitas un corte de pelo,” El Palomo said to the soccer ball.

The older man mimed a laugh, but no actual sound came from his mouth. The other looked down and toed his new cigarette into the dirt.

“Vamonos,” said El Palomo. The bobbing of his own head had slowed, and the other two could see that he had chilled out. Both were wondering which of them would be given the responsibility of holding the fucking ball while El Palomo drove.

Maybe forty minutes more, and then they would cross the border, Hoa figured. An alloyed glare from the sky and landscape radiated through all the windows of their car, and even with the air conditioning on, they found themselves, every ten minutes or so, tinkering with their visors, Dale mashing his against the side window and Hoa trying to wrestle hers lower than it wanted to go against the front windshield.

Dale kept relocating his browning left forearm so the sun wouldn’t sear the same strip of flesh. Like turning a roast. He would flop the arm, forearm down, into his lap for a while and then pry it against the door under the armrest. Hoa had plugged her phone into the console port again. She was scrolling through music.

Mesas slowly yielded to corraded canyons, creosote bushes to piñons. The landscape was at once relentless and changeable, exhausting and seductive. To the left and right were tangles of cave-fenestrated peaks and crags. Beyond those were higher mountains, spreads of mesa, and wider canyons.

Under the car the pavement hummed hypnotically. The highway would be empty for miles, and then they would pass a pickup, or an eighteen-wheeler would whoosh past them in the opposite direction, leaving their rental car trembling in its wake. Pink talus piled up below vertical canyon walls. There was a shimmer of heat rising from everything, but it didn’t seem to blur the clarity.

Dale couldn’t help but picture himself climbing the bare mountains, exploring caves he glimpsed from the road. What would it be like living in such a landscape? You couldn’t help but imagine dropping yourself off out there in the primeval wilderness as you drove past in your air-conditioned capsule of a twenty-first-century car. Did everyone have that same fantasy? Was there something intrinsic to the ego that it had to project itself into spaces from which human presence was missing, into a terrain so brutally indifferent to human beings that, but for the road, it managed to repel almost any trace of the world’s most aggressive species?