Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

The trail is a pale scar running up the middle of the canyon floor, and at first the going is easy, the route fairly level. But then the canyon narrows, and the trail begins to climb. Papá has a hard time of it. The crutches keep slipping, and he falls farther and farther behind. Mr. Brewer hangs back to help him, but Miguel stays out front, still hoping to set a good pace.

Everything in the canyon burned. The chaparral, the grass. Miguel bends to pick a stick up off the ground, and it crumbles in his hand. The trail eventually spits him out onto a sandy flat. The canyon dead-ends here, in a hundred-foot wall of rock, but the trail continues, zigzagging up the wall in a series of steep switchbacks. Miguel turns to check the men’s progress just in time to see Papá go down on one knee and Mr. Brewer step forward to lift him to his feet. It’s going to take them forever to climb out of here.

Miguel kicks at a pile of burned wood. Once, twice, three times. A blackened skull is dislodged and rolls across the flat. Miguel backs quickly away from the pile as he realizes that what he took for wood is bone. A leg that ends in a melted shoe. A clawlike hand. The canyon walls close in, and his mouth dries out. He turns and races down the trail toward Papá and Mr. Brewer, stumbling when he reaches them, falling and sliding painfully across the ground on hands and knees.

“They’re up there,” he says. “Dead.”

“You sure?” Mr. Brewer asks.

Miguel nods.

The three of them make their way to the flat together. Miguel hangs back when Papá and Mr. Brewer approach the bones. He doesn’t want to see them again. Papá tosses his crutches aside when he reaches the pile and kneels beside it, reaches out to run his fingers over the remains.

Miguel stares down canyon, following the trail back to its mouth. He imagines the fire funneling up toward Alberto and Maria, their fear when they realized they wouldn’t be able to outrun it, their pain as the flames enveloped them. A shiver runs through him. He doesn’t want to die. Ever.

The sky overhead is now a deep blue streaked with pink and orange, and the first stars flicker weakly against it like they might still go out. Papá and Mr. Brewer discuss what to do next. Mr. Brewer says he’ll hike out by himself. He thinks he can reach the highway before full dark and bring back help. But Papá shakes his head when Miguel translates this.

“I’ll bury them here,” he says. “It’s nobody’s job but mine.”

He sticks his finger down into his sock, fishes around, and comes up with a square of green paper, a hundred-dollar bill folded small. He holds it out to Mr. Brewer. “Thank this man for his help and tell him he has my gratitude,” he says to Miguel. “Then tell him to go home. He’s done enough.”

Mr. Brewer pushes the money aside. “I’m staying,” he says.

“Take it,” Papá says in English. “Please.”

“Let’s get to work.”

They go back and forth, but Mr. Brewer won’t be swayed. Papá finally relents and puts the bill away. He picks up the bag containing the burritos and passes it to Miguel. “Share with him,” he says, nodding at Mr. Brewer, then walks to a spot near the bones, kneels, and begins scooping a hole in the sand.

There are two burritos left. Miguel unwraps one and offers the other to Mr. Brewer.

“You go ahead,” the man says. “I had a hell of a lunch.” He carries a bottle of water to Papá and makes him drink before crouching to help dig.

Miguel thinks maybe he shouldn’t eat either, that it’s some custom the older men know and he doesn’t, but his legs are shaking, and he feels like he’ll pass out if he doesn’t get at least a little food in his stomach. He eats only half of his burrito, barely anything, and wraps up the rest and puts it back in the bag.

The men are knee-deep in the grave when he finishes. Papá waves him off when he offers to help, but Mr. Brewer says he could use a break. Miguel replaces him in the hole and begins digging alongside his father.

Papá chuckles and says he can’t believe it. He jokes about how Miguel has always hated having dirt on his hands, how even as a baby he’d run to Mamá when he got the littlest bit of mud on himself and cry and cry until she lifted him to the faucet and scrubbed his fingers clean. It’s not funny to Miguel. Why don’t you look at me now, old man? he thinks.

Papá refuses to take any breaks, but Miguel and Mr. Brewer switch off every few minutes. The ground beneath the sand is rock hard, so they pull the rubber tips off the crutches and use the crutches like jackhammers to bust up the soil. They work silently except for an occasional grunt or exhaled curse. Sweat runs down Miguel’s face, and he licks his lips to taste it. Neither Papá nor Mr. Brewer admits to noticing when night falls, so Miguel doesn’t comment either. The three of them continue digging in the dark.

Miguel is resting, lying on his back on a pile of freshly excavated dirt with his eyes closed, when Papá declares that they’re finished. The hole is five feet deep. They chopped a step halfway up, which the old man and Mr. Brewer use now, Miguel pulling them the rest of the way out.

Papá sits for a while and drinks some water. He’s covered from head to toe in dirt that’s turned to mud wherever he sweats. He rinses his mouth and spits.

“I need you to bring the bones to me in the hole,” he says to Miguel.

Miguel’s heart stops.

“I can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I can’t touch them.”

“It’s your family.”

Miguel doesn’t respond; he’s crying too hard. Deep, deep sobs, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. He’s ashamed, but also angry. It’s not normal, what the old man is asking. This isn’t Mexico.

Mr. Brewer pats him on the back. “It’s okay,” he says, then walks over to the pile.

Mr. Brewer passes the remains to Papá, who stands in the grave and carefully lays them at his feet. Five minutes, and they’ve finished. Papá climbs out of the grave, and he and Mr. Brewer sit down to rest. Miguel feels like crying again. He and the old man will never be the same with each other, he knows. This day will forever stand between them.

Swallowing his grief, he walks over and begins shoveling dirt onto the bones with his hands.

“Wait, mijo, I’ll help you,” Papá says.

“I’m fine,” Miguel replies, his voice too loud in the nighttime silence of the canyon. And then there’s only the reassuring hymn of his breath and the grateful sigh of earth returning in darkness to where it belongs.

IT’S CLOSE TO midnight when they finish refilling the grave and stand over it with bowed heads. Brewer realizes he’s forgotten all the prayers he ever knew except the childish ones, “Now I lay me down to sleep” and such, and decides he’s fine with that.

Miguel is ready to walk out tonight, says he’ll carry his dad if he has to. He’s got school tomorrow, a track meet. Brewer argues the other side, pointing out how tricky the switchbacks will be for Armando on crutches, especially with no flashlight. Better to hunker down here until dawn, when it’ll take half as long to make the climb and be a lot less dangerous. Miguel’s face falls when Armando decides to wait. Brewer hates to see him disappointed. He’s a good kid.

“A few more hours,” he says to him.

The boy turns away, doesn’t want to hear it.

The night is plenty warm, and there’s food and enough water if they go easy on it. The three of them sit on the ground with their backs to the canyon wall, and Brewer smokes a cigarette. Lights twinkle in the distance. A ranch in Mexico, on the other side of the fence. The silence is so profound — everything that might make a noise having fled or been burned — that the distant roar of a jet passing high overhead makes them all look up.