Bentley Little: The Burning

She needed it.

"Are we there yet, Mom?"

Jolene glanced at Skylar in the backseat. As always, the expression on her son's face was serious, almost solemn. He looked at her with clear, sad eyes, patiently awaiting the answer to his question, and it was all she could do not to cry. She forced herself to smile at him. "We're almost there. We're almost at Grandma's house."

She'd sworn when she'd left Bear Flats that if she ever had a child, she would never subject him or her to the type of chaotic, emotionally unstable upbringing she'd had, but history really did repeat itself, and she now found herself returning home divorced and defeated with her son in tow, her son who had gone from being a happily gurgling little infant to a grave and overly sober boy as a result of the turmoil in their household the past few years.

He'd been through far too much for an eight-year-old child.

The past six months had been especially harsh. She and Frank had been at each other's throats every moment they were together, and though she knew it wasn't good for Skylar to be around such constant hostility and told herself after each blowup that she couldn't and wouldn't allow it to happen again, she and Frank were like oil and water, and not even concern for the welfare of their son could keep the two of them from going at it. She wondered sometimes if they hadn't both been order guards, if they'd had separate jobs working for different companies and had seen each other only morning and night the way normal couples did, whether they would have gotten along better, whether the resentments and irritations that had escalated into hatred would have retreated back into minor annoyances. But they'd both worked out of the border patrol's Yuma office, and their differences had widened into gulfs with the pressures of the job, exacerbating problems that turned out to be not so trivial after all. Seeing the same faces over and over, throwing people back like catch-and-release fish only to capture them trying to enter the country illegally yet again, had made her more sympathetic to the plight of the immigrants, whereas Frank had become hardened against them. She remembered talking to him after September 11. (She refused to use the appellation 9/11. What was next, calling Christmas 12/251 Referring to the Fourth of July as 7/4? Where was this numbers madness going to end?) She'd told him they were lucky the hijackers had entered the country through Canada. "Could you imagine the hysteria if they'd come in from Mexico?"

He'd reacted with outrage, yelling at her, telling her that there were a lot more criminals entering through Mexico than Canada and who knew what kind of atrocities they had planned? It was lenient attitudes like hers, he said, that were weakening America's defenses. This was a racial thing with him, she realized, just as it was with a lot of people, and it was at that moment she understood that he was not the man she'd thought he was.

Still, she'd stuck it out, trying to make it work for Skylar's sake, remaining through the increasingly rancorous arguments, answering Frank's slaps with thrown dishes, knowing deep down that it was over but not able to make the break. It was not just Frank she hated, Jolene came to realize. It was their house; it was their friends; it was Arizona; it was her job; it was the border; it was everything in her life except Skylar.

The family in the gulch had been the last straw.

She had been the one who'd found them. It had been in a remote section of the Sonora far from Organ Pipe and the drug route where Frank and a team were patrolling. She'd gone off-road to follow a trace of a track that instinct told her might lead somewhere, and, though it was against regulations, had left her vehicle without radio authorization and continued on foot when she spotted what she thought was a coyote's trail marker. It turned out it wasn't. And then she'd found the family. There'd been three of them-a mother, a father, a little girl-and they'd been at the bottom of a gulch, arms around each other not as though they'd been huddling together for warmth but as though they'd fallen asleep in a gentle embrace and had simply never awakened. That had obviously been some time ago, however, for the bodies were desiccated, skin parchmentlike and horrendously wrinkled over visible skulls, ragged color-faded clothes flattened out against bony frames. The mechanics of the bodies had been clearly visible, a matter-of-fact breakdown of biological processes that was neither romantic nor mysterious but merely routine and distressingly physical.

It was impossible to tell what had killed them. The heat? The cold? Starvation? Dehydration? They were a good twenty miles from the border-at a point where the crossing would have been made without benefit of road or nearby town on the Mexican side- and likely they'd run out of food before they got this far, surviving for days perhaps on desert plants and captured rodents.

She'd stood there for a long time- too long-staring at the dead family, trying to imagine how it must have felt for them to end their lives here in this dry, terrible place. They hadn't died alone-they'd had one another-but in a way that must have been worse, because they couldn't have perished all at once. One of them would have had to go first, and Jolene imagined that it must have been the girl. They'd probably carried her as far as they could, hoping to find a house or a road or someone to help them, maybe even praying at the last for a patrol to find them so they could be deported and thus saved. But they'd wandered farther and farther astray, and finally she imagined the| exhausted parents, unable to carry the girl any longer,| deciding to stay and wait for rescue, then gradually^ giving up as they grew weaker and weaker, as their daughter's body started to rot in the heat.

Who had gone next? And had the last one to dies simply cuddled against the others, praying for an ends to it all? How long ago had that been? How long had they lain here, undiscovered, unmourned? Years, it looked like, and Jolene wondered if the hell they'd endured back home, wherever that was, had been worth the risk of death to them, if they would still have made the trip if they'd known how it would turn out.

She decided then and there to take Skylar back with[ her to Bear Flats. She didn't know if it was because' this family had risked all-and lost-and the only thing she had to do in order to escape her life was pack a few belongings, get in a car and drive; or whether she was tired of seeing death and sufferings and human misery day in and day out as part of her job. Maybe it was just the weariness she felt when she thought of all the paperwork she'd have to fill out/ and the lack of understanding and interest she'd receive from a callous, uncaring Frank.

Whatever the reason, she'd turned in her resignation that afternoon, effective immediately, no two weeks' notice, with the resulting complete abdication of accrued benefits. She'd gone home, packed a suitcase of clothes each for herself and Skylar, loaded up the back of the Blazer with some of her more personal and precious possessions as well as most of his books and toys, written a quick note to Frank, then picked up her son at school and hit the road.

Now they were here.

Jolene drove past the lumber mill with its twin black chimney stacks, corrugated-tin outbuildings, iind pyramids of logs stacked next to the side of the road, then, without thinking, navigating almost by sense memory, swerved down the sloping dirt alley behind the mill, bouncing onto Second Street. A quick turn onto Fir, and they were there.

She pulled to a stop on the gravel driveway next to her mother's beat-up Impala. The place looked the same as always, only more so. The paint on the small house was not only peeling but faded, and the twin T poles holding up the clothesline in the side yard were slanting so far over that Jolene doubted a full-length towel could dry on them without dragging on the ground. The porch was a mess of dead plants in broken pots.