The helicopter lifts up from the ground, rotates slightly in place, and disappears with a roar. Sara and the park ranger shield their eyes from the dust. When the helicopter is in the distance, they get into the truck. The ranger makes a U-turn and the vehicle moves slowly away. Emiliano crawls out from under the overhang and stands so that he can follow the truck until it’s out of sight.
“Good-bye, Sara,” he whispers.
Emiliano climbs down the hill and walks to the rock where Sara placed the object from her pocket. He kneels down and picks it up. It’s a map of Big Bend National Park, which she must have found in the park ranger’s truck. He checks both sides, and at the bottom, he sees Sara’s scribble.
Ranger Sandy Morgan. Going to sheriff in Alpine, Texas. Then Border Patrol for asylum. Be good.
He has been holding back tears since the first time Sara walked out of the gully, but now he lets them flow. Who is there to see or hear him? A buzzard circles above him. It smelled Lester’s blood and came hoping for a meal. It is so quiet out here. The ground is warm.
Since when did he become such a crybaby? Tears are valuable liquid he will need.
Emiliano wipes his eyes and nose with the sleeve of his shirt and spreads the map on the ground. He can follow the original plan, the one they had before they saw the black car, and walk parallel to the main road until he runs into the hiking trail clearly marked on the map. Or he could take a shortcut through the mountains behind him and save maybe five hours of walking. That is, if he can walk in a straight line. But there is no such thing as a straight line where there are mountains and canyons.
He takes out his knife, finds north on the miniature compass, and then finds a mountain east of that point to use as a landmark. If he walks in the canyons, there’s no way he can get lost as long as he walks east. Even assuming the compass is off by a degree or two, he will still reach the highway that leads to Sanderson at a point beyond the Border Patrol checkpoint. Walking in the canyons will provide shade, and then he can walk farther and need less water than he will walking out in the open under the sun. The soft silt of a canyon’s floor will be easier on his aching foot.
Another option flits through his mind: He can go back to Mexico the way he came. The road they traveled yesterday is right there in front of him. He can be in Mexico by nightfall, find a place to sleep in Boquillas, and then hitch a ride somehow to Chihuahua. From there he could take a bus to Juárez and mail the phone to Yoya. He is protected. Armando told him so and Lester confirmed it.
He stands, folds the map carefully, and sticks it in his back pocket. He looks in the direction where he last saw the white truck.
He made promises. To Sara—he taps Hinojosa’s cell phone in his pocket—and to Lester, God only knows why. Of course, he’s made promises before that he didn’t keep. The Jipari pledge comes to mind. When he thought about the pledge, the night after the party when he was deciding what to do, he figured the pledge was a promise made to God, and thus meaningless if you didn’t believe in God. But it comes to him here, as he watches the dust from the white truck, that all promises are promises you make to yourself. What happens when you don’t keep a promise? Something in you begins to die. He’ll send the cell phone and make the call for Lester, and then he’ll go back to Mexico, where he belongs.
He turns toward the mountains and starts walking.
The fever starts two hours later. He knows it is a fever because the heat comes from inside him, and the heat continues even when he sits under the shade of a rock. The pain in the sole of his left foot is also getting worse and worse. When he takes off his boot, he sees a clear liquid coming out of two small punctures in the middle of a red welt. He presses on the swelling and the pain almost makes him scream. The liquid on his finger smells like the street where Javier lives. The fever, the swelling, the tenderness, the pus, the smell—all are signs of an infection. He pours water on his foot and cleans it with a strip of cloth he tears from his shirt. He wraps another piece of cloth around the foot, puts his sock and boot on, and keeps on going.
The next indication that things are terribly wrong comes after the sun sets. He has difficulty urinating. The color of the urine is a dark yellow and the liquid burns him. That’s not good. He’s losing more water through sweat than he is putting in. He knows that in addition to the infection—maybe because of it—dehydration has started, and unless he drinks more water it will continue. He unfastens the water bottle and examines it. Five or six very small swallows are left. His mouth would salivate in anticipation of taking that last drink, except his mouth has no saliva. Thirst is a painful, empty wanting. The thought of it expands in your brain until you can’t think of anything else. As much as he wants a drink of that water, just a sip, a tiny sip to moisten his lips, he decides against it. He needs that water for tomorrow. What he has to do now is rest. Rest will not stop the process of dehydration, but it will slow it down. Nothing, except maybe an injection of penicillin, will stop the infection.
He sits and leans against the western wall of the arroyo with his swollen foot elevated on a rock. He takes out the piece of agave cactus that he cut before descending the arroyo and rubs the gooey side on the wound. He remembers telling the man Lester not to talk, but he wishes he could talk to someone now. Anyone.
The bottom of the arroyo has fine white sand. Water flowed through here sometime last century. There were times during his walk where the abundant plant life in the dry creeks gave him hope of finding a spring nearby. He stands on one leg and hobbles to the opposite edge of the arroyo. He picks up a piece of wood about a foot long. The stick smells like mesquite. Maybe it’s the root of a tree that was carried by a flood. He goes back to his spot and begins to whittle the edge of the stick with his knife. When the end is finally pointed, he uses the stick to dig a small hole next to him. One time, the Jiparis camped in an arroyo similar to the one where he is now, and Brother Patricio found water only a couple of feet beneath the surface. Emiliano digs and digs but does not find water. He has only succeeded in perspiring more of the precious and limited liquid in his body.
The fever is making him dizzy. He tells himself to be smart and be calm and simply rest. He lies down and watches the sky slowly darken. The first stars appear—all at once, it seems, as if someone realized it was time to turn a switch on. He is so thirsty. He is burning up inside and outside and someone is skewering his foot with a hot iron. Where is Sara now? Did Perla Rubi know what would happen to his sister when she told her father where they planned to cross? What is Perla Rubi’s father’s name? He can’t remember. That’s not good. He can go back to Juárez because he is protected. Armando told him as much. Today was a humid day. It shouldn’t be so humid in the desert. Humidity prevents the body’s sweat from evaporating, so your body makes more sweat. That never made any sense to him, but it’s in all his survival books. There are lots of things that don’t make sense. When dehydration gets really bad, a person can’t even cry. Or rather, they can cry but tears don’t come out. Crying without tears, what’s that like? He cried this morning. Stars can make a person want to cry for some reason. It’s probably because you feel so small out here, so forsaken. The light from that star, one of the stars that makes up Orion’s belt, took more than a thousand years to reach him. What is the name of Perla Rubi’s father? He can’t remember. That’s not good.
Better close his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours. The only way he’ll make it at this rate is to walk in the cool of the night. He’s sleepy and the stars in Orion’s belt are trembling. It feels as if he’s going to fall into the sky. Is it dizziness he feels? Nausea? He wants to vomit, but what is there to vomit? That’s not good. He shuts his eyes. A coyote barks four times and then lets out a lonely howl. Another one responds. Emiliano wraps his hand around the sharpened stick. He’s so sleepy. Just two hours and then he walks. Find Polaris. Follow it. He won’t get lost if he follows the North Star.
A raindrop falls on his forehead and then another lands on his lips and h
is tongue licks the sweet moisture. When you are very thirsty you can taste the otherwise unnoticed flavor of water. It is sweet but not too sweet, bitter but not too bitter, like the perfect ratio of lemon and honey. It is a flavor that is both indescribable and absolutely right. Emiliano opens his mouth to receive the raindrops that are now falling one after another, like pearls in a necklace that has come undone. The drops soon turn into a torrent and Emiliano begins to gag with the water entering his mouth and throat and lungs. He tries to rise, but the water pushes him down. He hears muffled thunder, and then a rushing current crashing through the arroyo sweeps him up as if he were no more than a twig and slams him against protruding boulders. A crooked mesquite tree has somehow found a way to grow sideways from the walls of the canyon and Emiliano reaches for it and manages to hold on to a branch. He pulls himself up and hugs the slim trunk of the tree. But he can feel the water rising and soon it is up to his chin and Emiliano will drown unless he somehow makes his way to one of the top branches. He pulls himself up as high as the tree will bear his weight, and when he looks down, he sees a hand rise from the water and grab a lower branch. Then another hand reaches up and latches on to Emiliano’s ankle. Javier’s head bobs up from the water, gasping. How did Javier get here? The tree is not strong enough to support the weight of two people and it is bending and cracking as Javier manages to get a grip on Emiliano’s arm. Emiliano pulls his arm loose, but Javier grabs Emiliano’s leg again. Emiliano tries to shake his leg, shake him off, because what else can he do? They both will die if Javier doesn’t let go. Isn’t it better for one person to die than two? Javier holds on tighter, pleading, but Emiliano has no choice but to kick Lester in the face. Lester? Where did Javier go? It doesn’t matter, he’s got to kick himself free. He kicks Lester once and then again harder and then the branch Emiliano’s holding snaps and Emiliano falls into the roaring water and now it is his father holding him. It is his father’s hand that is keeping him from being swept away by the powerful current. His father is holding on to him with one hand and holding on to Lester with the other and Lester is holding on to Javier, who is holding on to what remains of the mesquite tree. It is Javier’s grip on the tree and Lester’s grip on Javier and his father’s grip on Lester that is keeping him from drowning.
Emiliano opens his eyes. Where is he? The sun is shining on his face. He sits up and looks around. There on the opposite wall of the canyon is the exact mesquite tree that appeared in his dream. It must be almost noon if sunlight is reaching the west side of the canyon. Emiliano tries to stand but his legs are weak. He crawls over to the east wall, where there is shade. He unfastens the water bottle from his belt, unscrews the top, and drinks the last gulp of warm water. His forehead is moist with perspiration. The damn dream made him sweat. Great! That’s just what he needed: to lose his precious sweat on a dream.
Emiliano places his hand over his heart, puts two fingers over the aorta in his neck, and counts to ten. His pulse rate is about a hundred beats per minute, about forty beats faster than normal for his athlete’s heart. That’s not good. And the fever is worse. The only good news is that the pain in his foot is gone. He bends his leg to look. The skin surrounding the place where the cactus needles entered has blanched and has a leathery texture. It feels dead. He presses hard to make it come alive again. Finally, the pain returns, along with a dark green substance coming out of the wound that is thick as glue and smells like decomposed flesh. How could this have happened to him? He’s stepped on cactus needles before. He has been on longer hikes in higher temperatures and never reached the same stage of dehydration that he’s in now. Maybe it has something to do with the fight with Lester. The adrenaline that shot through his body when he saw Lester walk away with Sara, the sheer rage needed to choke the living daylights out of him, all of that weakened his system. How else to explain the exhaustion, the rag-doll condition of his body? Rosario’s rag doll was so beautiful. Brother Patricio told Javier where to find Lalo so he could sell his piñatas, unstuffed, and also Rosario’s doll. He closes his eyes and sleeps.
He is dying. This certitude comes to him as soon as he opens his eyes and sees the indigo sky. Somewhere out there, the sun is sinking into a horizon he cannot see. He is dying. It’s a fact as solid as the rock he leans against. He knows the symptoms of dehydration and has ticked them off one by one as they came. If dehydration doesn’t kill him first, the infection in his foot will. It’s no longer an infection. The putrid smell coming from his foot can only be gangrene. There’s a kind of gangrene that travels fast. Fast. Fast and quick like the days of his life.
He read somewhere that a great peace descends upon you during the last few minutes before death. He hopes that happens, because he doesn’t want to die with this restless, prickly heaviness in his chest. It’s not fear of dying. It’s sadness and shame and something else he can’t name. He knows where the sadness comes from: the sorrow that Mami and Sara will feel when they don’t hear from him. He wishes he could prevent their suffering, but he is as powerless over that as he is over everything else. He’s in a small canyon with walls only slightly taller than he is, but they might as well be the burning cliffs of hell for all that he can climb them. If only he could make it to the surface, where it’s more likely someone will find his body. His mother and sister would prefer the closure of knowing he was dead to never knowing what happened to him. He remembers when the Jiparis went to the outskirts of Juárez with other groups to search for bodies of Desaparecidas—the wrenching sorrow on the mothers’ faces when they were told that their daughters’ remains were found, but also, something like gratitude.
He’s not someone who likes to analyze himself, wondering why he feels this or that. It made Brother Patricio happy to tell him the real reasons behind his actions, and Emiliano let him do it, because what other sources of fun did the poor man have? But that kind of spinning of the mental wheels is not for him. Even on his long, silent hikes with the Jiparis, his thoughts dwelled on his handicraft business, the tasks that needed to be done when he got home. Strategizing about business and making money was where his mind found its best groove. The one exception was when images of Perla Rubi overwhelmed his brain and other things. But even that didn’t stop his careful calculations on how to win her heart. Perla Rubi. He searches for the force that tied him to her every day, from the time he woke up until the moment he fell asleep, but it is gone. Where did that force go? He makes an effort to remember the kiss she gave him at her mother’s party, but the memory is made of cardboard, has no flesh, no life.
Now, bereft of any tomorrow, he turns his gaze inward to the loud hurt in the middle of his chest. It began as a small bruise, now that he thinks about it, a discomfort he chose to ignore. When did it start? When Javier told him he would help him, if that’s what he wanted. When he knew without a doubt that Perla Rubi was responsible for the men in the black Corvette. When Sara found out he was associated with bad people and he wanted to go back anyway. And now here it is, a wound so big it clamors to be healed. It’s sadness and shame and something else he can’t name. Like the time he threw his largest marble at Paco’s face and the gash on his forehead was so big he had to be taken to a hospital. The remorse and then the desperate need for Paco to forgive him—that’s what he feels now, only worse.
It is the wishing that hurts the most. He wishes he would have told Sara the conversation between him and Mr. Esmeralda that night in his room when she asked for details. He wishes he would have said no when he realized that he was asking Javier, an addict, to work with drugs. He wishes he’d never driven that Mercedes. He wishes he would have stuck to his humble but good dream: Joel’s motorcycle, and eventually a shop where he sold folk art made by poor kids. He’s suddenly overcome with an immense sense of waste: wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted life. Lester back there wanted his son to know that he was loved. The time he could have spent loving but didn’t, that’s the waste that was killing Lester. The same waste that is killing him now. He is afraid for the firs
t time. Not of dying but of dying like this. It can’t be that he will die like he didn’t get what life was about. He just didn’t get it. He knew it once. How did he forget? When did it happen?
The image of the brown manila envelope comes to him. He sits next to Sara at the kitchen table and watches Mami open the envelope. She hands the papers over to Sara, her eyes clouded with tears. Sara reads in silence for a few moments and then hugs Mami. Emiliano picks up the document and reads the top line: PETITION FOR VOLUNTARY DIVORCE. The anger started then and there, and everyone assumed that in time it would go away, but he made sure it didn’t. He kept it alive. That anger turned to wanting more, to be more and better than his father. But he was never better, was he? What did his father say in that letter? I’m not perfect but at least I can say I’m not a criminal. I want to do well doing honest work. The man, his father, a flawed human being like any other, chose to be and do good, as best he could.
“All right,” he says. “All right. I got it.”
How can the body produce tears when the only liquid left is blood? He feels the last drop of liquid in him streak down his cheek. He crawls on his stomach to the middle of the canyon, where there’s more of a chance someone will see him, and when he gets there, he sees two flashes of orange-tinted light in the sky one right after the other.
He turns on his back. The North Star comes out first, even while the sky is still a dark blue. He manages to keep his eyes open long enough to see the Milky Way spread from one end of the universe to the other.
Then his eyes close.
The first word he hears is in English.
“Hello.”
Is English the language spoken in heaven? Or maybe he’s in that other place where hearing English makes more sense. The fact that he’s thinking and even cracking little jokes to himself must mean he’s alive somewhere. He’s afraid to open his eyes.
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