The Border

by Steve Schafer

  “Then you know what happened? It was like he knew. I don’t know how. But it was like he could tell what was coming. Right as we got to that quince, he pulled me aside. He said he never told me how proud he was of me before…and that was a mistake. He said the way I played the game made him proud. Right there, that was the best moment of my life. And then, two hours later…”

  He stares deep into the space between us all. I know that space. I look into it often, reliving little moments, over and over.

  Gladys slides over to him and wraps her arms around his midriff.

  None of us respond, because none of us know how to.

  I’m torn. It makes me want to think differently of him. It makes me want to read into other things he does and understand where he’s coming from. It makes me want to like him again.

  Then there’s the other side of me.

  I think for Marcos, this was just another competition. And he won.

  Walking Blind

  The mountains that were once in the distance are now much closer. Their shadowy outlines linger like dark teeth rising out of the horizon, blocking the stars and drawing us further into the belly of the desert. Their growing presence is our only sign that we’re making any progress.

  The moon has dipped from sight. Among the more important items left back at the hotel are three of our four flashlights. From one perspective, it’s a nonissue, because we shouldn’t be using any lights at night. Lights can be seen by others.

  However, we quickly discover the other perspective. And it’s a painful one.

  We’re not on any kind of trail. We’re surrounded by a random scattering of cacti and other prickly cousins that plague our path. It’s like we’re walking through a minefield. All of us get scraped and prodded. Slicing our fingers to draw blood now seems less like a bonding experience and more like an exercise to prepare us for what was to come.

  The letters from Sr. Ortíz’s children made no mention of this hazard, which slows our pace and makes the walk miserable. They must have followed some kind of trail or a river bed, or had a bright moon to light their travels, or hiked through a different, sparser area of the desert. But wondering about what they did is a moot point. It only frustrates me and distracts me from what I should be paying attention to—each next step.

  Marcos remains in the lead. He rips a branch from a mesquite tree and waves it along the path in front of him, like a white cane. This helps, but it’s not a foolproof method. It’s only a matter of time before one of us takes a real hit.

  “Ouch! Ow! Ow!” Marcos hollers. He crashes with a heavy thud into the dirt.

  Gladys drops to his side. “What happened?” she asks.

  “My leg!” he groans. “My leg.”

  He turns on the flashlight and shines it down. If anybody is nearby, they’ll know exactly where we are, between the screams and the light. But this is a problem we don’t have the luxury of worrying about at the moment.

  As I peer around Arbo, I see the culprit. Next to Marcos is a barrel cactus—a round, stubby plant with firm spines like razors. I cringe and crane my head farther around Arbo to get a look at Marcos. He’s lying on his side. His knee is bent and he’s grabbing his shin. His face is tightened in a frozen wince. A small cluster of spines poke out of his jeans, a fist or two above his ankle.

  Gladys grabs his leg. He rolls his head back along the desert floor near Arbo’s feet and draws in deep, noisy breaths, blowing them back out with the same fiery force.

  “Shh,” she says. “Shh. Relax. We’re going to get them out.”

  She touches one of the spines.

  He yelps. “Stop!”

  “Okay. Okay.” Gladys strokes his hair, while his head wags back and forth as if trying to deny the pain.

  We all give him a moment.

  He groans through a loud exhale and props himself up on an elbow.

  “Help me get this backpack off. I need to get the knife out of it,” he says.

  Gladys helps him slide the pack off, then Marcos fumbles through it and pulls out the knife we used to cut our fingers.

  He thrusts the flashlight at Arbo.

  “Shine this on my leg.”

  We all lean in. There are four needles piercing through his jeans, though they are not all the same height. One appears half as tall as the others.

  Marcos gently slices the cuff of his jeans and works the knife upward. As he does so, it tugs at the fabric pinned against his skin by the spines. He moans, low and determined.

  Gladys reaches for his leg and he flinches.

  “I’m going to press the jeans against your leg so they don’t move.”

  He concedes with a nod.

  Carefully, she places several fingers on his leg, on either side of the spines. Marcos continues to cut until he reaches halfway up his calf. He grabs the flashlight from Arbo, asks Gladys to move her hand, then slowly lifts up the flap of denim and shines the light around at different angles.

  I take a delicate step around the cactus to get a better view.

  “Most aren’t that deep,” Marcos says. “I have to pull them out.” He says this more for himself than for us.

  He stares at his leg. We stare too. Seconds later, he snatches the top of a spine and yanks it out.

  “Mmmm,” he grunts, his face bunching together, stifling a scream.

  Twice more he repeats this drill until all that remains is the shortest of the spines. He inspects this final wound, shaking his head back and forth, looking at it from one side, then the other, then back again.

  “Está bien metido,” Arbo says.

  “Thanks for the reminder. It’s in my leg. I can tell it’s deep.”

  “You want me to pull it?” Arbo asks.

  “You touch my leg and you’re going into that cactus.”

  Marcos slides his hand down his leg and grabs hold of the spine. He pauses. His eyes squeeze shut and his jaws clench. He rocks forward, then jerks upward on the spine.

  It goes nowhere.

  He continues to tug, his upper and lower halves pulling violently in opposite directions. The white of his teeth emerges beneath snarled lips. He growls. He sounds like some kind of animal.

  Gladys presses back into me and reaches for my hand. She wraps my fingers in her palm and squeezes. My knuckles dig into each other as she crushes my hand.

  Marcos gives one final heave. His leg kicks out and his torso slams into the ground. His hands hover over his body, clutching something. Arbo shines the flashlight on his bloody fingers. He’s holding the spine, but only the top half of it.

  Gladys releases my hand and drops back down to his side.

  “I broke it. It’s still in there,” Marcos says. He sounds defeated and exhausted.

  “We can’t leave it like that,” Gladys says.

  Marcos slowly pushes himself back onto his elbows. He extends a hand out to Arbo.

  “Let me see the flashlight,” he says.

  He shines it along his leg. The jeans are no longer pinned down. He pulls them up over his knee, revealing his bloody shin. He slides his fingers in soft circles around the area, flinching several times.

  “There’s nothing to grab,” he says.

  “We need to get it out,” Arbo says.

  “I said, ‘There’s nothing to grab.’”

  “We still need to get it.”

  “How?” Marcos snaps.

  Arbo looks down at the ground. We all track his eyes to the knife.

  “You touch that knife and—”

  “Arbo’s right,” Gladys says. “It’ll get infected.”

  “No. It’ll work its way out.”

  “Marcos, we—”

  “I said, ‘no’! Nobody is digging a hole in my leg with a knife.” He says it to all of us, but mostly to Gladys.

  I look at Arbo. He see
ms to feel the same as me. This is between them.

  “Can you even walk?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he says, his voice thick with defiance. He rolls up the flap of his jeans, leaving the bloody mess exposed, then turns onto the knee of his good leg. He looks up at us as I hold out a hand for him to grab. He ignores it. He pushes himself up and balances on one leg.

  “We should at least wrap your leg with something. You’re still bleeding,” Gladys says.

  “I don’t want anything touching it. It’s done bleeding. It’ll scab over.”

  Gladys starts to say something.

  Marcos cuts her off. “Let’s just go, okay?”

  He places his wounded limb in front of him and leans on the mesquite branch to help support his weight. As he takes a quick, gimpy step forward, he lets out a barely audible groan, then looks back at us, as though this proves his case. He punctuates this by reaching down, grabbing his pack, and slinging it over his shoulder.

  “You know I’m not trying to hurt you, right?” Gladys asks.

  “Yeah, I know. Let’s walk.”

  So that’s what we do. Slowly. Our already sluggish pace is halved, partly for Marcos’s benefit and partly because we know what can happen if we try to move too fast. Gradually, the grunts and groans fade, and we hear nothing from Marcos. I can tell he’s in pain from his limp, but he’s not going to let us hear anything more about it.

  Several times, Gladys suggests we stop, but Marcos insists we move on. “It only gets hotter and harder from here,” he says. So we continue.

  • • •

  Clouds move in. If it were daytime, this would be a gift from above. But it’s not. It’s as if the desert has attacked us with a new weapon. At night, the clouds knock out the only tool we have to point us in the right direction.

  It’s not even kind enough to rain. It drizzles a light mist that’s impossible to collect to restock our dwindling water supply. It’s just enough to make the desert feel swampy. It doesn’t cool here at night—it just becomes less hot. The warm droplets dampen our clothes, making the heat stick.

  We trudge along, but we have no idea if we’re headed in the right direction. Furthermore, we are now walking on the slanted side of what appears to be a low hill, which pushes us along its slope. While feeling the angle of the hill keeps us from walking in circles, the path that it forces us to take may or may not be the way we want to go.

  Arbo has the only watch among us. He checks the time: 11:00 p.m. We have many more hours of walking ahead of us.

  “Are we going the right way? I think we’re turning,” Arbo says.

  “I don’t know,” Marcos answers.

  “Maybe we should stop.”

  “We need to make progress tonight.”

  “We can walk at dawn.”

  “We’re going to do that anyway. Then we rest,” Marcos says. “You’ll be happier sleeping through the middle of the day than walking through it.”

  • • •

  It’s 11:15 p.m.

  “I don’t think we’re going the right way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t, but it feels like we’re turning.”

  “I agree.”

  “Well, what do you want to do, go up the mountain?”

  “I don’t think it’s a mountain, I think it’s a hill.”

  “How do you have any idea how big this thing is?”

  “Before the clouds came in you could see it. It didn’t look that tall.”

  “There are mountains out here.”

  “I know. I don’t think this is one of them. I think it’s a foothill before the mountains.”

  “Then do you want to go up the foothill?”

  “I don’t think we should. I think we should keep going around it.”

  “How do we know we’re going the right way around it? Maybe we should be walking the other way.”

  “You want to turn around?”

  “No. I’m just saying we don’t know if we’re going the right way.”

  “It’s turning us. I say we go up it.”

  “You want to walk up because it might be the right way? I guess this isn’t exhausting enough for you already?”

  “¡Dios mío! Can we please decide on a direction to walk and go?”

  “Great idea. Anybody who can figure out the right way, feel free to speak up.”

  “I just don’t want to keep walking just for the sake of walking!”

  “So you want to stop?”

  “I’m saying that we need to make sure we’re not headed back into Mexico.”

  “I don’t think we’re turned completely around.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Okay! Look, none of us know where we are. Let’s at least admit it. We’re lost.”

  “We’re not lost. We just don’t know the right direction to go.”

  “That’s what lost is!”

  “No, lost is when you don’t know where you are. We know where we are.”

  “Please, do tell. Where are we?”

  “Stop! Stop!”

  “We are stopped.”

  “No, stop talking! Okay. Let’s make a decision.”

  Our group falls silent, which is both disheartening and pleasant. Marcos takes off his backpack.

  “So, we’re stopping?” I ask.

  “I’m at least going to take this sack of bricks off and sit for a moment.” It’s the first time he’s hinted at how heavy the pack is. “And we should have some water. If it rains harder, we can fill the jugs.”

  No one argues with this. We take off our bags, sit, and drink more than we should, hoping that the taunting clouds will deliver.

  Then we wait. We wait for someone to speak up, to push us on. No one does. So we sit, consumed in our thoughts, or lack thereof.

  I reach into my bag and feel for the book Gladys gave me. The cover is damp. It’s not dripping, but it’s wet from having been pressed up against the top of the bag, which has soaked up what little rain has fallen. I take it out and tuck it under my shirt, while thumbing through the pages. My whole body relaxes in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible by simply touching paper. It feels like years since I have run my fingers through pages. I love how they feel. I slide my fingers along the diagonal crease of a dog-eared page. It takes me back. I close my eyes and think of home. I’m suddenly whisked back into my bedroom, reading by the light of a lone lamp. My head flush against the pillow, my mind somewhere inside the pages and far outside the room, all from the comfort of my bed…until my eyes can no longer stay open, and I fold a page over to mark my spot for the next night. The same place, the same routine. The pages turn, the books change, but everything else stays the same.

  I smile. Then I think about who gave me the book and how she “bought” it. I smile even wider. I could stay lost in that thought all night, but I open my eyes. Sitting and thinking won’t get us anywhere.

  “If we could see Ajo, then we’d know the right direction,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” Marcos asks.

  “In the letters from Sr. Ortíz’s kids, they said they could see the lights of Ajo from far away.”

  “I don’t see any lights.”

  “That’s my point. We need to get up higher to see them. They’re probably blocked by this hill.”

  “Or mountain.”

  “Well, whatever it is, we can’t see around it. If we can spot Ajo, we can at least know what direction we should head,” I say.

  Marcos thinks for a few seconds before answering. “How long do you think it’ll take to climb up there?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty minutes maybe. But if I went alone, I could do it a lot faster. Probably in half the time.”

  “No, we’re not splitting up,” Marcos says.

 
“I’ll go with him,” Arbo says.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not? What else are we doing? Just sitting here,” Arbo says.

  Again, Marcos pauses and thinks. He looks at his leg. He won’t say it, but I can tell he knows that it makes no sense for him to go up a hill on a hunch.

  “We’re not going to go far. You keep the flashlight. If we’re not back in half an hour, then shine it up every few minutes. We’ll see it and know where you are,” I say.

  “How are you going to see?”

  We hear a beep from Arbo’s wrist, and a tiny blue light beams out. He holds it up to his face and smiles. Then he waves it away from us, out toward the brush. It’s dim, barely bright enough to light up a step or two in front of him, which makes it perfect.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about that before?” Marcos asks.

  “I forgot about it.”

  Marcos shakes his head back and forth. It’s not hard to connect the dots crossing his mind.

  “Look,” I jump in. “We’ll be back in thirty, okay? We’ll leave everything here. We’ll walk faster without it.”

  I take the book out from under my shirt. Rather than tuck it back inside the bag where it might get wet, I cram it into my back pocket. It’s a tight fit, but I don’t mind. I’ll keep it dry, and I feel better having it on me.

  Arbo takes the lead, using his watch to light our way. His steps are broad and confident. Compared to how we were shuffling before, it nearly feels like we’re running. And without the weight of the packs, moving uphill hardly feels like a challenge.

  We’ll be back in twenty minutes, I think to myself, as though I have something to prove.