Felipo looked at Luz, then began to lead Canguro down the ridge toward the barn and the truck and the bodies.
“No,” Luz hissed.
“One of them is alive,” he said. “Maybe they had an accident. Maybe I can help.”
“Don’t,” she said. And her own firmness, her willingness to believe it, surprised her: “They are dead.”
Felipo glanced again. The fire behind the bodies. Luz saw it in his face—the memory of the evening when his house had collapsed in flames and his parents lay dead on the lawn. “I’m sorry,” Felipo said. He shrugged and started down the loose slope of the ridge, pulling the horse. “Wait here if you like.”
Luz watched him go. “Shit,” she said in English, then she tugged on Pegaso’s reins and followed.
The heat was monumental. Grasshoppers fleeing the fire pelted against them, stinging Luz’s face and arms and sticking to her shirt. Pegaso shook his head and snorted and began to resist her pull. She whispered to him, tried to sound confident, but cold slipped between her ribs as it became clear that there had been no accident. The truck’s windows circled the vehicle in glass beads, and a sequence of narrowly spaced bullet holes checkmarked the body of the truck.
The low roar of the fire canceled out most other noise, and she didn’t hear the truck still idling until they were almost next to it. A handgun lay on the driver’s seat. Of the bodies, which were off a short way behind the truck, she couldn’t tell which one had waved. They all seemed to be dead by now. The nearest man lay cruciform, head twisted toward them, sand caked against his bloody rictus and the fresh red laceration through his lips.
“I’m sorry,” Felipo said. “I thought they could be the farmers. I’m sorry, Luz. You were right.” Felipo was pulling Canguro around, starting back for the ridge and the hills and the pine forest.
Something snapped overhead, a quick atmospheric twitch. Luz felt it as much as she heard it. Another snap. The briefest whistle of split air. Luz’s memory toned before the reports reached her. She dropped facedown in the dirt. Felipo pointed and shouted. Her eyes rolled heavily toward the Jeep tearing down the next hill, returning.
She got to her feet and pulled on Pegaso’s reins, but the horse wouldn’t budge. The big animal locked his knees and stared into some other place. Luz pulled on the reins, but it was as if they were lashed to a boulder. She saw the blood on the horse’s breast, rich and nearly black, spreading through his gray coat. She reached and grabbed hold of the bridle but the horse wouldn’t move, wouldn’t turn his skull. Felipo shoved her and she stumbled and straightened and looked at him.
She heard a sighing deep in her eardrums, like air being let out, and then something popped in the center of her brain, and all the sound around her crystallized—the low roar of the fire, the snap and bite of another rifle round, Felipo screaming:
“Run, Luz, run!”
She turned and accelerated into her sprint, her ghost runner a step behind. She sensed him reaching, extending his arm, grasping at her in an effort to trip her up. She lengthened her strides. Her soles found tenuous purchase in the dry crust of earth. Her heart thumped at a quicker rate than she could recycle her feet. It was a discordant, out-of-order feeling.
The Jeep leveled onto the trail. Dust plumed as it raced toward the skeletal barn and the bodies.
Head turned, Luz sprawled, full body crashing into the slope of the ridge. She scrambled to her feet. Felipo wasn’t with her.
He had remained with the horses, still yanking on Pegaso’s reins, attempting to get the wounded horse moving by throwing his whole body into it. She screamed his name, and a cramp razored across her lower abdomen, crooking her spine and folding her in half. A hot swell of nausea.
The Jeep skidded to a stop near the barn. Three men leaped out. Felipo let go of Pegaso’s reins and broke for where he had his shotgun sheathed along Canguro’s flank. He was pulling it free when the first man hit him, spearing him to the dirt. The gun spun away. The other men arrived and fell onto the boy, fists rising and falling.
Luz groaned. The pain in her stomach unclenched and she straightened. The men pulled Felipo to his feet. The boy hung limply between them. One of the men raised an arm in Luz’s direction, and another began loping toward her.
4
THE MAN HAD CROSSED THE FIRST HUNDRED METERS BY THE time Luz clawed up the loose shoring of the ridge and ran into the pine forest. Dried needles crunched beneath her sneakers. She needed to get far enough into the forest for the trees to obscure her from the narco’s view once he topped the ridge. She estimated the distance and guessed she had about fifteen seconds.
Shut up. Run.
She grasped at a tree and swung herself in a new direction. Her ghost runner tangled his feet and stumbled, and she pushed ahead. The webbing of her lungs strained. Her abdominal muscles knotted tighter.
Through the trees she saw the ground fall away. She slowed, halted, and stood, gasping at the edge of a U-shaped cliff, its arms stretching away. Rock hills crinkled into the distance. Buzzards turned in the smokeless air. She fled along the curve and faded back into the trees.
Her stomach convulsed. She was going to throw up. A brief but clear image of the narco in pursuit finding her vomit and tracking her made her hold it in for a few moments longer, and she found a depression within the pines, a little crater lined with pine needles. She fell to all fours, sharp broken rock beneath the needle bed, and she retched, the bile burning in her throat, and she stifled her vocal cords and strained, and then it was done and she collapsed onto her side. Her limbs were stone themselves, no feeling, but the pain in her stomach was like a boot stamping into her abdomen. She lay there. Get up, she told herself. Get up. But she couldn’t.
Felipo. They had him. The laceration through the dead man’s lips blazed in her mind. She had gotten away, and shitty luck ran her right into them again. Why, why. The cramp spiked. She scrunched into a ball and clutched her knees.
There was silence except for her own raging pulse and the rustling when she shifted her weight against the needle bed. Inches from her face, a gray spider burrowed. She rolled to her back and gazed past the trees to the white sky. She narrowed her lips and forced slow breaths and willed against the pain in her gut.
Footfalls, boots on stone. The man was whistling a happy little ditty.
Luz held her breath, rolled gingerly onto her stomach, and crawled to the edge of the crater, where she could peek through the bottoms of the evergreens.
The narco was there, taking in the view over the valley. He wore a western shirt and jeans and cowboy boots. He held a pistol at his side. His other fist dropped into view, a cigarette trailing smoke. He whistled again in awe.
Luz dug through the pine needles, closing her fingers around a loose rock. If the man turned, he might see her face. He might press through the trees and level that pistol, and the rock would do her no good.
She pulled the shard free and squatted and held it. Gray and jagged. Dirt caked to it. The man dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of a boot.
Now, she thought. Now, or he will turn and see you and you will be dead.
She stood and pushed through the pines.
The narco wheeled, startled, but quickly a pleased expression melted across his sweating face. He was older than Luz had expected. Deep wrinkles and gray-flecked hair. He grinned. “Hello—”
Luz reared back and hurled the rock across the few short meters.
The rock pelted against the narco’s eyebrow with a wet solid smack.
The man clapped his free hand over his eye, and he stepped backward and dropped from sight.
No sound. He had been there. Now he was not. No sound at all.
Adrenaline sucked away from her, and the next breath brought absolute pain wrenching from beneath her navel, knocking her to the ground. She was a live and quivering bait shrimp impaled and forced to the curvature of a steel hook. She pressed her forehead against the sun-warmed rock and cried out.
&nb
sp; The pain crashed and rushed away, but it was still within sight and would return. She dragged herself into the crater and hid while the hurt racked her. Her very molecules howled. It subsided, leaving a blue and pulsing afterimage. Water leaked from her eyes. Luz knew what was happening even before the blood started seeping through her slacks.
She managed to unbutton her pants and pull them down, and she lay there, clinging to the pain.
Jonah, she thought. She reached. Mamá, please.
She held onto silence by the thinnest of shreds. Voices passed through the trees. Hunters. She tumbled through the hours and the falling dark, and the universe swung over the tops of the pine trees. A bottomless sky threaded with drifting smoke.
The future—everything she had come to accept, everything to which her life would shape itself—bled away. It bled away and went home to the earth.
5
LUZ’S MUSCLES QUAKED, HER LIMBS TREMBLED. RAW AND EXHAUSTED. There was nothing to do and nothing to think and there was no one else, but Luz heard dogs. Faint, growing louder. Yes, she decided, the dogs were real. They were coming. They smelled blood, and they were coming. She got to her feet and pulled her pants up, and she scrounged and found another rock fragment, flat and sharp. She held it at her side and waited, slumping.
The pack darted into the trees. No preamble. The first dog came in low, white teeth and dark body. Luz swatted at its jaw with the flat of the rock. Saliva burst and roped. The blow reverberated through Luz’s finger bones. The dog spun and slunk away, and Luz braced herself. The pack bunched, a writhing mass, teeth popping. A dog tunneled its snout into the pine needles. She kicked at the animal, as if there was something left to protect. But there wasn’t. And there was no reason to run. I am going to die. For the first time, the thought entered her mind. I am going to die.
Wind gusted into the crater. The pines thrashed. Needles whipped and whirled. The dogs yelped and cowered, and a roaring wash of light swung over them all.
A man appeared behind the dogs. A craggy face. A collection of leather leashes knotted around his fist. Only now did Luz note that the dogs wore collars. The man hefted a knobby walking staff in his other hand, and he used it to beat his way through the animals, toward Luz. She retreated, brandished the rock. The man dropped his stick and showed his palms, mouthing inaudible words. Luz wobbled on her feet, and with this slight damming of the torrent coursing through her she lost her balance—the world flickering for a breath—and started to fall. The man rushed and caught her.
He helped her from the trees, leading her back to the ridge and the flat expanse toward the barn. The dogs trotted alongside, weaving over and around one another, nipping and fighting among themselves. The spotlight illuminated their path, and then the aircraft slid out over the clearing and landed in a billowing of dust. Out in the field, patches of fire smoldered like magma. There were people everywhere. Men in black uniforms and flak jackets held weapons. They stood like statues of men, but their round eyes were bright and quick in the eyeholes of their balaclavas. Lights shined on everything. Big trucks painted in pixelated black camouflage. Another helicopter bottomed out of the night and unzipped a cascade of water over the weakening flames.
A dark hump—Pegaso. No sign of Canguro, no sign of Felipo.
Ahead, a man in a suit leaped down from the helicopter. His tie lashed in the downdraft like a wine-colored snake. He shouted something she couldn’t hear. The dog man let go of her and shouted something into the official’s ear, and the official took a folded rain poncho from under his arm, shook it out, and put it around Luz’s shoulders. She held it shut at the front, concealing her bloody clothing.
The official helped her into the helicopter and buckled her into the bench seat. He gave her a headset and put one on himself. She watched his mouth move and heard the words thinly in her ears: “You are safe, miss. We will be off soon.” She waited, holding herself beneath the poncho, while the commandos returned to the helicopter. When the aircraft finally lifted from the ground, her stomach swooned and a cramp radiated through her abdomen. The glowing earth rolled away and the dark rushed past.
6
THEY LANDED SOMEWHERE NEAR MONCLOVA. LUZ WALKED with the official into a squat, square building. She clutched the poncho shut. The ceiling lights spiked to the back of her eyeballs. A woman in uniform rose from her desk. Something flashed over the woman’s pudgy features when she looked at Luz—fascination or concern or even horror. But the woman composed herself and smiled.
“Marta,” the official said, “please assist this young lady—” He paused and glanced at Luz, and she provided her name. The man smiled, white teeth. Gray at his temples and a cleanly shaven face, even in the middle of the night. His name was Garza. “Marta, please take señorita Hidalgo to one of the rooms so that she may refresh herself. Find her some clothes, shoes . . . anything else she might need. After, I would have a word with her.”
Luz went with Marta down a long, linoleum-floored hallway. The last light panel in the ceiling flickered, and the hallway’s terminus alternated in and out of existence. Reality itself came into question. I am here . . . I am here.
Marta opened a door. A spartan barracks room. Narrow bed with papery-looking sheets. Bedside lamp. Particleboard wardrobe. A door opened into a small washroom with a sterile-looking shower stall. Luz entered and sat wrapped in the poncho on the narrow bed. The cramp beneath her navel ebbed. She thought she was still bleeding.
Marta returned with a stack of things in her arms and set them on the mattress. A folded towel, a bar of soap, a small bottle of shampoo. A pair of gray sweatpants, an olive-green T-shirt, and a gray sweatshirt. A pair of white socks and some cotton underpants. A box of maxi pads.
After Marta departed, Luz stood and stripped out of the clothes Felipo’s grandmother had given her. They were stiff and disgusting. She balled them up and threw them into a corner. The washroom floor was cold against her bare feet. The light fixture hummed. She was there in the mirror. Naked, cold, trembling, and alone. Her face was filthy, striated soot in her dried sweat. But her eyes in the midst of it all were sharp, and she ceased shivering by focusing on them.
The pain in her abdomen heaved back. Luz gripped the sides of the sink and forced herself to remain upright. All those times as a girl she had imagined the Guachichiles, the ancient warriors who came before her mother, before herself. As a girl she looked in the mirror, dreaming of that lineage, and envisioned the warrior who might stare back like a hawk. Luz gripped the sink and shouldered through the pain. And now the warrior was there, watching in the mirror. She was held in the eyes. She existed. A thought—a memory, perhaps, something Mamá once told her—arrived in Spanish: El espíritu está vivo a causa de la justicia.
7
SHE TOWELED OFF AND DRESSED IN THE FRESH CLOTHES. A brand-new pair of running shoes had been set outside her door. She laced them up, light and comfortable. When she straightened, a quick spasm lanced from hip to hip. She steadied herself and stowed a few of the maxi pads in the sweatshirt pocket. She clutched the length of her wet hair and flipped it over her shoulder.
The buzzing of the fluorescents in the hallway made her uneasy. As she neared the lobby she heard the hushed tones of a television, melodramatic voices and affected music. She found Marta watching a telenovela on the small set on her desk. Her mother used to watch telenovelas, when there was time, with Luz curled up against her. Mamá would explain the plot as it unfolded, predicting what came next with a chuckle. What does it say about me that I enjoy this garbage? Laughing to herself, not caring that she did enjoy watching. Luz’s grandmother would pass through the room and say something. After she’d left, her mother would screw her face into a grotesque imitation and mimic Abuela’s tone, and little Luz would giggle.
Marta noticed Luz and punched the power button on the television. She jumped to her feet and took Luz in, saying, “You look beautiful.”
The old woman in the taxi had said that to Luz, as well. Luz saw the woman’s hea
d snap back, and she put the vision away like replacing some kind of file, and the ease of this shocked her more than the vision itself.
Luz thanked Marta for her help, then followed her into a dim, square room full of cubicles. Garza was in an office partitioned from the room by a glass wall. He waved them in. Steam tendriled from a coffee mug atop the heap of papers on his desk. There was a large map of northeastern Mexico bolted to the wall. Luz sat across from the desk and Marta took the other chair, producing a small notepad and pen. Garza poured a glass of water from a pitcher atop the cabinet and handed it to Luz. She drank it all in one go.
“You are very tired,” Garza said, “very distressed, so I am sorry. I will not keep you long, Luz. But you need to help me understand why we found you where we did.”
Luz merely looked at him.
“To begin,” Garza said, bumping his shoulders, “tell me what you know about the destroyed barn.”
Luz clutched the drinking glass in her lap. “Cicatriz,” she said. “He was there.”
Garza folded his hands on his desk. “And how do you know this?”
“The cuts,” she said, and pointed to her lips.
Marta’s pen scratched. Garza drummed his fingers on the desk. “What did you see?”
“They took my friend,” Luz said. Any calm she had felt a moment before now fractured. She was here, and where was Felipo? The ache in her abdomen pulsed. “You have to do something.”
Garza’s mouth opened and closed. He sipped his coffee. “I am truly sorry for whatever you have endured. Tell me what happened, and we will do what we can for your friend.”
Luz wiped her eyes. “It was bad luck,” she said, “running into the fire. I was trying to get home. Felipo was helping me.”
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