Luz began to jog, feeling her hamstrings and calves loosen. Her ankles were stiff and they ached until they warmed. It was a relief to run only because she wanted to. The road was hard and steep, and so she didn’t push herself but rather picked her steps carefully, relishing the slow burn smoldering in her quadriceps. The trail ended at a dilapidated shed, collapsed upon itself and rotted. There was nothing there. Black, scorched rock where fires once guttered. No smell save for the pines. The clear air.
She pressed on into the forest, ascending. Here there were no stark white borders. No shouting and screaming parents, no jangling cowbells. There was no Papá, separate from everybody, clutching the chain-link fence and looking in from the outside. This was no track at all. She could run where she pleased. She felt free. The breath in her lungs tasted sweet. But only for a moment, for she recognized that at the end of her run she would return to the big house in the clearing—indeed, this was another loop, after all.
With the thought, her ghost runner sprang to life behind her, and so she had to outrun him, climbing the slope, her soles finding the stone beneath the dried needles and pulling her forward. He was there, cold and gaining. She was tired of him. She wished she had the knife with her so she might turn and slash, cut his smoky form to wisps and scatter him to nothing. But she was unable, and his pace was relentless, so she pressed on, spurred on by him.
Her mind wandered as she settled into the work of running. She saw a boy, a young child. He was quiet and content, but he would speak and have much to say if need be. He wouldn’t be muzzled, and he naturally accepted this as the right way—he would have no reason to question it. He was special because of the histories that made him, the crossing of borders that made his life possible. He had parents who loved him, who loved each other, and who could live with him. Luz saw it: a world that could have been.
No. Not that could have been. She was breathing hard and climbing through the pine forest, and this was what she thought: It was a world only to be imagined, now and forever—but of what use is the imagining? Luz needed to determine this, or forbid herself from imagining it again.
She came through the last of the forest to the ridge. She halted, ribcage heaving. Ahead the mountain dropped, diving toward a frothing stream at its foot and an adjacent flat of lush-looking grass. From there the earth crimped into a serrated panorama, sprouting entire forests that were nothing more than tufts at this remove. In the waning light a flock of something rose from the pines, a fluttering shadow, and though they were likely bats Luz imagined them to be monarchs, traveling as they were meant to. Luz turned to the east and walked along the ridge to the edge of the outcropping, where the valley bottomed out far below. Down there, horses had once galloped, and the pyramid stood small and distant, hardly there.
3
IN THE MORNING LUZ WOKE FROM A DREAM IN WHICH SHE’D BEEN pursuing somebody along a dark, dry alluvial plain. Cracked earth underfoot. Silent, faraway lightning uncloaked mountains, like perpetually frozen swells just shy of crashing upon the plain. She found the remains of her quarry’s fires where they couldn’t be buried over in this place. Ash and the fine, blackened bones of rodents. They were out there ahead of her somewhere, flying in the darkness, but Luz didn’t think they were actually prey. They were somewhere ahead, with another fire and with other stories, and she needed to sit with them and to hear them and to share her own tales. She needed to ask them something important. But when she woke, she didn’t know what it was. She was hot and it was late in the morning, and she got up and crossed to the window and looked at the valley and the pyramid and desired to see the structure up close.
She put the borrowed gym shorts on again. She left the knife rolled in her mother’s dresses. She told Ninfa she was going for a hike and walked out. She didn’t see Cecilia anywhere. The narco on the porch looked at her, at her legs. She stared at him until he averted his eyes. On the trail, she turned down the mountain.
She walked on her heels against the decline, where it ran away and slalomed like some petrified creek bed. The general quiet clung to her, and she listened to the thrumming of grasshoppers, the squalling of a squirrel somewhere overhead. A steady jingling interrupted it, and the leñero with the mule came into view, headed once again up the trail. When they passed, the old man lifted his face—white whiskers and dark, drooping patches beneath his eyes—and grunted, “Blessed day, miss.” Luz nodded. The jingling and clip-clop faded, and she was alone again.
Where the rocky road ran off the mountain, Luz found a divergent path, narrow, fit for a horse or mule or four-wheeler. It scrawled straight on into the valley, toward the hazy suggestion of the pyramid.
Luz flung her feet forward. She was lathered in sweat. She’d been walking for an hour, perhaps, when she came to a brick hut roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. A stack of firewood against the side of the home lay protected beneath a staked blue tarp. A rusted car sat wheelless on cinder blocks behind an empty livestock pen. Luz hurried her pace, not in the mood to be harangued if someone was home.
The pyramid glimmered like an apparition. She took in the valley, the earth scything into sky on either side. A contrail diffused over the ridge. She wondered where among the hills Felipo’s family had lived. Would the burned bricks and charred beams still mark the place? They certainly had not lived in a manor like Oziel’s. But somewhere nearby, they’d called this place home. As had Cicatriz, when he’d been Juan Luis Medina.
And it struck Luz with a bolt of electricity—an explanation, an idea, a story.
Ninfa had told her that Cecilia worked in Monterrey, and Cicatriz, when he’d held Luz in the shed, stated that he had worked in that same city. That he’d run a team or crew or something there. Luz recalled the rueful look between Cicatriz and Cecilia while he sat naked and bound in front of his hideout, and it was clear to her: once upon a time, Cecilia and Juan Luis Medina had been friends.
Luz marched on through the heat, the dust coughing up from beneath her sneakers and coating her legs. She squinted through the glare. The pyramid seemed farther away now than it had from the top of the mountain. Luz watched her feet and built the story.
Cecilia and Juan Luis were friends—not in the same sense as Jonah and Colby, for instance, but in the only way the sicarios could have been. They could not have been lovers; the story could not have gone this way, though they might have wished it at times, for their own reasons. They cared for each other, each the other’s lone friend. Each outcasts in their own regard, and each talented at a terrible thing. They had a mutual empathy for a complex way of life, for all the guilt and their methods of management. For their inability to free themselves, for the horrifying truth that they enjoyed themselves and their work much of the time, and for their consequent and shared self-hatred.
Yes, Luz thought. Sometimes this truth waited for them in the quiet: the glistening, pulsing, awful heart of the truth—and so they wouldn’t want to be alone. Cecilia and Juan Luis sat together in the evenings. At his apartment, perhaps, and he would place the silver knife on the tile between them where they sat on the floor and spin it, watching it flare and glint in the light. He had no scar yet. Still a smooth, young face. They drank tequila straight from the bottle, passing it back and forth and chasing it with cold beer. He would tell her on these nights stories he told no other, stories of his old family and the land where they raised horses. He had hated it, the backbreaking work and the negligible profits. But there were moments—galloping alongside his cousin, perhaps, the creek water splashing to either side and the wind filling his shirt—when he knew that it was a good life, a true life. A life that, he now knew, would never resurrect itself.
And Cecilia would open to him, as well. She understood that Juan Luis had run toward a life he thought offered something more, but that was not her history. Instead, she’d been pulled into it. She told her friend—for her voice was still hers—of growing up in Monterrey, of her policeman uncle who’d promised to take care of her and her mother after
her father had died. Her uncle delivered envelopes of cash to their home. As Cecilia grew, he took her on ride-alongs and she saw and understood certain things. Sometimes he left her in his car with a handgun in her lap for protection while he went into a store or office or other nondescript structure to collect. She learned to appreciate the weight of the gun in her hand, the feel of it, the promise of it. She learned to appreciate how her fear excited her, if she was afraid at all. When the day came for her to make a living of her own, she needed only to ask her uncle, whose true existence had come into the light by this point and would be the single life he led.
These were the stories they gave to each other. Theirs were lives filled with many things, not the least of which was regret. There would be no forgiveness—not of themselves nor from any other—and they could love each other for this.
Inevitably the world, and what it determined, interfered. As it must, as it always does. Cecilia was caught between her friend and what amounted to her family. She was the force and they were the immovable objects. The product was her silence. The infinite engine that had swallowed them both spewed them out no longer whole. It continued to churn. Their lives crawled on in the last manner left to them.
Luz imagined the story while she walked in the heat, throat sticky with thirst. Cicatriz’s team, with the exception of Cecilia, had defected, become renegades—they would blaze out. Though newly scarred, he’d never grow old enough for his otherwise smooth face to be touched by the tobacco, the alcohol, the drugs. Cecilia herself had become both rat and failed assassin. Sometimes the wrong turn is the only turn offered. Luz hiked toward the distant pyramid and understood, in a way, that this imagined story was similar to her mother’s old stories. She could not know whether the story was true; all that mattered was what the story could do for her. There were, however, two details she could accept as fact: Oziel had first tempted Juan Luis, and Oziel had used up Cecilia.
Luz halted in the dust. She was bushed. The pyramid, spectral on the horizon, had grown no closer. She thought it might be unreachable. She pivoted and started back.
4
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON SHE NEARED THE BRICK HUT. NOW A mule stood in the pen. Smoke tendriled from the stovepipe in the roof. The mule bayed and its bell jangled. The leñero appeared, stooping to get through his door. He wore the same baggy clothes and huaraches, but his straw hat was gone and his white hair flared like a crown around the brown dome of his bald head. His jowls jumped as if he needed to limber up his throat: “Good afternoon, miss.”
Luz smiled politely. Great, she thought. She was woozy in the heat.
The old man swiveled and looked toward the pyramid. “One moment,” he said. “You must be thirsty.”
He disappeared into his home and returned with a clay cup in one hand and a plastic gallon of water in his other. He shuffled toward her, pouring into the cup. Luz was parched, and the water made a chugging sound, and she saw the dying man in the desert, but here he was giving her the water instead, and she wanted to refuse—I don’t deserve this, let me die—but she was thirsty, too thirsty, and she accepted the cool cup with both hands. She sipped, and everything came into firmer focus.
“Thank you,” she told him.
The old man’s name was Onofre. “Please,” he said, gesturing to a folding chair on the dirt in front of the hut, “sit with me while you finish your water.”
He disappeared once more into the house and reappeared dragging a wooden stool. Onofre asked if she had hiked to the pyramid, and if so, what did it look like?
The folding chair shifted in the dirt beneath her. She shook her head. “It’s a lot farther away than it looks.”
Onofre chuckled, whiskers bristling and eyes glittering. “Yes. I have never seen it up close, either. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually there at all.” He was holding his own cup and the jug, and he poured himself some water and set the jug on the ground. “I have heard that a family owns the land where the pyramid sits, so they own the pyramid itself. There is some dispute over what to do with it—open it for digging, turn it into some kind of tourist attraction. But there is no agreement, and so nobody visits.” He sipped his water, waved his hand. “There are other pyramids—larger ones, popular ones. There is no hurry, and God will decide in the end.”
Luz’s water was silty but satisfying. Sweat slid down her ribs. “I like the thought,” she said, “of nobody ever getting close to it.”
The sliding sunlight swallowed the distant structure. The mule wheezed, stamped a hoof.
“There is no hurry,” Onofre repeated, “and God will decide in the end.”
Luz grinned, finished her water. He asked if she’d like some more, but she declined. She didn’t get up, though. She didn’t feel like moving yet. The old man was right. No hurry.
Onofre swirled his clay cup as if aerating a fine wine. He twirled his finger to indicate the surrounding land. “I sell my firewood to everyone in these hills, and I have never seen you before. Now I have seen you twice in two days. Once coming down the hill, and once returning.”
“I am just passing through,” Luz said.
Onofre raised his brow. “Is that what you believe?”
The question had the flavor of accusation. Luz did not like the way she’d so easily let her guard down. She would learn, though. She would learn to stop doing that. She stood, placed the cup on the chair, and started away.
“Please,” Onofre said. He pleaded with his hands. “I do not mean to upset you. I know who lives on the mountain—”
Anger sparked in Luz’s belly. She spun: “You would save me, old man?”
“I wish nothing of the sort. I certainly do not wish to cross my neighbor.” His eyes were large in his drooping face. He kept his hands out, splayed. “But I am telling you that if you do not wish to stay in that house forever, you will go from here. Right now. You will take some water from me and you will start walking and you will not turn around. You do not need him”—he pointed up the trail—“to go where you need to go, but if you return to his house now, you will never leave.”
Luz placed her fists on her hips. The trail ran to the road that snaked up the mountain. The sun had truly begun to set. The old man had articulated her fears; she admitted this to herself. But her mother’s dresses were still in the house, and Oziel wouldn’t return until the next day. The thought of abandoning her mother’s things was unbearable.
“Do not,” Onofre said, as if to sway her thoughts, “confuse God’s time with what we may deem as urgent. You must go.”
She looked at the leñero. He hunched toward her.
“I know,” she told him, “I’m sorry,” and she walked away.
A hundred meters or so down the trail, she finally looked back. He remained on the stool, elbows on his knees, hanging his head.
5
LUZ HIKED UP THE ROAD, LISTENING TO INSECTS SING AS SHADOW gathered. Onofre was right, she knew it. But she could still grab her mother’s things and leave, as long as Cecilia and the other narco guard didn’t try to stop her. But what if they did? They’d see her bag, ask questions. The leñero’s voice rang in her mind—turn around and go right now. Fear needled the nape of her neck, made her want to run. No, she thought. No. I can’t, not yet. She would just have to figure something out; she had before. There would be another way out of the house, a back door or a window, and she could hike to the top of the mountain, find a path down the back slope.
The trail swung around the mountain. There was a figure in the road, Cecilia, dressed in black and holding her rifle. Upon seeing Luz—and Luz had the distinct impression that the sicaria had been waiting for her—she lifted an arm and waved Luz in, beckoned to her: Come on. Molten lead filled Luz’s stomach and cooled, but she willed herself to walk calmly, to keep her pace. As she neared, Cecilia reached and gripped her shoulder. She pointed at the house. “I understand,” Luz said.
There was a new narco on the porch, rocking in the chair, smoking a cigarette. They passed him and went i
nside. Spanish music played softly in the house. The smell of roasting green chiles. The antelope-horn chandelier swayed and cast a discordant light show onto the wall. Cecilia gestured toward the kitchen: You first.
Luz walked to the entrance. Oziel was there, bent over the cutting board. He wore an apron and wielded a chopping knife. His gold tooth shined.
“Greetings, Luz!” He spread his arms. “I gave Ninfa the night off, as I shall make you dinner myself.” The point of the knife veered toward her before he returned to dicing an onion.
“It smells good,” Luz said tactfully. “I thought you were gone until tomorrow.”
“Business concluded early.” He glanced at her, at her legs where sweat had dried in a delta through the dirt. “Why don’t you shower, put something nice on. I’ll have dinner ready shortly. I have a story to tell you, one I think you’ll enjoy.” He rolled the knife through the air. “I would worry Cecilia might have spoiled the surprise, but alas.”
Luz flinched as if she were the one without the tongue, but Cecilia gave no outward indication of having been offended. The sicaria gestured with her eyes to the stairwell, and Luz pivoted and marched.
While she showered, she wondered if the leñero had seen Oziel’s car return, if that was why he had told her to run. She wrapped her hair in the towel, then laid her mother’s white linen dress out on the bed and looked at it for a while. Luz wasn’t sure anything would have changed, though, if Onofre had mentioned the car. She still would have come back for the dresses.
She finished toweling off and slipped the dress over her head. It was soft and it fit well. The hem reached her ankles, but the fabric rested loose and airy. She stood in front of the mirror and smoothed the dress over her stomach. She sighed and watched the breath move through her body. She turned to her things and hefted the silver knife in its leather sheath. She put her foot up on the bed, raised the dress, and placed the scabbard on her calf. Her hands were shaking, and it took her a couple of tries to work the buckles. When she stood straight, the dress completely obscured the knife.
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