The Rest is Weight

by Jennifer Mills

  I can see the purple rag still floating off downstream and I decide to follow it. I’m thinking I’ll catch up to it easy, but the water’s moving fast and I soon have to skirt a bank of slippery mud by clambering over a rise. I lose it then, but track my way downstream anyway just to see what the water’s done to the land. The bed of the arroyo shifts a little every year as the flood shoves the sand around and carves its signature into the rock. The McGills’ fence is down and one of their horses is out. He’s standing across the other side of the wash and he bares his teeth at me when I pass. I wave at him. There’s nothing else I can do. The water’s too high to cross here and old McGill will come down soon enough. Round here we look after our own fences.

  I have to push my way through a web of prickle bushes and into some long grass and I’m glad I have the stick so I can whack the ground for snakes as I go. They usually come out after the rain, but I don’t see any. Eventually I come up the slope against a crook in the arroyo where I can see a way ahead. There’s a tree that’s half knocked down, bent over in the middle with its branches over the water as if it’s looking to see why its bed is so wet. There, suspended in a fork of those branches, I can see the purple cloth. Part of it is getting sucked underwater by a weight. A weight I can’t help looking at now.

  Border Patrol come down here all the time. They even let me ride in one of their trucks once, but not the chopper. There’s two Black Hawks they got and they can fly just as low as they want to. It’s supposed to scare the Mexicans out of the bushes. It scares the hell out of me sometimes. When they come on our land we bring them water or sometimes beer if it’s a hot afternoon, and I sit with them and watch what they do. Mostly they stare at the horizon and brag. That Ant McGill is a border patrolman since he finished high school last year. He says it’s better than the marines. He says they catch twenty a day just off of our half-dozen properties, flushing them out of the mountains like spooked rabbits. He whooshes his hands when he says this, and he grins.

  I clamber down the side of the arroyo to the water’s edge where the tree fork is pinned like a wishbone stuck in a throat. I shed my shirt and I sit down to unlace my boots. There’s no sense hurrying now. No sense at all.

  I wade out, hanging onto the tree as I go, testing the depth of the water with my stick. When I get to it I brace myself against the trunk to yank at the purple t-shirt. The weight is heavier than it looks and the fabric tears in my hands. I have to get my arms under the body and twist it around. I don’t mean to look in her face. I don’t want to take in her gaping eyes, her dumb open mouth, the flies. She looks about twelve, maybe younger. Under the shirt I can see the little tits starting to grow and I get a feeling in my groin I have to swallow.

  She doesn’t smell bad. She hasn’t been dead long enough. But I gag anyway. She’s a bit bloated. Must be from the water. I can see she’s torn her skin at the neck and chest, probably from the rocks on the way down. The wounds aren’t bruised. They can’t have hurt her. She must have been dead already. The coyotes haven’t got to her yet, the wild dogs I mean. I cover my mouth until I know I won’t throw up. The wall of the arroyo is probably too steep with a load. I turn her back around and grab her by the clothes so I don’t have to fetch at the raggedy skin. I fold her over my shoulders like a sack of feed and start to carry her upstream.

  It’s hard going. The water’s strong, it’s still in flood, and I can’t help thinking how much easier this would be when it dies down tomorrow. But at the back of those hills I can hear the thunder fussing, and I think Poppa was right. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the rain.

  As I wade, I start thinking about McGill’s horse and how I wouldn’t go tell him his colt was out. He’d only get pissed at me for interfering. If it was our fence line where the wire was broke it would be a different story. But I start thinking maybe the horse could get caught up in the busted fence. Maybe he could get his leg broke and have to be shot. I start worrying about the horse so much I almost forget the Mexican. Then I remember Ant used to ride that horse and that gets me thinking about Border Patrol and the way they talk. Sometimes when Poppa’s back at the house and I’m sitting with them they talk to me like I’m one of them. I asked them once what they do with the Mexicans when they catch them and they said some of them go to jail, but mostly they send them back. We shove em in a truck, they said, drive em over the border and leave em there. No use pushin em further. Most of em gonna try again anyway.

  The stream gets rocky in the part just around the bend. The walls of the arroyo are still too steep to climb so I put the Mexican down on a rock and try to drag her through the difficult part, sometimes pulling her by the armpits, sometimes lifting her over. When I have to lift her up over my head, the water from her clothes drips down into my eyes and I can’t see where I’m going. She’s a lot heavier than she looks. I lose my balance once or twice. Just when I think I’ve made it past the rocks I slip badly on some mud at the bottom of the stream and land on my face with the Mexican’s body on top of my head. I throw her off and wallow into the water to get the thick mud off my arms and face. It already stinks like the leavings. I wipe the mud off my face with muddy water and look back. The light is starting to fade but I can still see the tree where I pulled her out. I’ve hardly covered any ground at all.

  Then I curse because I remember I left my shirt back there, and my boots, and I’m crazy if I think I can walk home in the near dark with a dead girl and no goddamn boots on. Poppa’s always telling me don’t curse in front of girls. Laying on her side in the mud, her face away from me, the Mexican looks like she’s asleep. I can’t think what to do. I can’t hardly think at all any more. I have to leave her here. I have to just leave her here and figure what to do. I look around at the clouds, and I decide it isn’t gonna rain again. Not tonight.

  I run back for my shirt and boots, pull the boots on, tie the shirt round my waist and climb back over the rise. I pretend I can’t see the thunderheads hovering in the distance. It’s getting late, that’s why it’s getting dark. I cut through the long grass until I come back to the place where the girl is lying. I clamber down and drag her out of the mud and up to dry ground, out of reach of the wash. I pull her under a tree and leave her there.

  I run alongside the wash until I get back to the place where I left the frypan and paintbrush. There’s no gold in the pan, of course. There never is. All the good minerals were mined out of here years ago. Miguel used to say all the gold’s gone to California too. Poppa still thinks he’s gonna come across a nugget one day and all our problems will be solved. So he sends me down after every flood, but nothing ever changes.

  My heart’s beating hard now from running and I go through my pockets for a cigarette, remember I forgot the matches, give up and turn for home. The rumble in the sky could be thunder, could be a helicopter, could be nothing but the inside of my head.

  Ant McGill told me there’s too many people around here who protect the Mexicans. He said they’re all criminals. Most of them are carrying drugs and that’s why they never have id. He said the women only come here to be whores. I asked him what they do when they find a dead one. How do they find out who they are if they don’t have any id? He said they send them back like they found them. They let the Mexican cops worry about it. Mostly they never find their people. It’s their own fault, Ant said. They already chose to leave their people behind. He grinned and leaned down to talk into my ear, his breath stinking of tobacco and coffee. Some of them we don’t send back right away, he said. Some of them little Mexican girls. At the time I was certain he meant the live ones. But now I’m not sure.

  I get back to the house just in time for supper but I’m covered in mud so I have to shower first. My hands are steady under the hot water. I get the mud off but I don’t feel a whole lot cleaner after. Poppa doesn’t ask but I tell him I fell in the river. He doesn’t say a word, just raises an eyebrow and turns back to the cooker. We eat corn brea
d and bacon for supper and the corn bread’s fried in bacon grease and the smell of it makes me feel like I’m going to throw up again but I don’t say anything and I hold my breath to swallow and I get it all down.

  Poppa pats me on the shoulder as I go to bed, as if I’m a working animal, as if I have done a fair job. I lay down in the dark with my eyes open for a while. Then I turn on the lamp next to my bed and lay there for a while more with the light on listening to the thunder outside. It’s set to moaning like an old dog. Finally I pull the photo of the old Mexican lady out from under the lamp. Maybe she has the same features, but they all look kinda the same. The girl’s dead eyes looked more like the dead eyes of an animal than the living eyes of another person. I’ve only seen animals dead before. I put the old lady back and turn out the light and I go to sleep.

  I dream I am hiking the trails through the back country down near the border. Hot hills and ocotillo. The sun on my back. Mexican garbage all over the place. A shoe worn through, an empty juice bottle. Corn chips and Red Bull. A tiny pink schoolbag. I’ve never seen them and I don’t see them in the dream, but wherever I go I see their traces along the trails. In my dream the trash gets thicker and thicker until it’s piled so high I can’t get through. I push and push but I can’t get through. When I wake up it’s raining again. It’s raining again and I don’t move.

  Heat

  Ant finds the apprentice sleeping in his Mazda out the back of the shop. His first reaction is to bang the ratchet driver he’s holding on the bonnet of the kid’s car in the hope it’ll rouse him, but when he looks again the boy hasn’t moved. His head has sunk into the collar of his polo shirt. For a second Ant worries he might have died in there, but when he shuffles up to the window he can see the kid’s chest rising and falling under the shirt. The light is dull through the tinting and the kid’s face looks puffy and vague. Ant scuffs at a tyre, steps back and clears his throat. The boy wrinkles his nose but he still doesn’t move. The young do sleep long, Ant thinks, inhaling, holding the air in his chest until it hardens. Something about their hormones. He leaves him be.

  Half an hour later the kid comes in the front door, hardly straighter, yawning.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I overslept.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ant says, and checks his growl. ‘Doesn’t matter now.’ The slouching annoys him. He wonders how you’re supposed to tell if it’s drugs.

  Later, he is close to asking the kid what the story is, even clears his throat to start a couple of times, but first the phone rings and then he’s having trouble with the lines on a genny, a simple enough problem that he shouldn’t need the kid to help him solve. After he’s seen the boy suck diesel from the hoses, watched his lips pinch, his cheeks hollow in, watched him spit, he doesn’t feel much like talking. So he leaves it, hopes the kid gets his shit together for Monday.

  There are seven mechanics in Airdale and everyone has more work than they can take. Sometimes he thinks about packing up and making it six. God knows he’s almost old enough. But he can’t refuse the work and, anyway, he’d go batshit rattling round a house all day.

  This particular kid has been around for four months. He might last and he might not. The last one took off after a fortnight, the one before that almost managed a year. In a highway town the work’s never-ending but the kids are all romantic. Not interested in staying with the work and making a go. They’d prefer to hood their haircuts and head out elsewhere. This one started good, enthusiastic even, but that’s been tarnishing. Lately he’s been getting that drifty look they get, the tapping foot and odd little frown. A couple of times Ant’s caught him staring up from an engine, hands still, eyes on the empty road. Away with the fairies.

  The kid doesn’t show up Monday, Tuesday and when he does come early on Wednesday it’s on foot and looking scurvy.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? I called you a dozen times.’

  ‘I lost my phone.’

  ‘What happened to your car?’

  ‘Sold it.’ The boy shrugs and disappears under the bonnet of a Falcon. His movements are slow and focused, beyond reproach.

  ‘What for?’

  He means why but the boy says, ‘Eight hundred.’

  Ant reckons he’s lying, probably wrapped it round the cenotaph on Friday night, but he retreats. You can’t push them, they just up and go. You have to let them fail. But only to an extent. Because if the kid fails too much then they both do.

  The boy’s ten foot away, beyond contact through the perspex window that separates the shop from the office. Ant watches him, his own hands dangling out a bit from his waist. It’s the habit stance of a muscular man, but he’s lost most of his form since he gave up fighting. The job keeps you fit, but with the kid around to take the grunt work he’s dropping bulk. The kid’s shoulders, round and hard as apples, hang in the air over an engine. He’s broadening up. Ant sniffs and plonks down on the wonky swivel chair to squint at the computer. There’s a stack of paper invoices and handwritten receipts waiting to be transferred into the system and he needs to get the wages done. Without the boy around the last couple of days he hasn’t had time to go near it.

  The kid has mocked him for keeping paper, for his one-finger typing. Not openly – he’s still the boss – but sometimes he catches him watching with a slight smirk. Ant won’t let the boy run the invoices through the system. It’s not that he’s unreliable, or no less reliable than anyone else has been. He’s got to learn at the right pace is all. Spread things out. If I needed an office girl, I’d get one, he’s thought of saying, but he does need one. He just can’t afford it. God knows he put off hiring an apprentice for as long as he could, and then only did it because of the incentives. Nothing about the kids he’s had through has made it seem like the right decision.

  Ant starts running papers through his fingers, counting with his calloused thumb. He takes a phone call from a guy who wanted his vk back last week; he promised he would have it yesterday. Angry guy, now. Testy voice.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘My fault. Off my feet.’ He raises his voice to say this, loud enough so the kid can hear he’s being covered for, but the boy doesn’t register. Ant hangs up the phone, goes to the office door and lingers, watching. The boy dangles over the engine, loose like he’s not really concentrating. Sometimes that’s the mark of a good mechanic and sometimes it’s the mark of an idiot. Ant still hasn’t made up his mind with this one.

  ‘You taking your sick leave?’ he calls out. There’s no reaction. He walks over to the kid, repeating himself. Still no response.

  The boy’s face leers out from the dark across the engine. It’s blank and hard, strangely grey. Ant wonders again if he might have a drug problem. But the kid takes out his earphones and the blank look goes. There’s a rattle of that music he listens to. Ant bites down on his back teeth.

  ‘What?’

  The kid looks nervous. Ant can smell something on him, fear and something else. His hair is sticking up at a strange angle. It might be deliberate. But it also looks like he hasn’t washed for days.

  ‘Just –’ Ant feels his chest tighten. Some buried reflex runs along his arms. He lets it go, pass through the fingertips and away. ‘Those last couple of days. You want that on your sick leave?’ He can’t make eye contact with him. It’s too dim.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Nothing more from the kid. No explanation. Ant’s not really angry; the anger’s in his body, just a habit, how it’s run. He should ask him if he’s all right, play the old dad, the kindly mentor, but he’s inundated, he can’t afford the time to listen to their problems. Can’t go getting involved in their girl trouble or hearing about their binges. So he gives him a stern look, and as he returns to the refuge of the office with its mess he feels the boy’s expression at his back. Ant sits down hard in the swivel chair, nearly tipping it. He takes two days off the kid’s accrued leave in the back of the wage book and
goes out to the yard to work on a truck so he can be alone.

  At day’s end, Ant is still hours away from finishing the truck’s hydraulics and the phone has been ringing off the hook. The kid won’t answer it, especially not with the earphones in. There he is, in the garage doorway, making for his car. About to lay into him for skiving off early, Ant checks his watch. It’s gone five-thirty.

  ‘You want me to stay back with you?’ the kid says.

  ‘Nah. Go home. Have a shower.’

  The boy flinches briefly and Ant wonders if he’s using too hard a tone with him. But really, who gives a shit. The kid stinks.

  On Thursday Ant makes sure they both go home at five, and on Friday Ant comes in early. He’s early enough to see the sunrise on the way in, to hear the magpies waking up. Early enough to drive past his apprentice walking down the road, moving away from the workshop, hands buried deep in his pockets, head down. He waves but the boy doesn’t look up. The shop is out on the highway, there aren’t any houses to the north, and there’s no reason Ant can think of as to why the kid would be walking around so early.

  He checks the shop, but there’s no sign of anything missing. An hour later the boy comes strolling in the front door. Ant almost lets it go again but the kid is still wearing his clothes from Wednesday and he doesn’t want to seem like he doesn’t care enough to notice.

  ‘Did you forget something?’

  ‘What?’ That sullen smile again, one hand stuck in the greasy hair. The kid leans back against the door of the Ford, his hips at an angle. His long-suffering expression, maybe, or the bend in one leg, gives him the air of a woman. His eyes seem not so much set back as drawn in, like a coiled spring. He has this irritating trick of not using them, not to show his feelings.

  ‘Did you go home for something?’ Ant should say what he knows but he wants to give the boy an out. Don’t make him deny it. Don’t set him up to lie.