“Can we not do this so early?” Georgia asked.
“No,” Tino said, rising to his feet. “I want to know if we’re lost or what.”
“We’re not lost,” Jenna said before Jaila could.
Then Sunday went, “Says the pyro,” and it was an all-out war of words that had everyone shouting at each other. Tino got in Jackie’s face, and Jenna covered her ears with her hands, and Cody stood in front of Georgia, like he was going to protect her, though I might have been mistaken in my first impression of her because I didn’t think she needed any protecting.
Finally, David shouted, “Can we please, please just start hiking? Anywhere? Please?”
“Whatever,” Tino said. “But I’m leading today.”
“No one’s following you who doesn’t want to get lost,” Sunday said. “Jaila’s the only one of you who actually knows what she’s doing!”
“You think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t you?” Tino said. “We’re nothing but a bunch of fuckups, every one. We got a girl lighting shit on fire, a guy who gets off watching his sister, a closet case who probably pushed her friend off the side of that mountain, and you probably tried to blow up your school or something.” He shook his head.
“I’m not a perv—” David started to say.
Jaila cut him off. “We’re not lost,” she said.
“How do you know?” Cody asked. His voice wasn’t accusing the way Tino’s had been, but simply curious.
“Because,” Jaila said, hanging her head low, “I know something about being truly lost.”
“THE SUBJUNCTIVE”
by Alaya Dawn Johnson
IT WAS DARK when the girl arrived, at last. She had come from far away—never mind how—and she had arrived too late—never mind why. But she was here now, with dandelion seed–hair, wild and dusty from days on the high and twisting roads that cut through the valleys and low hills covered in cactus and mesquite and the occasional flowering agave. She walked through the sleeping town slowly, the soles of her shoes scraping the broken cobblestones of the main road. A passing dog barked a question at her, sniffed, and cocked his head in recognition.
Been a while, he seemed to say.
The girl nodded and winced. “Too long,” she whispered, because of the night and the quiet but also because the words had burned to embers in her mouth, and she was afraid that if she spoke too loudly they might go out forever.
She continued past the dog and the sleeping turkey hens and the low houses with their open porches and swinging hammocks, illuminated only by the silver light of a gibbous moon. It smelled still of woodsmoke from the fires that had heated the evening meal; it smelled of dust and dry grass and the muddy creek that passed just in front of the church. Home, she mouthed silently, and tasted its tiny spark.
She made her way to the church. The large wooden front doors were closed, but she knew the side entrance would be unlocked for the townspeople who sought religious solace after sundown. She walked around the old eighteenth-century building familiar in its cared-for decay, and ducked under the low-hanging lintel of the doorway. Someone else had left it open. Inside, half-burned candles flickered against the vaulted ceiling of the nave. They had been left in front of the figure of San Antonio Abad, that kindly white man with his shepherd’s crook and matted beard. There were carnations by the candles and little papers folded by his feet—prayers and supplications for the lost.
“You came back.”
The girl recognized the voice; she didn’t flinch or turn around. It was a ghost; it was her sister; it was the only person who could have felt her return to this place that had once been their home.
“He hasn’t returned?” the first asked.
The second girl took a step closer. The girl with words like dry tinder in her mouth, with dusty dandelion hair—she didn’t turn around.
“You know he hasn’t. You can feel it, can’t you?”
“Feel what?”
“The pressure.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the dandelion girl, though she did know.
“You’ve been gone too long,” said the other, and her voice was as long and twisty as a valley wind. “They found a coyote in the decline by the path up to the sacred well. An hour from town, Jaila.” That was her name, the dandelion-hair girl, the girl whose words were slowly going out.
“It could have just been an animal. Any old coyote, dead in a ravine.”
“With a patch of orange fur at its throat. With a scar by its eye and a knife in its ribs.”
Jaila closed her eyes and swayed. “What did they do with it?” she asked after a moment.
“Nothing. Left it there to rot. It’s just an animal, after all.”
“Just an animal.”
“Everyone suspects and no one will say. He hasn’t come back.”
“Who? The flowers here? The candles?”
“I was waiting— I didn’t want to go alone—” The second girl stopped abruptly. In the distance a dog barked, then two more, and they woke the roosters who started crowing to one another, louder and louder, just to see who would win.
“Ursula,” whispered Jaila, and the din smothered the hot, dangerous flame of the name—because that was her name, the other girl. She had a rope of black hair down to her waist and a huipil embroidered with feathers, and a wide, happy nose, the better to keep the wind in it. Ursula had always been friends with the wind—the only one as good at following a trail was the boy both of them loved.
And he wasn’t here to help them now.
Jaila put her hands in front of her mouth; her fingers seemed to glow where they touched her lips.
“What happened to you?” asked Ursula.
Jaila thought. Her gaze shifted from Ursula’s face to the shadowy murals tucked into the cupula of the church to the serene image of the saint standing in his niche. She had belonged to this place once; it had been familiar and kind to her. She had dreamed herself here so many nights. Was this another dream? How had she found herself, at last, upon the road? And if it were a dream, why was she still too late?
“I tried,” Jaila said.
Ursula frowned. “I needed you, little sister.”
“I tried!” And this time Jaila’s voice was a roar that burned her lips and singed the little hairs beneath Ursula’s windy nose. She quieted the flame again; she hoarded the embers. “They wouldn’t let me.”
“And now? How did you get away?”
They stared at one another, Ursula expectant, and Jaila distracted, confused by the question. She was here, the dirt in her sandals was the dirt in her hair, and it was like no other dirt in the world. And yet, she couldn’t remember . . .
Very near them, just behind the church, or just by Jaila’s elbow, a coyote yipped. The dogs whimpered and quieted. Ursula gripped Jaila’s hand. They ran outside to the open plaza in front of the church.
“Was that—” Jaila started, but Ursula broke away.
“Brother!” Ursula roared. “Vete a la chingada, hermano, is that you?” The wind blew down from the hills, blew down the howl of a coyote, distant now, and brushed against the church bell so that it rang just once. The world was still; the world held its breath; the world waited, as the two girls waited, for what that bell had rung into existence.
Now, behind Ursula, muddy tracks crossed the broken cobblestones, heading away from the gate. They had not been there a moment before. Jaila bent down and touched one of their crumbling edges.
“Coyote,” she whispered.
Ursula knelt beside her and sniffed. “The woods. The track to the sacred well. He’s still out there. We have to find him.”
“I can’t,” Jaila said. “I’ve only been there once. They don’t like it when I go.”
“We won’t go to the well, just around it. But he’s out there, Jaila! You won’t abandon him again, will you?” And Jaila heard, unspoken, all the holes that they had ripped in each other’s lives when she left.
J
aila nodded. Her lips were burning, her tongue was a twisted wick dipped in the oil of conflicting vocabularies and aspectual grammars. Maybe Ursula understood. She just took Jaila by the hand and led her away from the church toward the creek. They followed it silently until the town dropped away behind them. They climbed the hill and entered the path through the woods, dark and forbidding—darkened and forbidden.
* * *
The path was a slim red dirt line looping through patchy forest up here in the hills. In the dark, with the moon sinking rapidly in the west, it held different dangers than the winding desert roads below. Only the wind in Ursula’s nose, chasing and testing her, told them where to go when the trees blocked even the stars overhead. An owl hooted, three low beats. They flinched.
“We won’t die tonight,” Ursula said. Because that’s what the owl’s call meant on a night like this: an omen of death.
Maybe we won’t, Jaila thought, and then froze. Though she hadn’t opened her mouth, she had heard it, a voice not quite her own murmuring with the leaves and the wind.
“Did you say something?” Ursula asked.
Jaila’s mouth was burning again. She shook her head. After a moment Ursula shrugged and started again down the path. They continued for an hour like that, using roots and outcropping rock for handholds as the path got steeper. Jaila had to stop twice to catch her breath. She had a pack with a bottle of water still half filled, though she couldn’t remember where she had bought it. She offered it to Ursula, who took a swig and then let Jaila drink the rest. It had been too long; Jaila could see it in Ursula’s eyes. That pity and impatience, as though she were truly a foreigner.
“I’m trying,” Jaila snapped, unthinking. Her words lashed out like a whip and sizzled in the air between them. They smelled of sulfur and burning rubber.
“What did you say?”
Jaila realized that she’d spoken in the other language, the one that Ursula didn’t understand. She pulled out other words, placed them gently on the tip of her tongue, and let them fall with lazy sparks to the dirt and dry leaves at their feet. “Harder than I remember.”
A wind blew between the two of them, blew the sparks into the air where they were extinguished like fireflies. Ursula’s nostrils flared wide. “I smell it,” she said. “It’s down the slope there. The body.”
Jaila’s heart started pounding, fast enough to break. Ursula put her hand on Jaila’s shoulder.
“The body of the coyote,” Ursula whispered.
Jaila nodded fast. “Not him,” she said, and this time the words that slipped out were in the other language, the one that the trees and the rocks and the wind and the rain spoke up in these hills. Their fire was pure and blue and smelled of rain.
Ursula frowned at it. “How long have you been able to do that, Jaila?”
But Jaila didn’t say anything, because Jaila didn’t know. She followed Ursula as she veered from the path. In the dark Jaila would have stumbled straight over the edge of the decline, but Ursula hauled her back by the collar.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll go down.”
Ursula secured her machete in its scabbard on her belt and clambered over the edge. Her head quickly disappeared from view. Jaila waited. She wanted to join her friend and not let her face whatever was down there alone, but she knew that she’d never be able to scale the cliff safely in the dark. Ursula and the boy had always been better in the hills than Jaila. The wind rushed past her, spinning the leaves in circles. The owl hooted again, closer now. And then another animal, maybe a dog, growled softly just behind her. She spun around. The trees were quiet; even the mosquitoes seemed to be sleeping. She was alone.
The dog—or whatever it was—growled again. The sound came from deeper in the woods, farther from the path. She couldn’t see it for the shadows.
“Ursula?” she tried to call, but fear had banked the flame in her mouth. Her voice was the heavy smoke of wet kindling, and the wind blew it away before it could reach her friend. The animal shrieked, and now she recognized it for what she had feared: a coyote. And she was alone, undefended in its territory, with her back to a ravine. She couldn’t see well enough to run, so she unslung her pack from her shoulder and searched inside. She couldn’t remember how she got it any more than she could remember how she found herself on the road back to her most beloved home. Maybe it had a light or a gun or— Her hand wrapped around the hilt of a knife. She’d have been better off with a machete, but a knife was good; a knife she knew how to handle. The coyote howled. She wondered if it was alone; she wondered if it just meant to threaten her off or attack her. It howled again; from below them, as though from the middle of the rock itself, a howl answered. The two calls twined into a song, not as inhuman as it ought to be. Like horns at a funeral playing in mournful diminished fifths. And then, for a moment, like boys at four in the morning drinking Victorias and listening to sad ballads, a cry of pleasurable despair.
His name slipped from between her lips. She didn’t mean for it to. But she was staring into the dark of the woods, holding a knife, and she wanted so much for him to be there that she couldn’t hold it back.
She thought it was a bomb at first. It lit the trees, the hills, the cliff where Ursula had disappeared. Birds screeched and flew away, squirrels and moles and snakes scrambled from the underbrush. The closest leaves caught fire, which spread down the branches. She froze, staring at the damage she’d unintentionally caused. Where was Ursula? She couldn’t hear her friend anymore. She didn’t dare call out. The fire was high now, burning the hairs on her arms with its heat. Her lips, though . . . Her lips felt as cool as the bottom of a well.
A coyote walked from the fire. He was large, his head nearly to her hip, with a blond triangle of fur by his neck and a drooping right eye cut by an old scar. He bared his teeth. The knife fell from her grip and speared the earth by her foot. Ashes were raining around them like fat snowflakes; she had dreamed of snow once, back in the days when they had all loved one another.
The coyote nodded once and then turned around and left the circle of the burning trees.
She chased after him. She wanted to call out, but she knew the woods might not survive it. She’d go back to the cliff, she’d find Ursula later. Ursula would agree. She couldn’t let him go this time. Not if it really was—
She leaped over the thought just as she leaped over the roots and overturned trees in her path. The coyote kept just ahead, fast but not so fast that she couldn’t follow. Periodically, he’d stop to look back at her and jerk his head as though to say, Faster, string bean. Did you forget how to run while you were away?
They were climbing the hill, where the trees gave way to outcropping rocks and scraggly shrubs. She wasn’t sure where because he had left the path, and all she saw were stars and sky and dark blobs of trees in the distance.
They paused just at the edge of some kind of clearing. She stopped. Ursula was there, facing her across the darkness of the open space, as though suspended above it. The wind ran its fingers through her hair, brought the smells of the burning forest and wild coyote fur and the dried flowers crunching beneath her feet, right beside puddles of wax from long-expended candles.
“It brought us here,” Ursula called. “Why?”
“Where is here?” Jaila whispered, so that her intention could be discerned more by the pattern of smoke leaving her lips than the thready sound of her words.
Ursula laughed, and the wind kicked a spray of brown-orange petals into the void.
“The well,” she said, and the wind said, and the coyote said, just as Jaila felt sharp teeth—his teeth—bite hard into the back of her leg. She stumbled forward, but instead of rocks, her right foot encountered cold, dead air. She was on the edge of the sacred well after all. She hadn’t marked the edge, and so she overbalanced, and she fell in.
Ursula screamed. Her face receded more slowly than it ought to, as though Jaila were sinking into water and not miles of empty air. Then Ursula took a breath and dove in after
her.
* * *
Jaila had only ever been to the sacred well once. It was meant for rituals and sacrifices, solemn processions winding their way for hours through mountain paths until they reached the edge of the world. A hole in the earth, a navel in the belly of god, so wide and so deep that no one could see the bottom, or hear an offering crashing against it. It did not end—or at least, where it ended was not a place the way the hills and the rocks and the trees were a place. It was a conduit to the gods, a between-space, where in the right time and after the right rituals, the mundane world could communicate with the divine.
In the old days they had sacrificed humans above the well and then thrown their bloody bodies inside. They did it at the start of the rainy season, to give the gods their due and rebalance the scales of the universe, so that the rain might fall and the harvest might be good, and fertility of the earth renewed again for another hard year. These days they sacrificed turkeys and chickens, but it meant the same thing. The gods understood. A boy would fast for months beforehand, purifying himself for his brush with the gods. Jaila had come to the ceremony when she was eleven. He had been thirteen then, dark skin and long bones and a rib cage like a wooden box you keep fruit in. He had already been skinny, but as he fasted he grew into something else—frail and ferocious, like a sapling clinging to a cliff face. She had loved him before, but in an ordinary sort of way. He showed her how to knock down paper wasps nests and collect the honeyed combs; he brought her back the first young corn from the maize field; he called her “string bean” to her face and stupid names to impress his friends and then apologized after.
But on the day of the ritual, she saw him transformed. He didn’t look at her once, though he was nearly naked, and before it would have embarrassed him to be seen that way in front of the whole town. He stood calmly through the blessings, so still that she had nudged Ursula to ask if he was still breathing. His eyes were so wide, his pupils so black; even before the sacrifices, all he could do was stare at the sacred well.
The blood splattered him when he killed the chickens and turkeys. Jaila flinched, though not because of the death; she was used to that. It was because at that first moment, he had stared straight at the two of them, and something moved behind his eyes, something great and inscrutable and not him.
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