“Fifty-four dollars,” said the towering monument of a manwho crowded out the others. There were four in all, big white men with knottedshoulders. They were untouched by dust and their shoes had no holes. Notfarmers, then. They wouldn’t be under the camp’s authority; she couldn’t askthe foreman to deal with them. They could strike her dead, if they wanted.
“I don’t have the money,” she said, though they must haveknown already she couldn’t pay. No one worked for wages in the labor camp; theyworked for food rations and, twice a year, new dresses, and, after five years,documentation papers. Glancing across the grizzled landscape of their sunburntfaces, she said, “I’m sorry,” and tried to shut the door.
The man stopped the rust-eaten aluminum frame with the toeof his boot and shoved closer. “We need the money. Your husband, where is he?”
“Gone,” she said. “I don’t know. I think he’ll be back, comemorning.” A lie: he’d been gone a month and probably would never come back. Ifhe’d been gone this long, he’d found work somewhere else—on the railroadsmaybe, or digging canals and holes for telephone posts in some city. She nevermade any effort to resent the abandonment. He’d kissed her forehead withsomething like reverence as he’d gone.
The man shoved past her. The scents of clay and machine oilclung to him. A thorn was stuck in his mud-crusted shirt, and she felt thestrangest impulse to brush it from his shoulder before it sank into his skin.He crossed the room in three steps to reach Sylvie’s cradle and produced ashining pistol from a holster at his side.
She’d never come so close to a gun. She heard herself whimperthe word no, and then she said shakily, “Don’t you touch her.”
“We will come back tomorrow morning for our money. And if wedon’t get it,” said the man, pressing the pistol to Sylvie’s forehead, “shewill get a hole in her little head.”
When the men shut the door, she was already calculating howmany miles she could put between herself and the camp before dawn. Maybe sheshould not have left the camp, maybe she was stupid to flee the only placewhere Arturo would ever think to find her, should he come back, but she foundthat she cared only for Sylvie. So she stole a mule and abandoned everythingbesides her dying baby, cutting through a hole in the barbed wire fence toreach the open desert. Before her, the landscape stretched out endlessly. She hadnot left the camp in close to a year, but knew secondhand that the road to thecity never forked. She thought only endurance was asked of her.
Over her shoulder, she remembers, she could see nothing ofthe fields or shanties. The dust silhouetted only what she expected: a singlefigure, four-legged and ridge-backed, lean and ravenous.
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When the boulders become a crush of stones underfoot and theheartbeats of the mountains fade deeper into the earth, Ana and Sylvie and thecoyote emerge onto a plain which is bare and crowded. Ana has known no desertso full of lifeless, twisted things: dead cactus, burnt and black; dead ramsburied up to their heads with their curled antlers sticking savagely out of theground like ivory flowers; dead crow’s skins, stuffed and mounted upon posts.The crows are the corpses of great explorers, the coyote says, brave intrepidmen named Cortez and de Gama whose bodies the gods used to line the road to thevalley.
Ana tries to imagine a valley in the land of the dead. “Withgrass?” she says. “With trees and water?”
“Grass and water do not make a valley,” says the coyote.
Further down the hillside, the land flattens out. The coyotestops to gnaw at the thorn in his paw and they slide down from his back ontothe hard-packed earth. Ana’s breath catches to see how the valley resembles thelabor camp after harvest-time, when the fields are lush carpets of witheredgrapevines and rotten peppers. She can almost see the women moving along therows, uprooting the last survivors. She is fearful of what secrets the desertmight hold, for nothing that looks so ordinary can possibly be safe, but beingtimid does no good in the land of the dead. Where there were corpses fashionedfrom maize, she had to see herself broken and crumpled; here, among the bodiesthat beckon ahead, perhaps she must point her own way.
“There is sometimes rain in this valley,” says the coyote.
“Rain?” She can hardly remember the meaning of the word inthe midst of whisper-thin gray dust and featureless sky. She is suspicious:“What sort of rain?”
The coyote trots ahead, panting. His tongue is the color ofcactus, and spiny all over. When tiny knives of rain begin to fall, they glanceoff him. Ana is not so fortunate. She doesn’t feel the little blades when theystrike her, but blood runs down her arms in hot rivulets.
She hitches her dress up to cover Sylvie, even know-ing thatneither of them feel any pain. For herself, she is not much concerned. Nomatter if the gods bury knives in her chest; as long as she has hands andknees, she will crawl out of their pit. The wind drives the knives sideways,blinding and deafening her, but she does not stop. Bereft of the landscapeahead and the coyote’s taunts in her ears, left with only the scent of thedust, she never stops, never slows, never lets her direction change. The valleymust end sometime, and then they will ascend back into mountains. She mightstill be confined in her sightlessness, but at least there she will feel theroughness of the rock beneath her hands and know she has made progress.
She cannot describe what she feels when she comes down hardon her knees in a well of mud. All that surrounds her is unsharp, soft and wetand wonderful. She wrestles Sylvie out from underneath the cover of her dressand presses mud into their foreheads and cheeks and lips. When she tears theknives from her eyes
