A few months later, Lane and Ev play basketball in the cracked driveway, weak spring sun traversing their spines. Ev dribbles through his legs and swishes past his father to score a layup, but Lane thinks of a recent pipeline fracture around Lubbock. A gelding took off by leaping across a fence, and when they found him in the long corridor of a corn field, they pried his teeth open for the bit and found his tongue all inky shine, an ominous rainbow in black from drinking water at the stream. No choice, they put the poisoned horse down, and Lane wonders how much the creature could’ve ingested, if it was any more than the milliliters the doctor slips into his bloodstream every week.
Just then, Ev barrels at him, elbow flailing, but Lane sidesteps and dodges the blow. His body locks, tensing for disaster, and doesn’t relax.
Idiot, Lane cries out, grabbing Ev’s collar and shaking him with fury.
Dad, Ev says, slowly wedging his fingers in the tight spaces between his father’s digits. He looks away from Lane’s gaze—he has been nervous ever since the veins in Lane’s eyes turned black from the oil treatments. What are you doing?
Lane isn’t usually prone to anger, but he understands his body as weaker now, even if it thrums with energy. What runs through him is volatile, not meant to spill out of the web into the rest of the cells. The safety he believed in before is tenuous. Slowly, he steps back, straightens his son’s shirt at the shoulder blade, and retreats to the house.
It takes less than purposeful violence to empty a vein, just him dressing for church, while Ev complains about hating the preacher. It’s then, as Lane agitatedly pulls clothes from his closet, that a belt buckle smacks into his eye. Searing pain blacking out his vision, and then he realizes that it’s not just that, but oil leaking out, dripping down his cheek. He touches it again and again, smearing it around in his soft under-eye region. Someone pulls him along urgently.
Don’t look, Ev, Katherine says, closing the bathroom door. She positions Lane under the light and tries to open his lids wider, but he winces. The half of his face covered in oil is burning, like the skin is freckling into a thousand sores.
Katherine wets the cloth under some water and presses it to his face, but it doesn’t help. His eye is hot and somehow it doesn’t seem as solid. Like pudding on a stove, like jelly mixed hard with a spoon. He can’t see right, his vision teeters, unbalanced.
You should look at yourself, Katherine says. You should see what you let them do.
In the mirror, he has only one eye. The other is a dark, empty space, the inside burned away. He is raw, he is forever changed. When he looks back at Katherine, he sees that Ev has come inside anyway, though he hides his face in his mother’s blouse. She is crying.
No one told him about these close-up consequences of a leak. Maybe the Lubbock ground aches too, the gelding just the visible harm. Lane wonders if they’ll have to put him down now. When he looks at his family’s faces, fighting the dizziness latched on like a mask over his mouth and nose, he understands what Katherine meant that first day when she begged him to spare his eyes. Once the three of them owned the looks between them; no longer.
Caravan
PEDRO INIGUEZ
Rudy raised his arm and wiped the sweat from his brow. Around him, thousands of people from the caravan settled into the Zócalo in Mexico City. Here and there, volunteers wove their way through the crowd, dispensing food, medical aid, and clothes.
A light-skinned boy named Enrique who’d traveled in Rudy’s immediate clique received a pristine Cruz Azul cap from a generous woman. She caressed his face and made friendly chatter with his father, Guillermo, the fat man from Honduras. Rudy looked at his own arms. They were dark, and shimmering with sweat. A group of curious onlookers gave them cold stares, as if looking upon a herd of animals.
Rudy’s mother pulled him close. “Mijo, stay close. Stray children have been known to get snatched here.”
Rudy turned his head to look up at her.
“This world is full of monsters. They kidnap children and demand ransoms or sell their organs on the black market. We’re not in Guatemala. People disappear here all the time.”
“Monsters?” Rudy asked. He wanted to ask what she meant but he knew better than to question his mother.
They walked inside a large tent and received the best meal he’d had in weeks, since crossing the border into Chiapas: a bowl of rice, beans, corn, and tortillas.
“Enjoy,” his mother said. “It only gets harder from here.”
The nights were the worst for Rudy. He sat beside himself and wrapped his arms across his chest and shivered in front of the campfire. He looked at the people around him as the light danced across their bodies. Their faces looked gaunt and pale, like corpses. Many had grown thin, relying on the generosity of strangers for food. He’d spotted some of the men catching rats and bashing them against rocks and grilling them over the open flames.
Some of the older travelers stayed behind to wither away as their feet could no longer carry them.
Tonight, they camped outside San Miguel, Sinaloa. His mother had left for town to scavenge for dinner. She often left him alone at night, as she offered her services to old townsfolk or to local butchers who detested cleaning the bloody counters and allowed her to do it in return for scraps.
As he waited for his mother to return, he made a game of counting the people in his clique. He counted fifty. The group had thinned out over the last month. Many of them disappeared during the night. Some, he’d overheard, had turned back as the trip dragged
