María’s vacas snorted at me as I passed them. They sat behind a shaky wooden fence whose posts teetered at various angles, as if they were as drunk as Rogelio. I expected to see María tending to them, as the sun had been up for over an hour at that point, gradually baking the world around us. But she was nowhere in sight, so I pushed on toward Manolito’s.
My huaraches slapped against the dirt, kicking up dust as I walked, my heart a drum, beat after beat. Not from the activity, but from the anticipation. I came upon the well in the center of Empalme. It was a stone structure, small but dependable.
I gazed at the men gathered there, trading chisme, their long knives resting on their shoulders or against the well. No Julio. They glanced at me but otherwise did not acknowledge that I existed.
I was relieved. This was the best part of my day, and I didn’t want them to ruin it. What would Manolito have for me today? What story would he give me?
I passed la señora Sánchez, who was on her way for her daily allotment of water, and I greeted her, too, but we kept the interaction muted and brief. I picked up the pace after that, distracting myself with thoughts about los mensajeros that Manolito employed, who took packages and letters across the punishing desert up to Obregán, sometimes south to las aldeas that rested against las montañas down there. And what was beyond that? I didn’t know. But those mensajeros brought with them stories. Not the kind that I took from willing bodies, but those of their travels. Of what Obregán looked like. Of Solado, days and days to the north, so far away that few people ever had stories of that place. We were an isolated aldea, our ancestors few, and Empalme lay between two brutal ranges of montañas. I hoped that Manolito had some chisme he could pass along to me, anything that would make my world seem bigger. He was my only source. Los mensajeros did not live in Empalme; they only visited. So few of us had roots here in this aldea. We had a saying: If you left Empalme, you did not come back. As I sped toward Lito’s, I wondered if anyone else craved escape as much as I did.
Manolito’s mercadito rose above the group of homes built of clay and stone that stood around it, and it was still one of the biggest structures in our aldea. Most of Empalme was constructed of hardened mud, mixed by hand and then left to dry in the baking heat. But Manolito had connections. He knew people, people from cities like Obregán or Hermosillo, real places with mercados that were ten times the size of his own, that overflowed with food and wares from all over. His door was lined with some shiny stone he’d been given, but the rest was made mostly of wood from un árbol that grew only in the desert north of Obregán: whitethorn.
I stepped up to el mercadito and raised a hand to knock on it, but Manolito must have anticipated me. The door swung open away from me, and I stood there, awkward, my hand raised in the air. He laughed at me, the sound rushing out of him, his dark mustache drooping at the corners. “Xochitl, buenos días. What are you doing?”
I frowned at him, then shook my head. “You’re up early,” I said, pushing past him into the darkness of el mercadito.
As my eyes adjusted, he gave my shoulder a squeeze, then shut the door behind us. “Los mensajeros,” he said. “They just left.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. I was shameless, Solís. “Dame el chisme, Lito. I want to know it all.”
He chuckled at that, and I shuffled farther in. Ramona sold most of the food in Empalme; everything else fell on Manolito, who stocked anything a person might need. There was a stack of candles, in various colors and shapes, that sat alongside leather water bags. There were books, used and new, that Lito lent out to me if they’d not sold in a while, and I hoped he had something I had not read this time. Clothing, tools for hunting water, tools for hunting for food, building supplies, various pots and pans, rope—there was no real method to the way these things were organized. Despite that, Manolito knew where everything was.
I ran a finger over one of the shelves, and it came away coated in dust. “You need someone,” I said to Manolito. “Someone to get you to clean this place more than anything else.”
He grunted and walked slowly past me, toward the back of el mercadito, his shoulders hunched forward, his gait lazy. “There you go again, amiga,” he said, and he headed for the counter stacked high with mensajes. “Always thinking I need a woman.”
“This dust says it all,” I shot back. “You’re certainly not cleaning it.”
He looked back at me. “And if I fell in love with someone, they’d get me to tidy up the place? Or they would do it for me? Is that your reasoning?”
I flashed him a teasing smile. “Are you saying you wouldn’t like some company?”
He grunted and pulled the pile of mensajes—folded papers, stiff envelopes—into his arms and began to sort through it, quietly reading the names off the front. He handed me one for Mamá from her friend Xiomara, then asked me to drop off one for la señora Sánchez on my way home. When he put them down and gazed back at me, he groaned.
“I see that look on your face, Xo,” he said, wagging a finger in my direction. “I know what you want.”
“Tell me a story, Lito. Something new. Something
