“¡Ya basta!” said Roberto, and he tugged his partner closer to him. “You’re just scaring them.”
“After what we saw? What we went through?” He scoffed. “They should be scared.”
Jorge walked up to the fire, maíz in his hands. “Enough of this talk,” he said, then looked at me. “Some people don’t make the journey, Xochitl.” He began to place los elotes on an old metal grating over the fire. “They turn back because it’s too hard, too long, or … well, they start to see things.”
Ah. The heat. I knew about that. But as I nodded at Jorge, Héctor stood again. “None of you believe me,” he said. He glanced down at Roberto. “I expected you to support me, but you’re a coward, just like it said you were.”
He walked away from the fire, off toward the fields to the east. Roberto gave us an apologetic look, but said nothing. He chased off after Héctor, and left us to ponder what this had all been about.
What had they seen? Why was Héctor so convinced we wouldn’t make it? What had told Roberto that he was a coward?
The maíz crackled and popped as it cooked, and Jorge started to hand it out after adding spices, butter, and some sort of white cream on top of it. When he handed me an ear, I realized how hungry I was.
“Gracias, Jorge,” I said, taking the food from him.
“It’s what I do,” he said. “Solís be willing, I help where I can.”
We raised our free hands and covered our eyes and then our hearts.
“Don’t pay too much attention to them,” he continued. “I’ve been hearing stories for years.”
“What kind of stories?” asked Rosalinda. Her son, who had remained quiet during all of this, was staring with his eyes and mouth wide open. Rosalinda gently tapped his chin with her hand. “¡Qué grosero, Felipe! ¡Cierra tu boca!”
He did, but he kept staring.
“I never know how much to believe,” Jorge said. “Mi familia … we have always been en este valle. Tending las granjas. The fields. The crops. There’s livestock to the east that my twin sister manages. I see her only a couple of times a year, she’s so busy.” He went quiet, wistful. “We don’t leave this place. There’s too much to do, and now that I help others … well, there’s not a whole lot of time to go exploring.”
Jorge spread strips of some sort of meat over the grill, seasoned them liberally, and flipped them over to do the same for the other side. We waited, eager to hear what he had to say next.
“So I take it all in,” he continued. “Los cuentos. I hear what people have to say. And I don’t know if the heat of Solís makes people imagine things or what. But something happens between here and Solado. People … see things.”
“What kinds of things?” Felipe’s voice was high but soft, his attention rapt, focused entirely on Jorge.
Jorge knelt in front of Felipe, and his smile lit up his face. “It’s nothing you need to worry about,” he said. “You’re brave, aren’t you?”
Felipe puffed up his chest and nodded.
“And you’re traveling with your mother, ¿no?”
Nodded again, harder this time.
“And neither of you will let anything happen to the other one?”
“Never,” Felipe said.
“Good.” He ruffled Felipe’s hair. “Then you’ll be fine.”
When Jorge returned to the fire, I nudged Emilia. “Did anything ever happen to you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I was with my father as we traveled south.” Then she pursed her lips. “Things happened, I guess. But it was always him that was happening.”
“So will we be safe?” I asked.
No one responded.
We looked to Jorge.
“The more of you there are, the better chances you have,” he said. “You’re all heading north for various reasons. Why not travel together?”
It wasn’t a bad idea. But where were the others even going?
“I would feel better if we had all of you,” Rosalinda said. “It’s been me and Felipe for a long time, and … it would make me feel safer.”
“I’ve been alone on my journey,” said Eliazar. “I could use the company.”
“I don’t mind,” said Emilia. “As long as I’m not taking anyone into Solado with me and Xochitl.”
“And what of the others?” I said, gesturing with my head toward the east, where Héctor y Roberto were last seen.
“I don’t think they’re going to continue on,” said Jorge, and he started passing out some of the meat he had cooked. “Not after what they saw.”
“And what exactly did they see?” said Eliazar. “Tell us. We can handle it.”
Jorge shrugged. “The truth.”
There was a terrible silence after that. “What does that mean?” I finally asked.
“That’s what Héctor said. He said, ‘The truth came to us, and it judged us.’” He shrugged again. “It spooked them out so much, they came back.”
We had nothing to say to that.
We settled in, spreading out our sleeping rolls, and Rosalinda spoke to her son in a soft, purring voice. Felipe was stretched out on his back, his eyes up to the sky.
Did these people celebrate at night, as we did in Empalme? It felt strange not to, but I guess we all did in our own way. We had eaten together. Now we were sprawled out, our eyes on the stars around us, and I finally felt calm. Comfortable. The stories had gone quiet; perhaps they were frightened by what Jorge had told us.
The truth awaited us in the desert.
What was my truth? What had I not yet revealed?
I thought of Manolito’s warning. I’d see him again when I was about to admit the truth. Would that be soon? What had I lied about?
So much, I thought. I had lied so many times in Empalme. Would this be a reckoning?
Perhaps. Perhaps I would finally face Your wrath after defying You. Perhaps You wouldn’t let me succeed in my attempt to rid myself of this power, to find a life outside of Your control.
I reached down then, dug around behind me
