The Trace by Forrest Gander

Author:Forrest Gander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2014-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Toward La Esmeralda

For the next five hours, they let themselves steep in a cenote of silence. In the discomfort and brooding that follows confrontation, they sat next to each other in a dead space with the omnipresent sun melting the windshield. The episode at the lunch table looped through Dale’s mind, even as he forced himself to make comments now and then about the scenery, about anything else, in a voice that he tried to adjust so that he didn’t sound defensive or hurt. Hoa’s accusations, he told himself, were merely the product of long, relentless miles through the desert, the cramped confines of the car, and a wound they both carried. Her lashing out at him in that way was just so much water under the bridge. But every word he spoke sounded stilted or testy, and they sat two feet away from each other like strangers on a bus. And once again, the drive was taking far longer than he anticipated.

The paved road degraded into what they called in rural North Carolina “improved road” and the “improved road” yielded to a swervy runnel of gravel, sand, and potholes that went on chirring and dinging the underchassis for miles. At the side of a dirt road in the sun, they saw a brown dog sitting beside a dead dog that looked at lot like it. The living dog looked directly at Hoa as the car passed. Their eyes locked, each of them thinking what?

Hoa was sick, regretting what she’d said to Dale. But she couldn’t say anything more. The bouncing and jolting, the dog and the sun, all made her feel punch-drunk. Once it goes out of tune, she thought, it takes a long time to readjust the quiet to the sound of me. The trail bent south, and they climbed into mountains slashed by dark plutonic seams and glimmering quartz veins. From the corner of his eye, anxious about her, Dale could see Hoa lean one way and the other as he maneuvered slow twists in the graded dirt road unspooling between calamitous drops and intimidating masses of metamorphic rock.

“What are we averaging, fifteen miles an hour?” Hoa asked matter of factly. Her voice sounded gargled with the car’s shuddering. Her first words since lunch. “There’s no way trucks with ore from Sierra Mojada could be using this road.”

He was quiet a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes behind his sunglasses. Was that more exasperation and weariness in her voice? Was she simply trying to make conversation? She turned to her window.

“I don’t know,” Dale said. They hadn’t glimpsed a pueblo since Ocampo. In fact, they’d seen few human structures at all, but for occasional barbed-wire fences and cattle guards, or smaller dirt roads that led, he supposed, to ranches, although whether that meant wide tracts of fenced desert or little compounds where someone actually lived, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes modest adobe houses were visible, limned by dusty mesquite trees, or by stunted, thin-boled oaks.

They descended slowly along

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.