Hiking in the Sonora (short story - 3400 wd)
William Penrose, 2005
“There are no mistakes?” she asked across her newspaper.
Paul looked up from the neat array of papers fanned across the desk. He had jotted a list of figures on a legal pad, added them, added them again.
“I can’t find any. We’re out of money.”
“The house? The car? No equity there at all?”
“All hocked to the limit. We got the letter of foreclosure four days ago.”
“The bank?”
“About $750 overdrawn. And that’s without paying down any of the credit cards.”
“Well, we agreed to this, didn’t we?”
He nodded. They had indeed. Deciding on this course had been easy, seven years ago. It had been a subject of dark humor between them, and a source of concern to their friends. Eat dessert first, they had said, and laughed.
From the file drawer beside his desk, he withdrew the file that he’d started in 1998. The bottom-most sheets of paper bore the original calculations. Beginning with the lump-sum kiss-off from the company, they could live almost indefinitely on the edge of poverty. Alternately, they could live as they always had - nights at the opera, wine with dinner, mornings at the tennis club, vacations in Europe.
He had calculated the money would last five years. In fact, they had made it for seven. When the original investment ran dry, they had found money in all sorts of unexpected places. They discovered E-Bay and sold their rare books and jewelry. They found forgotten insurance policies. Eventually, however, it had to run out.
Now ‘eventually’ had become ‘today’.
“Now we move on to Phase 2, I guess,” said Pearl.
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“Silverbell, north of Tucson. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, without inflection. "So soon." Her gray eyes never moved from his.
Paul got out the map and showed her the route they would follow.
At 73, they were in excellent physical shape, more like 50-year olds. Even so, they made love that night with an intensity that was unusual. In the morning, as the sun rose, Pearl cooked a breakfast of bacon and eggs. There was no toast, because there was no bread. Breakfast used the last of their eggs.
They packed two quarts of water and a tube of sunscreen into each backpack. After a shower, they dried each other and dressed in khaki shorts and shirts and their expensive hiking boots. They deliberately left their breakfast dishes on the table, the bed unmade, and the television set on. It would have to look as though they were expecting to be back that day.
Paul moved the big Lexus LX from the garage while Pearl carefully set the intrusion alarm and locked the house.
Their next-door neighbor, Judd, was raking his red gravel front yard. In the summer, it was smart to get outside work done before the sun rose and the temperature shot up over 110 degrees. He raised his hand in greeting.
“’Morning, Paul. You two are just going, going, going, all the time. Where do you get the energy?” He stooped and picked up a handful of debris. “Where are you off to, today?”
“Oh, Pearl and I are going to check out an old mining town near Tucson,” said Paul, forcing a cheery tone. “Just a day trip.”
“Enjoy,” said Judd, and turned back to his raking.
They drove southeast from Chandler on I-10. After an hour, they left the freeway and headed west. The road crossed the flat land for fifteen miles, and began a shallow climb toward the mountains, among the saguaro, palo verde, and mesquite. When the mine buildings came in sight, Paul pulled off the road, although they had seen no cars going in either direction. He peered at the map, and soon found the turn onto a rough dirt road. They climbed steeply towards a saddle between two peaks. Looking back, they could see clear across the Avra Valley.
At last the powerful SUV threatened to become pinned on the rocks. It was just as well, for the gas gauge sat only a hair above empty. Paul searched for a steep slope and parked at the top.
The sun beat harshly as they stepped onto the sand, took out their backpacks, and carefully sorted the contents: water, sunscreen, power bars, map, pencil, light jacket, flashlight, knife, rope, blood pressure pills. Pearl also had her little CD player and headphones, which she insisted on taking along wherever they traveled.
She fussed with her pack, saw him watching her, and smiled. Thin white hair curled out from under her hat brim, and deep wrinkles framed her eyes, but they were the same gray eyes that had first seduced him, fifty-two years ago. They had set out hopefully together, not knowing how long the trail would be, or where it would lead. Nor did they know where the end of the trail would lie, or whether they would arrive there together.
He opened the door of the Lexus and released the hand brake. The big white vehicle rolled down the hill, lurching over the stones, until it jarred to a halt against a granite rock the size of a refrigerator. It looked as he had hoped it would, an unfortunate twist of the wheel, an accident far away from help.
Pearl caught him watching the vehicle a moment too long, and said, “Let’s go.”
They walked easily down the southwest slope of the saddle, following the remains of the road, until it dissolved into unbroken desert. The tumbleweed scratched at their bare legs before they found a wash wide enough to walk in. Although the soft sand was difficult footing, it was easier than trying to penetrate the brush. The wash also offered occasional sparse shade, when an ironwood or palo verde hung over the sandy track.
They took time to appreciate the things of Nature around them. In the heat of the day, there were few animals about. A cactus wren perched on a thirty-foot saguaro beside the wash. Barrel cactus, fortified by the last monsoon rain, bloomed yellow and salmon pink. The hot desert smelled like burned sugar in the rising heat.
They found the desiccated carcass of a javelina against the side of a wash. Pearl looked at Paul in alarm and clutched at his hand.
Soon the wash joined a larger, meandering one. Their boots sank deeper in the sand, and it was easier to bushwhack than follow the curving track.
Every so often, a fitful breeze cooled them, but for the most part the heat was unrelenting. About three in the afternoon, they sat with their backs to some rocks, drank some water, and resumed their trek south, toward the sun.
The heat grew more intense, even as the sun fell low in the sky, and they stopped long enough to drink more water. Now they each had a quart left. Sunset approached and high puffy clouds appeared. It was time to locate a place to stop. It was important to do this right. It would be their last night.
They turned to their left, where a low rocky ridge ran north and south. There seemed to be overhanging rock they could sleep under. This was generally considered a bad choice. But snakes and scorpions be damned, thought Paul, the heat is our enemy here.
The shelter was better than they supposed. There was a cleft at least six feet deep. Others had been here before, and dug a fire pit. Plastic water bottles and paper bags littered the area, and between two rocks lay an untidy pile of crumpled white paper. This would have been the toilet.
“Whoever did this had no respect for the desert,” said Pearl. “I’d like to smack their faces.”
The sky began to redden in preparation for a magnificent sunset. The high clouds were arrayed in puffy rows, silver and violet now. In a few minutes, they would glow mauve and blood-red. Pearl gathered up the trash and threw it behind some rocks, out of sight. Paul gathered armloads of saguaro skeletons. They burned as quickly as paper, and a vast number would be needed to build a decent fire.
When they finished, the sunset was at its height, a blaze of color as fleeting as life itself. They watched intently, their backs to the rocks, forgetting to nibble their power bars, as the light show changed from moment to moment. They burned the fire very low, conserving their fuel.
They had walked for seven hours, and fell asleep quickly. Their old joints no longer made it possible to sleep tangled in each other’s arms, as they had years before, but they always touched while they slept.
Sometime in the night, Paul awoke. There was no moon, but the Milky Way burned overhead, casting a little light. Paul could make out vague shapes. Nearby, something snorted. A herd of javelinas wandered somewhere out there. They probably smelled the power bars, or perhaps they were merely curious about the two intruders.
“Second thoughts?” said Pearl. She had been awake herself.
“No. Too late for that anyway.”
“We’re committed. It feels more strange than scary. We still feel strong and fit, but we can’t make our way back and we can’t call for help. We’re really going to die out here. Together.”
“Together.” He didn’t want to say more. The cold determination in her voice made him uneasy. In one or two days, they both would be dead, right here, or somewhere nearby. No one would be able to call it suicide. ‘2 Hikers Die in Desert,” the headline would read, but only if the newspapers chose to mention it at all.
They slept again, and when Paul woke, the earliest dawn glowed over the ridge with a light that did not illuminate. Orion still sailed high in the western sky. Staring up at it, he could feel the spin of the Earth.
“Do you hear that?” said Pearl.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You were always deaf as a post,” she said. “Listen.”
He heard them. Voices, low and distant. At least three or four people talking. Paul got out his flashlight in readiness. How could anyone be searching for them yet? No one would even know they were missing, and the information he’d given Judd was too vague to guide a search.
They stayed silent as the voices came closer. Coals still glowed in the firepit, and Paul added a few sticks to the pit and blew on them until a little flame caught. He sat on a flat rock and poked at the fire. Something about a fire made him feel more secure, even though a telltale column of black smoke rose straight up into the violet sky and marked their location.
The voices, close and in Spanish, ceased, much too abruptly. They had been spotted.
“¿Quiénes son usted?” A whisper from the dark, much closer than expected. He felt Pearl’s startled grip on his arm.
They sat in frozen silence until Pearl whispered, “He’s got a gun.”
“Who are you?” Paul, tried to keep his voice calm and commanding, the way he had with his sales force, a decade ago.
The dawn light increased slightly, as if on cue, and Paul was able to make out a squat, powerful man, nearly invisible behind a palo verde.
“We’re lost,” said Paul. He knew who these people were.
A swift shadow flickered at his side. Strong hands jerked him to his feet and felt around his waist and in his pockets. A couple of terse Spanish words. The hands gripped his shoulders and forced him to sit again.
The man with the pistol moved into the clearing, and other shadows began to materialize from the bushes, like ghosts.
“You’re sitting on our water,” said the pistolero in poor English. He would have to be the coyote, the guide for this group of illegals.
“We have only our own water,” said Paul, “but you’re welcome to it.”
The coyote thrust the pistol into his belt and pulled Paul to his feet. He grasped the flat rock that Paul had been sitting on, and shifted it with a grunt. He uncovered a narrow, deep hole.
“Our water is gone,” he said. “Se va nuestra agua. Where is it?”
“I’ve only got a quart,” said Paul. “A liter.”
Someone found the pile of empty water bottles behind the rock. “We have dying people, and we have no more water,” said the coyote.
Pearl said, “It wasn’t us. See? We have our own water. It’s a different brand from yours.”
There was some rapid speech, and Paul was pushed roughly to the ground. “It’s the Indians,” said the coyote. “They hate us worse than you do. They drain the water stations, and they find our supplies and take them.”
“You’ve got sick people?” said Pearl. “I was a nurse. Years ago, but I was a nurse for most of my life.”
* * *
At about nine o’clock, the sun was getting hot. Thirty-five illegals had disappeared among the bushes, taking with them Pearl’s still-unopened quart of water. They left a bottle with about three ounces. Paul warned them it was over twenty miles to the nearest road, and perhaps another ten to a source of water. He gave them the keys to the SUV, in case they could make some use of it.
The coyote left behind three people too sick to go on and two relatives who refused to abandon them, but it was difficult to tell if the relatives were any better off. All five stretched inert under a thin sheet of plastic lashed up against the cliffside as a sun shelter. Before leaving, the illegals had collected a formidable stack of dry saguaro sticks and left it near the fire.
“I think that circumstances have complicated our tidy plans.” Paul held an unconscious woman’s hand. “Now we’ve got to get help.”
Pearl nodded and made an apologetic smile. She had had nothing to drink this morning, and her voice was hoarse. “So how are we going to keep these people alive with this little trickle of water?”
Paul held the bottle by the neck, and was almost overwhelmed by the urge to swallow it all down. “We just make smoke and hope someone spots it soon.”
Pearl picked up a handful of sticks and put them on the fire. It flared up immediately and a puff of thin gray smoke billowed into the sky. But as soon as the smoke rose to the height of the ridge, the wind dispersed it.
One of the sick women muttered something.
“What, honey?” Pearl bent close to the woman. “Paul, she said something like ‘botella plástica … humo…’ Do you know what that means?”
“Well, ‘plastic bottle’, obviously, but ‘humo’? What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” She picked up one of the empty water bottles, and held it to the woman. “Plastic bottle,” she said. “¿Botella plástica? ¿Qué?”
A withered hand pointed toward the fire, and made a weak tossing motion. Pearl looked at the fire, and at the woman, and tossed the bottle into the fire. In seconds, thick smoke rose up, oily and dark.
“Now that’s real smoke,” said Paul. He felt excitement, but the effort of displaying it was too much.
Pearl gathered bottles into her arms, moving very slowly. Paul croaked, “Wait a bit. We can’t be sure anyone will see them burn. Let’s wait in case a plane comes by.”
“These people won’t last long,” she said. “But neither can we.”
“Just wait.”
They sat and waited and it grew hotter. Pearl got out her CD player and put the headphones in her ears. Paul lifted one earpiece. “Your hearing’s better than mine, or so you said. You listen for an airplane.” She made a face and thrust the CD player at him.
Time passed. Paul held the CD player in his hand. He flipped the player open. Enya. Pearl couldn’t get enough Enya. She had planned to die to the sound of Enya’s voice. He lifted the CD out and turned it over. A memory came flooding back. Something he had heard from another hiker, years ago.
He stepped into the sun. With his left hand, he held his fingers in a ‘V’ against the sky. Looking through the hole of the CD, he could tilt it and aim the reflected light between his fingers, as one would sight a rifle.
About noon, Pearl crawled on her hands and knees from one person to another, giving each a sip of water. She had to wrestle the bottle back from a woman who tried to drink it all. She offered the last tiny swallow to Paul. He shook his head, though his throat burned. She wet her lips and passed the bottle back. As he drained the thimbleful into his dry throat, a gust of wind blew into the shelter, hot and fierce.
Pearl dozed as the heat reached its peak. It was getting toward four o’clock. Her eyes popped open.
“A plane!” she said. “I hear a plane!”
Paul listened, but he could only hear the wind.
“It goes in and out,” she said. “It’s a long way away.”
“Now’s the time to make smoke,” said Paul. He didn’t want to waste energy standing up. He crawled on his knees to the pile of bottles and began to throw them into the fire. Pearl tried tossing sticks into the pit from under the shelter, but she missed more often than hit. The fire crackled and a column of smoke began to blow toward the sun.
“The wind is blowing the smoke away,” she said. The disappointment came through the dry rasp in her voice.
Paul forced himself to his feet, and took the shiny disk from his pocket. Stepping from under the shelter was like walking into a flame. He leaned against the rocks and peered at the horizon. A speck, like a fruit fly, moved against the horizon. It was too low to be an airplane. He hoped it would be a Border Patrol helicopter, searching for people exactly like the five Mexicans in the shelter. Plane or helicopter, it must be twenty miles away. He held up his arm and aimed the reflected beam between his fingers. He moved his arm from side to side, waggling the light beam at the distant object.
The wind abruptly died, and a great curl of black smoke rose into the air like a question mark. There was no time to gaze at its graceful curl. He had to keep the light flashing. He could no longer see the helicopter, and he moved the beam back and forth along the western horizon at random.
Dizziness threw him off balance. He had been in the sun far too long. When he drew his hand across his forehead; it was hot and dry. Heatstroke. He staggered into the shelter and sat down hard.
Pearl was on her belly, gathering the last of the wood and bottles and pushing them into the pit. The shelter spun around him and the world dissolved into frightening dreams and blasts of heated air, vivid images of flowing, icy water. Fully aware that he was dreaming, he watched a dragonfly flit across the water, a loud, clattering dragonfly, gleaming white and green. Its mighty whirring wings blew away the flimsy shelter.
Cold water trickled down his throat. This is what it’s like to die, he thought. He lifted into the air with a great mechanical howl and floated over the countryside, while drops of icy water continued to drain into his throat.
The floor vibrated against his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he saw only Pearl’s gray ones. He lifted his hand, which pinched, and a plastic tube draped upward to a plastic bag of intravenous fluid. The side door was open, and the desert slipped by.
Pearl reached out and grasped his hand, but there was not the smile he expected. Instead, the gray eyes were wide with panic and despair.
She had to shout over the whine of the turbines:
“Paul, what are we going to do now?”
[The End]
“There are no mistakes?” she asked across her newspaper.
Paul looked up from the neat array of papers fanned across the desk. He had jotted a list of figures on a legal pad, added them, added them again.
“I can’t find any. We’re out of money.”
“The house? The car? No equity there at all?”
“All hocked to the limit. We got the letter of foreclosure four days ago.”
“The bank?”
“About $750 overdrawn. And that’s without paying down any of the credit cards.”
“Well, we agreed to this, didn’t we?”
He nodded. They had indeed. Deciding on this course had been easy, seven years ago. It had been a subject of dark humor between them, and a source of concern to their friends. Eat dessert first, they had said, and laughed.
From the file drawer beside his desk, he withdrew the file that he’d started in 1998. The bottom-most sheets of paper bore the original calculations. Beginning with the lump-sum kiss-off from the company, they could live almost indefinitely on the edge of poverty. Alternately, they could live as they always had - nights at the opera, wine with dinner, mornings at the tennis club, vacations in Europe.
He had calculated the money would last five years. In fact, they had made it for seven. When the original investment ran dry, they had found money in all sorts of unexpected places. They discovered E-Bay and sold their rare books and jewelry. They found forgotten insurance policies. Eventually, however, it had to run out.
Now ‘eventually’ had become ‘today’.
“Now we move on to Phase 2, I guess,” said Pearl.
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“Silverbell, north of Tucson. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, without inflection. "So soon." Her gray eyes never moved from his.
Paul got out the map and showed her the route they would follow.
At 73, they were in excellent physical shape, more like 50-year olds. Even so, they made love that night with an intensity that was unusual. In the morning, as the sun rose, Pearl cooked a breakfast of bacon and eggs. There was no toast, because there was no bread. Breakfast used the last of their eggs.
They packed two quarts of water and a tube of sunscreen into each backpack. After a shower, they dried each other and dressed in khaki shorts and shirts and their expensive hiking boots. They deliberately left their breakfast dishes on the table, the bed unmade, and the television set on. It would have to look as though they were expecting to be back that day.
Paul moved the big Lexus LX from the garage while Pearl carefully set the intrusion alarm and locked the house.
Their next-door neighbor, Judd, was raking his red gravel front yard. In the summer, it was smart to get outside work done before the sun rose and the temperature shot up over 110 degrees. He raised his hand in greeting.
“’Morning, Paul. You two are just going, going, going, all the time. Where do you get the energy?” He stooped and picked up a handful of debris. “Where are you off to, today?”
“Oh, Pearl and I are going to check out an old mining town near Tucson,” said Paul, forcing a cheery tone. “Just a day trip.”
“Enjoy,” said Judd, and turned back to his raking.
They drove southeast from Chandler on I-10. After an hour, they left the freeway and headed west. The road crossed the flat land for fifteen miles, and began a shallow climb toward the mountains, among the saguaro, palo verde, and mesquite. When the mine buildings came in sight, Paul pulled off the road, although they had seen no cars going in either direction. He peered at the map, and soon found the turn onto a rough dirt road. They climbed steeply towards a saddle between two peaks. Looking back, they could see clear across the Avra Valley.
At last the powerful SUV threatened to become pinned on the rocks. It was just as well, for the gas gauge sat only a hair above empty. Paul searched for a steep slope and parked at the top.
The sun beat harshly as they stepped onto the sand, took out their backpacks, and carefully sorted the contents: water, sunscreen, power bars, map, pencil, light jacket, flashlight, knife, rope, blood pressure pills. Pearl also had her little CD player and headphones, which she insisted on taking along wherever they traveled.
She fussed with her pack, saw him watching her, and smiled. Thin white hair curled out from under her hat brim, and deep wrinkles framed her eyes, but they were the same gray eyes that had first seduced him, fifty-two years ago. They had set out hopefully together, not knowing how long the trail would be, or where it would lead. Nor did they know where the end of the trail would lie, or whether they would arrive there together.
He opened the door of the Lexus and released the hand brake. The big white vehicle rolled down the hill, lurching over the stones, until it jarred to a halt against a granite rock the size of a refrigerator. It looked as he had hoped it would, an unfortunate twist of the wheel, an accident far away from help.
Pearl caught him watching the vehicle a moment too long, and said, “Let’s go.”
They walked easily down the southwest slope of the saddle, following the remains of the road, until it dissolved into unbroken desert. The tumbleweed scratched at their bare legs before they found a wash wide enough to walk in. Although the soft sand was difficult footing, it was easier than trying to penetrate the brush. The wash also offered occasional sparse shade, when an ironwood or palo verde hung over the sandy track.
They took time to appreciate the things of Nature around them. In the heat of the day, there were few animals about. A cactus wren perched on a thirty-foot saguaro beside the wash. Barrel cactus, fortified by the last monsoon rain, bloomed yellow and salmon pink. The hot desert smelled like burned sugar in the rising heat.
They found the desiccated carcass of a javelina against the side of a wash. Pearl looked at Paul in alarm and clutched at his hand.
Soon the wash joined a larger, meandering one. Their boots sank deeper in the sand, and it was easier to bushwhack than follow the curving track.
Every so often, a fitful breeze cooled them, but for the most part the heat was unrelenting. About three in the afternoon, they sat with their backs to some rocks, drank some water, and resumed their trek south, toward the sun.
The heat grew more intense, even as the sun fell low in the sky, and they stopped long enough to drink more water. Now they each had a quart left. Sunset approached and high puffy clouds appeared. It was time to locate a place to stop. It was important to do this right. It would be their last night.
They turned to their left, where a low rocky ridge ran north and south. There seemed to be overhanging rock they could sleep under. This was generally considered a bad choice. But snakes and scorpions be damned, thought Paul, the heat is our enemy here.
The shelter was better than they supposed. There was a cleft at least six feet deep. Others had been here before, and dug a fire pit. Plastic water bottles and paper bags littered the area, and between two rocks lay an untidy pile of crumpled white paper. This would have been the toilet.
“Whoever did this had no respect for the desert,” said Pearl. “I’d like to smack their faces.”
The sky began to redden in preparation for a magnificent sunset. The high clouds were arrayed in puffy rows, silver and violet now. In a few minutes, they would glow mauve and blood-red. Pearl gathered up the trash and threw it behind some rocks, out of sight. Paul gathered armloads of saguaro skeletons. They burned as quickly as paper, and a vast number would be needed to build a decent fire.
When they finished, the sunset was at its height, a blaze of color as fleeting as life itself. They watched intently, their backs to the rocks, forgetting to nibble their power bars, as the light show changed from moment to moment. They burned the fire very low, conserving their fuel.
They had walked for seven hours, and fell asleep quickly. Their old joints no longer made it possible to sleep tangled in each other’s arms, as they had years before, but they always touched while they slept.
Sometime in the night, Paul awoke. There was no moon, but the Milky Way burned overhead, casting a little light. Paul could make out vague shapes. Nearby, something snorted. A herd of javelinas wandered somewhere out there. They probably smelled the power bars, or perhaps they were merely curious about the two intruders.
“Second thoughts?” said Pearl. She had been awake herself.
“No. Too late for that anyway.”
“We’re committed. It feels more strange than scary. We still feel strong and fit, but we can’t make our way back and we can’t call for help. We’re really going to die out here. Together.”
“Together.” He didn’t want to say more. The cold determination in her voice made him uneasy. In one or two days, they both would be dead, right here, or somewhere nearby. No one would be able to call it suicide. ‘2 Hikers Die in Desert,” the headline would read, but only if the newspapers chose to mention it at all.
They slept again, and when Paul woke, the earliest dawn glowed over the ridge with a light that did not illuminate. Orion still sailed high in the western sky. Staring up at it, he could feel the spin of the Earth.
“Do you hear that?” said Pearl.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You were always deaf as a post,” she said. “Listen.”
He heard them. Voices, low and distant. At least three or four people talking. Paul got out his flashlight in readiness. How could anyone be searching for them yet? No one would even know they were missing, and the information he’d given Judd was too vague to guide a search.
They stayed silent as the voices came closer. Coals still glowed in the firepit, and Paul added a few sticks to the pit and blew on them until a little flame caught. He sat on a flat rock and poked at the fire. Something about a fire made him feel more secure, even though a telltale column of black smoke rose straight up into the violet sky and marked their location.
The voices, close and in Spanish, ceased, much too abruptly. They had been spotted.
“¿Quiénes son usted?” A whisper from the dark, much closer than expected. He felt Pearl’s startled grip on his arm.
They sat in frozen silence until Pearl whispered, “He’s got a gun.”
“Who are you?” Paul, tried to keep his voice calm and commanding, the way he had with his sales force, a decade ago.
The dawn light increased slightly, as if on cue, and Paul was able to make out a squat, powerful man, nearly invisible behind a palo verde.
“We’re lost,” said Paul. He knew who these people were.
A swift shadow flickered at his side. Strong hands jerked him to his feet and felt around his waist and in his pockets. A couple of terse Spanish words. The hands gripped his shoulders and forced him to sit again.
The man with the pistol moved into the clearing, and other shadows began to materialize from the bushes, like ghosts.
“You’re sitting on our water,” said the pistolero in poor English. He would have to be the coyote, the guide for this group of illegals.
“We have only our own water,” said Paul, “but you’re welcome to it.”
The coyote thrust the pistol into his belt and pulled Paul to his feet. He grasped the flat rock that Paul had been sitting on, and shifted it with a grunt. He uncovered a narrow, deep hole.
“Our water is gone,” he said. “Se va nuestra agua. Where is it?”
“I’ve only got a quart,” said Paul. “A liter.”
Someone found the pile of empty water bottles behind the rock. “We have dying people, and we have no more water,” said the coyote.
Pearl said, “It wasn’t us. See? We have our own water. It’s a different brand from yours.”
There was some rapid speech, and Paul was pushed roughly to the ground. “It’s the Indians,” said the coyote. “They hate us worse than you do. They drain the water stations, and they find our supplies and take them.”
“You’ve got sick people?” said Pearl. “I was a nurse. Years ago, but I was a nurse for most of my life.”
* * *
At about nine o’clock, the sun was getting hot. Thirty-five illegals had disappeared among the bushes, taking with them Pearl’s still-unopened quart of water. They left a bottle with about three ounces. Paul warned them it was over twenty miles to the nearest road, and perhaps another ten to a source of water. He gave them the keys to the SUV, in case they could make some use of it.
The coyote left behind three people too sick to go on and two relatives who refused to abandon them, but it was difficult to tell if the relatives were any better off. All five stretched inert under a thin sheet of plastic lashed up against the cliffside as a sun shelter. Before leaving, the illegals had collected a formidable stack of dry saguaro sticks and left it near the fire.
“I think that circumstances have complicated our tidy plans.” Paul held an unconscious woman’s hand. “Now we’ve got to get help.”
Pearl nodded and made an apologetic smile. She had had nothing to drink this morning, and her voice was hoarse. “So how are we going to keep these people alive with this little trickle of water?”
Paul held the bottle by the neck, and was almost overwhelmed by the urge to swallow it all down. “We just make smoke and hope someone spots it soon.”
Pearl picked up a handful of sticks and put them on the fire. It flared up immediately and a puff of thin gray smoke billowed into the sky. But as soon as the smoke rose to the height of the ridge, the wind dispersed it.
One of the sick women muttered something.
“What, honey?” Pearl bent close to the woman. “Paul, she said something like ‘botella plástica … humo…’ Do you know what that means?”
“Well, ‘plastic bottle’, obviously, but ‘humo’? What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” She picked up one of the empty water bottles, and held it to the woman. “Plastic bottle,” she said. “¿Botella plástica? ¿Qué?”
A withered hand pointed toward the fire, and made a weak tossing motion. Pearl looked at the fire, and at the woman, and tossed the bottle into the fire. In seconds, thick smoke rose up, oily and dark.
“Now that’s real smoke,” said Paul. He felt excitement, but the effort of displaying it was too much.
Pearl gathered bottles into her arms, moving very slowly. Paul croaked, “Wait a bit. We can’t be sure anyone will see them burn. Let’s wait in case a plane comes by.”
“These people won’t last long,” she said. “But neither can we.”
“Just wait.”
They sat and waited and it grew hotter. Pearl got out her CD player and put the headphones in her ears. Paul lifted one earpiece. “Your hearing’s better than mine, or so you said. You listen for an airplane.” She made a face and thrust the CD player at him.
Time passed. Paul held the CD player in his hand. He flipped the player open. Enya. Pearl couldn’t get enough Enya. She had planned to die to the sound of Enya’s voice. He lifted the CD out and turned it over. A memory came flooding back. Something he had heard from another hiker, years ago.
He stepped into the sun. With his left hand, he held his fingers in a ‘V’ against the sky. Looking through the hole of the CD, he could tilt it and aim the reflected light between his fingers, as one would sight a rifle.
About noon, Pearl crawled on her hands and knees from one person to another, giving each a sip of water. She had to wrestle the bottle back from a woman who tried to drink it all. She offered the last tiny swallow to Paul. He shook his head, though his throat burned. She wet her lips and passed the bottle back. As he drained the thimbleful into his dry throat, a gust of wind blew into the shelter, hot and fierce.
Pearl dozed as the heat reached its peak. It was getting toward four o’clock. Her eyes popped open.
“A plane!” she said. “I hear a plane!”
Paul listened, but he could only hear the wind.
“It goes in and out,” she said. “It’s a long way away.”
“Now’s the time to make smoke,” said Paul. He didn’t want to waste energy standing up. He crawled on his knees to the pile of bottles and began to throw them into the fire. Pearl tried tossing sticks into the pit from under the shelter, but she missed more often than hit. The fire crackled and a column of smoke began to blow toward the sun.
“The wind is blowing the smoke away,” she said. The disappointment came through the dry rasp in her voice.
Paul forced himself to his feet, and took the shiny disk from his pocket. Stepping from under the shelter was like walking into a flame. He leaned against the rocks and peered at the horizon. A speck, like a fruit fly, moved against the horizon. It was too low to be an airplane. He hoped it would be a Border Patrol helicopter, searching for people exactly like the five Mexicans in the shelter. Plane or helicopter, it must be twenty miles away. He held up his arm and aimed the reflected beam between his fingers. He moved his arm from side to side, waggling the light beam at the distant object.
The wind abruptly died, and a great curl of black smoke rose into the air like a question mark. There was no time to gaze at its graceful curl. He had to keep the light flashing. He could no longer see the helicopter, and he moved the beam back and forth along the western horizon at random.
Dizziness threw him off balance. He had been in the sun far too long. When he drew his hand across his forehead; it was hot and dry. Heatstroke. He staggered into the shelter and sat down hard.
Pearl was on her belly, gathering the last of the wood and bottles and pushing them into the pit. The shelter spun around him and the world dissolved into frightening dreams and blasts of heated air, vivid images of flowing, icy water. Fully aware that he was dreaming, he watched a dragonfly flit across the water, a loud, clattering dragonfly, gleaming white and green. Its mighty whirring wings blew away the flimsy shelter.
Cold water trickled down his throat. This is what it’s like to die, he thought. He lifted into the air with a great mechanical howl and floated over the countryside, while drops of icy water continued to drain into his throat.
The floor vibrated against his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he saw only Pearl’s gray ones. He lifted his hand, which pinched, and a plastic tube draped upward to a plastic bag of intravenous fluid. The side door was open, and the desert slipped by.
Pearl reached out and grasped his hand, but there was not the smile he expected. Instead, the gray eyes were wide with panic and despair.
She had to shout over the whine of the turbines:
“Paul, what are we going to do now?”
[The End]