Lester opens his eyes, looks at Emiliano’s legs stretched out next to him, and says weakly, “Your sister …”
Lester’s words, his face, everything about the man reminds Emiliano of his own ugliness. He has no intention of speaking, but the words come out of him. “Went for help.”
“Why?”
“She wanted you to live.”
Lester sticks out his tongue to moisten his lips. Emiliano reaches for the bottle of water and pours a few drops into the man’s mouth.
“Guy I work for. He said … get the cell phone. Finish the girl. Let the boy go.”
“Someone hired you.”
“No. A favor to … some big shot in Juárez. I follow orders. He said to take his nephew … Joe. That guy. Back there. Ran away. He’s a coward.”
“And you are?”
“No. Not a coward. Worse. Your sister … she’s so pretty.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m sorry. Couldn’t kill her. So pretty. That … saved her. When you think about it.”
Emiliano watches Lester. It’s confusing. It’s like seeing evil and some kind of goodness and innocence all rolled into one, inseparable. Lester opens his mouth to take in more oxygen. Any moment now Emiliano expects him to stop breathing. Instead, he sees the man swallow hard. He’s trying to speak.
“Don’t talk,” Emiliano says to him.
“Wall … wallet.”
Emiliano reaches in the man’s back pocket and takes out a bulging brown leather wallet. He shows it to the man. The man is dying. Emiliano is keeping him alive and he’s worried about his money.
“Open.”
Emiliano opens the wallet and shows him the bills. “All still there,” he says bitterly.
Lester shakes his head. “Yours. Take it.”
Emiliano closes the wallet and puts it next to the man’s shoulder. “No want your money,” he says with the best Mexican accent he can come up with.
“Please,” Lester says. He speaks clearly for the first time. “Thousand dollars. For you. To get away. Please.”
“No.”
Emiliano lifts his hand and removes the wet bandage from the wound. He waits a few moments. There’s no blood flowing. Then out it comes again, with more force. Emiliano rips another piece of cloth from Lester’s shirt. He balls it and presses down again.
“I’m gonna die.”
“Probably. Sooner if you talk.”
“Just before I came. I went and got … these copper-tip bullets.” Lester tries to laugh, coughs a few times. “My wallet. Please.” Lester takes the wallet with one hand and opens it. He gestures for Emiliano to hold it while he lifts a picture out of one of the wallet’s compartments. “My son.”
The boy in the picture is about seven. The smile has a gap where a tooth is missing and the face is full of freckles. Lester struggles to speak. “Lives with his mom. Over in Odessa. His mom and me divorced … when he was four. She doesn’t let me see him. Can’t say I blame her.” He shuts his eyes and then opens them. “I don’t mind … dying. Hell, I been killing myself. I only mind for … him. Jimmy.” Lester closes his hand around the picture. Then he closes the wallet and gives it to Emiliano. “If there was a way for you … to tell him. His daddy loves him. There’s a paper in there … with his momma’s phone.” He grabs Emiliano’s hand. There’s a desperate, wild look on his face. “I know I have … no right to ask. In my wallet, his mother’s phone. Can you call her? Tell her Les wanted you to give a … a message for Jimmy. Tell him his daddy loves him.”
Emiliano can feel in Lester’s grip all the force remaining in the man. The grip is as insistent as his eyes. He notices the scars on the inside of the man’s arm. Five or six old needle marks run along the contours of the veins. He thinks about Javier’s piñatas.
“Please. Will you call him?”
Emiliano nods. Lester lets go of Emiliano’s hand. Then he asks softly, “You still got your father?”
Emiliano shakes his head. The man will keep on talking until his last breath. “Yeah,” Emiliano says, pressing hard on the wound.
Lester winces. “It wasn’t supposed … to turn out like this. I wanted to be a real father to my Jimmy again. He needs to know … how much I love him. I don’t want to die with him not knowing … You tell him. You promise. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
Lester thanks Emiliano silently and then closes his eyes. Emiliano stares at him. This dying man’s last wish is for his son to know that he was loved by his father. He remembers the letter he read in his bedroom the night after the party. You don’t know how much it hurts me that you may think I don’t love you, his father wrote. He didn’t believe his father’s hurt was real when he read the letter, but maybe he was wrong.
Emiliano checks Lester’s wrist and waits until he feels the almost imperceptible pulse. In one of the wallet’s compartments, he finds a piece of paper with a telephone number. He takes it and puts in his pocket. He pours a small amount of water on the last piece of torn shirt and touches Lester’s lips and forehead with it. He is about to cut another piece of cloth from Lester’s other sleeve when he hears a sound. He stands.
Far away there is a white cloud on the east-west road.
Quickly, he bends down and wraps the wound as tightly as he can with the wet bandanna. Then he grabs his hat, the water bottle, and Hinojosa’s cell phone and climbs out of the gully.
Emiliano kneels behind the rust-colored boulders and watches the white truck park on the side of the road. Sara gets out from the passenger side, and then the driver steps out—a woman, blond hair in a ponytail, olive-green uniform, not much older than Sara. Sara leads the way toward the gully, her eyes searching the rocks where he’s hiding.
Emiliano sinks to the ground, relieved. Of all the people whom Sara could have flagged down, a park ranger is not bad.
A few minutes later the park ranger climbs out of the gully and runs to the white truck. She opens a tin box in the bed of the truck and takes out a green canvas bag. Emiliano watches her run back to Lester. Now and then the top of her head bobs above the gully edge as she ministers to Lester. Then he hears a hollow, throbbing sound, and when he looks up, he sees a helicopter approaching from the west. Emiliano climbs up a few yards and crawls under a rock overhang.
There, lying on his stomach, he watches the red-and-white helicopter touch down in a swirl of pink dust. The woman with the ponytail waves at the three men in the helicopter. Before the blades have stopped turning, two men carrying a stretcher with an aluminum suitcase on top jump out of the helicopter and run toward Sara and the park ranger.
How long does it take to lift a man onto a stretcher? Hours go by, or so it seems, before Emiliano sees the group make their way to the shallow end of the gully. Lester is covered with a gray blanket, a clear plastic mask on his face and an IV bag on his chest. He must still be alive. They walk, slowly, deliberately, in single file: the men carrying the stretcher, the park ranger, and finally Sara. Just before they emerge from the gully, he sees Sara take something from her back pocket and place it quickly under a rock.