Better close his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours. The only way he’ll make it at this rate is to walk in the cool of the night. He’s sleepy and the stars in Orion’s belt are trembling. It feels as if he’s going to fall into the sky. Is it dizziness he feels? Nausea? He wants to vomit, but what is there to vomit? That’s not good. He shuts his eyes. A coyote barks four times and then lets out a lonely howl. Another one responds. Emiliano wraps his hand around the sharpened stick. He’s so sleepy. Just two hours and then he walks. Find Polaris. Follow it. He won’t get lost if he follows the North Star.
A raindrop falls on his forehead and then another lands on his lips and his tongue licks the sweet moisture. When you are very thirsty you can taste the otherwise unnoticed flavor of water. It is sweet but not too sweet, bitter but not too bitter, like the perfect ratio of lemon and honey. It is a flavor that is both indescribable and absolutely right. Emiliano opens his mouth to receive the raindrops that are now falling one after another, like pearls in a necklace that has come undone. The drops soon turn into a torrent and Emiliano begins to gag with the water entering his mouth and throat and lungs. He tries to rise, but the water pushes him down. He hears muffled thunder, and then a rushing current crashing through the arroyo sweeps him up as if he were no more than a twig and slams him against protruding boulders. A crooked mesquite tree has somehow found a way to grow sideways from the walls of the canyon and Emiliano reaches for it and manages to hold on to a branch. He pulls himself up and hugs the slim trunk of the tree. But he can feel the water rising and soon it is up to his chin and Emiliano will drown unless he somehow makes his way to one of the top branches. He pulls himself up as high as the tree will bear his weight, and when he looks down, he sees a hand rise from the water and grab a lower branch. Then another hand reaches up and latches on to Emiliano’s ankle. Javier’s head bobs up from the water, gasping. How did Javier get here? The tree is not strong enough to support the weight of two people and it is bending and cracking as Javier manages to get a grip on Emiliano’s arm. Emiliano pulls his arm loose, but Javier grabs Emiliano’s leg again. Emiliano tries to shake his leg, shake him off, because what else can he do? They both will die if Javier doesn’t let go. Isn’t it better for one person to die than two? Javier holds on tighter, pleading, but Emiliano has no choice but to kick Lester in the face. Lester? Where did Javier go? It doesn’t matter, he’s got to kick himself free. He kicks Lester once and then again harder and then the branch Emiliano’s holding snaps and Emiliano falls into the roaring water and now it is his father holding him. It is his father’s hand that is keeping him from being swept away by the powerful current. His father is holding on to him with one hand and holding on to Lester with the other and Lester is holding on to Javier, who is holding on to what remains of the mesquite tree. It is Javier’s grip on the tree and Lester’s grip on Javier and his father’s grip on Lester that is keeping him from drowning.
Emiliano opens his eyes. Where is he? The sun is shining on his face. He sits up and looks around. There on the opposite wall of the canyon is the exact mesquite tree that appeared in his dream. It must be almost noon if sunlight is reaching the west side of the canyon. Emiliano tries to stand but his legs are weak. He crawls over to the east wall, where there is shade. He unfastens the water bottle from his belt, unscrews the top, and drinks the last gulp of warm water. His forehead is moist with perspiration. The damn dream made him sweat. Great! That’s just what he needed: to lose his precious sweat on a dream.
Emiliano places his hand over his heart, puts two fingers over the aorta in his neck, and counts to ten. His pulse rate is about a hundred beats per minute, about forty beats faster than normal for his athlete’s heart. That’s not good. And the fever is worse. The only good news is that the pain in his foot is gone. He bends his leg to look. The skin surrounding the place where the cactus needles entered has blanched and has a leathery texture. It feels dead. He presses hard to make it come alive again. Finally, the pain returns, along with a dark green substance coming out of the wound that is thick as glue and smells like decomposed flesh. How could this have happened to him? He’s stepped on cactus needles before. He has been on longer hikes in higher temperatures and never reached the same stage of dehydration that he’s in now. Maybe it has something to do with the fight with Lester. The adrenaline that shot through his body when he saw Lester walk away with Sara, the sheer rage needed to choke the living daylights out of him, all of that weakened his system. How else to explain the exhaustion, the rag-doll condition of his body? Rosario’s rag doll was so beautiful. Brother Patricio told Javier where to find Lalo so he could sell his piñatas, unstuffed, and also Rosario’s doll. He closes his eyes and sleeps.
He is dying. This certitude comes to him as soon as he opens his eyes and sees the indigo sky. Somewhere out there, the sun is sinking into a horizon he cannot see. He is dying. It’s a fact as solid as the rock he leans against. He knows the symptoms of dehydration and has ticked them off one by one as they came. If dehydration doesn’t kill him first, the infection in his foot will. It’s no longer an infection. The putrid smell coming from his foot can only be gangrene. There’s a kind of gangrene that travels fast. Fast. Fast and quick like the days of his life.
He read somewhere that a great peace descends upon you during the last few minutes before death. He hopes that happens, because he doesn’t want to die with this restless, prickly heaviness in his chest. It’s not fear of dying. It’s sadness and shame and something else he can’t name. He knows where the sadness comes from: the sorrow that Mami and Sara will feel when they don’t hear from him. He wishes he could prevent their suffering, but he is as powerless over that as he is over everything else. He’s in a small canyon with walls only slightly taller than he is, but they might as well be the burning cliffs of hell for all that he can climb them. If only he could make it to the surface, where it’s more likely someone will find his body. His mother and sister would prefer the closure of knowing he was dead to never knowing what happened to him. He remembers when the Jiparis went to the outskirts of Juárez with other groups to search for bodies of Desaparecidas—the wrenching sorrow on the mothers’ faces when they were told that their daughters’ remains were found, but also, something like gratitude.
He’s not someone who likes to analyze himself, wondering why he feels this or that. It made Brother Patricio happy to tell him the real reasons behind his actions, and Emiliano let him do it, because what other sources of fun did the poor man have? But that kind of spinning of the mental wheels is not for him. Even on his long, silent hikes with the Jiparis, his thoughts dwelled on his handicraft business, the tasks that needed to be done when he got home. Strategizing about business and making money was where his mind found its best groove. The one exception was when images of Perla Rubi overwhelmed his brain and other things. But even that didn’t stop his careful calculations on how to win her heart. Perla Rubi. He searches for the force that tied him to her every day, from the time he woke up until the moment he fell asleep, but it is gone. Where did that force go? He makes an effort to remember the kiss she gave him at her mother’s party, but the memory is made of cardboard, has no flesh, no life.