By David Bajo
Prima X — Equisa — honors her cousin’s request and scatters his ashes over the caldera of Paricutín. The wind is perfect, swirling lightly around the volcano’s lip, taking him in a procession of dust devils down the inside slope and over the green lake at the bottom. Steam filters up through the pumice, forming wisps that go into the blue sky and disappear. She marvels at this, one parade down, one up, and then at the geometry of the grey cinder cone resting atop its apron of black lava. She feels herself a point along the sharp edge of the cone, invisible unless you measure her against something. The sky, the green lake, the stark line where the lava meets the pine woods.
She makes the hike back across the lava beds in under three hours, but stops in Angahuan only to have a tortilla, canned sardines, and a cactus-pear soda before catching a bus north. She is already tallying the inheritance he left her, all his savings from his work in the Tijuana quarry. She rides the green vinyl seats bus instead of the black one with curtains and AC.
When the bus reloads after a stop somewhere in the desert, Equisa finds herself sitting next to something new. She looks back among the passengers to find her former seatmate. The woman, discovered, looks away. Equisa can tell from the swift turn of chin how much money the woman accepted to switch seats. For the first time, Equisa sees the other side of the woman’s profile and notes that there is a mole where the end of her eyebrow should be. It forms a supine exclamation mark at the base of her furrowed brow. Equisa watches it flex; with thoughts of newfound money, it flexes and exclaims.
Her new seatmate wears a white campesino hat and a new work shirt blue enough to remind her of the sky above Paricutín. Sitting a notch too close, he wears cologne that she at first mistakes for bus ozone.
He smiles at her. His teeth all slant one way, as though once struck by a mighty blow. He has a dark brown splotch on that side of his jaw. The rest of his skin is creamy. All the Mexican is in that one splotch. She isn’t surprised to hear an accent, German, or that his breath smells of mint over bus-stop beer. I believe I have something that you need. He uses the subjunctive.
She looks down at the space between his hip and hers, waiting for the appearance. His pale hand moves in, palming a torn corner of paper filled with words. He curls his fingers before she can read.
How much?
How much pages? Or how much monies? He winks, but with both eyes at the same time. She has seen this before, from people who can’t do it with just one.
Pages.
Three hundred nine. His slanted teeth grind the sounds. Tres. Cien Nueve.
And money?
This corner is free for you. And the rest is free too for you when you find it. Just across the border in a house in San Ysidro. The yellow house on Vidrio Street. The whole thing waits for you. He presses the corner of paper into her open hand. They’ll ask you to describe me. I think you can describe me.
She has been reading the same antique cereal-box fragment for the past week. She knows all about the plight of giant pandas just before their extinction. On her journey with the ashes, she tried to trade the scrap several times for anything new. In Morelia she tried at a café she’d heard about, and in Pátzcuaro she tried once in the old library that is now a museum full of jars, and once in a pizza joint she’d heard about. At the pizza place she almost fell for a con, an old one, where the words were just words and the paper wasn’t authentic paper.
Her new seatmate leans back, folds his arms across his chest, and covers his eyes with his hat. She craves reading the corner scrap he passed her. But she knows the rules and waits for the next stop, hopes he will leave then, or at least change seats. She eyes the passengers, looks for another like herself. How might they look? How does she look? Everyone else is staring into their laps, a shine in their eyes, an occasional fingertip to the ear. At times, they turn to the window and glance at the desert. At times, they look at her.
And there is no one else like her on this green vinyl seats bus going all the way to Tijuana. No one else who can read from paper. No one else who can read for more than twenty seconds at a time. She wants to ask the sleeping coyote next to her if he can read from paper, if he can read what he just gave her, if he can read the three hundred nine pages from which it was torn. She catches a waft of his cologne, his breath of mint and Modelo, and knows the answer.
The sleeping coyote slants further into the seat and his hat skids down with each breath, until it rests in the crook of his folded arms, rising and falling on his chest. Equisa craves the words on paper tucked into her jeans, carefully into the coin pocket, spread to the cloth, shaped to the cloth, the feel of the cloth. She has not even registered the language, only the curves, lines, and angles of the black letters, the soft white bed of the parchment. She brims with the promise of the corner full of new words, of the whole it will connect her with.
The coyote sleeps deeply, dreaming something fast and thrilling, his lashes lifting sometimes to reveal his whites rolled back and searching. He’s somewhere else, she thinks. Now she is unclear on the rules — which she knows as well as anyone — or is convincing herself of their vagueness. She knows you wait until he is gone. Until his body is gone. It’s for his safety and for the safety of what he has just sold her.
But the craving and the promise inside her are very strong. She knows the scrap is legitimate because his payment awaits him, delivered after she arrives, performs. She reads the panda cereal box again. She tries different things, fitting in anagrams, applying n+7 and other tricks of the Oulipou. The panda eats a particular bamboo found only in the Chinese forest. The pandit teas a particular bandarilla found only in the Sinchee foretoken.
She smiles at how this makes sense, how it is more interesting. You could tea a bandarilla, sink it into something. And a pandit might very well be someone who would do that. And he would also be one who could find something in a foretoken. And she smiles more at how the sentence is about her on this green bus somewhere in the middle of the Durango desert. What she has in her coin pocket is a foretoken. The pandit snoozes beside her, plunging bandarillas in his dreams, dreams fed by the foretoken he has passed to her.
The Oulipou were right, way back then. It’s all in the words, all about the words, and the paper that receives them. Every reader should’ve listened. The Oulipou should’ve been more convincing, not so playful.
An especially active moment of the coyote’s dream causes his arms to flop and release the hat. The hat tumbles across his belly and into her lap, upside down. She sees that other passengers have noticed this, the fate of his hat. What will she do?
She waits the twenty seconds it takes before their eyes turn away. But other eyes find her and the hat, those eyes following the gaze of others, a long series of twenty-second waits. An endless loop perhaps. The woman with the exclamation-mark eyebrow finds her. Equisa counts to twenty and then does something simple and brilliant, something that takes care of everything for the moment.
She continues cradling the hat politely, propping it with the fingers of her outside hand. Secretly with her inside hand, she removes the scrap from her coin pocket, palms it, and lets it drop unnoticed into the hat as she raises her hand to sweep her hair behind her ear. The fumy cologne rises from the brim of the hat. The corner scrap steeps in it.
But she can smell the paper, the ink. She closes her eyes, inhales, sifts through the grime from the bus’ rubber floor, the oil of the gear box, the hot metal of the gear box, the cakey pollen of marigolds from a passenger two seats up by a cracked window, the Modelo and mint sleep-breaths of the coyote, the immediate rise of sweat and cologne from the hat brim. And she finds them, the ink first. The ink smell is the air of a dream, damp and tannic. She swims in it, imagines the cool cloud released by an octopus. They once wrote with that ink. It worked well, and all that squid and octopus in the Mediterranean. The only problem was that it drew bugs and worms. It tasted too good.
Then rises the paper, fibrous through the ink, the remaining moisture of the ink wetting it, making that wet paper smell, clay, clay thoughts. Ink retains at least some of its moisture for the duration of its existence. When it loses the last molecules of moisture, it’s no longer ink and falls off the page, dust on your shelves. Really good ink seals itself and lasts who knows how long. Then they started using lasers and that just scorches the paper. No ink.
Equisa peeks only at the very top word on the wedge of words before she reaches into the hat and palms the scrap, returns it to her coin pocket. She decides this quick taste and smell, this brief infusion, is fair. The coyote is away in a dream, with her in body only. So she feels it’s fair to resist the body of the scrap while experiencing a bit of the dreaming it offers. Still cradling his hat, she closes her eyes and reads the top word, which is merely a fragment of a word, its front end torn: ure
Three of her favorite letters — either in Spanish or English. The shapes of the first and second contrast into the golden ratio. The second forms a perfect upside-down incompletion of the first. Then the third introduces the promise of a circle, cuts it off and tries to go back, and within the resulting shape implies the golden ratio again. The first mirrors its capital, a proud child. The next two reinvent themselves, hardly even shadows of their capitals, maybe at least crumpled high noon shadows of their capitals. She lets herself indulge in these metaphors; they are exact enough and they efficiently describe the indescribable shape and impact of these letters, letters that have no remaining referents other than sound, other than the shapes they force upon our lips, teeth, and tongues.
ure Recalling the scent of ink and paper, the salty warm swim with the octopus, she considers some of the many possibilities. Allure rapture capture sure — a name even. Saussure, someone she studied at UNAM. She doesn’t even realize if her eyes are opened or closed. She is following the contours and scents of the letters, sliding herself over their crests and down their chutes.
But in the bottom corner of Chihuahua the bus must navigate, things go wrong. Her eyes are definitely open and the sun is close to setting behind a distant bluish sandstorm. The bus stops at a sun-bleached station with corrugated steel over its windows and a shattered solar panel on its roof. But there is a new-looking baño sign on one edge of the building, and so when the driver cranks open the door, passengers start to get out. Equisa and the coyote are fifth and sixth in line exiting the bus. She sees that there are more one-story buildings, tracts and tracts of them spanning all the way to the blue sandstorm. It’s one of those places that just gets big, never gets a set name, never becomes a city, but just gets big. It’s one of those places and this station is on the edge.
As soon as the coyote steps off the bus behind her, the driver cranks the door closed and rumbles away, leaving the six passengers arms-spread and spinning in a kind of sandstorm of their own. Then four people appear from the side of the building where the baño sign is. One, a skinny young man, carries what looks to be a torn half of a bicycle. He circles behind the coyote and impales him with the bike-thing and jumps back. The coyote falls backward, straight, and the ground shoves the bike-half deeper. The wheel presses all the way to his spine and he is balanced like that, arms spread, punctured chest to the sky. The coyote’s eyes are opened and his one-way slanted teeth are gnashed. Two of his breaths pass up through the end of one of the bike frame tubes, two blow-notes in a bottle.
The four ambushers let the other passengers run away, but the skinny youth and another catch Equisa before she can even move. They hold her arms, each one grasping with both hands, and turn her toward the leader, who is a woman in a uniform windbreaker — maybe stolen, maybe issued, maybe stolen then issued, maybe she doesn’t know. Another man stands there. The windbreaker woman nods to that man, and he searches Equisa for the scrap.
Another blow-note sounds from the coyote. His eyes are open, unblinking, beginning to skin over with dryness in the desert air. She looks to the sandstorm in order to endure the search. Endure.
The sandstorm is boiling sideways along the horizon of single-story buildings. It’s the color of the corrugated steel that covers the windows. The sun’s image wavers behind it, melts through in bursts. Her body is jostled, swatted, prodded with the man’s heavy fingers. He begins to knead into her clothes, the folds and pockets.
No time for that, the woman says. Strip her and take her clothes.
He finds the cereal box scrap with the panda text when he yanks down her jeans. The panda eats a particular bamboo found only in the Chinese forest. The pandit teas a particular bandarilla found only in the Sinchee foretoken. She looks at the impaled coyote, balanced on the wheel, arms spread in final wonder. One more ooooo-sound bubbles from one of the metal tubes piercing his chest. It is mournful, and for her.
The man flings her clothes back toward the windbreaker woman. The two boys continue their holds on Equisa’s arms and now they are looking at her naked body, back, front, back, front. Then they get out of sync and it’s one back, the other front. One front, the other back, tick-tocking that way as the woman eyes the cereal box scrap.
This isn’t it. This is nothing. This isn’t even paper. He wouldn’t sell her this. She wouldn’t bargain for this. She burns it with her lighter and the paint from the cardboard, the paint of the black and white words and the black and white panda face, burns in multicolored flames, green, blue, and deep orange.
The man’s fingers are inside her. It feels worse to feel the boys looking at her in that tick-tocking way.
That’s enough, windbreaker woman tells him. It can’t be any place moist. Don’t be an idiot. Her hair. Search her hair.
Equisa feels his fingers go into her hair, feels them rake her skull. He tries to comb his fingers through, but she hasn’t washed or brushed it since before her volcano climb. Some ashes are in there, in those snarls and cool black pockets. He tries again.
No time for that either, says the woman. Cut it off and bundle it with the clothes. He uses a big knife to saw off her hair in one massive clump. One of the boys holding her rubs himself against her thigh as he watches this shearing.
No time for that, says the woman. You stab him if he does that again. You stab him.
Equisa is relieved the blade is sharp and her hair goes easily. Her head lightens. She lets her head lighten. She watches the distant sandstorm turning purple as the sun lowers behind it. Fragments of wind thrown from the storm hurry through this raid. She feels the breeze on her skin and on her scalp, on her scalp for the first time she can ever remember.
The man tosses the bundle of hair to the woman. She catches it and cradles it with the clothes. I’m certain it’s in here somewhere. Somewhere in all this. As she turns to stride away she says to the boys, Strangle her and bury her in the sand.
Can we take our time?
If you do, you have to walk back. We leave now. She strides to some place behind the building and the man hurries after her, sheathing his knife.
One of the boys throws his belt over Equisa’s head and cinches it around her throat. He leads her to a sandy patch just off the road where the other boy is scraping out a grave with his forearms. Equisa makes an effort to look after the coyote, to give him that bit of respect. His slanted teeth gnash at the sky, his arms question the wide universe, and his eyes petrify.
The boy with the belt yanks her into the scoop and she goes into the sand knees first. The other boy undoes his pants. Equisa closes her eyes. She hears the other boy unzip and a truck starting up and peeling away, its tires making a throaty choking sound over the crumble of the road shoulder.
The boy yanks the belt and says, Open your eyes, open your eyes. You have beautiful eyes and we want to see them. She doesn’t open them and feels the belt collapse around her throat. She inhales softly through her nose, finding passageways that seem new in there, around and behind her vocal chords.
ure Endure is no longer enough. Endure won’t work. It would end in death, closure.
The belt pulls her into the grave. The sand shapes itself along her spine, her curves. She feels the other boy’s mouth on her toes. His tongue is cold and limp, a fake one, she thinks, a prosthetic. What is the word? There is one. What is the word? she asks them, out loud. The belt goes slack for moment, the mouth leaves her toes. There is one, I know.
Open your eyes! The belt tightens, pulling her head into the sand, but she has stolen a healthy breath.
With the dose of air feeling its way through her body, a cool cloud of ink in warm salt water, her thoughts sharpen. When she finds the word she opens her eyes. It remains silent behind her eyes. Conjure.
Conjure.
Out loud, to the sky, she says: The panda eats a particular bamboo found only in the Chinese forest. The pandit teas a particular bandarilla found only in the Sinchee foretoken.
The boys go still, look at each other. The pandit… She begins again but never finishes.
At first, the sandstorm seems to sweep over him from the side, the boy at her feet. But, no, it’s the long sunset shadow of a man. The boy at her feet is slammed to the ground and killed. It happens so fast she can’t see how, only that his head snaps over to one side as his eyes stay open and his pink tongue pokes through sandy lips. There is a whirring sound.
The shadow passes over her quickly, an X-ray over her body, and she feels the belt immediately slacken around her throat. She fingers the belt open and flings it away with a shudder as she gets to her knees, skidding in her sand grave.
She sees that the coyote is strangling the other boy, the boy who held the belt. The coyote has him pinned to the sand with his knees, with his full weight. His arms are bowed and clenched, his red fingers digging into the boy’s throat. Above, the boy’s throat is black, below the grip it is white, almost translucent. The bike wheel still protrudes from the coyote’s back, from between his shoulder blades, spinning and arced to the sky.
She rolls the bodies into the scoop. The coyote, still on his knees, starts to tug the jeans the rest of the way off one of the bodies. It pains him. The clear wind at the front edge of the sandstorm has fully reached them now and it spins the wheel on his back, spins it steadily. When she realizes what he is trying to do, she stops him.
No, she tells him. I would rather be naked than wear anything of theirs.
He nods, but even that movement pains him further.
She motions to the wheel. You want me to pull it out?
He tries to say no, but the only sound he can make is the ooooo through one of the tubes. Phlegm seeps from the end of that tube, a very light trickle of blood from the ragged end of the other. He mimes the way you make an n-sound and then the ooooo follows. She recognizes the n-sound locution from her studies of Saussure. But together it all registers as newwwww.
They leave the bodies to be buried by the oncoming sandstorm. Two whirlwinds of sand have already passed over them. Pellets that spin free sting her body. At first she tries to cover herself with her arms and hands, from the flying grains of sand and from the coyote. But then she decides to let him look. Why not? He is going soon.
She waves her arm over the first line of buildings at the edge of this endless sweep of one-story buildings, solar panels on all the roofs shimmering in the fading light. The lowest, heaviest bar of the sandstorm has almost eclipsed sunset. She waves her arm. Pick one. Pick a place.
She recognizes the t-sound he is trying to make, his tongue going up behind his top teeth. But all his breath goes through the top tube protruding from his chest. T-ooooo.
Too? She looks at him and his eyes’ plea. Tú, she says. You want me to pick.
As they walk toward the place she chooses — she just counts n+7 over to the right — she tries to gauge his wounds. There is hardly any blood. There is that thin trickle from the one tube and there is a line of wetness on the back of his blue shirt, the same line you get when you ride a bike after a rain. But he is going soon.
They approach the first line of buildings from behind. The backyards are all unkempt and merely fade into the desert. None of the pig-wire fences are intact or complete. They sag with invitation.
She knows he is going because she once saw a quarry dog go this way. It was one of her cousin’s favorite pooches, one that never begged but just rested quietly in the shade and was content with whatever scraps were offered. But it took a projectile thrown by a hopper malfunction. A chunk of concrete with rebar impaled the poor beast in the back. The dog hardly yelped, looked at Equisa and her cousin once as though ashamed, and trotted along the slabs to find the best shade. The chunk of concrete rode its back as if balanced. But Equisa and her cousin knew that it was the rebar that held it there. No blood flowed. But they knew it was seeping inside. They followed it. It found the shaded entrance to one of the best caves and lay down and died without a whimper.
They bang on the backdoor of the place, figuring that anyone looking like they do should come from the desert side. The coyote must stoop because of the wheel, but does his best to wear a calm and respectful expression, as best his battled face can project. He can at least keep his lips softly closed because he breathes through the tubes. The breaths are quick and shallow, rhythmical. Equisa can imagine his heartbeat from the breath-patterns. Recent events leave her in her most sensitive reading mode.
She finds optimism even in the closed door, the shell of the paint hard and smooth against the desert, well kept, not like the yard. Those behind the door respect the desert, what comes from it, what survives it. This’ll work, she tells the coyote.
A woman opens the door. Her hair is half gray, half black, not mixed but in fat streaks. Equisa counts seventeen streaks total and thinks the woman has survived something that many times. She also wonders if she is over-reading, over-reading because she is worked up by recent events. The woman answering the door offers them each more than one glance. She sees worse than this in her life in this building, worse than what stands at her door now. Worse, thinks Equisa, but not more unique — a naked woman accompanied by a kind of centaur, half man, half bicycle. The woman raises an eyebrow, creasing the thin lace of wrinkles on her forehead and temple. Equisa knows she is here alone but doesn’t live here alone, not all the time. The workday is ending with the sandstorm and the coming dusk.
I just need clothes, says Equisa, and to help him go. I can pay you if you have a phone.
The woman hands her a phone and Equisa brushes her fingers over the screen, skin-soft, and pays her in advance. She hands the phone back and watches the woman see what she has paid her.
She waves them in and closes the door after watching two dust devils hurled forward by the approaching storm cross her backyard, jump the pig-wire. Equisa scans the room. A husband, a son, and two daughters, all working age, live here too. Another family of cousins live here sometimes too, four in number. The building is all one room except for the bath, which is behind a door. Four shoji screens fashioned from pig-wire and gauze divide the room. The screens are decorated: two with fresh marigolds, one with a string of lime-fizz bottle caps, one with a garland of tennis balls. The son’s nook, marked by the bottle caps garland, has books in it, shelved on cinderblocks and metal planks. The books are not the old, authentic kind. They are contemporary, the kind assembled from elixir and placards. The kind you don’t have to read. You just close your eyes, drink the tea, and peek at the pictures on the placards from time to time. But from the outside, the books look just like the old kind. The cinderblocks remind her of the Tijuana quarry.
To keep from reading too much, she shakes her head. She rubs her head too, and for the first time fingers the uneven brush on her scalp. Because the woman understands Equisa’s border Spanish, she knows there is even more family in the North, sending money down, coming sometimes for Christmas, sometimes for Easter.
In the center clearing, a stove, fridge, and table are clumped together around a column of wires and piping that goes straight up to the solar panel on the roof. This woman leads a happy life, a profoundly happy life, and Equisa draws a deep breath, finally a deep and measured breath.
The woman disappears behind a marigold shoji and comes back with some of her daughter’s clothes: torn jeans almost the color of milk, tennis shoes, and a Team Mexico soccer shirt, number 14.
First things first, the woman says and hands Equisa the clothes. Equisa dresses as the coyote turns away best he can. Every movement pains him. He stoops with his arms hanging still and straight.
Dressed, Equisa turns to the coyote and asks him what he needs. He eases himself down on his knees, sits back on his boot heels, finding rest like he did when he was a boy harvesting strawberries in Baja. If he could draw breath through his nose he would even smell them, them and the cool salt air of the Guadalupe Valley.
Painfully, he cranes his look up to Equisa and the woman. He locutes the b-sound for English or the v-sound for Spanish. Then sounds the ooooo. Then he opens his mouth, folds his tongue back against his throat. K.
B – oooo – K.
He wants to read a book, Equisa tells the woman. Can he read one of your son’s books?
The woman passes her phone to Equisa. Equisa takes the phone, brushes in payment, returns it to the woman. In tiny increments, her cousin’s inheritance dwindles.
The woman nods toward her son’s bookshelf, just visible beyond the lime-fizz shoji. Equisa moves toward the books and looks back for the coyote to follow. But he remains very still in his pose, sitting on his heels, shoulders stooped, arms dangled. The spokes of the bike wheel cut up the evening light slanting through the two front windows. The wheel doesn’t spin, but rolls softly back and forth with his breathing. T – ooooo, he tells her. Tú.
She begins to choose for him. Most of the son’s collection is stuff she doesn’t know: sci-fi, horror, fantasy, detective. She thumbs along the covers as the woman puts a kettle of water on the stove and sets an empty mug on the table.
Equisa is just about to quit searching, to just let the coyote read something easy and pleasant before he goes, when her thumb catches Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas. She searches no further, tilts the book from the shelf, checks to see if it’s complete. It has five placards and its cutout holds three teabags and a half-full vial of powder. The son has read it twice, she thinks, not shared it. If he read it once and shared it once, he would not have kept it buried and hidden in his collection. She begins to like the boy.
She brings the Rulfo to the coyote and shows it to him. He nods, barely lifting his chin really.
You know it?
N – ooooo. Newwwww.
Then prepare yourself, she tells him. For something beautiful.
They all wait a moment for the kettle to come to a boil. The woman stands at the stove with grace and pride, holds a tin spoon for stirring and measuring. Twilight fills the room, getting a little brighter, because the sandstorm subsides in the evening cool. The sand raised into the sky by the storm now falls in a light rain on the roof. It spitters on the solar panel. Perfect for the Rulfo, thinks Equisa.
She watches the woman prepare the book. She first lays the teabag into the empty mug, presses it to the bottom with the spoon. Then she pours the boiling water lightly into the mug, creating a chortling sound that brings with it a bergamot scent. With two fingers, she lifts and drops the bag three times. She hums a tune as she measures one level spoonful of powder over the tea. Steam from the tea clouds the bottom of the tin spoon. She lets the powder spill into the tea and uses a rhythmical plunging of the bag for the initial mixing before stirring with the spoon.
The coyote’s eyes watch the stirring, the only sense of lift about him. The rest of him sags, further and further. The wheel on his back tick-tocks quickly with his shallow breath and shallow pulse.
The woman finds a footstool on which she can serve the book. She sets the tea and placards before him. Equisa lifts his hands to the footstool, laces his fingers into the handle of the mug. She read this way only once in this life, as part of an assignment for one of her archives courses at UNAM. She found it very unsatisfying, a sense of whispers and distant promises, a sense of everything and everyone passing, with spurts of audio, Doppleresque. She saw her friends read this way all the time in the library. Some of them, right before exams, often skipped the tea and booted and mainlined the powder. The library tried to outlaw this the same way they tried to outlaw drinks and snacks, but the students sneaked in candles and kits anyway. Exams were too important. Exams were fatal. Fatal exams.
But Equisa read El llano en llamas many times on paper. She brought it, divided in quires, to her cousin’s caves in the quarry and they passed the Rulfo stories in pieces back and forth to one another. She broke it into quires and passed them around to others like her because she sensed before most what was about to happen, first the hoarding, then the vanishing. The archivists like her knew first. The readers in their caves realized last. All books on paper would disappear.
The coyote sips the tea with one hand and fingers the placards with the other. The graphics on the first placard show frogs, their sticky round toes gripping cobblestones. Equisa can close her eyes and just about read with him, or so she imagines. I am sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out.
The coyote guzzles the tea even though it must be scalding his throat. He flips and shuffles the placards quickly with numb fingers. His eyelids droop over images. Equisa avoids the images, not wanting to wreck her own visions of Rulfo’s stories. She watches the coyote’s expressions, can tell when he reaches the fog and ash and morning peals of the sixth story, “At Daybreak.” That’s the one she hopes for him.
When his expression goes sad, the saddest one, she knows he’s reached the thirteenth story: There was the moon. Facing them. A large red moon that filled their eyes with light and stretched and darkened its shadow over the earth. That’s the one she wants for him.
Maybe he finishes all fifteen, maybe not. His expression never recovers from the thirteenth story. No dogs bark, she says to him. It comes out as both taunt and salve, letting him hear that she knows the Rulfo too, is with him in it. Her smile is also both taunt and salve, as always, something she can never change. All she can do is reserve it, save it for those moments when both apply.
The coyote doesn’t seem able to move. His hand has fallen away from the empty mug. His other hand limply allows the woman to slide the placards free and return the book to its place on her son’s shelf, to be read two more times. The coyote sits on his heels, shoulders stooped, arms draped to the footstool, bike wheel barely ticking back and forth above the curve of his spine.
Now what, Freund? She tries to sound casual, throwing in the German for him. She tries to accentuate the salve in her smile. Now what can I do for you?
He mimes t, then makes the ooooo-sound. She interprets too quickly and thinks tú again, thinks he wants her to decide for him. Unable to look up, he repeats himself. t – ooooo… Then she sees it, crouches lower to see it, another mime at the end. M.
t – ooooo – m.
Tomb.
She looks at the woman. Do you have a scrap of tin and a nail?
The woman passes her phone to Equisa and goes to fetch the items. She returns from behind one of the marigold shojis with three pieces of tin cut into different shapes: heart, circle, jackal head. Equisa chooses the jackal.
Your name? she asks the coyote.
He can only gaze, his eyelids almost lulled shut. She must read, read him, read everything she can for him. This understanding, in all that has happened, is what breaks her. It’s what makes her give up inside, surrender, resign herself as prisoner, imprisoned insurgent. She cries. She is crying for herself — and for her cousin a little. But it’s okay, because to the others in the room it looks as if she cries for the coyote.
She draws back a sob and begins. Z, she thinks, that is the impression, everything about him. His teeth, his body, the way he moves, rests, slashing from side to side, traveling this way then the other.
Zapata, she guesses, but with that smile, taunt and salve. Then Zurillo, Lopez, Gomez, Mendez… Then she recalls the German accent and says, Guzman.
She sees the coyote’s eyelids lift, hears an extra hollow gasp from his tube. He shapes his lips into a circle. Her studies of Saussure let her know that this is one of those locutions found always and everywhere. In Spanish, J, in English, H. Our first sound, as we exhale that first breath that commits us to life.
He makes one final ooooo-sound through his tube. From that she gets Julio.
Julio Guzman, she says.
The coyote opens his eyes wide as he can. He wants to hear it again.
Julio Guzman. She speaks it carefully, doesn’t smile. Julio Guzman.
With hammer and nail she punches the coyote’s name into the piece of tin shaped like a jackal head.
Equisa can’t walk far even though the woman helps set the coyote piggyback, hooking one bike tube over a shoulder, lacing his arms below her neck, tucking his shins over her hips. Equisa can feel his jaw pressing the top of her scalp. She carries the load into the desert, stomping forward with momentum, envisioning it as one long stumble and fall. She just wants to get clear of the building lights, to get around the first finger of rocks, find a crease for the body.
The coyote’s neck presses her ear and his pulse is a bird heart flicking against death. She wants to get clear of the building lights, clear of any dog barks, clear into only the howls of coyotes. She understands that he wants this, this man who spends his life taking others to what they needed, taking what was needed to others, never taking himself anywhere.
I read the scrap, she says to him as she lurches over the sand. Maybe that’s what gets you killed. Maybe someone saw. That woman on the bus. The one you paid. She was looking for anything. Or maybe we were doomed from the start. Maybe they followed me, maybe you. But I want you to know: I read what you brought to me. And I will finish it. All of it.
A rattling sounds from one of the tubes. She doesn’t know what it is, what it means.
Remember in the Rulfo story? The moon? It appeared in different colors. Red, orange, blue. We have a white moon. You can’t look up, but you see its light on the sand. It’s white, like paper.
You’ll hear the coyotes howl. Soon you’ll hear them howl.
She makes it around the first finger of stone, around the end, and trudges along the base of its slope until she is clear of the lights. Her shadow on the sand is now cast only by the moon. Together, her form, the coyote’s, and the half-bike stuck into his back cast a distinct silhouette on the white desert, a kind of letter from a lost alphabet, a petroglyph, from when letters were asked to do too much.
The collapse is easier than she anticipates. Eyeing her shadow, she slows her pace but doesn’t stop. She buckles one knee forward and slides into the sand, sloughing the coyote off to the side. Without wait or rest she drags him by the shoulders into a wedge of stone, making sure there’s no pressure on the bike wheel. In recline, he fits neatly into the wedge.
She doesn’t know how she will cover him when the time comes. To the moon, which he can see now if he can still see, she holds the tin jackal head with his name punched through it. His name is many points of light on the eclipse. She then sets the tin marker on the front end of the wedge and in the coyote’s mind it must be still shining that way, throwing light out of the rock.
Free of his weight, she feels light enough to float, fearfully light. A breeze could come and toss her over the ridge. She rests in the sand and counts stones small enough for her to carry, near enough.
She revisits the break within herself. She knows when she first cries that this moment will present itself. There are no tears in this cry. She cries in words, covers him first in words before the stones.
I have three letters, she tells him, the end-fragment of a word. ure. Don’t think that’s not enough. That’s what makes me sad, that’s what brings this breaking feeling inside me, starting at the level of my heart, then rising, then falling. It doesn’t break me to think that they are all I have, they are all that’s left. It breaks me to know those letters are enough. Enough for me to read everything. For me to find the rest. For me to tell you everything.
David Bajo is the author of two novels, The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri and Panopticon. His third novel, Mercy 6, will be published this fall.
