Valentine(81)
The shoulder is narrow so she keeps an eye out for traffic and snakes, and a goddamned stick. When she reaches the open gate, Glory stops and peers past the cattle guard. A thin layer of fresh gray dust covers the metal grates and a horny toad stands in the middle watching a line of fire ants cross its path. Just beyond, a mockingbird sits atop a strand of barbed wire and sings a complicated song, some of the notes its own and some stolen, and who can tell. The air has begun to cool, but Glory can still feel the sweat running down her back when she walks to the center of the cattle guard and peers through the steel grates, half expecting something to reach up and sting or pierce or strike at her legs.
After the storm, a surge of water had rushed across the desert and filled the ravine, a flash flood so sudden as to catch a family of blue quail unawares, but now there is only garbage and rusting beer cans and shotgun casings. Her legs are damp against the heavy denim. The sneakers she wears are thin enough to be pierced by a piece of barbed wire or a cactus needle, and her socks barely cover the new scars that crisscross her feet and ankles. Standing now in the middle of the dirt road, listening to the steady drone of cicadas, she watches a pair of tumbleweeds roll aimlessly across the desert. There ain’t jack shit out here, she thinks, and a murmur of rage rises in her throat, a low burble directed at her uncle for bringing her here. When a roadrunner emerges from the brush and scampers across the road in front of her, Glory reaches into her pocket and curls her fingers around the knife she carries with her always.
Another fifty feet up ahead, dead and dying mesquite are lined up next to the dirt road like parade-goers. Knowing the branches will snap off easily, she moves quickly, her anger pressing her forward, a warm hand in the center of her back saying Go. When she hands Victor the damned stick, she will tell him that she wants to go back to Odessa. He can go back to work and she will lie by the pool watching her scars turn darker, scarlet and shiny against her brown skin, and they will wait until Alma is able to make her way back to, and across, the border. Trying to scare off any animals that are surely hiding in the brush, she stomps hard across the earth and sure enough, the vibrations startle several little critters—a rat and a couple of blue quail, a family of prairie dogs already holed up for the night.
Glory is only an arm’s reach from the mesquite when she hears the clicking of a baby’s plastic rattle, a maraca filled with dried beans, the terrifying chica-chica-chica as fifteen hollow rings of cartilage knock against one another. An old diamondback comes gliding across the desert floor, a shallow wake forming in the sand behind her. She is thick-bodied and long, six feet of heavy muscle and skin marked by brown diamonds that taper to a brilliant series of black and white stripes. Her head is flat as an old wooden spoon and each of her sharply curved fangs is as thick and long as Glory’s index finger. She has already scented the girl when she stops in the middle of the dirt road and wraps herself into a tight coil. When she uses every bit of her scarce strength to raise her head and flick her tongue in the direction of Glory’s bare legs. When she tries to discern how big a threat this animal is to her and the ten young snakes she is about to deliver.
The old snake is weak enough that a strike, even if she could land it, would surely be a dry bite, but Glory can’t know this—or that the snake will only live for a few more hours, just long enough to watch the last of her young emerge from its amniotic sac and unfold itself against the pale earth, its body a bright shimmer of black and gold lit by the full moon.
Glory stands with her fingers curled around a pocketknife that might stop a man but is entirely insufficient to this moment, and although she was hoping to stay angry enough to claim some space of her own and fight for it, now’s not the time and this is not personal. This is the sun threatening to go down and one hell of a big rattlesnake blocking her path. She watches the snake and the snake watches her, tongue flickering, rattles shaking steadily against the air, an unrelenting buzz and hum. When the snake lowers her head and uncoils her long body and glides slowly into the brush, Glory counts to a hundred and listens for whatever might come next, and when her heart has stopped hammering against her breast, she tears a limb from a mesquite tree and heads back to the highway.
Glory and Victor won’t make it to Del Rio in time for sunset. When she returns to the El Camino, her uncle has removed the fuel filter and sprayed it down with Chemtool. While they wait for the filter to dry, they sit on the hood watching the sun go down and listening as the coyotes get revved up for the night. The harvest moon, when it rises, is blood red and beautiful against the darkening sky. Try floating with your ears under the water, Tina had said to Glory as they drifted across the swimming pool that afternoon. Listen for long enough, she said, and the sounds from the highway will blend together. A truck hauling pipeline or water, a flatbed turning onto the highway, the crank of a pumpjack slowly winding itself up, they will all start to sound alike. You can tell yourself you’re hearing anything, Tina said, her large white arms floating next to her like buoys. And will you look at that sky? It’s a wonder, a damned wonder.
On the other side of Comstock, they cut south to State Highway 277 and drive along the border through Juno and Del Rio. At Eagle Pass, the road to El Indio turns to gravel and then dirt, and the border pulls them closer. Victor drives quietly, keeping an eye out for a cop’s flashing lights in the rearview mirror, occasionally glancing at his niece in the passenger seat. Is she okay, this child who has never been more than fifty miles from the town where she was born?