"Tell me again why you're taking him in, Cora."

"Where else would he go?"

Agustín sipped at the scalding coffee. He shuddered.

Ernesto shook his head. A strand of his long, thinning black hair fell out of the leather band in back, dropped down across his face. "You're not running a homeless shelter out there. What if the guy's a lunatic? What if he's dangerous? You don't know what you're getting yourself into. You have to stop taking in these strays." He tensed, looked briefly at Agustín. "No offense, Agustín. You know what I mean."

Agustín smirked faintly. "Estrayes, estrellitas, extranjeros. Soy un gato perdido, my friend." He sipped at his coffee again, shuddered again.

"How dangerous could he be with a broken thigh?"

"Look, I just don't like it, is all. You sure this can't wait until Eloy gets back from Sedona, keep an eye on him for you?" Ernesto chuckled. "I guess Eloy speaks his language anyway."

Cora looked at Ernesto, quizzical.

"They didn't tell you? The docs said he's not talking to them. He seems lucid, but he's not saying anything. You might have another quiet one on your hands."

Cora shook her head. "This one talks."

"He talked to you, huh?"

"Well, not exactly to me. I was in the room reading when he finally came around a few days back. I heard him start to murmur, so I put my book down and watched him. He took a while to fade all the way in; looked sort of bleary at the window and at the lights in the ceiling for a few seconds, looked at me after that — I smiled at him, asked him how he felt. He looked down at himself, bandages and drains and traction gear and all, and then it was like he came back all at once, like he was suddenly really all there, and that's when he talked."

"So what'd he say?"

"'Fuck.' He looked at himself up and down, it seemed like he realized where he was, and he said 'Fuck.'"

"Well there's a pellucid assessment. Did he say anything else?"

"That was it."

"OK, well, I dunno. I guess you know what you're doing. If you don't I can't stop you anyway. Anyhow, the stakebed's out back, half a tank, don't forget what I said about making sure the slats are locked in before you do your usual desert driving. Those are stainless steel gateposts, Cora, and I can’t afford to be replacing them every time you bounce them out of the bed out in the outback."

"Strictly pavement this time, Ern."

"Yeah, well, you never colored inside the lines either." He slid the truck keys across the formica. Cora put her hand atop his, patted it. "Thanks, Ernesto."

Ernesto looked at his belly for a moment, cleared his throat. "Hey, well, you're family, you know? Or almost. I mean… you know what I mean."

"Yeah. I know."

"So you talk to Selma up in Bullhead, she knows you're coming. She's been wanting to meet you anyway. I guess Willson stopped in her place last month."

There was that name, again. Cora tensed. Nonchalance, now, she told herself. You don't care. "Yeah? How's he doing these days?"

I guess he's OK. He hasn't talked to me since he left: a Christmas card or two. What's it, eight years now? He's got no use for his cousins anymore, I guess. Anyway, Selma said he was in there with his son for a few minutes, they'd been doing some business next door or something and he saw her through the window."

"His son." The bottom fell out of her.

"Yeah, that was news to me, too. Talking almost, but still in diapers. Don't say anything to my mother if you see her. I haven't told her. She'd be hurt that he hasn't brought the kid down to meet Auntie."

"Yeah, you wanna avoid giving people upsetting news when you can. Hey, we'd better get north. Agustín, pay the man for our breakfast." Agustín pulled a handful of bills from his pocket.

Ernesto shook his head. "Now you know I'm not taking your money for toast and coffee. Put that back." He handed Agustín a thermos. "Some coffee for the road. It's a long way to Bullhead." Agustín swallowed hard, nodded. "Thank you, Ernesto."

The sun was not yet risen. The parking lot behind Coffee Ern's smelled of rotting food, irrigated alfalfa, and diesel from the trucks idling next to the tribe-owned motel. Cora strode to Ernesto's truck, Agustín a good twenty feet behind and trying to keep up. A son. He had a son. Why should that bother her? Ernesto was right: it had been eight years. Eight years, three months and what was it? Ten days. The bastard. Her hand on the driver's side latch. Her foot on the running board. The bastard. What was he supposed to wait for?

She looked up through the driver's side window. Agustín hadn't gotten in the truck yet either: he was discreetly pouring coffee from a thermos onto the soil at the base of a parking lot palm. She'd told Willson she wouldn't be coming back. She'd ignored the letters, the emails. Every six months they came, for a while, and she'd feel her stomach lining dissolve for a week, then for a few days, then for a few hours. Eventually he stopped writing. Eventually the days where she woke thinking of calling him, fighting the urge to call him, listing reasons not to call him, eventually those days became fewer. His birthday. When she sold her house. When that breakfast place they liked closed down. When someone asked her how she was.

A creak from the far side of the stakebed: Agustín yanked the door open against its rusted hinges, climbed up onto the passenger seat, closed his eyes, crossed himself, his lips moving silently. Cora got in, fumbled briefly with the keys, cranked it. The engine needed tuning. She watched the sudden pulse of dark, caustic exhaust smoke dissipate in the rearview, put it in reverse, backed crazily into the oncoming traffic on Arizona 95. Fortunately, that traffic consisted of one car. It swerved to avoid the stakebed, its horn an angry klaxon.

"Half a tank, hell! The needle's sitting on the peg! Fucking Ernesto."

Agustín opened his eyes and felt for his wallet. "I have your gas card still from yesterday." She pulled into the Circle K.

The pump nozzle wouldn't lock open; Agustín held the lever as the tank filled, 35 gallons at a trickle. He dreaded the trip. How many Immigration checkpoints were there between Parker and Bullhead? He didn't remember. At least one. The green card Cora had got for him looked official enough. At least he guessed it did. He hadn't seen a real one. And how many miles of sun-blasted desert, just to load a bed in the truck and drive back? Sitting in the right hand seat like a child? And now she had turned sharp and sullen. His hand smelled like gasolina. He shrugged. Better that than Ernesto's coffee.

Cora's eyes shone as he got back into the cab. "¿Estamos listos?" He nodded once. "Más que un coyote."

"Ah, leave him out of it. That pendejo has all the luck anyway."

North of Parker in the gathering morning, road flirted with river. Here running close enough that Agustín could smell the water even over the gasoline reek filling the cab, there veering away coyly into the hills. Mountains, Agustín corrected himself. Evil-looking mountains, worse than any he'd seen in the course of his jornada. Dark black lava in spires cloaked in impossibly steep talus slopes, tortuous arroyos carved by flash floods, miles and miles with no level spot large enough to build a house. Directly across the river in California a peak rose like an obelisk, though it was far too large to have been carved by human hands. A monument to suffering built by an uncaring creation. If the devil found these mountains in hell, he would plant bougainvillea to soften them. A few minutes and the road sloped back down toward the river, a green-grass park just coming into view, and Agustín realized he had been near holding his breath. He sighed heavily in relief at regaining civilization.

"I know," said Cora. "I feel the same way. It hurts to come around that bend and see this sprawling shit. We still have plenty of desert before Lake Havasu, though."

His hand tensed on the armrest. Cora glanced over at him. He was looking straight ahead, tendons taut in his neck, jaw working. The left corner of her mouth creaked up a notch, a hidden smirk.

"Hey Agustín?"

"Yes?"

"En Lake Havasu hay espresso."

He flinched, then chuckled softly. "Good." He pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, shut them against further assault from the landscape.

At Parker Dam the road turned abruptly eastward. "Right across the river there is the easternmost point in California," Cora explained. "It's the only place in California where saguaros grow." Agustín said nothing. She turned: head tilted back, jaw slack, he had fended off the desert by falling asleep.

A desert river, the Bill Williams, once joined the Colorado here. The dam builders had drowned the confluence. The road swung southeast, climbing a cliff face above the submerged lower three miles of the Bill Williams. At last the slackwater ended: egrets stalked among the tules on the south bank side of the little tributary. Five seconds across the bridge and the road swung back northwestward, roller-coastering 15 miles into and out of broad washes until the terracotta roof tiles of Lake Havasu City's two-SUV garages hove into view.

The espresso place was part of a national chain. Agustín found this reassuring, if a little surprising. "We're going to Jonah's coffee?" "It's what's here," shrugged Cora. The truck engine rattled for ten or fifteen seconds after Cora pulled the key out of the ignition.

They sat outside, Agustín grateful for the misters spraying gallons of precious water each hour into the air beneath the awning. Cora moved her chair into the sun. When he relaxes, she thought, when he drops his guard just a little bit, he looks… she couldn't place it at first. Caravaggio's Christ? In denim and straw hat? Except maybe a little sadder. There was a look of release in his eyes sometimes, she thought, times like this, when he's focused on his four shots of espresso, or when she'd watched him worry out a rusted bolt on a long-unused piece of machinery, lost in thought and porous to the world around. An acceptance, but of a sort removed from the self-help book fairytale closure variety.

She heard herself speaking without intending to. "You don't have to tell me anything, Agustín. You don't."

His eyes opened wide, staring at her.

"You don't. Not if you don't want to."

"I don't… what do you mean? Tell you what?"

"Anything I don't need to know. Anything you don't want me to know."

He stared into his little paper cup. Well, there goes that release, she thought. He's tensed all the way back up.

"Listen, Agustín. All I'm saying is, the doctor told me you must have had more education than you've told me about, because of how you splinted Flash Flood Man's leg. I know there are things about yourself you haven't told me. I don't need to know if you don't want me to.

He looked up at her. "Even if I killed somebody?"

"Yeah, except you didn't, did you."

"No." He crumpled his empty cup in his left hand, aimed for the trash, missed.

They got back in the truck.

North of Lake Havasu City the road headed long and gradually toward a low pass — a wash flowing through the mountain, really — then descended on the other side just as gradually. Ten miles on Agustín saw the glint of 18-wheelers on Interstate 40. They rode in silence past the truck stop at the on-ramp, headed west toward the river again. Agustín cleared his throat.

"Cora Colfax."

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

A few more minutes down the road, Needle Mountain appeared to their left: a nest of forbidding rock spires stained red with desert varnish. When they reached the mountains, hard up against the Colorado River, Cora exited the highway. But to Agustín's intense and silent relief they headed north. He watched the needles receding in the side view mirrors. Another threat avoided, he thought, and… oh.

"Do we pass by an immigration checkpoint today?"

"You slept through it."

"They did not ask about me?"

"The Migra agent was a local boy. He knows me."

"Ah. Muy profesional, La Migra."

They rode in silence the rest of the way to Bullhead City, winding at first past the marsh that fringes the Colorado River, then following the road on a straight line past mile after mile of dispersed sprawl on the Fort Mohave Reservation. Check cashing stores, cell phone purveyors, mattress sales, truck tires clearance cheap we finance, more check cashing stores, Basha's supermarket, rent to own quality furniture. At Bullhead City Cora pulled into a parking lot, which seemed to Agustín indistinguishable from those they'd been passing for the last fifteen minutes, and they looked for a moment at a cluster of improbable shining high-rises across the river. "Laughlin," Cora explained. "Nevada. Gambling." On a rise behind the casinos, an immense pink stack belched black smoke, ash and steam from coal mined on Navajo land, piped 273 miles in a slurry of Hopi groundwater to generate power for Los Angeles' fitness treadmills.

They walked toward the low-slung buildings at the back of the parking lot. "Avikwame Convalescent Supplies," said Cora, pointing.

A young man in the warehouse greeted Cora, saying that Selma had run up to Searchlight with a delivery. She was surprised at the relief she felt. He and Agustín wrestled a hospital bed onto the truck as Cora filled out paperwork. In almost less time than it had taken her to find the place, they were done and headed back home.

Odd winds picked up as they drove back down through Topock, past the marshes north of Needle Mountain. Sudden gusts spent themselves against the stakebed, rocking it an inch or so side to side. Little whirlwinds traced cloudy trails of soil across the road. "'Dust devils,'" explained Cora. "They're updrafts that form when there's no real wind. The earth gets too hot. All that heat has to go somewhere. If the wind doesn't cool the surface of the earth, the heat suddenly bursts out and spirals up into the sky, taking the dust with it."

Agustín nodded, a short hum of agreement. Cora turned onto the Interstate, headed east. Agustín saw it a mile down the road: a vortex fully thirty feet across at the base, the dust in it so thick the truckers drove through it with their lights on. It wandered from the westbound lanes onto the wide median, raising even more dust in the process. It seemed to gain strength as they approached it. Cora's did not so much as ease up on the gas pedal. Before he could say anything, the whirlwind was in front of them, blocking both eastbound lanes of the freeway, opaque with exaltated soil. Agustín clawed at the armrest again.

"If we die," said Cora, "just know that I loved you." Agustín stared at her wide-eyed. There was a moment, and then Cora laughed loud and teasing and they were through the torment and out the other side with hardly a shudder, and she hit the wiper arm to wash the dust off the windshield. Little rills of mud and soap ran down the passenger side of the windshield, blown sideways by the speed limit wind. Agustín watched them trickle toward the edge: one after another, they were wrested from the glass and leapt out into the godforsaken desert.

Lucia was born a week before Eloy. She never let him forget it. Eloy was only too happy to be bossed around. She only took advantage of it a little, ordering him to come out into the sunshine and play with her when he would otherwise have moped, hidden in the garage playing with clay.

On Sundays they rode their bikes. One day when they were five years old they made it all the way to Indian School Road, two miles away. It seemed the edge of the world to them, and Eloy was a little frightened. Beyond there be dragons, or Scottsdale, whichever came first. They turned around. They didn't tell their parents where they'd been. Around the corner was the library, a rented storefront with shelves to the ceiling. Lucia was already reading chapter books. Eloy liked the ones with pictures. They'd bring a few books home, and Lucia would read to Eloy, a chapter or two at a time, in the sparse shade of the arbor Eloy's father Jimmy had built.

One day, after a few weeks of her coaching him, Eloy read a whole chapter book aloud to Lucia out in the yard. At the end she squealed in delight, squeezed him and kissed him hard on the cheek.

One Friday evening Sonia dropped Lucia off at Inés', kissed her daughter, made her promise to behave. "You take it easy on Eloy, do you understand me?" "Yes, Mama." Sonia smiled indulgently. She went to the kitchen to speak with Inés for a moment, then gathered her purse and car keys, kissed her daughter again and Eloy as well for good measure. She went out the door, started the car. She drove off to meet her date.

She never came back.

Eloy fidgeted throughout the mass and the graveside service. He was restless to the point of panic during the dinner at Lucia's home. He wanted to sit with Lucia. Lucia was on the couch in the hallway with her grandmother Lupe, wearing a black veil, talking to no one. A stream of strangers came into the house bearing flowers and food. They patted Lucia's hair, spoke in low tones to Sonia's mother. Eloy felt the boredom threatening to overwhelm him. The bric-a-brac shelves beckoned. Sonia had collected salt and pepper shakers. One set was a pair of cats that mewed when you turned them over to season your food. Eloy made the cats cry over and over. Jimmy made him stop. "You're going to drive the women nuts with that," he told Eloy.

"When can we go home, Dad?" "It'll be a while longer, kid. Try and be patient. I know it's been a hard day. Go talk to Lucia," he said. "You haven't talked to her all day."

Eloy was sullen. He scuffed across the room, stood next to Lucia. He looked at his feet. Lucia looked at her knees, pressed together in black leotard on the couch. A distant cousin was asking Sonia's mother where Lucia would live. Eloy had not considered the notion that Lucia would move away. "With her uncle in Denver," said the old woman, "or perhaps in Hermosillo with Sonia's sister. It will be difficult. They have so little room." She sighed.

Lucia shrunk into herself, a black hole of grief. She sobbed. "I want my mama! Mama!" Old women rushed to surround her. They murmured consolingly, dabbing at their eyes with linen. Soon Lucia was crying in earnest.

"She is going to stay with me!"

The room fell silent. Two dozen pairs of eyes turned to Eloy.

"She is going to stay with me! She is not going away! Lucia will live with us in our house!"

Lucia's grandmother reached for him. "Mijito. We are all very sad today."

"You can't take her away!"

Lucia had stopped crying, almost. Her mouth was a bow, its ends pointing down. She looked at him fiercely, pleading.

Eloy would never forget that look. It cut through his six-year-old self-absorption. Grief-stricken as he was at the thought of losing her, feeling his need for her so keenly, the thought dawned behind his tears that she needed him even more.

"She's already staying with us. She already has her own room. She doesn't know anybody in Hermanseeo."

Inés moved to Eloy. "'Loito, that's enough. You're upsetting everyone."

Jimmy, his cheeks suddenly wet, stared wide-eyed at his son. He tried to speak. "You …" He choked on the words for a moment, coughed.

"You know, Eloy has a point."

"Jimmy."

"No, think about it. It makes sense, just for a while at least, until her family decides. We have the room, and she and Eloy…"

"We'll talk this over later."

"Sure, okay, I just wanted to say that…"

"Please, Jaime." Inés laid a palm on her husband's chest. This is not the time or the place. Please. We'll discuss it."

Jimmy nodded. He turned to Sonia's mother. "Tia Lupe, I'm sorry. I just… I'm sorry."

"No te preocupes, Jaime. You, Inés… you're family. I know you… Lucia, why don't you take Tio Jaime and Eloy outside for a while." The women set to talking.

Lucia stayed with Eloy, her twin.

The next summer they rented a cabin outside of Show Low, up in the pine forests atop the Mogollon Rim. Eloy had never seen the mountains so close at hand. He stared rapt at the landscape as the station wagon rolled through Superior, then Globe.

"Why are they called the Superstition Mountains?"

Lucia looked up from her book. "It's because of the Pima Indians. I read that. They didn't like to go in there. And the settlers thought it was because they were afraid of ghosts. Also there's a lost gold mine in there, I think."

They had come to the Salt River Canyon, a broad gash in the green and russet landscape. The road switchbacked down and down.

"I think there ARE ghosts in those mountains," Eloy said.

Lucia gazed for a long moment out at the Salt River, far below. "Me too."

The next day they were on the lake. Lucia came out of the cabin wearing her bathing suit, and Inés gasped. "Sweetheart, what did you do?"

"I didn't do anything!" "No, how did you get that bruise? Come here. Let me look." It was ugly and purple, near-rectangular. "Oh, honey, that's where you were sleeping on your book. But why would you bruise that way?"

"I don't remember, Aunt Inés."

Lucia was tired for the rest of the week.

She was in the hospital that Christmas, and Eloy whined to be taken to visit. Jimmy was doing a sinkful of dishes. "They don't let eight-year-olds visit the hospital, big guy. It's against the rules." Eloy sulked. "You can see her when she comes home next weekend."

"But I don't want to wait until next weekend!"

"I know, kiddo. I know. Hey, why don't you write her a letter? She's really bored in there, and the television hurts her eyes. I can take it to her tonight when you mother gets home."

Now that wasn't a bad idea, Eloy thought. He ran to his room, tore a page from his notebook, and wrote.

"Dear Lucia. How are you? I am fine. I want you to come home. I miss you so much. I looked at a map, and Indian School Road goes almost all the way to the [he went to the kitchen and asked his father for help spelling] Superstition Mountain Range. We could ride our bikes.

"Get well soon, love Eloy."

Lucia was gaunt the next weekend, deep purple crescents beneath each eye, a sickly pallor. Jimmy carried her from the car. Eloy was jubilant.

"Lucia! I got a book from the library to read to you! We could sit in the yard."

"I don't feel like it right now. Maybe tomorrow."

The next day Eloy sat by her bed, reading to her about the Lost Dutchman Mine.

By March Lucia was in the hospital more often than not. When she was home she mainly slept. The cancer had reached her bones, and she went from waking torment to morphine drowse and back again. Eloy picked a bunch of globemallow from the lot next door, took them to her. "Why are you bringing me stupid weeds?" Lucia was furious. "I don't want them!"

Inés found Eloy in the yard, poking at an anthill with a stick. "Honey, Lucia wants to talk to you." The globemallow was in a glass vase on her bedside table. Lucia looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. "I'm sorry I yelled at you, Eloy. I like the flowers. They're so bright and orange. I shouldn't have yelled at you. My legs just hurt so much."

"It's okay," said Eloy. "I know you're sick. I'm gonna go to the library and get a book to read to you. What should I get?"

"The Great Brain," Lucia said.

An hour and a half later Eloy was back. "I got your book, Lucia. I can read it to you now, okay?"

"I don't want you to read me any stupid book! Leave me alone!"

"It's OK, Lucia. I know you don't mean it. I'll read softly so that it doesn't hurt you."

"No!"

Eloy turned to the first page. "Most everyone in Utah remembers 1896 as the year the territory became a state. But in Adenville…"

"Stop, Eloy!"

"…it was celebrated by all the kids in town and by Papa and Mamma as the time of the Great Brain's reformation."

"Get out of my room!"

"I was seven years old going on eight."

"You're hurting me! Stop it! I don't want to hear you say anything else!"

"But you wanted me to…"

"Stop talking to me! Don't say anything more!"

"Lucia…"

"Don't say anything ever again, Eloy!"

Eloy left Lucia's room. He lay on his bed all afternoon and evening. At ten that night Inés put a blanket over him.

The next morning Lucia screamed. She couldn't move her leg. There was a phone call to the doctor. Eloy watched Jimmy carry her out to the car.

It was fully two weeks after the funeral that Inés realized Eloy had been silent since Lucia's death. She and Jimmy were understandably concerned. She was his soul-mate, Jimmy said. It makes sense he'd be bereft. They tried patient reasoning, sympathy. Surely a catharsis would come and unstop his tongue. A month passed. The grief counselors were called in, and then the psychologists. There were batteries of psychological tests. They didn't show anything out of the ordinary. Then came the neurologists. Eloy's reflexes were normal, and his electroencephalogram unremarkable. X-rays showed no abnormality at all. Inés and Jimmy tried everything.

And then, after a long time, they stopped trying.

What had started as an act of sullen rage slowly transformed itself. At first he'd intended merely to show Lucia that even after her death he would do as she said. Wouldn't she be sorry, looking down from heaven and seeing him suffer because of her! That rage passed, and the attention paid him by his worried parents took its place as the impetus for his silence.

And then that passed. The quiet became habit, and then comfort. And then it became discipline. He felt an odd power in his silence, a sloughing off of distraction, a way of carving away the extraneous noise just as surely as he'd pared this piece of steatite down to the figure latent there, hidden within.

He had been working a long time, and the new piece wasn't far from ready. This soapstone was nicely porous. He liked the green of the naked stone, but it was only after oiling that the deep black color - the true color, as he thought of it - was made manifest. He looked the work over. Eighteen inches tall, the woman waved graceful, exaggeratedly long and slender arms from beneath a cloak. Her head was canted upward, her chin outthrust slightly, as if she were watching the sky or looking up a long slope. Her face was blank, aside from a horizontal solid line incised into the stone where her eyes might have been.

Something about the fabric's folds wasn't quite right: it was draping oddly by her left knee. He reached for the coarse rasp, scraped increments of stone from the cloak. Anything worth saying he could say in stone. How much more precise than words. How much more impenetrable. How could he have described in words the tilt of the subject's head just so, the deep black cascade of her wind-rifted hair, the resigned set of her shoulders? An eighteenth of an inch scraped from the fold and she was right. He would have to sand that patch again, and he was out of 100 grit paper. It would have to wait until tomorrow, and he might as well get a new dust mask or three anyway. Cora was always nagging him about his certain looming and untimely death from sculptor's silicosis, asbestosis, and pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. A new package of filters would keep her off his back for a little while.

He tilted the sculpture down onto its bed of foam and cloth, strapped it down against an earthquake. It was tricky to get those arms as long as they were without breaking them off. He grabbed a diamond stylus, engraved the piece's title into its base. It took ten minutes, Eloy blowing the grit away every few seconds. He stood up, wiped the dust from his shirtfront. In neat informal letters the piece read "Lucia #43".

One early morning a month after her funeral he'd grabbed his bike and pedaled hard to Indian School Road, where he made a right turn. The sun shone in his eyes as it came up over the mountains. It was a long ride, ten miles at least, and it took him more than an hour. He jumped the bike over deep potholes, felt an odd, viscid breeze coming off the Arizona Canal. Mist rose off the water in the desert morning. He stood on the pedals through Scottsdale, the old donut shop men watching him pass. A sign announced the Salt River Indian Reservation. The buildings were fewer there.

And then, at the great barren dry wash that was the bed of the ass-end of the Salt River, the road just stopped. He had misread the map. He had made it only halfway to the Superstition Mountain Range, where the ghosts lived. A fortress wall of dark, backlit rock, it seemed no closer than it had when he had started. A fire went out of his heart and he turned for home.

If one wanted evidence that the desert is shaped by water, one needed look no further. All these stones, five miles from the nearest water and a thousand feet above it, were as smooth and rounded as if tumbled in an Appalachian stream, flushed out of the Whipple mountains over the centuries by flood after flash flood. The cobbles were stained black. A thin film of bacteria settled on each upturned surface, pulled manganese from the air and laid it down on the rock, there to oxidize and turn black. Ten thousand years they labored and then the artists came.

The artists went to a lot of trouble, one thousand years ago, or two, to move the rocks just so. Their intent was now obscure. There were five of their figures within five square miles, all of them with their feet pointing south. Those figures had fourteen feet among them. Some said the figures – or at least those of them with two legs – each represented Mastamho, who drove a willow spear into the side of a range of mountains far to the north, and pulled it out to unleash the Colorado River. He used his spear tip to carve the river's course through the desert.

Two of the figures were lions, fifty feet from pad to shoulder. There were those who referred to them as representations of Hatakulya, a were-puma variously described as Mastamho's spirit guide or friend. Some interpreters quibbled, suggested the stories were mere overlays, appropriations of the work of earlier people into current local myths.

Whatever meaning they held, the figures represented many hours of labor. Pick up a varnished stone and the desert floor, formerly guarded from exposure to the elements, will be pale underneath. Scrape away a layer and light shines out on a dark background. Drawing each figure meant moving seven or eight cubic yards of rock, in an age before the advent of the Bobcat rental yard. All of it was moved in baskets, or pushed by improvised wooden rakes.

Darrell picked up a stone from the periphery, hefted it in his hand.

There is a peculiar cast to the light in the evening desert sky, an odd pink with a wash of celadon. Across the river, lights flicked slowly on. The land turned purple. A light plane flew slowly past, two thousand feet above the cobbled ground. Its engine noise against the quiet desert twilight flushed a raven from behind a nearby boulder. From up there, you got your best view of these intaglios, light figures splayed out across the black desert soil, as if Mastamho had been washed out of the canyon by a flash flood. The raven flew off toward the river. The plane flew southwest toward Blythe. Its taillight winked for a long time, red against a deepening red sky.

He hurled the fist-sized stone at Mastamho's face, as hard as he could. It splintered, leaving a crater in the figure's brow. He cracked another beer, flicked the twist-off into the darkening intaglio, and scuffled along its perimeter.

His F-250 clicked in the cooling air. The engine had rattled coming up the hill, again. Thinking about it infuriated him. Four hundred goddamn bucks to the Yuma Downtown Mechanics last week! Hydraulic lifters were just not supposed to make that kind of noise. He knew he was looking at a valve job, and rent was coming due. No way the check-cashing place would front him enough. Another what, eight hundred? A thousand bucks sunk into the damn truck engine? More than he paid for the fucking fender flares, that's for damn sure. He shouldn't have gotten the grille guard last month, and he was looking at another nine hundred dollars worth of tire sometime before winter, and the court was after him for the child support again.

A noise came from the arroyo, a skittering of stones and a yelp. Goddamn wetbacks finally showed up, thought Darrell, and he sprinted for the truck, an inconspicuous cherry red parked across Mastamho's calves. He grabbed his father's hunting rifle off the front seat, peered through the scope. The scope was brand new, from the "neighborhood watch" section of the Army Surplus in Needles, and he'd never actually used it in the field.

He couldn't see a damn thing.

He grabbed the maglite instead, steeled himself to bathe the outcrop in the white light of frontier justice. He peered into the gathering dark.

There came a snap of twig from the arroyo. He flinched so hard he wrenched his shoulder. A spooked pair of quail burst out and flew off a hundred yards to the west.

Someone had spooked the quail, Darrell reckoned. This was it. The Minuteman camp had paid off. He would do his part for America. He raised his father's Remington. Goddamn wetbacks. Was a time when this was a good place to work, dams going in, good pay, when a guy could get a job doing something other than mopping the floor in the bail bonds joint. By the time my grandfather was my age, he'd already worked three years on Boulder Dam. My dad poured concrete at Glen Canyon, and then at the Mohave power plant. Try getting a Bechtel job around here now. Or any kind of construction at all. Unless they're putting in a new casino in Laughlin, and even then you'll work with the goddamn wetbacks. Fucking stores with Spanish signs I can't read, goddamn unlicensed truckers coming into California again, taking our wives away and moving them to fancy-ass houses in Victorville and slamming us for child support, teenagers having their babies in Bullhead City and going on the damn welfare. I've had enough. We've all fucking goddamn had enough. Time to make my move. "Come out with your goddamn hands up, asshole!"

His voice echoed off placid granite.

No one came out with his or her hands up.

"I said, come out with your hands up! I've – we've got you surrounded."

Echoes died off again.

He tried to remember the phrase they'd taught at Minuteman camp. Some of these wetbacks got here not even speaking English. Yell "you're surrounded," and they might think you're yelling at some cattle or some ass thing. Three beers made it harder to remember. "Salada con el manos arriba!"

Nothing.

"You have one last chance, Pedro, and then I'm gonna come get your brown ass."

Nothing.

A breeze ruffled the bundles of paper in the truck bed. He'd used the Internet to translate a message into Spanish, printed leaflets up after hours on the bail bonds office copier. In big block letters, they read:

"¡Amigos del espalda mojado de la atención! Sus partidarios han depositado el agua en las rocas a través de la presa de Parker, por la pintada de "Norte". ¡Si usted tiene sed, ayúdese!"

(Attention wetback friends! Your supporters have cached water in the rocks across from Parker Dam, by the "Norte" graffiti. If you're thirsty, help yourself!)

He'd cut out a figure of a snoozing sombrero-ed hombre leaning up a saguaro in an effort to liven up the leaflet, and left them laying around Yuma. A week of waiting by the rocks had turned up nothing. About Wednesday he'd realized that his campfires might have given him away, and now the blackened circle of ash on Mastamho's breast was three days cold. And now, his trap sprung, he had but to collect his prize.

"I..." he croaked, and then stopped. Damn it! Don't let on you're alone until you've got 'em tied up!

"We've got you covered, Pedro. Don't try anything funny!" Rifle braced against his right shoulder with one hand, Maglite in the other hand, he crept toward his quarry.

He remembered another word they'd taught him in camp.

"We have men behind all the rocks here, pendejo, so just sit tight and don't move!"

He crunched another hundred feet across the gravel. Now he could see into the arroyo, but the brush obscured his vision. He shined the flashlight.

"Come out with your hands up! Salido!" He carefully fired a warning shot over the arroyo, and then swept the Maglite over the brush with his left hand.

There was sudden rustle from inside the brush, and a burst of movement running away from Darrell, and in the split second before he recognized the lupine ears, the brushy tail, he had turned and fired wildly.

He knew he had fucked up even before he felt it. A .416 Remington Magnum's recoil velocity is 18.5 feet per second. He had fired one-handed and in a hurry. Every single one of those feet per second caught him in his collarbone, which snapped. He dropped the rifle, shouting in pain and anger.

Across the arroyo, behind the rocks to which he had scrambled when the flashlight spooked him, the coyote perked up his ears at Darrell's howling. He gave a tentative yip in response, and then a chorus of barks rained down on them from the Whipple Mountains.

It was early morning and six more beers before Darrell had dulled his pain enough to risk driving with his hurt arm. He climbed into the driver's seat, wincing and bleary. Out of force of habit he reached for the shoulder strap. A sharp stab persuaded him otherwise. He reached around the steering column with his left hand and turned the ignition key. The truck roared awake in a clatter of lifter noise. Closing his eyes against the certainty of pain, he reached for the shift lever and pushed it into first gear. The pain made his whole body flinch. His foot fell off the clutch. The truck lurched forward in a spray of varnished gravel, then stalled.

Another swig of beer, another awkward reach around the wheel, and he jolted another twenty feet. The third time was the charm. He carefully pushed the clutch all the way down, centered his foot on the pedal, screamed the shift lever into first, rode the clutch as he waited for the blinding flashes of light to leak from his head, and then fishtailed across the open plain to the dirt road.

Shifting into second was easier, and he made it all the way to Route 62 and a half-mile west, steering one-handed, before a kindly San Bernardino County sheriff escorted Darrell first to the hospital and then to jail.

It took a long while for the dust to settle, an hour, perhaps two. At noon a light plane flew low and fast over the intaglios, then doubled back for another pass, and then another. A third of Mastamho's torso had been obliterated, scraped away in a near-helix of fish-tailing all-terrain tire tracks, flung into the air to choke the beaver tail cacti for miles downwind under the pink and celadon evening sky.

— ¿Porque, Agustín? ¿Porque?

"I had to, Isa. I had no choice. It was my oath."

— Bullshit, your fucking oath. You took an oath tambien conmigo, pendejo. What about the oath you took with me?

"I had to, Isabel."

— "I had to, Eesabel."

Her mocking tone cut deep. The person closest to his heart, she needed but flick a fingernail to wound him mortally, and here she was stabbing wildly with words like those.

— The pinche bruja says "jump," you jump, como el sapo.

"English, Isabel. This is the North."

— ¡Chingalo! I see your "North!" Esa puta traviesa, filthy whore, naked in that truck yesterday, howling for you.

"Gorrioncita. Mi alma. Querida. Lo siento. I had to do it. Had to do it."

— ¿Por alguien extranjero? Some stranger?

"He would have died."

— And how many people are dead already? How many of us?

"Isabel."

— They will find you now, you stupid asshole!

"Isabel, I had to help him."

— And who will help you?

"Isabel, the gringa thinks I am from Guatemala. She has no clue."

— And what if she talks to someone who isn't stupid?

"His femur was broken, Isabel. What could I do? I had to do my job. No, no my job. My duty!

— They will find you. They will break you. Like your father. Like your sister.

"I know."

— I want you to live, my husband!

She was sobbing in earnest now.

— I want you to live. That is all I want. All I ever wanted. They came and I said nothing. You saw what they did to me. You saw what they did!

She pointed an accusing finger. He took it, brought it to his cheek, kissed her wedding ring. Agustín looked closely. Her hand was severed at the wrist. Radius and ulna looked roughly sawn, as if the procedure had been done in a hurry on a very uncooperative patient. Bits of muscle hung loosely from the site of amputation. A long muscle, the patient's Abductor Pollicis Longus was intact, as if wrenched with great force from its posterior ulnar attachment. Other muscles, the extensors and flexors, had given way more or less at the point of injury. Agustín wrote a few notes on the nearby clipboard.

Gustavo cleared his throat, coughed. His breath steamed in the chilly air of the morgue.

"Lo siento, Profesor. I was just examining another set of remains."

Gustavo peered over the worktable. "Hmmm. Female. Yes, yes, I know, that's easy with the nail polish. She appears to be about 25 to 30 years of age. Educated. No calluses... no, wait. Odd calluses on the fingertips. A typist?"

"A musician, Gustavo. She was a musician. She played the guitar: she sang. And she was 33 years old."

"¡Ai! The birthmark on the finger. This is Isabel, then. Que lastima."

"I thought it would be different. I thought I would feel at peace. I have waited so long. And now it ... it is like I kissed this hand just this morning.

"I have no peace, knowing. Only desolation in my breast."

At least you doknow now, mijo. All these years you wondered. All these years not seeing the body. Her hand looks so fresh, like it was yesterday. I don't see how that can be: it's so hot out here."

Agustín looked up. The vulture that had followed them from Los Vidrios had gone out to get his ten closest friends. "Rest, Gustavo. Don't talk. It's almost night. The canal is only fifteen miles, and then the road."

Gustavo breathed heavily in the sparse ironwood shade. Agustín checked his pupils, his pulse. There was no longer any doubt. Insuficiencia cardiaca congestiva.

Isabel screamed.

— Do something! He's dying!

"He should not have come with me, Isabel. All those diuretics for his heart! He was dehydrated before we started across."

— Why did we bother to send you to medical school? You should have been a mechanic like your father wanted. He never killed anyone in his life. How many bodies do you have now? How many corpses make a career for you?

"Isabel. You're upsetting Gustavo. He needs to rest."

— He is already dead. I am already dead. And you show off your training to that fucking whore! Splinting a dead man's thigh! You can heal the dead now? Why did we die, Agustín? Why did your whole family die? So you can play doctor with some Norteña?

"She rescued me. I was going to die, not two days after Gustavo did. I was drifting away. I wanted to die. I missed you so much, gorrioncita. Mi vida. I wanted the desert to kill me. And she, she plucked me out.

"Don't you see, Isabel? I want them to find me, to send me back for my bones to be broken. I want them to tear my flesh from my body, to grind my fingers in their vises, to burn out the pain with their electricity. None of that would hurt like this, Isabel. They took you from me. They took my wife, my soul. Why should I live? How can I live? The whole world is dark with you gone."

He wept.

— Agustín.

He could not take his eyes off his feet. His hands jammed in his pockets. He shook with grief.

— Agustín. I am sorry. I should not have scolded you.

— Look at me.

— ¡Míreme!

He raised his head.

— I was upset. I'm sorry.

Agustín nodded.

— I wish I cold soothe your pain. I wish I could take it for you, to carry it in this cold afterlife so that you could go on. I gave everything for you because I love you. They did not kill that.

Isabel's eyes. As brown as chocolate. Rimmed red with tears. Her lips. Her beautiful teeth. She smiled sadly.

— Solo por tu amor...

He had so missed her singing.

— Solo por tu amor yo me moriré...

Her voice covered him.

He awoke in a sweaty tangle of sheet. His heart fell with a near-audible thud. One more god damn day in El Norte. One more aching, arid day in this pointless life.

He looked at the clock. Four in the morning.

Two agonizingly long hours before he could start working, before he could drown the pain in the meager solace of repetitive and menial labor. Every knuckle skinned on a slipped socket wrench, every spasm in his lower back brought her to mind.

Every night he drank until he could no longer feel. Every morning he poured coffee into his suffering gut, fought off the bitter bile and the queasiness. Six years. Six years! and every day as bad as the one on which she disappeared.

He found himself longing for just one day, just one day where he did not think of her.

And immediately the guilt rose up in him. He ran for the bathroom, vomited up the shameful, momentary betrayal of his wife.

He gripped the toilet seat hard enough to cut his fingers. The floor, linoleum half-missing, ground into his kneecaps. One more job. One more useless pastime to fill the empty space between widowhood and death.

It would fill an hour, perhaps.

He found the linoleum knife, ran its sharp, curved blade along the thirty-year-old flooring. The kitchen's linoleum came up in long strips.

The sun began to color the eastern sky. A thin line of red formed along the horizon, behind the dunes that fringed the Colorado's ancient floodplain. A tall cottonwood shaded Agustín's double-wide on that side. A raven sat in its branches, barely visible against the dark sky.

Six years! Another ragged strip of flooring came free. When does this end? And another. If I survive until a hundred, and die then? A narrow piece ripped partway. Where is the virtue in endurance for its own sake?

Resignation. He stopped. "I am sorry, Isabel. I am so weak. I cannot stand any more of this." He went to the bathroom mirror, made the skin of his throat taut with his left hand, and brought the linoleum knife up to his jugular.

He studied his reflection. Once, he thought, a beautiful young woman looked into those same eyes. Hers were so dark. He could never tell where the irises stopped and the pupils began. Looking into them was looking into the depths of the earth. What did she see looking into his? Flecks of green on gray. Eyebrows that faded ever so slightly before meeting. Nose broken in a teenage soccer game. Six years of lines and scars and world-weariness layered over all.

No. His last sight on Earth would not be of his own tortured face.

He went to the bedroom, took his father's pocketwatch from the nightstand. He hung the chain on the bathroom mirror, opened the watch, brought knife to throat again, gazed at the photo of Isabel mounted inside. She stood in their old garden, in front of a big bougainvillea blooming purple. She wore a white dress. Her head was cocked to the left, black hair cascading over her shoulder. She smiled crookedly at him. They had been late for a party, and she had said "vamonos."

This was it. "Let's go." He tensed.

A sudden thud from the right, and loud squawking. The window screen fell out of the frame and into the bathtub. Startled, Agustín dropped the knife. It slid a few inches and fell through a hole in the floor. There was a raven in the tub, its talon caught in the screen. It yelled, screaming bloody murder. Agustín made to grab the bird, which brandished her nasty-looking beak. Rebuffed, he grabbed a towel from the rack, tossed it on the raven's head, folded it down around her and lifted. She came free, a swatch of window screen in her claw. He stepped into the tub, tried to shove her through the open window. The bird shook her head out from beneath the towel. She turned, reached around, clamped her beak down hard on the flashy part of Agustín's hand, between thumb and forefinger.

"¡Pinche pajarraco!" He dropped her back into the tub. His blood was all over the towel, dripping onto the floor. The raven croaked at him reproachfully. She hopped up onto the sill, pushed off out the window, and landed in the cottonwood branches.

By the time Agustín finished cleaning the bite wound, it was time to go to work.

He told her how he felt about her. He asked her to be with him.

Raven laughed. She refused him.

"But tell me why!" cried Falling Man.

"Just look at you!" Raven scoffed. "You're worthless! And you want to be my husband? I have the most beautiful singing voice in the desert!"

Raven coughed, then let loose a few harsh, guttural croaks.

"See? The one who becomes my husband must have qualities the equal of mine, at least. I can fly from here to Monument Valley in less time than it takes you to wash your ugly face! And look at you. You can't even fly."

Falling Man knew Raven was right, but Falling Man had too much pride in his heart. He could not let Raven's challenge go unanswered. "If I show you that I can fly, will you take me as your husband?"

Raven laughed again. "If you show me that you can fly, then I will agree to discuss the matter with you further."

Falling Man went to the edge of the big cliff. A long distance below lay a dry wash. Its surface glittered with sharp stones. Falling Man wondered how best to begin to fly. He had never done it before. Should he wait for a breeze to pick up, and then glide on it? Should he just jump?

"I knew you couldn't do it," Raven scoffed. "I would never live with a coward like you."

Her words went through Falling Man like arrows. He looked down again. Directly below him a labyrinth of stones was laid out in the sand; a spiral of turquoise, carnelian, and serpentine.

He dove for the center of the labyrinth. The ground rushed up to meet him. He heard Raven's laugh grow faint and distant. The realization grew in him that he was not flying. Heartsick, he waited for the ground to reach up and swat out his life.

The center of the labyrinth came up to meet him. The sun glinted off the sand in the wash. It grew impossibly bright. And then...

And then, suddenly, with a loud sound like an explosion, the sand just went past him. He was falling through the earth. The soil was hot where it brushed against his skin. It tore at his clothing. He stretched out his arm to hold his shirt together, and was surprised to find that he was turning. He stretched out his other arm. It turned him back the other way. He lifted the index finger on his outstretched left hand and banked down toward the center of the earth.

He grew thirsty, light-headed.

The soil became thinner the farther down he flew. It no longer scraped his skin. He began to see light beneath him, filtering up through the thin soil from the second world. Soon the earth was white, no thicker than a cloud. He emerged from the base of the cloud and saw a world of mountains below him.

He landed in the center of the labyrinth. Raven was there, watching, her head cocked.

Falling Man looked Raven in the eye. "As you can see, I can fly. I am ready to become your husband now."

Raven scoffed. "All right, so you can fly. There's more to my life than just flying. Your people must stay within a day's walk of a spring, or you die of thirst. I can live for weeks in the desert with no more water than the dew from the cactus spines! I can call up sweet water from the rock! Why should I take a husband who cannot freely roam the desert with me?"

Falling Man took his despair and swallowed it, forced himself to appear brave. "If I show you that I can live in the desert with only the water I can find, will you take me as your husband?"

Raven shook her head. "If you show me that you can live in the desert with only the water you can find, then I will agree to discuss the matter with you further."

Falling Man nodded. "Then I'll prove to you that I am not weak and thirsty. I will stake myself out here in the desert, far from water."

An ironwood root protruded from the sand at the mouth of the labyrinth. He went to it, pulled on it. It was stuck fast. Falling Man tore a strip of leather from the hem of his shirt. He tied one end to the stump, and the other around his ankle. He turned to Raven. "Come back in a week and untie me."

Raven cocked her head again. Falling Man's determination was beginning to melt her heart. She croaked softly and flew away to the south.

The first day without water was very hard. It was summer, and Falling Man had staked himself out in a spot with no shade. His mouth parched, he licked the sweat from his arms, drank it where it ran down his brow and into his mouth. Then night fell. He slept. Painful dreams of water just beyond his reach flitted through him like the barn owl clicking overhead on its way down to the river.

The second day was harder. The clouds had come in and promised rain. No rain came: only the scent of it on a parched breeze. By the time night came again he had stopped sweating. He did not dream.

On the third day the clouds vanished, leaving only turquoise sky. Falling Man's skin, already fiery red, began to blister. He sat dully in the sun all day, his mind circling around the dark hole in his soul. Who was Raven that he endured such torment for her? He would prove his worthiness, and then... what? Another test?

The ants had found him. They were small ones. They did not bite, but rather climbed up among the hairs on his legs and stole the flaking, desiccated skin. He ate a few of them.

"Even if I die of thirst," he thought, "I will have proved myself worthy. But not of Raven."

The film that had shaded his mind seemed to part, like oil on water when you add soap. He saw things with astonishing clarity now. Raven was too full of herself, too boastful. He longed for She Who Weeps, the one who had first cast him into the desert long, long ago. He would survive this test, and then he would refuse Raven. She would taunt him. She would claim the right to another test of his worthiness. He would look her in the eye and tell her "I love another." He would leave the desert. He would find She Who Weeps.

That was when Horned Lizard showed up. He climbed onto Falling Man's leg. He ate an ant, swallowed, thought for a moment, then ate another ant. "Grandson," he told Falling Man, "I am happy to see you."

"Good afternoon, Grandfather," said Falling Man.

"I understand you've changed your mind about Raven."

"Yes, Grandfather. I have."

"That's good, Grandson." Horned Lizard crawled up onto Falling Man's forehead, looked him in the eye. "Raven has given us nothing but trouble. I'm very happy to hear your decision. I feel as if I might shed tears of joy."

And Horned Lizard did weep, strong bloody tears that coursed down Falling Man's face and into his mouth. Falling Man drank them greedily.

"Do you thirst, Grandson?" Horned Lizard seemed surprised.

"I have been without water for three days, Grandfather."

"You have water at your feet, my foolish Grandson." Horned Lizard scuttled to the center of the labyrinth and scraped away an inch of sand. Cool water rose up to fill the little hole.

"Drink this then, Grandson, and if it runs dry just dig a bit more, and more water will come. But be careful not to dig too deep."

Horned Lizard ran off then.

Falling Man stretched as far as the leather thong around his ankle would allow. He could just reach the water hole with his outstretched hands. He cupped them, filled them with water. But most of the water ran out before he could bring his hands to his mouth.

He thought for a moment, then took a finger and scratched a narrow channel in the sand. Water began to run down the channel. A few drops reached his mouth. He sucked greedily, swallowing some water and more sand. He scraped a deeper channel with four fingers. At last, a thin stream coursed into his mouth. He rinsed the sand from his tongue, and drank a little more.

But still, the water was not enough. Falling Man grew frustrated and angry. His thirst was so intense that he needed to sit in the water, to let it soak in through his skin, before he would be sated. He dug at the sand like a coyote, and more and more water flowed the deeper he dug.

At last he came to a rock buried in the sand, a fist-sized chunk of turquoise. Water leaked out from beneath it. "This is the stone that keeps the water from me," thought Falling Man, and he worked to loosen it. But it would not budge. Night fell, but Falling Man did not sleep. It was only in the afternoon of the fourth day that the turquoise began to let go of the leaking earth. With torn, bleeding fingers, Falling Man pried it from the bottom of the hole.

Behind it was the flood, and water rushed out. It clutched at Falling Man, tore him from the labyrinth, snapped the leather thong like a strand of spider silk. The valley filled with angry brown water. Falling Man tumbled down the wash like a broken twig, riding the front of the wave. Logs and stones battered him. The water cast him sharply up against a boulder. A bolt of unbelievable pain shot from his leg, made even his scalp and fingertips hurt. He tried to reach the surface. His lungs burned. He longed to breathe. The pain from his broken leg made him retch. He managed a gasp of air, then another, and then the flood pulled him under again.

At long last the flood ebbed. He rolled up against a slab of metal. There was a rope there. He held on to it, crying at the intense pain from his thigh, until the blackness folded around and took him. Raven found him there. She landed next to him, stayed with him until the sun began to set, then leapt into the air with a mournful croak and flapped off heavily toward the Mogollon Rim.

Falling Man slept for a long time.

It was on the eighth day that light began to filter in. There were voices, the soft sounds of machines. Then came pain, muffled and distant. A few minutes later, the sounds and pain were no longer discrete things existing on their own. Falling Man was back. It was him hearing the sounds, him feeling the pain. He murmured. His lips were cracked, his throat dry and intolerably sore. A sliver of something cold appeared in his mouth. It was the best thing he had ever tasted. He sucked at it until it was gone, and then another appeared. It was better than the first. The stuff was familiar, and he tried to remember what it was called.

The word came. "Ice," said Falling Man.

"Hush," said Cora. She put another sliver between his lips. "Don't try to talk. You've been through the wringer. Just rest."

A doctor peered through the door. "Ms. Colfax?"

Cora handed the cup of ice to Eloy. "Be right back. Don't give him too much." Eloy shot her a mock-annoyed glance.

"Sorry," said Cora. "Forgot who I was talking to." She walked out into the ICU hallway.

The doctor had a clipboard. He bore the typical expression of an Intensive Care Unit intern: tired, distracted, abrupt. "Well, the EEG looks normal, under the circumstances. It looks like your friend here is pretty lucky. No sign of brain damage, which is what we were most worried about as a long-term consequence of severe dehydration. And the sunburn shouldn't give him any problem, though we'll keep him on the Cipro just to make sure all that dirt in his blisters stays non-infectious."

Cora relaxed. "Well, that's good news."

The doctor leafed through the file. "We've got the orthopedic surgeon coming in day after tomorrow from Loma Linda to slap some titanium in that femur. I'd rather have him in the OR sooner, but apparently there was a bus crash in Barstow last night. He's booked. Anyway, we've got your friend stabilized and two days in traction won't hurt him, as long as he's in ICU. My guess is he's going to be fine after a few months and some physical therapy."

Cora smiled. "Good. Thank you, Doctor."

The doctor gave Cora a weary smile, began to turn away, halted. "You know, you probably saved his life with that traction splint. Femur fractures have a very high morbidity when the patient's untreated for that long. Are you an MD?"

Hesitation. "No."

"An EMT, then?"

"No, Doctor. My mechanic splinted him."

The doctor's eyebrows shot up. "Your mechanic?"

"Mechanic, laborer, you know. My ranch-hand."

"Huh. Well, tell him he's got another career waiting if he gets tired of fixing tractors. That was the best damn field traction splint I've ever seen. I doubt half our guys could do that good a job with the ER staff standing by." He shook his head, chuckled, turned to check on the cardiac in 11B.

Cora walked back into the room. He was sleeping. Eloy looked up at her.

"I think I need to have a little talk with Agustín," said Cora.

She took off her kidskin gloves, wiped her brow with the back of her hand. This patch of tamarisk had been a bear to remove. The invasive plants' fibrous roots still criss-crossed the desert soil. She wrested her gaze from the Whipple Mountains to the west, walked to the irrigation slidegate. A few turns of the valve and the metal slab slid slowly along the concrete. A gap opened: an inch, then six, then a foot. Water rushed out onto the soil she'd loosened, sank into the parched earth. She let it run. The mountain skies had been generous this winter, and no one would mind her requisitioning a tenth of an acre-foot.

The cold water was tempting. She decided to wade. She squatted, unlaced her boots, slipped them off. By the time she got the right leg of her overalls rolled up to her calf, the left had fallen down again. She really should sew straps on the things, she thought to herself. Ah, well. Agustín was a hundred yards away on the other side of the barn, working on the balky generator. He'd be out of sight for a good hour. Not that she'd mind if he spied her. He was a recent arrival, and his Guatemalteco modesty hadn't quite melted away under the warm sun of her influence. She chuckled, imagining herself slow-roasting poor shy Agustín to a deep, rich umber. Off came the overalls. She walked out into the racing water, warmed only a little since emerging from the penstocks of Parker Dam. It stung bitter cold against her feet and ankles.

Teeth chattering, she walked to the end of the row she'd dug. Two hundred feet away, if that, and the soil was so thirsty that she beat the water to the end with plenty of time to spare. Her feet were already hot again by the time the first, now-tepid, waves caught up with her.

Half an hour of flood irrigation and the soil she'd dug would be moist a foot down or more. The tamarisk roots would swell and bud, sending one shoot after another to sprout leaves in the desert sun, greedily drinking every bit of moisture to regrow the bosque she and Agustín had razed with backhoe and plow. Thin, questing stems would emerge, one after another, and she would be there to kill them all, to pull them from the still-moist ground and toss them into the fire. Another flood, and another spurt of growth, and another scorched-earth plant-yanking rampage, and then two more cycles just like that, and with luck the tamarisk would be gone. It was easier than trying to find each blind piece of root underground, and far preferable to using herbicide. Once they'd knocked back the infestation, this year or the next, she'd start planting out the ironwood and mesquite saplings she'd been nursing in their fifteen-gallon pots. Then, Cora would turn her deadly attention to the next tamarisk copse down. It was all about achievable goals. Killing tamarisk on a fifth of an acre at a time seemed doable. With a little persistence, Cora would rid her ten-acre homestead of tamarisk by her ninetieth birthday.

The water around her ankles was turning cold again. She started back toward the valve. A few steps, and a hidden stick of tamarisk scraped hard against her callused heel. Ow! Oh well and dammit. The squeaky wheel gets yanked out by the roots. She felt for it under the flood, her fingers immediately going numb. There it was. It wouldn't come up. She wiped muddy hands on suddenly goose-pimpled thighs, screwed her face into a look of supreme determination, set her feet wide, stoked the blaze in her eyes to "serious," grasped the stem like she really meant it this time. It gave just a little, but no more.

What was this thing? She felt like she'd been over the plot with a comb. Must be an elastic bit of root, tamped down into the earth by her digging, which had sprung back up through the water-soaked soil. She knelt back down, started again to work the tamarisk out of the mud. The effort had her dripping with sweat again. It ran down her scalp beneath her thick black hair, pooled in the hollow between her shoulder blades, ran off down the small of her back, stung her eyes, glistened on her throat and arms. If the stick wasn't underwater, her palms would have been too slick to keep hold of it.

A minute passed, then two. She felt stupid, pulling on that root with her bare hands. The pickaxe was only a hundred feet away. Still, using it would mean putting the boots back on over feet caked with mud. She kept pulling.

She felt a sudden shift, almost a pop. She wasn't sure at first whether it was the root or her lower back. Lift with your legs, Cora. An extra inch of the root had broken free of the mud. Determination redoubled, she got to her feet, squatted low, dug in her heels. Come on, stupid root. Come on, dammit! And then it was almost as if the root had shrugged, thrown up its hands, said "you win": three feet of horizontal runner came up out of the mud as easy as an extension cord out from under a throw rug.

Cora held her prize aloft, let loose a howl of triumph. "Take that, you motherfucker, river-sucker, defouler of habitat and place! Back to the compost from which you came! I will use your ashes for soap to wash my ass! Yeehaw!"

There came a flicker of motion in her peripheral vision. It was Agustín, peering around the corner of the barn to see what the commotion was all about, a look of concern on his face. She smiled, waved. His eyes met hers for a moment, then found something important to look at near his toes. He blushed deep and dark, waved vaguely, slipped back around the corner of the barn. Arizona is a strange place, thought Cora. You never know when you're going to run into a naked, mud-covered gringa holding aloft a stick, yelling obscenities at it under the dazzling sun.

The water had stopped soaking into the soil. She walked back to close the slidegate. The valve was stuck. She dropped the tamarisk root, grabbed the handle with both hands, and wrenched the damn thing shut. Sweating again. Looking toward the barn, she reached down to retrieve the stick.

The stick coiled angrily around her arm.

Ai! She jumped. But it was just a racer snake, upset at having to swim, then doubly so at being handled. She grasped it behind the head with her left hand, uncoiled it gently from her right arm, walked it over to the low levee that lined the irrigation ditch, set it on the ground. It was defiant. The levee was not where the snake wanted to be. It fairly leapt back into the water, zipped between her shins, swam off toward the remaining tamarisk at the end of the row.

There wasn't a living thing on the planet that Cora didn't love, but even the most devoted herpetophile must flinch when the stick at hand suddenly becomes a snake. What was next, a plague of frogs? Nervous giggle grew into full-on laugh. That really spooked her. It really did. Full-on laugh became gales. Oh, my god. She held onto her sides, it hurt so much. Nothing to do but sit down until this passed. Her black eyes sparkled. She gasped for breath. Oh, man, what a trip. Eloy has to hear about this one.

Sitting felt good, slowly warming water six inches deep and mud down to the center of the earth. Parker Dam, the deepest on the planet, went 230 feet below the surface of the river before it hit bedrock solid enough to anchor it. The river had washed gravel, cobbles, and silt from Wyoming and New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, and dumped it all on Cora's land. Who was she to refuse a bed made so thoughtfully? The Princess and the pea gravel. She laid back, gasping at the cold. Better a layer of mud than a layer of sweat. Stomach hot, back cold. Not bad. She rolled over. It was harder to do than she expected, earth pulling on hip and elbow with a sucking sound. She pushed herself up onto her side. The mud suddenly slipped beneath her, and she fell onto her face. Laughing again, waving her arms back and forth in the muck, she made face-down "snow-angels." Mud angels. That was her, she decided, a mud angel. A harbinger of humus. A dove of the dust. A pomme de terre.

OK, that's it, she was getting far too cold and far too silly. Shivering. She stood up, an inch-thick layer of clay coming with her. It oozed down her belly, her legs. This presented a problem. Should she scrape it off there, or walk to the shower and hose herself off, running the risk of clogging the drain? Oh. She'd sit on the porch, wait for the mud to dry – shouldn't take more than twenty minutes today – peel it off, and sweep it into the garden.

There was the small matter of carrying the clothes back. No sense getting those all dirty. She climbed the levee, started washing her hands in the ditch.

Sudden tires on gravel came up behind her. What the hell? The urge came to flatten herself out in the mud again, to seek the camouflage of soil on soiled skin. But it was only Eloy. And what the hell had happened to his poor truck? She stood, grinning. "Eloy! I borrowed your work boots!"

Eloy seemed preoccupied. He jerked his head toward the truckbed. Cora padded across the gravel on clay-soled feet.

There was a wool blanket in the bed, covering something. Eloy pulled back a corner. "Holy fucking shit, Eloy! What the hell have you gotten yourself into?" Eloy, of course, said nothing. Cora pulled the tailgate down, jumped up into the bed, put two stiff forefingers to the red-raw throat to feel for a pulse. Five seconds and nothing. She shifted her fingers slightly, and five more seconds, and a dark look crossed her face. "Eloy, I don't know where you found this guy, but he..." Startled, she moved her fingers slightly one more.

"My god. Drive into the barn, quick. We've got to get him out of the sun. He's alive."

A cloud of dust settled on the creosote bushes. It was a left at the fork, then nine-tenths of a mile to another fork, and take the right. The road – now a two-rut, red brome grass growing in the middle – scuttled sidelong up the bajada. Eloy reached the first stand of saguaros, found the wide swath of bare desert pavement he had remembered, pulled over and got out. He pulled his crowbar from the bed, and the backpack frame and tumpline. The truck’s engine clicked as it cooled. Up along the ridge that petered out just to the south of his parking space, three mature saguaro stems grew from a single base. That was the spot. The soapstone was just beyond.

It was hot. Eloy cursed himself silently as he walked, crowbar in hand. He should have been up here, gotten that rock, and been back home by now. This time of day he should have been under the ramada, roughing out the piece with the reciprocating saw. Rising at ten and eating breakfast until noon had put him out here in the heat of day, and those afternoon clouds boiling up over Harquahala Peak didn't make him happy. Monsoons were not to be trifled with out here.

The vein of steatite was where he had left it a year ago. It didn't show on any geological map. Local rockhounds had somehow neglected to catalog it. Eloy was pretty sure he was the only person who knew of the vein, and he... well, he wasn't talking. The rock face had eroded only a little since his visit a year ago. The scrapes he'd made with the crowbar looked fresh. Last year he'd pounded wedges into a seam in the rock, split out a two hundred pound piece, laboriously sawn an inch-deep kerf with a masonry saw, pounded wedges into the kerf to split the rock in two, and hauled one piece home. Half of that piece was now scattered around his shed, dust in the corners and bits of filigreed chip - three-dimensional doodles. The other half, carved and oiled, sat in a hotel lobby in Sedona. It had been too long since he'd finished that one. It was time now.

He pushed the crowbar's blade into what was left of the old crack. The piece he'd put back in place, about two feet long by six inches wide by eight deep, rolled out onto his right steel-toed boot. He yanked it out from underneath. Didn't seem damaged. The backpack frame came off his shoulders, and Eloy laid it alongside the rock. Give me a place to stand, said Archimedes. Wedge the crowbar under the far side of the rock, jam a rounded granite cobble underneath for a fulcrum, and I can get this hundred-twenty-pound stone onto the backpack frame. On Eloy's fourth try, it worked.

It was very hot now, with no breeze to stir the sweaty tank-top under Eloy's denim shirt. He fished in his back pocket for the nylon rope and lashed the rock as tightly as he could to the frame, scraping his knuckles as he threaded the cord underneath.

And then, the fun part. He tilted the frame and rock on end with the crowbar, leaning them up against the rock face. Sat down in front of the pack. Slipped the tumpline over his brow, tightened the leader. Slipped left arm, then right, into the shoulder straps. Tightened every compression strap he could reach, then tightened them all again. Eloy took a deep, aching breath, sweat fairly flowing into his eyes. He held the breath, pushed it out all the way, and rolled forward onto his hands and knees.

Good god. Was this really such a good idea? A hundred-twenty pounds of rock riding piggyback. Eloy bid a silent farewell to his disks and knees, brought the crowbar up with his right hand, and slowly, achingly, got to his feet. Not bad. The rest is just patience. Using the crowbar as a cane, watching very carefully where he put each foot, he needed only half an hour to get back to his truck. And then lower the gate, and turn around carefully, and sit, and then comes that blessed post-pack feeling: lighter than air.

A swig of water and it was time to head for pavement. Eloy was nervous. The clouds over Harquahala looked pretty damned ominous. He was reluctant to race down the rutted roads: why go to all this trouble just to smash the rock against the bed liner, breaking it into useless shards? He kept the speedometer hovering at fifteen, watching lightning strike the summit in his rear-view mirror.

At long last he reached the wash, gunned the engine, barreled down over the lip, began to roll up the far side... and felt his rear wheels dig themselves into the sand. Raindrops began to dot the windshield. He got out. His truck was at thirty degrees from the horizontal, front tires just up on the rim of the wash, rears dug in about eight inches, tailgate resting flat on the sand.

He found a couple big, flat rocks, and jammed one beneath each rear wheel. Started the engine, popped it into first gear, and nothing happened save more rut-digging. He fished behind the seat for his camp shovel.

Half an hour later, he'd dug a foot of sand out from beneath the tailgate, and replaced the rocks beneath the tires. The jangle of keys in the ignition, the roar of an overheated engine, the whine of tires digging themselves still farther into the sand. And then another noise, like a freight train coming toward him at high speed. It was far distant, but getting louder. Eloy closed his eyes in frustration, laid his forehead against the steering wheel for just a moment. And then grabbed a milk crate from its spot on the passenger seat.

The ground started to shake. The leaves of the creosote bushes lining the wash began to tremble. Eloy carried the crate and camp shovel twenty yards up the hill, felt suddenly in his shirt pocket, ran back to get the matches from the Ford's glove box.

An inch-high tongue flowed into the hole Eloy had dug, filled it, sank into the sand with a hiss. Then a trickle, a mere four inches deep, raced past Eloy.

A wall of water, brown and flecked with foam, rounded a curve upwash. It pushed a breeze before it. The flood surged under and around the truck, lapping up against the tailgate. And then it rose, and rose some more. Eloy stepped back, felt his shirt pocket for a cigarette, remembered he hadn't smoked for ten years. The flood was racing into the truckbed now, eddies swirling over the wheel wells. A surge in the flood, and the truck jumped sideways a foot or so. Logs and rocks roared past, some of them dinging the truck's side and fenders.

Eloy wished the truck a wistful, silent goodbye. He walked back to the crate, carried it and the shovel to a nearby ironwood. He pulled a wool blanket from the crate, spread it out in the tree's sparse shade. He took a nap.

He woke as the sun was setting. His truck, to his immense surprise, was still there. It was right-side-up and everything, though with a brand new crop of dents on the upstream side. The water had not reached the engine compartment. Eloy carefully walked down into the wash, wary of quicksand. The flood had dropped a floor of cobbles around the rear wheels. The truckbed was full of flood wrack. On the floor of the wash lay an odd black object. Eloy picked it up: a wallet. Forty dollars and a credit card.

Eloy tossed it into the cab, then went to unload some of the wrack from the bed. Atop it all, a section of rusted chicken wire. That went, flattened out, beneath the rear wheels: a godsend! There was a broken mine timber, a saguaro skeleton, six or seven thorny ocotillo stems. There was about a half ton of sand. There was a glint of white: a pointed tooth, which came free from the sand attached to the skull in which it grew. A javelina, probably dead in the wash for years.

Eloy started shoveling sand back into the wash, careful to throw it away from the tires. One shovel full, then two, and another and another, and then on the eighth scoop, the shovel got stuck ever so slightly. Beneath something flexible. Pliable. Curious, he wedged the shovel beneath the obstruction and pried. Whatever it was under there came loose, emerged from the sand into the dim twilight.

A hand.

He didn't.

This was his second day in the valley. The first, he had stormed up from the pullout – his moping, half-hearted bluff called, his dog looking confused through the truck window as she pulled away in a cloud of angry dust – thinking that he'd made a big, melodramatic mistake. Even though the intervening twenty-eight hours had been a hellish pastiche of sweat, dark cold and fever dreams of nonexistent full rock tanks of blessed, stinky water, he had lost the regret. The heat had baked all doubt from his soul. He was more or less at peace.
There were times when his body took over and forced him to seek out shade. This was one of those times. Ironic that the imperatives of the flesh would so totally overrule the despair, the longing for oblivion. There it was, a quarter-mile away, the patch of dark ground to which some reptilian fragment of his desiccated mind drove him. From his inadvertent shady perch under a stray palm he watched the valley, right hand reaching for the flask of water that wasn't strung on the usual place on his hip. Down there, along the alluvial fans washed off the range in a million years of light rain and flash floods, were the saguaros, dependent children of the basin ranges. Couldn't grow too high, for the cold that seared their flesh. Couldn't grow too low, for the baking, ill-drained soils – if you could call them that – of the valley floor. He could relate.

Thirst has its own demands, and they overrule the rational prerogatives of the sane person seeking to immolate his being in the desert. Five thousand years of civilization, four hundred years of reason hadn't freed him from this irrational desire to save his life. Like saving it would generate some interest. He'd been amply shown that the one person who mattered had no interest at all. No fucking matter. A smell of urine, of excrescence, of water trickled into his forebrain. There, in a wall of desert-stained basalt above the palm, there it was: a fern-infested, shaded artesian sump. Last thing he needed. Funny how his motherfucking guardian angel had stuck this font in the place his fevered mind had deemed most likely to be hospitable to his all-too timely demise. He climbed.

A few feet, a few yards, fifteen minutes, and he stood unevenly at the base of the wall. Only a sheer fifteen feet of black rock to go. Sun glinted off the basalt, obscuring vision, but it looked as if – could it be? – there were handholds carved into the dusky wall, almost too easy a climb to be believed. Wiped his mouth on his left arm; opened a new wound, blood trickled out onto his tongue. Burned lip skin came away on his shirt sleeve. He leapt for the lowest of the handholds, which dissolved before his eyes. Nothing but sheer, blank wall. He fell, hitting his head on an erratic granite.

Fade to black.

Raucous cry woke him partway. A cloud of zopilotes. Black, comforting vultures, their gray heads shining in what was left of the sun. Destiny. But intellect intruded. Closer, closer than the buzzards, an obligatory inquisitive raven – it figured, he thought – croaked a question from the sparse shade of a stunted juniper.

Something in the raven's aspect prompted an answer.

"Need.
"Need.
"Need."

Raven croaked.

"What can I do? Endurance is an old game for me, and I am sick to fucking death of it.

"Catharsing at some damn crow. Why the fuck am I saying this? Who am I talking to?"

His words trailed. Tired. If they made sense to the raven, it didn't show it.

"Exploring. Exploring. The imperative of the colonizer. She was exploring what it meant to be in love with me. Didn't work. She should never have landed."

He fell into a doze as raven watched.
And woke, and dozed, and woke again.

For some reason, raven stayed with him through the heat. Raven didn't understand why. Raven stayed motionless, while the man stirred, for fear of the two-legged treachery she knew so well. Traps and shot and poison his kind brought. Death and pain and loss.

Still, there was something new about this one. No guile, no threat. Raven allowed herself the luxury – while the man stayed safely inert under the juniper where he'd fallen – of stretching wing, cooling her black body in the slight breeze of evening.

And then morning. He'd stirred twice, that night, prompting Raven's involuntary, alarmed growl each time; the sound roused him for a moment, then drought swept him back to that fevered mapping of his unconscious.

Susan? Raven? They swapped bodies every time he thought to look; it was hard to tell. Dark, cautious, brooding, inaccessibly beautiful. He set his expectations, his disappointments on end in the glaring gruss under the juniper. Her foot swept from her perch and knocked them over, every one. He reached out to her: she withdrew further into a sudden hedge of mesquite thorn and catclaw. He sketched out the shape of his need in the gravel: she threw a handful of mesquite pods at his face, stinging and distracting him as he drew. He told her his life in lunatic prose: she sat on her branch, not responding, face turned to the playa to the south, away from him, away, always away.

"Oh, Susan. Oh Raven. You've made up your mind, so fast, so fast. Listen to me is all I ask. Listen to me is all I ask. The darkness, the welcoming darkness. So warm."

He was still again.

Until three in the afternoon of the third day, when the sun finally boiled his thirst out through his skin, there to dry in great salty welts about his shoulders. His tongue was what woke him: swelled past the point where it fit in his mouth, his brought him to gasping for air. Eyes opened, dazzled. Crust and clot wiped away, he tried to focus on the shape before him. "Susan?" It was Susan. It had to be Susan. "Yeah, 'sme, hon." She'd come back for him! In oddly measured tone, she told him how she'd searched the bajada where she'd dropped him off so long ago, three days ago. Found him dried to a lizard husk under the juniper. Shocked and grieving to see him this way. "Here's some water, some shade. The helicopter's on its way, and the EMTs."
He got up on his elbows, raised his lips to the offered water. It never came. Just that black Susan shape, sitting there in the mesquite, preening.

Anger. Rage. He was on the verge of death, and this pinche bird comes to him with fantasies of she who killed him? Fury. Venom. Murder. He launched himself at the damn crow.

Raven wasn't quite expecting his sudden assault, but where he had the advantage of surprise, she had the competing advantage of not being half mad with thirst and sunstroke. She lifted off, moved with three placid wingbeats to the rock ledge ten feet above, and watched as he flew past the juniper's lower limbs to the valley floor far below, tumbling, tumbling clumsy, sharp sounds of alarm giving way to deep grunts which gave way in turn to nothing but the elemental sound of flesh against rock and thorn. Then far below in the wash he lay, before the last of her hurriedly shed feathers had drifted to the base of the juniper.

A flex of leg, a breath, and she was coasting downhill on ebony wings, a hundred yards to where he lay there in the wash. He lay so still. No evidence of breath, of life. But there, over there, in the loose soil of the wash, was – wonder of wonders – a hill swarming with black ants! She hopped to the mound, letting the insects swarm pleasantly through her black down, eating the occasional stray louse. Felt tingly. He was dead, no doubt about it. Still, not ripe enough to do her any good. She'd come back to him when he was ready. Off she went, determinedly, to the west, the strong woof of her wingbeats the only sound in the valley.

Until the thunder, a few hours later. A crack of lightning, and pregnant clouds breaking over the range, and a wall of boiling mud surged down the declivity with a roar like Moloch's own freight train. The flood lifted everything in the wash, swept them far away and downhill toward the Colorado: corpse, driftwood, letter, ants, black feathers, ID, wallet.