The day was in its full heat, but the shade made it pleasant, and every few seconds a breeze rose, coming across the parking lot and empty campsites. No one camped near the river. Everyone, like them, was up in the Chisos Basin, with the red mountains rising around them, where it was cooler. Josh sat next to her. Together they watched a roadrunner trot across the asphalt, then a rabbit came out from some brush and gnawed on a dandelion.
Later, at the campsite, Josh cooked a can of Dinty Moore over the propane stove. When the stew was warm, he poured it into their plastic bowls, passing one to Shelly. She took her spoon, lifted a chunk of meat to her lips, cooled it with her breath, then ate.
“I’m leaving when we get back,” she said after she swallowed.
“What?” Josh said. They had neighbors — a couple with a backpacking tent on one side, three middle-aged men in a camper on the other — and she could tell what Josh was thinking. His face was darkening. Not here, he wanted to say. Not now. He wanted her to grin and say it was a joke. But she said nothing and finished the Dinty Moore. He would carry his stunned, sick heart through the next hours in silence, she knew, and then, once they were alone again, in their tent, and the night was finally quiet, their loud, beer-drinking neighbors safely retreated to their RV, he would try to wake her, whisper her back, believing it that simple, and she’d keep her eyes shut and pretend to be asleep.
TAYOPA
MOTA STUDIED THE MAP as the viceroy’s plump, pink finger traced the line of peaks into the far reaches of the northwestern frontier. “Here,” the viceroy said, stopping his finger in a wide stretch of empty parchment. “This is where he says it is.”
The viceroy was sitting in his sedan chair, held above the greenest lawn in all of New Spain by a pair of smooth-skinned guinea bucks. Women in meringue-pale dresses strolled past, followed by dandies with needle-thin swords at their waists. Parrots and quetzals squawked in brass cages hung among the trees, stretched their feathers against the wire bars.
“And you believe him, Excellency?” Mota asked.
“He gave me proof,” the viceroy said. “Listen. Ninety pesos to the quintal, sixty thousand marks of silver a year. The mine is too rich to ignore.” He leaned farther out, causing the front bearer’s knees to buckle, and tapped Mota on the chest. “I want you to claim it.”
MOTA HAD BEEN AN INSPECTOR OF MINES for the Royal Audiencia for ten years. It was not the career he had intended for himself. At Salamanca his sole friend, the third son of the Duke of Córdoba, had fed him stories of the New World: ribbons of ore, impatient creole virgins, the moon hanging low above a hacienda. So he had come, securing a minor post copying letters in the Audiencia and envisioning a future that already seemed set. He would become rich without thinking and live out his days growing fat in a creole palace, tickling his mistress each night while his wife whelped a child a year. Debarking at Veracruz, he had bribed the customs men and the men from the Holy Office — whose long fingers spidered every passenger’s books — so that he might hurry toward this new life in the city of Mexico.
He’d started off well. Within six months he’d made a good match, María Isabel, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wine merchant. He’d seen her at a ball, standing behind a knot of protective old women, and her dark eyes, her willowy figure, her quiet manner had seemed to hold the secret to his happiness. He wrote letters and had them spirited to her room, spent nights hunched beneath her window. One evening a servant bumped into him in the street and pressed a handkerchief in his hand. It was María Isabel’s, and it contained a note in which she confessed that his constant, sorrowful figure had unlatched her soul.
More letters were exchanged. Mota saw María Isabel at other balls, trailed her during her afternoon walks. He pleaded with her father, and after a month of pressing his case he secured the man’s approval. Then, a week before they were to marry, Mota bribed the cook to sicken María Isabel’s duenna, so that he might climb through his waiting love’s window and claim her virginity. He and María Isabel lay together in her great bed with its silk-trimmed sheets until the hour before dawn, giggling as they listened to old Rosita curse and retch. A day later, though, María Isabel broke into sweats, and by the morning set for their wedding she was wrapped in lace and laid in her grave. The surgeon said the disease had risen from the lake in a fume, but Mota blamed himself. He was twenty-two. Locked in his tiny, rented room for five days, he wept until he felt his heart turn brittle. Then he went to the president of the Audiencia and begged for a job that would send him from the city, and the president gave him a mine to audit at Cuencamé.
THE VICEROY HAD TOLD MOTA he would find his guide waiting at the pulquería Hijas de Hernández, and it was there Mota went after he left the Alameda. The pulquería stood alongside a canal in the southeastern quarter of the city, behind the Convent of La Merced. Indian bargemen and idle creoles sat in its court, shaded by lemon trees as they watched leaves float toward the weir. Their watching was intense, punctuated by shouts — wagers had been placed on each leaf’s progress.
Inside the pulquería, most of the tables were empty, and those that weren’t were occupied by slouched loners or whisperers craned over their drinks. One of Hernández’s gawky daughters leaned against the bar, her face lit by a feeble shaft of sun. Alongside the far wall sat a man with the distinct look of a freshly bathed vagrant, his clothes new, his hair washed and combed, yet a nimbus of filth staining his person. His hand rested on a half-empty carafe.
Mota crossed the room toward him. “You are Father Pascual?” he asked. The previous morning, so Mota had learned, a man in tattered black robes calling himself by this name had taken the viceroy’s arm as he was leaving the cathedral. He had claimed to be a fugitive from Tayopa, said he had lived in hiding for two years, and offered, for a sizable sum, to guide a party back through the wilderness.
“I am,” the vagrant said, and gestured to the table’s empty chair. The man looked no older than Mota, but he was balding, his skin calloused and burnt, and he had mummied, claw-like hands. Mota sat and, keeping his voice low, said, “I will get straight to it. You say you come from Tayopa.”
Father Pascual bowed in acknowledgment.
“Do you have a map?”
“Here,” Father Pascual said as he tapped the left side of his forehead.
“Tell me, then, are the stories true? You Jesuits, your Yaqui slaves, bells struck in silver and gold?”
“Much of it is true,” Father Pascual said.
Mota took the carafe of pulque, tipped some into one of the spare glasses sitting on the table, and sipped. His throat burned.
“Why did you leave?”
“I had my reasons.”
“All right, so tell me how.”
“By night, by accident, and by terror.”
Worry swelled like a cloud beneath Mota’s stomach. The man shifted, turned, refused him even the slightest hint of solid truth. “You must give me a reason to trust you,” Mota said.
Father Pascual looked at him for a moment, then took a silk bundle from his pocket, laid it on the table, and unwrapped a dull, dung-colored rock streaked with the purest vein of silver Mota had ever seen.
“You could have gotten that from anywhere,” Mota said.