In the morning, the woman still hadn’t appeared, and at this Mota felt a pinprick of sorrow. Father Pascual was already on his mule when El Sepo and Fernando took their leave, standing over him awkwardly, and Baltazar gave the leg a final inspection. Then they put on their hats and left, and Mota was alone, the wooden hut empty save for a pair of flies that traced a crooked path above him.
The hours crawled alongside the doorway’s shifting portion of sun. Maize leaves poked through the mattress and gave him sweat rashes. Mota stood only to piss and defecate into a bowl. Baltazar had cautioned him against using the crutches overmuch in the first days, and, his leg still throbbing, it was all Mota could do to make it to the door and scatter his waste.
A WEEK PASSED, a long, slow week. The woman never came to the hut, but, after the first days Baltazar had warned him of, Mota began hobbling around the clearing outside, then wandering farther up the canyon, working the crutches over roots and stone. His third day out he found her. As before, she was with the cattle. They stood in a rocky clearing, and she sat in the shade of a knobbly pine.
“Hello,” he called.
“You are walking,” she answered without looking up.
He hobbled closer, saw that a small red carcass lay at her side. Before her was spread the animal’s skin.
“I am,” he said. Though he hadn’t admitted it to himself, in his wandering he’d been looking for her. He thought to get nearer, but stopped himself, lest he rewake the mad fright she’d displayed when he pulled her from the cave. “I’m sorry to have forced you from your bed,” he added.
“It is no matter,” she said. She scraped at the skin.
“I’d be pleased if you returned,” he said. “I promise you, I am harmless. As you see, I’m slowed.” He tapped his leg and grinned. “I have books with me. Reports from Mexico. I could read to you, if you like. Surely, after so much time alone, you want for companionship.”
Her eyes remained down, on the skin, as if she did not hear him. But Mota knew something in her was curious. Otherwise she would have fled before he appeared, as she had done when he and the others had first ridden down toward her rock.
“Or poems — I have pamphlets left with me by one of my men. Winners from the city’s last competition and other such things.”
She hesitated in her scraping, then picked up the skin and, without meeting Mota’s eyes, retreated beyond the pine tree and into a clump of others. Mota’s leg ached from standing, and so with an unanswered farewell he pivoted on his good leg and swung himself back toward the cabin.
THE NEXT MORNING he went looking for Beatriz, but she did not allow herself to be found. The curiosity he had detected had been pure illusion, he decided, the sad imagining of a withered heart. But in the night that followed he was woken by breath on his face, an elbow sharply pinching his chest. His eyes opened to darkness, and in that first terror he flung out a hand. It struck a shoulder, ribs, the curve of a back. Beneath his palm flesh stretched against bone, surprisingly smooth. Fingers wrestled with his trousers and he helped, pushed the trousers down. The night phantom was astride him now, and, his leg stiff and awkward in its splint, the creaking bed’s maize leaves poking his back, they coupled, the woman’s grunting nothing like María Isabel’s dutiful cries. She held him at the shoulders, either to anchor herself or keep him pinned, and he bit his lips shut for fear of frightening her away. She groaned when he loosed himself, then waited for him to lengthen again.
The next morning Beatriz was still there, asleep and curled against him. With care he negotiated his way over her and out of the bed, then went to the door and cleared his bladder. When he turned around she was sitting up, yawning with arms stretched, and he tried to decide if she was beautiful. “Read me some of those things you brought from the city,” she said when she finished her yawn. He grabbed the satchel of books and went to the bed. Whenever he stopped, pausing after a mascarada song or an account of a sea battle with the English — all the stuff and trash of life for which he had no taste — she said, More, more. She dug herself into him with her backside, pulled his arm over her, and he indulged a fantasy of taking her back to Mexico, presenting her to the viceroy as a marvel, a wild woman tamed. He would live with her in a fine palace bought with his earnings from the mine; though dressed in silk, she would keep her wildness and bear him a string of cubs. Others would speak of him as the man who had found Tayopa in the wastes, who had rescued a near savage from the lands beyond the frontier, and he would be changed — no longer the man who had let ten years silt away into nothing, the man who had buried himself in a lead coffin and joined himself with the dead. His mouth tired of so much reading and he begged a respite. Beatriz said she would allow it, and as he lay back she told him scraps of her life: that her mother sold her for a year’s worth of meat, that she had begged her husband not to take her from their village outside Querétaro, that he had beaten her when the midwife pulled a daughter, stillborn, from her. They had been lured here by the Jesuits, she said, who had told them they were supplying missions in the far north and forbade them to leave their ranch. She had hidden in her cave when the Yaquis had come, had refused to weep when she found her husband and the other ranchers slaughtered. As she spoke she shifted at random to whispers, covered her eyes, made crosses on Mota’s arm — traces of the small but important something in her that had long been rattled loose. After, she fed him a mash of corn and dried meat. When he mentioned the city to her, said he wanted to take her there, she answered that she wanted to go.
Two days later, they heard the shuffling hoofbeats of a horse in trot. Mota was in the bed, resting his leg, and Beatriz was lying beside him. She startled, and he held her. The hoofbeats drew closer, and soon after they stopped Fernando appeared in the doorway and looked down at them. “We’ve found it,” he said.
FERNANDO HAD GRINNED AT THE WOMAN, and at Mota’s insistence they bring her with them. Such a demand, Mota knew, was much unlike the self he had long presented his fellows. But Fernando quickly swept the grin away and said, “Of course.” When they left, Mota and Beatriz sat atop Fernando’s horse while Fernando walked it and told Mota of the mine. It was a three days’ ride away, he said, and they hadn’t actually seen it — as soon as Father Pascual identified the canyon they’d turned around, believing Mota, as inspector, should be with them. But the ex-Jesuit assured him there could be no doubt. He’d recognized the country, and the horn’s echo was unmistakable.
The others were waiting for Mota at a camp not far from the canyon. They betrayed the same muted astonishment at the woman’s presence as Fernando had, but otherwise kept their distance from her and avoided her gaze, as if fearing she might be ill luck. Once Mota was helped off the horse Baltazar poked his fingers inside the splint. “Better,” he pronounced. “But it’ll need at least six more weeks.” Meanwhile, El Sepo launched into his own version of how they found the mine, telling how he had danced a quick jig and Father Pascual had refused to smile. Mota seemed to miss every other word. Night had fallen, and on the far side of the fire, where its light bled into darkness, Beatriz was bedding down, away from them. The distance ached. When El Sepo finished his story, Baltazar leaned over to Mota and said, “I bet she was hungry for it, she ride you cross-eyed?”
TWO DAYS LATER they came to a shelf of rock beneath which the country flattened. Mota and Beatriz had shared a mule, she mounted in front of him as he kept his hands on the reins, his arms around her. The country from atop the shelf of rock looked no different from anywhere else they’d ridden through, but here they stopped and Father Pascual took his horn from his pack and blew. The first echo was faint, but the second came back louder than the original blast.