“Tayopa,” Father Pascual said, pointing to a break in the valley’s far side. The last echo had come from there.
They crossed the valley, halting at a stream that purled out of the break, which, Mota saw now, was the mouth of a narrow barranca. Alongside the stream led a trail covered with broken shale, disappearing as it bent. A breeze coursed out of the barranca’s mouth, fluttered over Mota’s face. In front of him Beatriz shifted as she cursed the mule’s backbone. They rode in.
After forty varas a red shoulder of rock forced path and stream into a tight embrace, and once they eased around the shoulder they came to a round, two-story building.
“The first guardhouse,” Father Pascual said.
Past the guardhouse the trail and the stream twisted north. The walls of rock began to widen, and the bunchgrass and the madroños, which had granted the narrow path a dappled green light, started to thin, giving way to ropy thornbushes. Then the trail swiftly mounted several layers of rock, and Mota and the others found themselves in the wide, barren bowl of a box canyon — Tayopa. In the middle of the bowl, attached to the roofless skeleton of a church, stood a bell tower, its sides licked with soot. Machinery from a smelting works lay broken and half-buried, and patterns of mud and stone rubble were scattered between the bell tower and a circle of kilns. Beyond loomed the dark piles of slag, and all around, in the basin’s walls, watched the black, hollowed eyes that were the entrances to the mines.
Mota tightened his grip on Beatriz — she had shuddered, at what he wasn’t sure — and took in the brown and red slope of the far ridge. The air smelled of dried, flaking dirt, and the wind coming over the ridge carried an empty sound. Mota closed his ears to it, buried his nose in Beatriz’s matted hair, erected once more in his mind the vision of their return. But this did nothing to still the shadow that had stirred once more in his heart.
With the aid of his crutch, he slipped down from the mule. They would be weeks, assaying samples from the mines and the slag heaps, logging troves, scouting new routes from the mine. The sooner they started, the sooner they could leave.
AMY
I HAD BEEN IN WIESBADEN FOR TWO WEEKS. This was in October 2009. The German semester hadn’t started yet, and so neither had my job, and after a first week surrendered to various bureaucracies I was spending a chain of sunny days exploring. On the third such day, after taking the little yellow funicular up the Neroberg and hiking down, I was walking in the pedestrian-zoned city center and had paused to look through the window of the gummy candy store. Thoughts of a present shipped home to my nephews took breath then perished (the postage, the hassle) before somebody behind me said, “Holy shit,” and grabbed me by the arm.
The words with their three flat American syllables leapt at me from the German public’s constant guttural hum. I turned and a short, nicely thick-bodied woman with light green eyes and rusted blond hair was looking up at me, mouth hanging open in a display of shock. My memory fumbled, then immediately I had a flash of her at fifteen: studded leather choker around her neck, bottle of cherry soda constantly stowed in her backpack, Mod Podged collages of ads from Spin magazine covering her folders. Amy Heathcock. She’d been two years behind me in high school, and we’d been members of separate outcast cliques that shared the hallway outside the band room for standing around in the mornings before class. Once we’d gone on a date, and later, when I was home from college, I ran into her at the Corny Dog in the Longview Mall, where she dipped hot dogs in batter. But by the time she clutched my arm in Langgasse I’d forgotten she existed.
“What are you doing here?” she said. She smiled and freed her other hand from a stroller to pull me into a hug.
“I’m teaching,” I said, neglecting to mention I was also fleeing a failing marriage — arguably the truer answer. “What about you?”
“I’m staying with a friend,” she said. The friend’s husband was army, she explained, stationed at the airfield outside town, and they lived in one of the blocks of married housing on the other side of the train station. I nodded. The day before I’d taken a bus in that direction and seen a Popeye’s and a Taco Bell locked behind a tall, guarded fence. “This is my Macy,” Amy added, looking down at the two-year-old who lay in the stroller’s seat, passed out. “She likes it when I push her through here. Sometimes it’s all I can do to get her to sleep.” Amy looked up again. In that moment she seemed barely changed in the decade-plus from the girl I remembered. The same freckled nose with its mousy tip, the same sly light in her eyes, the same thin T-shirt fabric pulling across the same soft pouch of belly. She said we should hang out and I agreed.
WE WENT TO THE CAFÉ MALDANER, just around the corner, where we picked slices of cake from a glass case and sat in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled tearoom. I’d wanted to go inside the Maldaner since I first saw it. According to the gold lettering on the window, it dated to 1859, and I imagined Dostoevsky, who’d lived here in the 1860s, drinking coffee inside as he fretted about the previous evening’s losses at the gaming tables.
As we sat Amy tended to her daughter. She had woken, and, after staring silently at me for three minutes (“Macy, this is one of Mommy’s friends,” Amy had said), she started throwing her toys at a mink-coated frau whose spun-sugar sphere of white hair made an irresistible target. The toys kept landing short, and I would pick them up and give them to Amy, who would give them back to the crying Macy, who would throw them again. I wondered if this was all that would happen and if it was for the best. But after Macy’s fit, as Amy asked me about high school — who I still saw, if I remembered this or that drama — she took my hand, and once we finished our cake I walked her to my apartment. There we parked Macy in front of the TV, which I turned to KiKA, the children’s channel, and we went into the bedroom. As we stood together, Amy’s back pressed against me, I lifted her skirt and bit her neck. She squealed — I remembered that squeal, heard sometimes in the hallway before class whenever another sex-deprived, aching boy poked or tickled her generous flesh. Then she told me to hurry. We only had until the cartoon ended.
AFTER WE FINISHED she wheeled Macy out of my apartment, and I sat down to work on my syllabi. I’d given Amy my phone number and my e-mail address, but as I looked at my laptop’s screen I hoped that was it, that she would step back into her life and I into mine. The last thing I wanted was a new entanglement.
So when she called me a few days later, asking if I’d like to meet her, I was worried.
“Just for an hour,” she said.
“My wife,” I said.
“You said you haven’t talked to her in a month.”
“Macy.”
“I’ll leave her with Beth.”
She waited while I said nothing. I found myself thinking of the large, milk-white breasts that I’d admired at sixteen and that, as we’d stood in my bedroom, had remained bound behind her bra, unexplored.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Think of it this way. We’re friends. What’s wrong with being friends?”
But we’d never been friends. She was just a girl I’d happened to know years ago. Still, it was enough. Two hours later I was waiting for her outside the Karstadt, one of the massive, glass-walled shopping centers downtown. She showed wearing jeans and hoop earrings, and I felt twelve years younger, the entirety of my life spread before me, unmade.