LATE IN THE AFTERNOON SHE NEARED THE BRICK HUT. NOW A mule stood in the pen. Smoke tendriled from the stovepipe in the roof. The mule bayed and its bell jangled. The leñero appeared, stooping to get through his door. He wore the same baggy clothes and huaraches, but his straw hat was gone and his white hair flared like a crown around the brown dome of his bald head. His jowls jumped as if he needed to limber up his throat: “Good afternoon, miss.”
Luz smiled politely. Great, she thought. She was woozy in the heat.
The old man swiveled and looked toward the pyramid. “One moment,” he said. “You must be thirsty.”
He disappeared into his home and returned with a clay cup in one hand and a plastic gallon of water in his other. He shuffled toward her, pouring into the cup. Luz was parched, and the water made a chugging sound, and she saw the dying man in the desert, but here he was giving her the water instead, and she wanted to refuse—I don’t deserve this, let me die—but she was thirsty, too thirsty, and she accepted the cool cup with both hands. She sipped, and everything came into firmer focus.
“Thank you,” she told him.
The old man’s name was Onofre. “Please,” he said, gesturing to a folding chair on the dirt in front of the hut, “sit with me while you finish your water.”
He disappeared once more into the house and reappeared dragging a wooden stool. Onofre asked if she had hiked to the pyramid, and if so, what did it look like?
The folding chair shifted in the dirt beneath her. She shook her head. “It’s a lot farther away than it looks.”
Onofre chuckled, whiskers bristling and eyes glittering. “Yes. I have never seen it up close, either. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually there at all.” He was holding his own cup and the jug, and he poured himself some water and set the jug on the ground. “I have heard that a family owns the land where the pyramid sits, so they own the pyramid itself. There is some dispute over what to do with it—open it for digging, turn it into some kind of tourist attraction. But there is no agreement, and so nobody visits.” He sipped his water, waved his hand. “There are other pyramids—larger ones, popular ones. There is no hurry, and God will decide in the end.”
Luz’s water was silty but satisfying. Sweat slid down her ribs. “I like the thought,” she said, “of nobody ever getting close to it.”
The sliding sunlight swallowed the distant structure. The mule wheezed, stamped a hoof.
“There is no hurry,” Onofre repeated, “and God will decide in the end.”
Luz grinned, finished her water. He asked if she’d like some more, but she declined. She didn’t get up, though. She didn’t feel like moving yet. The old man was right. No hurry.
Onofre swirled his clay cup as if aerating a fine wine. He twirled his finger to indicate the surrounding land. “I sell my firewood to everyone in these hills, and I have never seen you before. Now I have seen you twice in two days. Once coming down the hill, and once returning.”
“I am just passing through,” Luz said.
Onofre raised his brow. “Is that what you believe?”
The question had the flavor of accusation. Luz did not like the way she’d so easily let her guard down. She would learn, though. She would learn to stop doing that. She stood, placed the cup on the chair, and started away.
“Please,” Onofre said. He pleaded with his hands. “I do not mean to upset you. I know who lives on the mountain—”
Anger sparked in Luz’s belly. She spun: “You would save me, old man?”
“I wish nothing of the sort. I certainly do not wish to cross my neighbor.” His eyes were large in his drooping face. He kept his hands out, splayed. “But I am telling you that if you do not wish to stay in that house forever, you will go from here. Right now. You will take some water from me and you will start walking and you will not turn around. You do not need him”—he pointed up the trail—“to go where you need to go, but if you return to his house now, you will never leave.”
Luz placed her fists on her hips. The trail ran to the road that snaked up the mountain. The sun had truly begun to set. The old man had articulated her fears; she admitted this to herself. But her mother’s dresses were still in the house, and Oziel wouldn’t return until the next day. The thought of abandoning her mother’s things was unbearable.
“Do not,” Onofre said, as if to sway her thoughts, “confuse God’s time with what we may deem as urgent. You must go.”
She looked at the leñero. He hunched toward her.
“I know,” she told him, “I’m sorry,” and she walked away.
A hundred meters or so down the trail, she finally looked back. He remained on the stool, elbows on his knees, hanging his head.